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Poetry for Order of Service
Hard to get into the habit of yourself;
Hard to get out of the habit of yourself.(From "Variations," Gunnar Ekelof, tr. Robert Bly)
Call to Worship
Holy and beautiful is the custom that brings us together at the beginning of this new church year.
Here we gather to give our thanks, to face our ideals, to remember our loved ones, to seek that which is permanent, and to serve goodness, beauty, and the qualities of life that make it rich and whole.
Through this hour breathes the worship of all ages, the cathedral music of all history, and blessed are the ears that hear that eternal sound.
Congregational Covenant Statement (in unison)
We are travelers. We meet for a moment in this sacred place to love, to share, to serve. Let us use compassion, curiosity, reverence, and respect while seeking our truths. In this way we will support a just and joyful community, and this moment shall endure.
Responsive Reading
MINISTER: From the fragmented world of our everyday lives we gather together in search of wholeness.
CONGREGATION: By many cares and preoccupations, by diverse and selfish aims are we separated from one another and divided within ourselves.
MINISTER: Yet we know that no branch is utterly severed from the Tree of Life that sustains us all.
CONGREGATION: We cherish our oneness with those around us and the countless generations that have gone before us.
MINISTER: We would hold fast to all of good we inherit even as we would leave behind us the outworn and false.
CONGREGATION: We would escape from bondage to the ideas of our own day and from the delusions of our own fancy.
MINISTER: Let us labor in hope for the dawning of a new day without hatred, violence, and injustice.
CONGREGATION: Let us nurture the growth in our own lives of the love that has shone in the lives of the greatest of men and women, the rays of whose lamps still illumine our way.
MINISTER: In this spirit we gather.
CONGREGATION: In this spirit we pray.
(Phillip Hewitt)Reading
A part of my sermon this morning will have to do with the difficult project of becoming an individual. And a part of that difficulty is that you can't become an individual without others.
Coming into this world we are completely dependent for our very survival. And we remain at least somewhat dependent on others throughout our whole life.
But to be a person means to have your own name and your own independent point of view. It means that, if necessary, you will stand against the whole world, including those upon whom you depend, like a Martin Luther saying, "Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me God."
My reading this morning, from the poet Emily Dickinson, has to do with this difficult task of being a person in your own right. And how Emily Dickinson struggled with this issue! Except for a few months, she lived in the home of her parents her whole life through - "her Father's house," as she put it, "Father" always capitalized. And in the later years of her life she was almost completely reclusive, rarely leaving the property. Yet I can hardly think of anyone with a more developed and independent point of view than Emily Dickinson.
The poem I've chosen for our reading is a bit difficult to get on a first reading or just by hearing it. I've asked that it be printed so you can follow along. I will read the poem twice, the first time for sound and feeling, and then a second time with a few interpretive remarks.
I'm ceded - I've stopped being Theirs -
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading - too -Baptized before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace -
Unto supremest name -
Called to my Full - The Crescent dropped -
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.My second Rank - too small the first -
Crowned - Crowing - on my Father's breast -
A half unconscious Queen -
But this time - Adequate - Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown -
(#508 in Johnson edition; see also #353 in Franklin edition)And now a second reading with a little commentary:
I'm ceded - [I've seceded; I've left the union; I'm my own state now] I've stopped being Theirs -
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it [the old name] with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I've finished threading - too - [The old decorative life, the training that young ladies of that time received to take their place in society, is over and done with.]Baptized before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace - [Becoming your own person, discovering your individual identity and true name. This second baptism is an experience of grace.]
Unto supremest name - [Not supreme in relationship or comparison to others, but . . .]
Called to my Full - The Crescent dropped -
Existence's whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem. [In other words, not the crescent moon anymore, but the full moon. The whole arc of the sky filled with the light of that single light, which is like a crown, not a gaudy or large crown, but a small one, just fitted to the individual.]My second Rank - [This new rank of self-identity] too small the first -
Crowned - Crowing - on my Father's breast -
A half unconscious Queen - [The first crowning was in relationship to outer authority, to the protective Father; she a queen to a king, but only half aware]
But this time - Adequate - Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown - ["Adequate" and "erect" are important words for Emily Dickinson. To be adequate and erect, not inflated, not deflated; not more than an individual, but not less either. To simply be a person with the capacity to choose or to reject. And she chooses "just a crown," that "small Diadem" fitted to the individual that yet fills up the whole world with its light.]"OUR MOST PERSISTENT HUMAN NEED"I'd like to begin my first sermon as your new minister by speaking a bit about the nature, value, and purpose of the sermon in a religiously liberal context.
In about 1975 I thought I would have to give up the idea of being a minister. From my youth I had been attracted by religion and the large questions that religion addresses about what is true and real, about who we are and what our place is in the scheme of things. To have the opportunity and time to think and read about these things and then to share my thoughts and feelings with an interested community: this appealed to me and attracted me to the ministry.
However, by my early and mid-twenties I found that neither my questions nor my answers could be contained in the context of the religious community in which I was born and raised. And so I thought that was that. I thought that was the end of my ministerial aspirations - a bit of a blow since by this time I had obtained a theological degree.
How delighted I was to find, not long after that in 1976, that there was a religious community in which I could feel comfortable, where neither the questions nor the answers were fixed, where the minister was actually encouraged in an individual and personal ongoing pursuit of truth and meaning. And so I became a member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, a church by mail for isolated religious liberals, created by the Unitarian Universalist Association.
I will tell you from the beginning, however, that I am not interested in promoting the brand name of "Unitarian Universalist" even though this organization "saved" my life, and even though I am pleased - and usually proud - to be a member of this religious organization. What I am interested in is what initially drew me to the Unitarian Universalists, namely the encouragement to think as deeply, to question as widely, and to feel as keenly as one possibly can. To be part of communities engaged in these tasks, and others as well, is still a most compelling thing for me nearly thirty years later.
The sermon is, for me, the primary place where this happens: this engagement with life's perennial questions. To be a minister in a religiously liberal context, who is charged with the task of regularly bringing before a congregation one's largest questions and deepest answers, and to be given the time and resources to think out in advance what you will say, and then to let the energy of a gathered community carry you along: this indeed is a high privilege that I take very seriously.
For over twenty years in my past ministry I was in charge of the lay-led summer services. I chose the speakers and worked with them on the services. And it was the sermon that was understood by all of the speakers to be the place where the most energy was to be expended.
To a person, all the speakers, many of them professionally accomplished and many of them fine speakers in other settings, understood that the sermon called forth something different from them than their professions typically did. I have sometimes described it as "heart speaking to heart" or "soul engaging soul."
So I stand before you this morning feeling this privilege and challenge and aware of its responsibility - and having never undertaken it in quite this way before. Even though I have been in the ministry for a good long time, never before have I been the lead or sole minister of a congregation.
And so I've been thinking, "How do I begin my ministry with you? What is the first subject I want to address with you? Where do I want to start?"
What emerged for me in this regard was a sermon title from the minister who gave me my chance in the liberal ministry, Dr. Duncan Littlefair, from 1944-1982 the senior minister of the Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I served as an associate minister for over twenty years.
Dr. Littlefair was the finest orator I have ever heard on week-by-week basis - he died this past winter at the age of 91 - and it was in 1990, when he was in his late 70's, speaking as an emeritus minister, that I heard him deliver a sermon with the arresting title, "Our Most Persistent Human Need."
What is our most persistent human need? That morning Dr. Littlefair gave his answer. And this morning I will give you mine. But just to make one more point about the place of a sermon in a religiously liberal context, an important point: the answers given from a religiously liberal pulpit are always understood to be the answers of the individual person speaking, not the answers of the religious community, nor the answers of the religious association.
So it is always "my truth" that I bring to you, or more accurately, my angle on the truth - even as didactically and forcefully as it might sometimes be presented - so that some might ask, Who is this person to say what our most persistent human need is?! And why does this person appear to speak so confidently about it?!
If I do speak confidently, or appear to speak confidently, it is because I operate under the assumption that it is my truth that I am talking about, not your truth, not this community's truth, and certainly not truth for all time - just my truth at this particular time. As the philosopher Montaigne once said:
"All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed."
(Quoted from the preface of Eric Hoffer's book, The True Believer)
What is our most persistent human need?
What is our most persistent human need? Dr. Littlefair, in the sermon to which I referred, didn't keep his congregation long in suspense. He answered in his opening words, which went this way:
"Our most persistent, urgent, desperate, universal human need is for self approval. To think well of our self."
(Quoted from a transcribed sermon of December 16, 1990, Fountain Street Church, Grand Rapids, MI)
Simply that. Our most persistent human need is to approve our self, to think well of our self.
We keep coming back to this our whole life through, beginning at about age two when we begin to use the word "I." I watched this happen with my children when they started to develop a sense of personal identity, often asking, "Mommy, Daddy, do you see me? Do you love me? Do you approve me? Is this how you want me to be? Is this how you want me to act?"
It starts there and never ends - all the way to the end of a life - when we may ask, "What has my life meant? Have I measured up? Have I been what a human being ought to be? Have I been what I was called to be?"
In this regard, I think of T.S. Eliot's difficult words relating to a life-review, where he speaks of:
...the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to other's harm
Which once you took as exercise of virtue.(From "Little Gidding, " Four Quartets)
Tough stuff. And it has to do with whether and how we approve ourselves, whether and how we think well of ourselves.
Meanings of self-approval
What does it mean to approve of our self or to think well of our self?
1) It means to be a human being and to be pleased and happy and honored to be a human being. It means to have a sense of personal identity and individual judgment. Some idea of who you are, what you think and believe. What attracts and repels you. Some sense of inner authority. To be basically pleased about your being - to feel, as Emily Dickinson put it, "Adequate - Erect,/ With Will to choose, or to reject." This is what we most desperately and persistently want and need.
2) To think well of our self, to approve our self, might have to do with having a sense of place. To feel and believe that we have a place in the world, a place in the universe, a place in the scheme of things. To feel and believe that we belong, that there's a place for me here, there's room for me here, that the universe has room for me. The Powers That Be accept and affirm and approve me; they welcome me. Or, if they don't welcome me, at least they don't reject me. Perhaps the Powers That Be are indifferent to me. I think one can still have a sense of place under those conditions.
Just over two weeks ago, my wife and I closed out on our house of 25 years. For 25 years we had a place in the world that we called our own. It was a place where we raised our children, provided hospitality, laughed and cried. That house gave us a sense of place, a sense of rootedness, and it helped us to think well of ourselves.
As we were packing up its contents and shipping them out here to Port Townsend, the closing words of a Robert Frost poem kept coming to me, words that he had written when he sold his farm in Derry, New Hampshire when he moved to England for a few years, words I left on the kitchen counter for the new owner of "our house," these words:
Only be it understood,
It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years,
Seeking ache of memory here.(Robert Frost, from "On the Sale of My Farm")
A physical place, a home, helps one with the project of thinking well of one's self and of meeting this most persistent human need.
3) To think well of one's self may also mean to have a sense of being loved. If you have even one person in the world who loves you and who cares for you as you, that may be enough for you to think well of yourself. Poet Raymond Carver, near the end of his life, wrote these words. He asks:
And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?
I did. And what did you want?
To call myself beloved,
to feel myself beloved on the earth.(Raymond Carver, "Late Fragment")
To think well of your self may mean to have a sense of being loved. Feeling loved would help meet this most persistent human need.
4) Or, to think well of your self might also be related to having a sense of purpose in your life. Not necessarily that you know what purpose, if any, this great cosmos holds, but that somehow within the vastness of time and space, you have found a purpose for yourself and your life, a sense of connection, a sense of how you are part of a larger process and a greater wholeness.
To find and have a purpose will go a long way toward approving yourself.
Why the difficulty in approving our self?
Why does it seem to be such a difficult task to approve and think well of ourselves? Why is this such a persistent need?
Two reasons, quickly:
First, the persistent need has to do with what I call, "the project of being human."
And what is that project? It's the project of being self-aware, of developing a sense of personal identity, a place to stand, a point of view that can look out upon the universe and see and know and understand and be aware of it as only one point among many. Be aware that "it," this point of identity, will some day dissolve and die.
Nature, God, the Powers That Be - call it what you will - have thrust this project upon us, this project of self-awareness or self-consciousness. And it is this project that makes the struggle for self-approval our most persistent need.
So I like to say, "Don't take it personally." Don't take it personally if you struggle with thinking well of yourself. It's the most natural thing in the world, given how the Powers That Be have constructed us. We are forged and formed to wonder who we are, what we should be about, and what we should believe. That's ground into us.
A second reason why it is so difficult to think well of ourselves is the process by which we come to develop a sense of identity.
This is what I talked in my introduction to the reading this morning, the paradoxical fact that you can't develop an independent point of view without others - others who support and shape you, upon whom you continue to depend, and with whom you are in relationship.
This is a terribly complex matter, and I can't go into it deeply this morning. It is the struggle that was expressed in the Dickinson poem I read, that triumph of breaking free of the bonds that shaped you, yet without diminishing the persons who have shaped you. In another poem Dickinson writes:
The Props assist the House -
Until the House is Built -
And then the Props withdraw -
And adequate - Erect -
The House support itself -
And cease to recollect
The Scaffold, and the Carpenter -
Just such a Retrospect
Hath the Perfected Life -
A Past of Plank - and Nail -
And Slowness - then the Stagings drop -
Affirming it - A Soul -(#729 in Franklin edition; see also #1142 Johnson edition)
That's the goal, to be a soul, to grow a soul. But what a difficult and never-ending process to become a soul! It's our most persistent human need and problem.
Insecurity and doubt in relation to thinking well of our self
To be a soul, to have a sense of identity and to think well of yourself doesn't at all mean that you are without insecurities, anxieties, and doubts, as we sometimes assume.
As I indicated, I take insecurity and anxiety to be a necessary condition of human life, an indispensable part of self-awareness.
Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to find some lines of poetry that struck me years ago, but I've not been able to find them in all the mess of moving. But the import of the lines was this: that under the robe of the Buddhist monk or the Tibetan lama - perhaps the most serene image one can think of - under even such serene appearances, terror exists, terror is not absent. One might even conjecture that it is just such terror, such insecurity, that creates the need for the meditation systems of monks and lamas.
I couldn't find those lines, but I do have some words from longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer, a keen observer of the human condition, who wrote:
"There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day."
(Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, pp. 132-33)
And I would add that this insecurity applies not just to intellectuals, but to anyone who is a thinking, aware human being.
And so to think well of yourself does not mean you always feel secure; rather, it means to have the capacity to live with your insecurity.
And the same thing with doubt.
Absence of doubt is not a sign that one has achieved self-approval, though that may be the appearance given. Frankly, I go on high alert when I hear that someone has no doubt, or when one is trying to talk me into a perspective from which all doubt has been extracted.
Doubt is part and parcel of the human project.
Do you find that you easily collapse at the disapproval of others, or that you become rattled or fall apart when a given person, or maybe any person, disagrees with your opinion?
I say, "Fine, let it be so. And don't kick yourself over it." It's natural and normal for us human beings; it's part of the human condition.
It's how we come to be a person - by over and over stumbling and collapsing and still finding our way. It's through this process that, through time, you begin to discover a resiliency, and a sense of who you are, as well as a sense that there is some underlying support and strength that holds you and upholds you, and to which you are related: a strength that is rooting for you to be a person, an individuated human being.
So, again, I believe that to think well of yourself has to do with the capacity to take in your doubt, to embrace it. Not to flee from it, or to deny it, but to be willing to doubt everything right down to the roots over and over and over again, to doubt everything you have ever believed or stood for or done. To have such a capacity would be an indication of one who truly thinks well of him or herself.
Sometimes we have the idea that the one who thinks well of him or herself is the one who always appears confident, in charge, one who knows the answers.
But do you think the person who appears this way is essentially different from you? Is there anyone here who in his or her interior life is always confident, always secure, always free from doubt, and always without anxiety? If there is, please don't answer, because I am not much trustful of such confidence.
Nor are arrogance, control, and the drive for power and success indicators of self-approval. They are rather bluffs, dodges, and defenses - perhaps sometimes necessary - against the difficult task that the Powers That Be have set upon our plates.
Conclusion
It's so hard to be human. It's so very, very hard!
And that's the message I wanted to begin with. I wanted to say something about how hard it is to be human. I wanted to say something about how hard our human project is.
And I wanted to say that if, indeed, it is the case that our most persistent human need is to find a means of approving ourselves, then let us be gentle with one another. Let us cut each other some slack.
That doesn't mean that we never disagree or argue or provide critique of others - far from that, I hope - but it does mean that we try to be patient and kind with one another, and generous in spirit, recognizing the enormity of the human project.
Thus, let us not pass judgment on others in the sense of minimizing the difficulty of our human task. Let us be a community aware of both the honor and hardship of being human. Let us affirm one another in all ways that we possibly can.
Let me conclude, then, with a great poem of affirmation by a modern American poet, whose words I expect you will hear many times from me in the course of things. Her name is Mary Oliver. She lives on the far side of the continent from us out on Cape Cod. For years, as she has written, she struggled "just to love her life." Out of that struggle there emerged this poem of affirmation, affirmation in the midst of insecurity, fear, and despair. It's titled "Wild Geese":
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.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of 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.
(Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese," from New and Selected Poems)Benediction
Now may peace be in our hearts,
and understanding in our minds,
may courage steel our wills,
and the love of truth forever guide us. Amen.(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A. Bode on his first Sunday as the new minister of the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Port Townsend, Washington, September 12, 2004. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette at the Fellowship, may differ somewhat in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)