A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 29, 2006

We all grow up a little battered, bent, jury-rigged with fixes that let us get by, but that cover over sometimes small, sometimes gaping holes in our selves. And into those gaps we stuff what we can.

What it is we’ve put there isn’t just accidental. We put, in place of something once fundamental to ourselves — in place of some Essence about ourselves, in place of something absolutely authentic to ourselves — in its place we’ve put something that resembles that Essence in some way, that kinda looks like it.

If what we’ve missed is Compassion, we may well have stuffed in its place a never quite satisfactory sentimentality.

If it’s intuition that you’ve lost, you might stuff the hole with a lot of schemes and theories.

If what we’re missing is Strenth or personal Power we’ve put bravado and coercion and violence. Or maybe just rigidity or stubbornness.

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Oh oh. I guess I’ve just described a false personality that’s been structured around the most glaring deficiencies, those gaps in the real self. John Davis puts it: “We experience ourselves through thick veils of ideas, ideals, beliefs, images, reactions, memories, desires, hopes, prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, positions, identifications, ego structures, labels, and accumulated knowledge,” [1] our past. Not a lot fresh and immediate about that!

You construct a personality that isn’t free, but a prison. But you know there is a treasure beyond price even if you know you haven’t reached it.

But this false personality put together out of defenses and filler is a reflection of a truth, an attempt to imitate something essential and true that’s gotten lost. Follow its clues. That’s the path to enlightenment.

Somewhere, under all this surface and defense, there is an Essence — something that might flow freely, spontaneously, and authentically as if from Beyond, in your very being and personhood. You can be a force of nature. The fulfillment of your potential as a human being is possible.

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In a child, this authentic essence begins to reveal itself and, when it does, it meets with varying qualities of reception. When we are very young, we need from our parents and the adults around us a mirroring back of our intrinsic beauty, worth, love. When you’re about a year, a year and a half old, you’re learning to walk, you’re full of energy and confidence, you’re learning to navigate the world. Wow. You feel very grand. But you need to have this sense of grandeur mirrored wisely and affirmingly by the adults around you so you can integrate it. Sometimes you will fall, sometimes fall from grace, sometimes prove not a bit omnipotent or grand.

Were those adults around you really attuned to your Essense, to the free flow of your authentic self? What was rewarded, what was idealized, what was mirrored back to you in affirmation?

So there you were — creating a brand new identity in a way that you thought would win you love and pleasure and protect you from abandonment and pain. Well, of course, you don’t do that anymore — present the world, present yourself — with a persona designed to get you love and pleasure and protection from abandonment and pain! Of — course — you — don’t —

And we need people and things and concepts and spiritual teachings to support a really authentic sense of identity. If these finest and highest understandings of what we are — get undermined instead of supported, there will be hurt and disappointment and anger. Hatred for what wounded us, brought us down, devalued what was truest and best in us. Planted seeds of cynicism.

And that wound, that place of deficit and hurt, can lead us to what is most true and essential in us.

Sam Keen wrote:

The hole in the ego
is where the holy
flows in and out . . .

What is it that we do to avoid shame, worthlessness, insignificance?

The path from that hole, that gap — the path through it — home to the Essense we have lost, — is not so long as we think. If we can enter that passageway, understand it, we can find the treasure beyond price.

We can find the real power in our lives.

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You might consider it unspiritual to admit our human need for power, but we bring that need here. It’s real and legitimate. We’re uncomfortable talking about our need for it, so maybe let’s consider it the other way around: we can and do talk about “powerlessness.” We agree — it’s a bad thing. It really doesn’t matter how many Gods are out there thundering the great biblical I AM if you can’t find the I AM inside. It isn’t good to be weak and helpless. The search for a God-out-there is futile, and we will ache and hurt and want in vain, without relief, as long as the search for God is conducted on the outside. The kingdom of heaven is within.

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Where people are so profoundly alienated from the power of their essential humanity and from the heart of Being Itself,

— where the treadmill of competition, the pursuit of material wealth, the false identities of party and ideology,
— replace the grandeur of life itself and of our own authentic humanity
— the spectres of terror and torture, and of greed and ecocide — will rise to haunt us.

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Sometimes in popular religion, power seems to mean eliminating some evil — gay people or muslims or Democrats, perhaps — or at least making them illegal.

In our public life, there are winners and losers, and so our nation seems incapable of designing a welfare system that doesn’t humiliate the recipients.

Our ruling political party has become so obsessed with power that retaining it and expanding it seems to comprise its entire agenda.
Nothing else — not ecological devastation, not the desperate poverty and hunger of masses of the world’s people — none of this matters. Only power matters.

Power in such a culture just another name for fear masquerading as bravado. The general or president who cannot imagine enough advanced weapons to counter the threat of the imagined enemy — is a general or president who is controlled by fear. No one wants to be a loser.

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Power is the capacity to trust your own truth and act on it with conviction in the face of danger. It is the capacity to take control of your own life and to be able to say “I am responsible for what happens here; I must do what lies within my power to do — for the sake of myself and for the sake of the world; I must contribute what is mine to contribute toward the possible human future.” [2]

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Now, a congregation is a gathering of people faced with this same spiritual dilemma and quest.

And this is not so much a presentation of a formula for getting there, as it is a plea to a community of faith to be an fruitful garden for authenticity, a place where nothing ranks higher on its scale of priority than the discovering, liberating, and cultivating of this essential humanity in each of us: — a place that says to each of us “We believe in you, and we are committed to the unfolding of your essential humanity and the powers that are yours with which to gift this world.”

And inseparable from that, it is a plea for this to be a place that understands these lives of ours as part and parcel of a greater world.
Let this be a place that knows deeply the truth that we live in a world where great forces and powers are creating a future, and some of that future is deadly, and we are here — do we understand this? — we are here to make the highest and finest possible human future come to birth instead of the worst. So it matters when we gather that the scientist James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis that the Earth is a living, intelligent organism of which we are a part, for whose health we are responsible, is dying because of our activity. A couple of weeks ago he issued his starkest warning. In what kind of spiritual community would that truth not be spoken as part of what is essential to our self-understanding? Would you want to be a part of it?

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There is a great spiritual theme, sweeping across many particular religious traditions, of waiting, in a dark time, waiting 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. You become a force of Nature.

Of course, my Unitarian Universalist take on this is a bit different from the traditional idea , where you wait for a God to come and take care of matters. What other hands does the possible future 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, and us.

How do we get there? What do we have to learn? How do we have to change?

How do we make a real connection with the Essence of our very selves, beyond the ideas, ideals, beliefs, images, reactions, memories, positions, identifications, ego structures, and labels?

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A community that makes room for this central quest, makes it part of the equation — will be electric.

It will free the creativity inherent in us.

It will open in us our best passions and energies.

It will stay focussed on its mission and do so with great imagination. It will not waste time and energy on trivia, spend long meetings to make one inconsequential decision. It will think bold thoughts; it will attempt significant things.

It will radiate respect, trust, and mutual regard.

It will be a place where human lives are transformed from within, by the force of the power within them — and it will cherish the transformation.

It will take risks. It will give you space to make mistakes and learn and keep at it until you get it right.

It will work, really work, at finding the gifts and capacities of each of its members, and make a place for them. It will will be a force and a factor and a healing presence in this world.

We — you and I — need this Unitarian Society to be that place. We have the power to make it so.

1 John Davis. The Diamond Approach. An Introduction to the Teachings of A.H. Almaas. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1999, p. 140.
2 Carol S. Pearson. The Hero Within. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989, 83f.

For further reading: John Davis. The Diamond Approach. An Introduction to the Teachings of A.H. Almaas. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1999.

Meditate

From the facts of our days, the facts of the cold and grey, of work and home and joy and duty, we are gathered to contemplate the stupendous fact of our existence.

We gather in this sanctuary

away for awhile from the demands of everyday

and we contemplate the work of

our hands and

our minds.

So often thwarted, distracted, compromised, stifled
Undermined by doubt and fear
And so we come with these gifts of our works and words

to offer them before the Mystery of Life
that they might be lifted and refined as the offerings of our lives
the sacred work of our days.

Let there be renewed in us

a trust in the deeds and labors that flow from the heart of us
a trust in these hearts of ours from which our work flows

for good done without recognition

in doubt and uncertainty

Yet we trust our labors

as we trust a harvest we shall not see.

Let there be renewed in us

faith

in the just and the compassionate and the true

In the silence.

Reading

Sam Keen, Beginnings Without End.

Begin with the end. . . . Death lurks beneath the symbols of my security, the grasping I call love, the bondage I call commitment, the frenzy I call creativity. Death hides behind bushes of my consciousness. He tricks me into fighting the wrong enemy. . . .

There is a moment in the downward spiral of any “negative” emotion when an escape route opens up. Stop running away from the dreaded thing. Turn slowly. Face it. Walk deeper into the anxiety and know the pain. Cease resisting. Breathe deeply. . . . Listen. Be attentive to the voice of the pain. Invite it to speak to you about your life.

Where I tremble I find the lost scent of the sacred. At the raw edge of fear and desire I face the unknown mystery. Near the site of the fear and trembling is a burning bush. . . . When did I tremble last? . . .

Pay attention to the holes. It is in the empty spaces — lacunae [luhKEWnae], vacuums, interstices, pauses, voids, black holes in space — that new things begin. Creativity is born from silence. Novelty comes from the unexplored spaces, the badlands.

The hole in the ego
is where the holy
flows in and out . . .

And from Emerson’s essay, “Power”

Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being?
	Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated, — there is no chink or crevice in which it
 is not lodged, — that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.
	All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the 
current of events, and strong with their strength.