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Sermon Index

A LIVING . . . OR A LIFE?

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 15th of September 2002

READINGS

First Reading Let Your Life Speak, by Parker J. Palmer,

I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but . . . [s]eeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one's own. Fearful that I was doing just that . . . I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling.

Then I ran across the old Quaker saying, "Let your life speak." . . . I thought I understood what they meant: "Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to [them] in everything you do." So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out.

Today, some thirty years later, "Let your life speak" means something else to me "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

Vocation, the way I was seeking it, becomes an act of will [which becomes] an act of violence toward ourselves. . . .

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.

Second Reading CallingsFinding and Following an Authentic Life, by Gregg Levoy

Recently an acquaintance who has searched for many years for a sense of direction revealed that he was waiting for "a unshakable vision." I immediately thought of the work of the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of what he calls "dissipative structures," part of which contends that friction is a fundamental property of nature and nothing grows without it

It is precisely the quality of fragility, he says, the capacity for being "shaken up," that is paradoxically the key to growth. Any structure that is insulated from disturbance is also protected from change. It becomes stagnant. Any visionor any thingthat is true to life will not be unshakable.

If you aren't willing to get shaken up, if you hang on to the belief that you have an unshakable vision, [then] when your call falters in any way something painful happens, or you hear it once but then it goes away, or you drive into a tunnel and lose the receptionthen you will probably conclude that the call wasn't true to begin with because it shook! Almost by definition, calls shake us up because in the same breath that a call is uttered, so is suffering. As Jonah discovered, a call rocks the boat.

Being unwilling to bear the hurly-burly of faithfulness to our call, we court disaster Latin for "against one's stars" and we end up agitated anyway. Although we have the choice not to follow a call, if we do not do so, the Sufi poet Kabir said, our lives will be infected with a kind of "weird failure." We'll feel alienated from ourselves . . . and fitful with boredom, the common cold of the soul. The calls we will not name or follow coalesce into entities that will attempt to tunnel their way into consciousness using any rough tool at hand to remind us of their imperatives, and they will do so through the impeccable logic of pain. As an old Roman saying goes: The fates will lead those who will. Those who won't they drag.

SERMON

The poet May Sarton wrote:

Now I become myself.

It's taken time, many years and places.

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people's faces. . . .

Which of us has not worn, or tried to wear, other people's faces? To fit some mold because we admire it, or because our parents urged it on us; because we just don't think much of ourselves as we were, or because we wanted to make ourselves more acceptable in the world? Perhaps to get a job we wanted or to get ahead. There are many reasons, and we may not realize we're distorting our real selves until we've been at it awhile. But eventually we begin to feel the pain of wearing shoes that do not fit. We hurt.

We may, early on, not have he luxury of choosing work that feeds our souls. But in almost any work, there is at least some scope for bringing to it who we are, in changing how we see the work, in relating to our co-workersand if we will but attend to the search for ourselves, we also as the years go by may have the chance to find work that fits us better.

We're not talking just about work. Shaping a whole life includes making space in our lives for friends and for family, for spouse and for children. It includes the life of our minds and our hearts, our hobbies and our inner life, the causes to which we give ourselves, the priorities of our lives. When I speak of vocation, I'm speaking of the choices we make about all of these things, from childhood to the last days of our lives, as we are dissolved and shaken and, in the end, become more fully ourselves. It is a lifelong process.

Parker Palmer says that from the perspective of his 50s, he can see the unique personality of his young grandchild far more clearly than he could 30 years earlier, in his children. This has been my experience, too. I think it's a product of growing older: we've seen more children. We've had more years to see the variety of human personality. How much less, then, can we expect much insight into our own personalities, while we are still young? Palmer says he's collecting his observations about his granddaughter in a letter, which he will arrange to have given to her when she is in her teens or 20s. Imagine such a gift!

We start out uniquely giftedbut whole. There is a naturalness about childhood. Until self-consciousness begins to grow, we assume that we can do just about anything we want to do. We don't think about it. We just do it.

Gregg Lavoy, tells of an artist friend whose 7-year-old daughter asked him one day what he did at work. He told her he taught people how to draw. She looked at him in astonishment, saying, "You mean they forget?"

Robert Fulghum, too, speaks of visiting kindergarten classes in which, when he asks "Who can dance?" "Who can draw?" "Who can sing?" every hand goes up with every question. But in each older grade he visits, the answers get more selective. By high school, they want to know, "what kind of dancing?" "what kind of drawing?" "what kind of music?"

Parker Palmer speaks of our "original giftedness," and says that over the first half of our lives, we are gradually "disabused" of this broad giftedness, and self-confidence. Then, he saysif we are awake, aware, and able to admit our losswe spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.

I can't remember ever thinking I could dance, but maybe my mother could have produced pictures to remind me. Certainly I found stacks of my childhood drawings in my parents' attic. Yet now I don't even attempt stick figures.

We may not forget how to draw, how to dance, but as we grow older, we may discover that others are better than we are. We learn that there are standards and that few of us are stars. We discover our limits, even as we discover our gifts. It doesn't take us long, and a lot of us get pretty shy about displaying our lack of talent.

Still, when it comes to the workplace, we mostly take for granted that apart from the arts, we can learn whatever we need to know. When it comes to a job, within a broad range of possibilities, we assume it's a matter of studyand hard work. So it's natural that we look for what may pay the most.

I can't remember it being suggested, at home, in school or in church, that I might not be wise to adapt myself for whatever kind of work or life I might choose, and I dont remember being encouraged first to look inward. I don't remember any caution about wearing other people's faces. Not until I was in my 50s did I begin to think about such things. Of course, it also may be that I was just not ready for it, so I couldn't hear it. I did hear, in college philosophy, of the ancient teaching to "know thyself. But I heard it at an intellectual level. I didn't let it touch my life. It might have scared me if I had.

It never occurred to me, when I considered becoming a lawyer, to think about whether I'd really like doing what lawyers do. Well, I knew I liked to write, and lawyers write. I knew I liked public speaking, and lawyers speak. But lawyers are advocates. Would I really be suited to work that demanded assertiveness? In standard personality profiles, mine is the "bridgebuilder" personality. The flip side of that is that bridgebuilders duck when there's conflict. Part of their spiritual task, in becoming more whole, is to learn to be more assertive. It didn't take me long to discover that I wasn't much of a negotiator, far from a great advocate. I found a niche that took advantage of my skills in analysis and writing, but let's face it"real" lawyers go to court. An office practice was a little like my Air Force experience as an officer who was not a pilot.

Understanding ourselves is not easy. Perhaps you've heard me tell Parker Palmer's story of how, after a decade of conscious vocational search, he convened what Quakers call a "clearness committee" to help him decide whether to accept an invitation to become the president of a small college. Tell us what attracts you most about it, he was asked. But all his answers seemed to focus on what he did not likefundraising, politics, giving up his summer vacations, even wearing a suit. When someone repeated the question, he heard himself saying that, well, he guessed he'd like seeing his picture in the paper with the word "president" under it. Awkward pause. Then, "Parker, can you think of an easier way to get your picture in the paper?"

He didn't take the job.

Our rational selves can go only so far in understanding hopes and fears and desires that mostly lie deep in the subconscious. My message this morning is to invite us to go deeper. We must recognize that as much as we long for "the good life," the good life is not just about our standard of living, but our standard of life. It's about finding wholeness. It's about discovering who we are, discovering our gifts and our longings along with our limitsand matching them with "the world's deep hunger," in Frederick Buechner's imagery. It's in this matching that we find meaning and satisfaction, and what has traditionally been called "vocation"that is, a life that calls to us.

Vocation, Palmer reminds us, is not an act of the will. As we heard in our reading, it's about listeninglistening to ourselves. This is a spiritual journey. The great religions teach that the spiritual journey is one of growing in awareness. This begins with calling us into the present moment. But it's more than simply being in the now. It's about opening all our senses to what's happening around us and reacting to it. It draws on both intellect and feeling, both head and heart. But before we can even begin, we have to accept the task. We have to recognize that reality includes more than the realm of the intellect. Call it soul, call it subconscious, call it spiritit's the realm that expresses itself in dreams, in thoughts and images that come unbidden into our minds, in things we say and do unthinkingly, then wonder where they came from. This can be especially hard for literalists, of whom I was one for much of my adult life.

For years, I would have the experiencein dreams, but they were so real I never thought of them as dreamsof leaping through the air, just above the ground, on and on and on, just as far as I wanted. There was no limit. I think I knew that I wasn't meant to try it physically. But I never gave serious attention to where the image came from, or what it was trying to tell me. It was just there.

Only in thinking about this sermon have I considered the possibility, that my spirit might have been telling me something about the possibility of change in my life. I didn't have to let my fears keep me stuck in a marriage that had long been failing, in work that never engaged my soul. I suspect there were other signals too, in my dreams. But I wasn't ready to pay attention, and I didn't.

Most of us, says Lavoy, will never encounter a burning bush, or be struck dumb on the open road, like Moses or Paul. The signs we need to attend to will be smaller, more subtle, and often disguised. Most of us go through life oblivious to them. But if we are aware, if we are mindful, and if we keep our senses attuned, they'll get through to us. The channels through which they come, he says, are "like pierced ears. We have to keep earrings in them, or they close up." I'm too old for body-piercing, but I love the metaphor of keeping the channels open.

One of these channels is our inner life. We tend to think of prayer as words, most often words of petition. But the heart of prayer is listening. The words, at their best, invite us into the questions, and through the questions, into listening for the answers. Seldom will they come in a thunderclap, seldom in a voice that we might hear. But in our meditation, we may find a thought or idea or an image keeps popping into our heads. It can be good to keep the channels open, the earrings in.

Obviously, not all such ideas come from the best that is in us. Some may come from ego, from temptation, from ambition or fear or greed. How often have we as humans claimed God's blessing for actions of violence? And so we need community.

Sometimes, too, when we begin to look within, the chaos that begins to bubble up can be quite frightening, as with memories of painful childhood experiences, even abusive ones. And so we need experienced guidance on the journey, sometimes just the presence of other seekers in a group we trust. The covenant groups we are starting in this congregation are meant as safe places to share our journeys. As ministers, we can offer spiritual reflection and a listening ear.

For me, a holistic approach to religion must embrace both the journey inward toward self-awareness and the journey outward into the world of justice-making and human service. Without the journey outward, the journey inward can be narcissistic. Without the journey inward, the outer journey may lead to burnoutor worse, we may find we are following only the call of ego or guilt, serving our own need more than the world's.

Together, these two journeys can make our lives whole. The great test comes at life's end, as we look back. Have we found the place where the deepest longing of our souls has met the world's greatest hunger? Have we found not just a living, but a life?

In the great body of Hasidic wisdom, there's a much-told story about Rabbi Zusya. Toward the end of his long life, he is said to have declared that "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'"

How will we answer?