Shut Up and Sing!
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 27 June 2010 01:00
- Written by Jim Reynolds
Opening Words
Our opening words today are from a Concordian who is neither famous nor dead. He is Chuck Gordon, and he lives on Commonwealth Avenue. Chuck is a singer and assembled a book of lyrics to doo-wop songs so that he and his friends could join in the fun of singing together. You all know them: “Going to the Chapel,” “Teen Angel,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” and all the rest. At the top of page 1, he introduces the book with these words:
“These pages are a political analysis free zone. Yes, we know all about sexism, hetero-sexism, machismo, unhealthy neediness, lack of appropriate boundaries, co-dependence, … Shut up and sing! Oops – you can’t do that. Open your mouth and sing! ”
Our service today is designed to have a “shut up and sing” quality. If you analyze them, you will no doubt squirm at many of the words. But see if you can “shut up and sing” – see if you can resist the temptation to comment on an experience and instead give yourself over to it. You may find value in the process.
Our opening hymn is and easy one: #38 Morning Has Broken.
First Reading
Our first reading is from Mahatma Gandhi. I particularly enjoy reading Gandhi because, unlike many spiritual writers, you could see the effect of his faith in his very public life. And unlike other inspiring political/faith leaders like Martin Luther King or Oscar Romero, he wrote clearly, honestly, and deeply about his private and internal experience.
Now, Gandhi was an ascetic. He is easy to admire, but not many of us would agree with him that all pleasure is a trap that diverts us from God. Forget sex – Gandhi would avoid food he enjoyed and considered sleeping more than 4 hours to be a mortal sin. But he was a man of great faith, and those who spent time with him always commented on the joy he took in living. His writing is absolutely honest to his experience. It is not for show.
So let’s listen for a minute to Gandhi talking about faith. Some of these words are easy for most UUs; others will probably make you squirm. Listen for what may inspire and challenge you.
Mahatma Gandhi
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and then re-creates. That informing power or spirit is God. And since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, God alone is.
And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see that in the midst of death, life persists; in the midst of untruth, truth persists; in the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. God is Love. God is the Supreme Good.
Second Reading
Our second reading is by William G Wilson, better known as Bill W, author of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like Gandhi, Wilson is a spiritual writer who is unflinchingly honest about his own internal experience and his own shortcomings, and on the other hand was a social actor who changed the lives of millions.
Wilson grew up in East Dorsett Vermont, not far from Manchester, and moved to New York City after serving in World War I. Although his casual religious upbringing was nominally Protestant, his writing about spiritual experiences is recognizably Unitarian in character. After a dramatic “burning bush” or “road to Damascus” kind of conversion, he was able to overcome debilitating alcoholism, and he developed a spiritual way of living that has since helped millions. He rejected all explicitly Christian language when writing about his spiritual experience, and generally used the phrase “the God of your understanding.” Higher Power or Deeper Power were other terms he and early AA members used as they struggled to discuss faith while avoiding doctrine.
Wilson wrote extensively on the internal life of a spiritual experience. Here is a famous passage from his original writing on the Twelve Steps. It is called “The Promises,” and it appears in AA’s Big Book after Wilson introduces Step Nine. See if you can recognize his description of a spiritual experience.
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us; we will intuitively handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.
Sermon – Shut Up and Sing!
“Wow, that’s going to be a big challenge for a lot of Unitarians!” That was Jenny Rankin’s response when I told her that I intended to preach on the importance of spiritual disciplines and to suggest that we UUs unnecessarily forego their benefits as we fanatically avoid doctrine. For good measure, I told her I would say that we spend so much energy not believing in a God defined by others that we fail to develop our own language for thinking and talking about whatever power greater than human power has brought us here – and about our relationship to that power and our place in a created universe.
But don’t head for the exits yet! I’ll try to preach without lecturing, to engage and perhaps inspire. I hope to intrigue you and encourage you maybe to wander off your spiritual and intellectual beaten path, for I believe the path of faith is wide enough for even Unitarians to tread.
We seek to open the life of the spirit to UU's in ways that do not feel doctrinaire, but I think our Unitarian impulse to be expansive and inclusive may not always serve us well in thinking about our spiritual activities and spiritual disciplines. Let's agree that it is not for any of us to dictate how another should understand himself or herself in the universe. And let us stipulate, further, that nearly anything can be a spiritual practice: a daily chore like washing the dishes, certainly – Zen Buddhism is well-known for that; and the Bhagavad Gita, which was Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite sacred text – and, by the way, was a favorite of Emerson – is set the evening before a momentous battle in an internecine war. (Gandhi reinterpreted this to be a metaphorical, spiritual war between within the human soul, but I don't think most scholars believe it was written that way.) Those disclaimers aside, we’ll all agree there is a difference between spirit-lifting and spirit-crushing activities, and certainly between activities consciously undertaken as spiritual practice and those that the actor does not regard consciously as spiritual.
I am suggesting that while there is a wide range of spiritual discipline, there are benefits to choosing one and to carving out time for it, often to put ourselves under the teaching or discipline of mentor. Consider the practice we have here of singing Spirit of Life, sitting in silence, and then Find a Stillness. Most First Parish members find this consciously undertaken spiritual discipline to be spirit-lifting. But we all know that consciously undertaking a discipline does not necessarily make it spirit-lifting: I found reciting the Nicene Creed became rote and meaningless, and I left the church that required it.
We UUs, however, tend to exalt the spirit-lifting, unconscious activities. We often undertake these with some other explicit purpose and find ourselves swept away, sometimes in rapturous awe or other times in quiet serenity, but nonetheless transformed somehow by the experience even though we thought we were just tucking our kids in for bedtime or walking the dog the morning. Or, as Diane Rollert described once in a reading many of us have heard, sitting at a traffic light in the rain and listening to the rhythm of the windshield wipers. Or helping a friend in need. These moments arrive unbidden, and time falls away; we are left with gratitude, wonder, and serenity. That welcome feeling does not come on command but rather because at those moments we have gotten outside ourselves and allowed something of the larger life to flow through us.
So we focus our practice by asking the question “What feeds you?”, and we emphasize the joyful part of spiritual practice. We say our practice includes walks in nature, long evenings spent with good friends, the joy of a craft or a sport. Yes, we pride ourselves in our high regard for these unconscious spirit-lifting experiences. We say that we avoid rote repetition and try to live “present in the moment.” But I am not so sure. The art of being truly present is difficult for me. We all recall Thoreau's observation that most of us “lead lives of quiet desperation”; oftentimes, that has described me.
We tend to shy away from the “discipline” parts of spiritual practice – no days spent with a vow of silence, no regular early morning prayer services, no acts of confession for Unitarians! No, we're so relentlessly positive, and so damned independent, that no one is going to tell us what we have to do to achieve enlightenment. We'll do it our own way. The way we choose.
I think we may be missing something by giving that self-direction full sway. We do avoid the shallow hypocrisy of rote liturgical practice, but we may forfeit some of the benefit of finding a conscious spiritual practice and giving ourselves over to it. The best spiritual disciplines usually call on us at some point in our lives to submit to the discipline in a way that requires us to dig deep for courage, or patience, or humility. This level of discipline is almost always conscious, because otherwise we naturally avoid it. We often have to put ourselves under the guidance or discipline of a spiritual teacher and accept tasks or approaches we do not understand and whose benefits appear nebulous or downright impossible. Somewhere, we struggle with existential questions of why we’re here, what it means to live a good life, and how we get what we think we want when there are trade-offs for what others may want.
But the benefit of healthy spiritual disciplines is precisely that they increase those instances of transformation we UUs so greatly prize for “being in the moment.” Exercising conscious spiritual discipline expands the time we spend “surprised by joy,” to use a phrase of 20th Century Christian writer CS Lewis. Or think back to Bill Wilson’s description of enlightenment – “We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.… We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.” Who would not want that? And Wilson – unlike CS Lewis – asserts that it is available without doctrine, and even without addiction! But we have to get out of our own way. We have to resolve the natural selfishness that is the human condition (for most of us anyway – and certainly for today’s speaker). And that is the role of the spiritual discipline.
Like an athlete’s warm-up stretches, or a pianist’s scales, a spiritual discipline prepares us for the main event: it places us in a frame of mind where we are more conscious of our blessings and less impatient with the world for not delivering all we could wish to have. We feel more often the sense of gratitude, wonder, and serenity that makes life rich. We feel, in a word, blessed.
This sense of blessing comes more easily if it is preceded with a bit of humility. Humility is much misunderstood and far more pleasant than it sounds. It is nothing like humiliation, and is entirely devoid of groveling. The simple truth is that each of us is unique, wonderful, and beautiful – and none of us is very important. Humility is simply a sense of being right-sized with the world, and it opens the door to enormous serenity. For me, whatever humility I have has been hard-won. In fact, if I did admit how late in life it came, and how difficult it was to accept, I might be humiliated because I do retain some sense of a social mask. But I’m so damned self-important that I can charge through the day swearing “If there really is a God, why did that guy just take my parking space? If there really is a God, what accounts for war, famine, or the popularity of Glen Beck?” OK that last one was a cheap shot. I’m sure he has his own story. I just don’t want to hear it. But I tend to define life’s goodness by whether my current circumstances are what I wish. I may be in the moment, but I’m not exactly serene.
Humility additionally allows us to get over the fact that we are not going to understand everything. And this, for Unitarians, is often the hardest part. Carl Scovel, the former minister of Kings Chapel and a regular guest in this pulpit, preached a terrific sermon here a few years ago about the story of Thomas, the apostle who doubted that Jesus had physically risen. “Unless I see him stand before me and eat,” he declares, “unless I put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe.” Whereupon of course Jesus appears, Thomas falls to his knees, and he believes. Marcus Borg, a biblical scholar and author of several fascinating books about the language and meaning of the gospels to their 1st Century authors and hearers, asks, “What would we have seen if we’d recorded the event on video?” Thomas only, falling to his knees? Thomas and Jesus both? Thomas and a glow of light? Borg’s point is rhetorical; it doesn’t matter what we would have seen. Carl said that he himself had not seen a physically risen Christ (which I found comforting) but that like Thomas, he had reached a point of falling to his knees in awe with a cry of wonder.
And so here we are at the “Shut up and sing!” moment. This is where we UUs have so much trouble. We want to read and dissect the words. We want to explain and to understand. But we wind up chasing our tails – we are not going to understand. These truths are not simply beyond our current knowledge; they are inherently unknowable. But that is not the point. I asked Laruen to sing In the Garden earlier. It is a beautiful hymn and I asked her to sing it because I know she loves to sing it and I love to hear her sing. It’s a sappy song. The words are hard for Unitarians. But it describes an experience many of us have had, of being alone in the morning with a sense of transcendence. It does not matter that we would not use those words. What matters is that we identify with the experience. It is in community that we find meaning, and if we wait for the perfect doctrinal statement, we will end up alone.
In the meantime, we search for this doctrinal perfection at the expense of experiencing the moments given us as daily gifts. We will sing in a moment a hymn called How Great Thou Art – the words are in your order of service. It describes one of the sources of our faith: direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder – in this case, from the beauty of the natural world. But you know what? When I typed those words this morning, I realized I needed to return and capitalize all the Thees and Thous – I’m a Unitarian, but I’m also a grammatical pedant. So I did. And I physically reacted to every capital-T. I do not like that language. But I have learned over time that if I wait until I find the perfect doctrinal statement, I will never see the beauty and the wonder in the world. I have to let go. And the daily practice of spiritual disciplines – in my case, the Twelve Steps but I encourage each of you to seek your own – has taught me enough humility to do that, and in return the gift is to comprehend the word serenity, and to know peace – at least for a time.
OK, so now it is time for me to shut up and for you to sing.
How Great Thou Art is in your order of service.
How Great Thou Art
O Lord my God
When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works Thy hands have made,
I see the stars;
I hear the rolling thunder –
Thy power throughout
The universe displayedChorus
Then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee,
“How great Thou art!
“How great Thou art!”Then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee,
“How great Thou art!
“How great Thou art!”When through the woods
And forest glades I wander
I hear the birds sing sweetly through the trees;
When I look down
From lofty mountain grandeur
I hear the brook
And feel the gently breezeRepeat Chorus