George Bernard Shaw once said.
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner:‘Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.’
When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied,‘The one I feed the most.’
We gather this morning, hopefully, to feed the good dog.
When I was invited to speak here today for this third anniversary service I accepted because I thought it would be easy to work up a sermon of celebration to share with a community I have come to love and respect. I got to work immediately and found the task moving along so well that, being about half finished, I would lay it to rest for a while. Two Tuesdays ago I resumed the task only to find that my battery was a little low and I had trouble getting my homiletical engine started again. Last Sunday as I sat where you are sitting now and listened to Sarah York talk about “Living from the Inside Out” it was like a jump start and on Tuesday morning I got the old engine revved up and started all over again. Ideas and thoughts kept coming and I kept putting them into the pot and stirring them all together. When I stopped to take a look at what was accumulating it was like I was staring into a bowl of soup. So what I have to offer to you today is a sermon with two beginnings and it will probably seem like no ending. It is not exactly an entrée. It might best be described as “a half of a sandwich and a bowl of soup.”
I have chosen as the topic for this anniversary celebration, “Breaking Free”. These words seemed appropriate to me for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that this whole process that ended up with this facility becoming the home of our religious community was a breaking free experience; a breaking free from a hidden space that was far from ideal, into this beautiful place, amidst these lovely trees on this busy Black Mountain thoroughfare.
I remember well the many things that had to be done each Sunday as we gathered in the Black Mountain Primary School. Lee Reading would arrive early and place the signs out on the street that offered some visible evidence to the community that we existed. Lee then proceeded to the Library room where he began to collect the chairs that had to be placed in the room where we gathered. Then the speakers stand, the sound system, the hymn books, the chalice table, all had to be pulled from their hiding place to make ready for our gathering. At the same time all of this was going on Marjorie Alexandria, with whatever help she could muster, was attending to all of the details of preparing for the finger food lunch that followed the service. Numerous items had to be moved and then later replaced in exactly the same spot so as to leave the facility just as we had found it. The first time I witnessed this operation I could not believe that such a feat was possible. The commitment of time and energy to make all of this happen was astounding. And while all of this was going on Linda Harrison and Monroe and the whole Religious education crew were busy setting up the morning program for the children. This too involved moving chairs and tables and numerous items that had to be replaced. And Phil Fryburger was busy setting up the welcoming table in the hallway and setting out the name tags and all the UU propaganda he could get on the table. The Primary School looked like a beehive on Sunday mornings with all of the activity that was necessary in turning a school house into a church facility and then back into a school house again as if we had never been there. I am sure you would agree that we did not have the most ideal setup at the Primary School and those here who were not a part of all of that can imagine what a “Breaking Free” experience it was when we found this place as our own new home.
However, there are other reasons why I choose the topic “Breaking free” as the theme of our service today. We gather here as a Unitarian Universalist Community. That means we gather with a particular identity that has a history that goes back hundreds of years. It is a history that could well be characterized as a process of a people “breaking free”; breaking free from all kinds of oppressive ideas and forces that bind the human heart and mind and spirit.
In our own hearts and minds today, in celebration of our third anniversary, let us rededicate these grounds as the home of a religious community committed to keeping alive a heritage that has long fought for the kind of freedom William Ellery Channing spoke of so eloquently when he said: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith: which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come…which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite and in them finds help to its own spiritual enlargement; which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world…which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of God’s children, and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind…”
Ours is a rich heritage and how good it feels to know that being in this place today makes us a part of that ongoing process of breaking free from the bondage of little ideas and oppressive forces that devalue the human spirit.
But I have chosen the words “Breaking free” as our theme for celebrating today also because I believe these words have special meaning for many of us as we consider our own individual journeys. I know how true it is for me to see my life story as a process of breaking free; breaking free from oppressive forces and ideas and conclusions that have held me in bondage. It took a lot of breaking loose to get from the Southern Baptist ministry to a UU pulpit. But as I stand here today not far away from celebrating my 76th birthday, it is exciting to share with you that the process still goes on; the process of breaking free, of shaking loose, of opening up to knew ways of seeing and doing and being, the process of extending the boundaries within which my life is lived.
This process of becoming, continually breaking free and opening up to a wider vision, is not only a large part of the essence of what it means to be a UU but I believe is the essence of what it means to be a human being. And that too is what we celebrate today; this human spirit that always seems to want to break free into some larger way of seeing and being and doing.
As human beings we are a part of something exciting. We stand on the growing edge of an evolutionary process that goes back for eons of time and our place in this process is a fascinating story and remains a fascinating mystery. We can choose to be oblivious to the indescribable wonder of our existence or we can choose to break free from that oblivion and more consciously participate in the process; a process Channing described as “discovering everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit, and in them finding help to our own spiritual enlargement.”
Now that is a shortened version of the half of a sandwich. We now move on to the second beginning and the bowl of soup.
Those of us who were present last week recall the story that Sarah York told of the three bricklayers. When asked what they were doing the first replied, “I’m laying bricks.” The second said, “I’m building a wall.”
The third answered with a look of deep satisfaction on his face, “I’m building a cathedral.” The message in that story, Sarah said, summed up her sermon. She then proceeded to say that if you did not hear anything else she said, or you tuned her out at that moment, or you decided to leave early, you would have gotten her message. Well, right now I’m going to tell a story that in a nutshell contains the rest of what I have to say this morning. But I don’t have the courage that Sarah had to offer you the opportunity to leave after the story. I know some of you too well to do that. I’m not going to call any names but I can see the back of several heads going for the finger food if I gave you the slightest opportunity. So after I finish the story no one is invited to leave.
The story, a true story, is about a swan that fell in love with a swan-shaped paddle-boat. This love affair has entered its second year according to German wildlife officials. The swan, nicknamed Petra, apparently fell in love with the novelty tourist boat on Germany’s Lake Aasee last year, and there were fears she would freeze to death when her partner refused to fly south for the winter. Fortunately a local zoo agreed to house the pair over the colder months, and in the spring they returned them to the lake where Petra continued to circle her “boyfriend” while gazing at him in rapt adoration. “This arrangement could go on forever,” said Zoo director Joerg Adler.
End of story and therein lies the rest of my message. Now perhaps the message in this story is hidden a little more deeply than the message in the bricklayer’s story. That message was quite obvious, and that being that the way we look at what we do can make all the difference. Simply laying bricks or building a cathedral depends on the perspective of the bricklayer. We from the inside out can give meaning to our lives if we so choose or we can simply lay bricks.
The story of the swan falling in love with a paddle boat, a mate that could not even fly south with her for the winter, places before us another but quite similar choice that we all face each day of our lives - the choice of selling ourselves short - the choice of settling for too little - the choice of limiting our lives by decisions we have made and conclusions we have drawn in the past, by allowing those decisions and conclusions to become “walls” behind which we live out the remainder of our days. So I am asking us to consider this morning as we think about our lives, who we are and what life is really all about, in the conclusions we have made have we fallen in love with a paddleboat?
Now we must not take this story too literally or I will get into all kinds of trouble beginning in my own household. When I ask, “Have you fallen in love with a paddleboat?” I am not talking about the person sitting beside you. I am not talking about your mate. I am talking about the person inside your own skin, the image you have of yourself. As you think about your own life, about what it means to be a human being; about what you have settled for by the conclusions you have drawn about the meaning of your existence as revealed by the values out of which you live your life; could it be that you have settled down too soon with too little? You no longer fly south in the winter-time but end up enclosed behind the walls of some zoo,; walls that you have built as the brick layer of your own life; walls from which you need to break free.
What does it mean, really, to be a human being? Are you still asking yourself that question? Hopefully, being here this morning means that you are. To keep open the question of the meaning of our existence is one of the best ways to feed the good dog inside. But perhaps the biggest problem we have in keeping that question open is that whatever answers we find never seem to be quite enough. We try for a while. We search for the words that might capture for us the meaning of our existence but the words always fall short and we give up. Or, perhaps, we grow weary of the effort and settle down with an image that we keep swimming around and admiring but just won’t fly south with us in the winter-time.
The poet Rumi struggled with this as he sees life evolving through the eons of time from mineral to plant to animal to humankind.
Something inside said I was a mineral, and I was so glad to just be, I replied, “I’ll take that job; it sounds like fun.” But after eons, roots appear on my soul that wanted to nurse from a warm body, and the wonder of her love, the tenderness of the earth lifted me into the air and I beheld light, and praised it from the fields. Time sculpted my senses and another song I heard, “You are more than plant; you are like those extraordinary beasts,” So I believed that and roamed and roamed, but then I started thinking: What is my real truth? I became the wings on falcons and angels. I flirted with God in the sky. And I believed that He, once in a while kissing me, would be as close to love as I would get, but now I know: All words and images deceive our glory.
I love these words of Rumi. They express so simply and yet so profoundly the conclusion to which I have come after 75 years of searching for the right words to express the real truth about who I am as a human being. “All words and images deceive our glory.” In other words there are no words that can ever give adequate expression to who we are. There are no images that that can catch and reflect the full wonder of this human existence. We are caught up in a process that has been unfolding for eons of time, a process that surpasses our ability to comprehend. Our little minds, as extraordinary as they might be, lag centuries behind in their ability to explain, to understand, to define the glory of who we are. And yet, it remains true that the most fascinating thing about this human existence is the restlessness within us that endlessly strives to understand itself.
Here we are; the human species. In this emergence of human existence for the first time the cosmos has found the eyes with which to see itself and the mind to inquire as to its meaning. As far as we know never before in this evolutionary process has the universe been able to look at itself in awe and wonder and ask questions.
Could it be then that the essence of who we are as human beings is that we are a question asking species; the first of its kind in the evolutionary process. And whenever we stop asking the question “What does it mean to be me?” at that point we have settled for a paddleboat. Whenever we accept life for what it appears to be on the surface, we have settled for a paddleboat?
I would suggest that the essence of being human is to be found somewhere in the mystery of our being more than what is obvious. To find that essence requires eyes that can see deeply enough into what seems to be all there is to sense that there is more than can be seen. It requires a sense of knowing there is that which is beyond our knowing. From the beginning of human history, and in most all cultures, words and images have been formed to give expression to this unseen dimension of our existence; this life within life, this life beyond life, this something that is nothing – this “no-thing” that seems to be in all things and speaks out of all things to those who listen to the silence of their existence. But all the attempts to capture in words or images this unseen “whatever” have fallen short. All efforts to define ourselves as a human species fall short of eliminating the mystery of our being.
Whenever I ponder the question of who I am as a human being I always find myself looking beyond the obvious, sensing there is that which I cannot see or comprehend. I cannot avoid the experience becoming mystical, one meaning of which is vague, obscure. I find myself in water over my head and I usually head quickly for the shore because I seem to be going nowhere. But on rare occasions I allow myself to stay in this “seeming to be going nowhere” place long enough to have the strange sensation that I am already there. In this nowhere, this absolute silent response from the beyond that I walk into, I sense I have arrived somewhere; that I need go no further, I am already there. And in those rare moments of utter silence, of utter letting go of any need to go further, of being absolutely lost in a sense of being beyond knowing, I am overwhelmed with a sense of peace and joy that sometimes brings me to tears. Just for the time being I am allowing a just being time. I come away with no answers, but more importantly, I come away needing no answers. At least for right now, not knowing is OK. Having no words to describe the silence is OK. Having no way of knowing whether these moments of no boundaries, of no sense of space or time, of truly breaking free from the limitations of this body and mind , are moments of losing my mind or finding the essence of my being, my soul, not knowing which, is OK. There seems to be an uncertainty that feels more certain than certitude itself. Could this be what is meant by faith?
I am content at this stage in my life to be discontent; content with not knowing; content with saying that I don’t have a clue as to the essence of this human existence or of the existence of God. It is all beyond me but I am determined to remain wide open to the endless possibilities of, and to keep on questing for, that which is beyond me, and with which I sense some indefinable connection. And for the time being I will seek each day of my life to look deeply enough into the things that are obvious, to see the absolute wonder of that thing, and to feel the sense of awe that comes from pondering the simplest of things before my eyes. I will keep listening to the silence that seems to speak without words and I will accept the wisdom of the mystic who said, “All words and images deceive our glory.”
Rainer Maria Rilke said it so beautifully: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
You know it just might be true that in the living out of our lives, including our struggle for meaning and understanding, it just might be enough that we take the time each day to look deeply into what is obvious, deeply enough to see the beauty that is there and by seeing to simply stand in awe. Perhaps the highest point that we can attain is not understanding, or knowledge, but simply standing in awe and wonder that we live. To do so will surely keep us from ever falling in love with a paddleboat. No matter how secure it may feel to have an image that is absolute, an image that can never fly away from us, neither can it fly away with us.
A wealthy person once said, “There must be more to life than having everything.” Well, indeed there is, and that is learning to look deeply enough into just one thing to see everything. In the beauty and wonder of that one thing you may find yourself living into all the answers you need.