Choosing from the Heart

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“Choosing From the Heart”
The Rev. Terasa G. Cooley
Unitarian Society of Hartford

October 6, 2002

Invocation

Enter with me the sacred space.
Bring with you what is yours –

A burdened heart, a joyous song,
A wearied spirit, a seeking mind.

Bring the gift of yourself to the altar.
It is an honorable gift.

Story for all ages

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice...

"Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt great hate for those who have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It's like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times."

"It is as if there are two wolves inside me; one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But...the other wolf... ah! The littlest thing will send him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all of the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing. Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."

--- A Native American tale told many times around the Sacred Fire

Prayer [TGC 10-05-02]

We pause, for a brief moment, and sense a fissure in our lives,
A cleft in the rock of stability that we thought was beneath us always.

We sense the fragments of our selves –

--this face we show to family and loved ones,
-- this face we give to our work place,
-- this face we offer to strangers.

Which face reflects the picture of who we really are?

The world leads us out in so many ways –

-- so much to live up to,
-- so many shoulds and oughts and expectations,
-- a multitude of paths to follow, paths which sometimes tangle, and sometimes lead in opposite directions.

Surely there is a wholeness to all this,
Surely there is one true face we may offer to the whole of the world,
Surely there is one true path for each of us to follow.

And at times we do indeed glimpse this wholeness,
sometimes just a momentary flash of perception,
When we push past the shoulds and the oughts and the expectations,
When the faces seem to dissolve into one,
When we are willing to look both deeply within ourselves, and also far off into the distance beyond the surface realities of our lives,

When we take off the masks and peer into the face of the divine reality of life.

The wholeness is there,
If we can but look and see.

Amen.

First Reading

Parker Palmer Let Your Life Speak

I sometimes lead retreats, and from time to time participants show me the notes they are taking as the retreat unfolds. The pattern is nearly universal: people take copious notes on the what the retreat leader says, and they sometimes take notes on the words of certain wise people in the group, but rarely, if ever, do they take notes on what they themselves say. We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

I urge retreatants to turn their note-taking around, because the words we speak often contain counsel we are trying to give ourselves. We have a strange conceit in our culture that simply because we have said something, we understand what it means! But often we do not – especially when we speak from a deeper place than intellect or ego, speak the kind of words that arise when the inner teacher feels safe enough to tell its truth. At those moments, we need to listen to what our lives are saying and take notes on it, lest we forget our own truth or deny that we ever heard it.

Second Reading

William Stafford “Ask Me” [quoted in Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak]

Some time when the river is ice ask me
Mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
What I have done is my life. Others
Have come in their own slow way into
My thought, and some have tried to help
Or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
At the silent river and wait. We know
The current is there, hidden; and there
Are comings and goings from miles away
That hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

Sermon

A few days ago Ed Savage put a bug in my ear which sent me down to the bookstore. I often like to peruse the shelves of the “Spirituality” and self-help sections of bookstores, just to see what kind of advice people are offering in this realm, and I'm often a little disturbed at what I find. For what jumps out at me all the time when I do this is how the authors of these books are trying to make the spiritual life look so easy.

Here are a few titles I found the other day:

60 Days to Enlightenment by Wayne Dyer
30 Days to a Simpler Life by Connie Cox
How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci: The Workbook by Michael Gelb
The Handbook to Higher Consciousness: 15 Minutes a Day to Higher Consciousness by Ken and Penny Keyes
10 Days to Self-Esteem by David Burns
If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Cherie Carter Scott
The 7 Spiritual Laws of Success by Depak Chopra

And finally, my personal favorite, which was the book that Ed had mentioned to me: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Awakening Your Spirituality by Jonathan Robinson, with 25 easy guidelines in the front cover that will guarantee a spiritual life.

Now, I'm not saying that there are not valuable things offered in many of these books. I know I've been able to glean some insights from some worse titles. But what bothers me is how they make it look so easy, so reducible to simple rules and easy steps. I worry that people will buy these with the hope that they guarantee success and that when that inevitably does not transform them into the Dalai Lama they will give up the quest entirely in disappointment.

Anyone who has delved seriously into spiritual development knows that it is a lifetime process, not something that can happen in 30 or 60 days, let alone 15 minutes a day. One of the basic tenets of Unitarian Universalism is that we seek to live a religious life day and day out, all the time, not just a few hours on Sunday morning, or a few minutes a day. Nurturing and awakening our spiritual lives involves the whole self, and it challenges all that we encounter, asking us to bring our values to bear on all we do and say. It is a hard calling that we have imposed, and we rarely live up to it perfectly, but I believe it is a goal to which we can aspire that will lead us toward wholeness and fulfillment.

If we accept this calling as our own, it means we must treat carefully every choice that we make about how to live our lives. There is no easy instruction book, no neat set of rules to follow. Instead it requires a continual process of discernment about who we really are, or, as our poet put it in our reading this morning, asking ourselves constantly whether what we are living is our life, the life we were meant from birth to live, the life that will unleash the potential within us to give great gifts to the world.

Life offers us a seemingly endless panoply of choices every day which force us to go through this process of discernment, whether we realize it or not. From the major choices we must make at certain points in our lives, like who we choose as partners, what work will satisfy our multiple needs, how do we best care for our loved ones; to the seemingly minor choices like what kinds of foods we eat, what we will do with our precious spare time, how we respond to strangers – life offers us multiple opportunities, and indeed demands, that we choose one path or another, and we grow more and more conscious as we get older of the consequences of each choice we make.

This constant need to choose can overwhelm us at times, almost to the point of paralysis. What should I do, we ask ourselves over and over without realizing that the far more important question we should be asking ourselves is: who should I be? This is why we need to develop a well-grounded process of discernment in our lives, to help us not only to make choices, but in the making of choices, to awaken more fully to who we are called to be in the world.

“Discernment” has become a kind of buzz word of late, used by everyone from theologians to business consultants, to the authors of books offering you steps to spiritual fulfillment. The word “discern” is derived from the Latin and simply means: that which differentiates. So the process of discernment at its simplest level means to tease apart the component pieces, to understand the particular parts of our choices and their implications.

What often happens in our life when confronted with choices is that instead of trying to discern a path, we often get overwhelmed by concerns. Concern is the opposite of discern – when we get too focused on concerns we get tangled up in fears and anxieties and focus on dire consequences, rather than allowing ourselves the space and time to tease things apart and reflect carefully on what this choice really means to our lives, and who we understand ourselves to be.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, back in the 1600's, actually developed a comprehensive process of discernment which set the model for what many have tried to establish today, and I can tell you right now, that it was not something accomplishable in 15 minutes a day. It was designed for people who were deciding to enter into religious orders, but it actually has great wisdom and insight to offer us today when we consider very different kinds of choices we have to make.

Because it is a very complex process, I can't give you a comprehensive picture of it in the context of this sermon. [For that you can come to my adult education class we're starting on Tuesday evening, at 7pm]. But I want to at least offer you three major themes that emerge from his process that could be helpful to us no matter the kind of choice we are struggling with.

The first and most important principle of discernment may surprise you coming as it does from such a conservative religious source. Ignatius believed that the first step in a process of discernment is not to discover what other people want of you, but to know in the deepest sense who you are and what you are called to be. And this is probably the hardest part of this process. You would think in a culture which affirms self-actualization and individual achievement that this would be easier in our times than it was in the 1600's, but I actually think it is no easier today. There are so many competing demands placed on us today, so many expectations we think we should be living up to, so little space and room to really dwell with the deepest parts of ourselves to really understand who we are. And interestingly enough, it is not something you can really know just by yourself, for we discover who we are most often in our relationships and interactions with others. And it is often very helpful to find a guide in helping us to know ourselves better.

One of the most difficult choices I have had to make in recent years was in fact my decision to accept your call to be your minister. It was not that I didn't want to come here. That was part of the problem. I fell in love with this congregation from the moment I met the church committee, and felt it truly was the place I was called to be. The difficulty was that my husband Justin wasn't called to be in Hartford, he was called to be in New Jersey! And he, too, had fallen in love with the church that offered him a position. So we spent several weeks agonizing over what to do. I could go to a church closer to him, but it wouldn't be a church that I loved as much as this one. Or Justin could float around this area doing interim ministries hoping that something would eventually open up. Neither of these seemed good choices, for we knew that if one of us gave up the church we loved for the other, we would surely resent the other for being forced to make that choice.

Finally we sought the advice of a wise rabbi who is a pastoral counselor. He just looked at us with astonishment and said, the choice is obvious. Get a helicopter, and take the churches you each want to serve! Obviously your careers and your calling as ministers are very important to each of you, and there is no reason you cannot construct your relationship around those needs. People do it all the time! What had been hanging us up was this set of external expectations about what marriage was “supposed” to look like, rather than delving into the heart of who we each truly were and what ore relationship needed to be that could satisfy us both. And amazingly, thankfully, it has turned out just fine. When we see each other, we are very focused on the time we spend together, and when we are apart, we are able to do what satisfies us both.

Ignatius teaches us that the choice that will be best for us is the choice of inner freedom, that choice which leads us toward what is life-giving, rather than life-negating, which is the second theme I want to discuss. When we make a choice based on what other people expect of us, or because of some external idea of heroism that we think we should live up to, rather than because it is truly what we want to do, then we ultimately end up being destructive of ourselves, and also of those others whom we are trying to please. Rabbi Zusya once put it well: “In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: `Why were you not Zusya.'” The Sufi mystic Rumi put it even more starkly: “If you are here unfaithfully with us, you're causing terrible damage.” By unfaithfulness he did not mean unfaithfulness to others, but unfaithfulness to ourselves. It often takes a lifetime to understand what being faithful to ourselves really means, and it takes a great deal of courage to make the choice that liberates us to be ourselves, and thought the path is hard, it reaps great satisfaction.

When people come to me struggling with trying to figure out what choice they should make, I often offer this exercise. Imagine the different choices you are confronting as a series of rooms. People the rooms with things that symbolize what each choice represents, and then walk into each room and test how your spirit responds. Does it respond with a sense of excitement and lightness, or does it feel heavy and dour. This response will tell you something very important about what you need to do in your life.

But it's not always so easy to really figure out what it is we really want and what would satisfy us, which leads me to the third major theme in the process of discernment. How do we distinguish between the desires of our egos and the desires of true fulfillment? For the ego can often lead us down some destructive and dangerous paths. It can convince us that what we truly want and desire is something that ultimately will be unfulfilling to us, and damaging to others in our lives. We can see this most clearly if we look at addictive behaviors. One of the best definition of addiction that I've heard is that it is the endless desire for something which never satisfies. And that's how it feels, does it not, when we are addicted to something. We crave whatever it is that we believe we will get from the object of our addiction – peace and quiet, stimulation, whatever, but ultimately it never really produces what we hope for, or, at best, the satisfaction is momentary, and we pay a larger price for it later. It is our ego that is continually deceiving us into believing that what we want is what will satisfy.

There are all kinds of ways that we can see this operate at perhaps less destructive levels than addiction, but nonetheless they are damaging. I'll offer an example of a recent confrontation I had with my ego. About a year and a half ago, just after I started my work you here, I was asked by several people at the UUA, our denominational headquarters, to consider running for the Board of Trustees as the representative of this district. At first I was thrilled by the prospect. In between General Assemblies, the Board of Trustees is the group that makes the most important decisions about the future of our movement. Particularly exciting was the prospect of joining the Board just as Bill Sinkford would be taking office as our new president, someone I had supported in the election and who I thought would take us in exciting new directions.

My husband Justin reacted with less excitement to this possibility that I did, reminding me of how much time it took to be a member of the Board, and how much time it would take away from our ability to be together, not to mention the strain it would cause on my work here when I was just beginning this new ministry. I poo-pooed all his objections and found answers for everything. But when I met with my spiritual director and talked about it with her, she asked me the kinds of uncomfortable questions I have learned to expect from her. “Why do you really want to do this?” I had all kinds of responses about being able to contribute to our movement, etc., and she would then ask, “And would the work you would be doing really be something that you have the gift for and interest in?” “Well, no, I had to admit, it was mostly administrative work” which I have really grown to dislike. So again she would ask, “Why do you really want to do this?” And after several rounds of this, I finally realized with great discomfort that the reason the idea appealed to me is that it felt like it would make me someone important in the denomination. I could walk around General Assembly with a name tag that said “Board of Trustees” on it, and feel like that granted me some greater status.

This was not the choice that would bring me inner freedom. It was a choice that was driven by my ego. There are much greater gifts I could give to the denomination, not the least of which is serving this church that so inspires me.

As I said in the beginning, it is a difficult, life-long process to really understand our spiritual values and what they call us to do in the world. Oftentimes really dwelling on these things can be painful and challenging. But when we work through the pain and try to understand what we are being challenged to do, the results can be far more satisfying than taking the easier, more thoughtless route.

I am reminded of a story that Parker Palmer tells in Let Your Life Speak, in which he tells of deciding to go once on an Outward Bound expedition. Outward Bound, as many of you know, is a program of physically challenging tasks designed to help you confront your fears and challenge yourself to do things you never dreamed you would be capable of. Palmer was trying to shake himself out of a depression and make some tough choices about what he next wanted to do with his life, and he thought this would help.

He chose a weeklong course at Hurricane Island, which tells you something about the course! In the middle of the week they came to the task that he dreaded the most: rock-climbing. An instructor backed him up to the edge of a 110 foot cliff, tied a rope to his waist, and told him to start “rappelling” down that cliff. “Do what?” Palmer said. “Just go” the instructor said, in typical Outward Bound fashion. So he went, and immediately slammed into a ledge, just four feet down, with bone-jarring, brain-jarring force. The instructor looked down at him. “I don't think you've quite got it,” he said. “Right” said Palmer, being in no position to disagree. “What am I supposed to do?”

“The only way to do this is to lead back as far as can, at right angles to the cliff, so that your weight will be on your feet. It's counterintuitive, but it's the only way that works.” Palmer knew that this couldn't possibly be right, that the only way to survive this was to stay as close to the rock face as he could, to practically hug the mountain. So he tried it again, his way, and again slammed into another ledge. “You still don't have it,” the instructor said helpfully. “OK” Palmer admitted, tell me again what I'm supposed to do.” And this time he did it, and amazingly it worked. He leaned back into empty space, eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, and made tiny, tiny moves with his feet, and finally started descending down the rock, gaining more and more confidence as he went.

When he got halfway down, though, another instructor called out from below: “Parker, you need to stop and look at what's below your feet.” And he looked and saw that he was approaching a huge hole in the face of the rock. To get down he would have to get around that hole which meant letting his feet go and swinging around to the left or the right. And he froze suddenly, paralyzed with fear. The instructor let him hang there for a minute, and then called out: “Parker, is there anything wrong?” He had no idea where these words came from, but in a high, squeaky voice he just said, “I don't want to talk about it.” The instructor finally said, “then it's time you learn the Outward Bound motto.” “Great,” he thought, “I'm about to die and she's going to give me a motto!” But then she shouted out a motto he will never forget: “If you can't get out of it, get into it.” These words so compelled him that without even thinking about it he swung his legs out and suddenly started to move, and within moments he was on solid ground. [loosely quoted from Let Your Life Speak p. 84-85.]

And that is the way of spiritual awareness and discernment. It often takes us into very scary places that can seem threatening to our very sense of self and all we may think we value. But sometimes the choices before us make us realize that we can't get out of it, and so our only choice is to get into it, to look deeply at ourselves and what is most important to us and to make the choice that will ultimately make us feel free. It can happen, if we can learn to let go and follow the voice of the inner spirit. What we have to gain is no less than life itself, a life well-lived, the life within us that is waiting to be lived. So may we choose and find our life. Amen.

Benediction

Life is forever questioned, and forever answered;
It is forever dying and forever born anew.
Yet another tomorrow, it will stand upon the earth as upon a footstool
And reach upward through the stars.

Amen. Go in peace.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 2/19/05)