NO GREATER GIFT

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

17 September 2000

Last week I suggested rather strongly, that our leading characteristic as Unitarian Universalists is reasonableness. We are I, asserted, rational, or at least that sits rather high on our sure-wish-we-were list. Wisdom is a defining characteristic of our liberal religious way. Rationality, this-worldliness, a desire to understand the workings of the tangible universe, marks our way deeply.

This week I want to assert how we also need our hearts, and to truly know the ways of compassion. We are, of course, whole beings with intellects and emotions. So, here’s the truth of it. Any authentic spirituality must in some substantive manner address both heart and mind. This is important. Otherwise it is as if we are in large boats with but a single oar, always listing to one side, never making a sure way across the depths of our lives.

Heart and mind: our analysis and our emotional response. Or, our emotional engagement and our figuring out how best to deal with it. It really is hard to say ultimately whether mind leads, or heart. The actual mix is a mystery, a profound mystery of our existence. However, what we’re really talking about is wisdom and compassion, the greatest forces of an authentic and healthful life.

In fact I think too much concern with which lead actually misses the point. At bottom I suspect that intellect and emotion, or even better wisdom and compassion, just like for the mind-body dichotomy, while having some practical utility for purposes of discussion, is an artificial division.

Mind and body are ultimately one thing. And I believe wisdom and compassion, are also at bottom, one. I believe seeing into this assertion of a profound intimacy within and among wisdom and compassion as facets of our singular lives, is terribly important. So, for today, let me expand on this thought, and explore just a bit where if true this understanding might lead us.

Here I find value in a brief reflection on the two strands of our Unitarian Universalism. The Unitarian strand is often said to address our profound humanistic perspective, naturalistic and this worldly. It suggests our romance with scientific method and the arts of critical thinking. Now as I said last week, I believe this, more than most aspects of our faith does indeed reveal our general style. We are a people seeking wisdom.

But there is another and broadly pervasive aspect to our living faith, and that is a clear acknowledgement of love and the power of the human heart. This is the way of compassion. And this has often been seen as a defining characteristic of our Universalist current.

Love, our Universalists asserted, is the greatest force in the universe. Love is the glue of relationships. Love is a call to reconciliation. Reconciliation. They taught us that as we find this experience of love for ourselves, we discover a deep human need for reconciliation was and is at the center of our existence. Truly, this is the way of compassion.

Now when I give my little historical talks for newcomers I frequently opine that had it been that there continued to be two denominations, one Unitarian and the other Universalist, because of these alleged differences in style, I personally would choose to be a Universalist, walking the way of compassion. Unfortunately, my spouse Jan once overheard me pronouncing this and offered to the group, "No he wouldn’t."

And perhaps that is an important point, as well. We each of us lead from our own perspective, our own inclinations—always a boat with a single oar. But as we come together into this gathered community within this meeting room, we frequently discover our actual broadness, the wealth that is our heritage, which extends so far beyond that to which we usually would confine ourselves.

When I, so inclined to analysis and clear definition draw among my more heart-led friends, I am taught, I am guided, I am made more whole. My seeking of wisdom is clarified by the teachings of compassion. Indeed, coming into this sanctuary I discover a feast set forth from before the creation of the planets and stars, and I am nourished.

So, let’s make sure we ground all this in concrete examples. Such is our way, after all. Here, on a Sunday where the worship service will be followed by a meeting of the Social Action Committee (To which everyone is invited. And, there will be food!), it is good to reflect on this mysterious joining of our wholeness, of the ultimate unity of wisdom and compassion.

I believe that as we join in the work of seeking justice, we reveal ourselves in full. It is an authentic expression of our spiritual seeking. As we engage the suffering of the world, we discover ourselves. In that process, we discover the fractures, the splits in our being, that divide us from within, and against each other. And also, we find hints of some greater healing that is possible

This is so important. We have to engage those fractures in our being, those tears in our heart. We have to acknowledge them if we ever hope to see the world clearly, and to act with any grace. It is so easy to turn away from them, to ignore them, to deny them. We don’t want to see our shortcomings, our failures of heart and intellect. But as we commit to a way of authenticity, as those of us who have embraced the great way of Unitarian Universalism have, we cannot turn away. We must engage.

But if we do, we are greatly gifted. At that moment we find ourselves not alone in a large boat with that single oar, but among a great throng pulling together. We can find great strength and even direction as we pull together, and learn together.

Now I’m sorry for shifting the image, but these fractures, these wounds we inevitably discover as we engage the real world, and who we really are: are great and powerful teachers. Again, a concrete example: I recall reading something Mark Harris, minister of our sister congregation in Watertown, wrote last year, and my awful reaction to it.

This was a powerful experience for me, and I’ve addressed it elsewhere, illustrating a somewhat different point. Like most difficult but authentic experiences it contains a multitude of lessons. Here is one. Mark tells how "I went to an oral surgeon in Belmont for some unpleasant extractions."

He said, "I emerged with a mouth full of gauze and a hand full of prescriptions. I went into the CVS next door thinking I would get these drugs as quickly as I could. Before I could leave the prescription with the pharmacist, I had to wait for an elderly woman who was in front of me in line. He handed her a filled prescription and said, the total is $184.50.

"There was dead silence, until she murmured a faint, ‘what was that?’ While acknowledging it was expensive, the pharmacist countered by saying it was for a full month. The woman was still stunned. This was what her doctor wanted her to have. She was still stunned. It seemed like an eternity. Finally, she said, ‘I can’t do that I simply can’t.’ She gave back the drug and walked out."

I hear this story and tears well up from within my body. I think of my mother, I think of all our mothers and fathers, sons and daughters--and I am filled with rage. I want blood, not metaphorical blood, really stinking sticky blood pouring out in the public square. I find I am enveloped with anger.

It burns. Anger clings to my soul and burns. Like napalm it burns to the depths. I feel how so much I want a justice that includes vengeance visited upon those who put that woman and so many others in that unspeakable situation in the name of economic development or free enterprise.

This is evil. And I hate it. I cast about for how to oppose it, how to stand against it and all those other injustices: racism and sexism and homophobia and the seemingly endless other evils that worm into human hearts and sour us and waste our planet. I feel that rush of righteousness that calls upon God to visit such a vengeance that includes not only the perpetrators, but also their children and all they love.

Their children, I wish ill to their children. As I notice this feeling I am shocked. The fracture, the split appears. I am in awe, and realize there is something wrong with that call "first justice, then peace." I find I don’t know what to say, to think, to feel. I realize I’ve just joined the ranks of murderers, of all those who hate. My care turned to hate. My desire for justice twisted into a call for vengeance.

Then noticing all this bubbling within my being I find how I must pull back, just for a moment and reflect. Our great way is one of attention, of noticing. These are terrible emotions wracking through my body, they rend my heart and they cloud my mind. But, as we don’t turn away when we allow ourselves to find something out of kilter within ourselves, some great reality is also revealed. A special moment rises in time. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one of the more interesting teachers writing at the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of our Common Era notes.

"There are moments when a person is given a gift. Sometimes it is for a minute, sometimes it can last for a day or for months. Usually it is not a permanent change—just a gift, so to say, a loan. To use entirely different symbols," Rabbi Steinsaltz writes. "It is like giving someone a million-dollar check on the condition that it be returned after a certain time. The real question is, what use can be made of it in the meantime?"

Here was my terrible gift, my horrific loan, my special and precious moment. Thinking of that elderly woman, I feel the deep intimations of connection. Here is the birthing of compassion. She and I and we are all bound in the intimate strands of mutuality, of the great unity that is our living condition.

But then there is how I respond out of my knowing how unnecessary in this country of such incredible wealth, for that elderly woman’s turning away from the pharmacist. I quickly move from suffering with to something else. And in that movement away, I lose my authentic power. Instead of seeing the unity, I begin to divide the universe, good and evil, goats and sheep.

But gifted with the practices of our Unitarian Universalist way of attention, in that moment of seeing my own violent reaction, in that small horrible and precious gift of owning my visceral response to what happened to that elderly woman, I learn something. Mind and heart, wisdom and compassion are one thing. They cannot be divided. There is room for clarity, but truthfully not for animus. Truly, hatred will only beget hatred, and my hatred is a poison. We need to start with a realization of how we all belong to the same family. We are all connected.

Even as I am joined with that elderly woman, I am also joined with the businessman and the congressman who set the policies that denied simple medicine to one of us. And as we notice that, here the combined voice of wisdom and compassion whispers in our ears. As we seek righteousness, we must also seek mercy, because we are all bound together. And what is done to one, is done to all.

So, if we are all connected, as I so deeply believe, as we seek wisdom we must cultivate compassion. What we do to one, without a doubt, we do to all. When mind and heart are brought together all this becomes clear as glass. Justice and peace must come together.

Justice and peace together are the only authentic way through. I know my own work within the fields of social justice constantly reveals to me a divided heart, and a divided mind. But, by not turning away, I also discern how ultimately beyond those divisions, we really are all bound within the strands of interdependence. And peace and justice, compassion and wisdom are living threads that unite us all.

As this ethic of inclusion, of interdependence really becomes part of my consciousness, of our consciousness, we all discover how we are on a holy path. With mind and heart moving together, a true and profound way is revealed, one that takes us toward the reconciliation of the world, and I suggest, to something even deeper. But that’s for another sermon.

Now the work needs to continue. We UUs are on a path of engaged spirituality. And engagement is a verb not a noun. One gift is not enough; one loan will not cleanse our hearts and focus our minds, sufficiently. We must continue to wrestle with our own shortcomings and compassionately with the shortcomings of society. But, I guarantee that taking up our way of social engagement and participating in activities like our social justice committee will give many opportunities to see our fractures, our splits. Lessons are strewn like jewels across the floor.

So, we need to join together in projects like our partnership with Myrtle Street Baptist to feed the hungry, and we need to be active in our political life to make sure those who are elected will address the great issues of human suffering and the wounds of our planet.

This spiritual way of ours really is a weaving, is a dance. We accept we are not whole, we see only in part. But, in our willingness to come together, to laugh and cry together, to mourn and celebrate together, to struggle together: we find how wisdom and compassion weave together and become our lives. Indeed, who knows, as we pursue this way of reconciliation, of healing, of heart and mind, maybe that fabled Garden will actually one day reappear?

So, comforted by this gift, by this knowledge, I pull back from my call for vengeance and instead I seek ways to help. Justice and peace. In this, our wonderful spiritual way, we discover the power of kindness and the joy of working together. Here we find compassion and wisdom are both facets of our true way. And as we remember this then we will find the way to get that woman the medicine she needs, the medicine we all need.
Amen.