That reading Richard did from
Annie Dillard was a real wake-up call, wasn’t it? I
particularly like the part about the ushers issuing life
preservers. It made me wonder whether I should get up here and
ask you if you’re ready to go whitewater rafting this morning.
That’s not what brought you here, of course. But what DID bring
you here?
Most of us have answered this question before. We
often cite things like a sense of sanctuary from our crowded,
noisy lives; social interaction with friends; social justice
work; or a sense of community. But human motivation is a
complicated thing. Sometimes the best way to bring our own
motivations to the surface is to listen to a story about someone
else’s.
As a piece of motivational
testimony about religion, it’s hard to beat the story of John
Newton. He’s the slave trader turned author and minister whose
story I told to the children this morning. Newton had one of
those textbook near-death experiences that changed everything.
Unlike many who have such experiences, though, he didn’t treat
this feeling as a fluke. He was determined to make it grow.
And he didn’t do that by scouring the docks for leaky ships to
take to sea, in search of another perfect storm. John Newton
went to church.
We don’t have a home video of
what Newton was like after his transformational experience.
It’s pretty easy to imagine him, though, as a highly excited
fellow. I picture him running into church, grabbing the pulpit
with both hands, and starting to preach up a storm. Most of us
have never seen anything like that in church, including in our
own behavior. And I’m not saying we should. I do find it
worthwhile to ask myself, though, what’s the difference between
John Newton and me?
Newton had his transformative
experience because all of his protective layers were stripped
off. A storm at sea left him naked to the elements. My own
life has mostly looked like the opposite of that – a thickly
insulated existence. Like most people, I worked hard to
insulate myself and my family from misfortune, hardship, and
uncertainty.
As many of you know, I
practiced law for a long time before entering the ministry. My
operating mode as a lawyer was just a more extreme version of
the insulating habits we are all trained to cultivate. I was
taught never to show vulnerability, because the adversary would
exploit it. I thought of this way of operating as a kind of
protective clothing I wore in my job and took off at the end of
the workday. But for me to have even a chance of doing that, of
course, the workday would actually have to end. And in my legal
career, I tended not to let that happen. I had a cell phone in
my ear on family vacations, and in many other ways I just never
really left work.
Sometimes insulation can be too
much of a good thing. It can make you miss what’s going on. It
can cause you to hit things you wanted to avoid and to miss out
on things you really didn’t want to miss out on. On April 12,
1912, a society lady boarded a luxury liner in Southampton,
England, headed for New York. She asked a crew member, “sir, is
this ship safe?” He responded, “Madam, God himself could not
sink this ship.” The captain was heavily insulated from the
possibility of disaster by all the hype and grandeur around his
new ship. Ignoring one warning sign after another, he took
hundreds of passengers to a watery grave.
I first began to wonder about
the insulated quality of my life about seven years ago, sitting
in my home UU church in Oakland, California. Susan Starr, a
church member and friend of mine, was acting as guest worship
leader. She reflected on her own life crisis over alcoholism.
She described the two worlds between which she saw herself
moving – A. A. and her church. She mused that she seemed to get
her social psychology at the church and her religion at
A. A.
Susan wondered what the difference might be between the people
around her at A. A. and the people around her at church. She
said, “I think the difference is that the people at A.A. know
that their very lives are at stake.” And then with remarkable
kindness, she said, “when that sense of urgency becomes present
in this sanctuary, you will be amazed at the things that will
happen.”
Recently I was leaving Parker House just before the local AA
meeting that uses our space. A few people had already arrived,
and we stood there shooting the breeze for a few minutes. I
told them about the AA story I had heard in my home church and
what a lasting impression it made on me. One of them smiled and
said, “there is an old saying in AA that people go to church
because they don’t want to go to hell. And alcoholics go to AA
because they’ve been there.” Sometimes the only way to get
religion is to go to hell. But what a costly, dangerous
conversion.
When I heard that AA story in
Oakland, I had been getting more active in my home church. The
story gave me a strong intuitive hunch about what was propelling
me in that direction. It lay underneath all the conscious
reasons about friendships, a sense of community, social justice
work, and a need for sanctuary from my crowded, noisy life. And
in retrospect the hunch was right. I was stepping further and
further into the church out of a growing sense of urgency about
my life. I saw it going on by, saw myself missing an undefined
something that felt important. And I saw the possibility of
finding something valuable in church -- something that would
enable me to transform my life without having a
near-death experience.
I was just starting to see how
I had used my career to build an over-insulated life – insulated
particularly from the kind of vulnerability that goes hand in
hand with true intimacy. But I was still cruising along in my
successful, unsinkable career, still missing things. I didn’t
see the iceberg. After thirty years of marriage that included
raising two children, my wife walked in one day and said, I’m
getting a divorce. A huge gash below the water line. Right out
of the blue. Except of course, it WASN’T really right out of
the blue. Looking back later, I saw that this calamity was
sitting there for a long time, hidden beneath all the
insulation.
My divorce was very painful,
but certainly not a near-death experience. Circumstantially, my
story is very different from John Newton’s, which I came across
not long after I heard that A.A. story in the Oakland Church.
When I look beneath the surface, though, I see clearly that I
was drawn to church for the same reason he was: the possibility
of a closer connection with the holy, of moving toward
wholeness, with transformative results.
How’s the insulation in your
life? In some places at least, might it be too much of a good
thing? And let me pose again the question with which I began:
what brings you here? Please peer inside your coat, or however
many coats you may be wearing, and consider it. I can’t say for
sure what brings you here. But I have a strong intuitive hunch
about it, based on my own experience and based on our common
humanity.
The only way to find out for sure is to try it, to pursue the
transformative possibilities here and see what happens. John
Newton’s story points us toward what “pursuing the
transformative possibilities” means: peeling away the
insulating layers in our lives. Newton didn’t need to worry
about that – the storm took care of it for him. Susan Starr and
her AA group didn’t either. Addiction took care of that for
them.
Lacking the denuding effects
of a crisis, we have to take our own coats off. I believe the
best way to begin to do that is by listening to the stories of
others and telling others stories of our own. Stories enable us
to begin where we are, regardless of how experienced or
inexperienced we are -- which is pretty fortunate since it’s
impossible to make a real beginning anywhere other than where
you are. As odd as it may sound, sometimes a story about a
storm at sea can be more powerful than the storm itself.
Sometimes a story that sounds unsensational on the surface can
be powerful that way too. The power of stories does not come
from sensational facts. It comes from the ordinary yet amazing
fact that a human being is revealing himself to another. It
also comes from the fact that the other human being is revealing
himself too -- by listening with respect and vulnerability, by
allowing himself to be affected.
I was affected by the story of
John Newton. If a major league wretch like Newton could be
transformed, surely there was hope for a minor league wretch
like me. I was affected by Susan Starr’s story too. I realized
that if Susan, whom I knew to be very smart, could confess that
she had been missing something really important in life, I had
better take a hard look at what I might be missing. And I was
affected even more deeply by the subtext of Susan’s story, which
came down to this sentence: “take me as I am, and let me have
the privilege of taking you as you are.” Telling others how it
really is with you, and really listening to how it is with them,
opens up transformative possibilities. If you go deeply into
this, you may never be the same again.
And the story Richard shared
with you this morning, which he told me at greater length in
conversations over a period of days, also made a powerful
impression on me – not so much about the circumstances he
described, interesting as they are to me, but rather, about
Richard. It is a picture of someone who believes that religion
ought to make sense. It reveals a conviction that spirituality
ought to have something to do with the way a person lives his
life -- in Richard’s case right down to the finer points of
aeronautical engineering -- rather than being a thing apart. I
hear in this story the voice of someone who believes spiritual
meaning is found in relationships rather than in isolation, and
who is prepared to take his coat off, so to speak, around other
people – those of us in this sanctuary in particular -- for the
sake of uncovering a clearer understanding of who he really is
and who his neighbors really are.
Richard’s narrative is
another “take me as I am” story, told by someone whose
experiences have shown him the importance of asking that of
other people, and granting it when they ask it of him. It is a
story that makes me ready to wade into the water with the
storyteller -- even to climb into an open boat with him, push
off from the dock, and go searching for whatever transformative
experience may be waiting in deeper waters. And it makes me
eager to hear the many other such stories sitting here in our
midst, yet to be told.
Now, at least one person here
is thinking, “ ‘transformative’ is a pretty big word. And this
kind of story-telling is not at all like spinning yarns around a
campfire. Looks like work, like there might be pain involved,
and the risk of being rejected or feeling foolish. I’d like to
see the goods before I make that kind of investment.”
The kind of relating I’m
talking about IS risky. You will not get your money back if you
are less than completely satisfied. And no, you can’t see the
goods before you invest yourself in a venture like this. Why?
Because you are the goods. If your venture is
successful, you won’t be the same you that wants to check out
the goods. If you could check them out before embarking, they
wouldn’t be transformative. They might be interesting or
appealing, but in the end, ordinary. Not transformative.
I believe there are only two
causes, working together, that can move anyone to embark on such
a venture. The first is getting an intuitive sense, a hunch,
that something urgent is at stake in his successful,
well-insulated life. It might be the negative urgency of
sensing that you are in danger of running into something you
ought to avoid. Or it might be the positive urgency of sensing
that you are missing something you’d really like to land on.
The only way to cultivate that
hunch is to listen to the stories of others who have taken this
voyage, and then exercise your imagination. Ask yourself
whether the experience available in church might be powerful
enough to bring you to something transformative. I’ve made a
large bet that it is. Annie Dillard thinks it’s so powerful you
might get inspired to take on challenges so big that they scare
you. The biggest risk in such a venture might not be that it
would fail, but rather, that it would succeed, giving you a lot
to live up to. As Annie Dillard says, when you come to church,
put on your life jacket.
The second cause is finding
the right crew to join up with. That means people who trust one
another and share a sense of where the venture is headed. We
can see this church as an open boat in which to find out what
the deeper and sometimes more difficult spiritual waters hold
for us. I wouldn’t row such a boat with just anybody. But I
would get right in and push off from the dock with Richard; and
with all of you. In a sense, I already have.
So. The state of spiritual
emergency I am inviting you to declare is an urgent, shared
intention on the part of all of us – to emerge. To step out
into the light. To reveal the person living underneath the
protective coatings. To move closer to each other, and in so
doing to move, as they sang on the deck of the sinking Titanic,
Nearer My God To Thee. Nearer to the holy, to wholeness. And
in so doing, to be transformed.
In most places in life, it
would take a miracle or a catastrophe to have this hoped-for
emergence. In church, it can be brought within our reach with
just three ordinary-sounding miracles: that we trust one
another, that we reveal ourselves to one another, and that we
see one another for the truth we are. When we make this
declaration and do these things, we will be amazed at what will
happen.
AMEN.
