Hannah Wells
May 30, 2004

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PRAYER:

For the soldiers who are working so hard as we speak,
and for the soldiers who have already given their lives,
may our thoughts be with them, especially this Memorial Day.
May we wake up to the reality that we are not as separate from them as we think, just as we are not as separate from anyone else;
may we understand how deeply connected we all are.
May we remember how connected we are to generations past
and to the soldiers who gave their lives many decades ago;
they are standing close behind us and we give our deepest thanks.

May we come to understand that war is a part of who we are
regardless of how noble the cause. Our kind has been dying prematurely of wars and disease since the beginning of our time. May we always take time to remember those who left us too soon.

And may we extend our deepest warmth and support to those families who are left behind, whose long lives stand before them; young mothers and young children.

May we be aware of their sacrifice and pray for their strength.

May we pray for the leadership of our beloved country, and pray for an end to the chaos in Iraq so our troops can come home. May we be patient, may creative solutions be found to an unprecedented struggle, and may our support for our troops hold steadfast regardless.

May we let there be time for the most difficult emotions to unfold surrounding this war and more recent wars. 

Dear spirit of life, please help us, as one nation, to take responsibility for our mistakes, to acknowledge the harm we inflict upon others and upon ourselves. Let us be that brave. Amen.

SERMON:

On “Washington Week In Review” on the TV PBS station early Friday evening, the anchor woman ended the program by saying, “and for those of you who are fighting in these wars that we only talk about, thank you for your service.” When she said that, on the one hand I was struck by the honesty of her statement, but on the other hand it seemed kind of cheap. 

Every Memorial Day I’m aware of some kind of uneasiness that I can’t quite name, but this year I’ve gotten closer to putting a name on it, and I think it’s shame. Since Jr. High when I became a tune to the context of United States history, every Memorial Day I’ve had the vague awareness that there’s a debt I’ll never be able to repay. Around Memorial Day there’s a bit of a time warp, or perhaps several wrinkles in time that closely juxtapose every major war of this country - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and now the Iraq War. All these wars come to mind because we know in our hearts that several of these wars were worth fighting. And we wonder how the world would be different if the good wars hadn’t been won. 

I know my life is what it is because the right side won those good wars. Reflecting on this is the stuff of a healthy kind of patriotism - this gratitude and humility - knowing I could never return the favor, so to speak. It’s this reverence for a kind of dedication and courage and violence that I’ll never have to experience. And maybe that’s where the vague feeling of shame comes from - that cheapness of “thank you for your service” seems to belie a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement to a service that not only equals the loss of human life, but some things that are worse than death. 

Some of the men who came back from Vietnam would have preferred to come home in a box because their lives had been ruined. Losing your soul and your sanity can be worse than death. Discovering humanity’s capacity for evil with your own hands can be enough to ruin a life, even if the events took place in minutes. I bring this up because I think the country is still reverberating from the pictures of torture by our own soldiers’ hands. And yet it seems like a silent reverberation. 

This country doesn’t do well with shame and remorse. Like a dysfunctional family, we pretend it isn’t there and so it festers harmfully in a state of non-recognition. If you consider the behavior of our foreign policy in the frame of a family system, the question comes up: are we repeating a mistake now because a generation ago we never acknowledged and mourned properly the mistake of Vietnam? We never, as a whole nation, took the time to ritualize an acknowledgement of the shame of that event, the remorse, the defeat, the waste. 

In some ways, the Bush administration is a scapegoat. Sure, we’re in Iraq now because of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeldt. But the fact is history is repeating itself in an effort to reach an opportunity of healing that never took place after Vietnam. That’s my theory. There are different actors now, there are different reasons, there are not as many casualties, thank God. But we’re about where we were 32 - 34 years ago. We’re scared, we’re worried, but most importantly, our country as a whole is in a state of denial of the shame and remorse we’re experiencing as a result of the atrocities taking place in Iraq. And not just to the Iraqis, but probably even more so the atrocities happening to us. 

See, the thing is, we are so deeply connected to one another - that is a spiritual law I am certain of and I think we forget about 99% of the time - we are so deeply connected to each other that ALL of us are fighting the war in Iraq. And the reason I say this is because I believe that any of us, put in that situation as a soldier, would probably commit the same abuses, the same tortures. All of us possess the capacity to do evil, and under the precise conditions - when the enemy is invisible, when our friends are dying bloodily around us, when the level of frustration and anger are so high, and our supervision has effectively condoned it - all of us are prone to committing these kinds of acts as a group, or alone. 

What I’m trying to get at here, is not only do we need to acknowledge that all of us as a nation have blood on our hands because it’s the truth. But we need to stand in solidarity and likeness with our soldiers ALSO for the sake of healing, for the sake of grieving as one nation, for the sake of saving the souls of these young soldiers who were put in that situation by their higher-ups; for the sake of acknowledging the shame as one nation. 

How do we do this? I think by naming it, by talking about it, by acknowledging it. By honoring our soldiers who are suffering the worst of this useless sacrifice. For the sake of our soldiers we need to share the shame with them and not pin it on them. We need to experience a healthy kind of shame that recognizes there’s no way we can make up for this. We can’t make it up to the children who are losing their parents or the parents who are losing their children. The war will never be over for them - for the family members of fresh casualties, the war is just beginning.

Thank goodness for the arts - for books, for movies, for music, for sculpture - these seem to be the only mediums in which our culture has attempted to address the truth of Vietnam, to give ourselves opportunities to grieve. But these are only voluntary opportunities; eventually we’ll have the same kind of movies and books written about Iraq that we have about Vietnam. But those opportunities aren’t compelling enough to do the kind of grieving work this country desperately needs to cleanse itself as a whole. I know I’m fantasizing here, but wouldn’t it be great if our leadership - whether Republican or Democratic, it doesn’t matter - declared a holiday for the specific purpose of mourning the event of Vietnam? For the specific purpose of acknowledging we made a big mistake? The Wall of Names is great, but the Wall is very quiet.

The fact is Vietnam just wasn’t that long ago. Yesterday Davidson emailed me the interesting factoid that of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII, less than 1/4 are still alive, and about 1,100 are dying every day. So I’m surmising that means that of the Americans who survived serving in Vietnam, at least half are probably still alive. I doubt there’s many people in this room who would not say his or her life has somehow been affected by the Vietnam War. The point is that this recent history is still terribly relevant and for the health of the family history of this country, I think it still needs to be dealt with somehow.

I want to talk more about this war stuff in the context of a country family system history. I learned a lot about WWI and WW2 growing up, especially WW2. I remember that history was totally overwhelming. I don’t know a thing about the Korean War, except that it was Communist related (I think) and that *MASH* was based on it. And then there’s Vietnam which I learned the most about by watching the television series China Beach, which I think was around the late 80’s. I also read Johnny Get Your Gun. Saw Platoon. I loved that show China Beach and almost every week I cried when I watched it. It wasn’t a comedy like MASH; looking back, I’m surprised such honest television was aired for as long as it was.

When I began writing this sermon and the word shame popped up, at first I wondered if I should dismiss it as embarrassing “liberal guilt.” Liberal guilt because I know my Dad didn’t have to fight in Vietnam because at the time he was a member of the educated class - he was a Freshman in college at Duke University when he became subject to the draft. But the reason I know this is more than liberal guilt is because I have inherited from my father the shame he carries surrounding Vietnam. I know I have - otherwise watching those China Beach episodes never would have affected me the way that they did. I was born just around the time the war ended! I didn’t personally lose anyone in that war, as most of my peers didn’t. And yet I know that my generation has inherited the shame and the guilt of that war. What it amounts to is a lot of sadness and that nameless uneasiness around Memorial Day. I guess we’re still figuring out what to do with it. This is just another theory, but I wonder if the generations getting successively more self-destructive has something to do with this nameless shame we’ve inherited. I don’t know.

I’m a sensitive person, so maybe I’ve just paid more attention to it. But I’ll never forget the day when my father and I were canoeing in a pond up in Wisconsin, on a very quiet serene day with no one around. I think I was in High School. Somehow we got on the subject of Vietnam. My father’s shame around Vietnam was made concrete when his roommate in college flunked out of Duke, got drafted, and was killed in the war. So he knows that he escaped a similar fate by the savior of education and being able to succeed at it. Sure there’s some liberal guilt in there, but it’s so much more than that. It’s survivor guilt; this stuff goes way deep into the psyche. It’s the trauma of losing thousands of peers. It’s trauma that goes beyond my comprehension, and yet I’m getting a taste of it watching all these young people die in Iraq.

There’s this song that my father knew about Vietnam, an a capela folk song by the artist Steve Goodman. He started singing it to me that day in the canoe, but he couldn’t get through it all the way because he had to cry. 

The song is sung in first person as a young widow of the war. And I want to share it with you because I think one of the best ways to honor our soldiers who have died is to also acknowledge the families that so many soldiers leave behind. Young, just getting started families, young mothers and children. Their sacrifice should also be honored. This song is called “Penny Evans.”

Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21.
A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.
And I have two infant daughters, and I do the best I can - 
now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

I remember I was 17 when I met young Bill.
On his father’s grand piano, we’d play good old Heart and Soul.
And I only knew the left hand part, and he the right so well - 
he’s the only boy I slept with, and the only one I will.
And it’s first we had a baby girl, and we had two good years.
And it’s next the one a notice came, and we parted without tears 
it was 9 months from our last good night the second babe appeared.
It was 10 months and this telegram, confirming all our fears.

Now every month I get a check, from an army bureaucrat.
And it’s every month I tear it up, and I mail the damn thing back.
Do you think that makes it alright? Do you think I’d fall for that?
You can keep the bloody money and it won’t bring my Billy back.

I’ve never cared for politics, and speeches I don’t understand.
And like wives took no charity from any living man
But tonight there’s 50,000 gone in that unhappy land;
50,000 heart and souls being played with just one hand.

And my name is Penny Evans, and my age is 21.
A young widow in the war that was fought in Vietnam.
And I have two infant daughters, and thank god I have no sons - 
now they say the war is over, but I think it’s just begun.

  - Steve Goodman

I’ve been scouring the Internet the past couple days, looking for stories behind the faces of the American soldiers getting killed in Iraq. I didn’t find as many as I thought I would. And again, I think this is to keep us numb. If we knew too many of the stories of the fine young men and women this country is losing, we’d have to feel that shame head-on. 

I think I’ve driven my point home about the suppressed shame that the country is suffering, and the need for it to be expressed on a larger scale so we can be free of its clutches, so we don’t keep passing it on to our children. But I realize that it’s also just plain and simple sorrow that I share with my parents’ generation. The kind of sorrow that will always be with us. 

I want to try to end on a positive note; I know this sermon is not uplifting. There’s just no way to sugar-coat what’s going on. But I hope being honest with ourselves can be uplifting, and offer hope for healing, for a healthier future. It’s not “this too shall pass.” What we want to have and work towards are sharing scars from these wars - wounds that have healed but still hurt when we touch them. We can’t pretend they’re not there. These wars, whether we’ve participated in them or not, are a part of who we are, they are a part of our American psyche, they’re a big part of our story. We need to try to integrate this truth into our national identity as well as we can - grow with it - and not ignore it at our peril. 

Our soldiers are not victims. If they’re victims, then we’re all victims, and we’re not all victims. They are literally our warriors, they are survivors, they are doing the hardest job in the world. I am very proud of them and I support them as we all must. We’re here because of them. 

Those wrinkles in time I mentioned, juxtaposing all our major wars - they’re not so much wrinkles - all those wars stand very close behind us, without the help of a wrinkle in time. The past isn’t nearly as far behind as we think. Vietnam was like yesterday; World War II a short 50 years ago. We are such a young country - just a couple centuries old.

At this time, I’d like to ask anyone here today in church who has served in a war to please stand. 

I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the most I can offer and I really mean it,

“Thank you for your service.”

Davidson Loehr
23 May 2004

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SERMON: “The Four Faces of Jesus”

          It was a time of terrible fighting. Everywhere people were divided into separate groups, like little clubs. And everywhere they fought against all the people who weren’t in their little club.

          They all said they hated the fighting, of course. But they all knew that only the people in their little club were really right — and it is so important, being right. And as long as so many others were wrong — well, they all prayed that God would give them victory so the fighting could stop. But in the meantime, it was a time of terrible fighting.

          One day a young magician came to the area. He didn’t belong to any of their clubs, but he was a wonderful magician who did some amazing tricks. And he had that kind of “star quality” about him that drew people to him. Many people loved watching him, though they didn’t much care for listening to him, because of the things he said to them.

          What he said to them was that if they weren’t divided into so many little clubs, there wouldn’t be so much fighting. Their clubs, he told them, were the cause of their wars.

          To the people, this was about the dumbest thing they had ever heard. Their little clubs gave them a tiny area of peace and friendship among people like themselves, in an otherwise hostile world. They liked their clubs. So they almost never listened when the magician tried to teach them. But they loved his magic, and so kept coming to watch him, and they started telling stories about what a great magician he was.

          Years later, after the young magician died, a funny thing happened, though it wouldn’t have seemed funny to the magician. People formed a new club. And to be in this new club, you had to believe all the stories they told about the young magician. They even made pictures and statues of him, and put them up in their meeting-places, so people could remember how great he had been.

          The club became very popular, and soon had thousands of members. Before long, they even had an army.

          That’s when they finally decided that they could use their army to end the fighting once and for all. Their priests and generals went to their meeting-places — which had become churches — and sort of talked to the pictures and statues of the dead magician, as if to ask his blessing. After all, hadn’t the young magician always talked about bringing peace?

          Then they went to war. It was a long war, and many people were killed or wounded. But their army was bigger, so they won. And they forced many, many people to come into their club, because they wanted them to be right — it is just so important to be right.

          After the battles, their priests and generals went to church to give thanks. They stood before the pictures and statues of the dead magician, and told him their proud story of the victorious battle. 

          That’s when the miracle happened. Just as all the priests and all the generals were looking up at the statues telling them about their successful wars, it happened: all the pictures and all the statues began to cry….

          The young magician, of course, was Jesus. 

          There are risks in stripping a man like Jesus of his halo and asking what kind of man he was, and how wise his teachings really were. It offends the popular romantic picture of Jesus as the Son of God and supernatural savior of humankind. Yet for over two centuries, scholars have known that those were mythic attributes invented by his followers long after he died, and that the real Jesus was 100% human — since that’s the only category there is for us. Calling him a “son of God” was poetry, not biology or genetics. We don’t like in a world constructed in such a way that people can receive half their chromosomes from a human and the other half from a sky-god — and neither did they. 

          I want to respect the truth without worshiping the myth this morning, by suggesting that this man Jesus had at least four different aspects, or “faces.” One aspect was useless, a second — the most “magical” — was real, but not supernatural. A third was just wrong. Then there is that fourth face of Jesus, which still seems to look into our souls with uncomfortable accuracy. 

1. Jesus as an Itinerant Cynic Sage

          The first face of Jesus concerns his life style, his personal values, the kind of role model he would have been. This is the dimension of Jesus that has hardly even been discussed, because it is so bizarre. For instance, see how many sermons you’ve ever heard preached on these quotations attributed to Jesus:

         “Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be a follower of me, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters … will not be worthy of me.” (Gospel of Thomas 55) — Not the text for a “family values” sermon!

         On another occasion, a woman from the crowd spoke up and said to Jesus, “How fortunate is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” It was a conventional way of handing a compliment to the mother through the son, like saying “your mother must be very proud of you.” But Jesus replied, “How fortunate, rather, are those who listen to God’s teaching and observe it!” (the Q Gospel, in Luke 11:27-28). — This one would be a bad Mother’s Day text!

         And the last quotation is the most extreme and the most famous. It comes from the gospel of Luke, where Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” (Q Gospel in Luke 12: 51-53) — You seldom hear the Christian Right preaching on this one, either!

          These sayings don’t fit the traditional picture of a sweet Jesus who preached family values. They show us some of Jesus’ personal values and lifestyle, and make him seem very strange and foreign, not to mention unappealing. For most of the styles of living that Jesus exemplified have never had many takers. 

          This is the profile of someone on the fringe of any culture at any time. Scholars recognize this profile, however. It was a marginal but well-known style of living in the ancient world. From about the fourth century BCE until the sixth century CE, there was a name for this style of living exemplified by Jesus. These were the people called cynics.

          Some scholars describe Jesus as an “itinerant cynic sage.” The name itself is derogatory, given to the “cynics” by their detractors (the way most such names originate). It came from the Greek word for “dog,” and was meant to imply that cynics lived like dogs. They had no home, no property, no spouses, no fixed circle of friends, no jobs, and no love for the society in which they lived. Cynics didn’t offer a correction of society so much as they offered an alternative to society. 

          The best of the cynics were astute social critics: they were like secular versions of the Old Testament prophets, standing outside the accepted order of things, trying to subvert it. 

          Someone who could live a life in this manner had to be, among other things, extremely focused and dedicated to his particular vision. For history’s most famous cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, the vision was one of personal autonomy, freedom from the unnecessary demands of society. An old story makes the point: 

          The king’s messenger came to find Diogenes, who was squatting in the street, eating his simple meal of lentils. “The king invites you to come live in his castle,” said the messenger, “and be one of his court advisors.”

          ”Why should I?” asked Diogenes.

          ”Well for one thing,” said the messenger, “if you’d learn to curry favor with the king you wouldn’t have to eat lentils.”

          ”And if you would learn to like lentils,” replied Diogenes, “you wouldn’t have to curry favor with the king.”

          The message of cynics was always extreme, and they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. Furthermore, they generally thought that everyone else would also be better off abandoning the society’s vision of life and adopting their cynic vision. Their message was to individuals. They didn’t belong to or care about a real community. They weren’t social reformers. They thought society was fundamentally wrong, and people should “tune in, turn on and drop out,” to recapture that slogan from the Hippie years.

          Jesus fits very neatly into this conception of a cynic sage. He had no home, property or job. He didn’t respect the accepted images of “the good life” or the normal expectations made upon people in a civilized society — the religious and cultural rules that gave people their social identities, for example. His vision of the “Kingdom of God” was, for Jesus, the only thing worth living for. His parables presented the “Kingdom” in this extreme way over and over again: it was a “pearl of great price,” a “treasure buried in a field” for which the lucky finder would sell everything.

          What must be noted about cynics, including Jesus, is that their message is never likely to be heard or followed except for the extremely marginal person — another cynic. Husbands, wives, children, the joy of working at a job, making a contribution to society, nationalism, ethnic or religious pride of identity — all these counted as nothing for cynics compared with their singular vision. In Jesus’ case, his entire family was treated as though they counted for nothing compared with his vision of the “Kingdom of God.” This doesn’t make Jesus exceptionally cold or uncaring, it just identifies him as one of history’s great cynics — and a sage whose vision was sometimes too extreme to be either useful or wise to the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, then or now.

          And so the first face of Jesus was his cynic lifestyle. It was a huge part of who he was and what he valued. For nearly everyone in history except other cynics, however, it was not a wise road to follow, but a useless aberration.

2. Jesus the Faith-Healer

          Virtually all biblical scholars agree that Jesus was a man with great charisma, and a remarkable ability for what we today call “faith healing.” While almost all scholars agree that the stories have been greatly exaggerated, and that scenes like”walking on water,” raising Lazarus from the dead or feeding 5,000 people from a few fish are all Christian mythmaking, the core fact remains that Jesus was primarily known in his time and in the early centuries as a gifted healer. It was this almost magical power that really attracted people to him, even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t want to hear, the things he wanted to teach. His followers also shared this healing power, though not to quite the same extent as did Jesus. 

          There is nothing here to debunk, except to note that this kind of charismatic power doesn’t necessarily imply that the healer is wise or good. There are still lots of faith healers today, from Oral Roberts to Bennie Han. Furthermore, the principle of faith healing is behind placebos — those sugar pills that can often make your symptoms disappear if you think they can. It is easy to think of other historical figures who also had immense charisma and personal power over other people, who were unwise or evil: Rasputin, Hitler, Jim Jones, Matthew Applewhite, and David Koresh come quickly to mind. Not all wise people are magicians, and not all magicians are wise. Still, Jesus was one of history’s gifted faith healers.

3. Young Idealist Without a Concept of the “Sangha”

          The third face of Jesus shows a severe limit to his vision, one that would have almost undoubtedly relegated him to the dustbin of history without the contributions of St. Paul. That statement alone is enough to upset or enrage many who love Jesus and can’t stand Paul.

          The ethical teaching most associated with Jesus is the Golden Rule. While he is reported to have said it means to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” it has also been equated for twenty centuries with another of Jesus’ sayings: “turn the other cheek.” Some radical Christian sects, like the 14th Century Cathari group in France or the 16th century Mennonites in Germany, took this literally and refused to resist the violence of others altogether. This led to the slaughter of thousands or tens of thousands of Cathari, and the slaughter of most of the first generation of Mennonites. 

          It wasn’t a new teaching. It had been around at least five hundred years before Jesus came along. We know this because we have the story of one of Confucius’ followers asking him five centuries earlier what he thought of the idea of repaying evil with forgiveness. Confucius thought it was a dumb idea. “With what, then,” he asked, “will you repay goodness?” Instead, Confucius taught that we should repay evil with justice and repay good with good. Confucius lived to be much older than Jesus did; perhaps this just shows the greater wisdom of a much older man. 

          Others have said that if you want to see a place where people have lived by the rule of turning the other cheek, go to a battered women’s shelter. It was a very idealistic teaching, but not a wise one, unless you are in a community where all are treated with respect.

          And that’s the second and more important limitation on the teachings of Jesus. All of his teachings were directed to individuals. He did not come to reform Judaism; he didn’t come to start a new religion or found a new church. He had no home, no job, no community, and he never addressed the necessity for a healthy community in his teachings.

          A quick look at Buddhism can help understand what Jesus omitted. Buddhists say you must have three things to become awake, enlightened. You must have Buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha means a center, a source of authority and inspiration. Dharma means the personal work that you must do. Jesus, you could say, taught that you must have God and dharma: you must live as God wants you to live. But he had nothing at all to say about the sangha. The sangha is the supportive community devoted to serving these high ideals, like a good church. And the Buddhists are right: we’re not likely to do the growth and awakening we need alone. We need a supportive community, a faith community, a church. Jesus never mentioned this.

          It’s ironic – especially for people who like Jesus but dislike Paul – but the concern for community was what Paul contributed, making it possible to create a religion out of the memories, myths and teachings of Jesus. Without Paul, Jesus was just another teacher who stressed individual duties but neglected to address the necessity of being part of a community of faith.

4. Subverter of Artificial Identities

          It’s hard to know what to call the fourth face of Jesus. As all biblical scholars know, Jesus’ primary concern was for what he called the Kingdom of God. What Jesus meant by this Kingdom of God was fundamentally different from what most Christians have meant by the phrase. Properly understood, it was Jesus’ most radical teaching. It was also his most profound and timeless, and his fourth “face.” 

          The phrase “the kingdom of God” wasn’t unique to Jesus. It was a popular phrase in the first two centuries, used by many people. It meant the ideal world, the kind of world that could have the most compassion and justice. John the Baptist, who had been Jesus’ teacher, said the world was too far gone to save, that we should wait for God to destroy it all and start over with the right kind of people — those who believed as John the Baptist did. 

          After John the Baptist was killed and the end of the world didn’t come, Jesus emerged as a charismatic leader, and many of John’s followers began following him. But Jesus’ message was very different. John’s “kingdom” was to be supernatural; for Jesus, the kingdom of God was existential, here and now, not in a world to come. 

          For Jesus, the Kingdom of God wasn’t coming. It was already here, at least potentially, within and among us. Or as he said in another place, the kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it. 

          How do you rejuvenate a hostile world? That has almost always been the question to which our greatest sages have offered their different prescriptions. For John the Baptist, as for many apocalyptic preachers today, we have to wait for God to act. For Jesus, God was waiting for us to act. And we act, we create the kingdom of God, or the best possible world, simply by treating all others as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. What Jesus was doing was attacking and subverting exclusive identities, identities that make us feel special or “chosen” at the price of casting others into a second-class status. 

          This sounds sweet and nice, but it’s a dangerous thing to teach. For instance, the food laws of the Jews set them apart from their neighbors. So Jesus’ instructions to his followers were to eat whatever was set before them: pork, shellfish, goat, whatever the host was serving. The Jews hated the Samaritans, who bordered them to the north, more than they hated almost anyone. So Jesus told a story about a beaten Jew lying by the side of the road, when priests passed him by and the only person who helped him was a Samaritan. During their high holy days, the Jews ate only unleavened bread. So Jesus said the kingdom of God is like leaven that you put in dough to make it rise. Over and over, he spurned the artificial identities that set us apart from others. There was only one identity possible for us in the Kingdom of God: to treat one another as brothers and sisters. 

          Do you see how subversive this is? This is a message that could threaten any form of government, all ideologies, and all religious or racial identities. The world is in chaos, we’ve lost a shared center, so we create a hundred little artificial centers, or “clubs,” from which we get our identities. The problem is, they’re all too small, all exclude those who believe or live differently than we do, and so they’re precisely the structures that keep the world hostile. 

          Today, his message might be Stop joining clubs! Stop identifying yourselves with your nation, your race, your religion, your political party or your sex. All of these are ultimately divisive identities that make a peaceful world impossible. You want the Kingdom of God? You want a world of peace and justice? It’s in your hands, and only in your hands. You’ve been given everything you need, now it’s time to act.

          This is a message that would still get the messenger killed almost anywhere in the world. Imagine going into Northern Ireland a few years back, telling the fighters that neither side is Christian, both are agents of evil, and they need to stop thinking of themselves as Protestants and Catholics, because those identities are themselves the problem. The only thing the two sides would agree on would be lynching you from the nearest tree. 

          Imagine trying to sell that message to the Jews and Palestinians, telling them the only way to stop the murderous fighting is to grow beyond thinking of themselves as merely Jews or Palestinians, and begin seeing each other as brothers and sisters, the children of God. You’d be shot! 

          I don’t want to imply that Jesus was the only person in history to see this vision of a world kept small and hostile by our artificial identities and our territorial impulses. You can find this idea that we are all brothers and sisters in many religions, many cultures. You also find it in cultures that never had contact with any Western civilization. Remember these lines from this morning’s responsive reading by the Lakota Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk:

          And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

          These things aren’t true just because Jesus or Black Elk or the others said them. They are true because they have seen to the essence of what it means to be human, with a clarity few people in history have ever had. I don’t know of any way to argue against that insight. It seems deeply, profoundly, eternally correct. Our human or animal tendencies to create artificial identities for ourselves are the original sin of our species. We feel bigger and more worthwhile as parts of a family, a nation, a race, a culture. So naturally we join the little clubs and wave their flags, and we wait for Jesus’ second coming so there might be peace in the world.

          The real tragedy of a man like Jesus isn’t that he has had so much silly hokum dumped on him through the ages — though God knows he has. The tragedy is that we elevated him into a man-God, then joined the religion of John the Baptist who expected this man-God to come save the world for us, as we sat silently by reciting whatever creeds our little religious or political or social cult has declared to be the current orthodoxy. We took the man who lived and died preaching against divisive identities, and created a club around his name. It is a cruel and ironic fate for the simple Jew from Galilee. 

          The tragedy is that this strange man, this marginal Jew without family, friends, property or job, really did have something to offer us, and nobody wants it. It’s too hard. It asks too much of us. So we found a simpler route. We made thousands of mental and physical pictures and statues of this man Jesus, whom we turned into a Son of God. And we pray that he, through his infinite power, will bring peace to this world in which we’re making war by identifying with our tiny religion, nation, party, race or territory. Then we say Amen, go outside, and prepare for the day’s battle against the infidels in the next church, next town, next nation. 

          And then I imagine the rest of the story. I imagine that all over the world, as people leave their churches, they turn their backs on the pictures and statues of Jesus they’ve made. And after they’ve gone, all over the world, in the cold darkness of the empty churches, all of the pictures and all of the statues begin to cry…

Hannah Wells
May 16, 2004 

Coming of Age Credos
Emily Withers, Coralee Trigger, Patrick McVeety-Mill

YRUU Reflections
Ian Reed, Will Boney

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Davidson Loehr
9 May 2004

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READING: Mother’s Day Proclamation, by Julia Ward Howe

          Arise, then, women of this day!

          Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears!

          Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

          From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

          The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

PRAYER: It is Mothers’ Day: Let us give thanks:

SERMON: Mother’s Day 2004

          Mother’s Day is an annual ritual when we expect images and words of peace, life, gentleness, and a well-deserved recognition for the many mothers of all kinds whose job, we say; it is to embody those things.

          It’s worth wondering why we only give ourselves a couple days a year for these voices to be recognized, isn’t it? Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, and Valentine’s Day – there aren’t many days that we set aside to remind us of the gentler voices, the angels of our better nature. 

          It isn’t that Mothers’ Days are new inventions. In prehistory, the Greeks held festivals to honor Rhea, the mother of all the gods. And they honored Demeter, the earth mother. Egyptians made pictures and statues of their goddess Isis holding her god-son Horus, and those pictures became the models for nearly identical pictures and statues of Mary and Jesus, another mother of another god. In Hinduism too, there are similar appeals to great mother goddess figures. I found this short prayer to Mother Durga, a many-armed symbol of many-faceted powers:

          This could be a prayer to any of the great mothers, the mothers of gods and mothers of dreams, life and hope.

          In Buddhism, the prayers are to Kwan Yin, the feminine counterpart of the Buddha. In Taoism, they are to Yin, the feminine principle associated with the moon, and with becomings, the vulnerable but necessary counterpart to the kind of male force represented by Yang.

          So these voices arise from all times and places, and they say much the same things. They plead for life, love, peace, compassion, understanding, and comfort. They’re all variations on one voice coming up from the depths of the human soul, a voice that pleads for compassion to balance combativeness, love to balance lust, generosity to balance greed, the power to give life to balance the power to destroy life. All these are voices of mothers, of mothering, of mothers’ days, and they span all times and places, these voices.

          But why are they so rare? Why do they speak out so seldom? Why do we have only a few days of the year when we’re supposed to trot these voices out and listen to sweet words of love and compassion?

          They are like fragile little spring flowers, these voices, always having to break through the hard soil of harder attitudes — attitudes of greed, lust, power, destruction, war, imperialism, and domination. That hard soil seems to be the ground of history, the ground on which are built all our tragedies, on which we stage our battles, in which we dig our graveyards. That hard soil is made of the coarser and dirtier aspects of our human nature. To become fully human, to become whole or balanced, we have to educate these coarse voices, like we would educate a teen-aged boy who thought only in terms of joining gangs, fantasizing about violence, domination and war, a show you can watch kids playing in a thousand video games and half the top-selling movies.

          We like to fool ourselves about this. We like to pretend that we are really just, honest and peace-loving, and seem to be more surprised when war breaks out than we are when peace breaks out, though peace doesn’t break out as often. It’s a kind of anesthetic that lets us make war, enslave third-world workers to make us cheap goods, and do all manner of unspeakable things. 

          I want to honor the spirit of Mother’s Day here by being blunt about the background noise, the hard soil, that motherly spirits always have to break through. I think we forget, at our peril, that the reason voices like those of Mother’s Day need special occasions is because those are not the voices that run our world or write our history. 

          The voices against arrogant violence don’t always come from women, but they do come from that feminine part of us, what Taoists call Yin. One of the most ancient and famous of these voices came from a man, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes. In 410 BC, he wrote his play “Lysistrata,” about a sex strike by the women, that is to continue until the men stop playing war. Yin has arisen to confront Yang here, to say you may not go destroy life then come to us to enjoy its sweet pleasures. If you would be served life at night, you must serve it in the daytime. That’s the spirit of Mother’s Day, in its ancient form. It is saying that the feminine force, the power of Yin, can be just as powerful as the testosterone-soaked power of Yang. 

          Buddhism has a wonderful story about the nature of true power. It is this same voice of Yin, this same feminine wisdom, attributed to the Buddha.

          A powerful macho bandit comes up to inform the Buddha that he is a ferocious bandit, the mightiest in the world, and is going to kill the Buddha to demonstrate his great power. The Buddha says “Ah. Well, then surely you can first grant me two wishes.” The bandit says to get on with it. The Buddha points to a small sapling nearby and says, “cut off the smallest branch on that young tree.” The bandit laughs, waves his sword, it is done. “And what is your final wish?” The Buddha bends over, picks up the small branch and hands it to the bandit, then says, “Now put it back.” Legend says the bandit achieved enlightenment in that instant, as he finally understood the true meaning of power is to create life, not to destroy it. 

          That is the message of all Mothers’ Days, too, in all times and places: that we need to remember that honorable power is the power to create life, not destroy it. The spirit of Mothers’ Day is always this spirit of Yin, of the mother goddess, the earth mother, the fierce determination of the gentle sex in Aristophanes’ play, the overwhelming power of the Buddha’s gentle wisdom, breaking through the hard soil of our everyday minds, the hard soil of human history and human nature.

          In England, they don’t celebrate our American Mother’s Day, but instead have a Mothering Day, in March. On the surface, it looks like hearts and flowers. It’s a day when children come home and bring their mothers flowers. But its history is darker. It came from the 19th century, when the wealthy had bought and owned the government, had looted all they money they could get, and reduced the masses to starvation levels, much as we find in many countries around the world today. Girls often left home at age ten to go find full-time work to stay alive, far from home. Mothering Day was the day when they were allowed to return home to see their mothers. Beneath the surface of hearts and flowers was a story of broken hearts and uprooted flowers.

          Our official Mother’s Day here began by President Wilson’s proclamation in 1914, as mostly a hearts-and-flowers thing — a day on which florists and restaurants make small fortunes, which is why they buy most of the advertising to remind you of Mothers’ Day — but the original Mothers’ Day wasn’t.

          That was the one you’ve already experienced, in the reading, the Mothers’ Day Proclamation written by Julia Ward Howe around 1872. She was quite aware that hers was a voice fighting up through the hard soil of greed, destruction and war, a voice fighting up through the forces that define history to oppose them. I want to read you some of what Julia wrote about the origin of her Mothers’ Day Proclamation, from her memoirs, so you can understand the manger in which it was born, the hard soil through which she was trying to speak:

          ”I had felt a great opposition to Louis Napoleon from the period of the infamous act of treachery and violence which made him emperor. 

          ”As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the [Franco-Prussian] war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?” I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed.

          ”The little document which I drew up in the heat of my enthusiasms implored women, all the world over, to awake to the knowledge of the sacred right vested in them as mothers to protect the human life which costs them so many pangs. I did not doubt but that my appeal would find a ready response in the hearts of great numbers of women throughout the limits of civilization. I invited these imagined helpers to assist me in calling and holding a congress of women in London, and at once began a wide task of correspondence for the realization of this plan. My first act was to have my appeal translated into various languages, to wit: French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and to distribute copies of it as widely as possible. I devoted the next two years almost entirely to correspondence with leading women in various countries. I also had two important meetings in New York, at which the cause of peace and the ability of women to promote it were earnestly presented.” (Taken from online version of Julia Ward Howe’s memoirs.)

          In the spring of the year 1872, Julia visited England, hoping by her personal presence to affect the holding of a Woman’s Peace Congress there. She noted, though, that as she put it, “The ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of woman suffrage, and were not much interested in my scheme of a world-wide protest of women against the cruelties of war.” 

          I don’t think the spirit of Mothers’ Day can have its true meaning or power without understanding the background against which it is taking place, the nature of the hard crust it’s always trying to break through, just as you can’t understand Yin without understanding Yang.

          But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We don’t want to reveal our own dark sides, the untutored and murderous layer of our human nature. This week, for example, we’ve seen and heard testimony from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the vicious and vulgar abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. That was the infamous prison that Saddam Hussein used for years as his center of torture and murder. That’s the prison we took over, closed and then re-opened. After these stories began to break, comedian Jon Stewart said it seemed that Abu Ghraib hadn’t actually been closed, it was just under new management. 

          You’ve seen or read about these vulgarities. A video showing American soldiers, including American women soldiers, laughing and giving thumbs-up signs as Iraqi prisoners are stripped naked and forced into humiliating positions. You’ve read about the U.S. soldiers riding a 70-year-old Iraqi woman on all fours, like a horse. These are despicable acts — and I expect that we or our soldiers will pay for them. Donald Rumsfeld, in what struck me as a disingenuous speech, characterized them as completely un-American.

          But that’s not true. Unfortunately, they are completely American. The New York Times carried a short article yesterday claiming that “Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, routinely takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern….” (”Mistreatment of Prisoners is Called Routine in U.S.” by Fox Butterfield, New York Times, May 8, 2004)

          ”Some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court” — who sometimes attends this church, and is worth getting to know — “imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.”

          Yesterday’s New York Times also pointed out “that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.”

          The Utah official, Lane McCotter, was handpicked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild Iraq’s criminal justice system. These behaviors weren’t un-American. They were both disgustingly American and completely predictable.

          The behavior we saw in videos was distinctly, characteristically, behavior Americans practice and permit in our own prison systems right here. It may be the lowest and most despicable level of our American behavior, but it was American behavior nonetheless.

          And while this administration — just as the administrations before it — tries to claim that our methods of war are humane and noble, the high activities of peace- and justice-loving people, this is no less a lie than it was 13 years ago in the first Gulf War or 35 years ago in the Vietnam War. 

          Remember that all over the television stations before we invaded Iraq — in a spectacle I hope none of us would have been willing to believe if we had not seen and heard it — our President, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State actually referred to the invasion and slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens under the proud title of “Shock and Awe.” No blood, no bodies blown apart, no crippled, orphaned children, just something really exciting and fun.

          It wasn’t wholesale murder during the invasion of a country whose oil and strategic position we had lusted after for fifteen years. No, it was something exciting, like special effects from an Arnold Schwarzenneger film: Shock and Awe. You could try to imagine how whoever thought up that line might describe the vicious and vulgar tortures of Iraqi prisoners. But we don’t have to imagine it. You could have tuned into Rush Limbaugh this week, to hear him laugh it off as being just like fraternity hazing, and an understandable way for soldiers to let off steam. Is this the most we have come to expect of Americans? No higher values that that? This is part of the background against which today’s Mothers’ Day takes place. Those are the violent voices we need to counter; that is the hard soil through which messages of truth and responsibility must strain to break through. 

          We need to claim the power to describe events more truthfully, in order to retain our own integrity and sense of sanity. These were vicious, vulgar, disgusting actions. But they were not un-American. Nor were they subhuman. Humans are the only species that do things like this to one another. They were part of human nature: the vulgar, untutored, unevolved part of human nature.

          The great tragedy of humanity is that the violent and vulgar behaviors write human history, while the truly noble and life-giving voices are relegated to occasional shouts from the back of the room, and sparse annual holidays.

          And yet life is bursting up all around us. We are surrounded, embraced, cradled in the great power of life. Even here. This week, working on this sermon, I’ve been thinking of some of these things, and have felt positively engulfed by life.

          Our last year’s intern, Cathy Harrington, is preaching her final Candidating sermon this morning up in Ludington, Michigan. I read her draft of it Friday; it’s a Mother’s Day sermon drawing a lot on her own experience as a single mother who raised three kids and sent them all through college. I served that church seven years ago as a half-time interim. And the other church I served at that time, also as a half-time interim, called their new minister last week. Her contract begins August 1st, though she won’t be doing full-time ministry until November 1st, because she is expecting her first baby in August, and will begin her ministry on paid maternity leave.

          Hannah Wells, this year’s intern, is looking forward to marriage and to having children, and sometimes talks about it in our weekly private meetings. She’s bursting to burst forth. Vicki Rao, next year’s intern, will arrive here with her husband and their six-year-old son.

          And Betty Skwarek, our Director of Religious Education, told me that last Sunday here in this church we had 39 kids in the pre-kindergarten classes. Thirty-nine kids age 4 and 5! You don’t think life is bursting up all around us? God, it’s everywhere! And it’s wonderful! That’s why the voices of Mothers’ Day and the spirit of Mothers’ Day is such an important spirit to honor, not only today but every day. These are the voices of life and love and compassion and nurture, without which we cease to exist as healthy, mature people. 

          There’s another problem with hearing these voices so seldom, and that is that we can under-rate them. It’s easy to value the voices of war, greed, piracy, or imperialism more because they get more headlines and write the scripts for more movies. And then we neglect or undervalue all the life-giving and life-serving voices that are our own lifeblood. We undervalue motherhood and parenting. Over 60% of women with children are also working outside the home. And when they come home to their “second shift,” they are doing an average of about two hours per day more work at home than their partners. 

          We hear these things, and it’s easy to get angry in all directions. The husbands feel they are overworked, and they are. The wives feel they are overworked, and they are. The kids, when polled, say the one thing they would most like to have, is more time with their parents. So then the parents feel guilty for being gone so much, in order to earn enough money to support their family in a good way. It’s like a trap with no exit, and I suspect all of us have felt some of these feelings.

          Well, it would be so easy to let this become completely dark, especially if we reflect on the rest of the changes in our society that are likely to happen during President Bush’s almost-certain second term. We can’t fix history today. We can’t change the hard soil, or the fact that gentle voices of life, love and compassion must always struggle to fight their way through it. The forces that write history will continue to be the forces of Yang, not Yin, because Yang owns the guns and the politicians and makes the laws. 

          But we can try to give a little recognition to the voices of Yin, those who are doing their best to serve life, add love, and bring compassion to the world. And the good news is that this includes most of us. 

          It is Mothers’ Day. Let us give thanks for all the many kinds of mothers there are among us. Let us give thanks for that spirit of mothers and mothering, that spirit which knows that real power is the power to give life, not the power to destroy or demean it. Let us give thanks that these gentle voices of the angels of our better nature do speak up at least on these few days of the year we have allowed them, for when we listen to them, they have the power of making us all better people, partners, parents and citizens, making us all more whole and more holy, a credit to ourselves, our species, and to life itself. 

          Let us be raised to those higher aspirations today, and show it in higher behavior. And let us remember that what we are capable of some times we can also rise to most of the time, if only we will. It is Mothers’ Day, a day which holds sacred the tender mercies within all of our hearts. Let us give thanks.

Hannah Wells
2 May 2004

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:  (Don Smith)

I remember well the first time I announced to a group of people that I considered myself to be a Transcendentalist. The words had barely crossed my lips when that small–and usually reticent–part of my brain that demands a higher degree of specificity asked “Whatever do you mean by that?” 

Well, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I had just been reading too much Emerson, but I doubt it. I don’t believe the things I believe because Emerson also believed them. In fact, there’s a pretty wide gap between my beliefs and Emerson’s on a great many things. Emerson would, no-doubt, say to me “You are no Transcendentalist.” But I also think that if Emerson were alive today a good many of his beliefs would be different.

I read Emerson because I agree with most of what he says about the way we should live—the proper approach to life and nature—and I enjoy the way he expresses the ideas that we share. A lot of the Transcendentalists’ thinking came from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of the principle ideas that Kant put forth was that certain knowledge is intuitive—it’s built into the structure of our minds–and is not the result of experience. Knowledge that is of an intuitive nature he called transcendental, thus the term Transcendentalist.

Kant said that we cannot know the real world because we see and understand it through our own perceptions and concepts. Our view of the world is distorted by the way our minds work. From there he, or at least his followers, went on to say that we form our world, and not the other way around. 

Ayn Rand once wrote that “Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.” This may be the case, but I find room in my rational worldview for a little mystery, and I celebrate that mystery as something that adds a wonderful dimension to my life.

If I’m designing a building that has an overhanging beam, I know that I must design for the inflection point—the point at which bending forces in the beam change direction and shear forces are greatest—and I know that I can employ the quadratic equation to find that point. But I never forget that the quadratic equation is no actual thing; it is merely a mental construct. To use Kantian language, there is no ‘thing in itself’ that exists outside our minds. 

While I do not believe that the physical world is the product of my thought, I do believe that there is more to matter than it’s molecular and chemical composition. I believe that there are categories of knowledge that are outside the bounds of science, and that things have meanings beyond their physical reality, even if those meanings are created by us and are, therefore, somewhat arbitrary. 

I’m comfortable knowing that there are bounds to human knowledge. Many of things that we would want to know are not knowable. I accept this and even embrace it. I choose to view life and the world we inhabit with a sense of mystery and wonder. I celebrate the transcendent things. That’s what I mean when I say that I am a Transcendentalist. 

Beyond this way of viewing life—of celebrating the wondrous and the beautiful–I embrace the idea of self-culture as expounded by the New England Transcendentalists. Today we might say self-correction, rather than self-culture. This is a simple idea, really. I have ready work with the correction of my own faults and weaknesses, so I need not worry about yours. Surely there is nothing easier to do than to find fault with others, but easy tasks don’t provide much sense of accomplishment, no matter how well we carry them out. 

Another point upon which I agree with the New England Transcendentalists is that we owe it to ourselves to go through life with our eyes wide open, alert to the world and to the ideas that are shaping it. A few weeks ago Dr. Loehr spoke from this pulpit of the concept of G’d as a man fully awake. Emerson lived a life of such mental intensity that Robert Richardson titled his excellent biography of him Emerson: The Mind on Fire. But Thoreau, who knew Emerson as well as any, and better than most, was still able to write in Walden that he had never known a man who was fully awake. “How”, he asked, “could I look him in the face?”

One could easily assume that these people we know as the New England Transcendentalists set the bar too high; that none could possibly reach it. But they were addressing the ideal, the fullest potential of humanity. Why should we not strive toward that goal? If we’re striving toward so high a goal—the goal of being fully awake to life—then it’s of less consequence if we fall short of our goal.

I enjoy living a simple life—a grounded life—even while dreaming of the infinite possibilities that we possess. If this sounds attractive to you, then there might be a little of the Transcendentalist in you too.

PRAYER: (Hannah Wells)

Amen.

SERMON: (Hannah Wells)

Let’s begin this morning with a trip down memory lane. Do you remember that certain book you read, perhaps when you were 13, a senior in high school, in college, or early adulthood, that book that completely changed how you understood life and your place in the world? That book that you loved so much because you felt like it enlightened you, made you privy to important knowledge. What book from years ago do you still think about, refer back to, look at life through the lens of? 

When I was 13, that book was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye. It was so funny to me! Holden Caulfield, a young man, criticizes everything about society with sharp wit, particularly all the expectations of the upper middle class - doing well in college, social climbing, marriage. To him, everything and everyone was so phony. Yeah, I thought when I was 13, I agree. I didn’t want to have to work hard to be “popular” in school, I didn’t want to work hard to earn A’s in my classes either. Holden Caulfield was an awkward middle schooler’s HERO.

Holden Caulfield affirmed my teenage tendencies toward what sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism.” That was one of the other chunks of reading that left an indelible impression on me, which I read Spring semester of my Freshman year in college. I was a Sociology major, ready to learn how I could save the world, or at least look darn good trying to. Robert Bellah and his team of sociologists published Habits of the Heart in the mid 80’s, a reader-friendly book about how our American values of individualism are impeding on our sense of commitment to public life, to being responsible, civic-minded citizens, and how the kind of church we go to plays a role in this. 

Bellah tore the Unitarians apart in this book, charging that there was nothing in this denomination that obligated one to serve the greater good with total commitment; there was nothing rooted in strong religious principles that instructed one to serve his or her community as equivalent to serving the ideals of one’s faith. I remember reading this, and thinking, “my God, he’s right! We Unitarians don’t hold each other to anything!” Bellah goes on to associate the Unitarians with the historical/cultural tradition of “expressive individualism,” and mentions figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, who he said “put aside the search for wealth in favor of a deeper cultivation of the self.” But it was Walt Whitman, Bellah said, who most epitomized the American cultural tradition of “expressive individualism.” 

Bellah wrote, “For [Walt] Whitman, success had little to do with material acquisition. A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life.”

I have this quote hi-lited in the copy I still kept from college. In the margin, is an arrow pointing to it with the word, “Yeah!” I was all for Whitman when I first read this. I remember all the students in this class greatly resisted the ideas in this book, such as wanting a life rich in experience being questionable, as something to be reconsidered or discouraged altogether. We took it out on the professor, who we called a “stodgy nerd with bad breath.” I know that in those years, I wanted to do everything that reeked of Whitman’s definition of “rich experience.” I wanted to travel the world, learn about exotic cultures, back pack in the far reaches of the wild, fall madly in love, run in a field of wildflowers, swim naked in Lake Michigan - whatever was popularly qualified as romantic experience I went after, and did.

Thankfully, my sociology teacher was a gifted educator, and through his lecturing I finally got what the main meat of this book was trying to say: to be an “expressive individualist” is selfish! It’s self-serving, self-absorbed, but most importantly, it limits the actualization of the self since the self can only be actualized within community, within a broader mode of being and acting in larger society. What does this mean? It means that the smaller our scope of attention is in the world, the smaller our sense of connection to humanity becomes, and essentially the smaller we are. If I only focus on myself and what feels good, the less I actually participate in the world, in contributing to the common good, in serving what is larger than myself.

While all those things aren’t bad in and of themselves - the traveling, the hiking, smelling the flowers - I realized that this was only a small part of what life is supposed to be about, of what is truly challenging and enriching, of what is character-building. Those things are good for MY soul - but they have no connection to the WHOLE soul of humanity. 

I didn’t figure this all out right away, but eventually in young adulthood I’ve come to realize that it’s only through serving the common good that my life becomes “rich in experience,” or “a life of strong feeling.” It’s only when I forget myself that I can finally become myself. We can only become our best selves in a community of people who know us and trust us and like us. We become known when we work with others toward the spirit of what is good for a shared community - I know now that this is the only way I can find authentic peace and wellness in my life.

If anything, we are the most miserable when we can’t see beyond our own wants and must-haves. People divorce as soon as they perceive that their “needs” aren’t being met. If you think about it, self-absorption is an evil force because it tends to break relationship. It pushes us into isolation. The only way to counter this isolation and separateness is to engage in my interpretation of Emerson’s “Oversoul,” which you read in the Responsive Reading this morning:

“Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.” 

Unfortunately Emerson stops short of being explicit of HOW one can engage this luminous reverence of life. He seems to imply that it is an individual experience. While undoubtedly we’ve all experienced individual moments of grace that seemed rooted in the divine, I would argue with Emerson that such experiences only scratch the surface of engaging what is at the center of the sacred. 

Perhaps what is at the center isn’t blissful at all; no rapture, no ecstasy, no enchantment. Perhaps experiencing the divine is only found through a culmination of hard, quiet effort to make the world a better place, to keep life safe and sacred.

This is why the sacred is so elusive! It cannot exist in immediate gratification, it’s impossible. The Transcendentalists of the 19th century seemed to make the mistake that it is easily accessible, if only we paid better attention to our senses, our thoughts, and feelings. But nowadays, that’s the way things are, that’s the entrenched status quo - we are paying too much attention to ourselves. For us living in the post-modern world, the real challenge is to get our minds off ourselves, off our personal stresses and concerns. All this self-improvement seems to have led to a neglected society. 

So I propose that Transcendentalism for today is to transcend our selves. How can we act in and experience the world beyond the self? Imagine that who you are can be represented in con centric circles. The small circle in the middle is you. The first circle around you is your family, the next circle your friends, the next circle your church community, the next your local community, the next circle your state, then your country, then finally the biggest circle is the world. It’s like rings in a tree trunk. When our lives act in those bigger circles, we become bigger, stronger, more wise. If we only act in the first tiny circle of our selves, we stay small; we don’t grow. 

The American Transcendentalists of the 19th century got one very important thing right. They had faith in the highest ideals of our human capacities; they truly believed that we could successfully serve those ideals. They believed that life could be rich in experience, in beauty. But the problem is that what they defined as beautiful and sublime tended to not go past their noses. It was too self-contained. They trusted in their intuition, but whether their hunches were good or bad, right or wrong, made no difference in the world around them. 

The health of our individual mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual states are all very important - I’ve preached many times on how it is essential to heal our wounds in those areas with courage and perseverance. But our healing isn’t complete or as relevant until we are able to give back to the world, or learn how to give for the first time. We work to heal for the same reason we take time to grieve - so we can participate in the world again. That’s when life is beautiful, when we can overcome or transcend our personal struggles to a place where we can give of ourselves fully once more.

The people who are so good at giving have healthy relationships with their egos - that is, they don’t think about their ego that much. They know that caring for their own hearts and minds and souls is an indirect process that happens primarily when they focus on how they can serve others. 

Personal healing is important, but we probably don’t need to worry about ourselves as much as we do. I know I’m still trying to learn this. There is a concept in Buddhism called “not-doing.” It means that we let things take care of themselves, we don’t try to over do it, or try too hard. It’s having faith that while we continue to focus on living the best lives we can and be the best people we can be, that our personal issues and problems have a way of solving themselves. Finally we get to a point where we realize we don’t need to be solved - we don’t need to be “fixed.” Things tend to work out when we simply continue to participate well in the world. Our flaws and our so called “personal growth issues” don’t seem to matter as much when we become good at helping others. 

When the Trancendentalists talk about trusting their intuition in terms of possessing knowledge that precedes experience, I want to say, ‘yes, that unconditioned knowledge is there, but I can only trust it if it doesn’t have to do with myself. I can trust it and follow it if it points to the highest ideals that serve humanity as a whole.’ I like to think of this trustworthy knowledge that we’re all born with as the knowledge of the Kingdom of God. I believe we all possess it, deep within our psyches, and life is about doing all we can to uncover it, to actualize it. We can discover that the Kingdom has very little to do with the self - the self becomes only a vehicle, a conduit for doing good in the world. 

The Kingdom of God not only transcends the self, it actually saves us from the prison of self-absorption,the constant clamor of the ego. 

One of my friends is studying the Kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism. He told me that his teacher explained to him that the constant yammer in our minds that keeps all our attention on ourselves is actually the devil speaking. The voice of our ego is the voice of the devil. I know that sounds heavy-handed, so let’s just use it as a tool of metaphor. I think it’s comforting - because what it means is that that voice of anxiety in my self isn’t my true voice; it isn’t the voice I need to listen to or act on.  According to my friend, the Kabbalah teaches that it’s the voices within ourselves that are faint, that are hard to hear that we should be trying to listen to. The quiet voice that says something like, “maybe I need to go over here and see how I can help someone.” That is our true nature, not this ego-driven one. 

If we’re going to pay any attention to our intuitions at all, they need to be the intuitions that come from this center, from this sacred center. Not the center of the self, but within those larger circles. Transcendentalism for today ought to focus on attending to what our center is to be; what is the circle of the largest diameter within which we can define ourselves? To what degree shall we transcend ourselves?

When we realize the extent of our power as individuals to act in the world, we come to understand what the Kabbalah teaches, and what some wise philosopher also concluded: that every act we do is either an act of creation or an act of destruction. For the sacred is not only elusive, the sacred is fragile - the Kingdom of God is difficult to access, we know that true moments of grace between human beings are rare. If we are the spiders and the sacred is the web, which connections with the world are we going to extend to? Which parts of the web are we going to repair, slowly, meticulously, but with great intention and purpose? 

Sure life is beautiful! The Transcendentalists of the 19th century perhaps served an important historical function of their time - to counter an increasingly industrial mindset, to try to preserve nature against production and development, to uphold a mind set that dismissed an agenda of ruthless progress. That’s still applicable in today’s world. But we need to take more steps outward.

Today we know life has beauty to offer us; that is a given. And it’s well advised that we do recharge our batteries every now and then in nature, that we do spend time just being with ourselves, star-gazing, watching the ants work. YES, there is so much beauty in the world and we are well advised to notice it - God does get mad if we walk by the color purple and don’t notice it. 

But what is really going to drive you to act in the best ways possible in the world? To what ideals are you so accountable that they transcend the need to serve the self, that serving these higher ideals becomes a priority, perhaps even your life’s work? 

In the Spring of my senior year of college I had to present a final project to the Sociology department. They had given me permission to spend an entire quarter writing poetry, rather than do some kind of social service internship, because I didn’t want to just serve the world, I wanted to be a poet in the world, too. I remember I began the presentation to all my professors and fellow students with a favorite quote from E.B. White. He said,

“It’s hard to know when to respond to the seductiveness of the world - and when to respond to the challenge. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world . . . this makes it hard to plan the day.”

May we transcend this quandary. May we discover that, after all - to improve the world and to enjoy the world are in fact the same thing.

May our joy be our service. May our service be our joy.