Surrender

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 17^th of March, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
at the dawn of the season of spring
to celebrate our common life
and the gifts of both joy and letting go,
to remind ourselves of what we already know
and to rejoice in the beauties of the world,
and welcome a touch of silence in our lives.

And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Again a week of kicks to the spirit,
as human breathing stops over and over
in the streets of the Holy Land,
and holiness itself dries up and blows
away on a desert wind.

Casual talks of pre-emptive strikes
and nuclear bombs
bring me back to my childhood
when I listened to my father whispering
to my mother in the kitchen
during the Cuban Crisis,

"Oh Lisa, what are we going to do?"
What indeed can we do?

We can breathe. We can feel heartache.
We can breathe. We can be loyal to spring.
We can breathe. We can remember the
difference between what we can do before
we have thought and what we can do after we have thought.

We can breathe. We can remember the
ways our feelings can serve our mind.

We can breathe. We can refuse to sign
our lives over into the service of panic
or hand-wringing self-righteousness.

We can breathe. We can get clear on our
most basic values. We can breathe.

Blest are you, breath, for you are
the spirit that sustains me in difficult days.

silence

Blest are you, breath, which sustains the whole circle of the human race when they remember that you are within them, the rhythm inside that binds them to the rhythm of the seasons and the rhythm of life and death. Breathe in us now as remembrances of those we love, and those who love us, that we might lose any feeling that we are alone in our breathing or our loving. Let the names be breathed aloud in speech, or enfolded tenderly in the quietness inside us.

naming

Blest is the breath of spring, that begins to sweeten the air around us, raising bright banners of tulips, reminding us of the tender flowering fragility of love, and leading us to the banquet table which surrounds us, and which to the eyes of those who love has been there all the time, abundant and free.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] this morning is a piece by the United States poet William Larsen. It has a word in it, dharma, which may not be known to everyone. It's a Buddhist term that translates roughly as "teaching" The piece is called, appropriately enough, Surrender:

At our house there live
a girl, a dog, and a yardful of newly planted
flowers

The dog came free, the girl is priceless
and the flowers cost three hundred dollars,
a cozy scene, but complicated
in that
I love the girl, the girl loves the dog
and the dog
loves to dig my flowers
and I

do not love the dog

creating a dilemma in which I
who crave
even the illusion of control
am stymied between my needs
for the orderly completion of my desires
and
the beam of joyous fire
in the eyes of the girl,
all of which
says more about the complexities of love
than the training of neurotic dogs
and I've just discovered
in writing these lines
that
the dharma of this dilemma
has less to do with my training the dog
to not dig my flowers
than the dog training me
to love
the girl

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] Reading is a poem beloved to me, because the poet, May Sarton, sent it to me when I wrote her to thank her for another poem I use often in worship. I had recently been separated from my partner of 16 years, and I also thanked her for her marvelous poem "The Divorce of Lovers" which gave me some comfort. She sent me a copy of this interesting poem about clams and mussels with her letter… Of Molluscs

As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean's food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.

A knife is of no use against a fortress.
You might break it to pieces as gulls do.
No, only the rising tide and its slow progress
Opens the shell. Lovers, I tell you true.

You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word -
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.

Now you are floated on this gentle flood
That cannot force or be forced, welcome food
Salt as your tears, the rich ocean's blood,
Eat, rest, be nourished on the tide of love.

Sermon: Surrender[Next][back to top]

When I was a child, we talked a lot of our Italian heritage whenever we gathered as a family. Sitting around the table, the whole family helping to fold the delicate tortellini (a little hat-shaped ravioli always served in broth), or taking turns to stir the polenta (a kind of cornmeal mush), we would hear wonder-stories about our grandparents or other Italian relatives. We would talk about why we ate food different from everyone else around us in the neighborhood, why we spoke differently, and why we had to hear, ten times a day, the famous rhyming proverbs at which the Italian language excels.

But we also told jokes, "ethnic" style jokes, "against" our own culture. My father would ask us all:

"How does an Italian go into battle during a war?" We would give up, and then he would throw his hands up in the air like this (the stereotypical act of surrender) and we would all laugh. He would always interpret the joke in a positive way… "Ah, well, after all, we Italians are lovers, not warriors."

Now, of course my father was not against being a warrior, per se. He served in the armed forces, believed that such fighting was necessary. However, he was given an emergency discharge during the Second Great War of the last century because he was an only child in a family where his parents were too sick to work, and thus had no income coming in. So unlike most young men his age, he had to fight hard, not against our enemies in Europe, but against the consuming poverty of his family.

And in my teen years, my father gave me boxing lessons, telling me that it was always better to fight than to run. As we folded the tortellini, he would tell of scraps he himself had gotten into, and he spoke of his now-and-then fierceness, with a pride hard to miss.

But strangely, it's the joke about surrender that I remember the most. Lovers, not warriors.

Surrender is a word that is used in certain religious and spiritual contexts. The word Islam itself suggests a form of surrender to Allah, the offering of one's whole life to God as the first step in the religious life.

Evangelical Christians sometimes talk of surrendering their own self-will and submitting instead to the will of God, or Christ. Many people in twelve step programs also speak of surrendering their own addiction to the healing embrace of a power greater than their own behavioral habits. I have to say, though, that during my 24 years in the ministry, not very many religious liberals resonate easily to such concepts.

And you will probably note that, in general, the word "surrender" does not have a particularly positive slant to it. It is most often interpreted in terms of fighting or conflict…it is seen as giving up, as quitting, or worse, losing, none of which are values held in high esteem by most people. It's seen, in short, as an expression of weakness, or at the very least, of running out of steam.

This morning, however, I would like to make a case for surrender being a most useful concept for religious liberals. Maybe even one of our most central concepts.

Here's what I mean.

While watching the Laramie Project a week ago, a film about the Matthew Sheperd murder out in Wyoming, I was reminded that Fred Phelps, that renegade self-anointed Baptist divine from Kansas actually showed up in Laramie with his famous signs… God hates fags and Matthew Sheperd is Burning in Hell… to parade in front of the church where the Memorial Service was taking place. Illustrations of hellfire yellowed his placards.

Phelps is so nasty in his language, so utterly degrading and cruel, that even bona-fide religious conservatives who share his basic views, like Pat Robertson, condemn him. There is no question that his presence evokes anger and rage of all those present, and a desire to strike out in violence against him. To see him trot his wicked signs in front of Matthew's stricken parents is such a revolting event that I found myself wanting to crawl into the television screen and knock out the teeth of the actor just playing him with my fist.

"Why should he be there?" I wondered. "Why should such a totally heartless creature be allowed to parade his defamation in public? Isn't he just out to hurt, and not convert? Can anyone be so foolish as to think that threats of hellfire actually change a person's religion? He simply should not be there, or at the funeral of anyone he does not like. Ever."

Ah, but he was there. The law allows it. Freedom demands it. And he really was there at Matthew Sheperd's funeral, with his outrageous signs and vile fundamentalist doctrines.

However, some friends of Matthew Sheperd surrendered to the reality that he was there. That's right, they surrendered, they gave up the abstraction that he should not be there, and accepted that he was, in fact, there. Occupying real space in real time. And better, they surrendered their desire to hit him in the teeth with their fists, for that would be to mirror back his own behavior to others. His language is, after all, no less than a fist into the soul. Using violence against him would neither ultimately stop him or his family. It would be only to imitate him, and grant his methods a certain validity. So Matthew Sheperd's friends surrendered both their resentment that he was there at all, and their understandable desire to strike back.

And through their act of surrender, they came to a profoundly religious response to his shenanigans. They made traditional angel costumes in white, with long wing-like sleeves swooping off the arms. Then they marched in a row to where Phelps and his family stood with their sordid and un-Christian signs. They turned their backs to him, and faced the crowd of stunned townspeople seething that Phelps was turning real human grief into a twisted circus of outrage. They then raised their arms high into the air, as if they were surrendering, thus making a wall out of the white fabric falling from their cuffs to separate Phelps's signs completely from the sight of the towns people. They maintained a deliberate and serious silence. And Phelps' malevolence was thus neutralized.

"Do not ask what force could do," May Sarton reminds us. "A knife is useless against a fortress." She is using the metaphor of molluscs in the ocean tide of Maine, but her meaning is clear to me. A knife, either one made of steel or words, would be useless against a man as unconscious as Phelps. But the "gentle tide" of a creative loving act, born of surrender, can save the day for the Sheperd family.

A religious liberal, you see, surrenders to Reality. Our wishes about the world are not Reality. Our dreams of the way the world "should be" or "ought to be" are not reality. The questions "How can they behave that way?" or "How can anyone believe things like that?" are not religious questions, but only ways of avoiding Reality, and in a rather self-aggrandizing way. They do behave that way. They do believe those things. Yes, they did just say that. Yes, the sign says exactly that.

To insist that Reality should automatically be different than it is, is the exact opposite of what I mean by a spiritual life. Yes, I said it, a spiritual life, something many people talk about but do not define, or worse, something that people assume that everyone else understands just as they do, using their definition.

To live a spiritual life, for me, means to surrender to the Reality of what is, to deal with it and to face it without doing end runs around it. It is to not waste any time making…. excuses.

"He didn't really mean what he said."

"O, she is just like that."

"He really is a good person, you know."

"You're making too much out of this."

"You are really being too sensitive."

I have heard all of these statements, and I have to confess that, from time to time, I have uttered them. But each of these statements is a form of running away from Reality. They are fundamentally dishonest statements, however well-intended. And, if anything, I hope we might agree right up front that to live a spiritual life is, at the very least, to live an honest life. So in response to each of these excuses, an honest response, a spiritual response might be as follows:

"Yeah, but whether he meant to say it or not, it really hurt and betrayed my trust, and he is going to have to earn it back, because right now, I do not trust him."

"Yes, she may indeed just 'be that way,' but it really hurts me and maligns me when she says things like that."

"Of course he is a good person; I am not debating that. But he did just belittle and ridicule me, and I do not have to put up with that."

"I am not making too much out of this. I am just noticing what happened for once and saying it out loud, which doesn't seem to happen much around here."

"Why is it so important for you to say that I am too sensitive? Is it not at least just as possible that he just acted in a most irresponsible and insensitive way?"

Now, hear me, surrendering to Reality is not a cold thing. It's not something that does not know anything of passionate denial and fierce resistance. When I am told by a friend that he or she is going to die soon, you better be sure I live in denial right off the bat. Even with much smaller things. When I lose my mailbox key, like I did this week, I deny that such an annoying thing could have happened. I say with rage that key rings just should not break.

But, praise be! the direction of spirit always flows toward Reality, not away from it. And so as I live, I try to make it my goal to turn, increment by increment, from my denial, in order to surrender to, and face, the Reality. After all, I need to be there for my friend, to be a presence to him as he goes through his own inner denials and upheavals. And on a more mundane level, on Monday, I will have to call the locksmith. My key ring really did break after all. Wishing that it did not break is a waste of my breath. Thinking it should not have broken is even more foolish.

Surrendering to Reality also clarifies our values, and reminds us of what is really important. As in Larsen's charming story poem. The three hundred dollar flower bed was important to him, but his priceless daughter, who smiles at the precocious and destructive little puppy digging up spring with his paws, is far more important. The center of the poem for me is when he writes:

I love the girl, the girl loves the dog
and the dog
loves to dig my flowers
and I

do not love the dog

creating a dilemma in which I
who crave
even the illusion of control
am stymied between my needs
for the orderly completion of my desires
and
the beam of joyous fire
in the eyes of the girl…

Control. There. He said it. Control. Surrendering to Reality means that I have to admit the limits of my capacity to control the world around me, admit even the illusions of my control. Surrender to reality means turning from the magical thinking that fools me into thinking life should be fair, or life should be just, or suffering should be passed out more fairly, or that death should only happen in one's sleep at age 103, or that there are cosmic reasons behind every sadness.

Now don't get me wrong. Being overwhelmed by sadness or loss makes perfect sense to me. Being deeply affected by the miseries of divorce or long illness is in its own way surrendering to Reality. And yes, tears don't change things, sure, but they sure do feel good, and they release soothing chemicals in the body.

And don't confuse surrender with acquiescence, with approval or powerlessness. By surrendering to the Reality that my government leaders are talking about using nuclear explosives in a pre-emptive way does not mean I agree with such plans, approve of them, or am anything less than horrified and embarrassed by such thinking. But surrendering to the Reality of social ills or problems means admitting they are there and facing them… in the ways I can face them. In the words of St. Patrick, from his Latin Confession, I cannot "strive for greater things"….such as a world without threats of nuclear destruction… unless I first surrender to the Reality of lesser things which can pull down the greater.

Let me show how refusing to turn from denial toward surrender makes a big mess of things. When a President of the United States over two terms does not even mention the reality of HIV disease that has wiped out tens of thousands of citizens, we have a mess. When a trustworthy newspaper like the New York Times will not mention over many years that the sufferers and caretakers themselves had to organize hospice treatment without government aid or ncouragement, raise money for research themselves, and spread the news of safer sex at their own expense, we can see the results of denial are terrible indeed. Denial leads to more death and more pain. Cruel are the results of the damnable unwillingness to surrender to Reality.

Thank God those who were suffering had the moxie to surrender to the greater good of saving lives even as they faced the hard reality of their own death. There is an awful lot of love in the hearts of those who faced their own mortality and nonetheless strove to establish the greater good for their brothers and sisters. I thank them from this pulpit. They too, like Matthew Sheperd's friends, put their own angel wings between self-aggrandizing leaders who wished that all this sex and disease stuff would just go away, and those who surrendered to Reality in a rush of spirit that moves me still.

Surrender for religious liberals. Not the first idea that comes to mind, to be sure. But not to an omnipotent Fate or a Lord of All as do many of our religious friends, but to Reality as it is.

Maybe my father with his silly joke was more right than he knew. Whether one is Italian like me, or Irish like so many celebrating today, or Russian, or African or Chinese or a mixture of everything, I say this. Better to be a lover willing to lose it all, better to be a people who live knowing that they will lose it all, than to be a perfect warrior, who thinks that he or she can control everything, and force open every shell. Better to surrender over and over to the greater power of love's possibility, than to fight through one's days thinking that winning and control is the end and means and even meaning of life.

To surrender is the beginning of living a spiritual life, a life that is a life worth living.

Prayer of Letting Go  [back to top]

Heart of my heart, speak to me,
And I will turn to thee.
Say to me:
Drop the rock.
Unlatch the door.
Loosen the knot.
Release the robin.
Cut the lock.
Tear the curtain.
And I will listen and do so.

Say to me:
Feet on the ground.
Eye on the horizon.
Tear in the eye.
Song in the mouth.
Sun (rain) on the shoulders.
Love in the word.
And I will listen and do so.

Say to me:
Resist meanness still.
Adore the springtime still.
Live by honor still.
Turn from hatred still.
Run from winning and losing,
and losing and winning,
and be still, and be still,
and I will, I say to thee,
and I will, and I will
turn back, turn back, turn back
to the world and its promise of spring. amen

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Last update: 02/02/2003