The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

A Sermon by Nathan Mesnikoff

I had neck surgery a couple of months ago—my second spine surgery in two years. Overall, my recovery is going remarkably well—not too much pain, sleeping OK. I couldn’t drive for a month and a half, which was a real annoyance. But most frustratingly, I am not allowed to ride my bicycle for three months, three whole months—a long time especially considering I had just saved up enough to buy a new bike a few weeks before the surgery. I bought it because I really enjoy riding and also in an effort to inspire myself to a moderate amount of exercise. Aside from the health benefits, exercising gives me a sense of control over and hopefulness about my physical state. I’m glad I’m so eager to get back to riding. I have, like many people, a love-hate relationship with exercise.

I know I need to move my body, and I know very well that I genuinely feel better when I do. When I was younger I practiced Japanese martial arts with an almost fanatic passion. For a long time, karate, judo, and aikido were my main form of exercise. I slowly stopped for a number of reasons during grad school. My back problems have put an end to any intentions of returning to judo or karate. But I can ride my bike and I really enjoy it. The feeling of cruising along, the speed, the wind in my hair, well at least on my face. I actually found myself in the garage a few days after surgery simply staring at my bike. Pathetic, but true.

Well, I didn’t come here today to talk about my workout schedule and how I keep this slender figure. You see, as I’ve been pondering about bicycles and exercise I read a book that shifted, so to speak, my thinking as to where strength comes from and pointed me toward an unlikely place.

Riding with the Blue Moth was written by Bill Hancock, director of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The first few pages of the book detail how wonderful his life was—a job he adored, a wife he loved even more, two sons with whom he had very close, loving relationships, a new grandchild, friends, money: the whole proverbial enchilada. But then his older child Will is killed in a plane accident and he and his wife, Nicki, are struck by a profound and understandable depression. Their lives have changed forever and they are lost. They have no idea how to move forward.

Now, I had just requested the book from the library along with a bunch of others on bicycling—some on repair and several stories about long journeys by bike. I was thinking this book was just about a guy who rode across the country. I hadn’t bargained for this much drama, but the writing was good and I was drawn through the book. The title, Riding with the Blue Moth, comes from the author’s metaphor for depression—it seemed like a large blue moth that came and went, at times disappearing only to reappear unexpectedly, smothering him with the pain, confusion, and guilt surrounding his son’s death.

Hancock, pedaling through the deep South, spends his hours in and out of the saddle carefully observing various cultural elements, a close study made possible by the slow speed and intimacy with which he is passing through the region.

He writes,

In Linden, population 2,400, I rode past the Marengo County Academy, a private high school. Laughing teenagers piloted flashy vehicles out of the parking lot. A couple of miles north was the Linden public high school. [Racial] Integration had caused private schools to spring from the ground like rain brings mushrooms. In the last six days, a dozen white people had told me to avoid blacks. No black person ever turned tables. As I struggled to find the meaning, I happened to look down at my bicycle wheel. The wheel is supported by flimsy spokes and gets its muscle from the spokes as they pull toward the center. That force, from pulling together, gives the bike’s wheel its strength. Somehow, many people had managed to overlook that simple technique in life: pulling together creates strength far greater than what each of us could muster individually.

A bicycle wheel is, indeed, a marvel of engineering and hidden strength. You take a rim made of thin aluminum, a circle that should crush instantly with any real weight on it, and you attach it to a small hub with very thin little metal spokes that would also bend and fold with any force applied. You put these elements together and all of a sudden you have an incredibly strong system—one that easily puts up with my 200 lbs going over curbs and potholes on the streets and even worse abuse off road. So how do we go from having simply a collection of individually fragile items to the strength of the spinning wheel? It comes from, in the first place, bringing the items together, and then binding them strongly with a fair degree of tension.

As I thought over the author’s words, and about the bicycle wheel, I continued to see how astute Hancock was in his observation. A wheel isn’t all that different than a community. You take a bunch of individuals who by themselves have real, but in many way quite limited strength, bind them together with bonds of love and necessity and then throw in a fair degree of tension and stress and, if it comes together properly, you have a system with tremendous strength and the ability to support great strain.

The bicycle wheel, and its unlikely strength, makes me think about UU faith communities. We are a curious bunch. We don’t have a unifying faith system anymore—unlike our Unitarian and Universalist forebears who had more specific beliefs that they shared. We hold very little in common in terms of specifics. We certainly have common threads—a concern for social justice, a belief that each individual must find their own path, etc, but we rarely agree on specific theological points. And yet we form communities, we come together to share in our individual journeys and have company along the way, sometimes have another path or perspective pointed out to us.

We exist in tension with each other and, right now, with what feels like the dominant culture. Within our congregations our lack of common faith means we have much more to negotiate between ourselves. This tension can pull us far apart from each other, leaving our congregations feeling disjointed. We see this disjointed-ness when we have trouble raising money. We see this separation when we have trouble finding enough people to serve on needed committees. We see the centrifugal force that threatens to whirl us away from each other when we allow the diversity of our opinions on politics, theology or ministers to lead to the division of our communities. Every congregation I have been a part of has these energies and arguments that move us further away from each other.

And yet, there are forces that can help us harness our tensions. Ideals and values that can take the tension and use it, like a bicycle wheel does, to create strength, to create communities that can support heavy weights and carry us great distances. Our principles and purposes can act as the rim and hub of our wheel—defining our general form, lending us shape, but the strength still has to come from the spokes, from the individuals as they contribute. But you can’t exclude any part. The strength doesn’t come without the stress. A wheel free from stress, with all the spokes loose, quickly falls apart. Indeed a wheel with loose spokes is, interestingly enough, said to be out of true. We are true when we all have a certain amount of tension, when we are all pulling toward the center.

Without our tensions we would not be who we are in this free religious tradition. I hope that increasingly we perceive that freedom as a “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” Freedom to, for me, implies positive choice. We are free to choose to associate, free to choose our own path, free to express our political views, free to love who we will. Freedom from, what political philosophers call negative freedom or liberty, implies more impositions from the outside. Freedom from prejudice, freedom from totalitarian governments—democratic or otherwise, freedom from the religious baggage of our birth that so often keeps up trapped. Freedom from is good too, but I would hope for us the autonomy and self-determination that the positive freedom to implies. I don’t see this as being in conflict with all I’ve said about being a spoke in the wheel; we make a choice to be part of this community, to be part of that strength, not be coerced by external or internal forces.

All faith communities have internal tensions—this is true of us as well as evangelical mega-churches like New Life church here in the Springs or the most conservative mosques or synagogues in the Middle East. To be in community is to have disagreements. It is sometimes easy to think that our more conservative cousins have it much easier than we, but that is an error in thinking. It leads us to think of other faith traditions and political views as monolithic structures when they are in fact not. My time as a chaplain here in Colorado Springs has been an eye-opener to me. Just as Bill Hancock had his own prejudices and expectations both about people and the Blue Moth of depression confounded, I too have had my assumptions and prejudices exposed. Even in as conservative a town as Colorado Springs, I have been welcomed and loved despite the fact that my own faith journey is quite different than many of my colleagues. I had too often equated certainty of belief for arrogance, when I was in fact the arrogant and overly certain one. I assumed the tension between us would be too great, but once again, properly used and understood the tension can lead to tremendous and unexpected strength.

Bicycles are not the only place we find circles of surprising strength. The martial arts I used to love so much are not without their own spinning wheels—several judo throws are known as “wheels” for the way the person gets spun around, and the martial art I practiced the most, Aikido, consists primarily of circular movements. Judo and Aikido are cousins, both deriving from older arts and both focus heavily on using your opponents weight and momentum against him or her. On many occasions, both here and in Japan, I saw elderly experts toss younger, bigger, stronger players as if they were rag dolls. In fact I was the younger, bigger, stronger rag doll on a number of occasions. I was always amazed at the incredible skill these little old men had and how little trouble they had throwing me around no matter how hard I resisted.

Aikido and Judo both ask practitioners to learn the difficult lesson of harmonizing with an attack rather than simply opposing. In Aikido one doesn’t block and strike, instead you learn to take the incoming energy and spin it off in a direction that is harmless to both you and the attacker. Here we are harnessing the energy of the wheel and its motion.

And again strength is found in an unexpected place. If the lessons from the bicycle wheel are about the role of the individual in community and the need to accept tension and the strength that comes with this, what do the wheels in Judo and Aikido offer? I believe here we learn about the strength in weakness or perhaps more accurately in softness, in flexibility, and acceptance.

The world’s spiritual paths are also, of course, filled with images of circles: from Dante’s vision that culminates in the heavens and the believer circling the divine in heaven, spinning round and round, driven by the motive force of love; to Buddhism’s wheel of existence; to the well-known Taoist Yin-Yang symbol. Circles are among the oldest symbols for life, love, and nature. The Sufi Poet Jalal’adin Rumi, who wrote our opening hymn, founded the Islamic order of mystics known for their spinning dance, the Whirling Dervishes. Rumi invited us to, “Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.”

Certainly the Wiccans and Pagans and other holistically and environmentally-minded here would remind us of the great circles in which we all participate—that of life and death, the seasons, and the almost infinite circular repeating cycles of nature. They would also remind us of the dangers, the loss of strength we suffer and havoc we create on our planet when we try to ignore or remove ourselves from these cycles. Here the strength comes from knowing and accepting our place in these macroscopic circles, allow the energy inherent in the wheel to carry us with it, rather than struggling against it or looking for ways to circumvent it. When in ritual we call the corners or draw a circle we are not, to my understanding, separating ourselves from the world around, we are not creating walls or boundaries that exclude, but rather we are embedding ourselves in the world more firmly, pointing out our connections to each other and the planet.

We are, of course, always spinning—on this planet, in this solar system, in the galaxy, in this body. Our blood circulates, the tides ebb and flow, the moon spins, our days and years pass. We are constantly immersed in circles within circles. I think the trick lies in finding ways of moving with those cycles, of hearing the hidden harmonies, of surrendering to the tides we so often struggle against. That is one reason we come to this place, to create a circle of care, to carve out a small niche in our busy lives so that we might have the chance to listen and observe the cycles of our souls.

And so I’ve counted down the months, weeks, and days until I can ride again, until I can connect with the spinning wheels of my bicycle. In the meantime I hope to pay close attention to some of the other cycles in my life, try to catch their rhythms and contribute what strength I can to these other wheels, other patterns and cycles. I’m going to try to listen to poet May Sarton when she advises that, “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.” I’m trying to find a bit of grace and maybe a little strength in this time off my preferred wheels. May we all lend our strength to whatever rapidly spinning circles we move in and are part of. And may we find the time to slow down enough to catch glimpses of the patterns so that we may appreciate all the more the inevitable turnings of the wheel.

As it says in the 2^nd chapter of Ecclesiastes:

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun:

Amen and Blessed be.

The Whale Upstairs

The Whale Upstairs:
Moby Dick, Woundedness, and Letting Go

a sermon by Nathan Mesnikoff

We mold clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes the vessel useful.

We fashion wood for a house,
but it is the emptiness inside
that makes it livable.

We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use.

---from the Tao The Ching

We bought a new house not long ago over on the west side, a beautiful place for us to call home. Built in 1899, the house wears its age well, but time has made its weight known here and there. The most obvious place is at the top of the stairs. On the second floor is a small area—not really a hallway, it doesn't go anywhere, but just an empty space into which the bedrooms, the bathroom and a closet open up.

Many homes have such spaces, but what makes this one special to me is that here, in this place that is in the physical center of the home, the floor is very, very bowed. The house must have settled over the main beam and just kind of slumps down to either side—our very own continental divide. Just to be clear, this is not just a little slope like the other rooms have; this is enough that you can feel yourself walk up one side and down the other.

Somehow I didn't notice this very noticeable defect when we bought the house. It wasn't until we had moved in that I noticed the hump. At first it bothered me a bit. All right, a lot. I like symmetry and I like houses that are regular and neat. This hump began to offend me, to itch at me, a reminder of all that wasn't perfect with the house. Okay, I can admit to being a bit obsessive—ideas and annoyances can get lodged in my head. I began to wonder how expensive it would be to tear up the floor, to somehow be rid of this reminder of the home's imperfection. And so this lump, this floor that I traversed every morning and night bugged me. Or at least it did until I thought about Moby Dick.

In that vast ocean of a novel, Herman Melville (a Unitarian I might add) places Captain Ahab, master of the sailing vessel the Pequod. The narrator of the story, Ishmael, tells his tale of going to sea on a whaling voyage. Soon enough the ill-fated ship sets sail and Ishmael meets Captain Ahab. Having lost a leg to the infamous white whale, Moby Dick, Ahab is determined to hunt down the great beast and kill him.

Melville describes Ahab's hatred of the whale and what it had come to represent:

“Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, [and] in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before [Ahab] as the …incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some feel eating in them... All that most maddens and torments;…all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it” Moby Dick, chapter 41 (adapted)

Ahab, crippled by the whale has invested all the frustration and anger he has ever felt on this animal—and spends the rest of his life looking for revenge. His quest ends not only with his death, but also the death of all but one of his crew. He seems to feel that could he exact some revenge, his life might be made right. He might, in some sense, be made whole again. He could return to his beloved wife and son; he could be satisfied if he could just find and kill the beast that randomly struck out and crippled him.

Poor Ahab never realizes his error, never sees that he is throwing his life away for an illusion. But Ahab's tragic flaw is ours, mine, too often. What do we look for in our lives thinking that, if we only had it, our problems would be solved—money, love, power, health, god? What is it that we are missing that we chase after, wounded deep inside for whatever reason? What is it that we feel at some deep level: if only this one thing were right my life would come together? What injuries do we hold close, forever picking at the scabs, never allowing them to heal, somehow psychically preferring to hold on to the pain that has become part of how we live our lives?

This sense is, of course, an illusion. There will always be more to want. Something else to hunt down. And wounds don't get healed by breaking the knife that cut us or bulldozing the scene of the injury. As the Tao Te Ching tells us, "We work with the substantial, but the emptiness is what we use." That is if we are wise. We focus on the substantial but ignore the emptiness that helps define us, that reminds us of our flawed nature. I'm not talking here about Original Sin or any such theological nonsense. I'm talking about acknowledging that we are all broken in some way: dysfunctional families, disease, spiritual assaults, physical and emotional violence. I once spent several hours with a Buddhist master talking about AIDS and the Buddhist response to the disease. While incredibly compassionate, he thought it strange to focus my research on a particular illness. He admitted how terrible it was, but went on to note that there is "an endless catalogue of human suffering." He was right; we all suffer in some way. We are limited beings. That is not the question. The question is, given our limitations, what are we going to do? Are we going to be Ahabs, chasing after that which offends us, or are we going to seek healing in love and spirituality and family, and yes, in our brokenness. (Oh, and if you happen to be one of the 16 people on the planet without any pain or problems, sit back, read the hymnal and wait for coffee hour.)

To me, Moby Dick carries a deeply spiritual message and I want to specifically talk about the injuries to our souls that we carry around. Most of us here grew up in other religious traditions, coming to UU later in life. Many of us bear scars on our spirit —some as deeply wounded as Ahab, a part of ourselves lost to an angry God or at least those claiming to do the bidding of such a deity. I grew up in an orthodox Jewish setting, and neither Judaism or classical theism ever really worked for me. I never felt comfortable in the synagogue.

I've listened to a number of you recount stories of rejection, confusion, even outright abuse in the religious settings in which you grew up. Many if not most of us bear these wounds. Just last week we listened to a member of our church family recount some of the horrible isolation and pain she felt because of her sexual orientation. I was inspired listening to Amanda speak of, not just the pain, but of the peace of coming through the injuries to a place of deeply spiritual calm. It reminded me of Ishmael when he says, "Even…amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of woe revolved round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

Ishmael, like Amanda and others like her, found a place of peace beyond the hate and the hurt. And, it is important to note, Ishmael with his sense of inner calm and acceptance of the mystery of life, is the only one to survive.

Many of us do not find our way out of this "dark night of the soul." The fact that these injuries exist is a tragedy, but what worries me is the way that we seem to hold onto them. If you want a sense of the spiritual state of the individuals in this church, teach classes in adult religious education and listen to the equal parts anger and anguish that so many have in their hearts. The spiritual diversity we enjoy here at All Souls not only speaks to our core values of tolerance and individualism but is also a testimony to the number of places our members didn’t find spiritual homes. UU congregations are always complaining about lack of space, but I’m no longer sure if that is for RE or for all the spiritual and emotional baggage.

I certainly include myself among the wounded. How long have I hunted the white whale of God? Having been offended and injured I sought to kill the beast with a steady onslaught made of equal parts rage and rationality. I am tired of the hunt.

I am not, please hear me carefully, I am not saying that healing is easy. I am saying that progress is difficult without it—both as individuals and as a spiritual community. I am not saying “get over it” I am saying look at it, embrace it, and continue on the path toward being whole even in your brokenness.

I think there are few better examples of this problem than the fact that I have repeatedly heard people say, in this and other congregations that they felt unwelcome and uncomfortable professing anything resembling a traditional theistic and especially Christian faith. Now, as many of you know, I am not much of a theist, and I am not arguing for a return to the much stronger Christian flavor of our forebears, but I am pointing out how deep our pain goes if it is fine to be Buddhist, Pagan, mystical humanist, or out and out atheist in this spiritual community, but not Christian. Yes, yes Christianity has been the primary force of patriarchal oppression for centuries, eradicated indigenous traditions, resisted all sorts of progressive thought, and been behind countless deaths. I take the history seriously. Still the Christian faith inspired and sustained our forbears admirably, focusing as they did on the religion of Jesus, rather than the religion about Jesus. The elements we so often despise—sexism, original sin, anti-intellectualism, damnation, rigid dogma were not really part of Unitarian or Universalist history. The cool reception Christians often receive in our congregations has less to do with Christian history than with the painful memories many of us still hold close. We’re tilting at windmills that appear to us as giants.

You know I often wonder if the way modern UU's approach religion effectively creates a space for spiritual growth or if in our focus on the individual we overlook a central element of religion. But that is a sermon for another day—August 14^th to be exact, mark it in your calendars.

So how do we emulate Ishmael who survives tragedy and not Ahab who turns it into a career. Being here is a start, I know many people who will never set foot in anything resembling a church again. As with so much, admitting the problem is often the hardest part, acknowledging how deeply the pain goes is a central to the healing process. We must also, of course, forgive ourselves. While serving as a chaplain I’ve met so many people who are worried if god can forgive them for all they’ve done. I always encourage them to forgive themselves first and then worry about the response of that which they hold holy. The intertwined practices of prayer and meditation have shown their worth through thousands of years. Both spiritual disciplines call me to remember that I have rarely had a problem that did not hold learning in its arms. As the philosopher Nietzsche once wrote “That which does not destroy us makes us stronger” and I reluctantly agree if not with the attitude than with the sentiment that challenge can often bring positive change. Certainly essential is the universal solvent, guaranteed to dissolve most problems—love: love of others, love of self, love of the holy. But most of all, what separates the healing from the hunter is choice. Our free will allows us to turn away from less healthy paths, to choose a different way, to ask for and accept help.

Moby Dick is often said to be about the quest for knowledge—a common theme in literature of the time. But while other authors of that era proclaimed humanity's ability to understand and decipher the mystery around us, Melville rejected the idea. Ahab insists on knowing, refuses to live with the mystery and the pain. But we can never fully unlock the mystery, know why our lives unfold as they do. What we do know is that we have a choice—do we turn and focus bitterly on the mystery and the apparently cruel turns life holds, or do we accept our limitations—physical, emotional, spiritual and sail on. I am not suggesting we do not try to learn or understand, Melville values the quest for understanding, our hero Ishmael is constantly relating all he has learned, but he also has a deep abiding appreciation for that which will remain unknowable and that ability to distinguish the subtle line between seeking understanding and obsessing over fate often makes the difference between a deeply spiritual life and an embittered one.

Finally, and being true to the theme of abundance I was asked to preach on, these white whales we continue to hunt sap us, not surprisingly our energy—spiritual, emotional, physical. They keep us on the high seas, sometimes for years, often preventing our coming fully to rest in the love of family, friends, and community. We chase our personal Moby Dick's, often forgetting those we leave on shore. Life is full of gifts, gifts of abundance and joy and yet the simpler more pedestrian moments are often overlooked as we rush by focused on the hunt. I know that I have been blessed with many gifts in this life, and yet it is too common for me to spend 80% of my time focused on the 20% that isn’t going as I want. I suspect many of us do the same. What forms of spiritual abundance do we turn away from because we continue to hold close the injuries of years past? What relationships, with people, with the divine, do let wither because of our fear of reopening those wounds?

And so, each day, week in, week out, I scale this massive hump in our upstairs floor. It still bugs me some, I hope someday I can learn to bless the pain and challenges in my life with more enthusiasm. For now, we've framed a quotation from Melville and hung it on the wall—a reminder to me of the glorious imperfections of life, the mysteries that will remain unsolvable, the itches unscratchable and calling me into a deeper relationship with the gaps in my life, the failures and regrets that can now be allowed to swim away, sounding depths I was never meant to know completely. May we all find ways of turning our ships around, letting go of the pain, and finding peace and healing for our wounds. Amen and Blessed be.