Sermon by Dr. Jonathan Miller
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
January 4, 2004
Reading 1:
words of Rumi, translated by
Coleman Barks
Can you endure silence?
Are you a night fighter?
Or more a child bored with outgrown toys
trying to win at tip-the-cat?
If you have any patience left,
we know what to do.
If you love sleep, we’ll tear you away.
If you change into a mountain, we’ll melt you.
If you become an ocean, we’ll drain you.
This is how a human being can change:
There’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever,
something wakes him and he’s no longer a worm.
He’s the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need to devour.
Reading 2:
words of Emily Dickinson
After great pain,
a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go
Sermon:
It is a
privilege to be before you and with you once again, to speak from this pulpit,
something I treasure. When I began to write this sermon, it was a cold night. I
sat in my office at home, listening to the haunting, stark, contemplative sounds
of Icelandic choral music for comfort and inspiration, as I have learned to do.
Slow, somber, beautiful music seems to center me somehow, to allow the muse to
flow; for it allows the dark in, welcomes it, and allows it its proper place in
the order of things. I sometimes crave happy music, but more often I turn to
music that tugs at me through its more contemplative qualities. I want
to be tugged like that, especially now. I want to be reminded of the dark side,
the quiet side, the still nature of things, and the voices that are so often
silenced inside. Only through quiet and compassion can they be heard and tended
to.
As we all know, darkness is symbolic as well as real at this
time of year. By now, the holiday hubbub has hopefully died down, the presents
are opened and the wrapping paper is in the recycling, and, as is always the
case, there is the lingering sense of, ”Well, okay, what now?”
The presents sitting on the living room floor stimulate a deeper
question about the orientation of our whole lives. It’s not simply a question of
material things, of course; as usual, external reality reflects a larger
emotional and spiritual context: ”okay, what now?” It seems inevitable to do
this act of taking stock, of balancing, of taking time to reflect.
Jews do this during the high holidays. I love that ten-day time
of pause, of turning down the volume and seeing what can be heard amid the
hundreds of prayers, the stillness of silent prayer, the times of fasting, and
the intense questioning of one’s own values and behavior. They are called
days of repentance, but, as Jay Deacon was fond of noting, the Hebrew word
that is conventionally translated as ”repentance” is more accurately translated
as ”turning.” It is a turning time, a time to turn our focus away from where it
usually is to reflect, to evaluate, and to turn to others whom we have wronged
and ask for forgiveness.
Those who observe the high holidays are indeed fortunate to have
that ritual of turning inward in the early fall. But whenever we do it—and I
believe that we must do it—this turning is a vital part of our yearly cycle,
something that the world of human souls urgently needs to do after our frenzied
holiday rush, after the intensity of family expectations and traditions ebbs,
and after the beginning of new things, and the loss of things that are no more,
dissipates, and we are left with the stillness that is part of our fundamental
condition.
The mythic archetypes use images and metaphors of darkness to
serve as mirrors for our inner life, our inner darkness or, in the plural, our
darknesses. Jungians talk of the shadow, the dark side of our souls that is
always there, and which needs to manifest itself and to be acknowledged. The
shadow demands, at some point in our lives, to be reckoned with, in some way
that makes it part of the balanced whole of our inner life. In whole or in
speficic parts, if unacknowledged, unspoken, or shoved aside, it will find ways
to wreak havoc, whether with trickster-energy or worse. Those more insidious
shadows will remain elusive and perhaps even become destructive, to ourselves or
to others, if we cannot know them.
The writers of the Gospels knew well the dark night of the
soul; it is no accident that Jesus was described as his most reflective late on
the night before he was put to death. People typically ascribe great courage to
Jesus, that he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice; at the same time,
each of us has a hundred moments of choice every day, choices to step off the
cliff or to play it safe, choices to play out our own unconscious dramas
unthinkingly in the outer world, or to dig down deep and sacrifice the comfort
of inertia and unawareness for the possible pain of growth or risk, to see if
perhaps it could be different today, if we could respond with more clarity or
precision of thought, more compassion or insight, more love or faith, more honor
and respect for the person with whom we are speaking, more patience.
I know many people in this room who, in countless situations,
have been examples of bravery and conscience, people who didn’t take the easy
way out, who know what it means to tell the truth, to balance expediency with
conscience, to balance defensiveness with compassion; and it is good, I
believe, to know that whether we take the easy way out today or not, there is
someone here in our community who has made the same choice in a similar
situation and knows what it feels like, all the little triumphs and all the
little deaths.
The great early Renaissance poet Petrarch knew
this, more than six hundred years ago. He was on the
cutting edge of thought in his day, right on the border between the medieval and
Renaissance mindsets, and he wrote the following lines at the end of one of his
greatest sonnets:
Mille volte il dí moro e mille nasco,
Tanto da la salute mia son lunge.
A thousand times a day I die, and a thousand am born,
So far away am I from my salvation.
The salvation of which Petrarch writes is not
traditional Christian saving of the soul, but rather wholeness, health, the
integration of the dark and light aspects of the soul, and all the shades of
gray. He struggled with parts of the medieval worldview that no longer made
sense with how he felt inside, and his masterful poems reflect his profound
working-out of this most human dilemma.
Among Western religious traditions, it seems
to me—and I mean this as a compliment—the Catholics do the best job of keeping
the dark side in focus, in a good way. Jesus is held up as a model in some ways,
of one who knew the darkness and would not let it break his spirit. In another
great Jesus-story, C. S. Lewis writes movingly of the death of the great lion,
Aslan, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in a passage that
usually makes me cry. It is sad, when, shortly before his death, the two
sisters from our world, Susan and Lucy, are walking with Aslan, himself a
Jesus-figure, in Narnia.
”Are you ill, dear Aslan?” asked Susan?
”No,” said Aslan. ”I am sad and lonely. Lay
your hands on my mane so that I can feel you are there and let us walk like that.”
And so the girls did what they would never
have dared to do without permission, but what they had longed to do ever since
they first saw him—buried their cold hands in the beautiful sea of fur and
stroked it and, so doing, walked with him.
After Aslan is killed by the White Witch, the
two girls come upon the slain Lion in the middle of the night. C.S. Lewis
writes:
I hope no one who reads this book has been
quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been—if
you’ve been up all night and cried til you have no more tears left in you—you
will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if
nothing was ever going to happen again. At any rate that was how it felt to
these two.
When I read that passage, I
am hugely comforted, even as I am brought to the edge of crushing sadness,
because I know that someone else knows how I have felt in those wretched
moments. These are those moments of greatest sorrow, the moments that are so
hard to talk about yet are so powerful, the ones that are pointed to on Good
Friday through rituals, when the altar is stripped and you still don’t sing
Alleluia because it’s the darkest hour of Lent, and it’s just so very sad
because Jesus is dead, or Martin Luther King is dead, or Yitzchak Rabin is dead,
or your heart is dead or a relationship is dead or a hope is dead or your job
feels dead or your addictive tendencies won’t let you alone, or because some
corner of your life, some corner that seems essential, is at a dead end.
All of that is sad
inside. We must go here, to that dark place inside. It cannot be
avoided. In my case a gentle and gifted therapist made it safe for me to go
there. I don’t know what the passage would look like for you. But we must go
there, or we will be dominated by that which we fear so much that we cannot look
at it. This is so true that it is almost cliché, and the danger of the cliché
is that we will cynically write it off as such instead of being willing to sit
with the stark truth that it represents, the clear inner bell that rings if we
only let it.
So
it is dark and cold and still, and we are left with, ”okay, what now?” It is an
awkward thing to ask, really. It’s no accident that new-year’s resolutions
often follow this awkward pause. Let’s lose weight. Let’s clean the garage.
Let’s start an exercise program. Let’s write to our estranged relatives. I
have never done much of this; while I admire those who make and keep such
resolutions, I have true compassion for the larger number of people who make the
resolutions and then fall off the wagon. It’s not easy to change, any time of
year. In January it’s probably hardest of all. It’s still dark and cold, and
the days are short, and people are still remembering how awful their relatives
were to them the week before. Where’s the inspiration in that? What is going to
sustain a resolution, other than willpower or the passionate desire for a
34-inch waist?
While it is easy to assume that the real work of this still time is to gird
one’s loins and finally lose those ten pounds, I hesitate to endorse such a
mindset, because it keeps the focus where it usually lies anyway, namely in
externals. I am not denying that asking ”okay, what now?” is awkward and begs
for closure, nor am I downplaying the virtue of losing 10 pounds if that’s what
you need to do. Yet it takes work to resist the tendency to turn that awkward
pause into a resolution, because it is likely that inside the awkward pause is a
voice telling you something else, telling me something else. I suspect that you
know what it is. It might be several things. But I bet that if I asked each of
you, one by one, in this quiet setting, to tell me the number one issue that is
up in your soul right now—the true soul-work, the one thing that you would
really like to work on if you could only get to it, get quiet enough to focus on
it—I bet that you could actually tell me, or tell a loved one. It is that first
thing that bubbles up from the inner core of our being, in response to the
prompting of ”okay, what now?” Yes, that’s the one I mean. You may also have
one or several other voices that don’t want you to think about that one. Yet I
am referring to the soul-speak that wants to cut through all the material stuff
and orient us back to the true north of true self, and perhaps most importantly,
the exiled inner voice that begs to not get lost this year, please please please
let this be the year when you do not forget me, I don’t know how to do it but
please don’t lose me again this time, please keep me close, don’t be so busy
this year, listen to me, listen to me, listen
to me ....
It
is that close to us, that inner need; it is indeed available if we will still
ourselves and make it safe enough to be heard, for the soul does not hide
completely where it wants to go, the direction in which it wants to grow, right
now. In some respects, that is all the soul knows anyway, namely where it wants
to go, and to grow, right now. If we don’t listen now, it will keep reminding
us, in a hundred different ways and in a hundred different voices and
circumstances, mostly hidden, until do we take notice, when we can, though all
too often the moment we take notice is not a moment in which we can stop and do
anything about it —not a moment when we can intersect that momentary prompting
with a more disciplined framework of consciousness, not a time when we can
harness the energy of a spiritual yearning to see that yearning through to its
end, its destination, and then the opportunity is lost. That is why I am
starting to see that even a little work on the soul like this on a more regular
basis is so helpful in navigating those complicated inner and outer waters.
Perhaps you’ve found the same to be true.
It
is really astounding how difficult it can be in our culture to find silence, to
find darkness, but when it is available, look what happens! I was at the Taizé
service at Ascension Church on New Year’s Day, and many people could not find a
seat. I was moved to tears at how many hundreds and hundreds of people
willingly sat in the darkness and sang, and then lit candles and sang, and then
sat in silence for 10 minutes, a church full of a thousand souls who all needed
the dark stillness, men and women, children and seniors and every age in
between; I truly love enthusiasm and fun and perkiness and energy and
extroverted, ecstatic, powerful, raise-the-roof moments, but I can’t sustain
that all the time and don’t want to. The quiet is so wonderful sometimes, and
the dark.
Darkness gently tugs at us the way the soul’s yearning does. It is just there,
always there. Darkness is different from willpower. Darkness is like mulch.
It takes time for darkness to do its work. Darkness and stillness are
underrated in our society, which tells us that more is always better, faster is
better, brighter and more cheerful are always better. But I believe that
familiarity with the dark side, symbolically and in our inner lives in
particular, is essential to a balanced existence, just as fertile soil is
essential to having a garden that sustains life.
Those of you who know me reasonably well know that my life has been in
significant phases of change during the last year. My passage as of late has
included much reflection and inward looking. I truly could not fathom five
years ago that it would be something of which I myself was capable. It has been
for me a journey of learning to sit very still, sometimes in my therapists’s
office and sometimes on my own, sometimes in the middle of a conversation, and
hearing all the voices that live inside me, including the very darkest, most
afraid and lonely ones, the parts who fear exposure and shame and ridicule and
failure and loneliness and every horrible thing that befalls humans. The
darkness has for me often taken the form of muddledness, an inability to sort
out just which of my inner voices is trying to get airtime, until with clarity
and patience and persistence the lay of the land can get clear enough to give
that neediest part of me, whichever it is that day, what it needs, namely the
peace and quiet and wisdom of the Self, which for others might be God or
Buddha-nature or Brahmin or Source. The quiet darkness outside is a gift to us,
a gentle, cold, quiet stimulus to similarly quiet our spinning minds and frantic
schedules, to sit quietly and cultivate a stillness inside that is based on a
clear, stable, healing energy that makes those other voices feel safe and whole
and part of things.
I
used to fear that much looking inward. I was afraid that it would or could
swallow me up, and that there would be no energy left for engaging the outside
world if the inner search became too intense. I have other parts who believed
that too much looking inward would make me a chump, easily manipulated, not able
to respond adequately to the demands of adult existence. I had reasons for
believing these things. My father is a significant introvert, and more than
that, he seemed, in the years of my growing up, to have a continual need to
disengage from the world as his primary strategy for dealing with it. I
believed in my youth that it didn’t really work for him, and so, as the
ambitious son who didn’t want to repeat his father’s mistakes, I never wanted
to disengage from the world; so it seemed as if it were all-or-nothing,
that I had to be either in the world or out; of course, that was an
oversimplification, one I could handle emotionally half my life ago, but one
which ultimately proved insufficient. It doesn’t seem so black-and-white now,
my sense of being in the world or out of it, and for that I am grateful. There
are many shades of gray, and the world is not as scary now because the range of
possible experience, including my own, has become so wide, and I am slowly
gaining confidence in my ability to negotiate tricky waters by watching the
inner compass more closely as well as the outer realities of work and human
relationships. This more acute awareness, which feels like a huge gift, is a
function in large part of my realization that no progress would truly be made
until I could look at the dark, the choices and assumptions I made, the things
and people I trusted and those that I didn’t, and to tell the truth about what
was and wasn’t working. The dark can be very, very dark. But I couldn’t not go
there. Maybe that is what it is like for you, now that we are in the week of
”okay, what now?” Maybe you are likewise on the edge of that cliff and
wondering if it’s safe to jump. I encourage you to find a way to make it safe,
and then to go for it.
So
if you truly sat with the dark and the quiet, and brought yourself to the task,
with whatever felt most right to you, whether to simply sit in the dark, or
stare at a candle or look at a stained-glass window or at the floor, or off into
space or out over the lake, or to walk or run or engage whatever turns on your
capacity to turn inward, what essential question would you sit with? What
spiritual capacity do you most crave to develop, to fortify you for the inner
and outer challenges you will most likely face this year or are already facing
right now? What quality of soul is your Achilles’ heel, your own dark side,
your own emotional liability, the place where you always seem to get stuck? Is
it a crushing insecurity, or arrogance, or the inability to deal with
frustration, or shyness, or the hesitance to speak up when you know you should,
or an inability to stop being distracted, or a long history of wasting time, or
simply inertia? Is it the feeling that you are powerless, or a victim, or
unable to overcome your basic temperament? Or do you fear coming to the end of
your life without ever having really lived? I know these might be hard
questions, and you might be feeling hot under the collar even as I mention
them. But they are there, there to be asked, there in the darkness when all the
toys are opened, there tugging at you and at me and there to be gently and
lovingly addressed with the most inner compassion and persistence we can
possibly muster, right now, and then again for tomorrow. If you really look,
you’ll notice at coffee hour that we’re really all the same in this regard.
Don’t be fooled by anyone’s pretension that it’s any way other than this. As my
father once said, everyone is the same in their underwear; put another way,
everyone is the same when faced with their soul’s most fundamental question for
right now. It can be hot in the face, but it’s ultimately, in my experience,
totally worth asking that question, over and over again, until it is safe to go
there inside, which in turn makes it safe once again to go outside.
Let us be together in silence.
© Copyright 2004
Jonathan M. Miller, All Rights Reserved.
Words for Parting:
words of Rumi
A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets:
Everything has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.
Painstaking work,
then the swan spreads its wings.
