PRAYER

            Let us pray for inspiration of the higher sort.  Too often, we act inspired by motives too low to be proud of: selfishness, greed, using other people as things to serve our own ends, rather than ends in themselves.

            We move so easily into attitudes of taking or entitlement, looking out for #1, as though the other people around us should be assigned numbers rather than respect.

            Yet we do this against a background of high ideals, high teachings, high expectations that are continually trying to get our attention, trying to help us become the solution to the human predicament rather than one of its symptoms.

            Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best when he prayed that we listen to the “higher angels of our nature” rather than the lower kind. 

            It is about who we shall become, and in the service of what ideals.  Let us pray for inspiration from the higher sort, and develop the ear that listens only for the better angels of our nature.

            Amen.

SERMON:     Selves & Souls            The general theme for this sermon came from Stephan Windsor, the man who bought the right to negotiate the sermon theme at last fall’s services auction.  He offered several ideas on which he had done a lot of work, and I chose to address the notion of the Self.  I wasn’t sure how I would keep it from being just an academic lecture. 

            What it means, or what I think it means, is that each of us has this distinctive style of being, a distinctive character that our parents saw the seeds of when we were still babies, and that people who’ve known us all our life say has always been who we are.  It seems to come, somehow, as part of our genetic package.  Some are shy, some are outgoing; some are aggressive, some avoid confrontation; some analyze, others feel, and so on.  That core style helps us choose the teachings, philosophies, theologies and values we find most natural. 

            This core personality, this fundamental style of being who we are, with all our gifts and strengths and weaknesses: I think of this as our Self.  

            I don’t need to belabor this; you all have a feel for what I mean.  The question is whether that’s enough.  Can’t we just follow our intuition through life, follow our own gifts and style?  After all, it’s what we largely do.  Isn’t it enough?  What would or could you add to it?  Specifically, what on earth do religion or philosophy or ethics really think they have to add to us that we would care or need to care about?  Every person seems to have this core, this Self, that’s apparent not long after birth, still identifiable when they become very old.  If we need more than that, why do we need it, and what is it?

            You can see how easily this could become so abstract you’d need to doze off. 

            As I thought about this, I wondered what it might look like if serving that core character got seriously out of bounds.  For nobody really wants to defend our total freedom to act however we want.  As someone has said, my freedom to swing my fists has to stop at your nose, and eventually my self-serving wishes will run up against your self-serving wishes.  And then what?  Then does the strongest, the greediest, or the one with the most guns win?  Or should there be something else to us?

            As I free-associated on this, my mind wandered far from the human species, as I remembered some drama that took place a year and a half ago in the attic above my bedroom, involving raccoons.  These are some of the cleverest animals around, and it took many months and finally calling out a roofer to discover that they had torn the heavy screen off from around my hot air escape vent on the roof, crawled in and dropped down to the attic.  We never figured out how they got out, though they got in by climbing trees and dropping onto my roof.

            But during what passes for “winter” here, one raccoon entered my attic, and the noise she made sounded like she was making a nest.  Before long, the noises made me believe she had given birth to a couple little raccoons.  So instead of thinking they were invading my space, I started thinking of my attic as a kind of homeless shelter for single raccoon mothers.  When her babies were old enough and it got a little warmer at nights, I figured she would take them out into the real world, and I could close my raccoon homeless shelter.

            But a few months later on a cold night, I heard a heavier thump on my roof, then in my attic.  Soon there was much noise and scrambling, and I heard the two young raccoons squeal and scream, as the intruder killed them.

            I knew what had happened, as you can probably guess too.  A male raccoon had entered to claim the space and - like males of many species do - had killed the young ones because they weren’t his, weren’t extensions of his own genetic line, had no connection to his raccoon Self. 

            Now when people do such things - and sometimes they do - we call it murder, and we prosecute them.  We don’t hold other animals to those higher standards - I doubt that you thought the raccoon had “murdered” the two young raccoons - because we don’t think they recognize those standards.  But we do.

            Those raccoons may seem an odd introduction to a sermon about Selves & Souls.  But in humans, it can point us to the difference between those acting out of self-interest and those acting out of an allegiance to much higher standards.  See if you find it useful as I try and flesh it out. 

            These nasty raccoon behaviors are things we see in so-called “higher” animal behavior, especially in politics, in our treatment of others around us. 

            A few months ago, I read an interesting book in the field of ethology, or comparative animal behavior, a field I’ve liked reading in for thirty years.  The book was called Our Inner Ape, written by one of the world’s foremost primatologists, a man named Frans de Waal.  Among other things, he studied human political behavior by studying chimpanzee political behavior, finding them nearly identical.  Both species seek power and privileges over the others through combinations of strength, shrewdness, and carefully chosen political alliances. 

            He talked especially about a very shrewd old male chimp.  In his early years, he had been the strongest and fiercest, so he was the alpha male, with all its privileges of power and access to females.  As he got older and weaker, he got more clever, and began forming alliances with a strong younger male who lacked his political savvy.  He would help the young male become the alpha male, in return for keeping his privileges and power. 

            Like human politics, chimpanzee politics can be vicious, bloody business.  De Waal described a time when the old chimp got even with a male who had twice defeated him many months earlier, by waiting until night when the human guards went home, then setting up an ambush, in which he and the young alpha male attacked his old rival and killed him.  Like the raccoons, these male chimps were only interested in what was theirs, what they could gain for themselves, and no amount of violence seemed too much.

            It’s easy for us to see patterns in chimp behavior, to reflect on them and judge them in ways chimps cannot do.  That ability to see actions against a background of higher expectations is one of the key abilities that distinguishes us from what we like to call “lower animals.”

            That’s a funny, and telling, thing to call them: “lower” animals.  It sure isn’t a comment on our relative strength!  There’s probably nobody in this room that could win a one-on-one unarmed fight with an adult male chimpanzee, or baboon, leopard, elephant, or a few hundred other so-called “lower” animal species. 

            We mean something else when we boast that we are “higher” animals.  And it has everything to do with this difference between Selves and Souls.

            So let’s move from chimpanzees to humans.

            First, a few words about souls.  Scholars have shown that very ancient Egyptian religions, from which our biblical religions got their message and many of their stories, celebrated a divine presence within us thousands of years ago.  The Greeks brought it down to earth about 2500 years ago, when they evolved the concept of Psyche, which is the source of our word “soul.”  It was tied to character, to what is most essential about a human, though for the Greeks there was no afterlife; it was all about what happened here and now, and our Psyche referred to what was highest or noblest about us. 

            They had a visual image of the person rising to their full humanity.  It was a set of nested concentric circles.  The smallest circle in the center represented what you could call our undeveloped Self: just us.  The next larger circle was of our relationships with lovers, friends and family - the relationships that make us bigger people, that begin to call us to higher values than the raccoons and chimps showed. 

            What the Greeks were doing with those concentric circles - and what Christian theologians followed them in doing - was saying that, since we have the ability to see our actions against a background of the highest ideals and expectations, we have a duty to do this.  Living in accordance with the highest ideals, rather than just those that serve our private selves, is what we must do to realize our true nature.  That’s what can raise us above the so-called lower animals: our greater capacity for understanding and compassion.  In humans, we expect these higher ideals to trump the “Selfishness” that’s also a part of us. 

            Ethologists like Frans de Waal argue that much or most of this also comes with our animal heritage: that altruism, a caring for others like us, is as much a part of us.  You’ve probably read about the mother gorilla who saved a young boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at a zoo a few years back, and returned him to his mother.  Or stories of how dolphins have saved drowning humans, carrying them into shallow water.  And Jack Harris-Bonham has a great personal story about being saved from circling sharks by a school of dolphins that he can tell you.  Altruism, even across species lines, is demonstrably a part of our evolutionary heritage.

            And every religion, philosophy, culture and system of law expects this of us.  Though, like the raccoons and chimpanzees, we have those lower and more self-centered tendencies in us too, of course.  We can see the contrast between serving our selves and a need for higher aspirations by looking at our own behavior, even better than by looking at raccoons and chimps.

            So let’s move from chimps to people. 

            I recently had dinner with the District Executive of another Unitarian district out in the East.  We were talking about churches with living spirits versus churches with dead spirits, and he said some of the churches in his district seemed to have dead or moribund spirits. 

            He told me about an old church with only fifteen members.  The church itself was old, 250-300 years, begun as a Congregational church in the 18^th century, before the members rejected two-thirds of the Trinity and became Unitarians in the mid-19^th century.  All the members are over seventy now.  But once it had many members, and enough money to buy the land and build the church that was now much larger than they needed.  And many members over the centuries donated a lot of money to build quite a healthy endowment.

            But that was long ago.  Now there are just the fifteen members, with no interest in attracting any more, especially young ones.  They are content with just themselves, and will use the remainder of the endowment to cover operating expenses, and the cost of burying the remaining members.  When they are all dead, the endowment will be gone if they plan it right, the church can slip into past history, and they are all quite comfortable with this.

            They’re taking care of themselves, and it looks like it’s hard to criticize them.  After all, they’re the only members, they’ve probably all been there for a long time, they can even vote unanimously to spend the endowment on their funerals at a duly called congregational meeting, so it’s perfectly democratic.

            They act like there are only the few of them to consider, taking care of themselves with free money for which they owe no one an explanation.

            But is it really just them?

            For over 250 years, a few thousand people have belonged to that church.  They gave their money, their time, energy and spirit to that church, and established the endowment, in the hopes that Something would continue to live into the future.

            What is that “Something”?  It was certainly not the hope that all this money, all these hopes and dreams, would be buried in the ground, never to be used for serving life again.  When we serve only ourselves, we lose access to that higher level of visions and inspirations.  We lose the inspiration of that whole Grand Reservoir of our human and animal heritage, and I think we need that Grand heritage to help us rise to our full human (and animal) height. 

            Well, you see the patterns I’m trying to sketch here, I’m sure. And now that you can see these patterns, and know what I’m trying to get at, let’s move from churches to some of the political behaviors we all see around us, and which are defining us as “Americans” to much of the rest of the world.

            As many critics have written, our present administration and lawmakers have effected a huge transfer of wealth, greater than at any time in at least the last eighty years, if not in our nation’s history, and a host of other money-transferring schemes that look for all the world like a vicious kind of greed that the chimpanzees would recognize immediately: looting our society the way Alpha males and females feel entitled to do. 

            And where to start in our illegal invasion of Iraq?  I’m sure most of you have read, as I also have, that the desire to invade Iraq was discussed in January 2001, the week President Bush’s administration moved into power. Greg Palast - who spoke to an audience of over 350 in this room last Sunday - has written that as early as March of 2001 - six months before 9-11 - Dick Cheney met with oil company executives to review oil maps of Iraq.  And by October of that year, Paul Wolfowitz had drafted an elaborate plan detailing the “sale of all state enterprises” in Iraq - that is, most of the nation’s assets, “… especially in the oil and supporting industries.” (See http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html, or Google terms like “Iraq Timeline,” “9-11 Timeline,” etc.)

            We were led into the illegal invasion through outright deceptions about weapons of mass destruction to serve motives that look completely selfish, and far more vicious than chimps could ever imagine - estimates of how many innocent Iraqi people we have killed since invading their country run to 250,000 or more, in addition to the more than 2,500 of our own soldiers whose lives were lost not defending “freedom and democracy,” but defending what looks to many people like little more than the looting of Iraq by some of our greediest and most well-connected corporations. 

            We could go on to a dozen other activities and events of the past five years that all paint the same pattern of chimpanzee-style US geopolitical behaviors.  In this country, when you kill people in order to steal from them, it’s called “homicide in the commission of a felony.”  And in Texas, that’s a capital offense.  If chimpanzees were observing us, they might say that we kill those people in Iraq because they’re not ours, not like us, because they’re in the way of our greedy ambitions, since we declared ourselves the Alpha Nation.  Both the raccoons and the chimps would recognize the behavior, though I think they’d be shocked at the scale of our greed and our wantonness.

            You can say we’re acting in our best interests, but without noble ideals it’s just the lowest kind of selfish behavior, serving Selves too low and mean to defend.

            Yet there is something in our government’s deceptions about Iraq that is, in an ironic way, encouraging.  Something deep in our leaders knew they needed to wrap their actions in noble talk about freedom and democracy because their real motives were so low that all decent people would have been ashamed and would have stopped them. 

            It’s that same noble part of us that I’m appealing to.

            Some of our major cultural institutions today are being used to drag us down to the lowest and most self-serving of ideals.  Just listen to Jerry Falwell praying that we blow away people in the name of the Lord, or that awful Baptist church that has taken to protesting the funerals of our soldiers, pretending that God is really killing them because he hates homosexuality - and not realizing that any god worthy of the name would hate their own bigoted and hateful actions far more.  Or listen to almost anything from Ann Coulter.  These people speak as Christians, so very well: they’re Christians.  It is not the religion of Jesus - I think he would have detested what they are doing.  But today these people are the best-known spokespeople for Christianity.  This means that Christianity and its God have, through people like them, become so vile that they can no longer hope to offer adequate moral guidance for our nation.  These people who loudly proclaim that they are Christians have become agents of a terrible selfishness that really is lower than the behavior of my attic raccoon or the wiley old male chimpanzee.

            We come back where we begin, creatures with high and low possibilities, always needing to be called to the higher ones. 

            Yet, at home and abroad, in small or large actions of self-aggrandizement, there is an important way in which we are like those fifteen members of that dying little church: we are not on this stage alone.  For millennia behind us, humans have worked, sacrificed, loved and cared about those higher allegiances and more tender mercies that help us become the best that we can be.

            They have left these high commands to us, buried within every human institution.  The warrior code of our soldiers is marked by some of the highest of human ideals, expressed in speeches like General Douglas MacArthur’s farewill address to West Point in 1962, in which he reminded them that those three words “Duty, Honor, Country” called them to their highest humanity, their most selfless devotion, their most courageous actions, made them heroes not just of war, but of our battle for higher humanity.

            Religions at their best - no matter how seldom they seem to be at their best today - also call us toward our tender mercies, reminding us that whatever we do to the least among us we do to our own souls.  And secular civic laws say we may not kill people in order to steal from them, and that lying is usually a bad thing. 

            So here we are.  We have the better angels of our nature on one shoulder, and the lower and more selfish angels of our nature on the other.  The lower angels say to take what we can, get away with what we can, and to the victor goes the spoils and to hell with the rest.  The higher angel says we were meant to be formed in the image of God, not something less - but it’s up to us.  The higher angel says when we act selfishly, to take what suits us no matter the harm it does to other humans, animals, and our environment, then we have disgraced ourselves, our race, and our calling - but it’s up to us. 

            We have selves, and can all act quite selfishly, and at times we all do.  We also have souls.  Souls are those repositories of all the highest hopes those before us had for what we might yet become, still beckoning to us, calling to us today with voices from ancient ages long past.  But it’s up to us.

            We have selves and we have souls, and if human history has shown us anything, it is that we can serve either level of ideals we choose, becoming either a low or a high model of what it can mean to come to our full humanity in this time and place. 

            Now it’s up to us.  And the Good News is that we know, we really do know, exactly what we should do, don’t we?

PRAYER

            We give thanks for fathers.  For those men who have had the character and courage to grow through the tough transition from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks. 

            For our own fathers, whether or not we think they were the best fathers or not, we give thanks.  We would not be here without them.  And at their time, in their shoes, they almost certainly did the best they could.

            We give thanks for fathers who have never met their offspring but have not forgotten them. And for those men who wanted to be fathers but could not.

            We open our hearts to fathers who have lost children – to chance events, disease, accidents, to war.  We open our hearts.

            For all the many ways in which men grow from manhood to fatherhood, we give thanks for fathers on this Fathers’ Day.

            Amen.

SERMON:     Father-Functions            When I was preparing to do the Mother’s Day sermon last month, I posted an invitation on the parents’ list for mothers to join me for lunch.  All together I met with or talked to about fifteen women who were eager to share their thoughts, frustrations and suggestions on motherhood.            Men are different.  I posted the same invitation, but only three men responded, so we had lunch together, then I checked the Internet for articles and tips on fatherhood.  If you Google the word “fatherhood,” you can turn up over six million sites.

            The talks with the men were very different from those with the women.  The women were often concerned with losing their Self, as motherhood defined them in a job without pay, without promotions, and without much recognition from society, or from other mothers.

            The men talked about duties, tasks, functions.  They still worked, and still had their professional Self, so were focusing on adding to it whatever new duties were involved in fatherhood.  We even discussed, and agreed, that it’s about learning new functions.

            This sounds radically different from what mothers want, but it isn’t.  It’s just the way men approach the subject.  All, I found – and almost all the books, written advice and tips I found – are after the same thing.  They all stress how hard it is, how it has to be learned, nobody will master parenting, everyone must allow themselves to fail, to feel their way through, and to forgive themselves for not being perfect.  All stress the need for more and better communication between the parents, so they can grow through this transition together. 

            But men seem to think more in terms of tips, how-to guides, and functions.  That doesn’t mean they’re unfeeling.  When I asked what the best thing about fatherhood was, every father talked about the amazing relationship with his child, and every father teared up while speaking about it, as I still do when talking about my step-daughters. 

            The transition from manhood to fatherhood is one of the hardest men will ever face, and not all couples can make it through the tough times ahead.  One study says that one of the most likely times for a marriage to fall apart is following the birth of the first baby, when almost 70 percent of couples reported a decrease in marital happiness. (Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions, p. 227) That’s also one of the several reasons that 39% of children in the US now live apart from their father.  It’s hard. 

            And men don’t often get much credit for being good fathers, just as mothers don’t get much support from others.  But for men there’s sometimes the added edge – or insult – that somehow being fathers is an optional activity.  One mother told me a story about her husband, who is a devoted father, and looks forward to the days when he can take their daughter to the store to shop.  What irritates him – and I suspect hurts him – is when women come up to him at the store, as they often do, saying “Looks like you got stuck baby-sitting!”  When it’s your own child, it isn’t baby-sitting: it’s fathering.

            But since men approach this differently, I want to frame it differently this morning.  I want to talk in terms of tasks, tests, functions, and tips for fathers.  And I want to say that this transformation from manhood to fatherhood is a kind of modern hero’s quest, and it fits the structure of mythic hero’s quests in almost every detail. 

            You’re in a wilderness, a strange new land, and you need help.  You need more than the tools of a bachelor or a newlywed.  And there is a fear that you can’t do this, won’t know how to slay the dragons that men must slay in their hero quests. 

            In mythic hero quests, heroes get help from gods, guides, mentors, and the wise people who are always a part of the stories.  In the Star Wars movies, this was the role played by Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobe.  In the Lord of the Rings, it was Gandalf and the elves.  You need to know you’re not alone, and that you can do this.  In the real world of learning to become fathers, the costumes aren’t as colorful, but there are still some special helpers and wise people.  It may be your own parents, or special mentors you’ve known.

            But in the Internet age, you can also pull up about six million websites just by Googling the word “fatherhood.”  Almost all of the sites on fathering I checked are written by men, for men.  Therapists, counselors, speakers bureaus, even a Christian man who homeschools his own seven children and speaks to your group for $1500 plus expenses, providing Bible citations as he goes. 

            There are sites with tips, how-to advice, one with Ten Tips for Fathers that even sells T-shirts with the tips on them.  There’s a site of Tool Box Tips, and the Army has websites with tips for fathers, taken from some of the tool-box sites, telling them to take care of themselves, work with their wife to redefine their relationship as parents, to forgive themselves for not being natural or perfect at this, assuring them that they can learn everything they need to know, it’s within their reach..

            Not all those who give advice are wise, just as great myths are dotted with tricksters and demons.  But many of them are.  And I was struck by the fact that men talk about this hero’s quest in very different ways than women authors write for mothers. 

            Men are being helped to “build” a new persona, one with increased communication, creating a new relationship with their partners, in a functional, step-by-step way.  They want tips on what to do: tools. 

            And one advisor, a pediatrician who calls himself Dr. Bill, adds this very male bit of advice: “Watching a man nurture a baby really turns on a woman.”  This sounds just like men talking, doesn’t it?  But when I talked with the mothers, they said one of the sexiest things their husband could do was help with the baby or do the dishes.  Same message, different style.

            The notion of a hero’s quest came from Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder:  fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won:  the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure as a larger, more deeply authentic man. (Hero, p. 30)

            This comes through the hero’s trials and tests, including the important trial of slaying dragons.  What are dragons?  They’re symbols of his fears, his past, his present world that must be transcended in order to grow into his deeper, more heroic stature: to grow from manhood into fatherhood. 

            The dragons to slay are tough dragons, as we’ll see.  And scary. 

            But he doesn’t have to do it alone.  As in classic myths, there are these helpers and guides, if he’ll look for them.  There are the modern Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobes, elves and Gandalfs all around.  By the way, there are over nine million sites if you Google “Gandalf,” and almost fifteen million for Yoda, the wise master of the Force and teacher of Jedi knights.  I’m betting the overwhelming majority of the people who visit those sites are men.

            Nearly all of the modern Gandalfs, Yodas and elves I read wrote in man-talk.  Tips, how-to advice, what to do next, with constant reminders that they don’t have to be perfect, or even in charge.  I don’t know that a man could make it through this transition without the help of some modern Merlins. 

            But the effect, the change, isn’t just functional.  It is building a bigger character and a bigger man; it really is a hero’s quest, and it is transformative. 

            So I want to take you on this adventure, a hero’s quest, through the first twelve months of fatherhood.   (Much of the following is taken or adapted from www.fathersforum.com, by Dr. Bruce Linton).  There are functions to learn, and also a few dragons to slay along the way.

            One of our Gandalf therapists begins by telling us that when the woman becomes pregnant with their first child, “There is good news and bad news. The bad news is the relationship can never go back to the way it used to be. The good news is with time and patience your relationships as a couple can become more intimate and satisfying.”

            Men don’t like to ask for directions in fathering much more than they do in driving, because we’ve all been raised to believe that we’re supposed to be in charge, and that weakness is unmanly and unsexy.  We’re afraid we won’t be able to do this.  But there is research that shows that whichever parent spends the most time with the baby will become more sensitive to the baby’s needs.  So it’s something we can learn.  And men will need to learn some of it from their wife, which means scheduling times to talk this strange new world over with their wife, so they can go through this together.  That’s like talking about feelings and intimate things.  Ask any man: that’s a dragon to slay, and a tough one!  It’s almost never the dinner conversation we would choose.

            An Obi Wan Kenobe says, “We need to know we can’t be expected to know how to do everything. Allow yourself to work as a team with your partner on this adventure as parents. Teamwork is the key to getting through this first year.”  I think all the women authors on mothering would agree.

            Then right off the bat in the first month, dear little Yoda says “Do not, by what you don’t know, embarrassed be.”  And Obi Wan Kenobe translates it as “Give yourselves permission not to know everything.”  This advice often takes the place of swordsmanship lessons in medieval hero myths.  These are the tools and functions we need to hone for these tasks.

            Others say during the first month, learn how to comfortably hold your baby.  See that you have a comfortable rocking chair for your wife to nurse the baby in – there’s a real “guy” thing to do!  Also, says Gandalf, you can help your wife by cooking suppers.  And don’t be embarrassed by what you don’t know.

            In the second month, continue to hold your baby as much as possible. Find time when you can be with your baby without distractions.  And with your wife, the two of you together give your baby a bath. Talk about what your baby seems to need to make him comfortable getting washed. Tell your wife what you appreciate about her “mothering.”  Find time when you can take the baby and she can take time just for herself.

            And try to find other new dads to talk with about the transition to parenthood.

            During the third month, Yoda says, “Exhausted are you.  Normal it is.” New dads need to recognize how emotionally weary they have become making all the adjustments to their new life style.

            “I remember,” a therapist-father confesses, “feeling when we went out as a family; it was my wife, our baby and their pack animal, me…carrying all the stuff we now needed to take with us.”

            What can you do during the third month? Take a walk together as a family. See if you can have the baby in a “front pack” that is on you.  And talk with your wife about each of you getting twenty minutes to yourselves in the evening.  Find time to walk with the baby by yourself. Use this time to appreciate how by caring for your baby you are making a very important contribution to her life.  And see if you can leave work ten or fifteen minutes early and have a cup of coffee or tea by yourself.  Take care of yourself.

            During the fourth month, says Obi Wan Kenobe, you start to notice that there is a change in your sexual relationship with your wife. It is very normal for this to happen.  So, if your wife feels sexually withdrawn but too concerned about your baby…things are going well! 

            Maybe it’s easier to hear Yoda talk about this:  “Intimacy must more than sex be,” he says.  “For many new dads the early months of fatherhood provide a challenge to expand their feelings about intimacy. Many new dads find it difficult to talk about sexuality with their wives. “I encourage you,” says Obi Wan Kenobe, “to talk about the sexuality in your relationship with your wife. As you go through life as a parent and adult there may be many conversations you have with your wife about the changing sexuality in your relationship.”

            Now in case you hadn’t noticed, this is a huge Dragon!  Redefining intimacy to expand it beyond the fireworks of courtship and early marriage is one of the hardest and most mature things for men to learn.  It is hard for men to talk about. It will take a platoon of Yodas, Obi Wan Kenobe’s, Gandalfs and elves, because it’s not easy.  It is probably the biggest dragon out there. 

            And then take time to get a message and sauna, say the elves.  Take a walk with a friend and let him know what you have discovered about being a father.

            Another fact to know is that during the first year of parenthood it is usual for a new father to reflect on how he was raised by his own father.  Sometimes this is enjoyable; sometimes, it brings up other old dragons to wrestle with. 

            In the fifth month, Gandalf says, “Find 5 minutes a day to talk about how the day went for your wife and you.  And you might plan a video “film festival.” You might enjoy comedies about family life, right about this time.” 

            In the sixth month, talk with your wife about the different “styles” of parenting you experienced as children. Conclude your discussion with a commitment to work out the way you will work as a team, together, in the family you have started.  Or as Yoda puts it, “Better than one are two.”

            Ask your wife to talk with you about what she loves and hates about being a mother for the first six months. Share the positive and negatives you have learned about fatherhood.  More talking.  This often seems unnatural, growing into a new and different role. 

            Then the elves say to make sure you are eating well and exercising. It is important to take care of your health and exercising will reduce stress.  Stay active in your baby’s care; give him a bath, put him to sleep, Notice how you feel after you have done these.

            The seventh month begins with this advice from Yoda: “To yourself kind be.  Forget this not!”

            The therapist says to find a Sunday morning to go out to breakfast and have a leisurely time together. Then come here to church.  OK, I added that last part. 

            Find a baby sitter so you can be alone for at least two hours a week.  Make sure that both you and your wife are getting time alone.  You each need time to recharge.

            At eight months, Obi Wan Kenobe says, you recognize how time consuming it is to have a baby.  If you’re really quick, you may have noticed this earlier.  Talk with your partner about what you feel are the biggest adjustments you each have to make as parents.  See what you’re doing here?  You’re learning to make this new role, the fatherhood role, learn to talk and relate to your partner in her new role as mother. 

            And take care of yourself.  Are there one or two friends that you haven’t talked with in a while? Call them up and let them know how having a young baby makes “free” time or “hanging-out” very difficult. Reassure them that you are still their friend and ask them to understand that being a father is a big adjustment.

            In the ninth month, the elves say to take a look at your body in the mirror. Are you taking care of yourself?

            This is a dragon to slay, too: not to lose yourself in your role as father. 

            A tenth month tip is to take turns “sleeping-in” to try and keep up on your rest.

            During the eleventh month, you are preparing for the conclusion of the hero’s quest, when you have redefined yourself as a father, and you and your wife have redefined your relationship as both parents and lovers.  You may need to make time to see if you and your wife can quit being parents for a few hours each week and be a couple again, and get the habit started.

            Moving back into a “couples relationship,” is the task of the eleventh month of fatherhood. You have defined yourselves around your child’s needs and now it is important to begin to look at your relationships not just as parents but as partners too. See if you can take the lead and ask your partner how she wants the two of you to grow as a couple as you approach your first year of parenting.

            See if you and your wife can find a weekly activity to do together. Something that you can continue over time and that you both look forward to.

            Begin to think about you baby’s first birthday and what friends you want to be there for you!

            As the twelfth month begins, plan the first birthday party, and see that your baby’s first birthday is as much a celebration for you and your wife as for him.  Gandalf says the first year of fatherhood is the most profound change you have gone through as a man. There have been many changes, you, your wife, and baby have gone through over the last year.

            At the end of the hero’s quest, I want to go back to Joseph Campbell.  “Wherever a hero has been born,” he writes, “the place is marked and sanctified.  A temple is erected there….”  For this is the place where a man became a hero by slaying the dragons of his smaller self and helped give birth to a larger soul: a soul big enough to hold the new functions, and the new love.  (Hero With a Thousand Faces, p.43)

            What does becoming a hero mean?  It’s the task, as Campbell put it, “of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life.”  (Hero, p. 388)

            The birth of a baby floods a mother and father with many new tasks, sometimes overwhelming them.  The role of fatherhood seldom comes easily for a man.  He must learn these new functions, build a bigger Self, learn to build a bigger kind of relationship with his partner.

            But it isn’t about mechanics.  It’s about building a bigger home for the spirit of life.  It’s about building a soul big enough to hold the new love that grows with the birth of a child – the love that moves men to tears, even trying to talk about it.

            A bachelor, a regular young married guy, couldn’t do it.  Only a man who’s slain the required dragons can do this.  He has become the kind of a man who can help save a new life, save a marriage, and transform our world, one father at a time.

            Joseph Campbell says temples, markers are erected to mark the spot where a hero was born.  And they’re present here, too.  A baby just learning to walk, the mard miracle of a husband and wife who are beginning to reclaim their own relationship as lovers and partners — these are some of the markers.  And people around you can feel this transformation.  Like ripples in a pond, it carries the message, “Here something whole and courageous took place.  Here, a father was born.”

            You’re more than just men, guys; you’re heroes.  Happy Father’s Day.

PRAYER

Mystery of many names and mystery beyond all naming we come to you this morning with many things on our minds. All of us here have had a week in which we have been presented with problems that need solving. Help us to remember that life is not a sit-com that can be digested and solved in 26 minutes. Help us Great Spirit to realize that sometimes our life’s work is but the beginning, middle or end of a problem that has been going on for 1000’s of years. In this vain give us the strength, help us to know that we have within us the strength, to do whatever it is that needs to be done regardless of the immediate outcome. And remind each and everyone of us that there are wild cards in life, things that we would never have guessed in a million years that can, do and will affect the outcome. Let our thinking be such that our minds are not closed around what we see to be the solution, that our vision can encompass ideas, thoughts, and solutions that may at first seem foreign and not to our liking. Finally give us all the strength to face the impossible as simply an idea that keeps most of us from trying. For everything that we do, every idea, every lesson, every child of ours, and even ourselves, we all face death on a daily basis. Let this not be a source of futility, but rather a source of the greatest joy as we realize that what we do we do in spite of this, perhaps in the very face of death we find a meaning that transcends both life and death.

We pray this in the name of everything that is holy and that is, precisely, everything.

Amen.

SERMON:     The Bleeding Wound of the Borderlands

What is born will die.

What has been gathered will be dispersed,

What has been accumulated will be exhausted,

What has been built up will collapse,

And what has been high will be brought low.

(Traditional Buddhist Scripture)

“Nothing personal,” said Coyote, but I really don’t like your kind. I think First Woman made a mistake when she created you as a species. You humans are coming to be a real curse on the planet. Nothing personal. Some of you I like individually. I find you entertaining in a coyote sort of way. But by and large you live in a weird world in your heads. You live in a complicated set of lies, both personal and social, which you believe even when they don’t obviously work. I think you humans are a threat to us all.” (God’s Dog - conversations with Coyote, Webster Kitchell)

Introduction: I wish I could say that this was going to uplifting. It’s a tragedy with no heroes or heroines. It’s a farce with the government wielding sledgehammers instead of rubber ones. It’s a love story of a people who will not be dominated by those who have the money. It’s a who-done-it with the surprise ending that we’ve all been at the scene of the crime, and we earned ourselves a spectators badge without even knowing it. It’s an essay on how democracy was hijacked by guys wearing Dockers who are married to soccer moms. It’s a lament that sings of lose and more lose. It’s a prairie coyote howling at the moon, sending its prayers for food and water to the great creator. And finally it’s the blues, can’t get none, ain’t none in sight, and it’s looks like a whole bunch-a-none is in our future.

          I have been to the borderlands 4 times now in the past few years and every time I wonder why I go? Why do I seem willing to witness what I witness there? What is it about these hopeless and god-forsaken people that draw me to them, that find in them a source of both strength and harmony?  How could I have imagined that a contract worker working for $75 a week with a wife, two daughters and a son would speak like a President and the man so elected would conduct himself as if he were the one deprived - deprived of good sense, deprived of the simple ability to speak the King’s English, deprived of his compassion - yet, this is the story of the borderlands. All Presidents of the United States have acted thusly toward her and she is really tired of it.

          So I come to witness and see with my own eyes the very thing that scares me - poverty. The very word evokes a desert land of just about everything that concerns having nothing.

          There is another caveat in this sermon. If you’ve got a good financial portfolio there a pretty substantial chance that you’re complicitous in the poverty that goes to make up the Borderlands. But don’t worry, too much, in a greater or lesser sense we are all complicitous. Ralph Waldo Emerson made the comment before the Civil War that those who had financial interests in the South and could not speak out against slavery had altered the Unitarian belief in the perfectibility of man. Emerson said that these invested Unitarians were less interested in the perfectibility of man and more interested in the perfectibility of their own pocketbooks. There is a sense in which this paradigm still exists today.

          To understand the borderlands - to understand anything that is going on in Mexico we must take a look at the past.

          The first question that we have to ask ourselves is why would a country that had an honest to goodness proletarian revolution at the beginning of the 20^th Century have labor problems at the beginning of the 21^st Century? They really had one of those “workers of the world unite” sort of thing so how could it have failed to secure the rights of the workers?

          The Mexican Revolution started in 1910 when the dictator Porfirio Diaz was divested of his power. The revolution lasted seven years and culminated in a signing of a new Mexican constitution in 1917. Their proletarian revolution happened before the Russians. Mexico had two popular revolutionary leaders - Poncho Villa in the north and Emilio Zapata in the south. When Diaz was forced to hold elections the man who had led strikes against his dictatorship, Francisco Madero, was elected President, but neither Zapata in the south, or Villa in the north supported Madero.

          Zapata and his farmer armies weren’t willing to wait for land reform and there was essentially a civil war between opposing rebel forces and one million Mexicans - ten percent of the population of Mexico at that time were killed. Zapata declared himself President in 1911 and his armies chased landowners off their property in the south. Under the guise of coming to the aid of a US sailor the United States’ Army invaded Vera Cruz in 1914 and stayed there for seven months.

          Villa kept crossing the US Mexican border and in 1916 General Pershing was sent into Mexico after him. A seventy-year-old Ambrose Bierce disappeared into this part of the revolution and was never heard from again, but was later lionized by Gregory Peck in the movie, Old Gringo.

          Madero, the president that no one supported, was assassinated in a coup led by General Huerto. The majority of revolutionaries revolted against the government set up by General Huerto and the governor of the state of Coahila, Venustiano Carranza formed a constitutional army and instituted the majority of the rebels’ social demands in a new constitution that was approved in 1917.

          Then, one by one the revolutionary leaders were done away with - Carranza had Zapata ambushed, but then when Carranza was running for election as President a General Obregon felt sure he was going to be defeated by Carranza so he had Carranza killed to make sure that didn’t happen.

          General Obregon turned out to be a terrific organizer and he founded the Partido Naccionalista Mexicano (the PNM), which then ruled for seventy years until Vicente Fox was elected President in the 1990’s.

          As one researcher put it, “The Revolution did, eventually, lead to social and political change of significance, but one could argue that very little of the ultimate outcome was envisaged or planned by any of the revolutionary factions. Ultimately, what made the Mexican Revolution revolutionary was the way change was canalized by popular struggles. The final outcome was, one could argue, in many respects a continuation of the project of the pre-revolutionary regime of Porfirio Diaz - that is, a project to develop and modernize the country through the action of a centralized state.” The more things change the more they stay the same. To quote another researcher “post-revolutionary class structure was relatively unchanged in spite of widespread mobilization and revolution.”

          Historically we’re up to date. During the seventy years that the PNM ruled the country the Maquiladora system started up. Basically Maquiladoras are assembly plants. Jobs that used to be done in the US and other countries get outsourced to Mexico. Why? Well, all you have to do is google Maquiladora and the first thing that will come up on your screen will be an ad that will guarantee you a savings of 75% on labor costs when you move your job site south of the US/Mexican border.

          The first Maquiladora that appeared did so in 1965. That date just happens to coincide to the height of the labor movement in the United States. This is no coincidence.

          The chief reason things have gotten worse south of the border is the North American Free Trade Agreement. This one lands right in the lap of the democrats and President Clinton. As the bumper sticker says Clinton lied and no one died, but the bumper sticker you won’t see is Clinton agreed and the wage-slaves were not freed.

          On Friday two weeks ago I traveled with the American Friends Service Committee to Mexico - an  organization sponsored by the Quakers. Four times a year delegates from the AFSC travel to the borderlands. These delegations are made up of anyone who wishes to go. Events are planned for the trip, but the main event is the first hand witnessing of what is taking place on the border.

          The town of Piedras Negras is actually a very clean and tidy border town. I was impressed by the lack of trash and the quaint square in the middle of town with the pick stucco Catholic Church right off the square.

          On the first evening, Friday night, we had dinner at the home of Juan Hernandez (I’ve changed all the names in this because workers have had reprisals brought against them when articles appear in newspapers, magazines or on-line). Juan, his wife, two daughters and a son live in a concrete block building that can be no more than 400 square feet. I believe Juan’s brother lives there, also. Juan’s wife fixed us Gordidas for dinner. We ate outside in the cooling twilight.

          After dinner Juan told us that in 1999 - before NAFTA he made from 140-160 dollars a week. Now he makes - doing exactly the same job - 40-60 dollars a week. The management of the Maquiladoras used to give the workers six month to a year contracts now they give them 20-30 day contracts.

          What impressed me most about Juan was his ability to articulate his problems. He said what disturbed him the most is that we were leaving a horrible legacy of bad environment and evil labor practices for our children and their children. Juan works for the CFO - the Comite Fronterizo de Obreras.

          The CFO is a union that is independent from the Mexican state.  During the industrialization of Mexico the leaders of the country thought it best if Unions were state run. Unfortunately, this means that the unions are not on the side of the workers, but on the side of the manufacturers and managers!

          The main purpose of the CFO - the union that is organized by and for the workers - is to help the workers understand the bible of Mexican labor. This bible is a thick red book, which contains all the labor laws enacted in Mexico. Mexico actually has good labor laws, but the workers are rarely informed of their rights. Good labor laws without informed workers are meaningless.

          The next day, Saturday we traveled the 84 kilometers from Piedras Negras to Cuidad Acuna. There we met with Teresa Isabella Rodriquez, a CFO organizer. She helps organize workers in the neighborhoods by helping them understand their rights under Mexican labor laws.

          In the afternoon we had lunch at the offices of the CFO and met with workers from various Maquiladoras. What we learned there was astonishing. The managers of the Maquiladoras are in charge of all monies that are paid workers. So … if there is a worker who has worked in a Maquiladora for many years there is a substantial amount of money owned that worker when they are divested of their jobs. Say when the plant moves somewhere else! The managers have taken it upon themselves to see that those workers are not paid their proper monies.

          One worker we met was locked in a room 2 feet by 3 feet, given water and let out to the bathroom twice a day. He is being paid, but is not allowed to work. The hope is that he will become disgusted with the treatment and quit. If a worker quits his or her job they are not entitled to get their severance monies.

          Another gentleman who had worked for Delphi - a subsidiary of General Motors - for seven years was put back in the beginning class where he was originally taught how to sew seat covers. There he was told to sew, and then unsew the same seat cover all day long. He was permitted to work, but the hope is that he, too, will quit in disgust.

          A gentleman known as Don Giovanni said that these tactics are worthy of the descendants of Hitler. Sighting examples of how holocaust prisoners were made to carry rocks from one pile to another, and then carry the same rocks back to the original pile, this man condemned such behavior as fascistic and torturous.

          I’m thinking now of Maria Reina Sanchez. I met her on a trip to the borderlands in February of 2005. For three years, six days a week for 45 hours a week, she dipped her unprotected, naked hand in Toluene. Why? Simply to wipe the fingerprints off the instrument panels of General Motors cars. On her face she wore a paper mask - the kind you might wear if you had allergies and were mowing your grass. Toluene is a hydrocarbon of the aromatic series, obtained chiefly from coke-oven vapors and the distillation of coal tar and it is highly carcinogenic.

            Not surprisingly Maria Sanchez got cancer from the prolonged exposure to the toluene. She was undergoing radiation and chemotherapy when Delphi - a subsidiary of GM - fired her for missing work. They fired her without paying her severance pay. She sued and won. She won a whopping $10,000! - enough to keep her family afloat for two years. But she is still dying of her cancers.

          The vision I have of Maria Sanchez wiping fingerprints off GM instrument panels is like the scene of a crime. Criminals want their fingerprints removed so that they may avoid prosecution for their crimes. In like manner, General Motors, General Electric, Johnson Controls, Kohler, Emerson Electronic, Erika, Tenneco, Maytag, Panasonic, Black and Decker, Goodwrench Auto Body Centers and other foreign and US companies want their fingerprints removed from what’s happening to the workers just south of our borders.

          Conclusion: In the movie The Barbarian Invasion the main character, a patient in a hospital, is speaking to a Nun who works for the hospital.

          “Contrary to belief, the 20^th century wasn’t that bloody. It’s agreed that wars caused 100 million deaths. Add 16 million deaths for the Russian gulags. The Chinese camps we’ll never know, but say 20 million. So, 130-135 million dead. Not all that impressive. IN the 16^th century the Spanish & Portuguese managed, without gas chambers and bombs, to laughter 150 million Indians in Latin America. With axes! That’s a lot of work, Sister. Even if they had church support, it was an achievement. So much so that the Dutch, English, French and later Americans followed their lead and butchered another 50 million. 200 million dead in all! The greatest massacre in history took place right here in the Americas. And not the tiniest holocaust museum.”

          I have a theory why there’s no holocaust museum in the Americas for 200 million dead indigenous peoples - we aren’t through yet. The slaughter continues, but this time in a more civilized manner. We’re letting the greedy corporations of the world do all our killing for us - unless of course, time is of the essence, time is money you know. If time is of the essence, then we’ll send the troops in first to clear the way - to kill the way so that the corporations can follow.

          I’ve told you some of the ways the corporations kill - they pass off their workload to the Kapos - those inmates within Nazi concentration camps who were Jews, but turned against their own kind. True, the Mexican managers of the Maquiladoras may not be literally killing their own kind, but they are torturing them with meaningless work, and playing power and mind games with people whose only concern is to put food on their tables.

          And for those of you who are not buying the idea that corporations are bad, here’s what Jerry Mander in his book, In Absence of the Sacred, has to say: “Now that we see the inherent direction of corporate activity, we must abandon the idea that corporations can reform themselves, or that a new generation of executive managers can be re-educated. We must also abandon the assumption that the form of the structure is ‘neutral.’ To ask corporate executives to behave in a morally defensible manner is absurd. Corporations, and the people within them, are not subject to moral behavior. They are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. To ask corporations to behave otherwise is like asking an army to adopt pacifism.”

          There are two lights at the end of this tunnel. The first light is a wildcard known as the Peak Oil theory put forth by people like M. King Hubbard and M. Heinberg. This theory states that oil production can be documented in a bell curve. There is the period when the well is first tapped and production soars. This is the upward movement of the bell curve. Then the production evens off and we have the top or peak of the bell. According to the Peak Oil theory when gasoline and diesel goes over $5 a gallon, then it will be too expensive to outsource jobs across borders - be it Mexico, South Korea, or China. The monies saved in labor costs will more than be made up for in transportation costs. Perhaps at that time the jobs that have been outsourced will come back into this country, perhaps not, but it looks as if the days of the unfair practices in the Maquiladoras, and perhaps the Maquiladoras themselves, are numbered. Yet, how many will be exploited and die in the meantime?

          The other hope is that there are worker owned Maquiladoras in Mexico. We visited one in Piedras Negras - owned and operated by members of the CFO. It is the Maquiladora of Justice and Dignity. This Maquiladora assembles organic cotton material into t-shirts and shopping bags. They started with two sewing machines that were for home use, and then bought industrial sewing machines. They work in a space that is neither air-conditioned nor heated. There are a total of 5 workers - all women - who work there.

          If you’re feeling hopeless and helpless then support this worker owned Maquiladora so they can air condition and heat their workspace. If this church feels like doing that I’d be glad to help the social action committee coordinate that funding.

          There’s something else we can all do. Stop buying retail. Put your money underground. Barter with your friends. Start buying second hand. Go to garage sales. Buy used appliances - your clothes will get just as clean. A used hammer drives a nail just fine. Yes, there is the argument that if we all stopped buying retail the economy in Mexico and this country would go south, that the workers who now have poorly paying jobs would have no jobs at all. All I can say to that is the same argument was made before the Civil War - what would all those slaves do if there were no slavery. In my opinion that objection begs the question. It’s cruel. It’s meaningless.

          The important thing is to be informed that such things are happening less than five hours from Austin. And after being informed it is important to act. Investigate companies that you do business with - don’t take a corporations word for anything. Corporations will always tell you the upside and never tell you the down side. They are fictitious persons who act amorally and in the end the only things that count are growth and money.

          Here are other things you can do. Join a delegation from the American Friend Service Committee, go to the borderlands and become a witness for humanity. Write your Texas Senators and Congressional Representatives and suggest that there are better ways to treat people and that saving money at Wal-Mart shouldn’t include wage slavery on either side of the border.

          In closing I’d like to remind you of that wonderfully terrible analogy of the world being represented at one long table. At one end of the table are the starving children of the world - hundreds of thousand dying daily. In front of them there is no food.  At the other end of the table is where we sit with all the food, our obese children, and our culture of television and escapism. Who among us could sit at such a table and eat with impunity? I dare say not a one.

PRAYER

Let us pray for some measure of comfort and peace for those who mourn significant losses.  They are members of your church community; they are the families of lost military men and women, and they are the survivors of natural disaster.

Let us rejoice for our lives, for all that we have:  a soft bed, good food to eat, a choice of what to wear each morning.  The future.  Let us reflect - gently, but with conviction, with courage.

Which part of us is given the most permission, the most air time, the most control?  Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose?  Do we know who that person is?  Are we giving ourselves the right ‘to be fabulous’?  Are we giving our best self a chance to live?

Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about failure and success. 

Let us love ourselves in the story we find ourselves in.  We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are important, that failures are the means to hard-earned growth and happiness.  With calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings. 

May we keep close to our hearts the certain knowledge that the nature of our world, and of ourselves, is always to be in flux.  No state of our being is ever permanent.

May we each honor the other’s response to change, and the need to make a better world.  Each of us are on a different path that we have been called to take.

May compassion be our guide, for ourselves and each other, and may courage be our salvation. 

AMEN.

SERMONThis feels like a homecoming.  It reminds me of when I preached for the first time at the church I grew up in;  First Church of Austin is my second home church, I hope that’s alright with you.  And I’m so pleased that the children’s choir of Tulsa is here to hear me preach today.  When I was your age, I found myself forced to sit through an entire church service - I think it was summer, no Sunday School, no RE wing to escape to.  The subject of the sermon was failure, and I’ll never forget it.  The main message was there’s no such thing as failure.  There’s only not trying.  I could grasp that, as an 11 year old, or however old I was.  When we’re kids, we are asked to succeed a lot; we’re not asked to fail, but we should be.  We should know that option is open to us. 

What this minister was saying in his sermon is that it doesn’t matter as much what the outcome is, it matters that we are part of the process of something, that we participate, that this is more important than anything.  And at a young age, this is absolutely true.  I won’t Pollyanna all the way for you here, it’s true that as you get older, it does matter more and more what the outcome is.  But for a youth, it’s a message of courage - just have courage, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it matters that you try at the things you’re drawn to, that you get to know yourself by figuring out what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. 

When I was an intern minister here for nearly a full year, one thing that helped me greatly was to know I had “permission to fail.”  That was Davidson’s phrase (Davidson was my supervisor and is the Senior Minister of this church, for the many visitors who are with us today).  It was perhaps the most attractive thing about this church for internship, because it seemed to turn failure on its head and take the sting out of it.  It was okay to fail!  In fact, it was expected.  Failure didn’t seem like such a specter then, and instead of walking on egg-shells trying to do everything right, I could just be myself. 

Of course Davidson was not shy about telling me when I did fail.  Mostly this had to do with the first drafts of sermons.  I pretty much failed all of first semester with my preaching; I just didn’t get what I was failing to do.  But I finally succeeded with the sermon I delivered at the very beginning of the new year.  I had an “a-ha!” experience, and I finally  got it.  I doubt I ever would have understood what I was doing wrong, what was missing, unless someone wasn’t kind enough to tell me how I was failing - over and over. 

And now I’m a working minister delivering a sermon on the topic of failure.  If I fail at a sermon on failure, is that a success?  I’ll worry about that later.

What are some of your most prized failures?  The failures that you learned and grew from, and never could have succeeded without?  Which failures do you still need to learn from?  Maybe we’ve failed to maintain our health, or spend enough time with our families.  Maybe we’ve failed to nurture our creative sides.  Maybe we’ve failed to reach some kind of cherished ideal. 

We tend to forget, though, that ideals aren’t meant to be reached.  We set high ideals to remind ourselves of what we want to be close to. But we don’t reach them. 

The truth is, that, most of the time, we are off-course.  The nature of the world and of us is one of imperfection. 

Perhaps some of you remember when, 30 years ago, the commercial plane The Concorde, began flying across the Atlantic for the first time in less than 4 hours.  Because of its phenomenal speed, the course was actually maintained by two computers, one to take course readings every few seconds, and one to correct the course when it was going off-course.  A passenger touring the plane asked the pilot, “what percentage of the time is the plane off-course?”  The pilot smiled, and replied, “About 99 percent of the time, sir.”

This story was taken from Rachel Remen’s collection, the woman I inevitably end up borrowing from in so many of my sermons, as Davidson taught me to do.  She asks, “Might it be possible to focus ourselves on the purpose we wish to serve in the same way… [as] the Concorde?  Once we stopped demanding of ourselves that we be on course all the time, we might begin to look at our mistakes differently, giving them… a frictionless response.  They will not prevent us from reaching our dreams nearly so much as wanting to be right will.   [my italics]

Those who have the courage to offer us honesty, to be our navigators, might even come to be seen as worthy of… gratitude… ‘You are off-course,’ they might tell us.  ‘Why, THANK you,’ we might reply. ”

She goes on to say, “Serving anything worthwhile is a commitment to a direction over time and may require us to relinquish many moment-to-moment attachments, to let go of pride, approval, recognition, or even success.  This is true whether we be parents, researchers, educators, artists, or heads of state.  Serving life may require a faithfulness to purpose that lasts over a lifetime.  It is less a work of the ego than a choice of the soul.”

If we’re using our souls to choose a destination, it is enough to be heading in the right direction.  We get in trouble when we make the ideals of the world our destination.  We cannot choose a trajector - or a path to follow -  under the guidance of what is outside of us.  These are the questions I don’t think anyone can answer for us; we have to ask our own souls, our own spirits:  We have to begin inside ourselves and ask, am I trying to succeed in becoming more human, more whole?  Do I do what I love?  Do I know what my gifts are, and does it offer some gifts to others?

While they don’t have to be the gifts the world wants, we do need to offer the world something; but it has to be what we are able to offer.  Nobody gets all the gifts, and there’s wisdom in being delighted with the few we’ve got - loving to use them and offer what little we have to offer.  Howard Thurman, a theologian, can help us figure out what this is when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Sometimes the gifts we have, though, aren’t the ones we would choose for ourselves.  There are always going to be things, that, in the end, we wish we’d been better at; there are failures we regret, but there are probably some gifts we’ve been given too that we didn’t even know we gave to others. 

There was a very successful businessman named George who got diagnosed with lung cancer.  He was told he didn’t have much time left.  He said to his therapist, “‘I have wasted my life…  I have two ex-wives and five children.  I support all of them but I don’t know any of them… I don’t think they’ll miss me.  I’ve nothing behind me but a lot of money.’”

It turns out that the business of this man was selling a gadget of medical equipment that he invented.  The therapist - who of course is Rachel Remen, this is another of her stories - had another patient who used this device, and knew that it had completely changed her life.  Her name was Stephanie.  Rachel asked her if she might write a letter to the dying businessman, to thank him.  The woman wanted to have him over to dinner, and he came.  Rachel Remen writes,

“The week after this dinner, he sat in my office shaking his head in wonder.  He had expected to have dinner with this young couple, but when he had arrived, George was welcomed by Stephanie’s whole family.  Her mother was there, her three brothers and sisters, several of her aunts and uncles, and a crowd of nieces, nephews, and cousins.  Her husband’s parents were there, too, and many of her friends and neighbors - the whole community of people who had sustained her in the years she was an invalid.  They had decorated the little house with crepe paper, and everyone had cooked.  It was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration.

But George told Rachel that wasn’t the most important part.  George said, “‘They had really come to tell me a story; they had each played a part in it and had a different side of it to share.  It took them over three hours to tell it.  It was the story of Stephanie’s life.  I cried most of the time.  And at the very end, Stephanie came to me and said, ‘This is really a story about you, George.  We thought you needed to know.’  And I did, I did.’”

Rachel asked, “‘How many of these things do you make every year, George?’ . . . ‘close to ten thousand,’ he said softly.  ‘I just knew the numbers, Rachel.  I had no idea what they meant.’”

That kind of story asks us to measure success and failure correctly:  by our effect on others, by the gifts we’ve shared, not necessarily by the world’s standards - or maybe even our own standards.

Another inspiring tale of failure is about West Point graduate Capt. Ian Fishback, a story you perhaps already know, but merits repeating.  It’s a story about doing the right thing, in the face of failure on an enormous scale.*

When the Abu Ghraib scandal unfolded in Spring of 2004, Fishback, from experience, knew the tortures were in accordance with interrogation procedures.  According to him, those terrible things were done to prisoners on a regular basis.  But as a by-the-book officer, Fishback held his tongue, that is, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disavowed the evidence of torture before Congress, testifying that “the letter of the Geneva Conventions” had been followed in Iraq.   “That,” Fishback said, “is when I had a problem.”

He told Human Rights Watch, “It is infuriating to me that officers are not lined up to accept responsibility for what happened . . . That’s basic officership, that’s what you learn at West Point.  It blows my mind.” 

Fishback could have chosen to stay anonymous, but instead he crafted an open letter to Sen. John McCain, accusing the top officers of contributing to murder by refusing to set clear guidelines.  In the letter’s conclusion, he wrote, “If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.” 

What courage it took this young man to tell it like it is!  To express so succinctly the exact nature of this national failure, this international humiliation and tragedy.  The fact is our country is not anywhere near on course, the fact is our ideals of freedom, the democratic process, and justice have been abandoned.

One of my failures as a minister has been speaking out against the war.  I don’t feel I’ve done enough of it - but I’m making progress; I did do an anti-war sermon about 5 weeks ago, and rite of passage occurred.  I got yelled at after the service by an elderly couple.  I mean, really yelled at.  It was amazing though, my grandmother happened to be standing there and she came to my defense - she started yelling right back at them!  And I shuffled away.  I’d never been yelled at before like that after a sermon, so I knew I had pushed some buttons. 

The truth is I’m optimistic!  I don’t want to push buttons perhaps so much as urgently share the message that we can be optimistic as a country. 

I’ve got a wonderful quotation of George Clooney’s.  He says, “I think we’re really great at this as a country:  We do dumb things, and  then we fix them.  Pearl Harbor:  We grab all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps.  Well, that’s not very sporting of us, but we fix it.  In the fifties, we grab people because they read a newspaper and bring them in for investigation.  Pretty dumb.  Vietnam?  Pretty stupid.  But there seems to be a tide turning.  The Democrats aren’t providing the answers, but the Republicans aren’t getting free passes on everything.  You don’t get to say you’re either with us or with the enemy anymore.  So I’m an optimist about the United States.”   

I think Clooney may be on to something there, and I agree:  We are going to rise to the challenge of this country’s failed sense of direction.  We will once again orient ourselves to the North Star, to a trajectory that is noble, and we will set a course.  I know we will! 

When you’re told you can either succeed or fail, either way you are being challenged.  Our country was built on challenge, and I think it’s one of the nameless anchors of liberal religion as well, of Unitarian Universalism.  We don’t get a lot of religious direction necessarily, we each have to challenge ourselves to identify our own noble trajectories.  When we find ourselves seriously off-course in life - when we are failing - that’s our opportunity to re-orient and embrace the challenge of setting a new course.  It was Edwin Friedman, a brilliant family therapist, who said, “Challenge is the basic context of health and survival, of a person, of the family, of a religious organization, or even (in the course of evolution) an entire species.” 

The hardest part may be deciding which challenges to pour our hearts and souls into, because we can’t do them all.  The one we should pick is usually the thing we have the most fear about doing.  We have to ask, what challenge is going to honor my life, my family, my community, my country, my planet?

You have permission to fail.  You also have permission to succeed. 

No matter how old you are, do not be afraid to do the things that make you come alive!  Because what the world needs is people that have come alive.  

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* The contents of this story are taken from the December 29, 2005 issue of Rolling Stone magizine.