A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
December 4, 2005

We sit here this Sunday morning in the midst of a world that is changing fast.

This Wednesday I sat with four colleagues, ministers of Unitarian Universalist congregations, all of whom reported a weariness, spoke of congregations of people freaked out by the state of the nation and the world, exhibiting a desire to find a cave in which to curl up and sleep for awhile.

The national government, disgraced in a web of distortion and untruth, is unraveling rapidly. The world’s climate has gone haywire. The economy is increasingly unstable and unreliable for any but the very rich in a world of imperial corporations. Rent by resentment about American power and its abuse, the world seems to be coming unglued.

The revelations are only becoming more dumbfounding. Faked news planted in the Iraqi press, Presidential plans to bomb the Al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, and increasingly isolated President who hears no voices that don’t echo his messianic scheme for Iraq, —

And now 180 countries gather in Montreal to talk about emissions targets under the Kyoto Protoco — without the United States, even as the currents that drive the Gulf Stream, which keeps northern Europe and Britain temperate, appear to be slowing dramatically.

And it all feels so very overwhelming.

No wonder the public mood is coming unhinged. Unless we can create space for people to participate in creating a different future, we’re not going to be able to halt what now seems inevitable. [1]

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We sit here and we wonder, have to wonder — what is it we are supposed to be doing? Where do we take hold? Is there no respite?
I believe, and I know many of you do as well, that these questions are vital to our congregation. That life can no longer be about going about whatever we have been doing with the certainty that the best we can do is what we once did.

What in the past we have done may have been the best it could have been. But what we bring to the present and future is what we know, and what we know is mostly the past, our past. We know pretty well how to repeat it, but when we do, it has no life, no potency.

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Last week I spoke of Advent, this symbolic time in the liturgical year when, in a dark time, you wait for something that will come and bring relief, salvation, enlightenment, whatever you wish to call it — but you don’t just wait. You see something, hear something. You see some kind of revelation, some enlightenment, and what you see and hear, you become, and that is what you do.

That’s a bit different from the traditional idea of Advent where you wait for a God to come and take care of matters. What other hands does it have? As the Hindu Upanishads repeat over and over, Thou Art That. That hope, that salvation, will have to be you, and can be you, and will be you.

How do we get there? Isn’t that the religious question for our Advent? What do we have to learn? How do we have to change?
Or, to put it in Otto Scharmer’s terms: What does it take to connect to that other stream of time, the one that gently pulls us toward our future possibility?

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One of the biblical stories associated with Advent — one I’ve told here and won’t retell now — pictures Jesus, head full of popular and customary assumptions, going to the wilderness to hear John the Baptist, a preacher of all the popular and customary assumptions, proposing the old solutions, with a little bit of a new twist here and there, but really it was the old idea of what salvation would be: a Messiah comes and leads Israel back to its former glory as in the days of David and Solomon.

The important thing is that he goes to the Wilderness and once there he stays long enough, after John has finished and gone, hears different voices. The first thing to note is something the Buddhists call Cessation. Full stop. The stuff whizzing around your head comes to a halt.

I’ll give you just the end of the story: he comes out of the Wilderness different, with a whole different understanding of his life, and the life of the world, and the future, and his own future possibility, and what it is he’s supposed to do.

That’s step one. That’s radical enough for most of us but it doesn’t stop there.

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Next thing, he sees and hears things he’s not accustomed to, from a different place. The authors of the quite brilliant new book from which the reading came suggest where that place ought to be: we need to begin to see, not from outside of things, from outside this aching world of possibility, but from within the whole. This whole aching world, so full of possibility, of which I am a part, we are a part. Hang back and observe, observe, observe — asking, What’s fundamentally going on here? Where does my life, where does our life, belong in the making of this new earth? You can’t rush it. Observe . . . until . . . you see.

When you see it, it commands your life.

Now you’re not looking from the past you know so well — but from a future that has not yet happened.

This is the real religious work of prophecy. Sensing the unfolding future before it unfolds.

You see from within the whole, becoming one with the world you’re observing, knowing that there is one body of all life.

You retreat and you reflect, cease the habitual thought-patterns and suspend the habitual solutions, and see, hear.

And then there’s hardly anything to decide. If you know who you are and where you’re coming from, you know what to do. Like that vision of the star-thrower last week — you see the highest future possibility that connects your unfolding self with this whole. Our deeper identity comes clearer and may surprise us.

I felt my mind expanding,” said Otto Scharmer, standing in front of the smoldering ruins at the age of 16. “I felt my mind expanding to a moment of unparalleled clarity of awareness. I realized that I was not the person I thought I was.”

But what person was that? A series of attachments and identifications. Well —I know about that. It all burned down. Now he was released from all that and free to meet that part of himself that drew him into the future — and into a world that he could bring into reality with his life.

But — what if the house had not burned?

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There is a realm from which the future is emerging. Not simply Advent, but virtually the whole of the mystical and visionary tradition everywhere — calls us to that realm, because in those moments, we can look back at the present where we sit today — and know very deeply how it is that we are linked to our highest future possibility and destiny.

Can we know that place? Can we sense, in some deep way, who we are as stewards and servants of what’s trying to come to birth in the world?

George Bernard Shaw talked about how, when this happens, it feels:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose you consider a mighty one, the being a force of nature, rather than a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. [2]

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The authors describe another scene. Two of them had been involved in the profound changes in South Africa; a third was deeply involved in Guatamala. In Guatamala, there was something called “Vision Guatamala” to try to see beyond the 36-years of civil war and terror and death squads. They describe a session in which, one after one, some of those who had suffered the horrors of that time told their stories. After one particularly wrenching description of a massacre, more terrible than I want to describe to you, the room fell silent. Stayed silent for some time. When the silence ended, a genuine enlightenment had fully taken hold. There was nothing, really, to left decide. They didn’t have to put their ideas together. They had heard the voice in the silence. They knew who they were and why they had come together. They heard what it was that wanted to happen and that something drew them in, committed them irretrievably. They knew who they were and they knew something more of their own destiny. First, something had happened in the hearing of human voices, speaking the truth of their own lives and sufferings. Afterwards, in that silence, something greater and more profound had happened. Something had actually unfolded. Spontaneously and quite naturally, the new took hold; they began to act differently.

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Now when the world’s on fire — may we see the possibility pictured by the wilderness listening of Advent. May we be freed from our pre-formed assumptions and frameworks. May we enter the place that lowers the walls between us, shifts our intentions, and opens to us a vision from the heart of reality and not from the margins.

Sometimes, the greatest possibility reveals itself in the deepest calamity, when the world is on fire. There is something Camus once wrote, at the end of “Create Dangerously,” that captures it:

Let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. For in my opinion, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.

A profound opening of the mind and heart to something beyond, and in that something beyond you find your own being; — it is you, it is us, it is the whole, the all; — in that other stream of time, the one that gently pulls you toward the future possibility, and enmeshed in that future possibility, in your own future possibility, the work that is given to you in this time —

Then the new earth can be born in us.

[1] Slightly paraphrased from Presence, 165
[2] Dedicatory Epistle, Man and Superman, 1950.

Copyright © 2005 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.

Meditation

We gather in the quietness and await a greater Silence beyond the noise and tumult where enlightenment may meet us, and other senses awaken, and we see, and hear, with clarity.

May we learn the meaning of our gathering and learn to gather well so that, in a dangerous time, a new earth may be born amid the rubble.

We bring these lives of ours yearning to know the meaning of our days and the path into our future. Yet now a deeper necessity joins us, a wider purpose, a grander possibility. Let our eyes be opened to see it, our ears to hear it.

May we be weaned from attachment to all that does not matter, that does not call us into our own unfolding future, that does not join us to the call of these times. In this quietness, in this sacred space, let there flow among us a Spirit and a strength to let go the fear, the delusion, what is false, what shackles and fetters us.

Breaking through the worn, the outmoded, the broken ruins of empire, the wreckage of striving without vision, the wreckage of our times: — let the new world arise

In this silence.

Reading

From Presence, a new book by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers

Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Presence. An Exploration of Profund Change in People, Organizations, and Society. New York: Currency/Doubleday/Random House, 2004, 79-82.

The first time I experienced this feeling, I was sixteen years old. I left for school one morning, and by the time I got home, everything had changed.

About halfway through the day, the principal called me out of my class and told me to go home. She didn’t tell me why, but I noticed that her eyes were slightly red, as if she had been crying. I walked as quickly as I could to the train station, and from there I called home, but no one answered — the line was dead. I boarded the train, and after the usual forty-five minute ride, I took a cab rather than wait for the bus to take me the last few miles home. It was the first time I’d ever taken a cab.

Long before we arrived, I saw it. Huge gray-black clouds of smoke were rising into the air. The long chestnut-lined driveway that led to the farm was choked with hundreds of neighbors, firefighters, policemen, and gawkers. I jumped from the cab and ran the last half mile.

When I reached the courtyard, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The huge 350-year-old farmhouse, where my family had lived for the past two hundred years and where I’d lived all my life, was gone. As we stood there, I saw that there was nothing — absolutely nothing — left but the smoldering ruins. As the reality of what was before my eyes sank in, I felt as if somebody had removed the ground from under my feet. The place of my birth, childhood, and youth was gone. Everything that I had was gone.

But then, as my gaze sank deeper into the flames, the flames also seemed to sink into me. I felt time slowing down. Only in that moment did I realize how attached I had been to all the things destroyed by the fire. Everything I was and had been intimately connected to had dissolved into nothing. But no — I realized not everything was gone: there was still a tiny element of myself that wasn’t gone with the fire. I was still there watching — I, the seer. I suddenly realized that there was another whole dimension of my self that I hadn’t been aware of, a dimension that didn’t relate to my past, to the world that had just dissolved.

At the moment, time slowed to complete stillness and I felt drawn in a direction above my physical body and began watching the whole scene from that other place. I felt my mind expanding to a moment of unparalleled clarity of awareness. I realized that I was not the person I thought I was. My real self was not attached to the tons of stuff now smoldering inside the ruins. I suddenly knew that I, my true Self, was still alive — more alive, more awake, more acutely present than ever before. I now realized how much all the material things that I’d become attached to over the years, without ever noticing it, had weighed me down. At that moment, with everything gone, I suddenly felt released and free to encounter that other part of my self, the part that drew me into the future — into my future — and into a world that I might bring into reality with my life.

The next day my grandfather arrived. He was eighty-seven years old and had lived on the farm all his life. He had left the house a week before to go to the hospital for medical treatments.

Summoning all the energy he had left, my grandfather got out of the car and walked straight to where my father was still working on the cleanup. He didn’t even turn his head toward the smoking ruins of the place where he’d spent his entire life. He simply went straight up to my father, took his hand, and said, “Keep your head up, my boy. Look forward.”

Turning around, he walked directly back to the waiting car and left. A few days later, he died quietly.

It evoked a question in me that still remains: What does it take to connect to that other stream of time, the one that gently pulls me toward my future possibility?