Untitled Document

A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
November 13, 2005

There is something in us that reaches far back to a time before our human existence to the life of the herd, and sometimes only with great effort breaks free from its well-worn paths. It can be deadly. That is nothing new, as certainly was obvious in Rabbi Lionel Blue’s reading a few moments ago. And — there is a style of living in which are lives become what Thoreau called “a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
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I am grateful for this religious movement that is surely a counter-friction against the machine. Here is an example. Last week, 76 percent of Texas voters passed a vicious new hate law that makes any kind of legal arrangement by which same-sex couples might protect their property or access to each other — nearly impossible. It was promoted by right-wing churches and endorsed by the governing party. Thousands of churches, crowded with otherwise good and decent people, did this injury to their neighbors.
But the Sunday before the vote, this is what you would have heard from the pulpit of the First Unitarian Church of Austin — this is what Rev. Davidson Loehr said:

Proposition Two is coming up for passage on November 8th . . . This is an excellent example of this religion Jesus would have hated. I suspect it will pass by an embarrassing margin, and the Christian churches will be able to take major credit for passing it. That’s what I mean by saying the religion about Jesus is, as it has often been, the mortal enemy of the religion of Jesus.

Had you been at the First Unitarian Church of Dallas, you would have heard our minister there, Laurel Hallman, deliver a rousing sermon against this piece of hate legislation. And in Houston, First Unitarian has been a vocal advocate for years. And in San Antonio, and in Carrolton, wherever that is, and all across that state, the Unitarian Universalist voice was raised against the barbaric hate-law. Probably you aren’t surprised to know that. It’s been a reliable counter-friction for a long, long time.
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This style of living — Thoreau’s “counter-friction to stop the machine” —

It’s a mindful approach to living. It doesn’t always have to make a lot of noise, though sometimes it does. But it’s driven from an inner core of itself and not from the outer rim.

Lately I’ve been watching our national leadership and the press — yes, especially the press. Suddenly I’ve been seeing more critical reporting — about the secret detention-and-torture centers, about the fabricated case for war, about the budget proposals that pull what little tattered rug remains out from under the poorest and most vulnerable, about the culture of greed and corruption in high places. You’re hearing it now because it’s become popular, easy.

But they weren’t there when it counted, were they? Because something in human beings hasn’t gotten over the instinct to travel in herds. Even powerful Senators and editors and allegedly critical, skeptical reporters.

Until now. It takes me back to the Nixon era — when hardly a voice was raised in protest, when you’d hardly guess from the press that the Administration was rotten to the core. And then, overnight, it all shifted, without explanation. But way too late to prevent so much suffering and death and distortion of America’s soul. Way too late, like a herd, they flipped from following to challenging the White House machine.

And so the machine rolls on. Look at us. As corporate America announces fresh layoffs and corporate profits surge, the average American works 350 more hours each year than the average European. Are we nuts? Our nation’s wealth is shifting inexorably and not so subtly to the richest tenth of one percent. The average pay of C.E.O.’s at big companies was already 40 times that of an average worker a generation ago; today it’s 500 times as much. And the Congress debates cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps. Smart people do this.

It all goes on, and what has been set in motion seem to meet with no resistance, because so few seem able to break out of the herd. I remember something I heard on the news, like three years ago — an automobile dealer was being interviewed. Didn’t it bother him that he was selling gargantuan, inefficient, polluting vehicles? Didn’t he care about global warming? And he said, “Global warming? Nobody cares about that except a few fanatics. When was the last time you went to a cocktail party and anybody was talking about global warming?” Question settled. Conscience salved.

In your name and mine, great hurt is inflicted — white phosphorus burns flesh in Falluja; detainees likely innocent, detained and tortured god-knows-where; hardly a voice raised in protest.
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You can look at a thing as plain as day and look right past it. You can, I can. There’s a kind of religious life that specializes in that, in adopting an official line that says We know the truth, don’t confuse us with the facts.
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What calls to us today, maybe more than ever before, is mindful, purpose-driven life. I don’t mean you have it all planned out. Great purpose doesn’t always allow that. Sometimes you have to turn on a dime. Sometimes you have to let life unfold organically, by remaining attentive to an inner principle, by listening deeply within.

In his Markings, Dag Hammarskjold tells himself: “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.”
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And didn’t Carl Jung get it spot-on when he said,

What is it in the end, that induces a person to go his/her own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decisions, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a person to emancipate him/herself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation that puts its trust in it as in God. . . . But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner person: he [or she] is called.

(CW 17 para 299)
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Now in a very basic sense, this is a solitary and possilby lonely thing. You can’t listen to the voice within you in a crowd. But it has something to do with the crowd. Because our public life isn’t going to make it if there is not some critical mass of people listening to that voice. And because we need to find the company of others who value what we value, who challenge us and sharpen us and support us in being counter-frictions to the machine.

Henry Thoreau, we know, learned to listen to the voice within. He understood the solitude of spiritual life. And exactly because of that, he sought the company of others with whom he could build something of what he dreamed. And what a bold and brilliant and incendiary company he found. He said of his friends: “it is the highest compliment to suppose that in the intervals of conversation your companion has expanded and grown.” We need friends who expect that, and not stasis, standing-still stagnation, of us.
And here, we found each other. What we do now — its creative quality, its boldness and its dimensions and durability — will depend on that listening, that mindfulness.

We have a work to do here, a creative community to build. We can let our energies be drawn away by the popular delusions, drawn downward into meanness and triviality, but to do that is to lose the scent of the sacred and we drawn from our vital and authentic path.

I say it is time for boldness, for bold action.
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Our first challenge is to remain mindful of our focus. This is a place that will always remind me and remind you of this: that the purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind and happiness. And that purpose flows not from others’ expectations of you, but from fidelity to what you are, and where you find yourself in this world, from your spiritually-sourced vocation. It flows from an inner necessity, a furnace inside you.

This is a place for spiritual unfolding, where our focus must be on helping each other get ahold of that particular ministry that is ours, the unique work that is our life — and where we can make that individual vocation a part of a greater work we all share.
As such, what we are is not merely a club, and it is not a store, though sometimes it feels a bit like the complaint department of a store. [Heh heh.]

Let us respond to what is urgent in the aching world out there. Many are doing that in many ways, from the homeless shelter to Treehouse and on and on. The Social Justice Forum proposal at today’s congregational meeting is a vital step in that direction, a logical unfolding of the social justice process we’ve already adopted.

But in our change-making and future-shaping, let’s look also right here. What will it take to get us to evaluate the suitability of our south-facing roof, over the offices, for solar panels? What are we waiting for? Maybe it won’t work. But then again, maybe it will.
Listen, folks! — the world is in danger. The life of the world is in danger and our nation is taking humankind on an excursion to disaster. We have a mission and it is an urgent one. There is hope and cause for hope and reason for this to be a very joyful place so long as we are true to that mission but we don’t have the luxury of deciding to sit it out.

So we have to get down to what to do about it and how to live with the reality that exists.

Meanwhile we are striving together to make this a place for renewal for the change-makers and future-shapers who gather here. Let us create spaces and occasions for learning, growth, and the discovery and support of our life-work and mission. Someone last year said we ought to make this a something of a downtown retreat center. Just as we must invest significantly in the religious education and development of children — we can look on, as equally important, adult education — and consider it, as I would far rather call it, and do sometimes call it, a Center for Spiritual Development. As we grow in strength and scope, imagine what can happen here.
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But most urgently today, I say: let us create a space for vision. I propose a weekend devoted to vision — an event where, perhaps an evening be spent hearing a few prepared vision statements, and then a period when everyone can respond; a conversation where we identify a few themes and begin the next morning with groups focussed on those themes, as a starting point. What sense of mission and purpose drives us? Do we know? do we share it? To what purposes must all our efforts answerable? No elite group can answer those questions — we must all shape the answers.

What are these lives of ours capable of becoming and creating?
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Until we focus on our mission and purpose, we are in danger of succumbing to the downward spiral of entropy. Let us resist the downward spiral of entropy! The future of this congregation is in our hands.

We are in a transitional period. We may feel a little anxious, a bit nervous, and get way too cautious. But our work and our future are restricted by inadequate building space. We owe it to the future, to the future of Unitarian Universalism in Northampton — to do something about it. It is time to study options for adding nearby space, and for a capital campaign to pay for it. And live as though we believe in what we are doing.

I ask you to reflect on that. Not because the minister said so. Consult the voice within.
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Sometimes, in the face of all that is going so tragically wrong in the world and this period of tragic shame for our nation — in the face of all the ways the magnificent promise of our being human is being betrayed — we may feel just a little bit overwhelmed, as in scream, cover your ears, run out the door, and suffer a debilitating trauma.

You know, there is another kind of convention, or conventional thinking, into which we can fall if we lose our spiritual center. Sharon Welch calls it “cultured despair.” The idea that only a fool or nut can look square into the face of the wretchedness and still be full of hope and promise.

What good is a higher consciousness in the face of all this?

But listen. The Renaissance was participated in by only about a thousand people. A parlor-full of people in Concord changed the religious and political course of America. If you’re into the Jesus thing, how many disciples was that he had?

In my current adult education course — oh, let me call it our Center for Spiritual Development course — we’re reflecting on a style of spiritual life that can illumine our lives now, and reflecting on a spectacular phenomenon that happened when our spiritual forebears gathered in Concord and Boston a century and a half ago. There really weren’t that many of them. Some thought they were fools, some thought they were nutty dreamers, over the edge. And the world has not been the same because of them. It’s time to write the next chapter, to unfold that splendid vision a little farther in our time. Are you ready?
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Immanuel Kant said “Act as if everything you do might actually become a universal rule.”

And to paraphrase Ken Wilber, every act you do on the leading edge becomes a groove that subsequent human beings will follow. You are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.

Often, when folks come through our doors for the first time, it is out of personal need, it’s driven by a hunger for personal growth. But then, a little further down that spiritual path, you realize that what drew you here never could have been that private, that personal. We come to know that our own development was always for the sake of the further unfolding of human consciousness, for the sake of the future of Life Itself.

What we do here matters so much. We don’t get to see the rippling consequences. But that’s why it’s so important that we get it right.

I said this a couple of weeks ago — we may sometimes stumble and fail. We won’t always get it right. But there will be something firing us that is worth our living and dying, our stumbling and getting up again, and fired by that, we can try and try and try again until we get it right.

Let your life —let our life together — be a counter-friction to stop the machine, — to create a space for the further unfolding of the human spirit.

Parting

Would you take the hand of the person next to you.

Walt Whitman

I know that the past was great and the future will be great,
And I know that both curiously conjoint in the present time,
And that where I am, or you are, this present day, there is the center of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that ever has come of races and days, or ever will come.

Look around you. See those around you who have experienced so much that is life, who now face another day, another season. See a people joined by a covenant of promise and hope.

May the circle be open but never broken.

Go in peace:

The work of peace is in our hands.

Meditation

From the tracks and passages these lives traverse we meet in this hour to ask whence we come and whither we go, and to find courage, and to celebrate and to mourn.

How long and mysterious is the journey! How often we tremble, grow weary, and fear. Let these joined faces and voices cheer us, and assure us that we travel not alone.

And in the quietness let the Silence speak. Let us hear, resonating through that Silence, the All, the One, great Brahman, the Soul of the Whole, made manifest in each life, in which we live, beyond the boundaries of these particles and cells and skin, one great living web of Being. Let our eyes be open to see all in our selves and our selves in all, bound in the Covenant of Life, acknowledging the kinship that joins us, the Necessity that calls us, the unfolding splendor that draws us onward.

Let the wonder and the awe cast out our fear. Let the glory of Being lift our sorrow. Let the greater Joy beyond accidents of circumstance energize for the sacred works of Life

In this silence . . .

Readings

From Rabbi Lionel Blue, Britain’s best-known rabbi,
in his Hitchhiking to Heaven, 2004

The second object of my devotion was an established member of the Catholic Church, very reliable and very pious. Franz Jaegerstaedter was a quiet, conservative civil servant who refused to send in his Nazi German call-up papers because it was obvious to him that Germany’s war was not defensive and therefore he could take no part in it. His wife, his bishop begged him to compromise — they would find him a non-combatant posting. He considered but regretfully decided he would not accept his cosy compact with the devil. He was ’officially’ murdered by the state.

His crime was that he had seen the obvious. It is strange that the official State Lutheran Church didn’t see it, nor Pious XII, nor Opus Dei, nor some ’saints’, whom Pope John Paul has canonised. Perhaps they did, but didn’t like it or found it inconvenient to speak out or just couldn’t cope. Jews who have been refugees don’t see Palestinian refugees either.

I also got to know Germany in another way. A Hamburg artist picked me up in Amsterdam harbour. He thought I was ’rough trade’ and was amused to find he had caught a student rabbi. . . . Through him I met other men in bars in Bremen and Hamburg. Some told me their life stories . . . They were still chilled by what might have been done to them in concentration camps — pink badges attracted more sadism than Jewish yellow ones.

These encounters forced me to reflect on myself in a fundamental way and not just on myself but all rabbis, my future colleagues and present teachers. While listening to their instruction, I couldn’t help wondering what would they have done if the Nazis had left Jews alone and only shot gypsies, beheaded homos, and tortured socialists and liberals? Would they have passed by on the other side, or rushed to the rescue? Would they have distanced themselves from such human ’rubbish’ or remembered that religion means more than respectability? who knows?

But even that question is too easy. The hard one is what would I have done if I’d been a German rabbi at that time? Would I have been a hero, a conformist, a mild Nazi even? don’t know.

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From the Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung:

What is it in the end, that induces a person to go his/her own way and to rise out of unconscious identify with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decisions, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extraordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a person to emancipate him/herself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation that puts its trust in it as in God. . . . But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner person: he [or she] is called.

(CW 17 para 299)