Oh, Gods!

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7 March 2004

Worship Associate: Jonobie Ford

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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AFFIRMATION OF FAITH:

Jonobie Ford

Working on distilling some of my religious beliefs into a short segment to share with a large group of people has been interesting, emotional, challenging, and, a little intimidating. Oddly, the end product of having a several-minute written description makes it sound rather more tidy than it feels in real life. That said, I’d like to share with you what I consider to be the central parts of my religious belief.

My religion helps me to interact with others, with myself, and with the Divine.

The first component — the one that’s about my interaction with others — is based upon my more expansive version of the golden rule. It’s more than just treating people well. It’s the idea that other things in this world and I are similar in some way, and that I should treat all parts of Nature respectfully. I’m not exactly like my cats, but I recognize that they and I share something — what some might call a soul, what I usually term the “breath of life”. But regardless, something that deserves my respect. A mountain and I are even more different, but there’s still something there that should be respected.

The second component — the one about my interaction with myself — is how I gain perspective on life. In particular I celebrate cycles in my life and in Nature. Spring turns to summer to fall and to winter, repeating in sequence year after year. Children are born, grow up, and have children of their own. I recognize my place in these universal patterns. I am also reminded that my life has cycles, including a physical process that repeats each month, and an emotional range from high to low and back again in a more irregular pattern. My current condition is impermanent, and I am prepared for changes.

The third component — the one about my interaction with the Divine – is about the honoring of my Gods. I take a polytheistic view, that there are many Gods that watch over different spheres of life. Gods aren’t all-seeing or all-powerful, but rather act within their limited spheres of influence. Interacting with one is akin to what happens when I call my mother in law to ask for her advice about a meal I want to prepare. She can give me encouragement and suggestions, since she’s an excellent cook, but in the end, it’s up to me to cook the dish. Who I call up on a particular day depends on what I’m doing and who is good at it.

For example, my main passion is writing. I’m a technical writer by trade, and write a fair amount of nonfiction on the side. Because of that, and because of religious experiences I had while exploring my faith, the main part of my worship is devoted to Brighid, a Celtic Goddess whose spheres of influence are, loosely, writing, healing and crafting. Historical writings about Brighid talk about the “fire in the head” that She brings to people — the inspiration or creative spark that strikes while trying to write or speak. Honoring that creative spark is important to me. In turn, there are times that I’ve felt blessed by Brighid’s fire of inspiration.

I do hang a lot of concepts on the word “God”. It is a complex word that simultaneously means different things to me. I consider myself a theist, believe that my Gods exist in some manner, but I also view them as archetypes and ideals to aspire to — somewhat like heroes. I honor Them by striving toward excellence at the activities within Their spheres of influence. For example, when I trained for and ran in a race for the first time, I considered that to be an act of devotion to Lugh, a storm God with strong sport associations. The preparation on the morning of my race included a short devotion to Him. By choosing which Gods to honor at a particular time, I can concentrate my focus on different areas of my life.

I’ve tried to talk about my beliefs in a way that you can connect with and understand, but when I step down and return to my life, where my beliefs are alive and real, I express these ideas in the shorthand of a creed that I wrote for myself. My creed has these three statements:

First, that I should recognize and honor the breath of life within all things.

Second, that just as cycles repeat in Nature, they also repeat in my life. As such, I celebrate the changing of the seasons and cultural holidays as my holy days.

And finally, that it is important to honor my Gods. My Gods are mentors to learn from, archetypal ideals to strive toward, and symbols of the great unknown.

Regardless of whether you view Gods as real or as archetypes, or both, I hope you’ll consider the value of occasionally viewing the world through a polytheistic framework.

PRAYER:

Let us attend to our sacred connections. We live suspended in a web that bind us to all the people, relationships and beliefs that can give and sustain life, and we must attend to those connections.

Who are the people who cherish us, who see what is sacred in us and affirm it? They are among the angels of our better nature; let us attend to our connections with them.

Who are the people who empower us, who urge us to sing our special songs and offer our unique gifts? They help attach us to our task in life. Let us attend to our connections with them.

Where are those rare and sacred places in our life where we find power, purpose and a mission capable of granting us both honor and a task? Let us accept them both: both the honor and the task. Because there are so many others who also need to attend to their connections, and sometimes we are the only help they have at hand. And so let us attend both to the connections coming to us and those going forth from us. Let us attend to our connections.

Amen.

SERMON: Oh, Gods!

When I was 21, trying to sort things out, I went to see my minister. I told him I was seeing a psychologist, but wanted to talk to him too. I asked what the difference was between what he did and what my psychologist was trying to do. “All I can do,” he said, “is try to help you understand the gods you are serving, and whether they are worth serving.” All these years later, I’m not sure that what we do can be put any better than that.

Years later, in Divinity School, I learned how hollow the traditional God-language of Western religion has become even among people who know it well, and how incapable it is of truly binding together our whole pluralistic world. The students who clung most tightly to the old language formulas could not explain what they meant by any of them. They were saying what they had been told to say, going through the motions as though it were still, perhaps, the 18th century. But when they got clearer about what they actually believed, it was never traditional, seldom systematic or very cosmic. A few stories here and there that they used to get them through. They planned to take the old stories to their parishioners in the faith that somehow they might work better for them than they did for their minister. And stories do have that power; they can awaken hope and meaning sometimes.

But mostly, we have no deep or nuanced knowledge of even our own Western religious stories. Mostly today, we have lost the names and stories of our gods. We aren’t sure what to call the forces of life within and around us: those forces, which sustain us.

Jonobie spoke of the inspiration she sometimes feels, which she associates with the stories of the Celtic goddess Brigit, because she knows those stories and has found connections in them to her own life. But few people have heard of Brigit or many of the Celtic deities; few even know much about the Greek gods, or those of Egypt or the Norse bunch.

And in our critical and often cynical age we are more aware, perhaps, that both gifts and seductive words come without patterns or guarantees. Not all gifts are useful; not all powerful words are wise.

Think of just some of the famous people who have great gifts and great demons, and can’t seem to sort them out:

– Curt Cobain heard the sounds of music and the sounds of madness, and finally listened most to the madness that drove him to suicide.

– Robert Downey, Jr. is an immensely gifted actor who can’t seem to stop listening to the Siren songs of his cocaine habit.

– Wynona Ryder has immense gifts from what the Greeks would call the Muses as an actress, but can’t seem to stop the voices that lead her to shoplifting.

A generation ago, it was Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix; and before that Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker, geniuses with gifts from the gods and addictions from demons, and the demons won.

I like Jonobie’s way of thinking of her writing as a gift from a goddess. I think there is something both humble and honest about seeing some of our abilities as gifts rather than achievements. The first time I really understood gifts was over thirty-five years ago when I began doing photography. I had never done it, never owned a camera, but I was in Vietnam and wanted to see more of the war, so interviewed to be a press officer and combat photographer in the Vietnam War.

After the interview, another lieutenant said, as I was being shown the way to my new tent, “I didn’t know you were a photographer.” “How hard can it be?” I answered. During the next couple weeks I had to buy a camera, film, and spend time figuring out how to load the film, focus, and set exposures. It is literally true that I shot my first combat operation holding a Nikon in one hand, and that little slip of paper that comes with film, trying to figure out whether the light was “hazy” or “cloudy bright” so I’d know what exposure to set – I knew so little about cameras, I had neglected to buy one with a light meter. You know, those little slips of paper are remarkably accurate. I shot the whole war that way. And I discovered, quite by happy accident, that I had a natural gift for photography.

I shot only one roll of film on my first operation, 36 pictures. I only saw 36 things that looked like good war pictures, so that’s all I took. Of those 36 photos, 21 were released to the media, and all were picked up by UPI, AP, Reuters, and a dozen other media outlets. It was kind of an amazing surprise, but this really was about as easy as I’d thought it would be.

I did have a chance to work with Co Reentmeister during that year. Co was the 26-year-old photographer who shot all the pictures and cover shots for LIFE Magazine, and was clearly a photographic genius. I wasn’t a genius, but I was good, and I couldn’t understand it.

I never felt like that gift was a part of me. It always felt like something that somehow came through me but didn’t have much of anything to do with me. I even opened a photography studio after the war, and did some expensive and award-winning portraiture and wedding photography for several years. One year, at the urging of some customers, I entered some outdoor portraits in the statewide professional photography exhibition at Cobo Hall in Detroit, and won First Place, over 900 other professional entries. I was so detached from photography that I could be as objective about my pictures as I was about others. I remember walking through the exhibits looking at the other entries, and thinking, “Well, I’d have voted for mine too – it is the best here!”

And, odd as it sounds, I had no ego connection with it. It just didn’t seem like anything of which I had any ownership. The Gift had done it. Usually, we think if we have a gift, it’s a kind of Calling, a clue to what we should do in life. But I never liked photography. It was a gift that gave nothing to me. And a gift that doesn’t give anything to you is like a god that’s not worth serving. It isn’t a gift, it’s a trap. I sold the studio, all the equipment, didn’t take pictures for 25 years and never missed it.

I never thought of it as the gift of a god, just a talent life had dealt me that would have been better off given to someone else.

Maybe we should have a word about this word “gods” before going on. There are thousands of gods in the religions of the world, and thousands of more that have died and faded from history. And most of the religions have always said that their god was here from the very beginning. You need to understand that it is not the case that, fifteen billion years ago, there were these thousands of gods sort of hovering in between time and space. The, billions of years later, human evolved, and some of them wound up living in the territories of some of these gods. This crew lived in the land of Brahman and his many imaginative representations; this other bunch wound up in the land of Mithras, Jahweh, Odin, Zeus, Brigit and the rest. That’s not how it happens.

First, humans evolved and separated into many different cultures. Then, within each culture, the more religiously creative humans concocted their gods as local deities arising from their interactions with the forces and powers they experienced in their culture. And then – as a sort of brand-name campaign – they all claimed these gods had been there from the get-go. Gods represent imaginative concretions of the experience of mystery and power, fear and trust. They’re our children, created in the image of our experiences and biases. Then they and their institutions return the favor by shaping the people of a particular culture in “their” image. There are more gods than you can count, most of them long dead.

But my minister’s words from forty years ago still ring true: about searching for the gods we’re serving and whether they’re worth serving. There are so many examples of people serving gods, living out gifts, that give them everything but a life worth living – which it’s a god’s job to help bestow.

When I was in the fourth grade, one of my friends’ fathers was some kind of an accountant who must have been pretty good at it. They had a nice house, two cars before everyone had two cars, nice things, belonged to the classy clubs, and his kids had a lot nicer toys than I did. He apparently had some gifts that most accountants apparently didn’t have. I couldn’t imagine why on earth anyone would want to spend their life looking at numbers. I’m one of the Damned in that theology: someone destined to wind up in Accountant God Hell because I can’t balance my checkbook. Ok, I’ve never actually tried, but I can’t imagine it.

So one day I asked my friend’s father why he did that work. He stopped to think about it, and then said he said he didn’t know; it just seemed so easy he didn’t feel he had a choice in the matter. At the time I chalked it up to Confusing Adult-Speak. Years later, after I sold my studio, I looked back on that conversation, and my heart went out to him.

Because that fourth-grade year of mine was the year my friend’s father was arrested in a city park, where he used to go at night and expose himself to strangers. His gifts gave him a good living but not a good life, and he felt so invisible he resorted to sad and furtive activities in dark parks just so he could feel that somehow, somewhere, someone actually saw him.

It sounds kind of funny to speak of these things as involving gods today. In our daily lives, few of us associate these things with gods.

Today, I’m not sure it’s really the gods we need to get in touch with, as much as we need to get in touch with the creative powers that create the gods, to reconnect with that power within and around us. For those powers, and their connections to sacred and powerful constellations, are all still here.

So I’ve thought of two stories about how these nexes of power and potential, these proto-gods, are formed in our lives today.

The first is a 2002 novel I just finished a couple weeks ago, an odd and remarkable book called Life of Pi (by Yann Martel). It has the most surprising and transformative ending I’ve ever read, one that makes you realize you’ve just finished a book that wasn’t about what you thought it was about. I won’t spoil the ending, but can tell you that this unlikely book is about a long ocean voyage in a 26-foot lifeboat occupied by a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi, and a 450 lb. Bengal tiger named Richard Parker – and that the tiger turned out to be a kind of god, a manifestation of power, survival, transformation, a fierce and fearsome will to live, who both saved and transformed the boy’s life.

The second story is more down-to-earth, and quite true. It’s by a remarkable physician in the San Francisco area named Rachel Naomi Remen. She is a woman gifted in understanding deeply and wisely, whose gifts have caused many doctors and psychiatrists to refer difficult and complex patients to her. Mostly, she works with terminal patients with AIDS, cancer, and so on.

She tells a wonderful story about creating gods, creating small sacred centers that are both life-giving and life-saving, though it’s not quite how she worded it. For over twenty years she has offered a very simple but powerful ritual to some of her patients before their radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery.

She suggests they meet together with some of their closest friends and family the day before their procedure. It is important that the group be made up of those who are connected to them through a bond of the heart. She suggests that they find an ordinary stone, big enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and bring it to the meeting with them.

The ritual begins by having everyone sit in a circle. In any order they wish to speak, each person tells the story of a time when they too faced a crisis. People may talk about the death of important persons, the loss of jobs or of relationships, or even about their own illnesses. The person who is speaking holds the stone the patient has brought.

When they finish telling their story of survival, they take a moment to reflect on the personal quality that they feel helped them come through that difficult time. People will say such things as, “What brought me through was determination,” “What brought me through was faith,” “What brought me through was humor.” When they have named the quality of their strength, they speak directly to the person preparing for surgery or treatment, saying, “I put determination into this stone for you,” or, “I put faith into this stone for you.”

Often what people say is surprising. Sometimes they tell of crises that occurred when they were young or in wartime that others, even family members, may not have known before, or they attribute their survival to qualities that are not ordinarily seen as strengths. It is usually a moving and intimate meeting and often all the people who participate say that they feel strengthened and inspired by it. After everyone has spoken the stone is given back to the patient, who takes it with them to the hospital, to keep nearby and hold in their hand when things get hard.

Dr. Remen has had several patients go to their chemotherapy, their radiation, or even their surgery with their stones strapped with adhesive tape to the palm of one of their hands or the bottom of their foot.

Over the years, many of the oncologists and surgeons in her community have learned about these stones from their patients and are very careful about them. One surgeon even had the staff go through the hospital laundry in search of a stone that was accidentally thrown away with the sheets in the recovery room. She asked him why he had done this and he laughed and said, “Listen, I have seen people do badly after surgery and even die when there was no reason for it other than the fact that they believed they wouldn’t make it. I need all the help I can get.” (pp. 151-153, Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen)

That’s a story about how gods are created, and about the kind of power and the kind of connections that can create them. Neutral things, stones, get loaded with powerful stories, meanings, wishes, and carry them for those who carry the stones. Those stones become invested with so much power they literally can hold the power of life or death over patients who have them taped to their hands or feet before a scary surgery. That’s how gods are created. Names and stories of gods get loaded with messages of power and hope and passed on. Messages, hopes, dreams, powerful stories and experiences connect with our own hopes and fears and become almost supernatural for us. The patient in the next bed wouldn’t get a thing out of your stone. You may get courage from it, even life. Those stories are like portable altars, so people can carry the reminder that they were touched and blessed by life.

There’s a passage in the Bible that says, “Build altars in the places where I have reminded you who I am, and I will come and bless you there.”

We do need to mark the places where we felt power and connection. Remember that religion means reconnection. It’s like an ancient picture the Greeks had, of our soul, Psyche. They sometimes pictured her as a spider in the center of a web connected by its radials to all the points that held it up, where the spider’s job was to attend to the connections, to keep them in good repair. That’s our job, attending to those connections. It’s a way of setting up altars where we feel touched by life.

Don’t let this sound spooky or supernatural. It’s very down-to-earth. There’s an example of this kind of altar here in our sanctuary. It is our side windows, with their recessed racks containing 150 votive candles in their red or blue glass holders. Before and during every service, we make time for people to light candles, and to give the candles they have lit their own meaning, to let them mark sacred or perhaps scary parts of their own lives.

On average, more than a hundred of you light one or more candles each week here, sometimes many more. This year, it looks like we will use over 3,000 of these 4-1/2 hour tea lights in them, which is about 12,000 hours of candles burning for memories, hopes, markers that become bright little altars of places where many of you have found connections. That window may be one of the strings in your web, a kind of connection. Like the stones, the candles can become connected with your own private associations and thoughts.

Think of the other times and places in your life where you have felt that power, where you have felt called out, empowered, connected. It doesn’t have to have happened a lot of times, though we need to be able to call those times forth, to reconnect with their power.

One reason we have so much freedom of belief in liberal religion is precisely because we each need a different combination of gods, voices and gifts, who are for us worth serving, who give us life. If yours don’t work for me, there’s a fair chance mine won’t work for you either. We are all here to try and become better people, partners, parents and citizens, but no two people will take the journey accompanied by exactly the same gods.

Stories, stones, candles are like little seeds of meaning and empowerment – little God-seeds that might, with our care, blossom into centers capable of reconnecting us with ourselves and the best parts of our world.

We are all in the position of that old Greek picture of the soul as a spider in the center of its web attending to all its connections. Those are the ties that bind us to one another and to the amazing powers of life, those powers that are the stuff of which the gods are made. Let us attend to our connections.