The day began as usual. The shower went on in the bathroom and I knew it was time to get up. I pushed the covers off, sat up and leaned my feet over the edge of the bed. I closed my eyes and said my usual morning prayers - offering thanks for another day of life and the health of my body, mind and spirit - asking for openness to all that might come in the next hours - After the amen I was on my feet and moving toward the now empty shower myself, smelling lavender and ginger and watching the dry air from the open door melt the steam clouds on the mirror. After a quick shower and my turn with the hair dryer I made my way back to the bedroom and got dressed - and then the song came on - a solo guitar, Peter Mayer's voice and the lyrics stopped me in my tracks - it used to be a world half-there, he sang, heaven's second rate hand me down, but I walk it with a reverent air, cause everything is holy now - In that moment my heart cracked open, tears rolled down my cheeks, and I reached for my partner.
I was sleep walking before, going through the motions of my life when something snuck in and caught me by surprise - I don't know if it was beauty or love, the way the light shone through the blinds, a period of dormancy naturally ended or just the right combination of it all, but whatever it was, that moment has colored all of my days since.
Light snuck into my soul that morning. I had been doing my best to make ready for a moment like that - moving along through the days reaching for extended hands, pushing myself to keep praying, to keep walking, to keep open to the possibility of change that was sure to come. In the midst of recovering from a difficult year, I was trying desperately to stay awake in this world. While of course, from time to time, and often for long periods of time, I leaned in instead to the pull of the tv, to action movies and Jerry Maguire and popcorn and the solitude of my apartment - I knew deep in my heart that the world was a mixed bag - that moments of joy would be wound in tight pressed up next to moments of pain - and I didn't want to miss any of it. I knew that the moments of joy and clarity would sustain me, and I wanted to keep my eyes wide open to as much as I could stand.
The moments of joy and clarity came that year and they still come - one after another when I least expect them - and there I am again with my heart cracked open and tears running down my face for the intensity of it all.
I think moments like this happen for most of us. They come and go for me. They don't happen very often, and I can't force them - I usually say, I wish I could take a picture of this - grab on and hold the feeling close forever, but the moments run through my fingers like water and before I know it they have passed - leaving me washed clean and slightly stunned, staring out at the world with new eyes. I know these moments as glimpses of ultimate reality, the shining of light into my soul, a split second of being truly awake in a world that is constantly lulling me to sleep.
It's hard to know if we are drawn to sleep-walking through our lives as a function of resilience or as a function of denial, but either way it is certainly a coping mechanism that helps us to survive the ups and downs. Some days I agree with T.S. Eliot that "humankind cannot bear much reality." So I am not here to pull away one coping mechanism without replacing it with another - and I am not even here to tell you that checking-out is a bad thing. I was, after all, the seminary student who relentlessly held Taco Movie Night one Friday a month, while many of my colleagues met over bags of chips to discuss some obscure German theological reference. Sometimes a nap, a break from reality, is just what we need if we are going to bring our full attention to the world at a later date. I believe that we must find a way to balance moments of intense awareness with periods of rest and contemplation. The danger occurs when we lean too much to one side or the other, craving only constant stimulation or complete detachment. Balance is what holds us in the rhythm of spiritual living.
And in our culture, striving for balance can be a challenge of monumental proportions. It's easy to feel lost and disconnected. We are not taught that being awake and aware is the object of life, but that more is the object of life - more money, more stuff, more achievement. Moderation goes out the window, and even with all of our labor and time saving devices, many of us find ourselves exhausted at the end of the day, eating pre-packaged food, missing out on opportunities to sit and talk with friends or read a good book. Naturally, in these moments we lean toward detachment, longing like our poet Billy Collins to crawl into the backseat of the car and fall asleep.
This conflict between the values of our culture and our own desire for a deeper, more spiritual life, creates a problem that you may be familiar with. After extensive research, neuropsychiatrists, Drs. Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, describe the dilemma this way. "Happiness," they say, "is within range only for people who give the slip to America's values. These rebels will necessarily forgo exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs, designer everything - all the proud indicators of upward mobility - and in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life."[1] When we make the decision to forgo even some of the trappings of our material culture, when we give the slip to prevailing ideas of what it takes to be happy - we may initially find ourselves alone - looking for support, searching for the manual on how to live deeply.
In our quest for a different kind of life, we often turn to the sacred teachings of other religions. We find solace and challenge in Buddhism and Judaism, new perspectives and meaningful rituals in earth-centered traditions and in boundless other sources. All of these traditions offer wisdom that can enrich our lives and I turn to them often. But in my own effort to live deeply, to plunge my roots down where I am planted, I also turn frequently to the Transcendentalists, a group of American, predominantly Unitarian, religious and literary leaders.
These folks, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker and so many more - speak to me in my own mother tongue and they offer solutions - or at least approaches - to the problems I face. They too were distressed with the materialism of their day, and they too were searching for a way to live spiritual lives in the midst of it all. Rebelling against the dry and perplexing stuff of their churches and their society, these folks strove to achieve balance in their lives between work and leisure, nature and civilization, society and solitude, spiritual aspirations and moral behavior.[2]
In their writing and in their lives, the Transcendentalists took a uniquely natural view of the spiritual life. They focused on self-culture - literally directing their energies to cultivating or growing a soul - and with this approach they introduced a new progressive, developmental view of the spiritual life.[3] In this kind of spiritual life, the individual was responsible for preparing and cultivating their soul - making it ready for those rare moments of insight and clarity, moments when we are fully awake and aware of things in all of their simplicity and complexity. This process of making ready, of growing a soul, did not require advanced education or finances, a person did not need access to priests or special rituals, and the potential for development was limitless. All that a person needed to grow a soul, to live a spiritual life, was the intent and the discipline to follow through on staying awake and aware and active in the world.
Often the Transcendentalists began with the seemingly simple task of fostering awareness in their everyday lives. Paying attention to people and animals and plants, breathing and sensing deeply, making intentional choices about their actions. In his book, Walden, Henry David Thoreau describes moral reform and spiritual awareness as a constant effort to throw off sleep[4] - a constant effort to throw off sleep.
Once we throw off sleep, we come face to face with the reality of our situations. Our back hurts, we feel overwhelmed, that morning glory is the deepest blue we've ever seen, the light is peeking through the window and moving ever so slowly across the back wall. Noticing all of these things can be beautiful and it can also be uncomfortable. A father, hands tightly clenched and face frozen, is fed by his daughter, light shines from his eyes as she presses her cheek to his, kisses his jowl. When we are awake, dying can be shot through with living, pain intertwined with joy. The trick is not to shy away from any of it, to urge ourselves forward, gently, recognizing the complexity of everything we are seeing and feeling.
And again, this is where balance comes in. While we may hold Thoreau up as an example of conscious, awake living - Thoreau also acknowledges throughout his journals that he never could have written Walden, never could have written any of his essays, actually, if he hadn't been able to balance those periods of intense activity with longer periods of rest and contemplation. While he lived in his small house on Walden Pond, experimenting with a life of simplicity, Thoreau often spent four hours a day wandering in the woods or sitting in the crook of his doorway watching the light and shadows move across the wall.
Those of us who are gardeners know that growing something is not always an easy task, that tending the soil can be difficult work, that plants go through periods of dormancy and periods of accelerated growth. As the Transcendentalists discovered, the process of growing a soul is no different. It requires a concerted effort of awareness and attention - periods that often look like dormancy to outside observers, and then it requires action, periods that look to outside observers like accelerated growth. Living deeply asks us to go beyond attention and awareness, taking our development one step further by applying the knowledge that we have gained to our actions in the world. To put our roots down deeply where we are planted, to gather nourishment, to live a spiritual life and to grow our souls, introspection must be wedded to action.
Stefan Jonasson, a Unitarian Universalist minister and consultant for larger churches - tells a story of being on an airplane and sitting next to a Baptist minister - the two started talking about their faiths and their work - the Baptist minister knew about Unitarian Universalism, and Jonasson was talking about how so many visitors come through one door and out the other of Unitarian Universalist churches - that we often don't do a good job of welcoming and supporting folks - so we remain small - The Baptist minister thought for a moment and said something that has stuck with me ever since - If you could keep half of the folks who come through your doors, he said, you could be the most dangerous religion in the country.
A dangerous religion. It's not often how we think about ourselves - but hearing that phrase got me thinking, and I must admit - I believe we are already a dangerous religion.
We are a religion that asks people to think for themselves, that champions spiritual democracy with all of its implications, and at our best, we connect our beliefs - our radical and dangerous beliefs about the inherent worth and dignity of every person - we connect those beliefs with the work of our hands. We reach out beyond ourselves and when we do that, we extend our conscience to the affairs of the nation, to the affairs of the neighborhood and of the PTA. When we let our values guide our actions we are the conscience saying yes or no or maybe and we are the hands reaching out across beliefs, across controversies, to recognize the common human nature we all share. When we act on our beliefs, we are radical people making up a radical religion. It is then that we are people living in balance, people living deeply, people living spiritual lives.
But this is not always the case - as Stefan pointed out, we don't always do a good job of reaching out our hands to the people closest to us - We don't always think to support the people in our own churches, our own families, our own communities. If we gave hands to our principles, if we lived as we believe not only in our political lives but in our intimate, personal lives and in our everyday decisions, the implications would be astounding. Each and every person, whether we agreed with them or not, would be deserving of dignity - and when those folks were in need our hands would go out to steady them. This is a tall order, and it is impossible to do it perfectly.
So there is work to do - there are aspirations to hold and to balance. Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist Theodore Parker stated his hopes for our faith this way - "Be ours a religion which, like sunshine, goes everywhere; its temple, all space; its shrine, the good heart; its creed, all truth; its ritual, works of love; its profession of faith, divine living."
When we share these hopes we don't have to be Emerson or Parker or Jesus or Buddha or Ghandi - we don't need to be souls faced with insurmountable public obstacles to live deeply, to live spiritually. There is enough going on in our personal everyday experience to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives - Each day we bump up against situations at home, at work, and in the news - situations that call to us and rub us the wrong way - situations where our conscience is peaked - all we have to do is allow ourselves to be awake to notice them. And once we have noticed them, the way to action becomes clear.
Spiritual living requires that we be awake - in this confusing and complicated world that pushes and pulls us in so many directions, deep spiritual living requires that we be awake - eyes and ears and heart wide open as much as we can stand to the realities all around us. And when we do this, we come to know that the stuff of our life is our spiritual road map. There is no manual. Our values are our compass, our guide to making decisions that foster a fuller, deeper life. Everything we need lies within us and around us, and it is up to us to pick up the map, to look at the compass, to move purposefully through our lives. When we choose to open ourselves to the reality that lies all around us, and when we choose to wed that insight to action, extending the reach of our thoughts and values beyond our own lives and into the lives of others, It is then that we toss our lot in with radical religious ancestors, and it is then that we bcome members of the most dangerous religion in the country.
May it be so and Amen.
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