Feb 27, 2011
Given at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver
Some of you may be familiar with the following quote from David Henry Thoreau, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” It’s from his book Walden.
Thoreau lived for a time in a tiny community along with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson had worked to create a community of thinkers and spiritual folk in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May Alcott grew up there and Margaret Fuller was an on and off resident there. Concord was quite a little hot bed of transformational thought then. Louisa, at the time, of course, was just a young girl, with a mad crush on Henry. Sad, sad Henry who was never the same after his brother drowned in Walden Pond. Theodore Parker, radical Unitarian Minister was a frequent guest. It was Louisa’s Dad that Emerson had recruited, Bronson Alcott, a radical reforming educator. Also Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a while as did the man who had a life-long, unrequited love for Nathaniel, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The names of the people he gathered there are legendary in Unitarian history.
Theirs was an intentional, vibrant, volatile community of people outside the norms of society. In her book, American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever chronicles the very soap opera story of this gang of friends. Love triangles, death, and the intense exchanges of ideas were very much at the heart of this movement that would later come to be known as transcendentalism. At the time they were living this life though, they were not so organized as to give it a name.
Throeau wrote his book, Walden, during these heady times at Concord, and I think this is a good way to frame our question this morning: Where is Your Wonder?
As you might be able to tell from what I’ve briefly told you this morning, the people gathered at Concord did not lead simple lives of scholarship. They didn’t live in a cloister there or a monastery. They lived real lives, full of tulmut and chaos. And they weren’t paragons of virtue, either. Not modern day saints.
They were just people, like us.
Emerson struggled with his ministry, and his relationship with the Unitarian church. Bronson Alcott was trying to reform public education. Fuller was a master mind trapped in a woman’s body. Thoreau was largely unemployable and lived in a simple structure he built himself, though Emerson’s wife did all his laundry. Melville was haunted by his love for Hawthorne, who in turn had his own demons.
And yet together they managed to articulate a new spiritual path. In part, they learned to experience the ordinary as extraordinary.
Earlier this year I quoted the Reverend Lilia Cuervo as she talked about the spiritual practice of cooking. She said “Each time I cut into a pepper, I remember that I am the first being ever to see inside that pepper. It is a whole new landscape to be observed.”
Lilia has taken the ordinary and recognized it’s value as a unique experience.
Louisa May Alcott, in her book Little Women, describes an apple, lovingly, as a miracle of nature. The ordinary apple, made holy.
We too can make the ordinary holy.
In fact, we should.
One of the things that Thoreau’s quote about desperate lives warns us against is apathy, the routinization of our lives.
Are you that person who gets up because your alarm is screaming at you, then you go make the coffee, hop in the shower, get dressed, put the coffee in a travel mug and hit the road onto work?
There you’ll spend hours trading your labour for money, and then head home, tired and exhausted?
Or you head to classes. And sit there, wishing to be almost anywhere else?
And then maybe you have family obligations.
You eat dinner.
You do your homework, check the internet to see what’s going on, maybe watch a little television.
And then before you know it, you’re brushing your teeth and going to bed.
How many wondrous things might you have missed on a day like that? Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into years. To quote Burt Bachrach’s Do You Know the Way to San Jose:
“In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star. Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.”
No one can make you a star but yourself. And by that I don’t mean a star of stage and screen. Even though this is Vancouver, and there’s a lot of movie-making going on around here.
You can be the star of your own life, I hope that doesn’t sound too cheesy, by paying attention to the ordinary in your life.
Transcendentalist scholar Meg North, explains that there are 7 things you can do, 7 practices of transcendentalism, you can do to help avoid living a life of quiet desperation.
The are:
1. Incorporate Nature
2. Incorporate Meditation
3. Incorporate Reading Sacred Texts
4. Incorporate Writing or journaling
5. Incorporate Conversation
6. Incorporate The sacred in both a time set aside and a place
7. Incorporate creative expression.
So easy, right? You’re probably half-way there already!
I’ll be honest with you, most of those sound pretty easy and fun, but that journaling business? I hate that. I had a teacher in Grade 9, Mr. Callahan, who tried to extol to us the wonderful daily practice of journaling. I didn’t do it then, which might explain my B+, and I don’t do it now.
But I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a failing of mine not to write in a journal daily. Or at least weekly!
I have spent years trying to train myself to keep awake to the beauty that surrounds me. And for all that work, and all the beauty I see each and every day because of that work, I can not tell what wonderful, amazing thing that I saw a week ago, Tuesday.
And that’s sort of a small tragedy.
I can’t go back in five years and remember the colour of shirt Denis wore when first told me he loved me. And that’s the sort of sweet memory one should be able to recall, don’t you think? Had I written it down in a journal, I could go back, re-read and re-live that moment.
I know this, and yet, I don’t journal.
But the other six? I do them, or try to do them daily.
I incorporate nature into my daily life. I have a house plant at home. I try to walk by and touch it every day. In some perhaps silly way, I’m letting my plant that it’s not alone, even though it’s not next to other plants. I also have a pair of fish that I feed and say hello to.
There’s also walking to the bus, or in the park, or, last weekend, walking on Bowen Island. Something spectacular happened to Steven and I on our way to the minister’s retreat on Bowen Island. Between Horseshoe Bay and the island, each of us saw our very first dolphin in the wild. He saw his first, and though he tried to help me see the same dolphin he’d seen, I ended up seeing another dolphin on the other side of the ferry.
I meditate, usually daily. I have a series of guided meditations on my iPhone and I sit in a quiet place for meditation. We do a short meditation here on Sundays.
Naturally, as a student minister I read a lot of sacred texts. But you know what, before I entered seminary, I read sacred texts often. I sought meaning in the writings of the women and men who lived before me. This is part of why when I discovered Unitarian Universalism, I stayed here. As a people of faith, we are seekers. The reading of texts, both generally accepted “sacred” texts and those reading that our own souls define as sacred, is something that we all seem to have in common.
I enjoy exchanging ideas with people. This, done with intention, can easily be seen as Meg North’s “incorporate conversation.” Talking with others about our faith, our confusions, our hopes….this is spiritual work.
Because you’re here right now, you’ve already begun to designate time in your life dedicated to a sacred space and a sacred time. By coming this morning, you’re already addressing the need to carve out a place that is separate, intentional, for your spirit. You don’t have to limit time to feed your spirit to just Sunday mornings. In fact, I encourage you not to!
Even in the tiniest of suites, one can set up a small altar. I know that word altar might make some people here jump a little inside, but stay with me for a moment. You can substitute “niche” or “corner” for the word altar, but I encourage you not to do so right now. If you have a strong reaction to that word, ask yourself why. And then ask yourself if you want to grow enough to reclaim that word.
On my altar at home, which truth be told is jus the top of my half-bookcase, on my altar at home I have a little statue of the Buddha. I bought it in a bookstore. It’s called “itty-bitty-buddha.” I have it there to remind myself that every being is a potential Buddha, and that my work in this life is treat my fellow beings with the respect that my own highest aspirations can muster.
I also have a prayer by St. Francis, given to me by a Franciscan Nun who works with the … She brought back this from her visit to Assisi.
A Simple Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow pardon.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.
Where there is despair, let me sow hope.
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
– St. Francis of Assisi
You may struggle as I do, with some of the language in this prayer. Theologically, I do not feel comfortable with asking God to grant me these things. I don’t like the idea of having to rely on God for anything really. I want to feel like the master of my own destiny, to be the force in the universe that is responsible for my own happinesses and successes.
But even so, to live this kind of life is I think a life well lived.
And Ms. North’s final recommendation to live the life of a transcendentalist is incorporate creative expression. This can take many forms, of course. Cooking, painting, photography, dancing, singing in the shower by yourself. The point, I think of this part of spiritual practice is to celebrate life. To let your soul speak though your right brain, and not just your left brain. To work both halves of your mind is one way, and perhaps a pretty great way, to fully embody your spirit’s experience.
To do these seven things, though, requires one to pay attention to your life. And this paying attention to your life is, I believe, the thing that will keep you from living a life of quiet desperation.
If you can train yourself to be mindful of the wonders around you, you can celebrate them. They will not whiz by you, in your life, moment by moment, leaving you at the end of the day asking “where did the day go?”
You will know how your day was spent. You will remember your first cup of coffee and it’s rich flavour. You’ll look back on those early spring flowers you saw pushing their way up from the ground, while you walked to the bus, train, car. You’ll smile at a joke you heard this afternoon. You will remember the robust flavours of the food you ate for dinner.
You’ll be able to see just how rich with experience your days are. And if you’re wiser than me, you’ll write them down.
I’ll make you a deal. I will begin the spiritual practice of daily writing, beginning this evening. If you join me in this discipline, starting sometime this week, I hereby grant you permission to ask me how my journaling is going. Who knows, at the end of the church year, maybe we can create a “journaler’s coffee shop” here, and some of us can read a few favourite parts of our journal to each other over tea and cookies.
The idea of spiritual practice might bring to mind arduous daily tasks and/or great personal sacrifice. Some of us may not even like to think about spiritual things on a daily basis, but I tell you that it is important work, and it doesn’t have to be painful! I hope that this list of 7 things, which I will put up on Ning, that this list of 7 can be recognized for what it is: a lot of things we’re already doing.
This is your life. Depending on who you talk with, we only get this one, and certainly this incarnation is unique. You, and you, and you deserve to drink deeply of it. To celebrate the days of your life! This is about you, your stumblings and your victories. You are the star of your own movie.
Even when, as will sometimes happens, the movie takes a turn for the sad. Love dissolves, there are financial struggles and health concerns. You worry about your supporting cast, your daughter, your friend.
When the music takes on a minor key, and your life is difficult it is especially important to seek out the small beauties that life can offer us.
Please, pay attention to your life. It is, on balance, filled with important events and amazing people. A life fully realized is a gift! Allow yourself to walk around, watching and be filled with wonder.
You are worth that gift.
