Let it Be...Let it Go
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 4, 2015
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
It was a late spring afternoon in my sophomore year of high school. The classroom was hot, the end of the school year was in sight and the last place I wanted was to be in religion class listening to Sister Mary Ann drone on about God or whatever.
Sister was a formidable woman...awkwardly proportioned...with very long legs, short torso, and large feet, all no doubt exaggerated by her consistent wardrobe of short blazers, crisp pleated skirts, and orthopedic shoes. She spoke with a booming voice that filled the room. She was passionate about her work and could be engaging... at times.
Yet on this day, so close to the end of the school year, the only thing engaging my mind were thoughts of summer vacation. And so Sister Mary Ann’s voice receded into the background, like conversation heard through a wall. The spell of my daydreaming broke when I noticed a dead silence in the room. “Well?”, said Sister Mary Ann who was looking right at me. Obviously I had missed something...I had no idea what she had asked me...I swallowed hard...and then... by some seemingly divine intervention she repeated the question I had missed, “What is heaven?” “Whew! That’s easy”, I thought. So I sat up straight and said, “A place to relax, where you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” “No, no, no!”, Sister said as she pounded her fist down on her desk. “Heaven”, she said, “is worshipping God without ceasing.” “Oh”, I said, as I sunk back down into my seat...and thinking to myself, “That sounds like a drag.”
Almost thirty years later I have a better understanding of what Sister was getting at...thanks in part to our Unitarian forebear Ralph Waldo Emerson, who noted, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
Both Emerson and Sister Mary Ann, understood worship as the giving of one’s highest devotion or loyalty. And they both understood to give our highest devotion or loyalty to something (or someone) unworthy of it is idolatry.
Over the course of human history, every culture has created its own pantheon of idols... dieties of flesh and philosophy, history and imagination, false gods that have demanded and garnered the devotion of many. Over time the prominence of various idols has waxed and waned reflecting changing tastes... and appetities. Some however, seem to never lose their appeal. Chief among these is the still quite potent idol, violence...a seemingly irresistable god to individuals, institutions, and nations alike, not least of all, our own, as headlines about school shootings, clashes between police and racial minorities, and the denial, even defense, of torture, attest.
Over the last several months we have been talking about sin and in particular the Seven Deadly sins. Now violence per se is not one of the Seven Deadly sins, but anger or wrath is. Violence is anger indulged. Anger is defined “a strong passion or emotion of displeasure, and usually antogonism, excited by a sense of injury or insult.” As a deadly sin, it is it is synonymous with wrath, suggesting an intensity beyond fleeting annoyance.
Most of us know anger as a complex, generally unpleasant, emotion. It appears in various forms from unrelenting iritation, impatience, passive agressiveness, resentment, hatred, and rage among others. Because it is unpleasant we try to rid ourselves of it as soon as possible, usually by acting on it...doing or saying something hurtful to another or ourselves, or by burying it in the ground of denial or repression. Either way we are indulging it and in doing so giving it power over us.
When we indulge our anger, we often feel better, at first. This is how anger traps and enlists us in the service of violence; it offers the reward of temporary relief from its unpleasantness by goading us into indulging it.
Throughtout our exploration of sin this year we have spoken of sin as something that blocks some truth, an obstruction that gets in the way. Anger as deadly sin is an obstruction. Like the other deadly sins, it prevents us from seeing ourselves and others as fully human. Anger unchecked leads us to objectfy others and even ourselves and in doing so we rationalize the mistreatment of others and ourselves. Indeed, the justification of physical, mental, and spiritual violence whether directed at ourselves or another is one of the hallmarks of anger as deadly sin.
Another hallmark of anger as a deadly sin is the spiritual decay of the one who indulges their anger...giving creedance to the claim that a deadly sin is one fatal to spiritual progress.
Case in point: I used to joke that former president George W. Bush was responsible for my return to organized religion. And not because he once named Jesus as his favorite philosopher...but because his statements and policies concerning GLBTQ people and same-sex marriage angered me to point where I despised him. What began as righteous indignation soon became resentment allowing hatred to take up residence in my heart. By the time I found my way to a church and this faith I was spiritually drained...I was like the man in this morning’s reading, still in full possession of my anger after many attempts to “give it away” by railing against the object of my despisement.
It’s not that Mr. Bush is a mature Buddhist practitioner, who deflected my anger like the Buddha in our reading this morning; indeed he doesn’t even know I exist, let alone how I felt about him, but the truth still holds...“Anger”, writes Robert Thurman, “wounds us from within.” This was certaintly my experience...and the insight that led to my return to church.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn explains it this way,
“If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and put out the fire, not run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not the action of wise person. You must go back and put out the fire. When you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish him or her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while their home goes up in flames.”
So how can we begin to put out or at least contain the fire of anger in our lives and reduce our own suffering and that of others in the world?
In the Christian tradition forgiveness is the heavenly virtue of choice in dealing with anger. To be sure, forgiveness is important, but forgiveness is something we arrive at over time; genuine forgiveness it is not an act of mere will.
Buddhism talks about embracing our anger. At first this may sound counter-intuitive, but if we are to reclaim or be in touch with our wholeness as human beings, even the most undesirable part of ourselves have to have a place at the table of our being.
To embrace our anger is to first let it be....to not push it away...or act on it, but acknowledge it is there. We might even do as some Buddhists suggest and greet our anger..say “hello” to it...or “I know you’re there.” Once we aknowledge it, we can ask its name. Anger, as we’ve already noted, comes in many forms, impatience, sadness, resentment, hatred. Whenever we can name our emotions, we are better able to manage them.
As we embrace our anger...and learn its name... we can learn to care for it. Caring for our anger is giving it our attention...our loving concern, like a parent gives a child. If a child is crying we don’t look for ways to make him or her cry louder, we try to understand what he or she is seeking to express....hunger, discomfort, fear. We care for our anger when we find ways to understand and let it express itself rather than indulge it. Just to meditate on the Buddha’s teaching, “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love.” or Jesus‘ commandment to love our enemies, bring us closer to understanding our anger.
It is worth noting here that love does not necessarily refer to liking someone or something, but refers instead to a sense of inclusiveness, recognition of our common humanity and condition with others...the interconnectedness that is so integral to our Unitarian Universalist faith.
Allowing our anger to express itself is to give it a voice. This is different than venting by punching a pillow or wall, which Thich Nhat Hahn cautions is actually rehearsing violence. When we give our anger a voice we respond to our pain in an honest and healthy way. Sometimes this means talking about it with another person...a trusted friend, therapist, your minister, even, if possible, the person with whom we are angry. Sometimes it may mean finding other ways of expressing it...through art, music, writing. It may mean breaking away from unhealthy relationships or situations.
When our anger is allowed to express itself, its demand for indulgence diminishes and the possibility of transforming its energy and passion into something more beneficial...something that can nourish our body, mind, and soul....opens up.
With anger’s energy transformed we can release it from our embrace knowing we have cared for it well. This is the point of letting go...and our opportunity for liberation through forgiveness begins to unfold.
Our lives are confronted daily with opportunities to indulge or embrace anger. Indulgence is and has been the norm for much of human history and with it has come great suffering. We see the effects of this everyday in the news, in our own communities and families, and in ourselves. We are here, in part, to change that. This is what it means to be a spiritual person in a religious community...to join with others to encourage, support, and challenge one another...to transform our lives and our world.
And so, let us strive to embrace and care for those unloved parts of ourselves...including our anger. May we learn to let it be, name it, give it our tender concern, and when time is right, may we let it go.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 4, 2015
By Rev. Craig M. Nowak
It was a late spring afternoon in my sophomore year of high school. The classroom was hot, the end of the school year was in sight and the last place I wanted was to be in religion class listening to Sister Mary Ann drone on about God or whatever.
Sister was a formidable woman...awkwardly proportioned...with very long legs, short torso, and large feet, all no doubt exaggerated by her consistent wardrobe of short blazers, crisp pleated skirts, and orthopedic shoes. She spoke with a booming voice that filled the room. She was passionate about her work and could be engaging... at times.
Yet on this day, so close to the end of the school year, the only thing engaging my mind were thoughts of summer vacation. And so Sister Mary Ann’s voice receded into the background, like conversation heard through a wall. The spell of my daydreaming broke when I noticed a dead silence in the room. “Well?”, said Sister Mary Ann who was looking right at me. Obviously I had missed something...I had no idea what she had asked me...I swallowed hard...and then... by some seemingly divine intervention she repeated the question I had missed, “What is heaven?” “Whew! That’s easy”, I thought. So I sat up straight and said, “A place to relax, where you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” “No, no, no!”, Sister said as she pounded her fist down on her desk. “Heaven”, she said, “is worshipping God without ceasing.” “Oh”, I said, as I sunk back down into my seat...and thinking to myself, “That sounds like a drag.”
Almost thirty years later I have a better understanding of what Sister was getting at...thanks in part to our Unitarian forebear Ralph Waldo Emerson, who noted, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
Both Emerson and Sister Mary Ann, understood worship as the giving of one’s highest devotion or loyalty. And they both understood to give our highest devotion or loyalty to something (or someone) unworthy of it is idolatry.
Over the course of human history, every culture has created its own pantheon of idols... dieties of flesh and philosophy, history and imagination, false gods that have demanded and garnered the devotion of many. Over time the prominence of various idols has waxed and waned reflecting changing tastes... and appetities. Some however, seem to never lose their appeal. Chief among these is the still quite potent idol, violence...a seemingly irresistable god to individuals, institutions, and nations alike, not least of all, our own, as headlines about school shootings, clashes between police and racial minorities, and the denial, even defense, of torture, attest.
Over the last several months we have been talking about sin and in particular the Seven Deadly sins. Now violence per se is not one of the Seven Deadly sins, but anger or wrath is. Violence is anger indulged. Anger is defined “a strong passion or emotion of displeasure, and usually antogonism, excited by a sense of injury or insult.” As a deadly sin, it is it is synonymous with wrath, suggesting an intensity beyond fleeting annoyance.
Most of us know anger as a complex, generally unpleasant, emotion. It appears in various forms from unrelenting iritation, impatience, passive agressiveness, resentment, hatred, and rage among others. Because it is unpleasant we try to rid ourselves of it as soon as possible, usually by acting on it...doing or saying something hurtful to another or ourselves, or by burying it in the ground of denial or repression. Either way we are indulging it and in doing so giving it power over us.
When we indulge our anger, we often feel better, at first. This is how anger traps and enlists us in the service of violence; it offers the reward of temporary relief from its unpleasantness by goading us into indulging it.
Throughtout our exploration of sin this year we have spoken of sin as something that blocks some truth, an obstruction that gets in the way. Anger as deadly sin is an obstruction. Like the other deadly sins, it prevents us from seeing ourselves and others as fully human. Anger unchecked leads us to objectfy others and even ourselves and in doing so we rationalize the mistreatment of others and ourselves. Indeed, the justification of physical, mental, and spiritual violence whether directed at ourselves or another is one of the hallmarks of anger as deadly sin.
Another hallmark of anger as a deadly sin is the spiritual decay of the one who indulges their anger...giving creedance to the claim that a deadly sin is one fatal to spiritual progress.
Case in point: I used to joke that former president George W. Bush was responsible for my return to organized religion. And not because he once named Jesus as his favorite philosopher...but because his statements and policies concerning GLBTQ people and same-sex marriage angered me to point where I despised him. What began as righteous indignation soon became resentment allowing hatred to take up residence in my heart. By the time I found my way to a church and this faith I was spiritually drained...I was like the man in this morning’s reading, still in full possession of my anger after many attempts to “give it away” by railing against the object of my despisement.
It’s not that Mr. Bush is a mature Buddhist practitioner, who deflected my anger like the Buddha in our reading this morning; indeed he doesn’t even know I exist, let alone how I felt about him, but the truth still holds...“Anger”, writes Robert Thurman, “wounds us from within.” This was certaintly my experience...and the insight that led to my return to church.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn explains it this way,
“If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and put out the fire, not run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not the action of wise person. You must go back and put out the fire. When you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish him or her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while their home goes up in flames.”
So how can we begin to put out or at least contain the fire of anger in our lives and reduce our own suffering and that of others in the world?
In the Christian tradition forgiveness is the heavenly virtue of choice in dealing with anger. To be sure, forgiveness is important, but forgiveness is something we arrive at over time; genuine forgiveness it is not an act of mere will.
Buddhism talks about embracing our anger. At first this may sound counter-intuitive, but if we are to reclaim or be in touch with our wholeness as human beings, even the most undesirable part of ourselves have to have a place at the table of our being.
To embrace our anger is to first let it be....to not push it away...or act on it, but acknowledge it is there. We might even do as some Buddhists suggest and greet our anger..say “hello” to it...or “I know you’re there.” Once we aknowledge it, we can ask its name. Anger, as we’ve already noted, comes in many forms, impatience, sadness, resentment, hatred. Whenever we can name our emotions, we are better able to manage them.
As we embrace our anger...and learn its name... we can learn to care for it. Caring for our anger is giving it our attention...our loving concern, like a parent gives a child. If a child is crying we don’t look for ways to make him or her cry louder, we try to understand what he or she is seeking to express....hunger, discomfort, fear. We care for our anger when we find ways to understand and let it express itself rather than indulge it. Just to meditate on the Buddha’s teaching, “For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love.” or Jesus‘ commandment to love our enemies, bring us closer to understanding our anger.
It is worth noting here that love does not necessarily refer to liking someone or something, but refers instead to a sense of inclusiveness, recognition of our common humanity and condition with others...the interconnectedness that is so integral to our Unitarian Universalist faith.
Allowing our anger to express itself is to give it a voice. This is different than venting by punching a pillow or wall, which Thich Nhat Hahn cautions is actually rehearsing violence. When we give our anger a voice we respond to our pain in an honest and healthy way. Sometimes this means talking about it with another person...a trusted friend, therapist, your minister, even, if possible, the person with whom we are angry. Sometimes it may mean finding other ways of expressing it...through art, music, writing. It may mean breaking away from unhealthy relationships or situations.
When our anger is allowed to express itself, its demand for indulgence diminishes and the possibility of transforming its energy and passion into something more beneficial...something that can nourish our body, mind, and soul....opens up.
With anger’s energy transformed we can release it from our embrace knowing we have cared for it well. This is the point of letting go...and our opportunity for liberation through forgiveness begins to unfold.
Our lives are confronted daily with opportunities to indulge or embrace anger. Indulgence is and has been the norm for much of human history and with it has come great suffering. We see the effects of this everyday in the news, in our own communities and families, and in ourselves. We are here, in part, to change that. This is what it means to be a spiritual person in a religious community...to join with others to encourage, support, and challenge one another...to transform our lives and our world.
And so, let us strive to embrace and care for those unloved parts of ourselves...including our anger. May we learn to let it be, name it, give it our tender concern, and when time is right, may we let it go.
Amen and Blessed Be
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