Monthly Archives: March 2016

sermons

The Stranger on the Road

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(The second of two homilies delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on Easter Sunday, 27 March 2016. Copyright 2016 by Everett Howe. The first homily, delivered by Rev. Tera Little, is here.)

On the Sunday after the Crucifixion, two of Jesus’s disciples were walking to the village of Emmaus. They had heard the report from Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, who had gone to the tomb to wash and prepare Jesus’s body; they had heard the two Marys say that that the tomb had been opened, the stone rolled away; that the body of Jesus was not there; but that angels were there, angels who told them that Jesus yet lived.

On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples talked of all of these things. And on the road to Emmaus, they met a man — a man who was Jesus, but in a form that they did not recognize. When the three reached Emmaus, they shared a meal together — and as the stranger blessed the bread, and broke it, and shared it with the disciples, the veil fell from their eyes, and they saw that it was Jesus… and then he vanished from their sight.

The story of Jesus’s death and resurrection is the most sacred story of the Christian tradition. For some Christians, Jesus’s suffering and death is the only thing that saves humanity from eternal punishment. Our Unitarian and Universalist spiritual ancestors had a different understanding of the story of the Resurrection; they believed in a loving God, a God who did not send Jesus to earth in order to exact some required amount of suffering; no, they believed in a God who sent Jesus to earth as a teacher, as a prophet, as someone who could bring to humanity a gospel of love and understanding. In this interpretation, Jesus’s resurrection is a sign of the importance and of the truth of his teachings.

But what about those of us who are not Christian? What can this story mean for those of us who feel more of an affinity to humanism, or earth-centered spirituality, or Buddhism, or Judaism, or any of the myriad beliefs held by Unitarian Universalists today? What can we learn from Easter?

At this time of year, one thing you hear frequently in humanist and Pagan circles is that the Christians co-opted pre-existing Pagan celebrations of spring to make the various Easter traditions. Springtime celebrations of fertility and renewal of life, with eggs and rabbits, were popular in Europe, and as Christianity spread, it embraced these traditions, but overlaid them with a new theology.

But while Easter has adopted aspects of these celebrations of spring, it is more than just a celebration of spring. It deals with an entirely different conception of time.

Earth-centered spirituality — and many other religions as well — focusses on the cyclical nature of time. Every year we have a summer solstice and a winter solstice; every year, a spring equinox and an autumn equinox. The stories we tell at these times of year emphasize the cycles: The Holly King and the Oak King battle for supremacy, each in power for half of the year. When we are in the darkness of winter, we know that we have been here before; we know that in every preceding year, spring has come; and we tell stories and enact rituals to help continue the pattern.

And there are other cycles as well. In Hinduism, there are four periods of time called the yugas that repeat in a cycle believed by some to be 24,000 years, and by others to be more than 4,000,000 years.

When you know you are in a cycle, you can take comfort in that fact. But it can be very disturbing when things are bad and you can’t see the cycle you are in.

Both of my children have lived their whole lives in San Diego. Our older child, Cee1, is now in their first year of college at a school in Pennsylvania. One reason Cee chose to go to a school back East was to experience winter; but Cee’s first winter has been very hard on them. It’s dark. It’s cold. And Cee is not used to this. Of course they know that spring will come… but they have no bone-deep experience of this to reassure them. It does not feel like a cycle.

Sometimes bad things happen, and we cannot see they are just one stage in a cycle. Sometimes bad things happen, and as far as we can tell, they are not part of a cycle. How do we cope, spiritually, when we are faced with unprecedented tragedy or evil?

This is something we can learn from Easter. Easter is different from a celebration of spring. When we celebrate spring, we are in the middle of spring; we are living through spring again, as we have done the year before, and the year before that. When we celebrate Easter, Christ is not being resurrected again; we are commemorating the one time, two thousand years ago, when that singular event happened. Christianity is not about cycles. The Christian view of time is linear. And in Western society, we have adopted this view so deeply that most people have a hard time imagining any other view of time.

So how do we deal with a crisis that is a singular event?

Well, Jesus’s disciples were faced with disaster. The religious authorities were against them; the government authorities were against them; their spiritual leader had been tortured and killed; and one of their own had betrayed him.

For each of us, there will be a time like this in our lives, a time when we feel that everything has gone wrong. When our plans have failed, and when evil has prevailed. A time when we have no hope. When we have looked inside ourselves for the strength to go on, and we have not found that strength. A time when we do not see the Wheel of Fortune turning to raise us up again; a time when we see nothing ahead but failure and death.

In times like these, Easter teaches us the spiritual practice of patience. Of maintaining hope, even when there is no hope. Of trusting that sometimes our job is simply to wait. It teaches that events may come to pass that we could never have predicted; and that victory can come in forms we might not recognize at first.

So this is my Easter wish for us all: When we are in despair; when there is evil in the world and we cannot see how to fight it; when our plans have failed, and we feel alone; when we have fled Jerusalem, and are on the road to Emmaus — may we look into the eyes of the stranger sharing our meal, and recognize there the face of our savior.

Amen.

Image credit: Jan Wildens, Landscape with Christ and his Disciples on the Road to Emmaus (detail), ca. 1640. See here for more information.

  1. Who gave permission for me to tell this story about them. ↩
sermons

Getting the Words Right

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(A sermon delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on 13 March 2016. Copyright 2016 by Everett Howe.)

Our worship theme for the month of March is evil. Last week, Reverend Tera began our exploration of this topic by recalling the relative innocence of American society in the 1990’s, and how much of that innocence was lost after the school shooting at Columbine, the painfully drawn-out Presidential election of 2000 and its troublesome resolution by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001… And she pointed out how Unitarian Universalists sometimes find it difficult to deal theologically with the concept of evil.

Today, I will focus on what I feel is sometimes a weakness of Unitarian Universalists, a weakness that can keep us from seeing evil, or from confronting it when we do see it: A love of words, and a belief that if we can just get the words right, goodness will follow.

But first, let me try to be clear about what I mean today when I speak of evil. Of course, theologians and philosophers have been discussing evil since forever. For philosophers who believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, good and loving God, the problem is to explain how evil exists in the world. In this context, the evil that exists in the world is often taken to include natural phenomena like plagues, and catastrophic earthquakes and floods.

But I don’t think it makes sense to include natural disasters as examples of evil. Last week, Tera quoted the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote:

Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of humanity, or the total order of the world.

Niebuhr refers to self-interest, and it seems to me that self-interest implies consciousness. I think that evil is something that people create. In interpersonal interactions, evil usually comes from one person putting too much value on their own desires and ignoring the humanity of others — it happens when people set aside or deny the inherent worth and dignity of every person. On the other hand, in interactions between humans and nature, evil can come from not recognizing the unique and precious circumstances that are necessary to create a living system in the world. So those two things are what I will mean today when I speak of evil.

As I mentioned, last week Tera spoke of the optimism of America in the 1990’s. There have been other times of optimism in America. Let me talk about one such time; let me speak for a moment about Universalism as it was a hundred years ago.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning of ‘Universalism’ was undergoing a change. Originally, Universalists were Christians who denied the idea of eternal punishment; Universalists believed that Heaven was universal — open to everyone — although many of them believed that people would undergo some kind of temporary purgatory before being admitted there.

But gradually, Universalism came to mean something wider. Universalists were interested in finding the commonalities of all religion; they were interested in universal truths, so to speak. That is one reason why in 1900 Swami Vivekananda, a religious leader who tied Hindu thought to various Western ideas, was invited to speak here at First Universalist Parish, Pasadena.

Now, Clarence Skinner was a Universalist who was active in the first half of the twentieth century. He is widely regarded by historians to have been the most influential Universalist of his time. A little over a hundred years ago, he published a book called The Social Implications of Universalism.1

In the first chapter, he wrote:

Universalism meets the demands of the new age, because it is the product of those forces which created the new age. It does not send its roots down into a mediæval civilization, interpreting past history. […] Its theology expresses the modern conception of the nature of God and man. Its motive power arises out of the new humanism. […] It is the philosophy and the power which under one name or another the multitudes are laying hold upon to swing this old earth nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the religion of the people, for the people, by the people. It is the faith of the new world life, sweeping upward toward spiritual expression.

Now, that‘s optimism!

Skinner thought that Universalism would further science, and defeat tyranny. It would support equality under the law. It would create a new social order based on the theological idea that all people are essentially spiritual beings. Skinner wrote:

[This theology] would transform prison systems and shops. It would work its revolution in mine and mill. It would seize upon wars, despotisms, slaveries, and abolish them. It would beget itself in flesh and blood. It would be the most actual, astonishing and manifest fact in the world.

Skinner’s book is a remarkable document, and a quick read. I’ll link to it when I post this sermon on my blog.2 But once you have read it, and heard Skinner’s inspiring vision of a Universalism that will heal the world, you have to think:

He wrote the book in 1915.

1915.

Even as he was writing that Universalism “throbs with hope” and “believes in the world and in its potential goodness,” — even as he wrote those words, World War I had started in Europe. Nineteenth century battle strategies were meeting twentieth century technology, and the result was enormous suffering: trench warfare, the widespread use of machine guns, the introduction of mustard gas… all of this was starting at the very time Skinner was writing that “Never before have we had such basis for our hope that […] there shall be no more misery or sin.” In the 30 years immediately following the publication of Skinner’s book there were two world wars, bracketed by the genocide of the Armenians in the very year the book was published and the genocide of the Jews in the 1940’s.

Of course, hindsight is easy. All I really want to point out, here, is that while we are in the midst of events, it is easy to miss the evil around us; especially if it does not fit into our world view. Like Skinner, I too believe in “the world and its potential goodness” — and I think it is important to believe in this — but in order to address evil, we need to have both optimism, and realism — knowledge of what is really going on.

Let me tell you another story from about the same period of history, a story with a happy ending. It’s March, and March is Women’s History Month. Last year, when I visited Canada for a conference, I learned about an amazing historical event concerning women. Since schools in the United States usually don’t say too much about Canadian history, I’m going to trust that few of you have heard the story of the “Famous Five” — also known as the “Célèbres cinq”.

Some background:

The Canadian political system was set forth in the British North America Act of 1867, now known as the Constitution Act of 1867. Canada has a bicameral Parliament, consisting of the House of Commons and the Senate. People are elected to the House of Commons, but people are appointed to the Senate. Initially Senate appointments were for life, but now Senators must retire at age 75.

Senate appointments are made by the Governor General of Canada, but traditionally the Prime Minister suggests names to the Governor General. The British North America Act of 1867 says:

The Governor General shall from Time to Time, in the Queen’s Name, by Instrument under the Great Seal of Canada, summon qualified Persons to the Senate […].

Take note of that phrase “qualified persons”.

In 1916, Emily Murphy, a women’s rights activist in the Province of Alberta, was made the first female magistrate in the entire British Empire. On her first day on the job, a defense lawyer challenged her qualifications to be a magistrate. He said that women could not legally be magistrates. He based his objection on a forty-year-old common law ruling that had never been officially overturned: it said that “women are persons in matters of pains and penalties, but are not persons in matters of rights and privileges.” In other words, women are subject to all of the restrictions of the law, but get none of the benefits. Being a magistrate is a privilege, argued this lawyer, so Murphy, being a woman, could not legally be a magistrate.

The Supreme Court of the Province of Alberta disagreed with this argument and upheld Murphy’s appointment as a magistrate, but for Canada as a whole the question of whether women were persons was still undecided. Over the next few years, more and more citizens and organizations demanded that women’s names be put forward as appointees to the Senate, but it was not clear whether women could be legally appointed. Finally, in 1927, Murphy and four other women3 — all of them provincial legislators and activists — petitioned the government to have the Supreme Court of Canada settle the question. The government asked the court: “Does the word Persons in […] the British North America Act […] include female persons?”

Perhaps now would be a good time to recall the words of Frederick Douglass from today’s responsive reading: “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.”

In April 1928, the Supreme Court answered: Are women persons? No. No, the court said, women do not count as persons for the purposes of the British North America Act. The Court based this decision partly on the use of male pronouns elsewhere in the Act, and partly on the idea that the men who wrote the Act almost certainly did not intend the word ‘person’ to imply that women could be Senators.

But at that time, the Supreme Court was not the absolute final authority on such matters in Canada; there was still the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England. The five women appealed the supreme court’s decision, and in October 1929, the Privy Council reversed it.

The Council’s decision stated that:

[t]he exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours, but it must be remembered that the necessity of the times often forced on man customs which in later years were not necessary. […] Customs are apt to develop into traditions which are stronger than law and remain unchallenged long after the reason for them has disappeared.

This case — known as the “Persons Case” — had a tremendous influence on Canadian Constitutional law. It had the immediate effect of allowing women into the Senate. But it also established the so-called “living tree” doctrine, which says the constitution is a living document that must be interpreted in light of current circumstances.4

I love this story — both because it has a good ending, and because it demonstrates something important about words and about evil.

Unitarian Universalists have the reputation of caring a lot about words. We argue about how things should be phrased, and we seem to think that if we could just get the words right, then justice will follow.

The Persons Case show just how wrong this idea can be. The British North America Act of 1876 had perfectly fine words: Any “qualified person” could be appointed to the Senate. But even though the words were as clear as could be, justice was still not served, until a new principle of constitutional law was established.

Sometimes, like Clarence Skinner, we are blind to the evil around us.

Sometimes, we can be fooled into thinking that words alone are enough to prevent evil.

How can we maintain our awareness of evil? How can we be sure to take action against it, and not just speak against it?

A few minutes ago I described two types of evil: interpersonal evil, which comes from a person or a group denying the inherent worth and dignity of others; and evil against nature, which comes from a failure to acknowledge the complexity, uniqueness, and precariousness of natural systems.

At Throop Church, we have a significant focus on ecological issues; we have our Learning Garden, and we have the Thirty Days for the Earth celebration and commitment that starts next Sunday. Among other things, we will be working to get Pasadena to ban styrofoam.

What about social evils? We do have some people and groups working for economic justice — for getting a decent minimum wage in Pasadena, for example. But what other social issues? What about systemic racism? What about the social problems that might be hard for some of us to see, given our position in society? How do we awaken ourselves to these issues? And how do we “stay woke”?

I invite you to think about what social evils we might try harder to address. Talk with me, and with Reverend Tera; let us know what is on your mind.

Even though I walk through a dark and dreary land,
There is nothing that can shake me,
She has said She won’t forsake me,
I’m in her hand.5

With our faith and our community behind us, we can learn to see the evil around us; we can speak out against it; and we can take action to prevent it.

May it be so. Blessed be. Amen.

Image credit: Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson of the Famous Five statue by Canadian artist Barbara Paterson, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Cropped. Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Original here

  1. Here is a scanned reproduction of the book, and here is the text converted to HTML. ↩
  2. See the preceding footnote. Perhaps I should note that there are also some troubling aspects to Skinner’s book — for example, his casual embrace of eugenics. ↩
  3. Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie L. McClung, Louise C. McKinney, and Irene Parlby. ↩
  4. The Famous Five are certainly feminist heroes, but their legacy in other areas is mixed. See their group Wikipedia entry as well as their individual pages to learn more. ↩
  5. This is from Bobby McFerrin’s adaptation of the 23rd Psalm, whose lyrics were our reading before the sermon. ↩
sermons

Sometimes the Answer Is ‘No’

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(A sermon delivered at Throop Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena, California on 28 February 2016. Copyright 2016 by Everett Howe.)

Reading

“Lost”1

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

—David Wagoner

Sermon

Here at Throop Church, our worship theme for the month of February has been vocation, the idea of being called to do something. Earlier this month, Reverend Tera spoke about how the over-arching themes of our lives can help us understand our vocation. And again just last week, she preached about the spiritual aspects of our chosen work.

Since we have now reached the end of the month, I decided that my subject today would be how we might think about those things that we feel called to do, but that we cannot do, or that we choose not to do, or that we must postpone.

The title of this sermon came from a discussion last month with an esteemed colleague, an ordained UU minister, who spoke about her path to ministry. There were several times in her life when there had been opportunities for her to leave her former career and enter ministry, or to further her progress in seminary, and she had not always been able to take advantage of them. “Because sometimes the answer is no,” she said. It seemed like a great title for a sermon on vocation.

What does ‘vocation’ mean? Most people today use the word simply to mean “your job.” But the oldest meanings of the word are in line with its Latin root, the verb vocare, to call. Originally, your vocation was that thing in life that God had called upon you to do. You might be employed to do many things, but you are called, perhaps, only to one.

For a humanist like me, this definition leaves something to be desired. The Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer speaks instead about those things that are compelling to the deepest part of you; the things that provide you with soul-filling satisfaction. That is the meaning of ‘vocation’ that I will have in mind today.

So how do you tell whether something is your vocation?

In the book of Exodus from the Hebrew scriptures, God speaks to Moses by appearing as a miraculous fire that burns within a bush but that does not consume the bush. God says to Moses, “Go to the King of Egypt, and bring my people the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt.”

Now, that‘s pretty clearly a call. But for most of us, our callings are not presented to us quite so directly. So my first story today will be about Parker Palmer’s experience in discerning his call.

In his book Let Your Life Speak, Palmer writes of how he had trained as an academic. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from U.C. Berkeley, and spent a few years as a community organizer and as a university professor. But then he burned out, and took a position at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center outside of Philadelphia. He stayed there for more than a decade.

At one point during his stay at Pendle Hill, he received an offer to become the president of a local college. It seemed like this could be just the right position for him — and he thought it might be his calling.

But to be sure, he arranged what the Quakers call a “clearness committee.” This is a process designed to help a person explore more deeply what they feel about a life situation or a problem. It works like this:

You choose five or six friends or colleagues who you trust completely; people who you will be comfortable speaking to very frankly about your feelings. Your friends must agree to keep all the discussions you have with them about your question completely confidential. You find a quiet space, and for three hours, your friends — quietly, and without looking directly at you — will ask you open and honest questions about the situation you are considering. Not problem-solving questions, not detail-oriented questions, not those things that aren’t really questions at all but instead are thinly-disguised bits of advice. No, none of those. The questions they ask should be questions that invite you to think differently about your situation, to change your perspective, to be honest with yourself. Questions like:

“If this problem were a landscape, what would it look like?”

Or, “Where in your body do you feel this question?”

Or, “What images come to mind when you think of this problem?”

The questions are important — but more so is the space between them. You and your friends must be comfortable in silence, because it may take you a while to think of how you want to answer — or whether you want to pass. While you think, your friends remain silent.

Your friends will listen to your answers — but more importantly, you can listen to your answers. When you actually let yourself speak your thoughts out loud, instead of leaving them to murmur quietly in the back of your head, it is easier to recognize them for what they are.

Parker Palmer writes that his clearness committee asked him many questions to help him reflect on whether or not to take this job as a college president. It wasn’t until halfway through that he got a question that allowed him to change his perspective. It was this:

“What would you like most about being president?”

A completely innocuous question, you might think. But Palmer found himself hesitating to answer it directly. After a pause, he listed many things that he would not like about the job… but his questioner noticed this, and asked again: “What would you like most about being president?”

When he had to be honest with himself, when he had to think deeply about what he wanted, he came up with an answer that he would have been too embarrassed to speak out loud if he hadn’t trusted his friends completely. He replied,

“Well, I guess what I’d like most is getting my picture in the [news]paper with the word president underneath it.”

Here, today, we can laugh at that answer. It’s a pretty ridiculous reason for wanting to make a major life change. But Palmer’s clearness committee did not laugh. They remained quiet, so that Palmer himself could hear the words that had come from his own mouth.

Finally, the original questioner asked a followup: “Parker, can you think of an easier way to get your picture in the paper?” That did break the silence with laughter, but it also helped Palmer see and acknowledge his own situation.

Parker Palmer’s experience gives an example of one reason to say ‘no.’ Upon reflection, we may find that what we thought was a calling — what we thought was something that answered a deep need of our own soul — we may find that this thing was in fact nothing of the sort. Perhaps what we thought was a calling was instead motivated by our pride, or our ego — parts of ourself that might not be the best guides in life. Or perhaps what we thought was answering our own deep needs was instead answering the expectations of other people.

It’s not practical to form a clearness committee for every life choice we face. But we can develop a habit of reflection. When I have been troubled, I’ve found it very helpful to find a quiet time in which to reflect; a time when I could ask myself open questions, and really listen to the answers; a time in which I force myself to notice when I am uncomfortable with a question, and to investigate the sources of that discomfort.

Taking this quiet time for reflection reminds me of today’s reading. “The forest breathes. Listen. […] The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.”

There are other reasons one might say ‘no’ to a calling. Tien Chiu is a talented weaver and textile artist, whose handwoven wedding dress is part of the permanent collection of the American Textile History Museum. She is also a writer who has blogged about her craft and her creative process, and whose first book is coming out later this year. She is also a chocolatier — every fall she creates about 100 pounds of masterful chocolate bon-bons — the best I have ever tasted — that she gives to friends and family who donate to a chosen charity. And, like me, she has a degree in mathematics from Caltech, which is one reason why I know her. With her permission, I will tell you part of her story.

Clearly Tien is talented in many areas. But these many talents led to expectations from friends and family that were hard to set aside. “How could you not do X?”, they would ask. “You have such potential in it!” She writes:

Every human has potential in many disciplines, and only time to pursue a few. If I spend eight hours a day practicing writing, I may become a great poet, but I will never be a great mathematician. If I spend eight hours a day practicing writing and the other eight thinking about number theory, I may manage both but I will never have time to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation, develop intimate relationships, or engage in social activism. So I expect to go to my grave a huge well of unused potential. If I lived 1000 years, I’d still never live up to my potential. I’m no different than any other person in that regard […].

How do Tien Chiu’s words relate to vocation? Implicit in the idea of a calling is the idea that there is one best thing for each person to do. But what if there are several things that answer deep needs in your soul? If you devote yourself to one of them, you may have to put the others on the back burner.

Tien writes:

[Y]ou have to accept that you will never fulfill all of your potential, and that you won’t ever achieve all the things you could achieve. It’s a disappointing, but also freeing, realization: then you can live your life the way you want.

You might need to say ‘no’ to one calling, in order to say ‘yes’ to another.

On the other hand, sometimes the answer to a call may be neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’, but rather: ‘not yet.’ Following a call usually means giving up something else; and sometimes that ‘something else’ can’t be given up so easily. Maybe that ‘something else’ is the job that pays for our food and housing; maybe that ‘something else’ is being present for our children or our loved ones; maybe that ‘something else’ is the social support network we have built up in our community, a network we cannot afford to leave behind in order to move across the country. In these cases, we have to hold on to the idea that someday our needs and responsibilities might change — and that someday, as our meditation hymn has it, someday this rose will open.

So there are many reasons why we may have to answer ‘no’ to a call. But we can still draw value and meaning even from a refusal, or a postponement. The very act of thoughtfully considering a call can help us rebalance priorities and see the world in a new way.

Let me tell you two related stories about my life to illustrate this.

When I was in graduate school looking for math problems that I could work on for my thesis, I would read through journals and make photocopies of articles that looked like they might be a source of interesting topics. Even after I graduated, I continued to gather up articles that looked like they might one day be useful. But a few years ago, our file cabinets at home were getting overcrowded… and two whole file drawers were taken up with math articles that I had saved because I thought they might someday be useful.

I decided that it was time to get rid of them. If I hadn’t looked at them in 20 years, I was not likely to need them — and nowadays, you can find almost any math article online.

But even knowing all this, it was very hard to put those articles into the recycling bin. I had grasped on to them; they felt like a part of me, part of my identity as a mathematician, because I was holding on to them so tightly; and letting go was very hard. But when I did, I felt a great spaciousness — not only did we have so. much. room. in our file cabinets again, but there was also a new spaciousness in my mind and in my heart, room for new ideas.

In a number of religions — Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism — there is the concept of non-attachment. In these traditions it is seen as good to not desire things, or people, or ideas. Desire leads to suffering.

There’s an often-told story about this, that seems to have originated as an anecdote told by the psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein about a visit he had with Ajahn Chah, a Buddhist teacher from Thailand. Epstein writes:

Before saying a word [in answer to someone’s question], [Ajahn Chah] motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, “Of course.” But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.

It is tempting to think too literally about this story, to view it as a warning only against attachment to physical objects and possessions. But letting go of objects is infinitely easier than letting go of ideas, letting go of images of ourselves.

Around the same time I had recycled my file drawers of math papers, I had also entered seminary. I had chosen to go to Starr King School for the Ministry because I thought it was very likely that I would not be able to graduate without having been transformed in some way — I felt that the school would help me rethink my basic idea of myself, and help me live less in my head and more in my heart.

One morning, while thinking about this, I suddenly realized: If I’m going to school specifically to be transformed, well, then, I might change my mind about some things — maybe even about some things I strongly believe in. Those of you who have heard some of my other sermons2 know how strongly I identify as a humanist, and an atheist. I thought, “I’m going to a seminary. It’s possible my theology might change. It’s possible that I might end up believing in something called God.”

In all honesty, I thought that it was pretty unlikely that I would end up becoming a theist. But I also thought that I should be prepared for the possibility.

The difficulty of letting go of 20 years of math papers was nothing compared to the difficulty of letting go of 40 years of self-image. But releasing my grip on this self-image did not make it fall away. After nearly two years of seminary, I’m still a humanist — only now I’m more confident that it’s because that’s who I am. Being willing to let go of some self-conceptions made it easier to tell who I really am.

Do you remember, in Charles Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, how the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Marley? Marley’s ghost is fettered by a long heavy chain made of cash-boxes and ledger books and iron purses. Marley warns Scrooge: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

The ideas and self-images that we cling to are like the links in Marley’s chain. We forge them of our own free will, and they weigh us down.

Maybe answering a call is not the most important thing. Maybe it is more important to live our lives ready to answer a call — to live life with our arms open, embracing the world and all its possibilities, without grasping tightly to any of them.

Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.

Amen.

Image credit: Luis Del Río Camacho, posted on unsplash.com under the Creative Commons Zero license. Original here.

  1. From David Wagoner, Collected Poems 1956–1976 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976) and Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). I believe the inclusion of the poem here falls under Rule 6 (“Poetry online”) of the Poetry Foundation’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. ↩
  2. This one being an example where I discuss my own humanism. ↩