Many Wells, One Source

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

December 6, 2009

READING

From Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World (14-15):

SERMON

I recently watched a re-run of one of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld. As the episode opens, we find George Kostanza's father Frank stuck in the back seat of the car as George drives his parents home. As usual, Frank and Estelle are arguing. Frank wants more leg room and Estelle refuses to move up her seat, and tensions quickly hit the boiling point. Suddenly, Frank raises his hands and his eyes to the heavens and shouts, "Serenity now! Serenity now!" When George asks Frank what that was all about, Frank tells him that his doctor gave him a relaxation tape to help lower his blood pressure. George asks, "Are you supposed to yell it?" and Frank replies, "The tape wasn't specific."

You can imagine how helpful it is in reducing Frank's stress level, and that of those around him, whenever he shouts out "Serenity now!" in the middle of a tense situation. But Kramer picks up on the idea and, as you'd suspect, takes it to a new level. Kramer embodies the "Serenity now" mantra, and as the episode progresses we watch him fall into an almost catatonic condition as he encounters an ever-growing barrage of stressors. He meets each situation with his new mantra until he's moving through life like a zombie. Finally, like a volcano that's been building and building pressure underground, he blows his top. As one of the bit players in the episode tells George, "Serenity now, insanity later."

We've all had our moments when we've felt like throwing our arms up in the air and shouting "Serenity now!" Stuck in traffic on the Blue Route when we're late for an important appointment. Waiting for someone to show up at a meeting when we've managed to get there on time. During that "witching hour" around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when the baby is cranky and we're up to our elbows in diapers and dinner, and our partner calls to say that she's got to work late. The stressors of everyday life build and build, and it would be wonderful to have a simple exercise to calm us and cool us down. A little trick we could pull out like a rabbit from a hat that releases the pressure and makes us feel better. At this time of year, especially. The holidays present their own, unique challenges to our serenity. We are supposed to be cheery during this season; at least that's what we're told. After all, as the song goes, "it's the most wonderful time of the year." But the pressure to be "merry and bright" during the holidays can sometimes push our buttons. The onslaught of ads telling us to spend money we don't have, images of Norman Rockwell feasts with family that don't reflect the reality of our own reunions, the grief we feel acutely this time of year when we see the empty chair where once a loved one sat. We are left longing for serenity, for just a bit of peace and calm and refuge.

What do we do in the face of all this pressure? We've got lots of options. I suppose that shouting "Serenity now" at the top of our lungs is one, but I don't think it's particularly effective. Although it may make us feel better in the moment. Many of us take the "muddling through" approach. As an experienced muddler myself, I can attest to this technique. We keep our mouths closed and our heads down, hoping things will get better and maybe praying for the arrival of a savior. We are models of stoic endurance, thick-skinned and impenetrable, imperturbable. We suffer in silence, concealing our pain from others and perhaps even ourselves, pretending that things are just fine, thank you very much. We develop elaborate avoidance techniques, and we fill our closets with the masks that we wear whenever we venture out into the world.

Others respond to the pressures of life by choosing to self-medicate. With booze or with pills. With food or with sex or with television. We seek an escape that we know isn't good for us, but it sure beats the alternative. Temporary relief is better than no relief at all. Then there's the option of withdrawing from the world. Of removing ourselves, physically, emotionally, spiritually from everything and everyone around us. Even those whom we love and who love us back. It's so much easier to pull back and disappear than it is to put on the pretext of normalcy, of pretending that everything is all right. And it keeps us from that risky edge where an encounter might blindside us when our defenses are down, and we inadvertently reveal our pain and our vulnerabilities to the world.

All of these are coping strategies. Ways to get through the rough times, to negotiate the bumps in the road that we invariably encounter in our daily lives. But they are no way to live. As deeply as I believe anything, I believe that life is a precious gift and that we are meant to live our lives joyfully. We are made to savor the world and all our experiences of it. Life is full of trials, but this life we've been given is not a trial. Our Universalist tradition claims that by virtue of our very creation we are saved, that we are one with the Divine. That unity, and the joy that comes with it and from it, is not a dream deferred until death, when we find peace and bliss in some future state of nirvana. It is our current condition, our birthright. In today's reading, we heard retired Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor describe our experience as Jacob's experience, where we are surrounded by angels and miracles and the holy all the time, if we but wake up and open our eyes to that reality. "Earth is so thick with divine possibility," she writes, "that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars."^[1]

Once awakened to this reality, we are empowered not only to be joyful ourselves, but we are meant to share that joy with others, to take it out into the world. We are here not just to enjoy, but to engender and embody joy, to bring joy to the world, as it says in one of the carols we hear this time of year. We here on earth, alive today, are the delivery system of the divine for spreading peace, hope, love and joy. Not just this time of year, but at all times of year.

And so, what we need to live life joyfully and to bring "joy to the world" is a way to see more clearly, especially during the darkest days of the year or the darkest nights of our soul. Not as some coping mechanism or a magic mantra that makes us feel better, but as a way of living, a way of life. What I'm talking about is a practice that is cultivated over time, over a lifetime. A practice that, like a garden that is cultivated and tended with great care, yields fruit abundantly, spiritual sustenance that can feed us even in the leanest of times. And like the seed that becomes the plant that yields the fruit, this practice really is miraculous. It is, what the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh calls "the Miracle of Mindfulness."

Thich Nhat Hanh, or "Thay" as his followers call him, is a Buddhist monk from Vietnam. During the war, he was an outspoken peace advocate and one of the founders of the movement called "engaged Buddhism." He was banished from his country because he refused to take sides in the war, and his efforts toward peacemaking earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from no less than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He founded a buddhist sangha in France called Plum Village, where he has taught followers his particular brand of Zen practice for four generations.

In his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thay tells the story of Allen, a friend of his who had two children, one an infant and the other in elementary school. Like most parents of small children, Allen was pulled in several different directions. He had to get up in the middle of the night, sometimes several times, to tend to the baby. He worked a full-time job. He helped his older child with his homework. He had to keep track of the family's finances and work on their house. A situation many of us can relate to, no doubt, and one that has led to frustration for many of us as well, particularly when we find that among all the competing demands there is little time left over "for us."

But rather than feel frustrated, Allen had made a profound discovery. He told Thay that he had stopped dividing up his days and his time into parts, and begun to look at all the time as "his" time. Allen shifted his perspective so that the time he spent helping his son with his homework was also his time. The same with the time he spent nurturing the baby or doing the housework or commuting to his job. "The remarkable thing," Allen told Thay, "is that now I have unlimited time for myself!"

Allen's discovery illustrates the core principle of Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching: that no matter what we are doing at any particular moment, no matter how mundane or how complex, we must devote ourselves, along with our full attention, to it. When we are washing the dishes, he tells us, we must call ourselves to the present reality of washing the dishes. We should not be making a mental list of all the things that must be done later, or looking forward to the cup of tea we'll enjoy after the dishes are done. "Wash each bowl as if it were a precious child." Thay writes, devoting our full and complete attention to it. Thay tells us that when we are distracted from our current reality, we are "incapable of living during the time we are washing the dishes. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life…and so on. Chopping wood is meditation. Carrying water is meditation. Be mindful," he tells us, "24 hours a day, not just during the time you may allot for formal meditation…Each act must be carried out in mindfulness. Each act is a rite, a ceremony."^[2]

When we can live our lives fully in the present, we will be awakened to the miracles all around us. Thay has famously said that "people usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is to walk on the earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle."^[3]

What I love about Thay's teaching is that it doesn't require that we remove ourselves from the world, but rather that it calls us to immerse ourselves in it. We don't need to become monks or even to set aside an hour to sit silently with ourselves (although he encourages that as well). Thay's form of meditation, simply put, is to awaken to life, to be fully present to creation in all its beauty and all its terror. And to acknowledge that we are a part of it. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, "paying attention requires no equipment, no special clothes, no greens fees or personal trainers. You do not even have to be in particularly good shape. All you need is a body on this earth, willing to notice where it is."^[4]

Mindfulness is a miracle, but it's one that's slow in coming. Most of us find it in fits and starts, and we're likely to spend many more hours immune to the miracles around us than we are aware of them. Thay connects awareness of our reality with awareness of our breath. But most of us breathe without thinking and so we spend our days in a thoughtless haze. I'm also pretty sure that Thich Nhat Hanh would say that being fully present to our multi-tasking is an oxymoron, an impossibility. Mindfulness requires that we slow down and that we give our attention to one thing at a time. This is no small feat in today's world of cell phones, texting and email on the fly.

I would like to invite you all, and perhaps challenge some, to engage in a little exercise of mindfulness in the coming days. I would suspect that many of you have yet to decorate your Christmas trees for the holiday. As you string the lights on your tree, try to do it mindfully. Don't think about the next step, of adding the ornaments. Or of all those past years when this has been a frustrating experience. Focus on the lights themselves and on your actions of stringing them on the tree, how your shoulders feel as you stretch your arms up, how the tree smells. Then, when it's time to put the ornaments on the tree, try to do that mindfully, too. Don't think about the dinner that needs to be made or the football game that will be on television later. Place each ornament on just its right branch, the branch that was made for it, breathing in and out and appreciating the tree and the branch and the ornament. Then step back and look at the wonder you have created, and feel the joy of creation itself.

The miracle of mindfulness is not just something we do for ourselves, although it is a transformative personal practice. When we bring our attention to the presence of the sacred and the spectacular that surround us, our appreciation is infectious. We ourselves become reflections of those miracles. And the joy that we feel is uncontainable. We become the bringers of joy to the world. And in so being, we offer to the world what it sorely needs. Just a little bit of joy. And some serenity. Now.

CLOSING WORDS:

Our closing words are the words of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse, adapted:

^[1] An Altar in the World, 15.
^[2] The Miracle of Mindfulness, 24.
^[3] The Miracle of Mindfulness, 12.
^[4] An Altar in the World, 34.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

---

Did this sermon bring forth any special feelings, thoughts or concerns that you would like to share? Consider this link as providing you with an opportunity to talk back.