Soul Force

Peace Like a River

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

November 9, 2008

Forrest Church, long the senior minister at All Souls Unitarian in New York, tells this story about illusions:

Avoiding judgment is not easy. I think of that young man who sat across from me in my office, fidgeting and avoiding my eyes. I sensed his anger yet couldn't place it. I knew him, but not well. He comes to church most Sundays but doesn't participate in our other activities. I waited for him to speak.

When he finally let his anger loose, he did so with a passion. It was my benediction. He simply couldn't stand my benediction.

I'm accustomed to offending people from the pulpit. Sometimes I even enjoy it. But this was a new one for me, my benediction, the "good words" with which I close every worship service:

And now, in our going, may God bless and keep us.

May the light of God shine upon us, and out from within us,

And be gracious unto us, and bring us peace.

For this is the day we are given.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

"You have no right to tell me to rejoice in the days I am given," he said. "No one does."

When this unhappy fellow wandered into my office, I happened to be having a particularly fine day. It's a good thing, too. Such encounters tend to make a bad day worse, and on bad days even I have trouble with my benediction. So I didn't argue, I just listened.

To hear him tell it, his life left almost everything to be desired. Disillusioned in his relationships, his work, and his causes, over the past few months he had built an airtight case against life. This was the day he was given, and he hated it.

He thought he'd found the right woman not so long ago. Their first dates were perfect. A delightful partner, everything she said and did amused, sometimes even inspired him. But lately they'd taken to arguing. Nothing important really, but it shattered his image of her. Their love had faded into an uncomfortable friendship.

At work, the job he'd always dreamed of having, nothing was going as he hoped it would or thought it should. Although he had been on the job only a short time, he found himself longingly casting about for a new position.

And the local peace group to which he gave so much of his time was thrown off balance also—ironically by the end of the cold war—divided down the middle between angry activists and passive pacifists, its energy siphoned off in internecine quarreling.

"I'm disillusioned with everything," he told me. "Even this church. It especially galls me when you tell me to rejoice and be glad, knowing as I do how grim things really are out there."

So I sat there, captive in my own office, smoking my pipe and listening quietly, watching him stare at the floor. Then I remembered something I heard at a peace rally in the late sixties.

"So you're disillusioned," the Reverend William Sloane Coffin had said. "Big deal. All that means is that you were illusioned in the first place."[1]

You may have been disillusioned or illusioned by the outcome of the election this past Tuesday. Some of you are probably exultant; others are probably worried and disappointed. We as a nation have undoubtedly achieved a milestone, and we have again experienced the blessing of being able to make this critical decision as a people, acting together, and then, whatever our feelings about the outcome, recognizing its continuity with our past and accepting its legitimacy. We have seen in other parts of the world the suffering which results when transitions between governments are not accepted as legitimate and civil wars break out. We are truly blessed as a nation to have been spared such agonies for well over a century; and the Civil War which we did suffer led us as a nation finally to the point where we can together put behind us yet more of the bitter legacy of slavery and the racism which supported it and continued in its wake.

Now the election is over, and now we return to ordinary time, the time in which our own lives become the center of our attention again. It’s a good time to consider what endures for us whether we are happy or sad, up or down, prosperous or poor, illusioned or disillusioned. It’s a good time to return to the cultivation of our souls.

I use the word “soul” advisedly. Like the word “God,” “soul” can become oddly concrete in our minds, and what I want to do is to point toward something about our nature which is more permanent than our bodies or our material being, something which is more lasting than particular moods or roles we play, our ego or our desires, something which we might call our “self.” Most religions of the world speak of our “spirit” and mean by it varying things. Most simply, “spirit” comes from breath or wind; the Hebrew word for spirit, “ruach,” is the word that is used in Genesis to describe how God imparted life to the dust from what Adam was made. The word inspiration literally means to breathe life into or to fill with spirit, and when we expire, our breath, our spirit, departs from us. Some religions hold that our spirits survive us, that there are ghosts of the departed which must be handled properly, and of course we remember that idea especially on All Hallows Eve – Halloween, just passed.

Some of our forebears like William Ellery Channing spoke of the cultivation of “character” as one of our key tasks in living, and he meant by character not just what we have been given at birth but what we have made of ourselves. The Baha’i religion – a modern reform movement within Islam – puts forth as one of its central tenants that we are put here on earth with one responsibility – the cultivation of our souls. Whatever word we wish to use – I’ll use soul, because it’s familiar – there is something in us which we are called upon to cultivate, to nourish, to make strong. Channing used the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount – [Matt 5:48] “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” – to argue that our goal in life is to strive for “Likeness to God.”

Such a task might seem to be an invitation to arrogance, to a kind of puffed-up egotism. In fact, I believe it is the opposite. I take one clue from Psalm 1, this in Stephen Mitchell’s modern rendering:

Blessed are the man and the woman
who have grown beyond their greed
and have put an end to their hatred
and no longer nourish illusions.

But they delight in the way things are
and keep their hearts open, day and night.

They are like trees planted near flowing rivers,
which bear fruit when they are ready.

Their leaves will not fall or wither.
Everything they do will succeed.[2]

After a time of outward stimulation and excitement, it is important to cultivate inwardness, to look to what is permanent, to the way things are, to this day that we have been given. How often we find that times of trouble, of loss, of pain and sorrow, times of great hardship force us to reconsider what is really of value in our lives, in our families, in our souls. Now is a good time to store up reserves of strength within to help weather storms which may be coming. A clear insight into the essentials of our living is truly a gift – as our opening hymn put it, “’Tis a Gift to be Simple.”

Consider the analogies of light suggested in our reading this morning from Forrest Church as ways to comprehend how God, the Spirit of Life, becomes available to us. One analogy is to a magnifying glass, the “hot” model, in which God’s nature is revealed only through the Gospel, or perhaps the person of Jesus, which then intensifies it into our souls. In this way we are made aware of God’s revelation to us and we can use it as a means of judging and perfecting our souls. One of the creeds used by our Universalist forebears asserts that the Holy Bible contains a revelation of the will of God; I like that use of “contains,” because it doesn’t assert that it is the sole source of revelation or that it is literally true or even easy to understand. We can search scripture, read from it, be illuminated by it – and that is my own practice – but it can’t answer all of our questions, and it is not the only source of revelation of the divine.

The prism, in turn, provides a “cool” revelation of the complexity of the transcendent, its myriad colors and relationships, but also the orderliness which underlies the invisible light which shines all around us. It speaks more to the mind than the heart and can lead to a distancing from the sacred, as though all we had to do was understand the divine and we would have all we needed. Unfortunately, the prism lacks that passion which arouses us, speaks to us personally, comforts us in sorrow and mends our hearts when they break. We are mind, but we are more than mind.

Finally, the holograph is both hot and cool. It offers a reflexive (both transcendent and immanent) image for God. Each part of the holograph includes the whole, just as each cell of our body contains the genetic code which defines our whole being, and which enables us to grow from the cells at the moment of conception to the beings which we become as adults. This analogy most completely captures the idea set forth in the first creation story in Genesis that human beings are made in God’s image, that we carry some divine spark within us which can glow dimly – as when one fragment of the holograph is separated from the others – or brightly, as when all of the pieces fit together and make a robust whole. Part of our task in nourishing our souls is to intensify the strength of our own sense of that image of God which is in us but also in others and among us. In that way we also bring into being the Kingdom of God of which Jesus spoke, when he said “The kingdom of God is among you.”

Like anything else we do, nourishing our souls takes practice. One part of the practice is to learn to rise above the chatter, the preoccupations, the worries and endless plans that go on in our heads every moment of the day and night. Sometimes we become so obsessed with problems which seem insurmountable that we can’t sleep at night, or perhaps we can’t think clearly about one thing of importance because another preoccupation takes all of our attention. At times like this, the practices of meditation and yoga developed by some of the sages of India can be very helpful. Practicing yoga as Kim Preveza described this morning, or developing a mediation practice in which we simply sit in silence, following our breath, in and out, bringing in new life, new breath, letting go of preoccupation and worry – these practices have been useful to many in finding focus and leaving behind the grip of everyday burdens. Sometimes, as Jesus put it, we have to lose our lives to keep them, give up trying to control everything and allow things to take shape on their own.

One of our tasks is to cease our preoccupations with things which are out of our control. As Jesus put it, [Matt 6:]³⁴ "[Do] not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today.” Forrest Church, in concluding his analogy about light as a metaphor of God, puts it this way,

God's light shines on the present alone. Only an ability to discern the light within each passing moment can redeem our days from the pain that abides within them.[3]

We must also nourish our souls once we have cleared away the brush which obscures them from us. A regular practice of reading scripture and prayer has been valuable to many, not to answer every question but to open our eyes to new possibilities, new vistas, new ways of understanding our lives and of offering them up for enrichment and for service. In uncertain economic times, lending a helping hand to those in greater need than we are can be an especially valuable way of expanding our own capacity, our own gratitude, our own souls.

Finally, we must become aware of the light which shines around us, and notice when it appears, as suggested in the poem “Exile” by Kathleen Raine:

Sometimes from far away

They sign to me;

A violet smiles from the dim verge of darkness,

A raindrop lands beckoning on the eaves,

And once, in long wet grass,

A young bird looked at me.

Their being is lovely, is love;

And if my love could cross the desert self

That lies between all that I am and all that is,

They would forgive and bless.[4]

Cultivate simplicity. Become calm, give yourself time each day to rise above the worries and preoccupations you carry like a heavy burden; let them go, give up worrying about outcomes. Cultivate your soul, care for it, nourish it, work on developing and nurturing your character with the same attention you give to your body. And then open your eyes for glimpses of a special light glowing around you, speaking from nature, reaching out from the eyes of the person you meet. In that way you can find peace like a river. In that way you can “delight in the way things are and keep your heart open, day and night.”

For this is the day we are given.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Amen.

And now, in our going, may God bless and keep us.

May the light of God shine upon us, and out from within us,

And be gracious unto us, and bring us peace.

For this is the day we are given.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it.