By Rev. Susan Maginn
Wy'east Unitarian Universalist Congregation
October 21, 2007
The Cracked Pot (Buddhist parable)
An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.
For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.
After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream "I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house." The old woman smiled, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?" "That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them." "For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house."
Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it's the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. You've just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good.
To see the world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.
-- William Blake
In these words you can hear the relationship between the infinite and the specific and how they are really one and the same, and how one is really a doorway to the other.
A religious life could be defined as one that intentionally holds an awareness of the infinite and the specific. A religious life cultivates elements that both expand us toward the infinite and ground us in the specifics of the here and now.
These two ways are found in the title of today's theme, "The Faithful Heretic". "Faithful" connotes grounding, devotion, intention, subduing the needs of the individual for the needs of something larger. Whereas "Heretic" connotes breaking rules, breaking from the communal to satisfy the needs of the individual. So today we are talking about the beauties and the boundaries of these two ways of engaging as a religious person, a faithful person and a heretic. Two ways that I hope we all can embody.
A faithful heretic. The word heresy actually means choice. So to be a faithful heretic would mean that we cannot know all there is to know in religious matters. But we can choose. Over and over again we can choose to find our way to what is true, for us, for now, recognizing that we are never completely done with search for truth.
To faithfully ask questions about what we experience, about what we learn, about what we believe; to ask questions about what other people believe. To faithfully ask questions means that we know that we can always grow and learn more about what it means to live in the ways of love. Asking questions causes us to follow an expansive way, challenging the unexamined assumptions. It means that we search for truth and when we find it, we don't rest there. This is a theme often found in mystical traditions, to not land too heavily on any one perspective, to stay light and expansive. "The surest way to lose truth is to pretend one already possesses it." --Gordon Allport in Becoming, (New Haven: Yale University Press p. 17.) Or the famous saying in Buddhism, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."
D.H. Lawrence...
This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.
Unitarian Universalists have a long tradition of choosing when it comes to religion. Our tradition trusts direct experience as a source of living a religious life. Other traditions do not trust direct experience as a starting point. See, they would say, for example, that you start with the scriptures and follow the teachings and let the teachings shape your experiences, not the other way around. Unitarian Universalists tend to start with our life experience and let our life teach us about the world and our place in it. We have a sense that there is choice in how and what we believe.
You can see markings of this religious way in transcendentalism - Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister, and Margaret Fuller, among many others were looking at how we are all capable of having direct experiences with the divine. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, Emerson's transcendentalist teachings told us that we all have the ability to transcend the doctrines and dogmas of the church and to experience God directly.
I was reminded of this recently in the 5 Questions class I'm currently facilitating, when a couple people agreed that they don't believe in God, they experience God. Others would talk about similar direct experiences but they would never label such experiences with the word "God". They are just remarkable experiences. Experiences that can be life altering, even mystical and others might just label the same experiences as that which reminds them of the sweetness and simplicity of life. Some might find these experiences in nature or in playing music or in painting or in writing. These are the experiences that bring the gift of wholeness, healing and awakening.
We have these experiences and then after the experience, we find labels for what happened. We find ways of naming and understanding so that we can live with the experience and move forward. But first there is just the experience. The sensation of being amazed, of being in awe, of having a glimpse into the wonder of all. Long before the narrowing explanation, there is the formless expanse of being with the beyond. We see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel. And into that wide space, we run with our linguistic chisels and hammers, forming something out of what was meant to be no-thing, forming something out of what was meant to be all, naming that which is beyond all names. But we can't help it. We are human beings and this is what we do best. We make meanings. We find language. And the strangest thing is, that sometimes we human beings come to love the language. We come to love the language so much that we will fight over who has the best language. We come to love the language so much that we forget. We forget that before the interpretation, before the fighting, before the language, there was just the experience.
I am interested in how we can cultivate religious experiences and how these religious experiences shape our daily living and how our daily living speaks louder than any language we may choose. I am interested in how our experience of the infinite shapes our experience of the specific.
Hymn To See The World - #398
To see the world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.
There is a new book that just came out about Mother Teresa, publishing some letters written to her spiritual advisors. This book reveals that Mother Teresa had something is common with other saints and other human beings: she went through periods of depression and doubting her life. However, what is unusual about her life, as revealed in her letters, is that her 'dark night of the soul' went on and on... for 50 years.
During her life as a young woman she had many years of feeling that she was profoundly close to God, hearing God talk directly to her and feeling God's presence as a consistent companion, having experiences that could be categorized as mystical, ecstatic (or perhaps psychotic, depending on your interpretational lens.)
But for the last 50 years of her life, she felt that God was completely absent from her life. She was one with God when she started her monastic life and that lead her forward. But when she went forward in her life's work, she went without God and in these letters we see that she somehow made sense of the darkness.
When she was in India, she had devoted her life to those who were the poorest of the poor, the dalit, the lowest caste in Indian society. During many years of depression she started working with her spiritual advisors and she came to realize that God was distancing from her so that she might empathize with the suffering of those around her.
If I ever become a Saint I will surely be one of darkness I will continually be absent from Heaven to light the light of those in darkness on earth.
She felt so far from God and yet so full of joy because she was sure that she was doing God's work. "I beg of you only one thing please do not take the trouble to return soon. I am ready to wait for you for all eternity."
Mother Teresa had a prescribed way that God could be revealed to her and she heard God, heard Jesus speak directly to her and guide her. And then it was gone. Something about this story makes me sad. That she had such a singular understanding of what God was and was not, and this understanding made her feel far from God since she didn't hear God talking directly to her anymore. In those later years, she didn't see God in the many Indian faces all around her. She didn't see God in herself. It amazes me that she could be as engaged as she was, but not experience God in the sacred work she was doing. She experienced God as a specific voice and a presence, not as a life force or as a verb...
- Buckminster Fuller, UU and architect
For God to me, it seems
Is a verb
Not a noun,
Proper or improper;
Is the articulation
Not the art ...
Is loving,
Not the abstraction of love ...
Yes, God is a verb,
The most active, connoting the vast harmonic
Reordering of the universe
From the unleashed chaos of energy.
What I love about Mother Teresa's story is that I imagine her being overwhelmed with questions as she was feeling lost in her relationship with God and yet found in her work. I imagine her asking so many questions and over the years, 50 years, coming up with an interpretation that helped her to make sense of it all and even further inspire her work.
And if I may be so bold as to say that, in this light, Mother Teresa's religious life was a heresy in that she chose (remember heresy means choice), she chose how to interpret her experience. When Mother Teresa went to Calcutta, she went without her understanding of God. She could have interpreted this in many ways. She could have come to believe that God did not approve of her work. She could have understood her previous relationship with God as a symptom of mental illness which she was now freed of. She chose to interpret God's absence from her life, which pained her greatly, as a sign for how she could learn to empathize with those who lived in great poverty and sickness.
If I ever become a saint I will surely be one of darkness I will continually be absent from Heaven to light the light of those in darkness on earth.
Hymn Spirit of Truth, of Life, of Power - #403
"Spirit of truth, of life, of power, we bring ourselves as gifts to thee:
oh, bring our hearts this sacred hour in faith and hope and charity."
Questions are often a central part of our religious life. Most of us are pretty comfortable asking big questions and knowing that there is no complete answer. I do agree with Saul Alinsky who says. "The question mark is an inverted plow, breaking up the hard soil of old beliefs and preparing for the new growth."
But if all we have are the questions, then we are lost, especially in times of stress. We need some solid ground to come home to. If we invert the question mark to become a plow and break up the surface of old soil, what do we do with all that soil? If all we do is ask questions then we are just making a bunch of loose soil and when the rain comes, we have nothing but mud.
And don't get me wrong, playing in the mud is big fun and just ask my kids - mud can be a costume, mud can be a musical instrument, mud be paint to create a mural. Mud can be many things, but, as my 16 month old son is continually testing, mud is not dinner. Mud is not solid ground. And solid ground is what we need when the mud hits the fan.
Like for Mother Theresa's 50 year dark night of the soul... She was certain that God existed but was just far from her. Her faith in God and her experience of God were at odds. Here she was asking big questions, immersed in leading a spiritual community and serving the poorest of the poor. How did she make sense of it all day in and day out?
We have talked about how covenant is what binds us together in our communal religious life. But what binds together our individual religious life? Questions, as great as they are, are not something that helps to bind or focus us. Our UU principles can focus us, but as someone so eloquently said, 'When lying on my deathbed, I don't think I would find comfort in hearing a recitation of the seven principles.'
My opinion is that the greatest source of grounding in religious life is spiritual practice. A spiritual practice is something that we do to link our experience with the infinite with our experience of everyday life. For me this is meditation. For others it is walking in the woods. For others it is painting, writing, creating in some way. For others it is daily prayer. The key to this is that it is a practice. It is a discipline that is repeated. I'll be leading a service or two on what it means to practice spirituality in the spring.
One way to nurture your own spiritual development is to be a part of Small Group Ministry, which we are going to call Chalice Circles. Right now it looks like we are going to have two chalice circles at Wy'east starting in the next month or two. We will be meeting after the service today up here in the sanctuary to talk about these groups and get people signed up for a group, if interested.
My feeling is that when we practice spirituality then we are planting seeds. We are laying rows of seeds in the loose soil so that when the rains come, as they most certainly will, we can have something more than mud. Because we planted those seeds, something beautiful can start to grow. And when those storms come, as they most certainly will, something nourishing can be there for us to harvest.
"To see the world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour."