What Hearts Crave
January 2, 2005
Rev. Art Lavoie
OPENING WORDS
In a week such as this, we are acutely aware that we live in a global village. The earth rumbles
on the other side of the planet, and the sea rolls and rolls, until its momentum takes it roaring onto the shores of islands
and continents, and the ripples reach us, a few more each day lapping at our broken hearts: more news of death, more pictures
of devastation, more human suffering washed ashore. And lest we grow numb with too much pain, lest we lose the bond of compassion
that links us to our neighbors in the global village, we come into this time today to invoke our own humanity, to offer our
prayers into holy space, and to act upon the values we share and hold dear. We light our chalice this morning for a
new year, kindling the flame of our faith and igniting in our hearts the resolve to live faithfully toward what we love.
Rev. Sarah York (in an e-mail posted on the UU Interim-Chat)
READING
There
is a sense of wholeness at the core . . . To be complete and of one piece, within, without.
Howard Thurman
A
touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich
In
music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness . . . I see what people call God in all these things.
Pablo Cassals
I
have a feeling that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing.
And nothing happens! Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . . Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
Juan Ramón Jimenez
We
can know the dark, and dream it into a new image.
Starhawk
Tao
is beyond words and beyond things.
It
is not expressed either in word or in silence.
Where
there is no longer word or silence
Tao
is apprehended.
Tao de Ching
Will
you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, in things best known to you,
finding the best . . .
Walt Whitman
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
O
Spirit, I worship Thee as beauty and intelligence in the temple of Nature. I
worship Thee as power in the temple of activity, and as peace in the temple of silence.
Yogananda
I
do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered about me.
Isaac Newton
What
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Micah 6:8
Life
for eternal us is now.
ee cummings
Something
more wonderful that the standstill of time. My head has no limit or boundary
of skull.
Katherine
Trevilgan
I
make my life a sacrament.
Henry David Thoreau
Spirit
is no louder than the silence into which we pour our words and sighs.
Mark Belletini
We
eschew the path of mundane power, for the healing power of the spirit naturally follows the path of the spirit; it abides
not in the stone of fine buildings, nor in the gold of images, nor in the silk from which robes are fashioned, nor even the
paper of holy writ, but in the ineffable substance of the mind and heart. Dalai Lama
I
come into the peace of wild things
who
do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I
come into the presence of still water.
And
I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For
a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
I’ve
known rivers;
I’ve
known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My
soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes
I
find myself pointing to an elusive energy, a shaping power that flashes forth in nature, in gesture, in human speech and action.
. . . This power seeks me, as well, or so it seems, for time and again I feel the pressure of an inescapable force that is
sometimes delicate, like a wing brushing my face, and sometimes fierce, like a hand squeezing my heart.
Scott Russell Sanders
Spirituality
is “what hearts crave, if minds do not know how to ask for it.”
Margaret Fuller
SERMON
I
remember one June afternoon several years ago, the sun lingering, seemingly without end in the late afternoon and early evening
sky. I was starting my vacation, at last.
It had been a rough year. I felt drained and empty and my heart craved,
I knew not what. That afternoon I was driving to Provincetown, at the very tip
of Cape Cod, literally the end of the road, the end of the continent, so it sometimes seems.
As
I was driving through Eastham and started making my way up that last stretch of route 6, I lost the radio station I had been
listening to. Fiddling with the dial, I found the Provincetown station, and the
strains of some of the most beautiful music I had ever heard filled my car and started seeping its way into my pores. The feeling was incredible.
As
I left Truro and approached Provincetown the sun was just hanging on the horizon. There
is a stretch of that road where there is little more than sand dunes, beach grass, and a single row of cottages. You might know it. The balance of nature seems so precarious
that this road I’m driving on seems like the only thing that is anchoring that last piece of land onto the rest of the
continent. It looks like it might all just wash away. And the music continues to wash over me.
Rather
than driving right into town I drove to Herring Cove Beach. I wanted to see the
sunset. As you may know, part of this beach, located where the fist of the Cape
curls back up on itself, actually faces west and offers a rare opportunity on the east coast to watch the sun setting over
water, into the bay. I also went there because I just had to listen to the end
of this piece of music so that I could find out what this was which had so captivated my soul.
The
magnificent sun set. The glorious music ended.
And as I breathed this deep sigh of relief and knowing, the announcer said, “You have been listening to the Eroica,
Beethoven’s Third Symphony.”
As
I turned the car around and started driving into town I realized that I felt miraculously better. Sun, ocean, sand, and music, had had a magical, healing effect on my psyche. I was smiling happily. My empty heart seemed more full. My broken spirit felt some healing. And
I could sense cares and burdens easing and slipping away.
Now,
I suppose there is a logical scientific explanation for what I experienced that June afternoon. I suppose a case could be made about my changing blood sugar level or the way that sunlight and salt air
affect hormones, or something or other. But, you know, I will never buy it. Because there are these things that happen in my life, and I hope in yours, that transcend
logical explanation. We all have experiences which reach down and touch us so
deeply, so tenderly, so filled with the grace and joy of being alive, so ripe with connection and possibility.
We
are beginning a new calendar year. 2005 has dawned. In larger scheme of things, it is perhaps a time just like any other.
Yet, it is also a time, like any other, that is pregnant with possibility. And,
I would like to use this opening of the year, this time of possibility, to focus a little on the deeper meaning of why we
are here in this church this morning. I want to look at what drew me to a church
community and what may have drawn you here.
And,
I am going to frame this discussion around our third Unitarian Universalist principle, “acceptance of one another and
encouragement to spiritual growth in out congregations.” As you know, I
have explored the first two principles in the fall and plan to move through the rest of them this winter and spring. And, I think, this principle is at the heart of what has brought each of us to be
part of a Unitarian Universalist church.
There
is a deep restlessness, a searching, within us. We want our lives to have substance
and depth. We want some understanding of why we are here and what this life and this world are all about.
Peter
Matthiessen describes it this way:
“The
search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns
in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for
this deep restlessness, and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home.”
Peter Matthiessen,
as quoted in The Force of Spirit, by Scott Russell Sanders
“The
path home,” home to ourselves, home to our place in the world, home to a deep connection with that which is most important
and most sacred in our lives.
At
the core, I think we long to be accepted for who we are, and we want to be encouraged to grow. That’s where we find home, in acceptance and encouragement.
Acceptance with complacency is not enough. Encouragement without acceptance
become condescending and can be abusive.
A
true acceptance of ourselves and others has a quality of welcoming, a quality of embracing, a quality of openness. This level of acceptance is very different from being merely tolerant.
This principle calls us to an experiment, if you will, that is not typical in western religion. It is an experiment of welcoming in and embracing all who covenant to walk with us in accordance with our
principles and purposes, no matter what is the particular spiritual or path of each individual person.
And
with that acceptance there is always an encouragement continue more deeply on life’s journey. And for us, that journey is a spiritual one. We are not a school,
focused primarily on intellectual development, or a counseling center, focused on emotional and psychological development,
or a medical center, focused on the health and well-being of the body.
Spiritual
growth encompasses all of those, but pays primary attention to what nourishes us at a deeper level. Church is the place where we can talk about those issues and experiences that have deepest meaning. It is the place where we can be encouraged to look to the transcendent experiences
of our lives as a source of comfort and meaning.
As
Unitarian Universalists we have often taken a rational and scientific approach to religion, yet we remain a religious tradition,
not only with ties to our Christian heritage but also with a deepening understanding of the teachings and practices of other
religious and earth based traditions.
We
come from a long and proud history of women and men who eschewed the supernatural, who built their understandings of humanity
and the cosmos on the basis of what could be reasonably and rationally understood by the human mind.
And
yet, there are those experiences, like the one I described at the beginning of this sermon, which tug at our sleeves and say
to us, “but wait, that’s not all there is. That’s not quite
the whole picture.” These are the experiences which I call spiritual.
The
word “spirit” comes from the Latin, spiritus, which is translated as
breath, air, life, soul, pride, and courage. One of my mentors, the Rev. Marni
Harmony has called spirituality “the process of coming into relationship with reality.” “Spirituality,” she continues, “has to do with our awareness of our connection to (ourselves
and to) everything else and an acceptance of the fullness of reality.”
(from a sermon on the Third Principle delivered on January 8, 1989)
Spirituality
is about the depth and quality of our living. It is about the process of making
every moment count, the ability to let ourselves see and feel things more deeply.
The moments of insight, of deep connection, and of profound love are all spiritual moments.
The
tension we often perceive between “spirituality” and “rationality”, in my view, is not about choosing
between opposites, or choosing between things that don’t relate to each other, but about embracing both and keeping
both in perfect balance, both woven seamlessly in the dance of our lives.
When
we can own the multiple layers of our own rational and spiritual beings, we come into a deeper acceptance of ourselves. And, the more we can accept ourselves the more open we are to accepting others.
The
Rev. Forrest Church tells the following story.
Imagine
the world as a vast cathedral. This cathedral is so large that we can never visit
all of its nooks and crannies, worship at all of its altars in one lifetime.
“Above
all else,” he writes, “contemplate the windows. It the Cathedral
of the World there are windows beyond number—some long forgotten, covered with many patinas of dust, others revered
by millions, the most sacred of shrines. Each in its own way is beautiful. Some are abstract, others representational, some dark and meditative, others bright
and dazzling. Each tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning
of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death. The
windows of the Cathedral are where the Light shines through.”
Forrest Church, A Theology for the 21st Century, UU World, Nov-Dec 2001
I
would remind us that this “light” shifts and changes with each hour and each season. And, I see each of our experiences coloring, filtering the light shining through whatever window we contemplate
at any given moment.
We
are all here in the same cathedral, claiming different windows that give us our own particular filter on life and on truth. And because we are here together, we can also be fully engaged with each other, seeing
each other’s perceptions, each other’s experience, each other’s filter on light and truth.
We
are then able to reexamining our own windows through what we learn from each other.
Our acceptance is grounded in the understanding that none of us has the whole picture, the whole spectrum of the light
that shines into the cathedral. In our encouragement of each other we give each
other permission and support to explore other windows, to look deeper for answers, to claim and relish those experiences that
bring insight, wonder and awe.
The
Rev. Carolyn Owen-Towle writes:
“If
acceptance affirms us as we are, encouragement pushes us toward whom we might become.” (p. 49) “The word ‘encourage’
literally means to put courage or heart into another.”
With Purpose and Principle, pg 50
And,
as I mentioned earlier, the word “courage” is part of the definition of the latin word for spirit.
Acceptance
and encouragement of each other in the fullness of our lives, in the great embrace of both our rational and spiritual natures. This is our striving. This is our journey. This is what our hearts crave.
In
the words of Nancy Shaffer:
I
have been looking for the words that come
before
words: the ones older than silence,
the
ones not mine, that can’t be found by thought –
and
are never used up, which arrive loaned,
and
make me weep.
Nancy Shaffer, “In Stillness,” Instructions In Joy
BLESSED
BE
