2023-06-21
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
“Think on These Things” Rev. Judith Bagley-Bonner
Federated Church, 6/18/23
I have a confession to make. And keep in mind I say this as an ordained Christian minister of some thirty-seven years duration. Here we go: I don’t really get the big deal about that prayer variously known as The Lord’s Prayer or, for Catholics, known as the “Our Father.” I mean, it’s fine, but I don’t really understand why it is so ever-present as to be almost a universal part of the wider culture. I suspect it is known by most everyone in our culture, although I’m not sure about the generations coming up in our increasingly secular world. Anyway, my point is, and I mean this with all due respect, that it has never really spoken deeply to me. I never particularly broadcasted that in my thirty-five years of active, Christian ministry, but I was comforted when a friend told me that his priest, of a progressive, Benedictine flavor, also acknowledged this from the pulpit. Then that priest went on to make what I have long considered to be a heck of a point: He said the church at large had missed the boat in making this prayer our bread and butter, because the whole point is that it was the LORD’s prayer, Jesus’s prayer, that is, and that the real challenge is for each of us to write our own prayer- our own credo, perhaps like the one by William Ellery Channing, entitled “My Symphony” which goes like this:
“To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy, not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.”
Lovely, but back to my friend’s Benedictine priest who suggested that part of our life’s work might be to boil down everything we believe and most cherish into a brief creed or prayer. It could change over time, and would grow with us as we age, until finally, as wise elders, it would be honed and polished into a truly beautiful representation of our lives, our beliefs and values, all that we hoped to stand for. Jesus did this and came up with a statement that beautifully expressed his whole purpose within his historical setting. But rather than adapting his or Channing’s or anyone else’s, the better challenge would be for each of us to figure out our own. And then, as Paul exhorted, to “think on these things,” to meditate on them and allow them to center us and give us life and empower us to be agents of justice and joy in our world.
And that’s what I am trying to do in this sermon. Mind you, it won’t be as brief a statement as Jesus’s or Channing’s. Catch me on my deathbed if you want the boiled down version. I’m young enough at sixty-four to still be a bit wordy. But as a now retired clergy person who has moved into my last third of life, (and that’s if you do the math optimistically) I find myself increasingly thinking along these lines: wanting to start boiling things down and summing them up. And so I give you this morning, a stab at my own credo. Here are a handful of things I have learned along the way that have been most helpful, most meaningful and most transformative on my journey. I will invite you to take what you like and leave the rest. Eat the meat and spit out what you find to be the bones. I offer them in random order.
First of all, boiled down to a nut shell: I believe the purpose of each of our individual lives is to grow up or evolve into the most whole and authentic version of whomever God or life or the Universe created us to be. This is not a matter of perfectionism, unless you understand that the word “perfect” in the hebraic sense means “whole” as opposed to the greek sense which means “without blemish.” I believe our purpose as humans is to grow in wholeness of soul, soul being short-hand for the amalgamation of our bodies, minds, emotions, psyches and spirit. To grow into the fullness of those, and then to take our place in the wider world to be agents of love, joy and justice for all. It’s something like a symphony. Everyone has a part. Without each of our unique and beautiful lines in the score, the symphony is the poorer. So our purpose is soul-making and all the circumstances and events of our lives are part of it. Not that God or anything premeditates what happens to us in order to teach us, but given that life happens, all of it becomes part of the river that hews and smoothes the stones… Ironically, death is the final piece to this process of soul-making. I stumbled on an old quote by Joseph Campbell from “The Power of Myth” recently that says it well: “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, (or soul) you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, soul, rejoins consciousness. It is just no longer in this particular environment.” (Wow! That’s some good stuff there!)
Next, an essential part of our soul-making, (or at least mine) is learning to love the inner child who, because of inevitable parental limitation, didn’t get everything she or he needed as a baby, toddler or child. I hesitated to include this one because it has become so cliche, if you remember Stuart Smalley in Saturday Night Live from maybe the nineties, making fun of the pop-psychology, self-help culture run amok with his whiney, chronic victimization. But for me, loving and nurturing my inner child, “soothing the baby” to put it most bluntly, has been an essential part of growing in wholeness. I feel stress in the pit of my stomach and when I sense it I place my hand there and direct warmth and love to that scared, inner place, that place of hardness. I try to just be with it in love, as I tried to be with my son when he was a scared or upset toddler. I know it sounds simplistic and cliche, but I find it really helpful! And so this Fathers’ Day, I exhort us all to nurture our inner child, as a good father does, no matter how old we may be.
This dovetails naturally with my next affirmation, which is finding the balance between having all the feelings and then being able to let them go. You cannot let go of what you never had to begin with. So it seems to me that if we find ourselves habitually beset by big, troubling feelings of anxiety or sadness or anger or even milder versions of things like restlessness, irritability or discontent, we need first of all to learn to stay with them, accept them, tend to them, in short, feel them and find a safe way to express them. Rumi said it well in his beautiful piece entitled “The Guest House.”
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
These guests, these big feelings, partially tend to run along gender lines, although of course there are always exceptions. Women in our culture have tended to be socialized not to be angry, men not to be scared or sad. Part of growing in wholeness as women is finding our angry voice, for men, it is in incorporating repressed vulnerability… But then, equally important to taking all the time one needs to have the feelings, comes, eventually, the time for letting them go. Letting the thunder storm pass, which it always does. In the words of Maya Angelou, “every cloud runs out of rain.” Or another cliche, but still the truest thing I know, “this too shall pass.” Now this is not a matter of trying to force a letting go, but more a matter of allowing it to happen in its own time, like the leaves gently drifting from the autumn trees. You know how that happens? During the spring and summer, the tree secretes a substance that keeps the leaves attached. But in response to waning light and cooling temperatures, the tree stops secreting that substance and the leaves are caught by the drifting wind. This is not to say that it is easy or a one time event. I recently heard a great line about anger and resentment, “I believe in forgive and forget except when I forget I forgave and relapse into a blind range.” Sometimes it takes lots of letting goes before it sticks. But eventually, I think our challenging feelings move along when we simply stop energizing them.
This leads to my next point which is the power of our own minds, our own thoughts, in creating our experience. Who has not had the experience of misunderstanding or misinterpreting something someone else said, usually in a negative way, then responding negatively or defensively, which then evokes a similar response in them, even if it wasn’t there in the first place, and before you know it, a whole straw scenario has been created based on nothing but the power of our own thought. This is not to say that our thinking is the only thing that creates experience. There are events in our lives which are just plain tragic, for example, and response with grief is inevitable and healthy. But it is to say that sometimes we, or at least I, worsen my own suffering by over-thinking. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall. Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there.” Sometimes when I am most overwhelmed by life, I need to stand back, try to gain some perspective, and see how my own sometimes compulsive thoughts or reactions are creating my reality and worsening my misery.
Another cliche that has become very important to me is the importance of mindfulness to the present. One of my greatest temptations in life is to live a skip or a beat ahead of myself. Sending out an inner scout to make sure the lay of the land is safe for tomorrow or two minutes from now. The upshot is I am fragmented and miss the full joy of experiencing “the now” in a centered, unified way. I especially love the way the writer, Robert Pirsig, of “Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance” fame, got at it when he talked about his decision to drive only secondary roads when traveling, thereby opting for a journey of small towns and real people and soulful experiences, as opposed to the generic and sanitized rest stops on the interstate highways. He said it was the difference between “making good time” and “making time good.”
Another benefit to living in the present is that you get to be more free of worry. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “I have suffered much misery in my life, some of which actually happened.” And my friend Dan Deweese says, “don’t tell me that worry doesn’t do any good; ninety-nine percent of what I worry about never happens!”
Another important insight along my journey has been that we exist in community, and that ultimately, we can’t, as individuals, be fully whole until everyone’s needs are met. I said in the introduction to this sermon, that our purpose is to grow into wholeness, and then to take our place in the wider world to be agents of love, joy and justice for all. It’s not enough to become whole just for own sake. We are bound together and built to take our place in the wider community and work for justice, which Niebuhr said is just “love working out its problems.” In Christianity, we call it creating the Kingdom or Realm of God. Of course we cannot do it solely on our own power. We need God’s power and presence to work through us. But we are called to create little glimpses of the realm of God here and now, by reaching out to the poor, the disenfranchised, those without power and resources. This can take any number of forms: volunteerism, financial support of good causes, activism to change policies, simply doing for a neighbor in need. The point is that humanity is a collective and nobody’s truly in a good place until everybody is. We are to be people of love and justice for all people. Faith without works is dead. Anne Lamott said, “Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of recommendation from the poor.” I’m not sure that’s literally true, but the point is well taken in any case.
Finally, and probably most importantly, is my belief in the centrality of love, which is just another name for God. Medieval mystic Julian of Norwich said “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. For there is a force in the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go.” Dr. King said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” I remember reading once, and I cannot give you the exact reference because of my aging memory, (and despite an exhaustive google search) but I read that a prominent scientist with spiritual sensitivities, perhaps it was Teilhard De Chardin or Thomas Keating, said that when you boiled life down to its smallest elements, smaller than molecules and atoms and even quarks, that at the core of it all is something like a string vibrating with love. Indeed, despite the fact that it gets distorted, and has been twisted time and again throughout history, I believe that the heart of the universe is gracious, and that there is a force, a silent working of good, God, if you will, trying to lure the whole thing further up that path of love. It’s in us and we’re in it and it’s the strongest thing in the universe.
So, there you have it, my credo, ***(which can be summed up like this: Life’s purpose is soul-making. Some tools toward that end are learning to love the inner child, learning to find the balance between having feelings and letting them go, learning the power of our own thoughts in partially creating our reality, learning to be fully present to each moment, helping create a world community of justice, and leaning into the power of love as central.)*** At ten pages this was decidedly longer and far more humble than the Lord’s prayer or Channing’s symphony. I’ll keep honing it down as I traverse the last third. But even more importantly, I want to encourage you to give some thought to your own life’s prayer or credo or symphony. What do you believe is most important? What do you cherish and from where do you draw your nourishment? What are the life-giving things you can think on, as Paul suggested we do in Philippians? The point is, don’t take Jesus or Channing’s word for it, and most certainly not my own, but come to your own conclusions as you continue the deep and creative process of soul making… May you know joy and enact justice as you navigate the journey.