Reading: When In Rome, by Billy Joel (The words may be found at this link: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/billy-joel/when-in-rome.html)
Children’s Story: Dumbo and the Magic Feather
Homily: Bargains We Make With Life
Dumbo didn’t need his magic feather. Once he had the experience of flying, he could do it by himself, although he was scared stiff the first time he had to do it.
It doesn’t always work out that way. We all rely on magic feathers of one sort or another to get through life, and sometimes the feathers help us discover ourselves, like the kid who relies on a parent holding her bike upright while she gains speed and suddenly discovers that she can keep her balance without any help; and sometimes the feathers keep us fro doing so. In fact, we can become so dependent on our magic feathers that we shape ourselves to them. We end up serving the feather rather than making it serve us.
Let me tell you a story as an illustration. A friend of ours who works as a consultant had spent far too many weeks away from home, traveling in cramped airplanes, sleeping in strange beds, eating heavy food, and pushing herself to exhaustion. She loves her work and the people she works with, but her schedule was taking a toll on her health and well-being. “So I sat myself down,” she says, “and did what I have always done when I have felt overworked. I counted up all the money I had earned over the last quarter.” Then she caught the irony of what she had just done and laughed at herself. The money was nice, but the cost was exorbitant. Our friend had experienced a moment of awareness that enabled her to see what she was doing to herself – and more important, what sort of bargain she was making with herself. She had been using the thought of the money as a magic feather. It was supposed to help her fly and instead it was grinding her down.
It’s time to set the magic feather metaphor aside and let this sermon fly under its own power. My real interest this morning is the sort of bargains we make with life, the understanding that if we do a particular thing well, we will receive rewards that are commensurate with our efforts. Our friend the consultant is very good at what she does and receives good money for her work, but she hadn’t taken into account the complexity of the equation. She had put a dollar value on her time, but not on her health, nor on the amount of stress she experienced, nor on the time away from her family, nor on the time she would not be able to make available for self-care, nor on the muscles in her shoulder that had gone rigid trying to hold her up as she pushed herself through her schedule.
Let’s look at another example – marriage. I counsel couples who ask me to officiate at their weddings to set a couple of hours aside in which they write down what they think it means to be married and what they are promising to each other. In effect, I ask them to come up with the substance of their vows. And people make the most outlandish promises to each other at weddings – to stand by each other in sickness and in health, with little thought to how devastating some sicknesses can be, and how threatening they can be not just to the relationship but also to the mental health of the spouse – to take each other for better or worse, even though they have may been careful not to show each other their worse side throughout the time of their courtship – to take each other for richer or poorer, with little understanding of what either unaccustomed poverty or unaccustomed wealth can mean to a person’s sense of identity and values – and most couples enter into marriage with the thought that any differences they discover will be reconcilable, while in truth, the majority of significant differences are not amenable to easy fixes. Differences of religion, for instance, may always pull them in separate directions, never going away no matter how much the couple tries to talk them through. The same goes for the tensions between career and relationship, both of which are so important to our sense of who we are, and which pull us in different directions all the time. Or consider differences regarding children (how many to bring into the world, how to parent them). Even when the couple agrees about the basic questions regarding children, how many newlyweds are ready to consider how children alter one’s identity, or how our hopes for our children can become manacles for us or for them, or how tense the parent/child relationship can become and how long that tension can persist.
So, promises are made within the confines of the hoopah, then the couple goes forth into the real world to discover what the words really mean. What counts in the long run is less the shape of the vision or the shape of the promises, than it is the couple’s ability to accept and tolerate the changes and the differences that they will inevitably experience. None of us knew what we were bargaining for when we married. I think perhaps we should reframe our thought process when considering such a commitment. Instead of asking ourselves, is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, we should be asking, is this the person who will help me grow to meet the unseen challenges that life will bring us, and am I the person to help him or her grow? Those questions would bring us closer to the actual dimensions of the bargain we are making with each other and with life.
A third area I would like to consider this morning has to do with how we see our place in the world. I have recently started leading studies of both the Sufi poets, who were mystics trying to convey in poetry their experience of connection with the divine, and Thoreau’s Walden, which poses the question, what is life all about when you strip away the trappings of society and experience being without any kind of mediating preconception. Both are concerned to move beyond what we have learned to value and get in touch with a higher or deeper reality. Their ideas challenge us to see the world differently, to see ourselves differently, to renegotiate the bargain we have made with life.
I find myself feeling defensive, inadequate sometimes, or just plain puzzled. I want to explain the choices I have made and the values I hold. I want to say, but you guys never married, you never had children, you had opportunities open to you that were never presented to me. But I know in my heart that all these quibbles are self-serving. Rumi, the Sufi poet, answers that in marriage and parenting, I learn about love and responsibility, and that should teach me something about how God loves me, what God hopes for me, and I have to figure out what that means within my own sphere of discourse, where God has always been a puzzling idea rather than a guiding reality. What is the nature of this love that Rumi has experienced? Can I really get there by way of domestic affections?
Thoreau answers my complaints by posing, in essence, the question that Dr. Phil has made famous, so how is that working for you? Are you one of those living a life of quiet desperation? What is the condition of your soul? Do you even consider the condition of your soul? Have you sold it for a false sense of well-being and security? Faust got a better bargain.
Rumi tells us that every new experience prepares us for experiences that will follow, and that we should accept whatever comes to us as a guest and a guide. Don’t fight reality, learn from it who you really are, he says. Each new experience is both an opportunity and a test. Pay attention and learn who you really are and what really matters. This learning is never completed, but it grows deeper and more sustaining as we face more and more challenges. But the learning never happens if we think in terms of what might be fair, what we deserve, or how this may look to others. Saving face is far less important than saving soul. – And I want to say, yeah, but I have to live with my neighbors, God’s a long ways away.
Fortunately, Rumi is compassionate and he says in return, even this ill humored response helps bring you closer to that overwhelming love you so want and so fear. See the yearning that lies beneath the spitefulness. You are only looking at your life-bargain in terms of its cost. Look also at its benefits, learn to discern them and value them because of what they have cost you.
And Thoreau reminds us that the world offers us a kind of music. The wind in the trees, the conversation of people in a restaurant, the movement of clouds, the rumble of trucks on the Parkway, the laughter of children, the smell of bacon frying, the beeping of cell phones, the colors of azaleas in spring, the smoothness of icicles, humidity in July, the jumble of junk mail that arrives every day, the ticking of clocks, the calls of geese flying overhead, the overly loud commercials on TV, the rustle of silk, all contribute to the music, if we will just allow them to share their song with us. Ultimately our job is to learn how to hear music rather than distracting noises and let the music carry us. And I snort, by going into the woods for two years! I can’t do that, and he responds, by listening for the music. It doesn’t really matter where you are. You carry the distractions with you. Even into the woods. Find your music and let it carry you. Renegotiate your bargain with life. And Rumi adds, find the music and let it carry you back to its source, which is also your source, and your consolation and your consummation. It’s all in the fine print. It’s part of the bargain. You just have to know it’s there.
Stewardship Story (Parking Problems) and Offertory
A woman was driving down the street in a sweat because she had an important meeting and couldn't find a parking place. She had circled the block three times with no luck. Her frustration was palpable. Looking up toward heaven, she said "Lord, take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to Mass every Sunday for the rest of my life and quit drinking."
Miraculously, a parking place appeared. The woman looked up again and said, "Never mind. I found one."
Like that driver, we bounce back and forth between seeing ourselves as autonomous and seeing ourselves as dependent, between being aware of our needs and aware of our responsibilities. Sometimes it’s not possible to separate the two. Our participation in the church carries the same tension – we come here to be nourished, but we know that the institution can’t function unless we help with some of its tasks and expenses. And sometime we can move beyond seeing our presence here as part of a transaction, we get to the point where we understand that a habit of generosity is nourishing to our souls, we are able to give with gratitude. May that be the case this morning.
Benediction - The Peace of Wild Things — Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Let us learn to rest in the grace of the world, That we too may be free.