"My Banjo is Broken"

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Written by Joe Cleveland

“My Banjo is Broken”

A sermon by Joe Cleveland, Ministerial Intern

delivered on Sunday, October 2, 2011

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

My banjo is broken. And my banjo can’t be fixed. In fact, if it were possible to fix my banjo, it would stop being a banjo.

We could say the same thing about people. This gets tricky. I started thinking about what people are like because I knew that there was going to be a child dedication today. A child dedication is what we Unitarian Universalists do instead of baptism. One of the reasons we have developed this practice is in response to more orthodox Protestant understandings. The Protestant reformer John Calvin would say that we come into this world “totally depraved.” Calling a child totally depraved makes no sense to me, and it made no sense to our Unitarian forebear William Ellery Channing. Looking at a child, somehow the phrase “totally depraved” didn’t pop to mind for him. I look at a child and I think wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. But maybe that’s because I don’t have kids.

In some strands of Christianity, you get baptized when you’ve been saved. You need saving because you are a sinner. This language can be uncomfortable, but let me talk about it this way. We do things we regret and we feel we don’t measure up. The Jewish High Holy days which are happening now are a time in which to acknowledge this. The task is to confront the ways you have broken trust and acknowledge them and resolve to learn from them. Part of what I think this requires is compassion for oneself.

One thing that’s involved in self-compassion is the task of accepting yourself. This can be difficult in our culture because we get the message all the time that we are not measuring up. We’re not strong enough, successful enough, happy enough. In Karen Armstrong’s book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, she tells a story of a woman who had cancer. And this woman said that “the hardest thing of all was her friends’ relentless insistence that she adopt a positive attitude; they refused to let her discuss her fears—probably,” Karen Armstrong says, “because they were frightened by her disease and found it an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality.”^{^[1]}

One of the things that struck me when I worked as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital was how often patients were in this sort of a situation, but often were playing the role of this woman’s friends themselves. I met with a lot of patients who were understandably anxious and frustrated and angry and sad. But on top of that, they felt guilty or ashamed of feeling anxious or angry or sad. Often, these patients were the ones who did a lot of caring for others. They told me stories of cooking for people who couldn’t cook or driving people who couldn’t drive to medical appointments. They tended to the needs of other very sick people. They were compassionate people, but they had a hard time extending that compassion to themselves. They had a hard time accepting their own limitations. They thought that they were, in some way, broken.

I’m reminded here of lines from Rumi that I ran across this summer. One of the publishers of the popular Coleman Barks translations remarked that he handled the permissions requests when others wanted to quote from the translations. The lines he got the most requests for are these: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” This publisher explains the popularity of these lines by saying that “Our culture is so shame-ridden that when someone comes along and says, ‘You’re OK,’ it’s a great relief.”^{^[2]} I’m also reminded here of the opening line of a poem by Mary Oliver that is very popular not just among UUs, though it is in our hymnbook: “You do not have to be good . . .”

I think that accepting our own brokenness is important, because I think that our brokenness is part of makes us individual. It’s part of what makes us who we are. According to the New York Times, there is even some research being done now that seems to be showing that “giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health.”^{^[3]} For one researcher in this field, self-compassion is important as a corrective to an emphasis in our culture on self-esteem. She says that, “The main problem is that having self-esteem requires feeling special and above average.”^{^[4]} Is this the town were all the children are above average?

For Karen Armstrong, developing self-compassion is the third step toward being able to lead a compassionate life. Being able to be compassionate with ourselves helps us to develop compassion for others. Armstrong says that we need “to acknowledge our own pain or we shall find it impossible to have compassion for the distress of others.” I understand her to mean here that it is out of our own brokenness that we can offer ourselves more fully to the service of others. I saw this a lot at Brigham and Women’s, too. The ways that people were hurting seemed often to be a source for real gifts of compassion, understanding, and love.

So let me tell you a story about my broken banjo.

One evening I was sitting in a small circle of folks at a UU church. We had just shared a meal and now we were singing songs and UU hymns. After playing one hymn, someone next to me asked me to play the hymn that came next in the book. And I couldn’t do it. I had my guitar, and the chords were actually given in the hymnal, but I couldn’t do it. The chords all seemed to go by too quickly and I couldn’t do it. Then that night I dreamed I heard the melody on the banjo and it made sense. Except for one note. I could play the hymn except for that one note.

I need to give you a little technical banjo whatnot here. The banjo has its limits, especially the way I play it. I don’t play bluegrass banjo. I use an older way of playing that has come to be called clawhammer because your right hand is held in a kind of claw-shape as you hammer away at the strings. It’s a neat way to play because it emphasizes the fact that a banjo is basically a drum with strings. Playing clawhammer style, you often are actually drumming on the head of the banjo and hitting the strings because they are in the way. But the style really has its limits. There are some rhythms that you just can’t get. And it is hard to get some of the notes. This style of banjo took root in the southern Appalachians where it met up with the fiddle. Playing on the banjo all the notes that the fiddle is playing can be pretty challenging. Even impossible sometimes. There are tricks you can use. For example, there’s a way you can actually pluck out notes with your left hand that your right hand can’t get to.

But I still couldn’t figure out a way to sound that one note in the melody of this hymn. But eventually, I stopped beating myself up about it and just said well, I’ll play a different note. I’m not playing the chords the way they are written out anyway, after all! The ironic thing is that this hymn is a meditation about developing compassion. It starts with self-compassion and then moves to compassion for others and the wider community. Will you sing it with me?

Sing: Filled With Loving Kindness #1031

Sometimes, whatever our limitations, whatever it is we have to offer can be just what is needed. I think we need self-compassion because often our brokenness can be our greatest source of creativity and the source of the gift we offer to heal our broken world.

^{^[1]} Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). iBook

^{^[2]} Kabir Helminski quoted in Rachel Aviv, “A Rumi of One’s Own” The Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/179906

^{^[3]} Tara Parker-Pope. “Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges.” The New York Times on-line. February 28, 2011. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/go-easy-on-yourself-a-new-wave-of-research-urges/

^{^[4]} Kristin Neff, “Why We Should Stop Chasing Self-Esteem and Start Developing Self-Compassion,” Huffington Post. April 6, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristin-neff/self-compassion_b_843721.html

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