Sermon Great Compassion

SERMON August 6, 2006
Great Compassion
Marye Gail Harrison

Prelude

Welcome and Announcements

Invocation:

#431 Barbara Wells

           O Spinner, Weaver, of our lives,
           Your loom is love.
            May we who are gathered here
            be empowered by that love
            to weave new patterns of Truth
            and Justice into a web of life that is strong,
            beautiful, and everlasting.

Chalice lighting

Musical Dedication # 403

Unison Affirmation

Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law. This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.

Hymn #358 Rank by Rank We Stand

Children may depart during the hymn for their program in Fellowship Hall.

Community of Greeting

Responsive Reading #490 Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles hrough the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Offering and Offertory

Unto us much has been given; so may we give generously to the work of our church. We will now receive the offering.

Prayer #505 Thich N’hat Hanh

Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living things.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.

To this prayer let us add the silent prayers of our hearts at this moment.

Musical interlude

Reading

From Matthew Fox A Spirituality Named Compassion

“Compassion is everywhere. Compassion is the world’s richest energy resource. Now that the world is a global village we need compassion more than ever – not for altruism’s sake, nor for philosophy’s sake or theology’s sake, but for survival’s sake.

And yet, in human history of late, compassion remains an energy source that goes largely unexplored, untapped and unwanted. Compassion appears very far away and almost in exile.

It is more and more certain to me that religion’s purpose is to preach a way of life or spirituality called compassion and to preach it in season and out of season. This is surely the case with Judaism and with Jesus Christ. It also appears to be the case with Buddha, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Confucius and Hinduism. People can indeed learn compassion from religious traditions, provided those traditions are in touch with their truest roots. And compassion will also be learned from nature and the universe itself.

To be compassionate is to incorporate one’s own fullest energies with cosmic ones into to the twin tasks of 1) relieving the pain of fellow creatures by way of justice making, and 2) celebrating the existence, time and space that all creatures share as a gift…”

Hymn #86 Blessed Spirit of My Life

Sermon: Great Compassion

I love these words:

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Mary Oliver. And

“Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living things.” Thich N’hat Hanh

And yet, in human history of late, compassion remains an energy source that goes largely unexplored, untapped and unwanted. Compassion appears very far away and almost in exile. “ Matthew Fox.

I recently returned from a week long silent directed retreat. I went on retreat with a couple agendas. First, I wanted to be sure I had time to prepare a sermon to deliver today! Secondly and more fundamentally, I wanted some quiet time to reflect on what is the deeper purpose of my life at this time.

I’ll be 65 this month. I’m starting Medicare. I feel like I am beginning to run out of time and it’s important to be more conscious about how I use my time. During this past year serving on the church board, I have been more aware of the UUA Covenant where we commit to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning as well as working for justice, equity and compassion in human relations. My husband, John, and I had just gone to see the movie An Inconvenient Truth and I wondered what I might do relative to this environmental crisis. So all these large questions were looming before me and I needed some perspective.

The way this retreat works is that I have a spiritual director to meet with each day of my retreat for 30 minutes to an hour. I chose to be guided using a body focusing approach. In this body focusing approach, I try to sense what is happening in my body and guided by my spiritual director’s questions, go deeper into the bodily experience with a non-judging, caring presence to whatever is there.

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Sounds like Mary Oliver tried body focusing.

Five or six years ago I was involved in more activities at the Meeting House than I am now. I had been on USH 2000 task force and then the Ministerial Search committee while reading at Betances school, serving on the Social Justice committee, ultimately it’s chair, and I helped organize the Fun Days we did twice a year with Center For Youth. I was also in a two year Internship training to be a spiritual director, doing some part time consulting work and my husband was not well. I was running on dry – nothing I did felt rewarding any more. At my spiritual director’s urging I took a sabbatical. It lasted longer than a year partly because I developed a heart problem that required surgery. But with all this in the background on my retreat, I was weighing my desire to serve at this time in my life and my concern about taking on a burn out commitment. I suspect many of you struggle with balancing the desire to serve with a concern that you will over load yourself. Maybe you are already at a burn out level of giving.

On this retreat, what I got in touch with was the need to offer myself compassion in order to be in the world more compassionately. So the theme of today’s sermon, Great Compassion, emerged over the course of the week.

As Matthew Fox said, “Now that the world is a global village we need compassion more than ever – not for altruism’s sake, nor for philosophy’s sake or theology’s sake, but for survival’s sake. “

What I really want to be able to do this morning is to create a caring presence for you. I wish I were able to create a sacred holding space inside you for the next fifteen minutes. I would have you relax as I did on retreat into the soft animal of your body and experience your own great self compassion - your ability to hold your own pain and your joy in total nurturing, to embrace lovingly your humanness in all its failures and glories. I believe, based on my experience, that as we listen deeply to our own truths, we experience in ourselves a caring holding, a self compassion that nurtures and guides us appropriately in our lives. This kind of guidance is always available to us, is wise, and can sustain us on our journey. So my intent is to invite you into that place with me this morning. I come to you in that spirit.

You know even Jesus said that we should love our neighbors as our selves. As ourselves – how well do we love ourselves? What keeps us from self caring? Well, lots of different things, but a fear of being selfish is a big one.

Sherry Anderson and Pat Hopkins in their book The Feminine Face of God, say that “of all the fears we have heard from women about taking time and space for themselves, the most common by far was the fear of being selfish. If there is a mantra that women repeat to themselves to deny their longing for solitude, it is probably, ‘Selfish. Selfish. Am I being selfish?’” One woman they interviewed said, “’So much trust is needed to turn down or tune out the internal critic and focus on what is happening inside you instead of always serving others.’” They observed that once women they interviewed had decided to honor their need for time alone, after experiencing the inner renewal and serenity that being alone can bring, their concern about self-centeredness disappeared. All this is true, of course, for men as well as women.

To love ourselves, we have to tune out, turn down or ignore our inner critic and bring a non-judging caring, nurturing attitude to ourselves in order to go within and find our deeper truths.

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

During my week retreat I had to feel both my fear of selfishness and my inner critic in order to keep going deeper into my own truth. What allowed me to do this is a strong inner presence I experience in my body which feels like a motherly nurturer. I fell it on my left side of my body, a little behind my heart. When I experience this presence, I feel sure that nurturing my self and loving myself is a right and appropriate thing to do.

Robert Wicks wrote a little book called riding the dragon – 10 lessons for inner strength in challenging times. Wicks is a counselor particularly for people in the helping professions. He says that we must take time for ourselves in order to be able to lead caring lives, to be able to work toward making the world a better place. He writes, “Kindness is essential for clarity to effect change. This is especially the case in regard to the love and gentleness with which we treat ourselves. Self-awareness and self-love go hand in hand…. Self-love is manifested in many ways. Chief among them is the act of kindness toward ourselves. The last thing many of us think about is a way to be as gentle with ourselves as we are with others.”

As we look at ourselves, wanting to know our truth, what is right for us, wanting to face our actions and motives directly, to face our pain and our triumphs face to face, we must do it with self compassion. We may imagine a great caring Mother figure inside us, a part of ourselves, holding us in our exploration. Maybe she wraps us in a comfort shawl and holds us close. This great nurturer loves us perfectly, has our best interest at heart, and offers us guidance that is perfectly suited to us. This nurturing may move us into difficult new directions but those new directions feel solid and sure, right for us, sincere, authentic, full of integrity – all qualities which energize us, and which we can sustain over long periods of time so that we, and perhaps even this beautiful world, can survive.

In retrospect, I realize I have had this self compassion experience before when things were difficult for me. One of the most recent was when I was preparing for heart surgery a few years ago. I had taken a few hours with a friend to do some art. It was an artist date in the spirit of the book The Artist Way which some of you have studied. I was making a collage expressing my fear and frustration facing this operation. I cut out pictures representing my heart broken and bleeding. I saw myself as a small helpless sick child. I felt very sorry for myself – a victim going under the knife. I wrote about my feelings, allowing myself to feel this inner pain and anguish. I brought a caring audience to my feelings. Something inside shifted. I felt an insight. I actually felt it in my heart: I realized I was the nurturer that I needed to take care of me, not a helpless victim. I was the caring one who needed to make the best decisions I could to get my heart fixed. I loved myself enough to do whatever needed to be done. It was a transforming insight. It opened me to many helpful resources including meditation guides called “Prepare for Surgery –Heal Faster”, a trip to Cleveland Clinic to have the heart repair surgery done, a clear request to friends and family to hold me in a spirit of love and prayer during the surgery and after, getting my legal and financial affairs in order. I experienced great peace going into surgery and once I got out of the recovery room after the surgery. I did heal fast on all levels- body, mind and spirit.

“Let us be at peace with our bodies and our minds. Let us return to ourselves and become wholly ourselves.

Let us be aware of the source of being, common to us all and to all living things.

Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living things.”

Thich N’hat Hanh calls us to this way of Great Compassion because he believes that we must see ourselves as one with all other humans in order to begin to care about one another well. And if we do not care about ourselves, how will we care for one another? Could all the violence in the world be a form of self hate? Maybe so.

And Matthew Fox reminds us, “Compassion is everywhere. Compassion is the world’s richest energy resource.”

So how do we live a meaningful life and make this a better world? We begin with our selves – we kindly look at ourselves deeply to find our inner truth and then lovingly, we do what we need to do both for ourselves and for others.

“Evoking the presence of the Great Compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living things.

Let us pray that we ourselves cease to be the cause of suffering to each other.

With humility, with awareness of the existence of life, and of the sufferings going on around us, let us practice the establishment of peace in our hearts and on earth.”

How can you do this?

We need to take care of ourselves daily, weekly, monthly, yearly so we can sustain serving others. Remember in an air plane when there is an emergency and the oxygen masks come down and you are traveling with someone who is dependent on you, who’s mask do you put on first? Yours? Or the other person’s? Right, yours – you can’t help someone else if you can’t breathe. Self-compassion is your oxygen mask in this life.

Don’t know where to begin? Don’t have time? Try some of these things, starting small and working up as you can.

Daily:

Get more sleep.

Pause before you eat and give thanks for all it took to get that food to you.

Relax and think about nurturing yourself if only for 2 minutes as you shower.

If you can, spend 15 minutes meditating, praying or reflecting attentively, kindly.

Walk alone while relaxing and paying attention to your walking, even if just from your car to the store or office or to pick up the kids.

Try to walk 30 minutes a day.

Weekly:

Go to church, give thanks there for your life.

Get outside for at least 30 minutes a week alone.

Journal 30 minutes about what’s true in your life. Ask yourself tough questions and answer them.

Exercise at least moderately for 30 minutes 3 times a week.

Read a short inspirational reading.

Spend 2 hours at a hobby or in a pleasurable pastime alone or silently.

Monthly:

Find a renewal zone where you can drop your masks and reflect for a couple hours on your deeper truths – try SGM, SD, therapy, massage, pedicure, fishing – find out what a renewal zone is for you and go into it monthly.

Meet with a close friend.

Sing or dance.

Check your body for lumps.

Spend an hour simplifying some part of your life.

Yearly:

Get a physical, including the once every three to five year tests and have your teeth checked.

Go on a retreat.

Plan a fun, relaxing vacation

Plan a celebration for yourself.

Love yourself. Seek out your truth and live it gently, peacefully. Know yourself as a loveable part of the universe kin with all others. Serve with gladness.

Please rise as you are willing and able and sing hymn #34, Though I May Speak With Bravest Fire

Our Benediction is #686 by Mark Belletini

Go in Peace. Live simply, gently, at home in yourselves.
Remember the depth of your own compassion.
Forget not your power in the days of your powerlessness.
Take care of yourselves as bodies, for you are a good gift.
Crave peace for all people in the world,
beginning with yourselves,
and go as you go with the dream of that peace alive in your heart.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 08/06/06)