A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 22, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 22, 2004
This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. You won't see streams of people pouring out of the Great Hall with ashes on their foreheads.
Unitarian Universalists don't generally make much of Lent and the holy day with which it begins, Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday and Lent are a little too — well, grovelly for us. Someone will say to me: Dust? Us? We are godlike, aren't we? You said so yourself.
But wait — there is truth here. And if I think orthodox Christian theology often gets it wrong, we can be just as simplistic and misguided in ignoring that truth, to the impoverishing of our souls.
Once, in his Markings1, Dag Hammarskjold wrote
Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy —Why?
Because — when opportunity gives you the obligation to create, you are content to meet the demands of the moment . . .
Because — anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become "famous," you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been. How dead can a man be behind a façade of great ability, loyalty — and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you.
Surely you've felt uneasy. The question is, what to make of this uneasiness? Does it mean, as the old theology says, we are mean and small and miserable, or does it mean that, when we feel it, we are undergoing something that might exalt us?
Uneasy. To be human is to have this anxiety, to live with it. We ask (though not very loudly, muffling the question so we ourselves won't hear it): do I have enough value to keep living? To justify my being here?
But then, it's when we question ourselves, evaluate, judge — then that we know we still possess that most precious thing that will ever be ours — our humanity. That is what it is to be a religious being, a moral being.
Now, we know that a person can, under extreme conditions, be robbed of a sense of worth. A child relentlessly bullied at school. Someone who is simply different in some way, humiliated, violated, and alone with no one to believe in them. It takes extraordinary strength to survive emotionally in those circumstances.
And we know we need a community that believes in us. What if the child has not a nurturing, faith-giving home and the loving arms of parents where they can find solace; what if the person whose difference has been the occasion for humiliation and this onslaught of contempt has no community in whose welcoming arms she finds again her pride and courage?
But in even the best of circumstances, there is an essential unease with which we live, and it cannot be be relieved from the outside of us, and the answer to that unease can come only from the heart and soul of each of us, in the pursuit of our own individual destiny.
A hole in the ego.Sam Keen's2 phrase, from a couple of weeks ago: —
The hole in the ego
is where the holy
flows in and out . . ."
Poor ego. Punctured daily. Why have always to doubt ourselves?
While I was in London a couple of years ago there was a BBC report about work by a British and an American social scientist showing that the popular notion of "self-esteem" might be misguided. Then, a couple of months later, the New York Times Magazine published a story about it. I haven't heard anything since. The social scientists' book hasn't appeared in any bookstore I've been in. But it's worth noting what they found. They found, according to the Times, that, and I quote:
We have created self-esteem programs in schools in which the main objective is, as Jennifer Coon-Wallman, a psychotherapist based in Boston, says, "to dole out huge heapings of praise, regardless of actual accomplishment." We have a National Association for Self-Esteem with about a thousand members, and in 1986, the State Legislature of California founded the "California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility." . . . It was galvanized by [an] Assemblyman [who] fervently believed that by raising his citizens' self-concepts, he could divert drug abuse and all sorts of other social ills.It didn't work.3
Instead, there was a positive correlation between high self-esteem scores and poor social skills and poor academic performance. In fact, one of the researchers, Nicholas Emler of [at] the London School of Economics, wrote:
There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly harmful," Emler says. "It's not at all a cause of poor academic performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better, because they often try harder.
And his associate, Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve, went further to say that high self-regard can maim and even kill.
All this followed three withering studies of self-esteem in the United States. They all had the same message: people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the cause of our country's biggest, most expensive social problems! To our ears, that sounds all wrong . . .
In the background, as I write, a gathering of policy geeks discuss how it happened that the whole nation was led into a war somebody wanted enough that they cooked the intelligence to make it happen. Meanwhile, the authors of this war, who dreamed it and planned it and have executed it thus far — show — at least until lately — no unease, no lack of confidence.
There is a mass-egocentricity of nationalism — trying to be the center of the Kosmos, as if we had no part in the rest of the world. It ought to cause us some uneasiness. The uneasiness begins in the heart of us, in our own want of humility.
This nation, and its leadership — it would seem — have gone to some extreme of self-deception to ease the unease, and in public life, truth seems the rarest thing.
Once, many years ago, I was thunderstruck by a phrase from M.K. Gandhi. "The seeker after truth," he wrote — "The seeker after truth must be humble as the dust."
Sometimes we disappoint ourselves. Sometimes we observe ourselves falling prey to mechanical instinct and to habit that is blind to the moment where we live, with its demands and its promise. Sometimes we need that unease that reminds us that we are "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." That in our quest we may sometimes be wrong, that we are not the center of the Universe or separate from it but a speck of dust in some great living Universe, that we have not forever to live, but this world of life lives on.
Our unease is sometimes unbearable, and under those conditions, we might do almost anything to drown out the voice of our unease. We know the ways: cynicism, frantic activity, drugs, or maybe a somewhat desperate boastfulness — to distract our attention from our inner experience of unease. It's the story of our time.
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
It gets worse. Sometimes, to relieve the unease, people are driven to what they assume to be good works, doing the will of their god, perhaps in the form of righteous judgmental scrupulosity, perhaps a righteous campaign of faith-based bigotry, sometimes even in the form of genuine cruelty and violence. add
It was said that Ivan the Terrible would go down periodically and torture his prisoners, and he always returned feeling relieved, feeling righteous and worthwhile. Don't try that at home.
People who care about their inner life, their spirituality — can start by learning how to relate to this unease we feel; how to make it a central part of a vital, an authentic, spirituality.
Among Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches, there is the practice, on Ash Wednesday, of blessing ashes placed on the foreheads of the worshipers, and words based on Genesis 3:19, "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." It goes back to a time when penitents bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth on account of their sins.
"Human life," says Sam Keen, "comes from the humus, that `brown or black complex and varying material formed by the partial decomposition of vegetable or animal matter; the organic portion of soil.' To be human is to remain humble . . ."
We are a strange amalgam of god and dust.
Nature's highest achievement, crowned with consciousness, capable of the insight and art that created Shakespeare's plays and Handel's music, humanity has penetrated enough of the powers of nature to threaten the very continuance of life on Earth . . . godlike and demonic all at once. We are a strange amalgam of god and dust.
And so our humility cannot be a "grovelling," which means, when I check a dictionary, "to creep with the face to the ground, to lie or creep with the body prostrate in token of subservience or abasement."
The wisest and best part of religious traditions have forever returned to the theme of the seed of divine life that is in us. Over and over they say the final aim of all our efforts, the deepest longing of our hearts, can only be the full unfolding of this divine potential — in the language of the eastern Christian — the Orthodox — tradition, our divinisation. At Yom Kippur, the call is for a return to our truest selves.
The reassurance others can give us that we are of worth — that what we have been and done is of worth — can mean a great deal. But finally the answer to our unease cannot come from anybody else, from any authority outside ourselves. It comes in living by that which is unique and beautiful in your deepest being and by feeling, really feeling, deeply, what all these poets and spiritual teachers and wisdom traditions have been talking about forever — that we are a part of a larger Whole, share the struggle of Life Itself, an unfolding Mystery of which we are part and parcel.
Our small dustlike egos are part of something more, and this big Self, this larger identity — it isn't just me and my God; that can make a terrorist just as well as it can make a saint. It is that Life of Ages, the divine Life, Life Itself — call it what you will — expressed and embodied in a community, the whole human community: — and as such, it presents itself to me, with its wisdom, with its gifts of life and truth, — in my neighbor, my community, in the stranger from another religion and culture.
How do you get there?
And here is the heart of what is good and true about Ash Wednesday. Beyond all the gloomy guilty-ridden theology you may remember from the past: — is this call to humble silence; to contemplation, to wonder. It's nothing more or less than the call of the soul.
In that light, — everything, even our failures, become steps on the path. We begin to see those mis-steps as the products of an illusion, weapons of the ego in the battle for self-preservation, but simultaneously something from which we can learn that our small, confused egos are not the final word about who we are.4
Emerson long ago asked:
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent?
Here's his answer:
What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? . . . Man is a stream whose source is hidden. . . .The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every [one]'s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, . . . and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty.
And there it is. Critic. The Supreme Critic. It isn't somebody out there who disapproves of you. It's in here, in the heart of us. It is Hammarskjold's "uneasiness" that he has decided to bless. Answering to that is what no other person or entity or force can do for us. For that, you need silence, and in the silence, a reckoning, and a commitment to what in us demands the highest and best in us, a commitment to a rising, deepening human consciousness.
That supreme Critic on the quality of our lives is in us, and we in it — a Self larger than our little egos.
And there was that troubling word, submission. Religious wisdom speaks often of submission, a surrender, to a power beyond our normal impulses, and that, in fact, is the very meaning of the word Islam, — and even though most of us spend a lot of our lives pursuing less noble or inspired impulses, the promise of these voices from across ages and cultures is that this higher consciousness can become our normal mode of being and not something extraordinary at all.
We all can know it in moments, and those moments make all the difference. We remember that it is possible to find access to energies beyond our usual motives and impulses.5 And then we can try, and fail, and learn from our missteps, and know that our lives are worthwhile, full of promise, sharing in the struggle of life itself, nobly, humanly. This is the humility we need.
But still you ask, how do you get there? And still the answer is humble silence; and contemplation, and cultivated wonder — the call of the soul.
But life is too busy. You don't understand. There is no silence in my world, no respite for the luxury of contemplation!
But isn't that the protest of the spiritual life — a protest against the unending noise and ceaseless frantic activity? Isn't it the unwillingness to live without the wonder and silence and contemplation? The unrelenting insistence on making room and sacred space in our lives?
This life that we are given — this Meanwhile where we live — can sometimes have the quality of Purgatory: a place of purgation, of cleansing tears.
In Dante, in his Divine Comedy, he's found himself lost in a dark forest. He thinks he can get out of it, and onto the sunlit mountain, on his own — that is, on the strength of his ego, his little self. But he find there are forces that have to take him there. He needs Virgil's wisdom, and he needs the bigger Self that extends to the Kosmos. Dante will have to go deep, deep down to find it, and with it, he'll have to find those deep forces that can guide him home. Gods, perhaps — these powers & forces are not entirely separate from us; they are part of what we are — but they are also beyond, and sometimes we must wait on them, wait for them, allow them to lead.
Helen Luke6 observed that there are no dreams in Hell; in Heaven there are no dreams. Here there are dreams, and here we must find the time and space for dreams and contemplation, because where we live is a state of becoming. In the tension of everyday, we sometimes suffer.
Dante spent three nights in Purgatory and on each of them he dreamed. We are caught in the tremendous obsession of this society on activity, and if we do not consent to do nothing, to listen and dream, we'll find that we are progressing rapidly into a swamp, further into the dark forest, walking backwards. We have to get the balance right, maintain the dialogue between inner and outer worlds.
We are a strange amalgam of god and dust. We have to find our way to that bigger Self that spills out into the whole Kosmos. We must be conscious and maintain consciousness of both the god that we are and the dust that we are, and while giving the dust its due, at the end of the day, it is the dust that must bow to the god; it is the god that will fill the dust with glory.
That means a rediscovery of both wonder, and humility.
It's not enough to be supremely confident, not enough to affirm our human drives and passions, not enough to recognize the fallacy in traditional theology's dim view of human beings. Not enough without the Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be.
It's simply that the ravishing beauty at the soul of things leaves us forever unsatisfied with anything less that the unfolding of our highest, noblest humanity.
T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday:
Lady of silence
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks, . . .
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
Bronson Alcott
So fine, so sublime a religion as ours,
older than Christ, old as the Godhead, old as the soul,
eternal as the heavens, solid as the rock,
is and only is; nothing else is but that,
and it is in us and is us;
and nothing is our real selves but that in the breast.
— Go in peace: the work of peace is in our hands.
Life within us, life that greets us in each other and every one and every thing, Mystery beyond our naming, sum and substance of all being, promise of all these lives of ours might be: —
Let Wonder apprehend us, and in this quiet, let us hear silent music, see beneath and beyond surfaces and appearances, discern and know what is real and what is false, and love the real that is and that our hearts yearn to make.
Let illusions and pretensions melt away.
Let hardened surfaces soften and melt and let the genius of Life, with its beauty and great power, renew us, and from the chaos draw splendor and strength and a nobler, wiser, braver humanity, making strength from mistakes and failure, making exaltation from every extremity, turning all things to the energies of love, making our days wellsprings of humble grandeur and the grace of Life. Let the ravishing beauty at the soul of things leave us unsatisfied with less than the unfolding of our highest, noblest humanity, in this silence.
From T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, 1930
Lady of silence
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among the noise and deny the voice
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks, . . .
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.