Does Generosity Cause Happiness?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 7^th of April, 2002

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

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
with all the colors of a spring day
as signs of the wonder that we live at all.
With the images of our history and hope
reminding us that every community
can grow ever deeper and more loving,
we now worship, offering generous praise
for the privilege of being together on earth.

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]

The quilting began this morning
with a later dawn in these parts.
Pink and yellow and gray designs
began to weave themselves
through blossoming apple trees
and branch of pear.
Stories from the newspaper,
news and music from the radio,
and all the sleepy questions of children
began to stitch themselves into human hearts,
already multi-colored and complex
with a thousand joys and sorrows
resistant to mere words.
The traffic was spare on the roads
this morning, the usual crazy quilt
of speeding cars and back-ups
relaxed and threadbare.
Memories of days gone by,
concerns about future problems I cannot solve
criss-cross in my heart,
making a pattern both beautiful and complex.
And now to the tunes of Gershwin,
the story we heard this morning,
the flame in the chalice, the common presence
of our lives in this place, we add the needle
and thread of the silence,
which brings it all together,
and make helps to make it
strong and tight and secure.

silence

We each are patterns in a greater quilt
that we did not fashion,
family and friendships and colleagues…
which lift our concerns and praises.
We pause now for a moment to
express our concerns and praise
by either seeing in our silent mind's eye
the faces of those who are bound to us,
or by naming their names aloud
into this safe common air.

naming

Quilted together into this community,
I say we have the power to make a bit of paradise on this earth.
May we never falter.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a story from a little book call Sermons in Stone by Mel Ellis which I found in a used-book store about ten years ago. It's been a treasure-chest of simple but revealing stories.

Of a young Boy looking out the classroom window, the Teacher asked:
"And what do you see out there?"
Jerked abruptly out of his reverie, all the Boy could think was to say
"The Horizon."
Instead of scolding the Boy for daydreaming, the Teacher asked:
"Have you ever walked up to the Horizon?"
The Boy thought for a moment, and then said:
"No, I am too young."
"Well, someday you will," the Teacher assured her pupil.
At once the boy was interested, and he asked, "And when I get there, what will I find?
"When you get there, you will discover another horizon…far beyond."
Then the Boy said, "And if I walk again?"
"If you walk again," the Teacher said, "you will know that the second Horizon is merely a starting place toward the third.
Disappointed and disenchanted, the Boy asked, "Will my life then be one of always losing Horizons?"
"No," said the Teacher, "of always finding them."

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a poem from Lisa Cullen called Reasons to Meditate. I have used it in smaller groups before, but I do not think I have ever read it on Sunday Morning. It's a marvelous list

Reasons to Meditate

to practice noticing
to understand simple things
to give myself clarity
to face inevitable difficulties
to make a conscious choice
to welcome my feelings
to know pain
to experience the bliss of effort
to take gentle possession of my mind
to free my mind
to be aware of my sensitivities
to dip below superficiality
to brighten my eyes
to forget how I look
to stop moving
to let myself be how I am
to love deeply
to risk being myself
to sit upright, like a pyramid
to stay still
to breathe in the air
to encourage a positive habit
to behave in the manner of one who woke up
to pursue freedom
to touch the ground
to learn without words
to unlock my heart
to go beyond

Sermon: Does Generosity Cause Happiness? [Next][back to top]

My New England colleague Robbie Walsh once read an article, he says, which claimed that generous people were healthier and happier than those who were not. "This is great news to bring up at church during the annual canvass!" he thought. Then he read the article a bit closer and he found, to his chagrin, that it didn't really say generous people, but rather, people who spent their money on goods that made them happy. He was disappointed, I think.

But it actually makes sense to me…if goods are not thought of as toasters and fast new cars, but literally as things that are Good.

Which brings me to my story:

I know I have told this story before in smaller circles. But I begin with it again this morning because I could think of no better way to start a sermon at the beginning of our annual canvass for the coming year.

When I was on my second Sabbatical in Chile, I traveled by bus a lot. So do all the Chileans. When you live in a country that looks like a bean pole, a nation that is at most a hundred miles wide, but around 2000 miles long, and where most of the people cannot easily afford the long plane flights all the time, busses make a lot of sense.

The trip from Valdivia to Santiago cost me only about 17 dollars US, but the journey was long for such a price, about 800 miles, or 1150 kilometers.

But the busses belie that inexpensive cost. You get terrific meals and your own personal entertainment system. And for those who want, they play bingo and other board games during the trip.

And when its lights go out at night and it's time to sleep, the seats have been designed so cleverly that every one of them turns into a bed where you can lie down flat without disturbing the person behind you. You can actually get a relaxing night of sleep on the bus.

I left Valdivia at 7 in the evening and traveled all night, and quite a bit of the next day. The stewards were so gracious they practically tucked us all in. Then they closed the cloth blinds, blocking out almost all outside light and noise. I slept like a rock. So I only woke up when rich breakfast aromas soothed me awake.

As I was eating breakfast, the young man sitting next to me started speaking to me in Spanish. I responded that I was not really able to speak Spanish and only knew a few words. The young man did not know English, I found out, and although I did know enough French to get by in a pinch, his second language was German, so no go for either of us.

Still, we mutually decided to talk anyway. Long trips are like that, I guess. We had hours before we returned to Santiago.

We talked with hand gestures, or with me just guessing at what the Spanish word might be by using my Italian background. He used a few German words that were close to English, and we both got quite good at leaping from flimsy linguistic evidence to hard-earned meaning. We got down all the details and names. It was an exhausting but finally, exhilarating experience.

I learned his name was Ricardo, and that he was a student at the largest University in Santiago. I found out that he was going to meet up with his girlfriend and some other friends there at the University. Then they were all going to drive down to the Bio Bio river to do some white water rafting during their February Summer Break.

Then he wanted to learn about me. I told him my name, and about my home in Oakland, California, and my birthplace in the Great Lakes area. Then he asked what I did for a living.

I was stumped. I often get bad reactions when I answer that question in English, so I was plenty worried about what I could say in Spanish.

So I said something like, "Ah, er, soy un Pastor Unitarista y Universalista," clearly making up my Spanish as I was going along.

But I could tell at once he got my meaning. His face blanched, like he had just met the devil himself. He looked pained, as if I had hit him.

So I said, "No, no, la mia chiesa n'est pas come l'uno lei penseri." I said, making a nearly criminal pastiche of Italian, French and God knows what else. But Ricardo got what I said quite clearly: "Wait a minute. My church is not like the ones you seem to be imagining."

I added with gestures and desperate words that I was not a minister of a church that taught that people would burn in hell, or that you had to do certain things, or say or feel certain things about Christ, in order to be a good person.

This good news seemed to calm him down. But then he began to ask me more questions.

Using my hand gestures, my bizarre mix of whatever foreign words came to mind, and these little pictures I drew in my notebook, Ricardo and I had an extraordinary conversation about the importance of Unitarian Universalist ways in my own life.

What did I tell him in my hodge-podge way? I told him pretty much most of the things that our poet tells us cause her to meditate all the time.I told Ricardo I am part of the church to practice noticing, noticing a tear, or a missing presence, or a sigh. I told him I am part of the church to help me understand simple things, like why it is the more I rush, the more I get behind. I told him I am part of the church to give myself clarity, clarity about what I believe, feel, think and know.

I told him I am part of the church to help me face inevitable difficulties; they always come…it's good for me to know that others have faced them before me, and bravely too.

I told him I go to a church like this one to help me make a conscious choice; so much of my life I live unconsciously. My church reminds me that making my decisions consciously is far better than reacting to insecurities and making bad choices or just flying off the handle because of fears I have never faced.

The church helps me to welcome my feelings, including the pain I feel when I have let someone down, or failed to live up to my own ideals, like when I, in Jordan Argus's words, thought I was having a conversation about beliefs only to find that a real human person was immersed in those beliefs, and was vulnerable before my strong opinions.

The church helps me to experience the bliss of effort, by joining with hundreds of others in work that betters the world.

Church both helps me to take gentle possession of my mind, so I am not molded by consumer culture demands alone, and it also helps me to free my mind from too much worry, and to be aware of my sensitivities.

Best of all, it helps me to dip below superficiality into the deeps of things, to get behind surface glitter and ask tough questions, even of myself. Myself first, in fact. A church like the one I serve, I told Ricardo, helps me to brighten my eyes for their own sake, not to think I have to live up to some look…in fact, it helps me to forget how I look, and to stop moving around so much frenetically, so I can let myself be how I really am not how others want me to be.

In this way, I told him, I can love more deeply by risking being myself instead of trying to be someone else.

In a church like I serve, I learn to sit upright, like a pyramid, unafraid of my own strength that has always been there even when folks denied it. There I can learn to benefit from staying still and take my pleasure from just breathing in the air which is, you will agree, a most positive habit. Coming to a church like this one, and supporting it, is important to me, I told him, because I really do want to behave in the manner of one who has woken up. All this so I can pursue freedom by touching the ground on which I stand, valuing the earth, not merely walking over it.

I support the work of this church because here I can continue to learn a lot without words, here I can slowly unlock my heart day by day, and here I feel encouraged to go beyond everything I ever expected when I was younger.

These are some of the things that I tried to tell Ricardo in my confused way of talking. Believe me, I am translating smoothly here. It would have beaned the linguists among you to hear how I was torturing half a dozen languages.

But after I said all these things as best I could, I saw tears in his eyes, tears that splashed down his cheek. Surprised, I said to him, "I'm very sorry. I didn't realize my pronunciation was all so terribly bad."

"Oh, it's not that," he said, smiling at my little joke. "It's just that every one I know at school believes as you say, wants to act in the manner you are talking about. Why are your people in North America not down here, talking with us who live in South America, telling us that it's possible to have churches like that, and unlike the ones your hell-and-damnation missionaries are founding day and night down here. Do you know how much we would give to have church congregations like yours in our country? My God, it would change everything."

When he said that amazing thing, it was my turn to grow wet in the eye.

"It's like your congregation members are on a journey together," Ricardo said to me. "You cross horizon after horizon and you don't stop ever and say, "This is the one and final answer everyone has to bow down to. This is the horizon where we stop, where no one goes beyond. You keep on asking more questions, getting deeper, going further."

"On our good days, yes, I hope so," I said. "But we don't always live up to our dreams, Ricardo. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we are tired or worn out. Sometimes we hurt each other inadvertently, or we grow sensitive and retreat for a while. Sometimes we confuse our own personal dreams with the goal of a deeper community, and we make a mess of things. We are human beings after all. But, I note we always seem to return to our principles, our visions, our dreams. And our dreams for the possibility and beauty of such a human community with a spiritual or religious dimension are tremendous indeed."

"Ah, you are quilters," Ricardo said to me, "like my grandmother. You stitch together a beautiful design using the fabric of your lives to make something strong and thick and warm. It's beautiful. I wish I could belong to such a church community."

We continued to talk about things…his life, and my own. We talked of work, school, family and friends, of our beloved cities and even more beloved grandmothers. Then we arrived in smoggy but sunny Santiago, and pulled into the bus station. We embraced good-bye, and we knew that our time was so special it would have been foolish to exchange addresses or phone numbers. Ricardo and I would never see each other again.

But when I got home from Chile, I assure you that one of the first things I did was to tell John Buehrens, the former president of our Unitarian Universalist Association, this story. I wanted him to hear that there were people around the world who would jump at the chance to belong to, and support, a religious community like this, however humanly imperfect it can be at times. I wanted John to hear Ricardo's great passion.

Ricardo was right. We are quilters, I suppose. But like the quilt in the story we heard this morning, it will mean different things to different generations, this quilt of community we are making. For Universalists here in Columbus in the Nineteeth Century, church meant some different things than it does to many of us. A poem on meditation or a reading about crossing horizons would never have made muster for Sunday Worship…the bible was still central then, in that beautiful Romanesque Gothic church building closer to downtown.

And generations from now, when our own children are gray, the meaning of this church will have probably changed again. They will be living in a different world, a different culture than anything we know now.

But the quilt will still be seen as beautiful and useful and warm. It will still be wrapped around newborn babies and arch over people exchanging vows of love before the assembly.

Like almost anything of great quality, quilting takes time. But community takes time, too. Lots of it. There are no quick fixes for problems, here, no easy friendships, no sudden solutions to life's difficulties or loneliness. There is just the common work and gradually shared dreams to bring us together. But real community takes years and years, and it doesn't come without bumps, anymore than a quilt can be made without someone's finger getting stuck with a needle now and then. And as with a quilt of cloth, some patches will always be at the edge, while others are sewn into the central pattern. But it takes all the patches to make a quilt.

At times like the annual canvass, it's customary to bring up the practical things of the church, like light bills, phone systems, window cleaning, office supplies and health insurance checks. It's customary to point out rising heating bills, the cost of grass mowing, the very real needs of the hardworking staff and the cost of copier repair.

But when I talked with Ricardo about why a Unitarian Universalist congregation is so important to me, I said none of those things. He knew about them, I suppose…he was studying for a degree in economics after all, and must have understood something about the costs of the real world. But that is not what brought tears to his eyes. It was my faltering, broken, clumsy attempts to describe the spirit of a Unitarian Universalist congregation that moved him and got him to promising support.

In our conversation, Ricardo and I enacted most of my best visions of what human beings can do in a liberal religious community. Sure, each of us speaks English here for the most part, but I would guess that real communication between us takes as much effort as it did for me and Ricardo. We each understand our lives and words differently, and overcoming differences takes time. What ministers, like Wendy and me, support when we support this church with 5% of our income is the dream that 600 people in a congregation like this cannot only work together to improve our common world and celebrate the milestones of life and death, but that, over a long time, we can each have a few relationships here even better than the one Ricardo and I had over a short period of time on a bus ride in Chile. I truly hope and pray that such a vision of a reachable paradise glows in your own bright eyes as well.

Such visions are the costly goods from which, when we spend of our livelihood to bring them home to our hearts, we might begin to find some deep and surprisingly satisfying sense of happiness.

Offertory

Mindful that every one works together to make a church as much as to make a quilt of beauty and duration and warmth, may we give and receive the offering as a boon to our own happiness.

Prayer [back to top]

If I do not ask the more poignant, difficult questions of myself, who will rush over and ask me those questions?
If I am afraid to take the next step, who will take it?
If I run from the truth, do I really believe it will ever turn and run after me?
If I think the song is difficult to sing, shall I wait until it becomes easy all by itself?
If prayer does not bend Love's power to my whims, might it not at least bend my whims to love?
If every room in my heart is filled to the top with calendars and worries, how can I ever take in Joy as one of my boarders?
If I do not walk out of here and notice with thanksgiving every single color, yellow, blue, red, brown, pink, white, which the Spring of the year lavishes on me, who will do it for me?

Mystery That All Things are, I say this: May I live with these questions and answer them with my life. Amen.

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