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Spirituality Sermons "Getting Unstuck"
Spirituality Sermons "Getting Unstuck"
| "Getting Unstuck" |
| Written by Rev. Dr. Lorrie Dunham |
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READING:
from “Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living” written by Pema Chodron
One evening Milarepa, returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about non-duality of self and other, but he still didn’t quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind—all the unwanted parts of himself—he didn’t know how to get rid of them. So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata, a state of emptiness, and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying, “I’m not going away and it looks like you’re not either, so let’s just live here together.” At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said, “Oh, this one is particularly vicious.” (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that’s all we’ve got.) He didn’t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, “Just eat me up if you want to.” Then that demon left too.”
SERMON
“Getting Unstuck”
Rev. Dr. Lorrie Dunham
Delivered at The First Parish in Bedford
November 27, 2011
About five weeks ago when I was asked if I would like to do this service, we hadn’t had that early snowstorm, we hadn’t lost our power, we were all looking forward to Halloween, and I was still wondering if summer was really over. But now we know what it’s like to live without power, to delay Halloween for safety’s sake, and even to be more overstuffed than the traditional turkey. Now we stand on that bridge that crosses between Thanksgiving and Christmas, splashed by the wake of Black Friday’s nonsense; the bridge from which we can look back with either longing or regret, and ahead with either anticipation or anxiety, and decide whether to rush forward and embrace it, or try to retreat and ignore all the possibilities out there, hoping that they’ll just go away so we can just stand securely on the bridge. It really doesn’t matter, the future going to happen anyway, and we’ll all be touched and changed by it somehow, no matter what we do or don’t do. But even so, there are times when wet seem to be stuck on the bridge... out there in the middle.
After I’d chosen ‘getting unstuck,’ as a theme, and after the sermon title went into print, I spent some time wondering what I really knew about that subject. I tried to think of a time when I’d been stuck, and what finally came to my mind wasn’t the jobs I stayed at too long, or the relationships that had ended before they finally ended, or some financial snafus, or the blank-minded times I’d stared at a keyboard paralyzed by writer’s block as a deadline crept ever closer, or any of the other emotionally resistant times, or traffic jammed times, or snow and ice, or sickness, guilt, and unwanted responsibilities and obligations times that might have fit the category of stuckness, but instead, I woke up one morning with my mind stayed on a light... a big light... a light I’d once wanted very much to see close up.
There are actually three lighthouses on Nantucket Island and I’ve visited two of them... Brant Point Light, built in 1746 at the mouth of Nantucket Harbor, and Sankaty Head Light, that 90-foot red-and-white tower overlooking the golf course, that boasted of the brightest man-made light in the world when it was first lit in 1850. The third light, that’s a bit more remote, is Great Point Light, a 70-foot lighthouse built in 1784 on the northern side of the island, way out on a sand bar. Today it can only be reached by walking, or, for a hefty fee, by four wheel drive vehicle.
A couple of summers after I’d graduated from high school, my friends and I, and my ’58 Chevy Bel Air went by ferry to the island for a summer vacation, and when we had one day left, I decided it was time to drive out there for a look.
As Nancy’s illustration on the program cover shows you, we’d nearly made it when that old Chevy got bogged down in the sand. I sat there spinning my wheels for awhile before admitting that I was really stuck, and when I got out to evaluate the dilemma, my friends got out and romped off toward the ocean for a swim and a game of frisbee. But this was my car and I was in no mood for play. I opened the trunk, took out the jack, and began scouting around for driftwood to set the jack. I quickly found a couple of flat boards, slammed the truck lid down and proceeded to jack up the car. It all went pretty smoothly and I was feeling kind of proud of myself when I climbed back into the car to test my work, and that’s when I realized that I must have locked my keys in the trunk.
Well, I’m no quitter. I tried every way I could think of to open that trunk. I tried removing the back seat but there was a pretty solid metal divider between seat and trunk. I took a piece of driftwood I’d found with a nail in it, and thinking maybe I could pop the lock, I proceeded to destroy it. By then I could feel tears stinging the back of my eyes and knew it was going to be a long walk back to town. In that muddle of emotion I sat down in the drivers seat, looked out at my friends at play, looked down at my hand resting on the shift lever, and that’s about when I noticed something really nice. When I’d removed the key, I’d left the ignition switch turned on, a feature unique to some cars back then, and I knew I was going to get unstuck. I started the engine, shifted into drive, and drove that car right out of that hole. I was moving! My friends came running; they were lucky I let them in! I turned the car around and got myself onto firmer ground, then went back to pick up the jack.
Being stuck is a relatively common thread that weaves it’s way into human lives. And it’s common, too, for us to keep spinning our wheels when it happens, only burying ourselves deeper and deeper, until we stop, let our vision clear enough to see that things are rarely as bad as they seem, though there are times of real stuckness.
Sometimes we just need to open our eyes, sometimes we need to open a door… like the day I opened the door and came into this church and found the gift of a living faith and friendly people... and sometimes it takes opening our ears to other people’s stories to get our minds and hearts unstuck. A couple of things happened during the past two weeks like that. The first happened when the final speaker at the Historical Societies post-Veteran’s Day program got up to tell his story. First he mumbled his name, tried again, then stood with difficulty and with the aid of a crutch, walked to a standing mic and told us about serving in Iraq where he had been injured several times by roadside bombs and gunfire, once while trying to help a dying friend, and how, shortly after returning home he suffered an injury related stroke. This 32 year old assured us that he was recovering and would, one day soon, get back on his Harley and travel this land he loves and fought for. I wept... I couldn’t help myself... the man has lost so much, yet he said he would do it all again because he believes so strongly in the rightness of our country’s involvement there. And I wept for him and for all who have lost so much in all wars. And still, I will never believe that war is the right answer, and I pray that we might one day find that right answer. Yet, we seem to stay stuck in a repeating pattern of violence that only perpetuates itself in ever more violence.
And the week before that I went by bus with some of you to walk the streets of Boston and wandered among the ‘Occupy Boston’ tent dwellers, listen to their stories and reasons for being there, look into their information tent and first aid tent, read the notices posted on the wall, and talk with the librarian in the library tent that’s filled with books given by a used book store owner from the Cape who donated them and dedicated the library to Howard Zinn, that professor, writer and activist from Newton who died last year. Then I joined the others and stood by the street and holding up my signs calling for RESPECT and COMPASSION, adding these words to complete the message we had come to deliver. That was a second step in opening and connecting. We often don’t think much about what’s happening out there in the wider world until we open our hearts and eyes and ears enough to look, listen and connect. Those connections give us a deeper understanding and clarity of our convictions. They wake us up, get us outside of ourselves, and free us for a richer life, because there are times when we’re stuck without even knowing it!
There have been plenty of books written about getting unstuck. Writer Brian Bartes’ offers a long list of suggestions... here are a few:
Recognize the current reality,
Break the task or project down into smaller parts,
Identify the bottlenecks,
Identify the next step to take and take it,
Change your surroundings,
Get help from someone you trust,
Reward yourself for little steps,
Give yourself a break and Visualize your outcome because, whatever happens, you need to know that you are going to be okay.
These are good suggestions, but there are times when no list can help us. The pain and problems are just too big, and it would take a whole lot more to dissolve the glue in our soul. Sometimes it takes what Rebecca Ann Parker, president of Starr King School for Ministry, calls grace. In her book, Blessing the World, Rebecca Ann Parker tells of a time in her own life when she was stuck deep in the sands of despair and sinking deeper as the days passed. She couldn’t sleep at night, and in the daytime she paced the floor and cried until she was down to the question of whether life was worth living at all. At midnight, in the depths of sadness, she stopped pacing, left her house and walked down the hill to the lake.
“The city was quiet,” she writes: “My face was wet with tears as I set my course toward the water’s edge. I was determined to walk into the lake’s cold darkness and find there the consolation I couldn’t find within myself. At the bottom of the hill, the street ended and the lakeside park began. I walked across the wet grass and climbed the last rise, before the final descent to the water’s edge. As I crested the rise, I discovered a line of dark objects between me and the shore, a barricade I was going to have to cross to get to the water. I didn’t remember this barricade being there before, and it was so dark that I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. But as I edged close, I discovered it was a line of human beings, hunched over some strange-looking, spindly equipment.
Telescopes! It was the Astronomy Club. There they were with their homemade Heathkit telescopes and their top-of-the-line Sharper Image telescopes, dressed in their Gore-Tex back-country gear and tennis shoes. A whole club of amateur scientists, up and alert in the middle of the night because the sky was clear and the planets were near. And to make my way to my death, I had to get past an enthusiast in tennis shoes. He assumed I had come to look at the stars.
“Here. Let me show you,” he said, and began to explain the star cluster his telescope was focused on. I had to brush the tears from my eyes to took through his telescope. There it was! A red-orange spiral galaxy. Then he focused it on Jupiter, and I peered through to see the giant, glowing planet. I couldn’t bring myself to continue my journey. In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to look at the stars, I could not end my life. I know there is grace, because my life was saved by the Seattle Astronomy Club.”
It is called grace, and sometimes when we slow down enough to let it do it’s work, it will. It’s the free unexplained gift that somehow is right there at just the moment we need it... even when we didn’t think we wanted it... it’s the car with the ignition already turned on, it’s the story waiting to be told, it’s the door and the heart waiting to be opened, it’s the friend ready and waiting to share friendship, it’s the amateur astronomer waiting to show you the stars.
I’ll let Parker’s words from the end of her book sum this up for me. She wrote, “It’s an act of recognition, it’s a confession of surprise, it’s a grateful acknowledgment that in the midst of a broken world ... grace abides.” And I say to that, yes, and Amen.
Benediction (adapted from Rebecca Ann Parker)
May the embrace of kindness encompass your life,
and though there is injustice and evil,
there moves also a holy disturbance,
a benevolent rage,
a revolutionary love,
protesting, urging, insisting,
that what is sacred will not be defiled.
May the blessing and beauty, and power and grace,
and wisdom, and healing, and liberation be yours.
Amen. Go in peace.
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