What Are You Looking For?
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 28, 2018
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
The desk in my study at home is positioned in front of a window looking east. From there, most days, I have a long and wide view of the large pond that stretches out behind and beyond my property. Most days, that is, except in the winter when, as happened earlier this month, the snow falls heavily enough that it seems nothing but a massive wall painted white sits just beyond the tall barren trees and tangled, leafless vines that trace the contours of the shoreline. It is an effect I can generally count on each winter…a change in the usual view from my window…that helps me notice other things. Like patterns of positive and negative space visible in the silhouette of barren trees and leafless vines.
Winter, poets remind us, isn’t just a season in nature. Throughout our lives we all experience times, sometimes years, for which winter is an apt metaphor. Though these may be times marked by beauty and tranquility, more often, they are times we feel stuck, left out in the cold, unclear or uncertain, disoriented, confined. Times that, like a snowy day can change our landscape, leaving us anxious to see it pass sooner rather than later.
But, says Greta Crosby in our first reading this morning, “Let us not wish away the winter.” Indeed, she even goes to far as to call us to praise it, declaring winter, “rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities.”
Though she uses the familiar language and imagery of nature’s season, she is speaking to our internal experience as well, the winters we experience within regardless of the weather outside or the date on the calendar. Reminding us, “it is a season to itself, not simply the way to spring.” It has something unique to offer us.
For the experience of winter throughout our lives…winter within… does more than simply temporarily change or obscure life’s landscape as we’re used to seeing it. It calls us away from what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing and paying attention to. And although it seems at first to obscure, it in fact nudges us toward clarity. As if to ask, “What are you looking for, really?”
What are you looking for? It is a question I usually ask in one way or another when people express interest in joining the church.
I came back to religion and church as an adult during an experience of winter in my life. And I have found many people tend to try church…either again or for the first time…during a period of winter in their own lives.
So, what do people say they’re looking for? Well, specific answers vary, but a fairly consistent theme or current runs through many, if not most responses. A transformation of the self. Now, I should note, no one has ever used those words in conversation with me. Instead they might say they want to be a better person, or find a different way to relate to or deal with the world. Some may express a desire for inner peace and inspiration. Or a need to be in community. Others to articulate and live their values. And for some, to give their children a grounding in something other than secular culture.
In one way or another, each of these express at the very least, an intuition, clear or vague, that there is some self trying to emerge…a self we’re called to be other than the one we’ve constructed or that has been imposed on us. And so we might seek, to borrow Annie Dillard’s words, “a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.” That we might find or get to this self.
I’m reminded now of a time, years ago, when I asked my minister at the time how to do this…how to find or get to this real or deeper self within. And she said, “just be yourself.” Finding her answer unsatisfactory, I later asked my late spiritual director the same question. And do you know what he said? That’s right, “just be yourself.” At which point I felt like that kid from the movie “A Christmas Story” who fears his mother, teacher and Santa Claus are all in cahoots to deny him the one thing he really wants for Christmas.
“Just be yourself?” What kind of an answer was that? What did that even mean? “Just be yourself”. I longed, as Annie Dillard in our second reading, to go northing. To face the unimpeded winds that would hone me to my essence. What my minister and spiritual director knew that I didn’t was such a trek was neither possible, or as Dillard observed for herself, necessary at that time. Indeed, their advice echoed that of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron who is known for advising spiritual seekers, “start where you are.” For as Annie Dillard realized and reminds us in our second reading today, “Something is already here. And more is coming.”
Now, some of you may or may not know that I have a professional background and personal interest in antiques, including Asian art. That seemed as good a place as any to “start where you are” and begin my quest to “be myself”. And indeed, it wasn’t long before the memory of a small Chinese bowl that I once owned came to mind.
The bowl, dating from the 12th/13th C. was covered in a thick olive green glaze known as celadon. One of the cardinal rules in almost every collecting field is to buy the best example you can afford in the best condition possible.
However, I found the bowl while still an undergrad and my budget at the time was well, non-existent. Needless to say finding good examples in perfect or near perfect condition in my price range was exceedingly difficult.
As it turns out I was able to buy the bowl because, despite its considerable age, it was actually quite cheap. You see the glaze was somewhat worn and scratched. Oh, and it was repaired! Not only was it repaired, but it was poorly repaired with what appeared to be some sort of yellowish gold colored glue that made no attempt whatsoever to hide the repair. Indeed, if anything, it seemed to draw attention to the fact that the bowl had been repaired.
As a novice and cash strapped collector, I decided to buy the bowl with the intention that someday, when I could afford to, I would bring it to a competent restorer who could make the repair nearly invisible…and the bowl almost perfect.
Not long after I purchased the bowl I mentioned it, and the unsightly repair, to a friend who was also a dealer in Asian art. He asked me to show it to him.
Upon seeing it, he said, “It’s beautiful.” “Yes”, I said, “but look at that glue! It’s all yellowed…it’s all I can see when I look at it.” “That’s not yellow glue,” he told me, “its gold lacquer; this bowl was precious to someone.”
He went on to explain that the bowl was exported from China to Japan at some point in its history where it likely broke and was then repaired with gold lacquer, a tradition known in Japan as kintsugi[1] or golden joinery.
In Japan, ceramics repaired with gold lacquer are highly prized, for such pieces offer elegant testimony of life’s fragility and resiliency.
Indeed, such pieces express, in physical form, the sentiments of the 9th C. Japanese poet Ariwara no Narihira.
Listen to his words…
“That is not the moon
Nor is this
The spring of years gone by
I alone remain
As I was before.”[2]
Both the poem and a bowl repaired with gold lacquer, are portraits of equanimity… revealing to us that wholeness is not dependent upon changelessness, but instead remains, even strengthens as the inevitability of change is acknowledged and experienced throughout life.
The visibility of the gold lacquer repair on my little bowl was intentional… The bowl was simply being itself. True, the passage of time had altered its appearance. The once hard glassy glaze was now worn and soft to the touch where it had been held over and over by loving or perhaps rough hands. Scratches on the interior showed that it had lived, not merely existed. And the gold lacquer repair revealed the experience of brokenness and yet, it remained whole. Perhaps even more so than if it had spent its years resting up on a shelf, hidden under a blanket of dust… untouched by life’s ups and downs…or what we call in collector speak…perfect condition.
Most of us don’t have the luxury…and if we’re honest…the ability, to avoid life’s ups and downs. Perfection therefore is not an option for us, only the appearance of perfection…an option not only encouraged, but, in many ways simultaneously demanded and denied by the world in which we live. Chasing after perfection however puts us on a path that ultimately leads to suffering, teaching us as it does, to cover up and deny the reality our lives and our experience as finite beings. It keeps us, as a Buddhist might say, grasping for permanence in a fleeting world.
As I’ve came to see it then, to “be yourself”, is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Divinity School Address of 1838, “to convert life into truth”[3]… to resist hiding or denying the reality of our lives and to instead be in touch with it...to embrace our worn spots, scratches, cracks and repairs, those experiences, both painful and pleasant, that have impacted our lives…and to let them be as patterns upon our soul…bearing witness to our own lives and of living…patterns which reveal where we have been and what we have learned…patterns which direct us towards the depth of our own humanity and that of others.
My own experience tells me this is not always an easy way to live, for it runs counter to the demands of many, even our loved ones, and the ways of the world. Whether we’re talking bowls or souls, we’re too often taught that repaired means broken, flawed… even worthless.
And this is where I have found meaning in Unitarian Universalism and why I believe our Unitarian Universalist churches, meetinghouses and fellowships and the ministry we do together matter. They are places to resist the shrill call to perfection and instead encourage the discovery of wholeness. Places, in the words of the poet Galway Kinnell, to “re-teach each other our loveliness”…or as Emerson hoped, to “convert life into truth.”
We are communities seeking to embrace our humanity…and discover the unexpected beauty of patterns upon the soul…those seams where the shards of experience are joined to reveal something of the truth of our own individual lives and the broader human experience of being alive.
Winter comes to all of us, friends. Rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities and sometimes more one than the others. Still, when it arrives, let us not wish it away but let us gather, searchers for the Truth of life. And to borrow the words of William Schulz, “Come into this place of peace, memory, prophecy and power to heal our spirits, warm our souls and change our hearts.” A place to discover and be truly ourselves. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
[1] Gopnik, Blake. “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics at Freer” Washington Post 3 March. 2009. 10 September 2001 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202723.html
[2] Rexroth, Kenneth. ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE. New York: New Directions, 1956.
[3] Emerson, Ralph Waldo “Divinity School Address”, 1838.
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 28, 2018
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
The desk in my study at home is positioned in front of a window looking east. From there, most days, I have a long and wide view of the large pond that stretches out behind and beyond my property. Most days, that is, except in the winter when, as happened earlier this month, the snow falls heavily enough that it seems nothing but a massive wall painted white sits just beyond the tall barren trees and tangled, leafless vines that trace the contours of the shoreline. It is an effect I can generally count on each winter…a change in the usual view from my window…that helps me notice other things. Like patterns of positive and negative space visible in the silhouette of barren trees and leafless vines.
Winter, poets remind us, isn’t just a season in nature. Throughout our lives we all experience times, sometimes years, for which winter is an apt metaphor. Though these may be times marked by beauty and tranquility, more often, they are times we feel stuck, left out in the cold, unclear or uncertain, disoriented, confined. Times that, like a snowy day can change our landscape, leaving us anxious to see it pass sooner rather than later.
But, says Greta Crosby in our first reading this morning, “Let us not wish away the winter.” Indeed, she even goes to far as to call us to praise it, declaring winter, “rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities.”
Though she uses the familiar language and imagery of nature’s season, she is speaking to our internal experience as well, the winters we experience within regardless of the weather outside or the date on the calendar. Reminding us, “it is a season to itself, not simply the way to spring.” It has something unique to offer us.
For the experience of winter throughout our lives…winter within… does more than simply temporarily change or obscure life’s landscape as we’re used to seeing it. It calls us away from what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing and paying attention to. And although it seems at first to obscure, it in fact nudges us toward clarity. As if to ask, “What are you looking for, really?”
What are you looking for? It is a question I usually ask in one way or another when people express interest in joining the church.
I came back to religion and church as an adult during an experience of winter in my life. And I have found many people tend to try church…either again or for the first time…during a period of winter in their own lives.
So, what do people say they’re looking for? Well, specific answers vary, but a fairly consistent theme or current runs through many, if not most responses. A transformation of the self. Now, I should note, no one has ever used those words in conversation with me. Instead they might say they want to be a better person, or find a different way to relate to or deal with the world. Some may express a desire for inner peace and inspiration. Or a need to be in community. Others to articulate and live their values. And for some, to give their children a grounding in something other than secular culture.
In one way or another, each of these express at the very least, an intuition, clear or vague, that there is some self trying to emerge…a self we’re called to be other than the one we’ve constructed or that has been imposed on us. And so we might seek, to borrow Annie Dillard’s words, “a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.” That we might find or get to this self.
I’m reminded now of a time, years ago, when I asked my minister at the time how to do this…how to find or get to this real or deeper self within. And she said, “just be yourself.” Finding her answer unsatisfactory, I later asked my late spiritual director the same question. And do you know what he said? That’s right, “just be yourself.” At which point I felt like that kid from the movie “A Christmas Story” who fears his mother, teacher and Santa Claus are all in cahoots to deny him the one thing he really wants for Christmas.
“Just be yourself?” What kind of an answer was that? What did that even mean? “Just be yourself”. I longed, as Annie Dillard in our second reading, to go northing. To face the unimpeded winds that would hone me to my essence. What my minister and spiritual director knew that I didn’t was such a trek was neither possible, or as Dillard observed for herself, necessary at that time. Indeed, their advice echoed that of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron who is known for advising spiritual seekers, “start where you are.” For as Annie Dillard realized and reminds us in our second reading today, “Something is already here. And more is coming.”
Now, some of you may or may not know that I have a professional background and personal interest in antiques, including Asian art. That seemed as good a place as any to “start where you are” and begin my quest to “be myself”. And indeed, it wasn’t long before the memory of a small Chinese bowl that I once owned came to mind.
The bowl, dating from the 12th/13th C. was covered in a thick olive green glaze known as celadon. One of the cardinal rules in almost every collecting field is to buy the best example you can afford in the best condition possible.
However, I found the bowl while still an undergrad and my budget at the time was well, non-existent. Needless to say finding good examples in perfect or near perfect condition in my price range was exceedingly difficult.
As it turns out I was able to buy the bowl because, despite its considerable age, it was actually quite cheap. You see the glaze was somewhat worn and scratched. Oh, and it was repaired! Not only was it repaired, but it was poorly repaired with what appeared to be some sort of yellowish gold colored glue that made no attempt whatsoever to hide the repair. Indeed, if anything, it seemed to draw attention to the fact that the bowl had been repaired.
As a novice and cash strapped collector, I decided to buy the bowl with the intention that someday, when I could afford to, I would bring it to a competent restorer who could make the repair nearly invisible…and the bowl almost perfect.
Not long after I purchased the bowl I mentioned it, and the unsightly repair, to a friend who was also a dealer in Asian art. He asked me to show it to him.
Upon seeing it, he said, “It’s beautiful.” “Yes”, I said, “but look at that glue! It’s all yellowed…it’s all I can see when I look at it.” “That’s not yellow glue,” he told me, “its gold lacquer; this bowl was precious to someone.”
He went on to explain that the bowl was exported from China to Japan at some point in its history where it likely broke and was then repaired with gold lacquer, a tradition known in Japan as kintsugi[1] or golden joinery.
In Japan, ceramics repaired with gold lacquer are highly prized, for such pieces offer elegant testimony of life’s fragility and resiliency.
Indeed, such pieces express, in physical form, the sentiments of the 9th C. Japanese poet Ariwara no Narihira.
Listen to his words…
“That is not the moon
Nor is this
The spring of years gone by
I alone remain
As I was before.”[2]
Both the poem and a bowl repaired with gold lacquer, are portraits of equanimity… revealing to us that wholeness is not dependent upon changelessness, but instead remains, even strengthens as the inevitability of change is acknowledged and experienced throughout life.
The visibility of the gold lacquer repair on my little bowl was intentional… The bowl was simply being itself. True, the passage of time had altered its appearance. The once hard glassy glaze was now worn and soft to the touch where it had been held over and over by loving or perhaps rough hands. Scratches on the interior showed that it had lived, not merely existed. And the gold lacquer repair revealed the experience of brokenness and yet, it remained whole. Perhaps even more so than if it had spent its years resting up on a shelf, hidden under a blanket of dust… untouched by life’s ups and downs…or what we call in collector speak…perfect condition.
Most of us don’t have the luxury…and if we’re honest…the ability, to avoid life’s ups and downs. Perfection therefore is not an option for us, only the appearance of perfection…an option not only encouraged, but, in many ways simultaneously demanded and denied by the world in which we live. Chasing after perfection however puts us on a path that ultimately leads to suffering, teaching us as it does, to cover up and deny the reality our lives and our experience as finite beings. It keeps us, as a Buddhist might say, grasping for permanence in a fleeting world.
As I’ve came to see it then, to “be yourself”, is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Divinity School Address of 1838, “to convert life into truth”[3]… to resist hiding or denying the reality of our lives and to instead be in touch with it...to embrace our worn spots, scratches, cracks and repairs, those experiences, both painful and pleasant, that have impacted our lives…and to let them be as patterns upon our soul…bearing witness to our own lives and of living…patterns which reveal where we have been and what we have learned…patterns which direct us towards the depth of our own humanity and that of others.
My own experience tells me this is not always an easy way to live, for it runs counter to the demands of many, even our loved ones, and the ways of the world. Whether we’re talking bowls or souls, we’re too often taught that repaired means broken, flawed… even worthless.
And this is where I have found meaning in Unitarian Universalism and why I believe our Unitarian Universalist churches, meetinghouses and fellowships and the ministry we do together matter. They are places to resist the shrill call to perfection and instead encourage the discovery of wholeness. Places, in the words of the poet Galway Kinnell, to “re-teach each other our loveliness”…or as Emerson hoped, to “convert life into truth.”
We are communities seeking to embrace our humanity…and discover the unexpected beauty of patterns upon the soul…those seams where the shards of experience are joined to reveal something of the truth of our own individual lives and the broader human experience of being alive.
Winter comes to all of us, friends. Rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities and sometimes more one than the others. Still, when it arrives, let us not wish it away but let us gather, searchers for the Truth of life. And to borrow the words of William Schulz, “Come into this place of peace, memory, prophecy and power to heal our spirits, warm our souls and change our hearts.” A place to discover and be truly ourselves. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
[1] Gopnik, Blake. “Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics at Freer” Washington Post 3 March. 2009. 10 September 2001 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202723.html
[2] Rexroth, Kenneth. ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE. New York: New Directions, 1956.
[3] Emerson, Ralph Waldo “Divinity School Address”, 1838.