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Fear and Happiness: Our Voices Still and Small Heather Janules April 3, 2005 Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland Opening words by Mary Oliver (Abridged) Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? Reading from Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer (Abridged and Adapted) “Vocation [is sometimes understood as] an act of will, a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that whether it wants to or not … But if the self seeks … wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within... Vocation …comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about—or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions...
The social systems in which…people must survive often try to force [us] to live in a way untrue to who [we] are. If you are poor, you are supposed to accept, with gratitude, half a loaf or less. If you are black, you are supposed to suffer racism without protest; if you are gay, you are supposed to pretend that you are not…[H]ow tempting it would be to mask one’s truth in situations of this sort— because the system threatens punishment if one does not. But, in spite of that threat, or because of it, the people who plant the seeds of movements make a critical decision: they decide to live ‘divided no more.’…Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it?… These people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.” Sermon About a year ago, I experienced a rite-of-passage in ministry: putting my first sermon up for bid at a service auction. If you haven’t been to a service auction at a church before, I highly recommend it. Church members and friends put items and services up for consideration and the highest bidders walk away with the goods. All proceeds benefit the church. It’s an evening of face-to-face Ebay, plus good food and excellent friends, all in the name of an important cause—their religious community. It is common practice for ministers to invite bidders to “buy” a sermon. The biggest spender dictates the subject to the preacher. This just proves that our “free pulpit” is not always free. In this case, I yielded the free pulpit for a good chunk of change. To be honest, I was unsure about offering a sermon at the service auction. What if the highest bidder asked me to preach about something I didn’t believe in? What if the highest bidder asked me to preach on a subject that I knew little about—string theory, World War II, Shintoism, why bad things happen to good people? But, soon after the auction, I received an e-mail from Keith Wilson, the winner of my sermon. He asked me to preach about fear. “Oh good,” I thought, “no research necessary.” His e-mail was brief, and the subject of fear is substantial, so I invited Keith to lunch so I could learn more about my assignment. “I would like to hear about fear of rejection,” he said, “not romantic rejection—we hear about that all the time—but fear of rejection when we want to make a change, when we want to do something drastically different in our lives. Will I make the right decision? How will others respond to me when I make these changes? If I am rejected, how will we take the rejection?” As I learned more about the task before me, I began thinking about Parker Palmer, the author of this morning’s reading. I remembered Palmer’s autobiographical book about choosing vocation, Let Your Life Speak. I remembered Palmer’s journey through many professions he saw befitting an educated, white, middle-class man such as himself and arriving at the realization that he was called not to fly airplanes or sell advertisements but to teach—low-paying “women’s work.” And while choosing to teach meant choosing a diminished status and fewer financial rewards, it also meant, in his words, “wholeness”—an alignment of his inner calling with his outer life. I shared with Keith the example of Parker Palmer’s choice to become a teacher and he agreed that this process of listening to our “still, small voice” and responding to its call, despite the fear of change implicit with this decision, is what he wanted me to preach about. “For example,” he said, “in becoming a minister, you did a similar thing.” Oh, yea. Making changes and feeling fear—no research necessary. Throughout the process of becoming a minister, students are often asked about their “call” to the ministry. In sharing my story and hearing the stories of others, I have become envious of those who “saw the burning bush,” those who have a dramatic story of being called from above to join the clergy. I wanted the strike of lightening, the voices from on high, the visions, the drama. But that is not what it was like. My story is a story of the “still, small voice.” Each year, at the national convention of Unitarian Universalist congregations called General Assembly, there is a special worship service, the Service of the Living Tradition. This service honors ministers in various stages of their ministries. At my first General Assembly in Nashville, TN, as I watched the hundreds of clergy process in robes and stoles, I had a fleeting thought. The logical thought would have been “I want to do that.” But my thought was “What will it be like when I do that?” Before this moment, I, in no way, consciously considered entering the ministry. But then comes this unbidden question that suggested that ministry was to become part of my path in life. That ministry was my calling. But while we are reflecting on the importance of responding to our calling, we cannot forget about fear. Choosing to respond to my “still, small voice” also meant choosing a number of sacrifices and losses. My search for a seminary brought me to Chicago and away from Boston—a city I lived in for seven years, the place of countless relationships, the location of the congregation I knew as my spiritual home. Choosing ministry was choosing fear as I was afraid of letting go of what I cherished. I remember attending my last worship service at Arlington Street Church as a Boston resident. This was the first service in our newly-renovated sanctuary and the joy in the congregation was palpable and electric. When we rose to sing “Forward Through the Ages,” I began to cry as I knew this “unbroken line” was moving forward without me. I share this story not just because it is an example of heeding the call of the “still small voice,” but because in this story, there is also a more urgent message. The morning I sang this hymn with my congregation was September 9. I drove west all the following day and arrived in Chicago the day after—September 11, 2001. In short, September 11 was my first day at seminary, the day of my first tangible step towards becoming a minister. On September 11 I learned something about the importance of heeding the “still small voice.” That day taught all of us, in visceral and painful ways, three important things: Life is short. Life is ever-changing. We don’t always have control of these changes. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Reflecting on the brevity and fragility of life makes a good case for “getting on with it,” for responding to our secret longings before it is too late. Separate from vocational calling, when we do not live our lives in the way that we must, we are not fully alive. Parker Palmer affirms “I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about—or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.” Heeding the “still, small voice” amid fleeting lives lived in a cataclysmic world is critical. But while we are reflecting on the importance of responding to our calling, we cannot forget about fear. Parker Palmer asks “Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it?” It should be no surprise that while Palmer is the one to ask this question, I also find in his work the answer. When I met Parker Palmer a couple years ago as the lead presenter at Winter Institute, a Unitarian Universalist Religious Education retreat, he taught me two important things about human nature –our way of being simultaneously strong and fragile. Parker Palmer illustrates this understanding of the human soul through the image of a wild animal. In his words, “the soul is very tough, very resilient, very resourceful, very savvy. It knows how to survive in hard places where nothing else in us knows how to survive, just like a wild animal survives through the winter in the deep woods with hardly anything to eat…That’s one side of the soul. The other side of being a wild animal is that the soul is essentially shy…[I]f we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is run crashing into the woods, screaming for it to come out…And while that image is still with you, let me say that I’ve been in a lot of [support] groups where people ran crashing through the woods, screaming for the soul to come out. And those are the exactly the circumstances under which the soul flees further into the woods. What do you do if you want to see a wild animal? You walk in to the woods quietly, you sit at the base of a tree, you breathe with the earth for an hour or two. And maybe eventually that wild thing you seek is going to put in an appearance…You won’t ask it to move…to frame your photo better. You won’t try to put a harness on it to get a job done for you…Just being in the presence of that wild thing is reward in itself.” This recognition of our inner selves as both resilient and, in Palmer’s words, “shy,” calls us to trust the “still, small voice”—in ourselves and in others—and to treat it with tremendous care. We are therefore called to not only honor this voice but to create quiet spaces, safe spaces, where it feels free to speak. This means you are called to listen with calm, careful attention when a co-worker tells you she is thinking of leaving her high-paying position to write poetry full-time. No matter how impractical this may sound to you, you are called to keep your opinion to yourself and create more space for her small voice to speak. This means you are called to listen to a loved one tell you that they need to move to a place far away in order to do something or find something that brings them happiness and to say “I feel hurt and angry but if you must leave to be happy, you must go.” This means you are called to play both roles in conversations like these—the revealer of the “still, small voice” and the listener—for the more our communities allow space for us to live undivided, the more undivided we will be. Where there is greater gentleness, there is less fear. A final word on the overwhelming force that is human fear. I am reminded by John Lydon that “anger is an energy.” Similarly, fear is, in its most neutral terms, an energy. We have ultimate control over how we invest our energies. We can use them to move forward through crisis or we can use them to submerge our true selves. Moving forward or enacting spiritual violence on ourselves—what do you choose? “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We perpetually engage with a world that asks us to move “forward” in “unbroken lines.” As I learned from the moment of my unbidden question in the Service of the Living Tradition until now, sometimes, to live lives of authenticity, we must step out of the line that is before us to heed the call of the “still, small voice.” Sometimes we must remember “that no punishment anyone might inflict on [us] could possibly be worse than the punishment [we] inflict on [our]selves by conspiring in [our] own diminishment.” Sometimes we must choose fear in order to live. Fear is an energy. The soul is shy. Let us invest our energies in moving forward our inner truths, in living our “one wild and precious life” in close harmony with what is inside. For life is short, life is ever-changing and we don’t always have control of these changes. Let us welcome these moments of discernment, honesty and courage with bold passion and gentle acceptance— acceptance for ourselves and acceptance for one another. May it be so. Amen. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
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