Sunday, September 28, 2008

Days of Shock and Awe

When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey, my parents and I attended Congregation Sons of Israel, an orthodox Jewish synagogue in Asbury Park, New Jersey. We would go most every Saturday. I never liked it much—all the good cartoons were on Saturday morning and I couldn't stand wearing a tie. Although we went to an orthodox, very traditional synagogue, my parents varied widely over the years as to how much we adhered to the rules at home. We didn't fulfill al 613 mitzvot or commandments, or pray all the complex daily prayers at home, my father never put on Tefillin, the little boxes that contained written prayers that are bound to the forehead and arm for particular prayers in accordance with an injunction in the Book of Exodus. At home, being Jewish mostly meant bagels and lox and laughing at Jackie Mason. But at Hebrew school I learned all the things we were supposed to do. Learned the blessings to say before eating or drinking anything, learned the rituals for the holidays, learned to read (but not understand) Hebrew. The rabbi who taught our classes was very, very orthodox—adhered to it all—and made it clear he didn't think much of my family for being, well, let's just say, less observant.

The result of these mixed messages was that I never really understood everything going on around me or what was actually expected of me during what the complex service. If you've never been to an orthodox Jewish temple, the morning service is mostly in Hebrew, with many songs and chants and very specific prayers—far closer to a Catholic or Muslim service that most Protestant ones. The service is highly ritualistic and fairly opaque to an outsider, or even someone like me who was, at least theoretically, an insider.
If the average Saturday was a strange combination of bewildering yet familiar, the high holidays were even more so. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year and, for me, mostly associated with the sound of the shofar, the horn made from a ram's actual horn. The blowing of the shofar is not just a interesting musical choice during the Rosh Hashanah service, it is a commandment from God that all Jews older than 13 hear the sound. It serves to remind us of many things—not the least of which is God's judgment. You see on Rosh Hashanah God opens the Sefer HaChaim, the Book of Life, and inscribes a fate for each of us for the coming year—most important is whether we are inscribed at all in the Book of Life or if our name will be blotted out because we are to die.

On Yom Kippur, ten days later, the Book is closed and our fates sealed for the year to come. The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the book is open and our fates might be revised are known as the Days of Awe. This period is when Jews consider the year that has just passed and the one to come. During this time, we ask forgiveness of each other and God. I remember going every year to temple and saying the prayers, part of which includes pounding one's heart as you list the sins for which you ask forgiveness. The prayer says:

We have transgressed, we have acted perfidiously, we have robbed, we have slandered. We have given evil counsel, we have lied, we have scoffed, we have rebelled, we have provoked, we have been disobedient, we have committed iniquity, we have wantonly transgressed, we have oppressed, we have been obstinate.

You get the picture and it goes on for while in this vein. This was a time of genuine fear for me as a child. I worried if my parents, my brother and I would all have met the bar—we weren't very good Jews, we ate pizza that had meat on it and, living on the Jersey coast, we even had lobster as a rare treat—both decidedly not kosher, as the Rabbi informed me with a scowl when once I asked what the proper blessing for pepperoni was. If I had really thought about or comprehended the full extent to which we failed to meet the exacting standards of orthodox Judaism, I would have been an absolute wreck. It's completely conceivable that the Pope was a better Jew than anyone in my family was. Still I felt deep inside a sense of what was right and wrong. I knew I was a Jew and that certain things were expected of me, even if neither I nor my family completely complied. I remember the deep sense of wrong I felt the first time I had a cheeseburger (mixing meat and milk is a kosher no-no). By the time I was 13 and done with my Bar Mitzvah, this was all starting to unravel as my somewhat high level of teenage rebelliousness took aim at any institution my parents valued. It would be many years before Judaism came to mean anything to me again.

I need to strike a balance here between the sadness I feel when looking back to that little boy who was so scared for his family's safety, so lost in a world that was both familiar and foreign, and the intensity of religious feeling that moved that little boy so. It is both deeply reassuring and yet sometimes concerning that the youth in our own church will likely never feel anything as intense here in this space. I imagine more than a few people might now be thinking, “Good, I would never want one of our kids to feel that kind of fear of God.” Of course, I agree, but there is something important about a sense of deep awe and even a little fear in religion. Those evenings at the temple as a child, with the light of the candles, the musty smell of the prayer books, the men somberly dressed with their white prayer shawls and yarmulkes, the chanting of Hebrew the meaning of which I only vaguely knew was nothing short of magical....and frightening.

But it got me, at the time, to take forgiveness seriously. To have a real sense of deep wrong. I'm not sure if we can muster that intensity for the errors in our own lives. I offer that question very honestly, not as a rhetorical device, do we have any way of connecting with a deep sense of wrong, one that moves us from the internalization of the cultural sense of right that is shame, to the deep grace of forgiving and most importantly to the saving power of profound change. I sometimes see it in the people I minister to. Mostly, a concern for forgiveness comes in the hours before death—but not too much before that, and I don't think I see it much at all in our public figures, in politicians, let alone celebrities who all too often are a substitute for heroes in our culture. When it is just human to human with no active divinity involved how do we find deep forgiveness for others and, just as importantly, how do we find absolution for ourselves? If there is no cosmic keeper of the score, no powerful agent who can really wipe the slate clean, how do we move past the hurts and harms that are done to our souls. How do we relinquish the easy apathy that comes from knowing that quick words and a band-aid is just as good, certainly easier, and more expedient than the painful work of deep reconciliation, forgiveness, and, most importantly, change.

I've been involved with Buddhism for the past eighteen years, and for many years I thought of Enlightenment as the process of getting rid of faults, of the perfection of the individual. Now I see it as the quest to accept and even embrace the faults and flaws—which, not surprisingly also reduces the influence they have. Not that we don't work on getting better and certainly reducing the damage those flaws can inflict, but the more I accept my inherent quirks and flaws, the easier it is to accept them in other people—to extend a bit more grace to my fellow keystone cops as we bumble along doing the best we can in a wacky world.

I've spent a lot of time in recent years wrestling with God, enough so that I think I should change my name to Jacob—and if that reference doesn't mean anything then we need a class on mythic themes in the Bible. Jacob's story is a bizarre one—as many of the Old Testament ones are, but I'm coming to a new appreciation for the old stories as I study and dig deeper into Jungian psychotherapy, theory, and perhaps one could even say Jungian theology.

Anyway, Jacob isn't a real upstanding guy in some ways—not what my parents would have called a “mensch.” And yet this fellow is a great patriarch of the Bible, the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Some, including myself not so long ago, would point to the immorality and inconsistency of Biblical figures as evidence of their poverty as worthy heroes—Jacob cheated his brother out of his inheritance, Noah was a drunk, even Jesus curses and kills a fig tree cause it didn't have any fruit. I read the stories and wonder why anyone would include them in a book that's supposed to guide and inspire.

The answer, of course, is that they are meant to be deeply flawed individuals because we are deeply flawed individuals. I am coming to prefer my heroes more broken and in need than perfect and powerful because they more closely echo my own struggles. We make mistakes that are profound. And for many of us, there is no absolution to be found out there. And so we must learn the painful imperfect path of forgiving ourselves and others without the benefit of divine justice or intervention. In a paradoxical way, the absence of a judgmental, punishing God makes the work even harder—there is no one else to turn to, to do this work. We have to do the heavy lifting. You've heard me preach enough by now to know that this theme that runs through most of my thought—regardless of what god or gods, forces or powers may or may not exist, we are the ones who need to act for good in this world. No one, no divine power will aid us more than we aid ourselves and this applies to forgiveness just as much as anything else.

I mentioned earlier the people I minister to. While that sometimes includes the members of this congregation, it is mostly with the patients in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital. Maybe three or four times a year, I meet with someone who expresses profound fear at dying because they don't believe God can forgive them for what they've done. I remember the first man who expressed this level of anxiety over his sins to me. He confessed to me a host of sins, some fairly grievous and even frightening, some so common as to be almost humerous if not for the intensity with which he spoke them. I remember being at a bit of loss as to how to console him and assure him that Love and Mercy are more powerful than Judgment and Punishment. As he talked and I listened, I started to have an intuition about his spiritual distress. When he paused in his litany of sins, I said to him, “I hear that you're worried if God can forgive you for all you've done, but I wonder if you've ever forgiven yourself.” He burst out crying uncontrollably. All the pent up pain and regret that was eating him up as surely as the cancer was came flowing out. We spoke several more times and while I don't want it to sound like a single sentence on my part “cured” him, it helped move him in a different and I hope more helpful direction.

I've spent a lot of time thinking and working on forgiveness in the past few years. My training as a chaplain consists largely of enough self-examination to allow me enough freedom from my own neuroses and anxieties to be reasonably present to people in crisis. I've also coupled that with a lot of work with Jungian psychotherapy. One thing I've learned, although it continues to be a challenge truly putting it into practice, is that forgiveness isn't something you give just to someone else, it is something you give to yourself as well. I don't mean just forgiving oneself for the errors we all make although that is essential to a healthy whole life. What I mean is that when we forgive someone else we drain poison from our own veins. Perhaps this is the deep wisdom of Judaism. Forgiveness can't be too simple. Forgiveness can't be too simple—and maybe that is more the sin of our culture, thinking it's just a matter of saying, “oops, sorry.” If the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur involved a ritual that consisted just of some simple gesture, it wouldn't be enough to shake our own thoughts and feelings loose. Chrisitianity believes that it is so difficult to be forgiven that God has to torture and kill his only son. Forgiveness is and may need to be hard. It is through pounding our hearts, going to a body of water and casting our sins into it, praying that we can be forgiven enough and forgive enough to be worthy of the gift of life—it is through these profound, dramatic gestures that we pause enough to consider the depth of what it takes to forgive and be forgiven. A simple sorry doesn't always do it any more than a walk to the mailbox counts as an aerobic workout. We need to get our emotional heart rate up if we're going to connect with inner peace.

We probably can't summon the intensity and sense of terror and awe that I felt as a child or that some of you may have felt in the church or temples or other places where you grew up. I am, overall, glad of it, but there's a bittersweetness to it as well—one that I think many of us feel at times as we've made the transition to being Unitarian Universalists. We make the choice, not always consciously at first, but almost always increasingly so, to trade certainty for freedom, religious clarity for spiritual integrity. And with any trade, we gain something and we give something up. If I am honest, I have to say that there are things I miss of those years being a religious Jew. I've heard other UU's express similar sentiments about what they've left behind to be a part of this free faith—they miss the beauty and mystery of mass, the power of communion, a sense of security that comes with dogmatic belief and I don't use the word negatively here. We are a congregation of what, 150 adults. There is much we agree on, but much that we differ on as well. Most churches don't have to have much discussion on whether there is even a God—let alone what he, she, or it wants us to do. So we take our license to believe as we will, to pursue our individual path, and we leave behind most of the structures that provided clear boundaries and foundational beliefs to our lives. I am not saying we believe nothing or that Unitarian Universalism is not a strong, beautiful tradition upon which to build a life. I am saying that, for the most part, we have dedicated ourselves to a complex journey, an adventure of spirit that comes with a price. Part of that price is having to find the strength within to acknowledge our weakness and to find it within ourselves to forgive and the sometimes far more difficult process of allowing ourselves to be forgiven.

I quoted one prayer of Judaism when I began this morning and I close with a different, very different voice of Judaism, song-writer Leonard Cohen. Cohen, who spent years at a Zen monastery, wrote the amazing lyrics that I should read aloud every morning and which I know were sung quite recently here, and bear repeating.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.