A sermon by F. Jay Deacon

Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence

September 18, 2005

Here is a great grief and a great joy: the loveliest of good lives, the kindest, the sweetest, whose gentle laugh cannot be forgotten — reduced to confusion, and terror, and helpless oblivion, dying, finally, in a state unrecognizably remote from the person anyone knew.

Where has she gone?

Five years ago, when Dad died, Mom began doing things she had never done: like air travel, and drinking margaritas. When, three years ago, the old house was sold — where Mom had spent the last 56 years and Dad had spent 53 — my sister and her husband took her in, a mile down the road by Barnegat Bay. I don't know when the word Alzheimer's first came up. Mom was losing a few words and some long-term memories. Soon she would have to stop driving. I would ask her about people and events in the past — elders know these things — and more and more often she would laugh and say "You know I don't remember much." Still, she could laugh, I don't know how.

The missing words multiplied until a complete sentence was impossible. But she was her same dear, funny self. Until this summer, really. Now she was confused, frightened, and crying, pleading with Pat and Al not to leave the house. This past June, with a lot of anguish and after a careful investigation of nearby facilities, Pat, exhausted and over her head, moved her to the best nursing home she could find. The worst was about to begin. Mom spent a lot of time crying but couldn't say what was wrong, couldn't put her finger on it. Last month as we sat in the nursing home she said to me, "We could go out . . . What does that mean?" I think she was missing home and wanted to return there, but couldn't even get clear in her mind that that was it, that there had been a place called home.

While she was still living with my sister, she was found reading a little book none of us had ever seen. It had been authored by our Mom herself as a high school senior in 1935, though now the contents seemed entirely new to her. We'd never known the dreams and convictions she cherished and had once committed to the little book. She describes herself as an "anti-war fanatic" and makes a strong case. She speaks of her hopes of higher education, smashed by economic pressures. She wants to travel the world as an ambassador of peace. She wants to be a broadcaster. She wants to leave the world better than she found it. But, she writes, "I have been advised not to be a nurse."

She earned an RN and served as a public health nurse for many, many years. She devoted herself to her work, even though poorly paid, seemingly always running about Ocean County tending to the county's clients who called at home needing her. She never traveled the world or crossed the American border.

After Dad was gone, while I was living in London, I almost persuaded my sister to bring her across the sea. She really ought to have seen the great monument on Great Portland Street — near Florence Nightingale's — to her great-great (there may be more "greats" in there) grandfather, Sir Joseph Lister. But it wasn't thought prudent.

Her forebears — mine — lived in Yorkshire, England, some in Huddersfield. Some crossed the Atlantic between 1820 and 1830 and settled around Philadelphia and then New Jersey. I found that in another book she'd kept and never told us about, a very old family Bible, with registered Eugenics tables going back to the 1890s. By the time we found it in the attic of the old house, she didn't know what it was. Her father was a dentist and a devout Presbyterian — except for when he was a devout Baptist. It all depended on which minister he was displeased with at the time. Depending on that,he would move his men's Bible study from one church to the other. And such a Calvinist. A dentist who refused to use Novocaine.

And they were Republicans. Both sides of my family were staunch Republicans, united in their loathing for Franklin Roosevelt. My grandfather once refused to shake President Wilson's hand because he had had a divorce. My father's side of the family had been more severe evangelical Republicans. My dad believed in the Vietnam War because an American victory would mean Christian missionaries could go and covert all those poor doomed Southeast Asians from Buddhism or whatever to Christianity and they could go to heaven.

In so many ways they pretty much resembled their cultural surroundings. Their Bible was the only one to consider, and all truth. Their America, their church, their South Jersey — not to be confused with North Jersey, which was heavily Democratic. Dad was the head of the household — mowed the lawn but didn't do dishes, always drove the car, always held on to the TV remote control, though he'd be asleep on the couch.

Mom was utterly loyal, always deferring to him, never contradicting him. Sometimes I could see the wrenching conflict on her face, but she remained silent. At first I embraced their world, with its values and beliefs. Their gods were my gods. They were evangelical Presbyterians — my form of revolt was to become an outright fundamentalist. That was all a long time ago.

v

Robert Kegan, in his In Over Our Heads, talks about life as a big school. The curriculum consists of our growth through orders of consciousness until we arrive at one where we stay.

v

My mom watched in anguish as I disappointed Dad. I felt his disappointment, though never hers. I didn't turn out different in order to disappoint him. The world changed. I found in my own soul different realities to reckon with. I had to abandon the household gods, evangelical Presbyterian sorts of gods; and the fundamentalist ones, too.

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Now maybe this was the roughest part. Suddenly I was a fish out of water. A fish out of water is a fish who has nothing to suspend it and has to move toward something that can. That' a tough quest — it's not automatic or smooth or even certain. Robert Kegan says a fish out of water "evokes the image of a desperate, expiring creature cut off from what it needs to survive. But `a fish out of water' is also the story of the evolution of our species."¹

Such a fish is not exulting in this marvelous evolutionary triumph onward and upward, into a creature that can live on land. Mostly they're looking for another pond to jump into. I found a few transitional ponds. Then, when later on I found my religious home in Unitarian Universalism, I remember telling someone, "Now if I change my mind, I'm still home. I don't have to find another home." Here was a pond that at least understands the enterprise we're all engaged in — not just measuring each others' orthodoxy against some a pre-formed explanation of the universe — No, this enterprise is about evolving consciousness, and supporting each other in doing so.

When Carl Jung went his own way, he disappointed both his mentor, Sigmund Freud, and his father, who didn't understand. In a vision only a little different from a dream I had — but much funnier than my dream — Jung is looking at the glittering roof of the cathedral, and he sees God the Father sitting on his golden throne high above the world, and then, from under the throne — let me quote Jung, I'd better quote him here — "from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder."

Jung continues:

I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. . . . A great many things I had not previously understood became clear to me. That was what my father had not understood, I thought: he had failed to experience the will of God, had opposed it for the best reasons and out of the deepest faith. . . . He had taken the Bible's commandments as his guide; he believed in God as the Bible prescribed and as his forefathers had taught him. But he did not know the immediate living God who stands, omnipotent and free, above His Bible and His Church, who calls upon man to partake of his freedom, and can force him to renounce his own views and convictions in order to fulfill without reserve the command of God. In His trial of human courage God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred.²

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We will have to discover a Self larger and more encompassing. We have to be the authors of our own book. Sometimes that calls for a changing of the gods. A very traumatic thing to do.

There had been in my former Chicago church a young man who came out as a gay man to his parents in a letter, and then he went home for Christmas. They had changed the locks. Their gods told them to do it.

I wondered what Mom and Dad would do. I had heard Mom talk about "homos." When my brother-in-law announced that he was gay, I heard Mom say, "Michael was such a nice young man before his illness." When I did journey to New Jersey and tell them, noting the books on the shelf by Anita Bryant, my Mom utterly astonished me. "What matters is that you're happy. What matters is what you do with your life," she said, adding, "I'd been wondering." By my next visit the Anita Bryant books had been replaced by some gay-friendly titles.

How did she know? For a long time that huge Presbyterian church provided Mom and Dad with no support in that kind of expansion of consciousness. I don't know where it came from. There is a quality about Being Itself — a property it has; — there is a capacity in Nature to evolve and grow in complexity and depth.

I could go home again to the slightly overgrown honeysuckle, and there was a comfort with my Dad and my Mom that I couldn't have predicted. Even if who I am was not fully understood, it was accepted — except for my Unitarian Universalism, which they found a deep mystery. My sister, now a Quaker, confided with me about a conversation with them in which they expressed concern for my eternal salvation. They didn't know what to make of a wildly changing world, a divorced and remarried Quaker daughter, a gay Unitarian Universalist son.

v

Spiritual writers through the ages have often spoken of a self so large and expansive that it can look on the identity you present to the world and see it with detachment, as if from a distance — look at the values and beliefs of your culture from a larger place — hold all the precious and nurturing relationships, the changing and fractured relationships of our lives, — hold them within a self larger than those relationships, hold them in a self which lies open to a more central love, a love higher, more broad, more deep, that pours into you as if from Beyond, always, in every hour and place — and reminds you that you are more than you know.

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There was more to them than they knew how to talk about. And they chose to hold those relationships precious and to hold their soul open to something they didn't understand, something more than they knew. This trait — it reminds me, strangely, of William Ellery Channing and his children.

Channing's spiritual children were the Transcendentalists — Emerson, Parker, Fuller. He knew it and they knew it. But Channing was a committed, biblical Christian. Even late in his life Channing insisted, in his words, "Jesus ever lives, and is ever active for mankind. He is Mediator, Intercessor, Lord, and Saviour." Not a very Transcendentalist thing to say. He firmly believed in the miracles of the Bible. Once he wrote to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody his worries about the great Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, one of his spiritual children. He's just read a sermon of Parker's that Elizabeth Peabody had sent him:

I grieved that [Mr Parker] did not give some clear, direct expression of his belief in the Christian miracles. His silence under such circumstances makes me fear that he does not believe them. I see not how the rejection of these can be separated from the rejection of Jesus Christ.

Mom and Dad, and Dr. Channing, held their fears about their offspring in this same way. It's explained by Samuel Johnson, who wrote that hymn, Life of Ages — he was one of those spiritual children of Channing, too, another great Transcendentalist minister. And he said:⁴

The limits of Dr. Channing . . . were of the head, not of the heart; and the ever forward look of the prophetic man inspired all younger and freer minds.

There have been times when my mother has made some pretty startling statements that show a degree of vision, and ability to comprehend, that her Presbyterian church did not give her. Here is something more that Channing said about his offspring. You must understand that within Mr. Channing's Unitarian church, Parker was an outcaste, a wild radical. It is hard to tell you why it grips me as it does, but here it is:

As to Mr. Parker, I wish him to preach what he thoroughly believes and feels. I trust the account you received of attempts to put him down was in the main a fiction. Let the full heart pour itself forth! And still more, — it will rejoice me to find a good . . . which I cannot anticipate. . . . Give my love to Mr. Parker. I shall be glad to hear from him, and in perfect freedom. . . . I honor his virtues. I feel that he has seized on some great truths . . .⁵

I have contemplated Channing's death. This is the account of another of his Transcendentalist spiritual children, Octavius Brooks Frothingham:

He was taken ill in a hotel, in Bennington, Vermont, October 2, 1842. As the vital flame in him burned low, he said, "I have received many messages from the spirit." His whisper was his last communication. With declining day his countenance sank. Being assisted, he turned to the window at the east. The curtains were drawn back, and the light fell on his face. He gazed over the valleys and wooded hills, and none but God and the spirit knew when his soul passed to that prospect which the horizon could not bound.

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That is not how my Mom died this past Thursday morning. Her face had been wrenched in the terror and confusion of Alzheimer's Disease; her cries would haunt the core of you. When my sister reached the hospital where she'd been taken the night before, she found the emaciated body, her face no longer wrenched as the night before, but calm. Her suffering was over.

v

When I went last month, I hadn't been sure she'd even recognize me, but when we found her where she had wandered in the secure section of the nursing home, her face lighted up. She reached up and hugged and kissed me. Two or three weeks later she would be beyond recognizing my brother when he came from San Francisco.

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And where is she?

The ancient mystics and spiritual sages — and not a few modern ones as well — have understood that these cells and particles that hurt and decay are not the ultimate reality. They arise out of an intelligence, a Ground of Being that is primal consciousness. And we — we separate individuals are entities with brains in which a kind of self-referential quantum measurement takes place, and that provides us with memory and a sense of individual identity and personality. But we partake in one Life, one Mind, one Being from which these cells and particles arise, from a realm of possibility, the Great Unmanifest made manifest in particular forms and ways in each of us, in the moments and choices of our lives.

We live, as Emerson put it in his essay "The Over-Soul," within

that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other . . . Meantime within [us] is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal one. And [in] this deep power in which we exist, . . . the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

And if, as Kegan says, the curriculum of life consists of our growth through orders of consciousness — I think there is no more urgent project in our living than never to stop growing but to expand ourselves beyond those stages of development that can only see our life as the separated realm of cells and particles and the small-s individual "self." To achieve those moments when we genuinely sense and feel that all of Life is one, to sense and feel the soul of the whole. And then we can know that those we miss terribly are not wholly gone from us, nor could they be.

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And I think for us, in a community of faith and life, — It's one thing to provide to one another a mutual assurance of respect for the integrity of the other's being and convictions. I guess that's what you call tolerance. Allow you to be you and me to be me. It is another thing to insist of one another that we be true to ourselves, that be never be satisfied with an identity consisting of conformity to some imagined dogma about what we are supposed to be — something other than, less than, we are. We are more than we know.⁷

v

The life of the world will change rapidly in the days ahead. Those who — to some extent — represent the new quality of consciousness that must emerge from these times — UUs among them — will hold a crucial role in determining whether the time to come will be a cataclysm or a saving transformation.

Every one of us shares in the rising now of a new consciousness and a new world. We won't always have the tools to understand it, but we must try. And when we cannot — let our limits, like those of Dr. Channing, like Dad's and Mom's — let them be limits of the head, and not of the heart. Let us trust the loving, healing, creative powers that are at work in us and in this time, and commit to them, because what is at stake is this whole world of life.

To take our place in that work — to commit ourselves to it — will make our lives worth dying for.

¹ Robert Kegan. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 105.

² Carl Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Random House, 1963, p. 36.

³ Kegan, 319.

⁴ Johnson, Samuel. Theodore Parker, a Lecture. Ed. John H. Clifford and Horace L. Traubel. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1890, 20.

⁵ Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880, p. 429.

⁶ Old Age, in Society and Solitude. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1870, p. 331.

⁷ Kegan, 319.

⁸ Kegan, 134.

Readings

Annie Dillard:

[43] So this is where we are. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? . . . Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other — for world . . . — is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and racing to the realm of spirit bare. . . . . . . . . . [65] Each thing in the world is translucent . . , and moving, cell by cell. I remember this reality. Where has it been?. . . . Everything, everything, is whole, and a parcel of everything else. I myself am falling down, slowly, or slowly lifting up. . [I] see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth's contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone. For outside it is bright. . . . It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable. There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time. There is only this everything. There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise. —Holy the Firm

Meditate

Out of the turmoil, the tumult,
the projects, the important business We have stepped aside, paused, gathered to
catch our breath
breath the air that is life to us
notice our breath, in and out And to remember
remember that as we breathe, in and out
so do we share one Life, one Spirit,
so do our individual forms
give expression to formless Spirit And to remember
that we are not separate from the very Life of All
it is closer than our breath
it is Love and we are encompassed in Love
that will not let us go. May we therefore know our place in the world: Bearers of Love
Prophets of the truth that all are held in Divine embrace
Creators of the world that shall be
Those who know that anguish and hurt may be turned to
joy and revelation
Seers whose vision pierces through
the sham, the hype, the popular delusion,
the tempation to live as less than we are Spirit in us renew our spirits
embolden us with courage and hope And let us hear
above the noise
the Silent Music
that flows from the Immensity
beyond
Silence.

Parting

Walt Whitman

I announce natural persons to arise;
I announce justice triumphant;
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality;
I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride.
I announce splendors and majesties to make all
The previous politics of the earth insignificant.
I announce adhesiveness^__I say it shall be limitless, unloosened;
I say you shall yet find the friend you were
Looking for.
I announce a man or woman coming^__perhaps you are the one.
I announce the great individual, fluid as
Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate,
Fully armed.
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold;
I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully
Meet its translation.