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This sermon is a continuation of a series
on teshuvah (turning), reconciliation, forgiveness, and reconnection in
recognition of the end of the Jewish month of Elul, and the beginning
of the Jewish New Year coming.
Story for
All Ages: Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “Finding the Way”, (2003) Hasidic Tales
Annotated & Explained. Skylight Paths: 187.
Reading:
A. Powell Davies, “How Sin Will Be Conquered,” in Without Apology:
Collected Meditations on Liberal Religion, edited by Forrest Church
(1998). Boston, Skinner House: 13-14.
How many
people have you unintentionally hurt today? Yesterday? This week? What
about this month or this year? To have a sense of that, how many people
offended or hurt you today? Yesterday? This week? This month? This
year? If your experience is anything like mine, then a modest way of
calculating how many people you’ve unintentionally injured is to
quadruple the number of people who’ve hurt or offended you.
Now, how
about the number of people you intentionally hurt? I’m including snarky
comments and speech acts maligning of others here, you know, the common
stuff of gossip and that form of complaining we often brush off as
“venting.” How about your experience of others intentionally hurting
you – now, I’m not asking about your suspicions or how you felt, but
backed up proof positive because the other person consciously
acknowledges that he or she meant to hurt you?
These
intentional and unintentional injuries are the work at hand right now,
at the end of the Jewish month of Elul, and something that is
articulated and practiced in all the major world religious traditions.
A moral and a sober life is built on this foundation of addressing
where we have gone wrong, in the intentional and unintentional ways we
have hurt others – not in claiming our pain and how things haven’t gone
our way.
This
practice, the work of teshuvah, the work of returning to the moral
center, involves four important steps in the 12-step recovery programs:
steps four, eight, nine, and ten.[i] These may have been steps
laid out for recovery from addiction, but they are good steps for us
all to be practicing as we recover from a society-wide addiction to a
sense of entitlement – that the world was actually set up and made and
should work for us.
Step
four: make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step
eight: Make a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to
make amends to them all.
Step
nine: Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when
to do so would injure them or others.
Step ten:
continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admit it.
These are
four major steps in recovery from addiction, and from our society’s
addictive patterns. Most of us, however, have resistance to accepting
responsibility for the ways we have harmed others.
Resistance
to Accepting Responsibility
If you’re
at all like me, you look at this period of making amends, and the steps
necessary to take them, and your first response is not, “Yes! Hurrah!
Great! I’ve been carrying around how I cut off that distressed person
in heavy traffic three months ago!” If you’re at all like me, your
first response to knowing you have these steps to take is a response
none of us would be proud to announce: “Yeah, right, all those people
who’ve hurt me aren’t going to seek me out and make amends, and even if
they do, they don’t really mean it.” If we do get around to our spat
with our office mate over the unfilled stapler discovered at 2 minutes
past midnight in the few hours left before the big program, we want to
brush it off with “Well, I can’t make amends, because the other person
will gloat and get all the glory when it was their fault anyway.”
Allow me
to pause here to observe that none of these responses after “Wow! I
have a lot of amends to make!” are responses of our highest or best
calling.
Humility,
it turns out, is dangerous stuff in our society today. Acknowledging
that we have missed the mark in any way, shape, or form, is dangerous.
It is as though when we meet the other lost traveler in the woods, that
we believe the only way we can get out is if we kill or evade her
first, and she believes the same of us.[ii] Because humility and
a rigorous moral inventory are dangerous stuff in our society, it takes
deep work for us to each grow our souls and address the ways we miss
the mark each and every day, in all kinds of big and little ways.
You know,
most religious traditions have rituals and prayers of saying “oops!”
“sorry!” and “I promise to do better!”[iii] Unitarian
Universalist congregations, however, in the United States, almost
universally dropped corporate prayers of confession in the 1960s, when
it was oh so chic not to acknowledge how in an interdependent world, we
all have to be part of the problem. Well, folks, it is now the 21st
century, and science and contemporary life proves over and over again
that the world is interdependent, and we are all part of the problem.
We all can also be part of the solutions, but this requires humility
and real conviction to our promises to do better, and community to hold
us accountable, and spiritual practices and rituals that draw us back
to both promises and failures.
As A. Powell Davies observed, the Book of Common Prayer, has a lovely
prayer in: forgive us for what we have done and what we have left
undone. I begin and end my days with that prayer: forgive me for what I
have done and what I have left undone.[iv] I never can get
everything done exactly the way it needs to be: never treat every
person I encounter exactly and fully as they deserve, never visit
everyone who needs a visit, never call every person who needs a call,
never spend the extra moment with this or that or have the perfect
laugh or sparkle or sober demeanor at the perfect moment. I have done
some abysmal things: spoken sharply, and been impatient, and succumbed
to the silliness that the world should work more in my direction. I
believe you know just what I mean here. But you might not, and I’m
taking a great risk sharing these things in a public sermon, things
that might later be held against me. As a society we penalize people
who are humble and acknowledge what they have done and left undone. We
tend not to praise and encourage to make it easier to do what is
necessary and to leave what is not, to be perfectly imperfect, to keep
learning, to grow a soul. But the risk I take does not really matter,
because to not take the risk would add this to the column of missing
the mark on the not done side, of not being courageous enough to own my
imperfections and share my spiritual journey while calling on all of us
to do the same.
We share
a covenant – a holy set of promises between ourselves and Life Itself –
and we share a symbol. For these to have meaning, we also need to share
a common practice of humility, a common turning again, to what we have
done and what we have left undone, not in seeking others to redress
their sins against us, but in first acknowledging our own to them. One
of the admonishments of Alcoholics Anonymous is not to take someone
else’s moral inventory. It is good, but hard, advice. To follow it is
hard work, spiritual work, and it takes you out of the very satisfying
round of grousing, being a long-suffering victim, and connecting with
others through gossip. And why don’t we really want to take someone
else’s moral inventory? Because, be honest, some of you, like me,
probably really want to do so, indeed do so as you’re going through
your day: she’s slovenly, he’s so conceited, she’s never paying
attention, he’s a fool.
Now,
there was this amazing teacher roaming around the shores of the Galilee
a few thousand years ago, and he taught the need for our humility like
this:
(Demonstrating
this story with a pillow in front of my eye: many thanks to my
colleague, Susan Shaw, who passed along the idea.)
Hey! Is
that a speck of dust in your eye! (whoops!)
Whoa! You
really need to get over to the priests and take care of that problem of
yours! (whoops!)
Oh oh!
You weigh too much already to eat dessert! (whoops!)
Hey! Let
me help you with that problem you have! (whoops!)
Luke, the
physician, tells it this way: Jesus was teaching one day and he said,
“Stop judging, lest you be judged, because howsoever you judge, you
shall be judged by others.”… “Why do you see the speck in your
brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own? If you attend
to the beam in your own first, then you may see and assist your
brother.”[v]
Our
healing begins in practicing humility and discovering our own sins
through a searching moral inventory. This is spiritual work in which we
resonate like a bell: how clearly, how well, depends on our
attentiveness. The poet, Denise Levertov has described the experience
of awakening to the spiritual work of growing a soul, of attending to
the beam in our own eye, in her “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”:
[poem][vi]
Our work
of taking the searching moral inventory each and every day and most
especially now, together, annually, is the day striking us with the
honor and the task, ourselves, the awakening bells, each of us saying
and singing what is known: I can, we can.[vii] We can take the
humble road, we can practice kindness, we can make amends, we can each
grow a soul.[viii]
Now, we
do not usually require our neighbor’s help to make this searching moral
inventory, for most of us here are quite aware of what we’ve done and
left undone. Although you might be sorely tempted to share with
me everything I’ve done wrong or that Sally or Joe have done wrong,
that is not what is needed at this moment. Ring your own
bell.[ix] At this time of the year, what we need is our own
awareness of what we have done and left undone, how we may have hurt
others inadvertently and deliberately, and then to seek our
amends.[x] In reality, we may not have the chance to make amends
directly, and so we have two additional practices to help us heal and
restore our selves and this world. These two practices are: corporate
prayers of oops & sorry & promise to do better a/k/a corporate
prayers of confession, and practicing kindness. William James summed up
the work of growing a soul: be kind. Be kind. Be kind. And as that will
fail us at times, because we’re learning and growing and perfectly
imperfect, we have these prayers to draw us back to our promises, our
better selves, each other, and the world.
I invite
you to repeat after me this prayer of humility, as you call to mind
those ways you have intentionally and unintentionally hurt others:
I have made mistakes. (I have made mistakes.)
I have hurt others intentionally and unintentionally. (I have hurt
others intentionally and unintentionally.)
May I find forgiveness (May I find forgiveness )
for what
I have done and what I have left undone. (for what I have done and what
I have left undone.)
I cannot change either what I have done or left undone,
(I cannot change either what I have done or left undone,)
But let my regret teach me, guide me, train me
(But let my regret teach me, guide me, train me)
To pay deeper attention, to love more boldly,
(To pay deeper attention, to love more boldly,)
To live into my highest ideals,
(To live into my highest ideals,)
And to be kinder. (And to be kinder.)
Let the light of my life illuminate the way.
(Let the
light of my life illuminate the way.)
May I cast smaller shadows as I grow
(May I
cast smaller shadows as I grow)
Each and every day. (Each and every day.)
Amen.
<pause>
In every
ritual practice around the world, these corporate acts of confession
are attended with words of assurance, the breath of hope to begin
again. William Stafford gives us these in his poem, “Cutting Loose” for
James Dickey: [poem] [xi]
We may be
travelers in the woods, but as the wise rabbi reminds us, and the wise
poet recalls in his own resounding bell, we shall discover the way home
by recounting the ways that did not work, by meeting the certain
twisted monsters barring the path and learning how real it is here on
earth, how real and how wonderful.[xii] Real humility takes great
courage. By engaging this practice you are already living into your
higher ideals. By taking a searching moral inventory and working to
make amends, you are living a deeply connected and healing life –
healing to you and healing to this world.[xiii] For the sacred is
found relationally – between our selves and each other, between
ourselves and the world, between ourselves and all of life of which we
are one part. Sin is nothing more and nothing less than missing the
mark, dropping stitches as we seek the loops between us that keep us
connected. Our work is to repair what we can, and today, we have
started again that journey in kindness and love. This is the work of
growing a soul, and what beautiful and glowing souls we are!
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