All Different Yet the Same

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

October 6 & 7, 2007

“We all live with the objective of being happy.  Our lives are all different and yet the same.” —Anne Frank

Meditation

“Fault Line” by Robert T. Weston

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:

a place in which your life is lived in meeting

and in separating, wondering

and telling, unaware that just beneath

you is the unseen seam of great plates

that strain through time?  And that your life, already

spilling over the brim, could be invaded,

sent off in a new direction, turned

aside by forces you were warned about

but not prepared for?  Shelves could be spilled out,

the level floor set at an angle in

some seconds’ shaking.  You would have to take

your losses, do whatever must be done

next.

         When the great plates slip

and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen

to lie in what you trusted most, look not

to more solidity, to weighty slabs

of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered

beam to save the fractured order.  Trust

more the tensile strands of love that bend

and stretch to hold you in the web of life

that’s often torn but always healing.  There’s

your strength.  The shifting plates, the restive earth,

your room, your precious life, they all proceed

from love, the ground on which we walk together.[1]

 

Readings

Our first reading today is an excerpt from an interview with Scott Neeson, a once big-time Hollywood executive who quit his upper-level position at Sony Pictures to move to Cambodia and establish the Cambodian Children’s Fund, which is a school, and for many of the children, home.   In this passage he describes his experiences working with the people there, who materially have nothing.

 

The family values here are remarkable, even among the homeless families.  You see the children beg on the streets during the day, but when they go home at night, they get together.  I’ve been down there with the families, and they talk about what they’ve done during the day and how their day has been and, indirectly, about their feelings and what’s good and what’s bad and how the mothers and fathers are proud of their children.  They’re sleeping outside, but they’ve got such a sense of family values.

If these kids had TVs it would be difficult.  There would definitely be a breakdown in the closeness with the parents which without doubt to me is what gets them through the day.  When they’re working at the rubbish dump, when they’re begging on the streets, it’s knowing that when they come home they have loving parents who want to know how they’re doing, want to know how they are feeling, want to hear their problems.

The one thing it’s really taught me, even more than spirituality, is the resilience of the human spirit.  What these kids have been through is remarkable, and you come and they have a sense of real happiness.  They have some issues, but they’re happy and they’re appreciative.

Speaking of spirituality, the basis of Buddhism is that life is suffering, that things will go wrong.  When you understand that and let go trying to change things, let go feeling that you deserve better, that this is unfair, then I think it helps you get through.  It makes you more accepting of the circumstance.[2]

 

Our second reading is a poem by Mary Oliver entitled, “Sunrise”

 

You can
die for it—
an idea,
or the world.  People

have done so,

brilliantly,

letting

their small bodies be bound

 

to the stake,

creating

an unforgettable

fury of light.  But

 

this morning,

climbing the familiar hills

in the familiar

fabric of dawn, I thought

 

of China,

and India

and Europe, and I thought

how the sun

 

blazes

for everyone just

so joyfully

as it rises

 

under the lashes

of my own eyes, and I thought

I am so many!

What is my name?

 

What is the name

of the deep breath I would take

over and over

for all of us?  Call it

 

whatever you want, it is

happiness, it is another one

of the ways to enter

fire.[3]

 

Sermon

I was an awkward soon-to-be teenaged boy living through what felt like the most difficult time of my life.  My family had just moved to a new state and I had started attending a new school.  I moved through those first few autumn months in my new surroundings nagged by my loneliness and my uncertainty about the future.  Would I ever make friends like the ones I had left behind?  Would things ever feel normal to me again?  But more than just anxiety of a social nature troubled me then.  I also feared for my life.  That sentence sounds dramatic…maybe too dramatic.  But, we all know that “dramatic” is a good descriptor of what it means to be an adolescent, particularly an adolescent thrust into a new situation like the one in which I had found myself…a situation that included not only being uprooted from the narrative I thought I had been living, but being forced to ride a bus each morning and afternoon where Keith Kisner and his buddies had chosen me as a target for their expressions of youthful uncertainty and angst, usually administered through a verbal barrage of insults and punctuated with a forceful blow to my head via the age-old tool of adolescent assault—the noogie.

 

Now I realize that name-calling and noogies pale in comparison to the methods of bullying and abuse that others have endured.  But they were real to me.  Real in their pain.  Real in the anxiety they caused.   Real in the despair they left in their wake.

 

I spent a lot of time that fall mulling over the next bus ride to come, imagining what might happen and how I might deal with it.  When my thoughts weren’t dominated by anxiety and strategy, I remember spending a lot of time lying on the floor at my house, looking into the peaceful face of my almost-always-sleeping cat, wondering what it must be like to live an existence of such quiet solitude and present-moment delight.  My cat’s lifestyle sure seemed like an improvement over the way things were going for me at the time. 

 

Even as a 12-year-old, my yearning for a less-burdened life expressed in my envy for my cat, was about more than me wanting to avoid getting noogies on the bus.  It was about me yearning to be freed from the inevitability of having to imagine the future, the inevitability of projecting the pain of today into tomorrow.  The ache of the noogies I could endure.  The trauma of knowing they were coming was far worse.

 

I don’t think I was unusual in this.

 

Studies have shown that people, on average, devote 12 percent of their daily thoughts to considerations of the future.  This means that each of us generally spends a minimum of one hour of every eight imagining, thinking, maybe even obsessing about the future.[4]  Now we all know that thinking about the future can be fun, and in itself a source of pleasure. But I would venture to say that in times of stress, times when we are most fearful or under-pressure or generally challenged by life, most of us probably spend even more time than usual focused on the future and, if you are anything like me, your thoughts in those circumstances are anything but joyful.

 

Before we beat ourselves up too much, though, we would do well to acknowledge that our ability to think about the future is one of the defining characteristics that make us human. Cognitive scientists have observed that the way we consider the future is controlled, or at least enabled, by the functioning of our brains’ frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is, in the history of the human animal, a relatively recent development.  Over the hypothesized 500-million-year history of what would become the human brain, the most recent two-million-year span is the period in which our ancestors’ brains have had their most growth, nearly doubling in size and effectively transforming Homo habilis into Homo sapien.  It was this development of our unique frontal lobe that took humans away from the perpetual present experienced by the rest of the animal kingdom, and gave us the ability to imagine, plan for, and develop anxiety about the future.[5]   It is the ability to imagine the future that has, arguably, enabled our survival.  But it is the ability to imagine the future that also could be the source of our greatest tensions and challenges as a species.

 

How else do we explain the abundance of books, teachers, even religions out there to help us to focus on the now, to train us to embrace the present, to suggest to us the importance that we live in the moment?

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance (and challenge) of living in the moment lately, in part because of a book by Dan Millman called The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.  A friend of mine, surprised that I had not yet read it, bought me a copy a couple of months ago. Written in 1980 this book has offered my friend a great deal of meaning, and, at least according to the jacket “has become one of the most beloved spiritual sagas of our time.”   So, I quickly made my way through it, searching for the promised wisdom. Equal parts novel, memoir, extended allegory, and basic Buddhist primer, the book’s live-in-the-moment philosophy was familiar to me and I dog-eared pages with lines like “there are no ordinary moments,” “the time is now,” and “A fool is happy when his cravings are satisfied. …[while]  A warrior is happy without reason.”  The next time I saw my friend, he said, “I can’t wait to hear the sermon you’re going to write about this!”

 

So the challenge had been set.

 

I had a significant problem, though, a problem explained through an anecdote offered to the book’s young protagonist by his wise older teacher:

 

     A mother brought her young son to Mahatma Gandhi.  She begged, “Please, Mahatma.  Tell my son to stop eating sugar.”

     Gandhi paused, then said, “Bring your son back in two weeks.”  Puzzled, the woman thanked him and said that she would do as he had asked.

     Two weeks later, she returned with her son.  Gandhi looked the youngster in the eye and said, “Stop eating sugar.”

     Grateful but bewildered, the woman asked, “Why did you tell me to bring him back in two weeks?  You could have told him the same thing then.”

     Gandhi replied, “Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”[6]

 

According to this standard, the only sermon I could legitimately share with you on the general themes of this book would be a confession that I don’t live in the present moment enough…that I, too, can get inordinately caught up in worrying about the future.  In other words, the sermon could have been called, “Hey, don’t be like me.”  It wouldn’t be the first time I have preached that message.

 

But I do want to be able to approach life like a Buddhist.  I really do.  I certainly comprehend the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism:  Life means suffering.  I can understand the second truth, which says suffering is caused by craving. The third noble truth makes sense, too:  to eliminate suffering, eliminate craving.  I just have found that it’s hard to do that when our brains and their frontal lobes have evolved to think about the future, to plan, to attach ourselves to expectations, to, in a word, crave.

 

One example of this is that studies of patients who have experienced head injuries have shown that while frontal lobe trauma does not necessarily lead to loss of intelligence or memory, it does leave the patient unable to plan…to imagine the future and act accordingly.  Another interesting characteristic of these patients is that, after frontal lobe injuries, they experience a significantly increased feeling of calm.  So much so, that, in the not-so-distant past, doctors were recommending frontal lobotomies as a treatment for anxiety.  Eventually this technique was all but abandoned, as we recognized that the alteration of our brains to live in a world without a conceivable tomorrow, even it if could be stress-free, left the patients, well, less-than-human.[7]

 

For much of what humans have come to call happiness is often tied to a vision of or a quest for the future, the pursuit of happiness we might say…just as much of what we experience as stress manifests as a preoccupation with what will be…of getting we think we want or what we think we deserve. 

 

So even as I acknowledge that this is where the fourth noble truth comes in, as it suggests the discipline of an eightfold path of interrelated principles for the cessation of suffering, with the intention of freeing an individual from attachments and delusions, I also point out that this path that can actually take several lifetimes to complete. 

 

So what’s a poor sap like me (or perhaps you) to do?

 

Buddhism, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and our own experience as humans suggest that our best option is to simply do the best we can.  We can practice acknowledging the present moment and try to live there as much as possible, also knowing that our very biology suggests how difficult that truly is…for all of us…for the entire human family.

 

I think there is some comfort in this knowledge that we are all in the same boat, so to speak.  That we are all going to struggle…that we would all do well to be compassionate towards each other, and maybe more importantly, compassionate towards ourselves.

 

The quick conclusion to the story I shared at the beginning of this sermon, the story of my challenges with name-calling and noogies, is that I didn’t just breathe in the present moment and endure the abuse because, well, life means suffering.  But I did react out of the present moment, out of what my life needed at that time. I eventually fought back, and by fighting I don’t mean throwing punches.  Rather I fought back by making a stand for self, by saying “You can’t do that to me anymore,” reclaiming in the process my inherent worth and dignity that my peers had tried to snatch, and life went on…as, one way or another, it always does.  I could not fight back right away, as I was too focused on the future: I feared that my life would be worse for fighting back than it was for submitting to the abuse.  But eventually, I acknowledged that the pain of not acting today was greater than any pain that standing up for myself might bring tomorrow. And I was right.

 

In the end, of that drama anyway, my happiness depended on my action, my willingness to consider my choices and to proceed on behalf of my life.  My Life. My life of the future.  But equally, if not more importantly, my life of the present.  My life now.

 

For the peaceful warrior knows, there are no ordinary moments.

And the time is now.

The time is now.

For all of us.

 

 

Closing Words
[by Wayne Aranson, from our hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition)]

Take courage friends.

The way is often hard, the path is never clear,

and the stakes are very high.

Take courage.

For deep down, there is another truth:

you are not alone.