To Convert Life Into Truth
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 29, 2013
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
To savor the world or save it?
With these few words Dick Gilbert poses a question I’m willing to bet many of us here today think about from time to time, and some of perhaps quite often.
Just the week before last, as our nation’s leaders debated military strikes in Syria, the spectacle of yet another mass shooting, this time in D.C., was streaming across the television screen. I sat down and shook my head in anger and sadness wonder if there was anything that could be done, anything that I could do to contribute to a sensible, compassionate response to the culture of violence and destruction that continues to plague our world...I wondered if there was anything that could be done, anything that I could do to contribute to a sensible, compassionate response to the continued stigma and lack of adequate access to treatment for mental illness.
Not a day or two later, I was driving west in New York state towards Corning, NY to attend a symposium at the glass museum there. As I drove along the winding highway my eyes widened as stunning vistas of sunlit mountains, darkened valleys, and shimmering rivers and streams continually appeared around each corner along the route and then, just on the outskirts of Corning, fields of sunflowers, their faces turned up toward the sun, stretched along the sides of the highway. The sight filled me with a sense of awe and wonder. I could have stared at that field for hours.
To savor the world or to save it? Arguments could, and I’m sure have, been made for one or the other. On the far end of the savor crowd are people we likely think of as selfish or entitled...out for themselves and the heck with everyone else, everything they do, whether they never step foot inside a place of worship or show up every week is for their own self gratification. They’re the people who either don’t care about the problems of the world or figure someone else will do what needs to be done.
On the extreme end of the save crowd are people whom we might think of as selfless, saintly, even self-righteous at times...out to fix the world and everyone in it...they usually have bad boundaries and end up burning out or they are the folks that get in your face to the point that even if we know there’s truth to what they say, we resist the message because they’re just so annoying or smug.
Now, while few people reside exclusively at one extreme or the other, we all know people who are more into savoring than saving and vice versa. The rest of us are likely balancers, that is, we’ve decided to try to balance savoring the world with saving it. Indeed, people volunteer, find a hobby, take vacations, read self-help books, etc. in pursuit of this elusive balance. People even come to church seeking this balance.
On opening Sunday, just a couple weeks ago we talked about gathering as a hungry people, that is, as people with a longing for transformation. We said this longing is a response to a deeply felt awareness that something is amiss in our lives or the world. Another way of saying it is we are drawn together to save...the world...and ourselves.
The following Sunday we talked about the role of discernment, religious observance, and ritual as ways to help us manage what I called our spiritual inventory, the feelings, memories, experiences, and beliefs that we accumulate over time. We said by learning to manage our spiritual inventory we can live a deeper, lighter, freer life. It is one way among many that we can savor the world more fully.
So of course the question that seems to make sense is how do we balance our desire to both save and savor the world?
I’ve come to realize this is a trick question.
How to we balance our desire to both serve and savor the world?
Quite plainly, we don’t.
When we try to balance saving and savoring the world, the result is almost assuredly frustration and disappointment. Part of the reason is because “to balance” has become code for “to manage” and that thing we usually try to manage when we talk about balancing our lives or concerns, is time. To balance then becomes yet another component of multi-tasking which implies separation, as if our lives are like scattered puzzle pieces that we hope will produce some meaningful or useful image if we can just fit the pieces together the right way. But separation, that is our separateness, our independence of self or from the world around is an illusion.
In his Divinity School Address, delivered to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a Unitarian minister for a while, rails against the illusion of separation perpetrated by what he calls the “formalist.” In recalling an experience from his own life, he contrasts the “spectral” nature of such a “formalist” preacher with the reality of snow seen falling outside a window behind the preacher.
Emerson was interested in the “isness”, the reality, the experience of life and of living and what it has to teach us…the very things the preacher failed to do as he droned on about whatever the topic of the day was. When Emerson laments, “Not one fact in all his experience, had he (the preacher) yet imported into his doctrine” Emerson is criticizing the preacher for separating his humanity from his calling. Indeed Emerson charges the “formalist” preacher with failing to learn what he called “the capital secret of his profession” and the primary purpose of ministry, both lay and ordained, I might add,...which is, ”to convert life into truth.”
So how do we get away from this whole idea of trying to balance our desire to save and savor the world with its assumption of separation?
Well, Emerson implored the graduates he was addressing that day to be in touch with their humanity and minister from their experience of life in all its wonder, complexity, joy and sorrow.
And Dick Gilbert offers us this insight...
“To save, one must serve.
To savor, one must save.
The one will not stand without the other.”
Rather than balance, both Emerson and Gilbert point us towards what I would call integration. Here the veil of illusion is lifted to reveal that saving and savoring the world are not two separate concerns but are in fact one...they are interconnected... ”the one will not stand without the other.”
Whereas seeking to balance our desire to both save and savor the world assumes separateness and moves us toward negotiation of resources, usually time or money, integration recognizes interconnectedness and moves us toward unity or wholeness.
Outwardly, the difference between balance and integration can be quite subtle. I’m reminded now of a woman, let’s call her Dorothy (not her real name), who I met during my ministry as a hospital chaplain.
Dorothy was a patient on my ICU unit. I ministered to her during the last three months of her life. She was petite, gentle woman, not much older than I, with a smile that lit up the room. We developed a close pastoral relationship in those three months and over that time explored with one another many of the most difficult questions a human being can ask about life, suffering, and God.
As Thanksgiving approached, Dorothy asked me if I knew of any soup kitchens in the area. She explained that she used to volunteer around the holidays and she was hoping to do some service work.
“I want to help.”, she said. Dorothy, gravely ill and hooked up to all sort of machines, knew leaving the hospital was not an option, but that was not going to stop her. So I suggested that she and I and put our heads together and come up with a way she could help others. I engaged her family as well and together we came up with a plan for Dorothy and her family to donate to the hospital’s Thanksgiving food drive.
Once the donation was made I took a photograph of the collection box which was decorated with colorful leaves and an image of a turkey like the kind that hung in my elementary school classrooms growing up. I printed the photo and wrote a thank you note to Dorothy on it and brought it to her room where I showed it to her and then hung on her wall. Dorothy smiled. Later that night, she died quietly in her room.
Dorothy’s is a story of integration...a story of a woman both savoring and saving the world even from within the confines of an ICU unit. What most touches me most, and I think the true sign that she had learned to integrate her individual life with the larger concerns of the world, is the natural ease with which Dorothy was able to transcend her own situation in service to others.
This was no balancing act. Dorothy was not attempting to juggle time between her self concern or interests and the needs of the world. Dorothy was not doing anything in order to be something else...like balanced. Rather she was being, and in being she conveyed her humanity and the truth that she had learned from life. Dorothy, I think, experienced a sense of unity, recognizing that while her own life and material needs would soon end, life itself and the needs of others will go on. Hers was no spectral existence. She had learned to save and to savor are not separate pursuits, but as Dick Gilbert and Ralph Waldo Emerson remind us, one life long endeavor.
Dorothy had learned to convert life into truth. As so, may we, as we journey together to save and savor the world, support and encourage one another to do the same.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
September 29, 2013
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
To savor the world or save it?
With these few words Dick Gilbert poses a question I’m willing to bet many of us here today think about from time to time, and some of perhaps quite often.
Just the week before last, as our nation’s leaders debated military strikes in Syria, the spectacle of yet another mass shooting, this time in D.C., was streaming across the television screen. I sat down and shook my head in anger and sadness wonder if there was anything that could be done, anything that I could do to contribute to a sensible, compassionate response to the culture of violence and destruction that continues to plague our world...I wondered if there was anything that could be done, anything that I could do to contribute to a sensible, compassionate response to the continued stigma and lack of adequate access to treatment for mental illness.
Not a day or two later, I was driving west in New York state towards Corning, NY to attend a symposium at the glass museum there. As I drove along the winding highway my eyes widened as stunning vistas of sunlit mountains, darkened valleys, and shimmering rivers and streams continually appeared around each corner along the route and then, just on the outskirts of Corning, fields of sunflowers, their faces turned up toward the sun, stretched along the sides of the highway. The sight filled me with a sense of awe and wonder. I could have stared at that field for hours.
To savor the world or to save it? Arguments could, and I’m sure have, been made for one or the other. On the far end of the savor crowd are people we likely think of as selfish or entitled...out for themselves and the heck with everyone else, everything they do, whether they never step foot inside a place of worship or show up every week is for their own self gratification. They’re the people who either don’t care about the problems of the world or figure someone else will do what needs to be done.
On the extreme end of the save crowd are people whom we might think of as selfless, saintly, even self-righteous at times...out to fix the world and everyone in it...they usually have bad boundaries and end up burning out or they are the folks that get in your face to the point that even if we know there’s truth to what they say, we resist the message because they’re just so annoying or smug.
Now, while few people reside exclusively at one extreme or the other, we all know people who are more into savoring than saving and vice versa. The rest of us are likely balancers, that is, we’ve decided to try to balance savoring the world with saving it. Indeed, people volunteer, find a hobby, take vacations, read self-help books, etc. in pursuit of this elusive balance. People even come to church seeking this balance.
On opening Sunday, just a couple weeks ago we talked about gathering as a hungry people, that is, as people with a longing for transformation. We said this longing is a response to a deeply felt awareness that something is amiss in our lives or the world. Another way of saying it is we are drawn together to save...the world...and ourselves.
The following Sunday we talked about the role of discernment, religious observance, and ritual as ways to help us manage what I called our spiritual inventory, the feelings, memories, experiences, and beliefs that we accumulate over time. We said by learning to manage our spiritual inventory we can live a deeper, lighter, freer life. It is one way among many that we can savor the world more fully.
So of course the question that seems to make sense is how do we balance our desire to both save and savor the world?
I’ve come to realize this is a trick question.
How to we balance our desire to both serve and savor the world?
Quite plainly, we don’t.
When we try to balance saving and savoring the world, the result is almost assuredly frustration and disappointment. Part of the reason is because “to balance” has become code for “to manage” and that thing we usually try to manage when we talk about balancing our lives or concerns, is time. To balance then becomes yet another component of multi-tasking which implies separation, as if our lives are like scattered puzzle pieces that we hope will produce some meaningful or useful image if we can just fit the pieces together the right way. But separation, that is our separateness, our independence of self or from the world around is an illusion.
In his Divinity School Address, delivered to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a Unitarian minister for a while, rails against the illusion of separation perpetrated by what he calls the “formalist.” In recalling an experience from his own life, he contrasts the “spectral” nature of such a “formalist” preacher with the reality of snow seen falling outside a window behind the preacher.
Emerson was interested in the “isness”, the reality, the experience of life and of living and what it has to teach us…the very things the preacher failed to do as he droned on about whatever the topic of the day was. When Emerson laments, “Not one fact in all his experience, had he (the preacher) yet imported into his doctrine” Emerson is criticizing the preacher for separating his humanity from his calling. Indeed Emerson charges the “formalist” preacher with failing to learn what he called “the capital secret of his profession” and the primary purpose of ministry, both lay and ordained, I might add,...which is, ”to convert life into truth.”
So how do we get away from this whole idea of trying to balance our desire to save and savor the world with its assumption of separation?
Well, Emerson implored the graduates he was addressing that day to be in touch with their humanity and minister from their experience of life in all its wonder, complexity, joy and sorrow.
And Dick Gilbert offers us this insight...
“To save, one must serve.
To savor, one must save.
The one will not stand without the other.”
Rather than balance, both Emerson and Gilbert point us towards what I would call integration. Here the veil of illusion is lifted to reveal that saving and savoring the world are not two separate concerns but are in fact one...they are interconnected... ”the one will not stand without the other.”
Whereas seeking to balance our desire to both save and savor the world assumes separateness and moves us toward negotiation of resources, usually time or money, integration recognizes interconnectedness and moves us toward unity or wholeness.
Outwardly, the difference between balance and integration can be quite subtle. I’m reminded now of a woman, let’s call her Dorothy (not her real name), who I met during my ministry as a hospital chaplain.
Dorothy was a patient on my ICU unit. I ministered to her during the last three months of her life. She was petite, gentle woman, not much older than I, with a smile that lit up the room. We developed a close pastoral relationship in those three months and over that time explored with one another many of the most difficult questions a human being can ask about life, suffering, and God.
As Thanksgiving approached, Dorothy asked me if I knew of any soup kitchens in the area. She explained that she used to volunteer around the holidays and she was hoping to do some service work.
“I want to help.”, she said. Dorothy, gravely ill and hooked up to all sort of machines, knew leaving the hospital was not an option, but that was not going to stop her. So I suggested that she and I and put our heads together and come up with a way she could help others. I engaged her family as well and together we came up with a plan for Dorothy and her family to donate to the hospital’s Thanksgiving food drive.
Once the donation was made I took a photograph of the collection box which was decorated with colorful leaves and an image of a turkey like the kind that hung in my elementary school classrooms growing up. I printed the photo and wrote a thank you note to Dorothy on it and brought it to her room where I showed it to her and then hung on her wall. Dorothy smiled. Later that night, she died quietly in her room.
Dorothy’s is a story of integration...a story of a woman both savoring and saving the world even from within the confines of an ICU unit. What most touches me most, and I think the true sign that she had learned to integrate her individual life with the larger concerns of the world, is the natural ease with which Dorothy was able to transcend her own situation in service to others.
This was no balancing act. Dorothy was not attempting to juggle time between her self concern or interests and the needs of the world. Dorothy was not doing anything in order to be something else...like balanced. Rather she was being, and in being she conveyed her humanity and the truth that she had learned from life. Dorothy, I think, experienced a sense of unity, recognizing that while her own life and material needs would soon end, life itself and the needs of others will go on. Hers was no spectral existence. She had learned to save and to savor are not separate pursuits, but as Dick Gilbert and Ralph Waldo Emerson remind us, one life long endeavor.
Dorothy had learned to convert life into truth. As so, may we, as we journey together to save and savor the world, support and encourage one another to do the same.
Amen and Blessed Be
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