Rev. Jason Shelton
May 10, 2009

In our household, I am the one with flexible working hours, so it’s my responsibility to do the dropping off and picking up the kids from daycare. It always surprises me how easily some people, even liberal, feminist-minded UU folks, can sometimes remark on this situation with an interesting bit of well-meaning but nonetheless insensitive stereotyping. “Gotta go be Mr. Mom, huh?” Hmm. As I recall from that movie – with Michael Keaton as the completely inept at anything related to the household or child rearing stay-at-home Dad – “Mr. Mom” seems like a bit of an insult. I’m sure people don’t mean it that way, but there it is. I’m not Mr. Mom, and I’m not babysitting when I’m with my kids. I like to think that I’m parenting, plain and simple.

I can get indignant about it, and it gets worse when some stranger will make an outrageous offhand remark. Like the other day, when I was at the gym with the baby, Sam. I took her swimming for the first time, and she and I were having a ball together. It was mid-morning on a Monday, and other folks in the pool, mostly elders who were doing water aerobics, just lit up when they saw the baby. Lots of people said things – “she’s so cute,” and “oh, how precious,” and “do you not work?”

Excuse me?

I suppose, if I’m really being honest about it, I get my hackles up about things like this because my situation is not unlike that of my own mother’s when I was a boy. She was a nurse before I came into the world, but she was a stay-at-home mom for my earliest years. When I started school, she started working part-time in an office, but her hours were such that she left after I did and she was home when I got back. Just like me every day. Back then, of course, there weren’t very many dads in that role, but today it’s not uncommon. I see lots of other dads at the daycare, or playing at the park, or swimming at the pool with their kids in the middle of the day. We’re not Mr. Moms, OK? Besides, there are all of those qualities that we associate with motherhood – or, more accurately, that I associate with my mother – that don’t have anything to do with me. Not at all my style. Would never treat my kids that way. . .

So the other day, I picked up Amanda from preschool. And, being a good dad, wanting to show my interest in her, and knowing how she just loves to talk anyway, I ask her, “So, honey, what did you do at school today that was really fun?” I hear this loud sigh from the backseat. “I don’t like it when you ask that question every day! I just don’t want to talk about it!”

And it hits me: oh, dear God. I have become my mother.

After thinking about it for a while, it seems that I have been asking her that question just about every day for the past two years. Combine that with the fact that my wife, Mary, has packed the exact same lunch for her every day over the same period, and we have pretty much laid the groundwork for the epiphany Amanda will have about how we screwed her up right from the start when she’s 25 and in therapy.

She doesn’t like that I’m asking her the same questions every day because, in a way, I’m still treating her like she’s two. Now she’s four, and she has grown and changed in extraordinary ways over the past two years. Perhaps, in her mind, my inability to change the parameters of the daily questions is disrespectful to the person she has become.

OK, so that seems like a lot of insight for a four-year-old. But I know that when Marion Winik talks about the dread of your mother’s voice on the telephone (*), what I hear and resonate with is that nagging sense that my own mother sometimes treats me like I’m still twelve. But when I give her a little bit of credit, and show her a little compassion, I was probably around twelve when I stopped sharing the bulk of my life experiences with her. Since then, she gets nuggets of insight, recordings of concerts or the occasional text of a sermon, but nowhere near the depth of knowledge that you get from first-hand observation of and interaction in another person’s daily life.

What’s more, when I really feel like she’s treating me like I’m twelve, I also realize that I’m kinda-sorta responding to her like I’m twelve, too, which means treating her like she’s roughly the same age I am now. Whoa. See the trap?

How can my mother be in relationship with me, know me for the person I have grown and changed into over the years, if I don’t really let her in? What choice does she have but to default to relating to the person she knew best? And, perhaps even more importantly, if I insist on relating to her as though I were the adolescent she sometimes mistakes me for, have I not also missed the opportunity to see how she has, in fact, grown and changed over the years, too?

I have a sense that many of us carry some pretty deep wounds around our relationships with our mothers (and other family members, too – Mom is just the lucky one today!). I thought my experience was unique until I read the essay from which this morning’s reading came. How is it that some random essayist completely understands and articulates my relationship with my mother? Could there be something archetypal in that relationship, something that is more common that I ever dreamed?

In this community, we recognize and celebrate the fact that our spiritual lives are journeys through diverse paths. But each of those paths acknowledge the special challenge of family. Jesus, when told that his mother and brothers were looking for him while he was preaching, refused to see them, saying to the crowd, “These are my mother and brothers, those who do the will of God.” (Imagine that – you can almost hear him sigh when they said, “Your mother is looking for you…”). The Buddha, upon his return to his family after experiencing enlightenment, was completely rejected and ridiculed, and he had to float in the air while spouting both fire and water to prove that his transformation had been anything of substance. Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield retells the warning of Zen Master Basho: “You can’t teach the truth in your native town. They only know you by your childhood names” (which of course is a statement mirrored in the Gospels). Kornfield continues, “As it happens, this may be the best reason to go home. Where better to fulfill a genuine practice of the heart. . .than with one’s family and neighbors? Because they see us unclouded by spiritual ideals, by image or reputation, they become the true testing ground of our practice.”

More to today’s specific point, a woman whose husband is a well-known Hindu teacher wrote, “My husband came home from his last visit in India in an amazing state. He was enlightened for six months, until he spent time with his mother.” (All from Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, pp. 216-17)

If we are to be whole, we must learn forgiveness. And forgiveness must start with our families. When I hear the stories of abuse and neglect from some people’s family histories, I realize that I’ve had it pretty good all in all. Yes, she can be overbearing and annoying at times, but so can I. I suppose I come by it honestly, and having known my maternal grandparents, well, let’s just say I’m beginning to lose hope in the whole “free will” idea.

A mother’s hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit she longs to hand you,
Ripe on a plate. And while you live,
Relentlessly she understands you.

– Phyllis McGinley

My mother understands me relentlessly. That sounds about right. Raised in an Irish-Italian Catholic household, she once told me, “I don’t really understand your religion, but I’m glad I raised you in a way that let you choose to be happy.” That blew me away, and it led me to an insight that was both comforting and profoundly disturbing. My mother understands me because I am exactly the person she raised me to be.

Let me unpack that a bit. If our girls do what we say for the next, oh, twenty years or so, and in so doing they come to espouse our values, take on our worldview, etc., then they will become exactly the people Mary and I will have raised them to be. But, if they end up rejecting those things, and go in another direction so as not to be like us at all, then they will still be the people we raised them to be.

See what I’m saying? Our parenting style is either like our parents’ style or a conscious choice to be unlike our parents’ style. But doing the opposite of what they did is still a result of their actions in raising us they way they did, and even if we are so bold as to try to find a new way that was neither the same nor the opposite of how we were raised, the value that tells us we can venture forth on our own probably was instilled in us by our parents. Depressed yet?

And so, at some point, we come to see that our parents deserve our compassion, and compassion can lead us to forgiveness. That doesn’t mean that we accept abuse or dysfunction without comment or honest effort to introduce change into the system. But we do have to see the multigenerational forces at work in how the system has functioned all along. Sometimes we will have to see this and come to a place of compassion from a distance – where circumstances make it unsafe or simply impossible to engage personally. But for many of us, we have the opportunity to engage in our familial relationships as a form of spiritual practice.

Saint Francis once said, “Preach always. Use words only when necessary.” The contemporary spiritual writer Parker Palmer says we must “let our lives speak.” And again from Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield:

We cannot escape the fact of our family background and the wounds it inflicts. Nor can we impose our spiritual ideals on our family. One young woman who had become very involved in our Buddhist practice returned to her parent’s home. She struggled with their Christian Fundamentalism for a time, until she sorted things out. The she sent a letter back to the monastery stating, “My parents hate me when I’m a Buddhist, but they love me when I’m a Buddha.” This is our task: to awaken the Buddha in facing our family karma. (218-19)

Engaging our families as a spiritual practice requires a long view. It doesn’t happen quickly, and sometimes change occurs without our even knowing it. I could just as easily have inserted myself into the story I just read, changed “Buddhist” to “UU” and changed “parents” to “in-laws,” and the outcome would be the same. But, in that relationship, it has taken more than then years of practice, of living the values of our faith (while skillfully avoiding conversations about our faith) that has made change possible. And before I become too puffed up with pride at thinking perhaps the change in our relationship has something to do with me, I fully recognize that it’s the grandchildren that have really melted the ice. But those grandchildren are being raised with the very best of the values we inherited from our parents, coupled with the very best that you offer to them, and to us, as partners in this spiritual community. And that combination is what is transforming the system, little by little, every time we get together.

This community is a living spiritual practice, where we prepare ourselves to put our values to the test. We prepare here to live our practice in the world so that words become unnecessary. With our familial relationships, that’s probably the safest and wisest path we can take.

Still, some words would be nice once in a while. I think it would be helpful if, out of compassion both for our mothers and for ourselves on this Mother’s Day, we could find a way to combine “I forgive you” with “I’m sorry.” What I think works, and what I want to say to my mother today is, “I love you.”

So may it be, and amen.

* “Mrs. Portnoy’s Complaint,” in Above Us Only Sky by Marion Winik

Feb 1, 2009
Rev. Jason Shelton

Hafiz (14th C Sufi mystic/poet)

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and could give the Beloved His choice,
Some nights He would just drag you around the room by your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds all your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep on too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us up in a tiny room with Himself
And practice His drop-kick.
The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know quickly packs their bags
And hightails it out of town.

from The Gift
trans. Daniel Ladinsky

In the history of the world’s religious traditions there have always been mystics – those who emphasize the living realization of their spiritual practices over dogma and creed.  Some traditions tolerate their mystics, while others silence or shun theirs.  Some are even threatened with excommunication or bodily harm, and surely many have been killed for the ways they have threatened the power structures of the mainstream.

Mysticism poses an interesting problem for those of us who like to think of ourselves as “rational religionists.”  We claim as the first source of our living tradition “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”  But when we hear the stories of the mystics do we really take them seriously?

Saint Joseph of Cupertino is one of more than 20 catholic saints who are credited with levitating or flying while in prayer.  And let’s not forget that both Jesus and the Buddha walked on water.  A great many Hindu gurus and yoga practitioners could levitate.  Simon Magus, a first-century Gnostic who was regarded by many early Christian writers as the source of all heresies, was said to have the ability to fly at will.  The non-canonical text Acts of Peter gives a legendary tale of Simon Magus’ death. Simon is performing magic in the Forum, and in order to prove himself to be a god, he levitates up into the air above the Forum. The apostle Peter prays to God to stop his flying, and he stops mid-air and falls to the ground, breaking his legs “in three parts”. The previously non-hostile crowd then stones him.

It’s easy to laugh at the story and dismiss these claims as outside of the bounds of physics.  We know better, don’t we?  It’s easy to diagnose some of the most famous mystics with mental illnesses, to explain away their visions and patronize those who think them credible.  St. Francis spent a year in a Perugian prison, and when he got out, a crucifix came to life and told him to rebuild the church.  Can you imagine the effects a 12th century Italian prison might have on a person after a year’s confinement?  The visionary and composer Hildegard of Bingen suffered great physical pain, but in the midst of it saw a great light that told her to write down all that she saw and heard.  Modern doctors are quite certain that she had migraines, and the light is a common phenomenon for those with this condition.

But St. Francis has inspired countless generations in seeking a way of holiness and peace through simplicity and humility, and Hildegard’s visions and exquisite music have led people to a deeper understanding of what is ultimate and real for centuries.  Can we discount the effects of their experiences just because we can explain why they had them?

I’ll tell you a secret.  I flew once.  I think.  Well, sort of.  Actually, I’m not sure – it’s kind of a blur.  I was on a retreat being led by a nun who had served a Native American community for many years.  Over several decades of service she had gained the tribe’s trust and had been invited to participate in many of their sacred rituals.  When she was reassigned by her order after more than 20 years, the community gave her permission to build her own sweat lodge, and to adapt the ceremony so that it worked within her Christian understanding.

The way a sweat lodge works is you heat a pile of stones in a fire pit for several hours, then you take them into the center of a hut or a teepee, and the participants gather around the stones.  The door to the lodge is closed, and the leader pours cups of water on the glowing-hot stones.  Since the skin of the hut is made from hide or burlap, the steam stays trapped in the close-quarters of the enclosure.  The group then sings, chants and drums, and sometimes incense or sage is burned.
It doesn’t take long before the lodge becomes extremely hot, and the air, thick with moisture and smoke, gets difficult to breathe.  I saw things there that I can’t explain – the intensity of the experience is still palpable for me, even more than a decade removed from it.  And yes, I’m pretty sure that I flew – it surely felt like it.  And when the door was opened, and the cool, clean air rushed into the space and into my lungs, I felt alive and aware of the world in a way that I never had before.

It changed my life.  That’s what spiritual ecstasy does.  I couldn’t see the world in the same way after the sweat lodge experience.  It helped me grow into a sense of the universality of spiritual experience and need, and was a key to my finding a place in this community.

But it was just one of many keys.  I can name several profound, deeply moving spiritual experiences in my life that changed everything, and I’m sure many of you can as well.  And just because they can be explained doesn’t diminish their impact.  Combine heat, steam, smoke and intense drumming in a confined space, and most of us will start to see things that aren’t empirically observable to the outsider.  But does that mean those experiences weren’t real?

from Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy… p. 61

One famous study of American spiritual life found that the majority of those interviewed had had a mystical experience at some time in their life.  However, the researchers also discovered that most of those people would not want it to happen again.  Why is this?

What we have no words for, we cannot understand; it does not fit into our view of what is real.  And if we stumble upon it, as the study shows, we may be taken by surprise, and frightened.  On the unknown places on their maps, the ancient cartographers wrote, “Here there be dragons.”

Yet, as surely as we inhabit the mystery of birth and death, as surely as the night is full of stars, as surely as we know the necessity of love, we contain the possibility of awakening.  Even today, in many parts of the world, many people are recognized as enlightened or illuminated with holiness, and sages are widely revered.  The sage in us can be awakened as well; the One Who Knows can be found in our own lives.

When I speak of spiritual ecstasy, I’m talking about a brief moment of insight, a sudden awareness of a vast and beautiful truth about who I am, who we are, what life is all about.  For me, those moments have been brief and fleeting, and they almost always come in times of great pain and struggle.  But they have also happened in moments of beauty – overcome by the grandeur of nature, enraptured by a piece of music, knowing the utter dependence of a newborn child, or in a simple expression of love from my wife.  These are not permanent states – we can’t stay there long – but they can change us permanently.

Sometimes I wonder if knowing that enlightenment is possible doesn’t actually stop me from doing the spiritual work that it demands.  Is it really worth it?  Every time I have found myself in a moment of spiritual ecstasy, the experience has asked something of me that meant great change in my life.

If it weren’t for a moment in a youth retreat when God spoke to me and told me to be a priest, I’d probably be a high school band director right now.  That memory is as clear to me now as it was almost 20 years ago when it happened.  I have all kinds of insight into what was going on with me psychologically that weekend – my parents had officially divorced the day before the retreat started, and it took me years to sort that out – but knowing that, being able to explain away the experience doesn’t change the fact that the twisting and turning journey of my life that has brought me to this pulpit on this morning started in that moment of saying “yes.”  I began that weekend believing that the love that had brought me into being was no more, and when I was broken open in grief I discovered that the love that truly brought me into being was infinitely bigger than my parents or their relationship.  But it has taken me nearly 20 years of practice, of sitting with that experience, to see it in that way.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds all your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep on too many fine days.

So it makes sense that most people who have had a mystical experience don’t want to have it again.  It asks us to change, to be transformed into something yet to be.  We are changed when we are broken open by the pain and suffering of life.  But these moments generally come to us not by choice, but by accident.  Who would choose them?

Wendell Berry – The Broken Ground

The opening out and out,
body yielding body:
the breaking
through which the new
comes, perching
above its shadow
on the piling up
darkened broken old
husks of itself: bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—
taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.

What is left is what is.  In spiritual terms, this is called surrender: the release of ego and the deception of self-importance.  Surrender is unlike the flash of insight that comes from a moment of suffering.  It is rather the understanding that emerges from deep practice.  In a flash I can see the interrelatedness of all things, the interconnection and interdependence of everything.  But after that moment we still have periods of fear and confusion – we still have lives to live.  After the ecstasy, the laundry.

Jack Kornfield writes that a proud mother once approached the Sufi mystic Nasruddin and declared, “My son has finished his studies.”  Nasruddin replied, “No doubt God will send him more.”

When I first came to this church, I felt a profound sense of arrival, of having found “it.”  In this sanctuary I believed that I had found a confirmation of all the spiritual insights I had been struggling to piece together.  But I mistakenly understood the sanctuary as a place of rest, and, like the woman’s son, I fell into the trap of thinking that my studies were finished.

Last fall I began meeting with a spiritual director for the first time since becoming a UU.  Almost immediately, in our first session, I felt a stirring within me, and it frightened me.  I have known that stirring before.  It is a longing for a deeper connection, a call to open myself to relationship and understanding that I cannot yet fathom.  But with this stirring comes a fear of what that deepening might mean.  What might be asked of me this time?  Am I really prepared to be broken open again?  Am I willing to go where the path leads next?

These are the questions each of us must face time and again if we are to live spiritual lives of integrity.  We answer these questions with a commitment to our spiritual practices – whatever that may be for you personally, and the practice of our coming together for worship. Our faith tells us that we can choose to be broken open, that we can choose to engage in deep and meaningful spiritual practices that lead to transformation.  In fact, it’s a choice we make every time we come together on Sunday morning.  We come together in this spiritually diverse body to open ourselves to one another, and in so doing, we come to know that which is ultimately true.

bud opening to flower
opening to fruit opening
to the sweet marrow
of the seed—
taken
from what was, from
what could have been.
What is left
is what is.

May it be so, and amen.