Spiritual Practices

Nov 27, 2005 Order of Service
Marye Gail Harrison

Spiritual Practices – Going Deeper Into Life — Worship Leader: Marye Gail Harrison (A UU member for more than thirty years, USH member for nine years, graduated from training as a Spiritual Director in 2002, and currently serving as USH Board member and liaison to the Council on Spiritual Life

Editor's note. Here you will find the entire service with various references and readings. If you wish to simply read the sermon, click here

Entrance Voluntary – Tom

Welcome and announcements:

Invocation: #435

We come together this morning to remind one another
To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,
To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,
Until we claim for ourselves
Awareness and gratitude,
Taking the time to look into one another’s faces
And see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes. [PAUSE]

This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope,
is hallowed by our presence together.

Chalice Lighting - Ken

Today I light the chalice in honor of our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Please stand as you are willing and able to sing the Musical Dedication 403 and then remain standing to say together our affirmation which you will find in the order of service.

Unison Affirmation .

Hymn: #112 Do You Hear? Please stand as you are willing and able.

A Time for all Ages: Excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit - Ken

How many of you know the story of the Velveteen Rabbit? Here is a part of the story I bet you remember:

What is real? asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick out handle? Real isn’t how you are made said the Skin Horse. It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real. Does it hurt? asked the Rabbit. Sometimes, said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt. Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, he asked, or bit by bit? It doesn’t happen all at once, said the Skin Horse. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because when you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. I suppose you are Real? said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. The Boy’s Uncle made me Real, he said. That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always. The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real would happen to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without those uncomfortable things happening to him.

Have you ever loved anything until it became Real for you? Thank you for being good listeners.

The children may leave for their classes now as we sing a departing blessing found in the back cover of your hymnal.

Departing blessing: Back cover of your hymnal

Community greeting: While we wait for some parents to return, please extend a warm greeting and welcome to those sitting near you.

Offering: We will now receive the offering to support the work of this congregation.

Offertory: Tom

Prayer: Please join me in the spirit of prayer, contemplation or meditation:

We pause in our lives for a moment of quiet, of calm, of peace.
We let go our super ego’s judging, critical messages.
We let go our monkey mind’s swinging from one thought to the next.
We let go to create a space in us,
a space for our curiosity,
for our growth and development,
for the experience of synchronicity and even mystery.

In the inner calm we lovingly bring our attention to what is Real and true in us, our essence.

And we invite the Presence of this Real Essential nature and truth to stay with us in the coming days, that we might live deeply.
Amen.

Responsive Reading:

We will read responsively #660 To Live Deliberately, Henry David Thoreau

Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?
We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.
I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.

Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.
I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;

Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.

Musical Interlude: Tom

Reading:

From “Letters from the Heart” by Elizabeth Lesser. She is co-founder of Omega Institute, the nation’s largest holistic education and retreat center, in Rhinebeck, NY. This is an excerpt from her letter to Huston Smith, professor of religion and philosophy best known as the author of the classic college text, “The World’s Religions”.

“I once heard you compare the human being to a lantern that contains within it the flame of the divine. You said ‘A lantern may have a functioning light within it, but it may be coated with dust and soot, sometimes even with mud.

Sometimes the light does not shine at all. Religious practice helps the faithful clean the surface of the lantern….’ I agree with you. In fact I think you may have defined the purpose of all spiritual life –‘to clean the surface of the lantern.’…I now see the spiritual process as one that happens in stages, and that at each stage the seeker must commit fully to a discipline, even as he or she stays open-minded and alert to the rest of the world. At different times in my life I felt called to heal or nourish specific parts of myself. Early on in my studies I was most attracted to the exploration of consciousness, and found my spiritual home in Sufi meditation and Christian mysticism.

When I was a young mother holding down a stressful job, the practice of Buddhist mindfulness meditation became critical to my ability to stay sane. When I was going through a painful divorce, I began Jungian psychology and body-centered approaches. I was a midwife for ten years and include that as part of my spiritual education: it helped me heal the split between body and soul…. So adding up all the twists and turns of my spiritual path, I conclude that it is not just religion that taught me how to walk with love and light through my life. Religion, mythology, psychology, science, bodywork and the rough and tumble of everyday life -- each has taught me about living an ethical, mystical and magical life.”

Hymn: #90

From all the Fret and Fever of the Day. Please stand as you are willing and able.

Sermon:

Sermon 4 Nov 27 2005 USH

I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you this morning. One thing we say here at USH in our welcome to newcomers is that “We offer to support you where ever you are in your religious journey and offer you spiritual tools to reflect upon the meaning of your life and your place in the world.” Well, I have been searching all my life for spiritual tools and I still am. This morning I want to talk about some of the spiritual tools called “practices” –some of the tools that help us go deeper into life, to become Real, or as Thoreau said to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” or as Elizabeth Lesser’s reminded us to clean the mud off our lantern, off our inner light.

As I started to prepare this sermon I talked to a few of my friends here. One said, “I don’t think we have words for this stuff, no words for our deeper experiences, never mind for any spiritual practices.” I hope today we can begin to have some words we can use to talk about these deeper experiences.

Let me back up first and start with what I call “spiritual flashes”. Now these are not kin to hot flashes which many of you know very well. What I mean by Spiritual Flashes are unexpected peak experiences when we feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Sometimes in SGM people share stories about such experiences. My husband has a favorite one he tells that happened when we stopped to walk the beach in ME 25 years ago. He was walking along listening to the gulls cry, the waves lap the sand, watching the sun glint on the water when suddenly he felt one with it all, one with everyone and everything. He looked into a tide pool and felt connected to all the life in it. It didn’t last long. Tears came to his eyes. He told me about it right then but said he couldn’t really tell me what happened; he didn’t know how to describe the experience. He’s never forgotten it, I can tell you that. Maybe something similar happened to you in nature.

This kind of experience, I call a spiritual flash; not a spiritual practice. In a flash, to use our lantern analogy, our inner light spontaneously flashes out through the mud and momentarily we know our essential Realness.

Others of you have described an experience that transcended your usual life when you listen to beautiful music; in fact you come to Sunday services to listen to the music hoping it might happen today, again. Maybe it did. Some of you have said you had feelings like my husband’s as you faced a life threatening illness which shattered your world as you knew it or at a more joyful time when you first held your child or grandchild in your arms and looked into the face of new life. These moments come “out of the blue”, and while we may never forget them, we may begin to doubt their importance. Yet we remain a little hopeful they will come again.

The lantern and becoming Real analogies work for me because I have two working assumptions I’m using. First, I assume we all have some essential core in us – call it essence, being, divine, God within, higher self, actualized selfhood, spirit – all similar ideas about something that is the best in us. This is what I mean by spiritual. The deeper issue seems to be how we live out of this spiritual core which I’ll call the Essential Self or the flame in the lantern. Maybe it is becoming Real as in the Velveteen Rabbit story – maybe we love this story because we all want to become Real ourselves, to know our flame directly, to know ourselves on a daily basis as we might in a temporary Spiritual Flash.

My second assumption is we develop spiritually; we grow spiritually. We go through stages and levels of development as we become more and more our core Essential Self. We see this very clearly each year here at USH at our Youth Affirmation ceremony and on our annual Youth Sunday when we are blown away by our youths’ development. Developing spiritually is what going deeper into life means to me. Just as we create opportunities for children to grow and develop, I have assumed I could create circumstances to encourage my own spiritual development. This is where spiritual practices come in for me. To me spiritual practices have 3 qualities: they are intentional, awareness building, and repeated. The reason why I do spiritual practices is because I am trying to clean off my lantern and experience that flame, that core Essential Self, to become Real. This makes sense to me from either a humanistic or theistic perspective. My spiritual practices are the way I try to provide myself with a supportive spiritual growth environment. I’m too impatient to just wait for spiritual flashes.

Like Elizabeth Lesser I have experienced my life in stages; different religious organizations and spiritual practices have seemed appropriate at different times. I am counting on my UU connection, which has now spanned 30 years of my life, to hold me in a healthy spiritual development environment, to support my lantern cleaning and to lead me deeper and deeper into life, into Truth, into becoming Real. Maybe we can begin to focus on developing spiritual practices together, “spiritual tools to reflect upon the meaning of our lives and our place in the world.”

So I am wondering if you and I have shared some similar spiritual practices at different stages of our lives but not called them such. My first spiritual practice was a Methodist Sunday School and then MYF youth group. I asked a lot of questions and questions were asked of me. I went intentionally and repeatedly and I grew in awareness – it was my first spiritual practice.

In the early 60’s the civil rights movement moved and shaped me spiritually by focusing on justice – standing against my parents’ prejudices, reeducating myself, sometimes picketing Woolworths and the state house. This was a different kind of spiritual practice.

As a young wife and new mother, there hardly seemed time for me. I know there are others here who have and are sharing that experience. There were two practices that seemed to stabilize me at the time. I did Transcendental Meditation for a year or so. I also noticed how physically unfit I was. I began jogging until I could run 1 mile. Both of these were intentional, awareness building, and repeated. They helped me hold the center of myself. Eventually we joined a new UU church in Manchester and I continued my teen year practice of belonging to church related organizations.

My life crashed. In my late 30’s my husband and I divorced and I agreed to be the parent who left our home and children. Perhaps you have experienced a similar stage in your life. Did you have any intentional, awareness building spiritual practices to support you then? I didn’t. It was all about survival in the next stage. I wonder if some of you were in this kind of place when you came to USH?

Unitarian minister Harry Scholefield, who has developed a wonderful practice called “Living By Heart”, says, “If you don’t have a devotional life, you will dry up and blow away.” That’s what was happening to me –all mud, no flame.

Many years later I began attending USH. About 6 years ago I came to Jon Luopa and asked for help with the grief and emptiness in my life. He said I needed spiritual direction. I had never heard the term but I said, “Yes. That’s why I came to you”. He said he didn’t do Spiritual Direction; they didn’t train most ministers in that. He thought I should go to St. Thomas Seminary; that’s where he went. I said, “Let me get this straight – you think I need SD, you’re my minister, you don’t do it and you’re sending me to the Catholics which is where you go?” “Right,” he said and I went.

So six years ago SD became my primary spiritual practice. I still go every month to see a spiritual coach. She listens to me as I reflect on where truth/meaning/spirit is emerging in my life. She helps me clean off my lantern, helps me see where the mud is and where the flame is burning. Eventually I became a Spiritual Director myself and learned more about spiritual practices in my two year training in Bloomfield.

My heart surgery two years ago tested whether these practices made any difference in my life. In the vulnerability of facing my possible death – I found a new element of spiritual practice – self compassion. Ironically my spiritual heart opened as I prepared for physical open heart surgery. For a month before surgery I used guided imagery tapes called “Prepare for Surgery Heal Faster” with visualizations twice a day. Intentional, awareness building, repeatedly done in self love, not quilt, not shame and not because I should. An amazing calm, spaciousness began to fill me in the days before surgery and sustained me then and after it. I assume these spiritual practices opened me to this wonderful calmness.

In the October 5th Hartford Courant, Garret Condon reports on a book called “Positive Energy” by Dr. Judith Orloff. One of her mini-meditations about developing self caring is reported in the article. Like Harry Scholefield ‘s work it involves getting quiet first. Then she says, “Gently rest your palm over your heart….Concentrate on a person, place, song, or memory you cherish. You may want to start with nature. Visualize a sublime dawn, or picture a puppy napping in your lap. If you prefer, focus on a higher power. The purpose is to feel love in a general sense, then specifically as a localized energy in your mid-chest….” Concluding the exercise she adds, “Observe the sensations, dramatic or subtle….Let it happen. Don’t hold back. With time you’ll feel a vortex of positive energy growing in your heart that spontaneously flows out into your body.” Some of you may listen to meditation and relaxation tapes and have experienced this positive energy, this generalized feeling of love which includes yourself. This is a spiritual practice.

Finally, last March something very ordinary drove my spiritual practice. I was gaining weight and knew that was not nurturing to my body but I didn’t know how to stop gaining. In spiritual reflection I faced my guilt and fear about weight and health; my new experience of self-compassion emerged. It grew over a few months into a delicate sweet feeling, a physical presence in the center of my chest. As I reflected on this experience I began to understand with a deep knowing and confidence what would help me. I put it all in place. I began to recognize that this weight loss commitment was actually a spiritual practice for me. I am cleaning some of the mud off my lantern. I am going deeper and deeper into my own truth, into my own life. I’ve lost 28 pounds. Now that’s a lot of mud!

Have spiritual practices made a difference in my life? Yes. They are exposing the flame of my core Being. I have discovered certain essential qualities in myself like real curiosity, quiet strength, gentle perseverance and self compassion. I know these lights shine in me in new ways as resources for living deeply. They affect the way I experience life. As I have become more intentional and more aware, I’m a little less judgmental, more open to other views, kinder to myself and others.

It sounds a little like the velveteen rabbit’s becoming Real. Only it is my ego mud that is wearing off, not my fur and whiskers; my old perspectives that are falling out of my head, not my eyes and -- yes , it’s taking a long time and lots of love, including self love. And, of course, it has taken until my body is a bit shabby.

My wish, and what I will end with today, is how can spiritual practices such as I have described be a part of what we do together here at USH? On January 20 and 21, Arline and I will introduce Rev. Harry Scholefield’s “Living By Heart” practice at the Annual USH Retreat. Please consider joining us. The sign up sheet is in the December Messenger. What are the practices you have found to support your life? What do you do repeatedly that is intentional and awareness building and in the spirit of self caring? The Artist Way daily pages, a daily devotional reading, SGM, eating a meal mindfully, prayer, choir practice, fasting on certain days, volunteering to serve others – are any of these your spiritual tools, your spiritual practices? Would you like them to be? What practices do we support here that take you deeper and deeper into life? What do you want and need to clean the mud off your lantern so you can know your own light? How might we support one another?

Hymn: #295 Sing Out Praises for the Journey. Please stand as you are willing and able.

Benediction: # 687 – John W. Brigham

Go your ways,

knowing not the answers to all things,

yet seeking always the answer

to one more thing than you know.

Postlude: Tom

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 11/28/05)