Sermon Archives : 2005/2006

The Future Is In Your Hands

Rev. Gail Seavey  ·  April 2, 2006

A week ago — on the auspicious day of my installation, during which you and I made a covenant to a shared ministry — I sat in the middle of the social hall, which was crowded and chaotic as people caught up with one another, ate snacks, signed up for covenant groups, and debated points from the sermon. There I passed around my deck of Tarot cards to a round of church members who each gave them a shuffle, thinking of the year to come. I laid out the cards in a Celtic Cross. Those cards are laid out before you here today.

I do not believe that cards, or anything else, can tell the future. The future is always in the hands of broad forces, natural and cultural, interacting with one another. But I do believe the cards are one of many cultural technologies that help us have a relationship with our intuition – our deeper realms of consciousness, our inner wisdom or higher power. Some would even say that this inner Self– call it Atman or soul, connects to the universal Self or Over-soul. Those people would suggest the cards are a way to have a conversation with God.

This is an experiment. The Stewardship Committee asked me to do a reading on the church. I have done readings on many individuals and a few times on couples, but I have never done a reading on a whole community before. The reading here surprised me. It caused me to reflect upon the church community in some different ways than I had been thinking. Today I want to share my reflections with you. These cards have suggested that we think about good fortune and worry, and the things that make us both happy and wise.

The reading begins with now. We wonder what would bring us peace of mind. As we look out over the desert areas, we wonder what might feed this church to become more fruitful in its areas of health, finances, work, and relationships. What nurtures us and make us feel well-fed?

The next card suggests that the challenge for the year is how to move in a positive, fortunate and abundant direction. How do we stay clear and objective, flexible, open to new opportunity and creative as we move on the great wheel of time?

The next card names the reason we need to face this challenge. We need to face the issue of emotional fulfillment. We are no longer willing to support a split between our inner feelings and outer reality – such as feeling emotionally fulfilled but not fulfilled in the world. Or its opposite — feeling emotionally starved, yet overfed by outer circumstances. True emotional luxury is feeling satisfied inside and out.

This church brings powerful strengths to this challenge. We are great communicators. We sing, write music, tell stories, set up a great website, write newsletters, speak heart-to-heart one-on-one, and preach to heal and inspire. We know how to plan the best time to communicate so that it can be heard, when to be silent, and when to listen. We need to remember to call upon this strength when we are challenged. We also know how to achieve clarity of mind. This community easily moves through mental doubt and confusion with inspired, innovative ideas and creative thinking. Through our minds we have access to expanded awareness and consciousness. This church has a special aptitude for wisdom.

As we look forward to the year ahead, however, wisdom and good communication will not be enough. We still struggle with the changes that our wisdom and the changing world demand of us. We are not always aware of how worry motivates us. This worry can be a good thing - it can move us to learn from the past or plan for the future. But the “what-ifs” of tomorrow and the “if-onlys” of yesterday can jam the gears that keep the wheel of fortune turning. The best grease for those jammed gears is living in the present — “seizing on today,” as the choir sang [earlier in the service].

The cards suggest that our worry has taken a toil on our emotions. Our worries keep us from looking at the ways we over-give, emotionally burning out the spirit of the church. This is in stark contrast to our purpose — emotional fulfillment inside and out. The reading suggests that if we can really see the ways we drain ourselves emotionally, we can change in a more fortunate direction, a direction that allows us to become as wise in the ways of the heart as we are in the ways of the mind.

I have reflected upon this reading all week and the question that keeps coming to me is this: What is good fortune? What kind of life is more fulfilling that money in the bank, more luxurious than wealth, more nurturing than meals at the most expensive restaurant in town? What is a happy life?

We live in a culture where the constant message is: the more you have the better your life will be. Just look at the houses being built around us. Lovely houses from the 50s where families of six happily grew up are now considered too small for today’s families of four. We call them “tear-downs.” More of us work more hours and spend less time at home in these big houses. Many are feeling more fulfilled on the outside – more money, more success, more technology, more good work – while feeling less fulfilled on the inside.

Survey after survey shows that money brings happiness — up to a point. The point moves slightly around for different people – but it’s at the place where you feel like you will have enough food, shelter, medicine, rest, and work to keep you and your loved ones thriving. Any money beyond that actually becomes more of a job with added responsibilities than a bearer of happiness.

After that financial base, we look to personal fulfillment, with things such as time with loved ones, living our values, and involvement with communities that share our values. One survey I saw this week said that personal intimacy with a special other person was equal to $50,000 a year in “happiness” points.

People are happy when they are fulfilled from the outside – with sustainable resources, and fulfilled from the inside – with personal resources feeding them with love, creative expression, wisdom, beauty and integrity. These resources can touch off spiritual and emotional wellsprings that are ever-flowing, ever-renewing wellsprings that can be described as a passion for life. It is interesting to me that the cards call this fulfillment inside and out a luxury. I wonder if we think happiness is a luxury we can’t afford.

Our religious tradition teaches us – NOT SO. Happiness is a better motivator to live a good life than worry. The first great Universalist theologian, Hosea Ballou, taught that the God of love calls us to “Happify” our lives.

Man’s main object in all he does is happiness; and were it not for that, he never could have any other particular object. What would induce men to form societies, to be at the expense of supporting government, to acquire knowledge, to learn science, or till the earth, if they believed they could be as happy without as with?

Repeatedly people would ask Ballou why people wouldn’t all become awful criminals if the only sought their own happiness. But Ballou patiently pointed them to the great majority of people who were made happy by loving their families, living in harmony with their neighbors and celebrating all that is just and beautiful in life. Happifying our lives is not a luxury, but a call to marrying love with wisdom.

When we worry too much, we drain the wellsprings of the heart, emptying us of the true abundance of lives, our abilities to nurture ourselves and others from the emotional groundwaters - our passion for life. In this coming year, we need to ask, what is this church’s passion? We need to pay attention to what drains us and to what bubbles forth joyfully from our strengths – our inspirational music and stories, our clear and enlightened minds, and our responsible support of this beloved society. We need to watch ourselves as individuals and as a community. What gets us excited — what moves us to do because doing makes us happy.

I have been watching what gets my passions flowing and what doesn’t. The installation was happifying. I get excited when we make plans to work for civic marriage as a civil right and when I learn more with TNT folks about how to end poverty in Nashville. These are big passions – too big for any of us to do alone. Doing secretarial work dries up my emotional well, but I got really excited when some of you helped me find a volunteer who was excited about helping me, because her dream is to become a copyeditor. This church helps me be happy — indeed, my husband and I would not be anywhere as happy without it. That happiness induces us to give as generously as we can without setting off the worry alarm. This year we have raised our pledge from 3.5 to 4.5 % of our joint incomes.

I am excited at what an all-church discernment would call me to do. It would clarify my two top priorities for next year. First, to offer a four track in Adult RE on discovering individual gifts and passions, so that everyone here is clear what happyfies them. Second, to help us engage in a process in which we could all talk in depth with each other to discern this church’s collective passions till we have clarity on how we can happify each other and the wider world from our spiritual bedrock.

The cards suggest that, if we can face the ways we drain our emotions with worry and tap again into the passions that bring us emotional fulfillment, we can complete our year with The Empress. The Empress represents the queen who rules her own soul with love and wisdom. She can nurture others, and she can let others nurture her. She can give and she can receive. This is what we can become — a community that is wise and compassionate — but it is not our destiny. It is a distinct possibility: a clear potential. It is ours to choose. The future is in our hands.