Stop the Intensity

Well, you got trouble, my friend, right here in River City. Trouble—or at least a lot of people want you to think so.

I was miserably sick with Swine Flu last month, as I lay about feeling wretched, I experimented with watching “TV” on my computer. This was a big change for me. I usually get most of my news from rather sober sources—The New York Times, The BBC, NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. I watched Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh with a horror I normally associate with particularly gory traffic accidents, and I was struck over and over by the intensity of the media. The right, out of power for the moment, seem the loudest now, but the left has its share as well. Keith Olbermann didn't always strike me as “fair and balanced.” Regardless of which side you listen to, the tone is pretty shrill and, speaking frankly, kind of scary. It doesn't take long kneeling at feet of these impoverishing prophets to be pretty sure the world is going to end sometime soon. Fear and intensity seem to be such dominant forces in our public conversation. I started wondering about what this does to us: physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

I know this stuff isn't new, this seductive shouting of fear and doom. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president a lot of people were deeply alarmed and didn't hesitate to warn us of the consequences of his election. A Connecticut paper claimed that electing Jefferson assured us a future in which “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught and practiced; the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed; the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Humans have always used fear to define good and evil, insider from outsider, saved from damned. It seems to me though that the yellow journalism, mudslinging, and schadenfreude of yesteryear was maybe the equivalent of beer and whiskey, while the current crop is far closer to crack and crystal meth. I think instinct, added to the incredibly pervasive and calculated nature of modern media, has created a far more fraught environment.

What we're struggling with here is our own animal nature. Not some deep bestial aggressiveness and certainly not some sense of Original Sin calling us defiled for the mythical action of some long ago fig-leafed couple, but just simple, adaptive biology—in a word, evolution. Our species has grown and changed and adapted over a vast reach of time.

We evolved in a state of privation, never having enough. Our bodies, like those of other animals, often went through periods where food was scarce. When nourishment was available, you gorged yourself because it wasn't clear when the next opportunity would come. We may have culturally and materially developed to the point where that kind of deprivation is only the province of the truly poor, but our bodies don't know the difference. Our brains reward us for eating certain types of food because biologically speaking they ensure survival—primarily fat and sugar. And, have no doubt, the massive corporations who design our food know exactly the mix that is most likely to result in that nice flood of dopamine and endorphins. Actions that are conducive to survival produce this wash of chemicals that we perceive as pleasurable—and so we want to do it again and again. Food and sex are among the strongest of these reactions—both very pleasurable, both completely central to the survival of our DNA, and both exploited every single moment of every single day.
But those aren't the only two signals important for survival or easy to exploit—fear is profoundly important as well. Imagine a creature that paid little attention to the sensation of fear—they hear the growl of the predator, pause for a moment, but then go back to feeding peacefully. There is a scientific name for this kind of creature—lunch.

Our nervous systems naturally key in on unique or intense environmental cues—they might indicate a threat. So the media, food and advertising industries have to constantly look for what is new, startling, shocking if they are to capture our attention. There is a ratcheting-up process that leads us from horror movies starring Bela Lugosi to the the Friday the 13th movies to the latest crop of what are known as torture porn movies which push boundaries ever further. We go from a quarter pounder with cheese being indulgent to the latest Carl Jr's inventions with a pound of meat, bacon, cheese, and guacamole with enough calories to meet the needs of the average Ethiopian family for a week. Everything has to be bigger, louder, sharper.

High intensity stimulates our brains. When Glen Beck openly weeps on camera, when Keith Olberman raises his deep, resonant voice to sternly and aggressively correct the Republican leadership--we are stirred. Strong emotion elicits strong reactions in us. To our brains, we are still tribal creatures—dependent on social signals for our place in the group and for our survival. If someone in the tribe was deeply upset we needed to respond—they were likely upset by something that was a threat to us. We didn't have time to determine if the threat was real—we had to react. Doubt any of this, go to a horror movie, see if you get worked up even though you know that every moment of it is absolutely fake. Our primal brain doesn't take account of special effects—there are just effects.

There is an old adage about dysfunctional and addictive relationships—intensity is not intimacy. Many of us confuse the two. The internet and television with their 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet of noise, body parts, violence, hatred, and pain feeds us plenty of intensity. Remember the old news saying, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

And the screaming heads on radio and television invite us to the worst interpretation of those we disagree with—and I can think of few things more harmful to the long-term health of our democracy or our individual souls than the routine demonization of those who think differently. We wind up with an almost Newtonian response—the more fear I feel the more likely I am to move further away from the center. Moderates become un-electable and so we push our national discussion from conversation to chaos—locked in a perpetual war of polar opposites led by idealogues.
Numerous books and studies have pointed out the increasing isolation so many of us feel. Isolation and loneliness we live with despite being connected every hour of the day by satellite TV, cellphones, and wireless internet. I think we, as a culture, are living out this addictions theory axiom—we have plenty of intensity and increasingly little intimacy.

When we are encouraged to feel afraid—afraid of our government, afraid of other countries, afraid of those who look, love, believe, think differently then we push ourselves into a constant feeling of danger, a perpetual fight or flight state which leaves us compromised intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Instead of ready and engaged, informed and hopeful, we find ourselves panting on the floor, door barred, wide-eyed and ready to repel the next assault. This is no way to live.

Where do we go to find silence and solace, rationality and reprieve, perhaps even recovery from the crystal meth-level high of irresistible media and unstoppable corporations? Well, right here, of course. We are the antidote to fear, this is the place to recalibrate your senses and your soul.

I don't think UU congregations always get why we come together on Sundays. We don't as Unitarian Universalists take the concept of sabbath seriously enough. If you cannot find a couple of hours each week where you will not answer your phone, will not check the latest headlines or stock prices, will simply let a little time pass in worship than we, actually you, have a problem. Be here, breathe, settle into a quiet sense of worship.

Whenever I use the word worship I can feel a little shudder go through a number of congregants—worship, such a word to be afraid of. Worship—as if we came together to engage in anything like what most other churches do. When we speak of worship, when we worship together, we are tapping into the word's deepest roots. We bring together “worth”—that which we find valuable—with the suffix “-ship” meaning to shape or create. We all come together to engage in a profound act of creation—we, together, minister and layperson, women and men, rich and poor, republican and democrat, gay and straight, theist and atheist—we come together to shape, to create and share what is of worth to us. Nothing less brings us together every weekend—nothing less should. I want, today, for all of us to let go of our nervousness about calling what we do worship. And yes, I am certainly using the word differently than most Baptists, Methodists, or Evangelicals would—but we can take their sense of it back as well. We do worship—we worship what is Holy and Divine like they do, but we locate it differently. We find God in the free mind and soul, we find it in the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and the dreams of Dr. King. We find it in small acts of personal courage and grand gestures toward justice. We find it in our history of tolerance and rationality in the face of superstition and fossilized tradition. We find it in the open hand and the open heart. We find it in every spiritual path an honest, loving person ever walked. We find it in the words of Jesus and Buddha, the music of Bach and the Beatles.

We Unitarian Universalists are different from those faith traditions that lace their message of love with fear and offer salvation with one hand while holding a stick in the other. Brave men and women over centuries have purged our tradition of fear and superstition. And, to be frank, it is surely one of the main reasons our religion has such low growth and loses so many of our youth. You will never hear in a church like ours—believe as we do or you are damned for eternity. You will never hear, love who we say is acceptable or you will be punished with a horrible disease. You will never hear, everyone who is not Unitarian Universalist is wrong and influenced by the devil. Coming to our church is like going to a Nascar race and never, ever seeing a crash. In fact going to a race and not only not seeing a crash, but being asked genuinely to hope one never happens anywhere.

This is not just modern UU, this is us going back. Does anyone know who John Murray is? He preached his first Universalist sermon in the states in 1770. He famously said, “You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them not Hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”
A deep, pervasive, bitter fear is not part of our history and has no place in our future. We offer hope and community. And we steadfastly refuse any claims to truth that hold distrust, fear, prejudice, or discrimination at their core.

This afternoon you will ordain me. You should not do this just because I'm a good guy or because I can preach, but because you recognize in me a life's calling as a minister of the Unitarian Universalist tradition. And I am that, I stand here at this pulpit with 500 years of our history at my back, holding me up, informing and teaching me, leading and inspiring me. I am a Unitarian—I believe that this holy, sacred, intoxicating, frustrating, comedic divine reality is ultimately non-dualistic, One with a capital “O” and that is what, if anything, I call God. I am a Universalist, I believe that salvation—a profoundly deep health and healing is available to all who seek it, not just those who hold to one set of beliefs, but all those that seek the truth in love shall find it and that truth creates freedom. I've heard dozens of UU ministers preach—here and New Jersey and San Francisco and Boston and Maine and Seattle and other places—Buddhists and Pagans, Christians and agnostics, Humanists and Jews. We use different language, different images but we speak with a surprisingly steady unified voice. We call you to freedom, peace, justice, balance, self-awareness and love---in short we try to call you to what is best in the human spirit, what is truly sacred in religion. You call us and then we call you.

Fear is easy; our way is hard. Fear removes the ability to think and traps us in a state of raw instinct, closes our eyes and hearts, and seduces us with false promises of safety and crystal clear identity. Overcoming this addiction will be, as with most addictions, very hard—made even harder because there's a peddler of fear and intensity on every street corner and the seductive call echoes from every radio, television, rooftop and, unfortunately, too many pulpits.

But that is, I think, increasingly the purpose of this free religion of ours, to be a strong gentle counterpoint to the rest of it all. I challenge you, today and in the days to come, to practice rejecting fear. Hear excess in the media and laugh softly to yourself. Read alarm in the paper, smile, and put the paper down. Consciously remember this community when you need to be re-grounded in what is of value. This is your genuine heritage; Unitarian Universalists have been doing this for 500 years. If your spiritual identity is primarily that of what you left behind, what you don't want, you are cheating yourself and this tradition. Reject intensity, refute fear, welcome intimacy, and practice--as John Murray advised—uncovering your light, give yourself and those around you hope and courage, not hell. Live our values, speak our gospel of justice, love, and unity in diversity. It is the task of this generation of Unitarian Universalists to reclaim the spirituality of our faith—steadfastly holding to the motive force of humanism, the methodical fearlessness of science, while not being afraid of the profound mystery of life. We have chosen a path that allows us tremendous freedom but requires of us a deep, steady strength. Ours is a path that has for many generations rejected the seductions of fear, let us strive to be worthy.

Amen, blessed be, namaste.

Cake or Death: Laughter and Spirituality

Cake or Death.

How many people have heard of Eddie Izzard? I'm a pretty big fan of the British stand-up comic and actor. I want to play a brief bit of one of his skits. (click here for a youtube clip that isn't identical to the one in church, but has the main point.)

Cake or Death. It seems a pretty easy choice.

I must admit I've felt a bit daunted by my topic this morning. Y'know, it seemed like great idea at the time—offer a sermon for the auction. I like preaching, you all seem to like listening—a match made in heaven, a veritable piece of cake. Ahhh, sweet naiveté of youth—or at least middle age. The auction bit went well—folks bid on the sermon, and Sheila won. I felt good, I was able to contribute to the church by doing something I already enjoy.

But then, people started coming up to me. Not before, when I could have changed my mind or placed some limits, not before did they come to me, but after, then they started.

"Y'know, one year, someone handed Matthew an 873 page book, written in Swedish mind you, on the ontological implications of interfaith epistemology in instances of sacred sexuality in persons of Buddhist inclination—and it was the best sermon ever given in the state of Colorado. Seven people in the congregation actually reached Nirvana by the end, seven. Two more the next day once they really digested it all"

The full extent of my plight kept being expanded for me. I kept smiling as best I could, but I'm sure my eyes started getting wider. I didn't have time to being reading long books, let alone ones written in Northern European languages. I mean, Norwegian I could handle, maybe Finnish, but Swedish, never. I don't even like Ikea much.

Then Sheila sent me the email with her chosen topic—and I breathed deeply.
Sheila asked me to preach on light in the midst of the dark, to preach about the role of laughter and joy in religion and spirituality. What a wonderful topic Sheila, thank you for creating this opportunity and for your generous support of this community.

And what a perfect time for the topic. Am I the only one who feels a need to take another look at the Book of Revelation? The economy , health care, global warming—and now pandemic. Swine Flu, are you kidding me? Who the hell is kissing the pigs? Swine Flu...Yes, Rabbi, yes...I know, I know, I should have kept kosher.

Of course, all of these catastrophes are starting to take on a new meaning for me as I rapidly approach fatherhood. Most every day, some helpful person reminds me how overwhelming parenting can be. To which I want to say, thank you. Thank you very much. I had already been worried, now I can really settle into some prime, irrational anxiety. Thanks.

It is in these moments, that I need to do three things. First, remember to breathe—greatest advice I've ever received or given—just breathe. Second, remember that I am blessed with community—not just this one, but others as well. We are only truly human and grounded in community. As most of you know I am a hospital chaplain and the one thing I see over and over again---the grease that eases life's sticky passages is connection—the more you have consciously sought connection, the easier life will generally be even in the face of tragedy. Third, I need to remember the healing power, the profound sacredness, of laughter.

For this morning let us think together on three elements of holy laughter—choice, community, and consciousness. All three are profoundly spiritual and important in our identity as Unitarian Universalists. And I do feel a need to connect this with spirituality and Unitarian Universalism. Making folks laugh is a noble enough goal, but I'm not sure its enough for worship. These sacred hours we spend together, when we share together our wisdom, our faith, our fears and our love. For them to mean something we have to, more often than not, touch on that which is beyond the mundane, to make a conscious choice to aim toward the sacred.

But we can still, indeed must still, laugh as we do this. Losing our ability to laugh at ourselves, is the first step toward forgetting that all religions are merely windows through which the light of the Divine pours through. Too much seriousness is like an accumulating layer of dirt on these windows—before you know it, the light gets blocked and you spend your days trying to decipher mystic patterns and perceive apocalyptic visions in the patterns in the grime. Laughter cleanses our eyes, our souls, our faith---laughter, it turns out, does windows.

I didn't write all my own material this morning—I've tried to draw from several traditions. I'll share with you traditional wisdom stories from Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism---as well as a smattering of UU jokes that have been around the proverbial block a time or two. Regardless of the source, I've tried to tie everything together to offer some ideas about why a sense of humor is a critical part of spirituality.

Let's begin with a story from the Islamic tradition.
One day the news went out that Mullah Nasrudin, the great Islamic Sufi mystic, had suffered a significant loss. His one and only, much loved donkey had gone missing What a loss, how terrible everyone said. When his neighbours heard the news they felt so bad for him they decided to go to Nasrudin's house and help him to find his donkey. So they came to the wise man's home and found him smiling and praising God in gratitude They couldn't understand it and asked the Mullah: " Mullah aren't you sad about loss of your donkey?" The Mullah laughed and said, "I am happy because God has been so good to me.” His friends were still confused. Nasrudin shook his head and smiled, “Don’t you get it? If I had been riding that donkey, I'd be lost right now too!”

For me the first message of sacred laughter is that of choice. We don't have a choice about much that happens to us. Life unfolds as it will, but we always have a choice about how we respond. Within the Buddhist tradition they sum this idea up by saying that “pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” “Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.” I see this over and over again, in the midst of tragedy so intense it sometimes literally takes my breath away. With precious few exceptions, events come to us all that cause pain, events that shatter our hopes, events that we wouldn't wish on anyone. These things simply happen, indeed it is one of the great tasks of religion to answer the question---why do bad things happen to good people? For the most part, the Unitarian Universalist answer is—I don't know. We don't spend much time trying to tease out the cause, we mostly focus on response. God's plan, karma, fate, or simple random chance—we don't, as a community share a single answer, nor does our history offer a clear systematic theology of evil. What we have now, and what is completely consistent with centuries of Unitarian and Universalist faith is that regardless of why it happened, we can use our freedom, innate wisdom, and goodness, and our community to get through.

Choice is not just individual though, it belongs to us as a community and as part of our spiritual inheritance. Because our religious forebears lived and died for tolerance and the use of reason in religion and the right of the individual to follow their own innate wisdom—because of these precious beliefs we are for the most part freed from the idolatries of the mind and spirit that afflict so many other faiths. We don't suppress questions, indeed we encourage them.

Not long ago, Julia and I were at Betty Davis' home for a Stewardship dinner. Conversation eventually turned to a Academy Cadet who happened to visit on a morning I was preaching. After the service he was, apparently, rather upset with some of the heresies I proclaimed. I can easily imagine an exchange he might have had with one of our members, the young man sputtering “I couldn't believe the sermon this morning, I didn't agree with practically anything that was said.” To which any of our members might have happily replied, “Oh well then you'll fit right in.” We all know the joke about a busload of UU's who die in a crash. They find themselves at a fork in a road with a sign saying “Heaven to the left” “Discussion about heaven to the right” and the whole troupe, of course, heads right.

When you join this community, when you begin to identify yourselves as Unitarian Universalist, you affirm more than perhaps anything else the value of freedom. You leave behind what seems to be the increasingly narrow dogmatism of many faiths. There are tremendous rewards for this choice but also a cost. The cost, as many of us have found and occasionally lament is the sense of surety and security that comes from letting clerics and texts dictate your reality in this world and the one to come. The reward, the reward is a sense of humor. Laughter only comes out of freedom for to laugh is to see difference, to recognize contradictions and paradoxes, to be aware of irony. To see the profound gap between what we hope for and what is reality is to be aware of the tension inherent in existence—and in that space between what we dearly hoped for and what we feared might happen, in that space we have a choice of how we respond. I see this in my work as a chaplain and in my own life. Do we choose cake or do we choose “death”?

Now, obviously I’m not suggesting anyone should laugh when given a diagnosis of Leukemia or smile when someone you love dies. Nor should we laugh off every insult and injury. We have to cry sometimes, to struggle sometimes, to scream and rage against reality sometimes—else how do we know when life is sweet? I doubt there’s a person in this room who has not at some time enjoyed an unexpected reprieve—the truck just misses hitting you, the diagnosis is benign, the lost child found playing at a friend’s house, the slide on the ice that comes to a gentle stop. Sometimes the laughter bursts forth at these times in sheer giddiness as the tension leaves so suddenly it does feel like a weight lifted from our shoulders.

The fact is religion is often absurd. For a long time I expressed that sentiment out of a highly critical analysis of religion in general. Church father Tertulian famously once said, "I believe because it is absurd." That kind of attitude drove me nuts, still does a lot of the time, but more and more I feel that the absurdity of religion is only exceeded by the absurdity of real life. Cake or Death, laugh or die—the choice is ours.

Humor and laughter are not just individual responses, but are an integral part of what binds us together as humans—they are part of what creates community. To laugh together is to create bonds and community is the second aspect of laughter I want to talk about.

Laughter, scientists and sociologists tell us, predates speech by tens of thousands of years, maybe even millions of years. Infants laugh way before they talk. Those born blind and deaf laugh. The ability and instinct to laugh is not learned, it is part of what it means to be human at the deepest level. We are wired for laughter. Groups laugh far more than individuals. Laughter is profoundly social—and that perhaps is the key. Laughter reminds us that we are social beings, that we are connected. When we laugh together, I feel happy, I feel love. Nothing else feels that way. I think of some of the most exciting things I've ever done. Racing against a thunderstorm while climbing a mountain in the Cascades. Driving a motorcycle at 130 mph. That's all adrenaline. That all makes me aware that I am alive. But to be surrounded by my community sharing laughter tells me why it's good to be alive. For inspiration, Sheila sent me several quotations. One was G.K. Chesterton, the English journalist who said, “It is the test of a good religion if you can joke about it.” We are bound together as a community not because of shared dogma, but because of shared ideals. Of course, sometimes it's hard to know just what those ideals are—a trait we make fun of ourselves about:

“How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?” “We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that a light bulb works for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your personal relationship to your light bulb and present it next month at our annual light bulb Sunday service. We will explore a number of light bulb traditions including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted; all of which are equally valid paths to spiritual luminescence.”

The third aspect of laughter I want to speak about this morning is consciousness. Now the truth is that what I'm actually talking about here is awareness of ego as a component of spirituality, but I was trying to find something that worked with choice and community and consciousness has more alliterative value than ego. There are two modes of awareness or consciousness that are important here. First is how a sense of humor is a natural outgrowth of spiritual development. May I be saved from those who are excessively earnest—I don't trust people who are too sober. I like people who can laugh at themselves, their beliefs, and me for that matter. I'd rather hang out with Trickster Coyote from the Native American tradition than with Yahweh any day. Yahweh seems entirely too serious to me. There are some signs of he has a sense of humor—the giraffe, the platypus, my baldness--but overall a pretty sober fellow.

I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of people I'd consider holy or advanced souls or on their way to enlightenment. I've also met a number of people who thought they were in this category. Perhaps the most significant difference is how easily the truly wise laugh—at themselves, at their foibles and failings and even at their faith.

A story from the Jewish tradition: One day a rabbi is overwhelmed with the spiritual realization of how small he is in the grand scheme. He falls to his knees in the synagogue and shouts out over and over again, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The president of the congregation sees this act of piety and falls to his knees, beating his chest, also exclaiming, “I am nothing, I am nothing.” The janitor for the shul sees the two men and rushes to their side, “ I am nothing, I am nothing.” The second man nudges the first and says, “Heh, look who thinks he's nothing.”

The second aspect of consciousness is how it can be happily derailed by humor. Humor can often lance through the tangles of intellectualism to show us wisdom that isn't linear and remind us of truths that aren't logical.

Mara, sort of the Buddhist equivalent of Satan--though not as pervasively evil, more of a tempter figure, is walking the earth one day with one of his demons. The demon observes a man stopping suddenly to pick up a shining item. The demon looks to Mara and says, “Did you see that? That human just found a piece of the Truth.” Mara nods and walks on. The demon sputters and exclaims, “Aren't you worried that he discovered a Truth?” Mara smiles and says, “Don't worry, he'll just make a belief out of it.”

Cake or death. It seems like such an easy choice. What are you going to choose today, tomorrow, and the day after? And yet, how often do we choose “or death”? How often do we avoid the risks inherent in genuine community for the safety of solitude, the safety of the expected. Perhaps the most basic platitude about life is that each of us ends in death. We all go there eventually---but we don't have to go there in tiny increments every day. If we are wise enough to bring holy laughter instead of mundane practicality or fateful resignation, if we bring a sacred smile or subversive giggle to more of our situations, we can develop the skill of choosing “cake.” Laughter is often our response to the unexpected. It can be so hard to look for the “cake” choice in the midst of the difficulty, but there almost always is one—people with cancer can laugh, those locked in concentration camps found things to smile about, indeed I'm sure they have to---for the alternative to “cake” is “death.” We find ways to cope, adapt, and eventually laugh or we most assuredly perish. We can learn, as a spiritual practice, to be aware of the choices in front of us and to consciously reach out for the laughter, for the healing it brings, for the community it builds, and for the awareness we all come here to find.

I want to close with one more story from the Islamic tradition starring the wise fool Mullah Nasrudin who, in this final tableau, is sitting with some friends drinking coffee:

They are discussing death, "When you are in your casket and friends and family are mourning, what would you like to hear them say about you?"
The first man says, "I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man."
The second says, " I would like to hear that I was a wonderful school teacher who made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow."
Nasrudin says, " I would like to hear them say... LOOK!! HE'S MOVING!!!"

Cake or death. Blessed be, amen, and namaste.