Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 19th of August, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
on a summer morning in late August
to worship, to join mind and heart and body
in a celebration that we live at all,
that wonder is our portion,
and that our glory is to love.
(ensemble) And, may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other, and true to that shared vision of what we may together become…
Affirmation [Next] [back to top]
Unison Affirmation for the morning: A poem written by Gary Snyder 1974
The silence of nature within.
The power within.
The power without.
The path is whatever passes---
No end in itself.
The end is grace.
Ease.
Healing, not saving.
Singing, the proof.
The proof of the power within.
Prayer Before the Silence [Next] [back to top]
The jazz of slate-gray afternoon clouds,
trimmed orange and purple in slanted late sun.
The jazz of a monarch butterfly hovering over dark green grass, flitting
this way and that.
The jazz of summer stars overhead, Altair, Deneb, stars at rest for a moment
a syncopation in the sky.
The jazz of life, of sorrow and joy,
hope and memory, of everything improvised and lyrical and
beautiful and loose… divine jazz set free in the silence.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
In Place of a Curse
by the humorist and poet John Ciardi is a well known poem to many people.
I actually give copies away to people who find it worthy of further meditation.
At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected,
I shall forgive last the delicately wounded
who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again,
neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration.
They who are wholly broken, and they in whom
mercy is understanding, I shall embrace at once
and lead to pillows in heaven. But they who are
the meek by trade, baiting the best of their betters
with the extortions of a mock-helplessness
I shall take last to love, and never wholly.
let them all into Heaven-I abolish Hell-
but let it be read over them as they enter:
"Beware the calculations of the meek, who gambled nothing, gave
nothing, and could never receive enough."
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
is a poem by the prolific Linda Pastan. Because it is very subtle, I will
ask Caroline to read it twice.
What We Fear Most
for R after the accident
We have been saved one more time
from what we fear most.
Let us remember this moment.
Let us forget it if we can.
Just now a kind of golden dust
settles over everything:
the tree outside the window,
though it is not fall;
the cracked sugar bowl,
so carefully mended once.
This light is not redemption,
just the silt of afternoon sun
on an ordinary day,
unlike any other.
Sermon: Thinking About Feeling [Next] [back to top]
I'm upset.
How exhilarating!
What joy!
I'm feeling really despondent right now.
I'm afraid.
My resentment gets deeper every day.
I'm numb, as if my soul had a shot of novocaine.
What a relief!
I'm feeling abandoned here.
That guy really feels entitled to all that stuff!
What a superior attitude you have!
I'm just feeling inferior to everyone else in the room. She is really ticked
off, buster!
Are you feeling sad, kiddo?
I'm so lonely.
God, he's bitter.
No, I'm not jealous.
I am so envious of those broad shoulders of his.
I'm really satisfied with the way my life is going. Boy am I irritated.
Ecstasy!
I'm really worried now.
What bliss! Boy, this is unsettling.
I'm as serene as a monk.
I feel safe in your arms.
This place is unsafe!
I'm totally confused.
How apathetic.
I'm feeling a little vulnerable here.
She was really scared.
How tender!
I'm just overwhelmed, that's all.
What a loving thing to do.
He's compassionate to a fault, that guy.
I'm glad.
Man, is he ever focused.
I feel like I'm hidden in plain view.
I'm feeling pretty unloved right about now.
I haven't felt so loved since I was a child and my grandma sang me to sleep.
I'm feeling, well, kind of insecure, I guess.
Emotions. There are words we use, there are images we create. We speak them haltingly, or fiercely. We may find them doing somersaults in our stomachs some times. And it should be clear to you that each of the little phrases or expressions I used at the beginning of this sermon could be unfolded into a whole story. Our lives are, quite simply, filled to the gills with a thousand feelings, our emotions.
But though our emotions are as much a part of us as our minds, I am convinced that most of us do not find dealing with them, in a satisfying way, very easy. Especially when you consider their amazing variety.
And because the complexity our human emotional lives is so daunting, I can understand why so many people come up with simple and comforting Schemes To Explain Everything, nice and neat.
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
Oh, all Scorpios are like that.
Oh, you know how emotional those Sicilians are! What do you expect from an electrical engineer?
And besides all of our Schemes That Explain Everything, I also find folks making day-to-day judgements based on some presumed common understanding of emotional expressions.
For example, I was watching the news the other day when they announced that the execution of the young man, scheduled to die by lethal injection in Texas, had been stayed by court legal action. The man on the television informed me that this young Texan, and I quote, "received the news without any emotion."
I found myself wondering, for the rest of the day just how the newscaster knew that. Did he expect that the man, who received the news only a few hours from his scheduled execution, would jump on his chair and shout "Hooray!"? Did he expect a smile, laughter, a hearty "Thank God!?"? Did he expect tears?
I found myself wondering ruefully, did the reporter have x-ray eyes? Could he see into the man's brain, there at the mid-cortex, in the little purple arch of the limbic system, and notice a lack of emotional synapses firing there? Does he think that emotion always flows fast and flashy, like a flooding stream in an extra rainy spring? Did he assume that emotion is always expressed in clear and easy to interpret ways? Did he imagine that emotions only resemble something as dramatic as a wild scream, as in the famous illustration of The Scream by Edvard Munch on the front cover?
Now as I was thinking about this, clearly annoyed at this newscaster's foolish attitude and arrogant turn of phrase, I remembered a time when I had done almost the exact same thing as he did. It happened this way.
I once worked with a ministerial intern named Jean Blackburn. Before her seminary years in California, Jean used to live right here in Columbus. In fact, she discovered our Unitarian Universalist community some twenty-four years ago. By the time she was my intern, Jean was using a wheelchair to get around. Her hands and arms were strong, but a serious illness had taken all the strength from her legs.
Yet this fact in no way interrupted Jean's vision of ministry or her capacity to live that vision. Jean got around just fine. She drove a car with a bench seat, but she had a clever device installed around the steering wheel that enabled her to drive safely without having to use her feet for the pedals. She kept her fold-up wheelchair on the passenger side of the seat. When she wanted to get out of the car, Jean would lean over to the right door, open it, and then push the wheelchair out of the door. Then she would use her hands to help her body slide across the seat. Then, using her hands and arms alone, she would hoist herself into the unfolded chair, grab her valise with her date-book and various ministerial papers, put it on her lap, and roll over the dirt and gravel parking lot to the side door of the Meeting House to turn off the alarm. Then she would go up the long driveway to the little old house where the office was.
I watched Jean take on all the roles of ministry: I saw her go into hospital rooms to visit folks who just had surgery. I watched her teach two slight men how to use special grips to get her up a small flight of steps without breaking their backs. I heard her preach, pray, and participate in circle-dancing at the church, by placing her wheelchair in the center of the circle, and dancing above her waist.
And it was Jean who taught me to say, "Please rise as willing and able," when I lead the opening words or a song. "Please don't ask people to stand," she said to me once. "You see, I can't stand, but I sure as hell can rise up." And with that, she would hunch her shoulders and neck, and smile. "And you know, Mark, there are some folks who can stand, but it takes all the energy they have for the day, and they really would rather not. So say, 'Please rise as able and willing,' since that way you make a clear statement that mere conformity of posture is not an issue here."
One day I noted to Jean that I admired her. I told her that she was an inspiration to me. I told her that I didn't think that I personally would be able to face such limitations as she faced daily without a lot more visible emotional upheaval than she showed.
"Does your life as a walking person cause you emotional upheaval?" she asked me. "Are you annoyed that you have to walk places?"
"Why no," I said, somewhat perplexed.
"Look," she said, "my life is no different than yours. When I get up in the morning, three things are possible. My situation could be worse than the day before. It could be the same as the day before. Or it could be better. Isn't that the same as your life?"
"Well, yes," I said.
"You are imagining, perhaps, that I never went through strong upheavals of resentment and anger and even depression when I was told I would not be able to walk any more. I did. But then, after a time, I recognized that resentment and rage are a heavy burden to carry, especially for wheelchairs, so I put them down. Mark, I think you are putting yourself in my chair and imagining what I must be feeling. But you are not sitting in this chair, and you cannot know what I am feeling, unless you ask me. But I assure you, you would never know what you would feel about this until you had been sitting here in this chair, and for a while. You would, like I did, have at least two kinds of feelings, fast feelings and slow feelings. You imagined fast feelings as you looked at me. But I have been sitting in this chair for ten years, and had time to work on my slower feelings. Feelings all move at different speeds. And anyway, feelings are not theories. Feelings are only your particular emotional response to reality as you experience it."
I learned a lot from Jean, I'll tell you that. She was the intern and I the supervisor, but so often I felt I was the one doing most of the significant learning. But it was never easy learning.
Thus, this is a sermon on a subject as close to us as our own pulse, yet as hard to grasp as a handful of water.
Why? Because even though I have no reason to doubt that we all feel a variety of emotions, it's sheer arrogance on my part for me to ever say that my emotional life overlaps yours precisely at all. There is no such thing as feelings in general. Anger and joy both have a thousand forms. There are only very particular feelings. And thus, there is treacherousness in preaching such a sermon to begin with.
I know my feelings. At least for the most part. A few are still looking for nametags to wear. But that does not mean I automatically know your exact feelings. We live in the same world, but something may make you angry, whereas the very same thing might only get me to laugh. Or, your way of getting angry…turning into an iceberg…may not resemble my way of getting angry…turning into Mt. Vesuvius…at all. You may not even recognize someone else's anger as anger, but rather as an out-of- control expression of barely restrained violence that frightens you and only makes you feel fear.
Let me look at one particular kind of feeling to underscore what I just said. I have experienced many kinds of anger directed toward me in my life. I assure you, I can, by now, easily tell the difference between anger that comes deviously, with a smile, and anger that is crisp, cool and efficient. I have experienced anger that blames me for vast things beyond my control, and anger that looks for a shared solution to a shared problem I had been ignoring. I have experienced anger which I recognize as a sign of a very deep and clear love, and I have experienced anger that dismisses me personally as an utter irrelevancy in the universe. All of these experiences trade by the name anger. But they are not the same experience at all. I have probably also expressed anger to others in all those ways as well.
But aren't all forms of anger somewhat the same deep down? Not at all. Some are clearly healthy and productive, and thus very valuable, whereas some serve only to hurt and destroy, and thus are not anywhere near as valuable.
But how can we tell the difference between a healing emotion and a destructive emotion?
It's not easy, that's for sure. There are so many social and cultural factors that go about wearing the mask of universal normalcy that I find the going tricky indeed. It requires a lot of thought.
Now thinking about emotions may sound cold and strange to some folks, or even ironical. But I assure you, unless we spend some time thinking about our feelings, our feelings may try and take up the slack and disguise themselves as rational thoughts, which they are not. If I feel rejected, it does not always mean I have been rejected. If I feel hurt, it does not always or rationally follow that someone is out to get me. I may feel good and right signing a petition to protest against the treatment of women in a far away foreign land, but my feeling good, and a computer petition, does not necessarily accomplish anything except to make me feel better about myself. Social justice can hardly rest on such a foundation. In short, it's not fruitful to confuse feelings with hard facts.
But I admit, the cultural and social factors involved in the emotions are very confusing.
For example, I cry relatively easily. I cry at certain movies, especially during scenes of reconciliation between fathers and sons. I often cry in the morning while I shower, when I am suddenly aware I miss someone terribly, either because they have died, or because they live very far away. Certain pieces of music make me cry.
And when a good friend dies…Alex, John, Mark, Dan, Dave, Frederica and Stephen come to mind at once…I wail. I fall to the floor. I keen, as the Irish say. That's the fast emotion, to use Jean's words. Weeks later, I may feel dull of spirit, or depressed, or listless. I may find myself confused and irritable. I may feel unfocused and foggy. Those are the slower emotions for me. They take some time to develop.
But I know folks who are the opposite of me. When they lose a friend, their form of feeling grief begins with a feeling of numbness and lack of focus, and progresses to crying in the shower months later, or a year later. The numbness comes fast, the tears, far, far slower.
Is one form of grief better than the other? Probably not. I even know some people who never cry at all, in the ordinary sense of that word. I knew a guy once who claimed that sneezing was his form of crying. To me a sneeze means a cold is coming on, or I have just developed an allergy to chocolate or something awful like that. But because I grieve differently doesn't mean I have the right to say he's not grieving. He just grieves his way, and I grieve my way, that's all.
Furthermore, some people will tell you that the reason I cry easily is that I am Italian American. Baloney. My father never cried easily when I was a kid, and he's at least as much Italian American as I am, right? In fact, he was demonstrably upset that I cried so easily. And now, at age 80, when so many of his friends are dying, I note that his tears are far more available than they used to be. Has he suddenly stopped being Italian American? So when I say there are culture issues to think about when we examine our feelings, do not imagine I mean simply culture of origin. Sure, there probably are some generalities one might make about some of these things, but it's important to remember that they are generalities, and that, in my short life, I have already met all the exceptions to these generalities.
And do not bring gender into this without qualifications either. I know women who have as hard a time naming their feelings as some men do, and I have met men who could tell you how their heart can feel and name all the subtle differences between various kinds and modes of anger… ire, rage, fury, irritability, vexation, being riled, going wild, being indignant, fuming, boiling or just plain mad.
You will hear the word culture reduced to the so-called race issues too. I have heard well-meaning people try to say that African American, Asian American, Euro-American and Native American ways of showing emotion are very different. Such a statement is 100% half-right, but that is not a very high percentage, it seems to me. To say that the so called Black Churches are all very emotional in tone compared to so-called White Churches may be only a foolish way to say that Baptist traditions of worship and Scottish Presbyterian traditions of worship are different. I for one have known as many white Pentacostals as I have known black Pentacostals. And frankly, I think there are many kinds of "aliveness," some quieter than others, others noisier. To expect the formal decorum of Japanese Shinto worship to resemble or imitate worship patterns in a Suburban Pop Music Style Evangelical Free Church is just plain nutty. Picasso and Rembrandt expressed themselves differently, but both were great artists. I may like one more than the other, or prefer Edvard Munch to them both, but my preference does not mean one form of expression invalidates another.
When I say that there are many ways of expressing feelings, including very quiet ways, am I saying that the whole idea we hear about repressing feelings is baloney.
Not at all. I think all sorts of experiences we have while we grow up will tend to make us flinch from certain feelings, or to disguise them. I grew up hearing that being happy and upbeat and cheery was the best thing in the world. To be visibly sad or depressed about something was clearly an unwelcome expression. So I very often denied feeling blue, even when I was miserable. Like the child in the story this morning, I would simply say, when asked about my mood, "I'm OK." After many years of working with this repression, I came to count it a great privilege to really be blue when I'm blue. It's a relief to me to not owe anyone a happy face anymore. Oh, I still say I'm OK now and then when I am not, but not as often.
I don't think I'm a rare bird either, when it comes to things like this. I love the line in Ciardi's great poem:
"I shall forgive last the delicately wounded
who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never
got up again, neither to fight back,
nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration."
Sometimes, when people come and tell me about some true calamity in their lives, I read them those lines. I tell them "what you describe is no delicate wound. What you describe to me is a real fist in your face. Instead of standing up after such a blow, or denying it hurts, why not just fall down, and finger your jaw in painful admiration…and then, if it seems reasonable, get up and fight back. You don't have to suffer such outrages by pretending that it didn't hurt. It did. Once you admit the pain, you can begin to let it heal. But if you don't admit it, and even grouse about it a little, it won't find any outlet and might come out at some later day looking a little crooked."
Linda Pastan reveals further difficulties of dealing with human emotions in her brilliant poem. She wrote it for someone with the initial R, who had an accident. We don't know what the accident was…she doesn't say. But it's clear R got away alive from "what we fear most." "Let us remember this moment," she writes, and then immediately she says "Let us forget it if we can."
The logical mind gets impatient with such riddles. "Well which is it, remember or forget? Make up your mind." But the heart is not the mind, and to anyone who has known someone who got away alive from an accident, the lines are as accurate as you can get.
You want to remember and forget that awesome moment, that terrible, wonderful day. At the same time. The poet calls such a day "an ordinary day, unlike any other." Again, the mind asks which is it, ordinary or extraordinary? The heart answers…both.
Accidents happen every day. Life offers no guarantees. And yet sometimes…just sometimes, we are lucky. And there is a reprieve. We may not be able to express our relief any faster than that man on death row in Texas, because sudden nearness to death is scary enough to make a lot of folks just shut down.
In other words, many emotions can live in the same place at the same time. And all of them are telling us something about ourselves, our place in the world, our boundaries and edges. Not external facts necessarily, but about my inner life, and that is important.
The information the emotions give to us may not be precise but it can be fruitful. From one set of emotions we may learn that we simply cannot be in the presence of someone who causes us regular pain, either through unconscious or conscious means. We may have to change our relationships. This is fruitful information. Just as many of us learned as children, often the hard way, not to touch fire, so we may learn the emotional way not to be in contact with people who burn us. Another set of emotions, those related to love and sympathy, may teach us to trust more, and give more of our time.
Furthermore our emotions are actually related to the chemical and nerve ending sorts of information in our fingers that keep us from putting our hands in the fire. Our emotions are associated with the limbic system in the brain, the part of our brain that roots itself in our ancient reptilian ancestors. Thus, our emotions are subject to ordinary and daily physical interference. We may find ourselves content when the sun is out, and more volatile or depressed when the sun has been hidden by clouds for two weeks. Certain food combinations may effect our feelings; certainly alcohol does, as do many drugs and medications. If I go two or three days without sufficient sleep, my emotional landscape changes from the rolling great plains to the jagged Canadian Rockies. If I have too much coffee, or experience too much stimulation or have too few loving contacts and conversations with long term friends and loved ones during the week, my emotional life twists and turns. There are all sorts of brain chemistries that effect how we feel emotions.
In the end, maybe I have come to feel that this is not a sermon on the emotions at all. I was leading both you and myself astray a bit. Instead, it's the sermon message I give many times each year…namely, that it's fine to say that we Unitarian Universalists affirm our differences and are inclusive in our attitudes, but what does that really look like on a day-to-day level? Are the theological differences represented in this room really as important for day to day church life as the emotional differences represented in this room? How do we forge a faithful and deep community that really respects differences and covenants not to let differences divide us? Do we have to take all of our emotional differences and styles into account as well as our differences in philosophy and imagery?
I think so. I really do. I think to assume in any way that we are "all basically alike" is really just to say "I wish you were more like me, so that my way of being in the world can be blessed by your assent." And that, as far as I am concerned, is not Unitarian Universalist thinking, but something else entirely. Learning to really understand the otherness of the other, and accept and bless that where we can, is the true and abiding basis for creating an authentically diverse and inclusive religious community. And dealing with differences in emotional speed, culture, style and depth is part of that deeply spiritual work. May we take such work as our own.
Prayer: [back to top]
O Love, let the summer sun outside me
come inside me and warm my heart.
Open my soul like an August mum,
and let it hum with a palette of feelings
as wide and lovely as a garden of many flowers.
May the sweetness of the last days of summer
return me to the days when I was less hard on myself, and less hard on
others.
Let the tenderness of these last days of August
open me to the stream of life
flowing around me, and through me,
outside of my illusions of control.
May I find myself more content
with my discontent, and dream no more
for any personal peace
that resembles sleep more than any life.
Let the four corners of my soul be lifted up,
like a summer picnic blanket,
that all the crumbs and scraps might fall to earth,
and I might be made useful again for other joys and pleasures yet to come.
And now let me sing, as the proof of the power that is
summer, that is love, that is spirit, within me, without me, among
us. Amen.
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