Beyond Reason

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
December 7, 2003

Reading:
"Kindness" from Words under the Words, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
what you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
how you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out in to the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Sermon:

Martha Beck tells a remarkable story in her book, Expecting Adam. She and her husband John were both Harvard PhD students, striving to excel in an intensely competitive environment. Martha says that fellow scholars often looked upon them suspiciously because they had a child so young in their lives. Since she was pursuing feminist studies, she found this especially ironic. It was tough. Martha was pushed to her limits by attempting to fulfill the roles of both mother and student with Ivy League dedication. And then something unexpected happened. She got pregnant with a second child, and this pregnancy brought extreme nausea and dehydration unlike anything she had with her first child. Just when Martha and John felt their lives had reached their most chaotic point, they learned their unborn baby had Down Syndrome. Friends, colleagues, and family were all in agreement about what they needed to do. It was entirely beyond reason and beyond their community’s comprehension why Martha and John elected to keep bring the pregnancy to term.

Life offers up great challenges at unexpected moments. At some point or another, we all must face such challenges where we don’t know where to go or what to do. Consider when your life faced a crisis, when there were no maps to guide you, when your own experience had no light to shine in the direction that you had to move. Despite the pain and agony, these are often times of great deepening—spiritual, emotional, personal. I believe our lives are shaped not so much by the life challenges that come our way but by how we learn to deal with them. 

 

When I recently drove by the River Forest United Methodist Church, the signboard outside read open minds, open hearts, open people. That message, I believe, is the essence of living with faith. But this religious imperative is not easy. Openness requires attention not only to beauty and joy but also to pain and sorrow, disappointment and dread, but in the end, openness is what will lead us to kindness and love. And this is what I believe faith is all about.

 

Today I want to reflect on faith, the kind of faith that can either take us through the most difficult life challenges or perhaps the kind of faith that emerges when we move forward into places of uncertainty and fear.  The word faith is a tough one. It wasn’t part of my vocabulary prior to seminary. And I hated hearing someone say in times of distress, “Have faith and all will be well.” This statement often offers no consolation, sounding hollow, even patronizing. I empathize with people who recoil from the use of the word faith, for so often it is used in the context known as blind faith, giving away one’s own authority to another person, to a doctrine, or to an organization. That’s not genuine faith; that’s seeking a crutch and choosing to live in a cave. Real faith helps people stand on their own two feet, embrace life in both times of joy and sorrow, providing the courage to step through darkness and into the light.

 

Authentic faith is not about believing in something that someone says you should. Faith is not about memorizing and parroting the teachings of a religious sect. Faith requires reflection and self-examination. The late great UU theologian James Luther Adams argues that there is no genuine faith that is not an examined faith. We all must cast away the faith of our childhood and then question for ourselves what is true, for no matter what we choose to put our faith in, each of us as individuals must make that choice.

 

Frederick Beuchner also speaks eloquently and simply about faith. “Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. A journey without maps…doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”

 

Martha and John had lives that sought first and foremost to be successful. Their measure of success was academic achievement. Nothing was going to change that—except extraordinary circumstances. Faced with learning that their unborn baby had Down Syndrome, Martha and John knew keeping the baby would have profound changes for their lives. Several doctors told Martha that she ought to have an abortion, one of them virtually insisted upon it, becoming upset when Martha refused. (This is an inversion of the problem we will have at West Suburban Hospital if Resurrection takes over, for then women won’t have access to abortion counseling). As for John, his supervising professor expressed great concern that he wasn’t keeping pace with his thesis work. The respected scholar told John that he himself once decided his wife would have an abortion for the sake of his career, and now John faced a similar opportunity that separated “the men from the boys.” Everything John had worked for the past ten years was at stake.

 

There’s something I haven’t told you about Martha and John’s story. They both had bizarre, unexplainable experiences of the unborn baby communicating with them. I know this sounds really weird, but on different sides of the globe, Martha and John each experienced the unborn baby telling them his name was Adam. Martha also recounts other bizarre, irrational experiences of being supported by her child while he was in the womb. They agonized over their dilemma, whether to do what virtually everyone expected of them or to base their decision on utterly irrational experiences, albeit their experience. Given their particular situation, they decided the truly rational thing to do was to trust their experience and trust that life would go on and perhaps open up, to expect or trust that life was calling them to raise a child with Down Syndrome.

 

This choice meant venturing into unfamiliar territory. It also meant making a decision that would alter the course of their lives with an unexpected un-planned for challenge. Martha and John Beck’s lives changed enormously after Adam was born. Their lives faced many new challenges. They did eventually leave academia. Others viewed them as dealing with hardship and suffering and treated them in patronizing ways or, more often, simply avoided them. For Martha and John, Adam’s presence in their lives challenged them to grow, to notice beauty, to value love over all else, and to cultivate faith that grace happens in unexpected ways. Martha claims that Adam brought more life to his parents lives than they brought to his, for they now know how beautifully tender life can be, something they didn’t pay attention to when striving to measure up to Harvard’s standards.

 

I have come to understand a significant aspect of faith as the intentional act of keeping our hearts open, and not only our hearts but also our minds and our entire being. Open hearts, open minds, open people.  Living with such openness may lead us to make a change in the focus of our life’s work or in a change in lifestyle. It certainly can change our priorities. We might very well decide to focus less on spending and getting, and more on really living. We might realize that we typically avoid people who are going through great pain, loss, or a significant life challenge. To identify with someone else’s hardship may mean confronting our own ill-placed priorities. But what a gift it is to be challenged to turn towards priorities that are life-affirming and venture out of the cave that prevents pain and beauty to touch our souls. As difficult it is when we are must face hardship, life calls us to question our own priorities and turn toward life-sustaining ones. Ironically, often it takes a life crisis to do so.

 

Often life crises come suddenly without any warning. On September 11^th, 2001, thousands of Americans unexpectedly met their deaths. I was serving in the Seattle area at that time, and I was receiving the New York Times because the Seattle paper was so lacking. Even though I was a continent away, I was compelled to read every word of every story about the victims and their families. Over the following months, the New York Times printed short bios daily about people who died. It became a morning ritual to sit down to breakfast, turn first to the biographies that were about people of all walks of life, allow tears to come forth, and then read as much of the paper as my time allowed. This daily ritual helped me acknowledge the horror and move forward with an open heart.

 

Horrific atrocities occur frequently, albeit on a much smaller scale, in most parts of the world. Innocent people are killed mercilessly in Latin America, in the middle east, in Asia, in Africa, even in North America, Just over the American border from El Paso, the city of Juarez over the last ten years has had over 260 young women kidnapped, raped, and murdered, with the local authorities either unable or unwilling to stop the carnage and horrific exploitation. I can empathize with people who say that reading the newspaper and news magazines just gets them depressed. I know a lot of people who forgo keeping up with current events other than the sound bites that filter down to them. But if we are to be faithful citizens of the world, can we live in comfortable denial or blissful ignorance?

 

For me, faith boils down to whether we have learned what kindness really is. As Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.”

 

It’s fully human to grieve for families we’ve never met who have lost loved ones, whether they are American soldiers, Iraqi parents, Palestinian children, Israeli families, or anyone else whether they be among your community or on the other side of the globe. Often there is grieving yet to be done in our own lives. The sorrow we share with others can serve as a guidepost. If we wish to make a small offering to others it behooves us to deal with the loss and grief in our own lives. In Nye’s words, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

For me, this is a time of the year that calls us to know both kindness and sorrow as cornerstones of our faith. This is the season of advent, a time of expectation and hope despite the onset of cold, the ever longer nights, and the relentless desperation that exists in the world. My colleague Ron Robinson notes that “Advent celebrates the time of pregnancy, of intentional waiting and of growing for what is to come, what is to be born. He says, “The season that commemorates the time before Jesus' birth is a time dedicated to creativity and casting vision for what the world should be like. It is a good counter-point season to the madness of the holiday marketplace season. “ He continues, “If we let Advent into our lives it will be to ponder on the power of pregnancy, of the period of waiting for something to be born, nurturing it, co-creating it with God, what is growing spiritually within us, of not letting the world tell us what is worthy of our lives and our fortunes and the risk of our deaths.”

Advent asks what are we waiting for? What are we birthing? In what ways are we all pregnant with the Spirit of Life?

When I reflect on Martha Beck’s story, a significant learning for me is that it is more important to be faithful than to be successful. The more we seek to measure up to success, the unhappier and more lost we shall be. To live authentically, we must live with an open heart. We must judge the worthiness of our actions by the love that goes into them and not the results that follow. For if we move forward in love and faith, what we create together will be life enhancing, not life-constricting. The more we seek to live faithfully, the more joy and richness blesses our lives, and the more we know what kindness really is, even though this means we must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

In our waiting, in our hoping, in our sorrow, and in our rejoicing this Season, may we realize that what we are called to may or may not fit in with other peoples expectations of us. We may be called to prepare for the Holiday Season in ways very different from those around us. We may not know what is waiting to be born within and among us. The Season invites us to discern how we are called to respond to the spirit of life. I take solace in Beuchner’s words that faith is on-again, off-again. It is part of the journey to find that one has veered from a place of openness and love, and to find a way back again.

I close today with a passage from Expecting Adam. It is set at the ocean in Florida, where Adam was taken by his mother to swim with a dolphin.

The sea is beautiful but frightening, like the fluid world I entered during the time I was expecting Adam, when the rock-hard structures of Pure Reason failed me. Maybe my life has always been as rich in mystery as it now seems. Maybe Adam merely called my attention to it. Or maybe his presence has trailed enchanting, enchanted moments into my life the way a comet trails sparks of light. Either way, I now have far to go before I can inhabit that world without astonishment and uncertainty. It calls to me with a siren’s song, but I still get scared.

That day with the dolphins, Adam wasn’t scared of anything. Alita [the dolphin] rounded the curve at the edge of the lagoon and headed back toward me, pulling [Adam] like a towrope from her fin. He was still laughing, the face below his golden hair radiating happiness. It is impossible to look into Adam’s face when he smiles this way and not smile back. For some reason that incredibly contagious grin reminded me of something Albert Einstein said: that the single most important decision any of us ever have to make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly. Adam appears to have made that decision.

My friends, may it be so for us all.

Blessed be.

Amen.

© Copyright 2003 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.

 

Benediction:
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, from the book I Asked for Wonder:

Over and above personal problems, there is an objective challenge to overcome inequity, injustice, helplessness, suffering, carelessness, oppression. Over and above the din of desires there is a calling, a demanding, a waiting, an expectation. There is a question that follows me wherever I turn. What is expected of me? What is demanded of me?

 

What we encounter is not only flowers and stars, mountains and walls. Over and above all things is a sublime expectation, a waiting for. With every child born a new expectation enters the world.

 

This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me. Every human being has had a moment in which he sensed a mysterious waiting for him. Meaning is found in responding to the demand, meaning is found in sensing the demand.