06.27.09
Posted in Sermons at 2:20 pm
Denise Gyauch
May 31, 2009
I found my sermon title in a quotation from James Luther Adams, who is often considered THE prominent 20th-century UU theologian. Adams wrote that “church is where we get to practice what it means to be human,” but like the monk whose practice of bowing in the meditation hall takes on more meaning when transferred to every place and every person encountered, it seems to me that practicing being human here at church is useful to the extent that it transforms our ways of meeting everyone in our lives—our every interaction with the interdependent web of which we are all part. I want to think this morning about some places and times other than church where we find opportunities to live out our Unitarian Universalist values. In particular, during this season between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I have found myself thinking about this in the context of life with children, an adventure which I’ve been on for about a decade now and which I find fairly consuming, but I hope you’ll feel free to translate my comments to other areas of your lives—friendships, work relationships, intimate relationships—whatever relationships bring meaning, joy, and challenge to your life. To date, I’ve spent more of my adult life without children than I have with them, so I’m fully aware that family life takes on many shapes and is not always life in close association with children, and I know that I learned as much about how to be human from the roommates and partners who shared my young adulthood as I have from my children. Indeed, as I continue to grow as a parent being, I find myself looking back with new eyes at earlier years and understanding more and more just how lucky I was to be so well (and so tolerantly) loved by those with whom I shared that period of my life.
I’d love sometime to explore just what might be meant by “what it means to be human,” but for now, I’m going to glide over that tricky question to focus on the principles of Unitarian Universalism. I have been lucky enough to have a few years worth of religious education students practicing the Rainbow Principles song in the car for RE Sunday, but it’s good to know that we can also find the “grownup” version of the principles on the back cover of our Order of Service or in the hymnal, just before the first hymn. Although we in this room would not likely agree on the best articulation of what it means to be human, members of this congregation and other UU congregations do covenant together to affirm these seven principles, which spell out the high points of how we strive to treat each other. Although many of the seven might be applied to family life, today I’ll focus on the first and the seventh: the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the interdependent web of all existence.
Parenting is an undertaking that is at once both intensely personal—colored by the individuality of both parent or parents and child or children—and incredibly, even surprisingly, public—the interest, observations, and advice of others ranging from close friends and family members to passers-by to experts can hardly be escaped, especially by new parents. When you become a caretaker of one, small infant, or when you venture into public view with a walking, talking child, suddenly many, many people seem to have a stake in how you spend your days and how you negotiate your interpersonal affairs. Unfortunately, these numerous stakeholders in your private life rarely agree on much beyond the fact that parenting is an immensely important job and that it can sometimes be very difficult. The array of diverse and even contradictory advice on feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, entertaining and disciplining children is astonishing and hard to avoid. To some degree, this public side of parenting can be distressing and the input from folks who may not even know you and certainly don’t know your child as well as you do can be far off the mark, but it is also an expression of the web of life—I find it encouraging that folks care about the continuance of our species, and we are right to care that ALL children have a good start on life. People care passionately about the project of parenting because the stakes are high for all of us—even for the “us” that extends beyond the human race. Furthermore, we parents NEED help—lots of it, in lots of different ways. We need someone to hold the new baby or bring dinner when we’re so tired we can’t see straight; we need reassurance that we’re doing okay and that our children are doing okay; and we need guidance and suggestions, too, for the times—and we all have them—when we’re not sure we are doing okay. Even if we were lucky enough to have good parents, the circumstances in which we ourselves are parenting are different, as we and our children are different from our own parents and their children. It’s not a bad thing to entertain suggestions from others about how to parent; the trick is in discerning which advice to take.
And here, I think, lies the usefulness of our principles—they can serve well to help us discern which advice we might find useful. In parenting, as in anything else in life, exactly WHAT you do isn’t nearly as important as HOW you do it. By “what” I mean here both strategy and tactics, i.e. the general description of what you’re doing (a 7:30 bedtime, for example) and the blow-by-blow minutiae of the how-to (scheduling activities leading up to bedtime, the intricate choreography of the washing-brushing-reading-hugging-kissing routine). By “how” I mean the attitude from which you make decisions about what you’re doing and with which you enact those decisions. Affirmations of the inherent worth and dignity of each person and of radical interdependence strike me as a good place to start in assessing any relationship advice (and parenting is ultimately a particular kind of exercise in relationship) that comes my way. In deciding whether or how to act in any situation, we can choose to evaluate my options in light of what serves best to honor and respect all the individuals involved and as well as to establish, protect, and nurture connection. When we encounter “problems” or things that don’t go according to expectations, we can look for something to bow to in that situation. A particular bedtime can show respect for the needs of both child and parent for rest, and sensitive, consistent implementation can build trust and a store of loving memories as well as good hygiene and reading skills. However, that same 7:30 bedtime and its attendant routine, if consistently undertaken in distraction or impatience, probably won’t build connection and may inspire resistance or insecurity. If rigidly enforced on children with differing needs or even the same child as she or he grows, it can communicate a lack of respect for the individual child’s needs. And then, of course, even if you were to pull off the impossible feat of managing bedtime with the perfect parental combination of firmness, sensitivity, and careful attention all contributing dietary, clothing, bedding, and scheduling factors within your control, there’s still just no guarantee that this beautiful young person who lives with you will actually fall asleep at a given time, let alone stay asleep as long as you’d like. Now I know, because I’ve read many of them, that there are simply oodles of books and magazines with pages and pages of advice about what to do to help your child sleep well. I also know that none of them has a solution for teething, which parents know tends to dominate the same period of early childhood during which we are most desperate for our children to sleep more. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for suggestions that might help your family get more rest, but if you feel moved simply to hold and soothe your baby as best you can for as long as it takes those teeth (and yes, there do seem to be entirely too many of them!) to emerge, well, that might work just as well. Whether you choose research, surrender, or both, consider bowing to the reality that nothing is as comforting as loving arms; to the darkness and quiet of 2 a.m.; to the realization that sleep deprivation, while dulling your intellect somewhat, cannot strip away your inherent worth or dignity; to the reality that your life is not your own in quite the way it used to be. And then bow to the worth and dignity of the parents who have made different choices in their efforts to do the best they can for their children. Ultimately, each parent gets the opportunity to choose (or to custom-design, if you will) strategies that respect and nurture child and self and others, individually and together. It’s a balancing act, it’s imprecise trial-and-error, and it’s good practice in what it means to be human.
In parenting, as in anything else in life, I’m pretty sure that most advice that gets repeated more than a few times must work for someone, and I’m equally sure that NO specific advice works for everyone all the time. Looking back at our story, I suspect that a cat could profit from toad’s riding instructions, but there’s just no way that a snake can ride a horse with a straight back, bent knees, and a firm hold on the reins. That doesn’t mean that snake is unworthy to ride, and it doesn’t mean that toad’s suggestions can’t be useful to snake. Although toad’s suggestions will hardly produce the effect he desired, their conversation might prompt snake to reevaluate his mission and purpose in riding down the road on his horse. Who knows, perhaps he’ll achieve spiritual growth in moving from his initial desire to impress onlookers to an honest, authentic acceptance of the realities of his own life. Perhaps snake will even begin to wonder whether he ought not to be considering the worth and dignity of the horse and their interdependence as they progress down the road.
When we affirm snake’s right to ride a horse, that is, the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we inevitably come smack up against the issue of diversity. Of course, that’s easier to think about on a larger scale—obviously, many human beings look, dress, eat, and speak very differently than my family and I do, and of course, I can see and celebrate such differences as an expression of the wonderful diversity of human culture, especially when it doesn’t impact my life too directly. (The idea that these differences are interesting but essentially distant from our lives is becoming more and more difficult to maintain with our increasingly globalized economic and communications structures, but that’s another sermon.) Despite our human tendencies to form tribes and maintain boundaries as a survival mechanism, it’s relatively easy to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of someone I don’t have to live with. It gets trickier to consistently honor and respect differences of opinion, preference, and habits when they show up in the people with whom we live intimately. Emerson’s fine ether of love and kindness and the glorious exclamations of oneness we heard from the choir are all well and good (and I do think they point to something tremendously real and encouraging), but, honestly, don’t the globs of toothpaste in the sink just get you to sometimes?
In my own marriage, one of our recurring conversations (you know what I mean—the conversations you have over & over again, perhaps with slightly different details, but without satisfactory resolution) runs like this:
Partner A: When you did X, it really bothered me.
Partner B: But that shouldn’t bother you; when you do X, I don’t mind at all!
I’m not going to tell you which one of us was A and which B, but I will admit that I used to feel just a tad bit superior to David, until I realized that I was sometimes having the reverse conversation with him in my own mind, just not saying it out loud. It’s not that we don’t want to support each other; it’s just that it would be so much easier to be able to assume we’re alike in our preferences and in our responses. Instead we are invited (repeatedly, if necessary) to bow to what the poet Rilke described as the distance between even the closest human beings “which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky” (Letters to a Young Poet).
Perhaps much unhappiness in family life, and human relationships generally, stems from a failure to honor the inherent worth and dignity of the individual and its attendant reality of human diversity. I grew up both Roman Catholic and military, so I’m sure I have a more ingrained sense of rules and standard operating procedure than some, but it seems to me that our culture generally assumes that if one just figures out the correct procedures, then outcomes will be satisfactory: How many milligrams of which nutrients should I get to maximize bone density? What foods should I offer to my child, at precisely which moment, to ensure a lifetime of good eating habits? How many “positive interactions” was it the experts recommend I make sure to have with a co-worker or committee member before I offer that one bit of negative feedback? The more extreme corollary to this assumption that I took away from my childhood—and mind you, I’m NOT saying it was what my parents meant to teach me!–was that if you figure out the BEST possible procedures, then you will, of course, obtain excellent, preferably pre-determined, results. I hope I don’t need to tell you that this theory doesn’t consistently bear out in reality, and it can be very misleading in parenting! Our children are not OUR children in any sense that makes them putty in our hands, and even if they were, I doubt that it would be possible to control all the variables at play in the process of growing a human being. (If “the studies” ever actually do manage to discover an exact mechanism by which we can all maintain our ideal body weight for an entire lifetime, then I might be willing to reopen this discussion. I’m not holding my breath.) In my experience, attempts to gain absolute control have generated anxiety and misery, not the compassion and connection that in my best moments I know I value most highly.
The wisest authors I’ve read on the subject of parenting remind us that life with children is not a unilateral undertaking. Nancy Mairs suggests that our children are raising us as much as we them, and without the much-touted benefit of all the expert advice and societal support that we parents have. We may pretend otherwise in order to bolster our authority and sense of control, but adults, like children, are still growing, still creating our selves out of the shared experiences of lives with our fellow beings. Anne Lamott, whose essay on parenting and anger is the one of the most honest, most courageous, and ultimately most hopeful explorations of the disturbing effects children can have on their parents that I’ve read, elsewhere reminds us that parenting done well is also about living our own lives: she says of her adolescent son that “most of all he needs me to be alive in a way that makes him feel he will be able to bear adulthood” (Plan B).
Given my personal propensity to sign on for the possibility of perfection, I am tremendously grateful that I stumbled upon a different vision of parenting. Sometime during my first pregnancy, I came across a book by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn entitled Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. I’m not entirely sure how much of it I read at that time, and I certainly remembered little of it until I returned to it to prepare this sermon, but Jon’s prologue to the book made a deep impression upon me, both then and now:
First child off at college freshman year, arrives home 1:30 a.m. for Thanksgiving, driven by a friend. When he had called earlier to say he would not make it home for dinner as we had hoped, we were all disappointed, and for a few moments there had been more than a slight current of annoyance in me. We leave the door unlocked, as arranged, having told him to wake us when he arrives. No need. We hear him come in. The energy is young, vital, spilling over even in his attempts to be quiet. . . . He comes into our darkened room. We hug. My side of the bed is closer to him than Myla’s. He lies down across my chest, backwards kind of, extends himself, and embraces us both with his arms, but even more with his being. He is happy to be home. He lies here, draped over my body sideways, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Any trace of annoyance at the lateness of the hour and the disappointment about him not making it by dinnertime evaporate instantly.
I feel happiness radiating from him. There is nothing overexuberant or manic here. His energy is joyful, content, calm, playful. It feels like old friends reunited, and beyond that, familial celebration. He is at home now, here in our darkened room. He belongs. The bond is palpable among the three of us. A feeling of joy fills my chest and is joined by a series of images of my life with him, captured in the fullness of this moment. This huge nineteen-year-old, lying across me, who I held in my arms as much as possible until he could and would wriggle out and run in the world, now with his scruffy beard and powerful muscles, is my son. I am his father. Myla is his mother. We know this wordlessly, bathing in our different happinesses that unite as we lie here.
I think my pregnant self found in this passage an image that made me feel that I could bear parenthood. Returning to this book a decade later and a bit more than halfway to my eldest child’s freshman year in college, I recognize in this passage and the rest of the book a depiction of parenting not as a fearful struggle to achieve acceptable results, to look good (or at least not foolish) riding down the road, but as an opportunity to practice mindfulness, attention and presence, a chance to see what happens if I learn to bow to the unexpected in our journey together and to make choices based on a deep appreciation of the balance between individual worth and interdependence. My children are still young; their father and I still hold them often and can’t yet imagine being separated from either of them for months. As a family, we’ve negotiated our way through the infant, toddler, and preschool years, and into the school years, learning sometimes easily and sometimes unwillingly and under duress that love and compassion make far better decisions than fear, and also that we’re never done figuring out what we’re doing.
We are, all of us, not sure exactly where our journey is heading, how we’ll get there, or even who we will be when we get there, but my hope is that some of the many connections we’re nurturing in our lives now will carry each of us to moments like that described in Everyday Blessings, moments in which we discover that our hearts hold more freedom, more compassion, more happiness than we could imagine. May it be so.
Permalink
Posted in Rev. Jason Shelton, Sermons at 2:11 pm
Rev. Jason Shelton
May 10, 2009
In our household, I am the one with flexible working hours, so it’s my responsibility to do the dropping off and picking up the kids from daycare. It always surprises me how easily some people, even liberal, feminist-minded UU folks, can sometimes remark on this situation with an interesting bit of well-meaning but nonetheless insensitive stereotyping. “Gotta go be Mr. Mom, huh?” Hmm. As I recall from that movie – with Michael Keaton as the completely inept at anything related to the household or child rearing stay-at-home Dad – “Mr. Mom” seems like a bit of an insult. I’m sure people don’t mean it that way, but there it is. I’m not Mr. Mom, and I’m not babysitting when I’m with my kids. I like to think that I’m parenting, plain and simple.
I can get indignant about it, and it gets worse when some stranger will make an outrageous offhand remark. Like the other day, when I was at the gym with the baby, Sam. I took her swimming for the first time, and she and I were having a ball together. It was mid-morning on a Monday, and other folks in the pool, mostly elders who were doing water aerobics, just lit up when they saw the baby. Lots of people said things – “she’s so cute,” and “oh, how precious,” and “do you not work?”
Excuse me?
I suppose, if I’m really being honest about it, I get my hackles up about things like this because my situation is not unlike that of my own mother’s when I was a boy. She was a nurse before I came into the world, but she was a stay-at-home mom for my earliest years. When I started school, she started working part-time in an office, but her hours were such that she left after I did and she was home when I got back. Just like me every day. Back then, of course, there weren’t very many dads in that role, but today it’s not uncommon. I see lots of other dads at the daycare, or playing at the park, or swimming at the pool with their kids in the middle of the day. We’re not Mr. Moms, OK? Besides, there are all of those qualities that we associate with motherhood – or, more accurately, that I associate with my mother – that don’t have anything to do with me. Not at all my style. Would never treat my kids that way. . .
So the other day, I picked up Amanda from preschool. And, being a good dad, wanting to show my interest in her, and knowing how she just loves to talk anyway, I ask her, “So, honey, what did you do at school today that was really fun?” I hear this loud sigh from the backseat. “I don’t like it when you ask that question every day! I just don’t want to talk about it!”
And it hits me: oh, dear God. I have become my mother.
After thinking about it for a while, it seems that I have been asking her that question just about every day for the past two years. Combine that with the fact that my wife, Mary, has packed the exact same lunch for her every day over the same period, and we have pretty much laid the groundwork for the epiphany Amanda will have about how we screwed her up right from the start when she’s 25 and in therapy.
She doesn’t like that I’m asking her the same questions every day because, in a way, I’m still treating her like she’s two. Now she’s four, and she has grown and changed in extraordinary ways over the past two years. Perhaps, in her mind, my inability to change the parameters of the daily questions is disrespectful to the person she has become.
OK, so that seems like a lot of insight for a four-year-old. But I know that when Marion Winik talks about the dread of your mother’s voice on the telephone (*), what I hear and resonate with is that nagging sense that my own mother sometimes treats me like I’m still twelve. But when I give her a little bit of credit, and show her a little compassion, I was probably around twelve when I stopped sharing the bulk of my life experiences with her. Since then, she gets nuggets of insight, recordings of concerts or the occasional text of a sermon, but nowhere near the depth of knowledge that you get from first-hand observation of and interaction in another person’s daily life.
What’s more, when I really feel like she’s treating me like I’m twelve, I also realize that I’m kinda-sorta responding to her like I’m twelve, too, which means treating her like she’s roughly the same age I am now. Whoa. See the trap?
How can my mother be in relationship with me, know me for the person I have grown and changed into over the years, if I don’t really let her in? What choice does she have but to default to relating to the person she knew best? And, perhaps even more importantly, if I insist on relating to her as though I were the adolescent she sometimes mistakes me for, have I not also missed the opportunity to see how she has, in fact, grown and changed over the years, too?
I have a sense that many of us carry some pretty deep wounds around our relationships with our mothers (and other family members, too – Mom is just the lucky one today!). I thought my experience was unique until I read the essay from which this morning’s reading came. How is it that some random essayist completely understands and articulates my relationship with my mother? Could there be something archetypal in that relationship, something that is more common that I ever dreamed?
In this community, we recognize and celebrate the fact that our spiritual lives are journeys through diverse paths. But each of those paths acknowledge the special challenge of family. Jesus, when told that his mother and brothers were looking for him while he was preaching, refused to see them, saying to the crowd, “These are my mother and brothers, those who do the will of God.” (Imagine that – you can almost hear him sigh when they said, “Your mother is looking for you…”). The Buddha, upon his return to his family after experiencing enlightenment, was completely rejected and ridiculed, and he had to float in the air while spouting both fire and water to prove that his transformation had been anything of substance. Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield retells the warning of Zen Master Basho: “You can’t teach the truth in your native town. They only know you by your childhood names” (which of course is a statement mirrored in the Gospels). Kornfield continues, “As it happens, this may be the best reason to go home. Where better to fulfill a genuine practice of the heart. . .than with one’s family and neighbors? Because they see us unclouded by spiritual ideals, by image or reputation, they become the true testing ground of our practice.”
More to today’s specific point, a woman whose husband is a well-known Hindu teacher wrote, “My husband came home from his last visit in India in an amazing state. He was enlightened for six months, until he spent time with his mother.” (All from Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, pp. 216-17)
If we are to be whole, we must learn forgiveness. And forgiveness must start with our families. When I hear the stories of abuse and neglect from some people’s family histories, I realize that I’ve had it pretty good all in all. Yes, she can be overbearing and annoying at times, but so can I. I suppose I come by it honestly, and having known my maternal grandparents, well, let’s just say I’m beginning to lose hope in the whole “free will” idea.
A mother’s hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.
My mother understands me relentlessly. That sounds about right. Raised in an Irish-Italian Catholic household, she once told me, “I don’t really understand your religion, but I’m glad I raised you in a way that let you choose to be happy.” That blew me away, and it led me to an insight that was both comforting and profoundly disturbing. My mother understands me because I am exactly the person she raised me to be.
Let me unpack that a bit. If our girls do what we say for the next, oh, twenty years or so, and in so doing they come to espouse our values, take on our worldview, etc., then they will become exactly the people Mary and I will have raised them to be. But, if they end up rejecting those things, and go in another direction so as not to be like us at all, then they will still be the people we raised them to be.
See what I’m saying? Our parenting style is either like our parents’ style or a conscious choice to be unlike our parents’ style. But doing the opposite of what they did is still a result of their actions in raising us they way they did, and even if we are so bold as to try to find a new way that was neither the same nor the opposite of how we were raised, the value that tells us we can venture forth on our own probably was instilled in us by our parents. Depressed yet?
And so, at some point, we come to see that our parents deserve our compassion, and compassion can lead us to forgiveness. That doesn’t mean that we accept abuse or dysfunction without comment or honest effort to introduce change into the system. But we do have to see the multigenerational forces at work in how the system has functioned all along. Sometimes we will have to see this and come to a place of compassion from a distance – where circumstances make it unsafe or simply impossible to engage personally. But for many of us, we have the opportunity to engage in our familial relationships as a form of spiritual practice.
Saint Francis once said, “Preach always. Use words only when necessary.” The contemporary spiritual writer Parker Palmer says we must “let our lives speak.” And again from Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield:
We cannot escape the fact of our family background and the wounds it inflicts. Nor can we impose our spiritual ideals on our family. One young woman who had become very involved in our Buddhist practice returned to her parent’s home. She struggled with their Christian Fundamentalism for a time, until she sorted things out. The she sent a letter back to the monastery stating, “My parents hate me when I’m a Buddhist, but they love me when I’m a Buddha.” This is our task: to awaken the Buddha in facing our family karma. (218-19)
Engaging our families as a spiritual practice requires a long view. It doesn’t happen quickly, and sometimes change occurs without our even knowing it. I could just as easily have inserted myself into the story I just read, changed “Buddhist” to “UU” and changed “parents” to “in-laws,” and the outcome would be the same. But, in that relationship, it has taken more than then years of practice, of living the values of our faith (while skillfully avoiding conversations about our faith) that has made change possible. And before I become too puffed up with pride at thinking perhaps the change in our relationship has something to do with me, I fully recognize that it’s the grandchildren that have really melted the ice. But those grandchildren are being raised with the very best of the values we inherited from our parents, coupled with the very best that you offer to them, and to us, as partners in this spiritual community. And that combination is what is transforming the system, little by little, every time we get together.
This community is a living spiritual practice, where we prepare ourselves to put our values to the test. We prepare here to live our practice in the world so that words become unnecessary. With our familial relationships, that’s probably the safest and wisest path we can take.
Still, some words would be nice once in a while. I think it would be helpful if, out of compassion both for our mothers and for ourselves on this Mother’s Day, we could find a way to combine “I forgive you” with “I’m sorry.” What I think works, and what I want to say to my mother today is, “I love you.”
So may it be, and amen.
* “Mrs. Portnoy’s Complaint,” in Above Us Only Sky by Marion Winik
Permalink
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 1:35 pm
Rev. Gail Seavey
May 24, 2009 (Sunday before Memorial Day)
Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
This is Memorial Day weekend, a time to remember the dead of wars past and present. But today I want to remember the living; literally, I long to re-member the living – put them back together – make them whole.
It was just after Memorial Day when I graduated from high school, like so many young people this week. It was 1967 – and we were testing our newfound rebellious natures – wearing banned blue jeans and boots under our graduation robes. Several hundred of us marched out to the football field, sitting on one side of the bleachers while our families filled the far side, as if they were fans of some opposing team. The chairman of the school board gave a speech about how we were the largest and the worst class they had ever seen. But then things got interesting. Sirens alerted us to turn around as fire engines drove up the side of the field behind us to the woods, which had burst into flames. Then our attention was drawn to the bleachers across from us, as the father of a classmate stood up yelling and screaming, lashing out at the people around him. People fled and an ambulance drove right up onto the field, while my fellow graduates murmured to one another, “Who is that? So and so’s father? Wasn’t he in the Korean War? Shell-shocked?” EMTs ran up steep stairs to subdue the man, wrap him in a straitjacket, and take him to the ambulance. As fire engines and ambulances drove away, we finally received our diplomas. No one ever mentioned it again.
A member of this church, Sarah Plummer, was serving as an army nurse in Vietnam at about the same time. She was a few years older than I, but still very young – 20-21. Sarah, like a majority of the other army nurses she worked with, grew up in the Midwest on a farm, went to church every week, and had not dated ’til college. With anxiety about being on her own after school, she chose the army, hoping for both a structured environment and adventure.
She was given huge responsibilities, running a hospital during the night shift in Saigon with few resources. She was lonely. There was no one there she could trust. Local employees smuggled out information that put them all at risk - there was no way to know which ones. Many of the officers, older and married, sexually harassed the young nurses, and in the days before birth control pills, a few ruined the lives of many a naïve enlisted woman. The enlisted nurses were forbidden to date the more appropriate enlisted men their own age, but they socialized with them and felt guilty sneaking around when they inevitably paired off.
Sarah nursed badly wounded men in the ICU, had to tie down men having violent mental breakdowns with the help of MPs, and had to walk late at night past the city square where she never knew if she would see firing squads shooting men or a protesting monk on fire. She came home badly shaken. She had nightmares about fire. No one talked about it. To do so while she was in the Army would have curtailed her career. She saw soldiers discharged for less. To admit the nightmares afterwards would still be considered a sign of weakness. As in the Anne Sexton poem, courage was seen as keeping the horrors to oneself. Like the veteran and his minister in Proverbs of Ashes by Brock and Parker (pages 111-12), no one then understood how the stress, the harassment, and the violence affected those who experienced it.
Several people from this church work at the local VA hospital. They have been treating men and women from these past wars for years. The good news is that they know a lot more about trauma then they did in the past. The bad news is that many soldiers are now returning home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq with what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The good news is that as medical care of physical trauma advances, more soldiers are surviving severe wounds such as head wounds and the loss of limbs. The bad news is that here in Nashville alone there are more than 100 soldiers between 20 and 27 years old with multiple traumas, including both physical wounds and PTSD. The good news is that with increasing research and understanding of how the brain works, there are more effective treatments for PTSD. The bad news is that these young men and women are not affected alone – their whole families have been turned upside down by their traumas. The good news is that some of then are finding a new kind of courage – the courage to talk about the traumas.
Sarah tried to get treatment from the VA decades ago, but was rejected because she earned too much money as a nurse. She had been told that the VA would be there for her and felt, yet again, that she could not trust anyone. Twenty years later, under great stress at work and at church, her health was getting worse, and she was told to lose weight, which she could not do. She went for mental health counseling to help her change her habits, and was finally diagnosed with PTSD. She was treated with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which is now considered by the US Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs as one of the most effective treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. By doing so, she learned a stunning thing. Her trauma did not begin or end with her wartime experiences.
First, I would like to tell you a little about how EMDR works, and then I will return to the ways wartime trauma is connected to one’s whole being. I am not a scientist, so I will tell you how I understand EMDR to work as an avid amateur. However, we are planning a series of classes about the science of trauma and evidences of healing for June 10, 17 and 24, taught by experts. Any mistakes here are my own! Our greater understanding of trauma is a result of recent advances in understanding the brain. When a child’s brain is overwhelmed with more stimulus – physical and emotional – than it can handle in the moment, the response is isolated in sensory motor or visual parts of the brain. They are said to disassociate from the experience. The child can have an experience of intense pain or fear and seem to have no memory of it at all. But there are memories - they are simply isolated from the left side of the brain, the side where spoken language normally develops. The child continues to respond to the experience in sensory motor or visual means – such as hiding in terror or having nightmares - but has no conscious knowledge of what they are responding to. Those responses or non-verbal memories can often be accessed more gently by play therapy or drawing. These therapies give the child conscious access to the memory when the adult responds to the nonverbal cues with verbal cues. This builds pathways between different parts of the brain, helping the child bring the overwhelming sensations to verbal consciousness, and to process them a bit at a time, until they become, simply, bad memories.
We now know that human brains continue to develop and mature well into the twenties, so it should be no surprise that many of these young soldiers’ brains are still overwhelmed by extreme physical and emotional trauma. They are still children in so many ways. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a technique for connecting disassociated sensory motor and visual memories to the more verbal side of the brain. I imagine it as wiring the right side of the brain up to the left side. The person suffering from PSTD starts with awareness of their sensory motor, emotional, or visual sensations while moving their eyes back and forth horizontally. As they literally move a non-verbal experience of - let’s say hypervigilance - into the verbal centers of their brain, they are able to access their memories on a more conscious level. They no longer react without knowing why. They can integrate the experience a bit at a time, interpret the experience from the viewpoint of safety and growing maturity, and re-member – put together - their lives so that they feel whole again.
What Sarah and many veterans learn through this therapy is that their terrible war experiences are not the only traumas they had suffered. Sarah suffered from polio when she was ten. She was put in a room for several months with sick babies, her mother could only come and visit once a week, and she was not allowed in the room. The noises of the iron lung machines terrified her. She and her parents were happy and relieved when she got better; so many did not. But then they never talked about it again. Sarah never had a chance to process the overwhelming fear, pain, and loneliness. The EMDR helped her process that experience thirty years later.
When Sarah was still living on the farm at age sixteen, she received a phone call from a neighbor late at night: did they know that their barn was on fire? She woke up her parents and ran out to the barn, which had blazed into a roaring inferno, and started to open the barn door. Her father, right at her heels, knocked her violently aside so that the escaping gases would not engulf her. Two badly burned cats jumped out and sank their claws into her. But it was too late. All their animals died. All winter long, the animals rotted in the barn while they waited for the ground to thaw so that they could bury them. They saw and smelled the holocaust every day but no one said a word.
The EMDR helped Sarah process this experience more than twenty-five years later. She no longer has “irrational” fears of fires, complete with nightmares. Sarah let go of the old kind of courage that helped her survive and be strong but was like a small coal that she had had to keep swallowing again and again. Instead, she worked through these traumas, re-experiencing them into consciousness, with a new kind of courage, a courage that has allowed her to be healthier and whole.
Learning about new understandings of trauma and healing has taught me a lot about what it means to be courageous and whole, and it raises more than one ethical issue in my mind. First, it has given me more compassion for people who disassociate or act out of their unconscious. They are not weak, they are merely human. This is how we are all hardwired.
Secondly, it gives me hope that many people who have had to bear great trauma can integrate that suffering into their lives and become more whole. Children and adults are aided in doing so when we learn to talk to one another about the depths of human pain, fear, despair, and shame. That is one reason we look for ways to talk about the traumas we have suffered together as a community with our children – they need to know that we will talk about the hard stuff just in case they need to talk about hard things that may happen to them. We all need to know the real risks of everyday life and even higher risks of war so that we do not make choices from overprotected naiveté. As we do so, we inevitably face issues such as human evil, judgment, and forgiveness, issues that we do well to hold together in faith and love.
Lastly, whether we support one, some, or no wars, we have an ethical responsibility to support our veterans and their families who return home suffering from physical and mental traumas. Some of these young people never considered the real risks of their service. As a society, we need to consider the real costs of war. As they re-member themselves, all of us need to remember the real risks of war so that we can make decisions based on the real costs of suffering. As a society, we need to hardwire those gaps in all our brains between disassociated suffering, mindful ethical discernment, and willpower. By doing so, we all continue to mature as a moral, compassionate, reasonable nation, holy and whole.
May it be so.
Permalink
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 1:09 pm
April 19, 2009
The Rev. Gail Seavey
Modern Criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol which men have made out of the Scriptures.
- Theodore Parker, “A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” 1841
Have you ever heard people say that Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they want? I have. It is true that we don’t have a creed. It is true that the members and friends here hold a wide range of beliefs. But it does matter what we believe. Let me give you an example.
This Tuesday is the Jewish holiday of Yom HaShoah, a day of memory for the six million Jews who died as victims of Nazi atrocities during World War II. It mattered what the Nazis believed. As you know, although the Nazis had an intense and focused desire to exterminate the Jewish people, they systematically arrested and killed other groups as well. Each group of people was marked in the Nazi concentration camps with a different color triangle on their clothes. Jewish people were marked with a yellow triangle, vagrants with a black triangle, and men who loved men – homosexuals – with a pink triangle. During the war, it is estimated that 50,000 - 63,000 men wore the pink triangle in the concentration camps. Most of them were killed. Many of those who lived to be released were re-arrested and jailed again after the Nazis were defeated. The war was over, but Germans still believed that men loving men was a crime. Like many other symbols of shame, the Nazi pink triangle eventually became associated with different beliefs. By the 1970s, it had become a symbol of the gay rights movement.
It matters what we believe. But how do we know what to believe. . . who to believe. . . what is true. . . what is not? These are questions that concern authority. What claims of authoritative truth do we trust – parents or teachers, religious or political leaders, scriptures or science – to build our beliefs upon?
This year, Bob Day bought my sermon at the auction. He asked me to preach about the ways the religious right uses scripture to defend continuing discrimination against people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. I have experience debating scripture with our neighbors of the religious right about this issue and I will share some of those debates. Those debates reminded me that there are two very different approaches to scripture.
The Jewish and Christian scriptures can be seen as:
the letter of the law or of the spirit
sacred History or human mythology
the word of God or words of people
authoritative or evocative.
The tension between these two approaches is nothing new. Unitarians faced that tension head on in the 1840s and 1850s. It was not an easy process for them then.They had to work through some of the same anxiety that we see in orthodox denominations today. The approach was decided upon by a critical mass of Unitarians coming to terms with where they placed their authority when forming their beliefs.
Theodore Parker, born in 1810, led the change. One of the young ministers inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson to become a Transcendentalist, Parker became one of the great political preachers of the century. Words of his became part of the national canon - familiar phrases such as “a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people” and “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.” But before he grew into a national prophet preaching for a reformed democracy in the years leading up to the Civil War, he was a religious prophet, preaching for a reformed church.
Parker was a brilliant scholar. He was one of the first people in this country to understand modern German biblical criticism. These German scholars started to look at the Bible as they would any literature. Studying the languages and cultures that produced it, they discovered that it was really a library of books written in different cultures over two thousand years. The books were originally written in several languages by different individuals or “traditions” (e.g., the tradition of Moses, or the tradition of Paul). These 60+ books were written in different genres, including poetry and hymns, mythology and legend, theology and letters, folk tales and histories, and selected to form one large book for various institutional reasons. As Parker studied, integrated, and preached about this scholarship, he realized that the implications were profound.
The Unitarians of his father’s generation did not believe that the Bible was the literal word of God. Influenced by the philosopher John Locke, they believed that the Bible was authoritative because it was written by eyewitnesses who saw, for instance, the miracles of Jesus, and reported what they saw like good newspaper reporters. As Parker studied the Bible as literature, he learned that it was unlikely that its writers were objective reporters or that the stories of miracles were true. Indeed, he realized, it didn’t matter. Here he underwent a great paradigm shift from one approach to a previously unimaginable new approach. It didn’t matter if one word of the Bible was fact, history, or God’s word. It didn’t even matter if a man named Jesus had ever taught or lived or died. Parker realized that the authority of the Bible had shifted from the letter of the law to the human spirit. As long as people felt in their hearts the core essence of Christian teachings: to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the teachings were true, even if they never had heard of Jesus. As long as those teachings inspired people to live more loving lives, then they were true, even if those people had never read the Bible.
Parker had preached these ideas in his church in the Boston suburb of West Roxbury. They loved their pastor and supported him even when they did not understand him. But the sermon that Bob Day read from [earlier in this service] was preached at an ordination that was attended by many of the ministers in town. Three orthodox ministers were scandalized and started a public argument about Parker’s ideas that raised the tension between these two approaches to scripture into a frenzied media war of ideas. Parker was able to live with that. He simply published his sermon and stayed out of the fray. He was personally hurt, however, by the tensions that his point of view caused among his fellow Unitarians.
Unitarians in the nineteenth century, as we do now, liked to believe that they were tolerant and accepted each and every individual’s personal conscience in matters of the spirit. But Parker’s elders were very upset by his paradigm shift. They wished he would have the good graces to leave the church like Emerson did. But Parker would not. He intended to reform the church – including his own. And his peers – those younger ministers who said they agreed with him – were scared. They did not want to upset their congregations. They stopped inviting Parker to preach in their pulpits. Parker felt betrayed by his friends.
Parker was supported by many Unitarians in the pews, however. Some joined together, formed a new church, and called Parker to be their minister. The public debate turned out to be the best advertising, attracting a thousand people to listen to him preach every Sunday. There he preached on the justice issues of the day, such as slavery and women’s subordination, by arguing that the Bible was sometimes wrong, and that love, conscience, and reason called people to work for abolition and women’s rights. By his death in 1860, most Unitarians had switched their understanding of religious authority from the Bible to personal experience. Our religious ancestors came to believe that religious beliefs are true if they helped a person live a more loving, more just life.
Unitarians and some liberal Christians and Jews now take this approach to the Bible. But the tension continues. Several years ago, my parents’ church was splitting over their minister’s support of marriage for gay and lesbian couples. My parents went to a Bible study exploring the passages cited to forbid gay marriage. At the end of the class, I asked my conservative father what he had learned. “Well,” he said, “I learned that you can justify anything you want using the Bible.” He could no longer use the Bible as the ultimate authority, realizing that he had to test its words with his own very reasonable heart. My dad had just made the great paradigm shift before my very eyes.
It wasn’t long after that when the state of Tennessee was debating the same matter. A proposition was up for vote that would change the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. This congregation, as a Welcoming Congregation and a church that supported civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, stood up for the human rights of the GLBT community. We worked hard against the proposition and we lost big. For six months. I had the opportunity to live in the tension between two completely different approaches to religious scripture.
People for the proposition quoted, for instance, Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death.” I argued, “‘abomination is a translation of a word referring to ritual, so this probably refers to Canaanite ritual sexual behavior.” They were not even interested. I learned, instead, to make points that caught their attention, like, “Well, yes, but Leviticus also forbids touching pigskin, so I guess we should put to death the whole Titians football team.”
People for the proposition would quote the story of Sodom in Genesis. Now, I have real trouble with that story. You see, it’s about a male mob trying to rape two male visitors. The problem is solved by throwing out two women to the mob to rape. Then the city is destroyed, not because of any of the rapes, attempted or actual. Sodom is destroyed for betraying the ancient value of hospitality. I had no clever sound bites when people bring up Sodom. They didn’t care that I know how the story was used in context, or what other passages say about it, or that ancient Jews had no concept of homosexuality as a sexual orientation. They were coming from a different paradigm – that the story and their interpretation is authoritative because it is the word of God. I was coming from a literary, historical critical paradigm that gives no authority to the story except how it informs my personal experience. My personal experience has taught me that all rape is morally bad – no matter which gender attacks which gender, and that people who are raped are rarely offered hospitality by anyone. This story inspired me to offer rape crisis support to all genders and sexual orientations, which was not a conclusion that helped bridge the gap between me and my debaters.
My final attempt to bridge the gap occurred when a TV reporter asked me for an interview. I brushed up on the seven or eight most frequently cited scriptures. but was unprepared for his question: “Did God create homosexuals?” In a flash, I thought, “’God’? What exactly do we mean by that? And ‘create’? Buddhists don’t believe in a creation. And ‘homosexuals’? I’ve been saying GLBT fora long time, instead. But I had learned better to voice these thoughts. I opened my mouth and said, “Yes, God created homosexuals.” It was the news sound bite of the week.
Another approach to attempt to bridge the gap between these two different approaches to scripture is to consider the Bible as a whole and look for its larger message. Many biblical scholars today would say that they are orthodox in their faith but see a record of people learning to be more just and more loving over time. They would ask us to measure our moral decisions against the Biblical authority of its overall themes. But, as Parker learned 150 years ago, this is no bridge. Justice and love do not need any authoritative texts to convince us. They are constant themes in human literature because they are part of the wider human experience of trying to figure out how to live well with others. We may learn from the struggles of the Biblical writers to grow in their understanding of justice and love; indeed, those stories have influenced our culture so completely that we should know them, or we can’t know the cultural base of our most basic institutions, but we will find that knowing those stories will not be enough for our debaters. Only obedience to the force of their authority will do so.
So I have come to understand that, like Parker, we more effectively stay out of the argument with people who are framing their points from vastly different approaches, or paradigms. Like Parker, we organize for justice as human experiences call us to do. Many will join us. We will use religious scriptures that inspire us to do that work but will find authority not in the words but in the ways those words open our hearts and move us towards building for the common good. And if we are clear about why we do this work of justice, we will be writing scripture for a living, changing, evolving religion - a religion that will be there to offer support to each person who discovers that placing their authority in scripture can kill the spirit.
Bob Day is a generous supporter of this church because he knows that it matters what we believe. This is the last day of our annual stewardship drive. He thanks those of you who have given generously and reminds those of you who have been putting it off to pledge today because he knows that it matters to the people of Nashville, whether they are Unitarian Universalist or not, that there is a church here testing religious authority with personal experiences of compassion, conscience and reason. By doing so, we are building a more loving, more just community for everyone.
Reference: American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins (University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Permalink
04.26.09
Posted in Rev. Gail Seavey, Sermons at 6:22 pm
April 12, 2009
The Rev. Gail Seavey
I wonder what you would say if I told you that the Lover of Us All’s will can be done on earth as it is heaven – indeed, we do it every day:
…that Heaven is already here on earth,
that Paradise is not 10,000 years in our sight but now,
and that you do not need an eye for miracles to see it.
Many ancient Christians told the story that, on Easter Day, the door to Paradise was opened once and for all, and that Jesus showed the way back in. And it didn’t take any magic hocus pocus to follow him through the gate: all anyone had to do to be in Paradise was open their eyes.
You might say, Gail’s dreaming again. But I am not. This is the historical theological truth as described in the reading today. For the last 1000 years, Paradise - once just a few miles to the East - got further away until it was only in two places: once upon a time a long time ago, only to return at the end of all time. Heaven, once a few thousand feet away at the top of the mountains, floated higher and higher until only the dead ever visited there. For the last 1000 years, Jesus was the only person who was divine. For the last 1000 years, most Christians have been blinded with grief.
Brock and Parker [see footnote] uncovered early Easters where all men and women lived the divine life and Paradise was thought to be wherever people lived the good life, by looking at the mosaics, icons, and frescoes from the first 900 years of Christianity. They were surprised to find no crucifixes, no tortured saints, and no suffering servants. Instead, they found images of Paradise and churches that taught people how “thy will could be done, on this earth as it is in heaven.” Those people did not make earth a paradise by their good works. Behold, they taught, and you could see that creation shines with beauty all around us. Those people did not make themselves divine through belief. Behold, they taught, and you could see the human soul shining with divinity. One needed eyes to see and a mature will that could make one’s own life in some degree a copy of the Original Beauty.
I had never heard before the interpretation they tell of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. The snake told the woman that eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would open her eyes. With open eyes, she would be like God. She and Adam ate, and they saw, but they were brand new - children, really - and they did not know how to respond. You only have to play with a toddler to see the problem. I was just visiting my 20-month-old granddaughter. To her grandparents’ eyes, she is pure delight. It is so much fun watching her respond to the newness of the world – if she likes it, she loves it and is very excited. NO one can be more joyful and full of delight than a toddler. But if she doesn’t like it, she is horrified. No one can scream or resist more completely than a toddler. She has no sense of proportion - no understanding that some things are necessary or of short duration. But she’s not even two, and as cute as a button. We don’t mind at all that she is totally self-centered. Adam and Eve were not so cute or young. They just didn’t know how to handle the knowledge that they were never at the center – and that reality did feel like Paradise to them at all.
This early Christian interpretation went on to tell the story of how Jesus taught the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve to live as grown-ups. Grown-ups know Paradise is not all about them. In Paradise, people get sick, but there are also people who can heal; people are born ignorant, but there are people who can teach; tornadoes destroy, but communities rebuild. Paradise is not some imagined, Platonic, perfect place. In Paradise, self-centered people oppress and hurt others, but grown-ups liberate the oppressed, resist evil, and practice nonviolence. People can behold Paradise much more clearly when they love their annoying neighbors and appreciate the beauties of life. These people don’t make Paradise – Paradise is always around us. But these people DO know where they are.
Brock and Parker remind us that Jesus taught many lessons to help people restore their sense of perspective and accurate perception so that they could behold Paradise.
In the Sermon on the Mount, he taught that no one could help another without first removing the log from her or his own eye (Matthew 7:4) He asked his disciples to perceive carefully the things of the world – to consider the sparrows and the lilies and learn from them. They must open their senses to the world, with the heart’s assistance; then, perceiving the world through many sensory ways, each could became a means of knowing God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Jesus’ miracles, while literally described as restoring the senses, are especially about renewed perception. He promised that perceiving could be rekindled spiritually as well as physically. (page 146)
Those early Christians knew that seeing clearly meant seeing everything – the beauty and the ugliness. They interpreted the death of Jesus as the prime example of the ugliness of empire, working against empire for hundreds of years. But Roman Christianity evolved into a political empire itself, becoming its own worst enemy. The first crucifix, carved in Saxony in the 960s, was a direct response to the so-called holy wars of Charlemagne. The Holy Roman Empire then developed rationales, such as the Doctrine of Atonement, to justify the Crusades. Artists responded with more and more images of suffering. Blinded by grief, it became more and more difficult for people to believe that Paradise was right in front of their eyes.
But some painters saw it still. I was never struck by the power of the story I told today - the road to Emmaus - until I saw Rembrandt’s first painting of the Supper at Emmaus, done in 1628. The painting centers the eye on a plain-looking man with eyes practically popping out of his head, sitting at a table, a simple meal of bread in front of him, rough wooden walls behind. He is strongly lit, as if there were a bright candle hidden by the figure to his right, a figure that is in such highly contrasting darkness that he is not much more than a silhouette. That figure, carved from negative space – visually there and not there, has the beard and long hair symbolizing Jesus. You can barely make out a third figure kneeling in front of the table at the feet of the silhouette. In a back room to the left is a woman working in the kitchen, silhouetted in a much softer haze of light.
Rembrandt was obsessed with what it meant to see – really SEE. His painting emphasized the scriptural verse: “And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.” The painting not only uses the technique of chiaroscuro – using highly contrasting values of light and dark to seemingly sculpt the image from light - the painting is about chiaroscuro: about seeing light coming from the darkness. Here the story itself is SEEN as a cure for blindness.
Simon Schama, in Rembrandt’s Eyes, describes looking at the painting this way:
The roughly fashioned, apparently incomplete work invites the beholder’s faculties to work with the picture, to become engaged in it, fare more empathically than any ostensibly finished product. It’s as if Rembrandt were already refusing the slick brush in favor of the urgent eye. (page 253)
Rembrandt is, here as in many of his paintings, urging the viewer to actively behold with their interior sight, their insight, their imagination. With this painting, the Supper at Emmaus, Rembrandt reminds the viewer - he reminded me - that I often look at the world and see it blindly, but that at any moment my mind’s eye can be flooded with the light of realization. With such “aha!” moments of diamond consciousness, the veil of grief is lifted, and I can see Paradise for what it is, in the here and now, for real.
So let me use this Easter morning to tell you what I have seen, with the interior mind of a painter, the insight of early Christian theology, and the imagination of a lover of this world, this church, this spring day:
The God of Love’s will can be done on earth as it is heaven: indeed, we do it every day -
Heaven is here on earth and we call it Paradise,
Paradise is not 10,000 years in our sight but now,
and you do not need an eye for miracles to see it.
- for ancient Christians told the story that, on Easter Day, the door to Paradise was opened once and for all, and that Jesus showed the way back in. And it didn’t take any magic hocus pocus to follow him through the gate. All we have to do to be in Paradise is to open our eyes and respond with mature love for all that we see.
Footnote
Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
Permalink
« Previous entries