A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 15, 2005
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 15, 2005
What a terrific gift of courage and hope, to be gathered here in the company of people who care and who hope and who are prepared to extend themselves, and commit and risk for their vision!
After a year that has been both absolutely wonderful and absolutely terrible, annual meeting day finds us in the midst of challenges and adversity that can feel overwhelming.
Often we ask, "What can be done? What can anybody possibly do? And what are we supposed to do? All I can do is just live my life."
But there is an unbroken line of great souls who have turned the world to life and freedom, toward a fuller realization of our humanity, from Aurobindo and Gandhi to Emerson and Parker, and on and on and on, and they give witness to something more.
And what is their secret for facing and overcoming adversity and leaving behind them a world more fair and beautiful?
I know this much. It is there, it is reached and has been reached by many before us. It is always already there.
And I know this: that we will have to reach it. If the work of peace is in our hands, so is the future of America and of the human community and indeed the fate of the Earth.
All that is in our hands; all that is up to us: — and it is not up to us at all. Note the paradox.
And that paradox is an opening. It is the entryway into the truth that we need. There is a great creative Energy at work. May it do its work through us.
And spiritual depth — what great spiritual teachers of all times and places have spoken of — spiritual depth is for trying times, and trying times are for spiritual depth.
There is a spiritual shallowness, a superficiality about these times — and I think it has to do with the ease and comfort we have enjoyed. We have not faced very much adversity. There are always the personal struggles and reversals. But we have lived in a relatively free country and we have not yet lived with very much of the certain consequences of our mistreatment of the natural world. Not until now. But that is changing fast.
Now our need for a new humanity is perfectly clear. We have to be the new humanity. The great creative Energy that brought forth life and consciousness is not finished.
Last week Cliff Matthews spoke about an evolutionary quality about this living, unfolding Universe. Intelligence and the creativity are inherent in it, intrinsic to it.
And you and I are bound into this whole, a part of it. It isn't about some gods and goddesses out there somewhere. It's the very life within us. But we are very cautious about all this. Emerson said there is no bar or wall in the soul where the human ends and the divine begins — "we lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God."
But, of course, we put up walls across that open side to protect ourselves. We don't want to be crazy religious fanatics.
The walls are there for a purpose. There's so much superstition, lots of easy answers and an awful lot of false religious authority to filter out. But this Life within us — it's creative and evolutionary, and it's real. Eventually in your mind and heart you come to know the difference, know where to let down the guard and surrender to this great creative Energy and intuition.
That, of course, is exactly what the word Islam means. Surrender. The original idea was not to obey a bunch of mullahs or some outward authority. It's an inner voice. We all know that.
And then, one day, when you are trying so hard to compose an answer to a question, a response to a situation, a word to speak — you quiet your mind, let there be a little silence, and then you realize that what you seek to figure out, you already know. You let it flow.
I had a friend once who was a terrific pianist, and I asked him about the act of playing his music. I mean, what is this experience? And he told me something that, if you think about it, should be obvious, really. He isn't thinking about notes. Let's see, a lower-octave F, and a middle A, and, oh yes, an upper-octave C, and I hit it with such-and-such force and hold it for eight-tenths of a second, no, no. The music is in him. The notes and the particulars are all there, yes, of course, but it is all flowing from him, he knows it, he isn't thinking about it. He's paying attention, very attentive, but when you contemplate what's going on, it's really quite spectacular.
And our work and our lives are the music. We know it, deep within.
Aurobindo — the great Indian independence figure just before Gandhi and then spiritual explorer, philosopher, poet — Aurobindo discovered this. He awakened to the situation of his people in his native India. He knew something had to change. And he turned to the profound depths of his native Hindu religious tradition, which, in turn, sent him directly to his own inner resources, which are one with the Great Energy that is the life of all this Universe.
He found at the core of him an inner silence, and came to love it, and out of it his words and his deeds came.
It won't come automatically just because you're around other people who understand this and value it, but it sure helps to live within a community that aspires to this kind of consciousness, and supports it when it shows up.
And so there was Aurobindo facing impossible odds, the weight of overwhelming oppression. He himself was in constant danger. And just then he wrote of a heart released from grief, and experience "beyond belief," and
A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all . . .
A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
How is it that a person who decides there's more purpose to his life than just living his own life in peace, who has instead thrown himself into the epic struggle, can speak of a heart released from grief? Can speak of a peace stupendous, of a thrill about his day-to-day existence? What an odd place to find peace, release from grief, the thrill of life. But it seems that that is where we will find it, in the midst of the struggle, buoyed up by a Spirit, carried along by purposes greater than our own, something worth living for and even dying for. So we face adversity today.
But beyond and behind the adversity there is More.
We know the present situation. The ecological collapse, the suppression of civil liberties, the backward leaps of consciousness, are the consequence of a fearful retreat from this journey forward that this human community is involved in. The Dominionist Christianist theology mixed with shameless politics by which the spectacular capacities and possibilities of the human mind and spirit are being driven backward in a deadly regressive, theocratic direction.
It's up to us.
Do you want to sit this out? We can't sit this out.
You and I are a vanguard. This faith of ours is a vanguard of a new mind, a new consciousness.
I believe there is only one way to enter this fray effectively, and retain our inner peace and the joy of life. It's a deeply spiritual route. This is why we gather. And along the way we enjoy, we're enriched by, some spectacular company, a wonderful community — but without this journey, without this calling, this community has no depth or meaning and will soon wear thin.
There are two things we can do concretely today. One is to look right into the face of the financial and budgetary obstacles we face today, and have the faith and courage to pass this very cautious, conservative budget. It should be a much larger budget because the work we have to do is urgent. And second — to accept this year as a spiritual challenge that presents itself to us. Pass the budget and do whatever we can to restore what's been cut out of it. And then stretch ourselves to commit, joyfully, hopefully — beginning right now — to a year of growth, focussed growth and achievement and the richest, most profound spiritual journey we've ever had.
Some will not choose to share this adventure. Some are already made that choice, and we must respect their choice, even as others join us. All we can do is — well, it was put so well long ago in the Gita — "Do without attachment the work you have to do. . . . Surrendering all action to this greater purpose, this upward surge of Life that is bigger than me or you, "with mind intent on [this bigger] Self, freeing yourself from longing and selfishness, fight — unperturbed by grief."1
Pursue our mission and our purpose to the best of our ability and the best of our spiritual capacities. Focus on the work and on the spiritual quest, and don't fret about the results. And it will be imperfect. Do you know anything that isn't? Aurobindo describes us humans as
This strange irrational product of the mire,
This compromise between the beast and God.
So we bring our gifts here, do the work that calls to us and that our hands and minds find to do, the gifts of our own human possibilities. This is a place for them to unfold.
But no one person's gifts are the whole show. Nobody's. It's a symphony. We have to figure out what that means for each of us.
Look, I am what I am. I continue to learn and to unfold but I am what I am. I am good for what I am good for, and this is my work and gift. I am not perfect. I am hardly the life of the party. I am absent-minded and rather intense. Sometimes I can barely remember my own name and I don't have all the social graces in the world — I grew up in a Puritanical lower-middle class household; I'm a product of in the South Jersey swamps, for gawdsake. Whaddaya want?!
I know that the responsibility of this ministry with which I am charged does not always allow me to say popular things or easy things. It has to be spiritual and it has to be intellectual and it has to be political and personal. I hope you know that I throw my whole self into this work. But I must be faithful to the inner voice. I must speak from my own inner depths and not superficially.
It's always a call to that deep silence at the heart of us; and from there it's a call to bring heart and mind and hands together. I can give to you only what I am given, with my whole heart. Not everyone is always pleased and that can hurt but you do not go into this work expecting that everyone will be happy. You cannot sustain this work if you cannot live with the consequences. I can't do "religion lite." I know that asks something, maybe a lot, of you. That is my job and calling and so I offer my imperfect labors in this community.To the things that have stirred me to the depths and have overflowed, I have given imperfect expression. But I think that is the only kind of expression there is.
What we do here, what we achieve together — will have to rise from the unfolding people that we are. I know pretty well what my calling is, and what it isn't. That's why we are a community, why it matters what your calling is. Our ministry won't be a full and complete without your gifts, too. We each have to focus our energies where our particular gifts lie.
What you are being asked to do is to find your own calling and place of ministry in this community of good faith, and to make some kind of symphony out of it.
Sometimes I feel a kinship with Aswapathy, in that reading. In this prayer, by Aurobindo, this character Aswapathy feels all the hope and all the anguish. My colleague Barbara Merritt has said the ministry to which you're called isn't yours until it breaks your heart. Look at what Aswapathy feels. Look at it. Maybe you have felt like this. He starts:
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death . . ?
All we have done is ever still to do.
The new-born ages perish like the old.
It's a statement of truth. But it won't lead him to despair. It's the entree to full and radiant joy.
There is something more, beneath, beyond. There's that dimension, that personal experience, of transcendence. Sometimes in that inner silence, it's there, we feel it and know it. And in the Silence comes a Voice.
As we gather today, much is at stake. The crisis never really goes away: Aurobindo says, so very truly, "All we have done is ever still to do."
What must be do? First, recognize where we are, what is this moment in which we live; — To do so is to begin to understand the meaning of our individual lives.
To quote Aurobindo, "Every one has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which [Life] offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it and use it."
And then let us make this a place for sacred imagination, venturing, as fearlessly as we are able, carrying forward the work of this congregation and of our lives in new and bold ways.
This is no time for retrenchment.
It's been quite a year. This year Cindy and I undertook a significant education initiative into the fundamentalisms that now threaten to turn out country and with it the world inside out, reversing the stupendous achievement of civil liberties, the separation of church and state, human equality. To do this, Cindy sacrificed huge quantities of her own time beyond what she is paid for and her work was brilliant. We need to free her to do more of this work. This coming year we had hoped to add staff to make things like this possible, Instead, budget pressures forced us to cut a position. Yet we cannot let this work be halted now.
This year we focused attention on the global crisis of climate change and human responsibility. A lot of you placed orders for hybrid cars and made changes in your homes and now we have to keep talking and engaging our imagination. Already one of you has proposed that our south-facing office roof should be evaluated for solar panels. To make that investment would be a gift that keeps on giving, first to the future of the earth, and second to the financial future of the congregation.
You will hear more about that here.
Our religious education program touched as many kids as we can fit into this building in two sessions, plus youth groups. But for this coming year we very nearly lost the rented classrooms outside this building.
Our public mission and social witness is probably more important than we even realize. We have been both a voice and a living witness to the world that can be.
There is more, of course, and there can be much more as our gifts become that symphony they can be.
At the heart and core of it all is this experience of shared worship. We are a worshipping community with a spiritual vision that can make sense to modern people, and makes sense of us, as well. It reaches to the deepest places and speaks to our souls, evoking the deep possibilities of our minds and spirits. It is a dynamic, transformative experience of transcendence and community.
So I ask you, what does it matter that we are here? That you are here, or not? what does it matter?
We are not here so that the world can remain the same. We will have to trust the energies of evolutionary possibility at work in us. We have to be a force of Nature. We cannot give up and give in. We cannot.
Let this be a year focussed on expanding the scope and scale of our work and on drawing through these doors many more who ought to be a part of this congregation. Let it be the most exciting year we can remember.
It begins with challenges. Sometimes, in the face of it all, our hearts are in our throat. We tremble.
And you know, the challenges and adversity force us to seek and find the great silence at the heart of us out of which something grander and mightier than we have known will speak. It can transform us.
Fasten your seat belt. The creative energies of life lie within us and it is time to turn to them, and find the meaning of our lives. And then we will find the great paradox: that it's all up to us, yet it isn't about us, and it's not up to us at all. It's time for a spiritual revolution.
May we be found faithful and worthy of our calling. May we know the sublime joy that's captured in these lines farther into Aurobindo's poem where he speaks of this pioneer people as "children of a marvelous dawn," "barrier-breakers," "wrestlers with destiny," and he says:
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.
A lot to aspire to, isn't it? And why not? What, now, is the alternative? In this hour, so much is asked of us. And how much, how very much, of creative energy, of overflooding joy, of insight and valour and ardent strength will be given to us!
This day finds us
a blend of laughter and anguish
high resolve and resignation
vision and bewilderment
discord and serenity
satisfaction and regret
Gathered under a [ clouded | leaden |changing ] sky
In a familiar and venerable hall
In a beloved community
Contemplating choices
meaning
duty
possibility
Weighing the worth of our covenant and commitment
the depth of our truth
the reach of our loves
the justice of our vows
the light of our minds
the strength — the strength of our hearts in a testing time . . .
So let our thoughts be still
our minds quiet
to hear the silent music
In the silence.
From the Indian philosopher and poet Aurobindo,
and written between 1899 and 1950:
How long shall our spirits battle with the Night
And bear defeat and the brute yoke of Death,
We who are vessels of a deathless Force?
All we have done is ever still to do.
The new-born ages perish like the old.
Baffled and beaten back we labour still;
Annulled, frustrated, spent, we still survive.
The executor of the divine attempt
Equipped to wear the earthly body of God,
This strange irrational product of the mire,
This compromise between the beast and God,
Is not the crown of thy miraculous world.
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
I saw . . . forerunners of a divine multitude
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvelous dawn,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable.
. . . . .
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner human,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.
William Ellery Channing, 1829:
He had too much the wisdom of experience. He wanted what may be called the wisdom of hope. . . . There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.
Emerson, 1862:
Never was anyone too strong for his proper work. Art is long, and life short, and we must supply this disproportion, by borrowing and applying to our task the energies of Nature.
The forces are infinite. Every one has the might of all; for that is the secret of the world . . . But if you wish to avail yourself of their might, . . . you must take their divine direction, not they yours. Obedience alone gives the right to command. . . . All that the world admires comes from within. . . . We are as we believe. We are as we think. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of truth.
Fear disenchants life and the world. . . . I admire the sentiment of Thoreau who said, "Nothing is so much to be feared as fear; God himself likes atheism better." For the world is a battle ground; . . . and the most quiet and protected life is at any moment exposed to incidents which test your firmness.
Besides, what we do and suffer is in moments, but the cause of right for which we labor, never dies, . . . gains by our defeats, and will know how to compensate our extremest sacrifice. . . . My point is, that the movement of the whole machine, the motive force of life, and of every particular life, is moral. The world stands on our thoughts, and not on iron or cotton; and the iron of iron, the fire of fire, the ether and source of all the elements, is moral force.