A sermon by Deacons Co-chair Bryan Wiggins, January 21, 2007
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
The old adage is; you are what you eat. That’s a fine proverb to describe our physical selves, but a better aphorism for spiritual beings might be; you are what you think. I believe the reality we create for ourselves is dependent on the manner in which we interpret our experience of the world, and that interpretation not only shapes our choices of how to live in it, but who we are as well. One of the most powerful ways we can grow as human beings is to seek to discover the limits of our perception, and with that knowledge to move beyond them to a fuller knowledge of ourselves, of each other and the God who unites us all.
So what are the limits of my perceptions and how have those limits confined my relationship with an infinite diety? I’m sure I’ll never discover most of them. But I’d like to share a few small revelations and how they’ve expanded my connection to a truly universal God.
Like many of you here today, I was weaned on television. Mixed among the fuzzy scenes of birthday parties, school plays and family vacations that make up the mental scrapbook I refer to as my childhood, are screen shots from TV: Wile E Coyote hovering over a cliff, Dick Van Dyke tripping over his hassock, Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. Later, when I entered college, the personal computer was born, yielding another monitor to catch the worlds’ wide open eyes. And these days, it seems as if every new tool or toy sprouts yet another seductive screen. Camera phones, Palm Pilots, Tom-toms, Ipods, I love them all and continue to watch, watch, watch.
My favorite thing to watch is movies, and my obsession with them is a family joke. There are friends with whom I can have an entire conversation scripted solely with lines from our favorite films. But as enjoyable as it is to lose ourselves in the sea of entertainment options that are available to us today, it is for the most part a passive experience that presents a separate version of life that is as impervious to our input as the shiny glass screens we watch it through. Growing up in this world shaped my consciousness so that it was founded in a belief in duality, a conviction that not only prime time, but the rest of my day as well occurred entirely outside of the sealed, tiny cosmos I thought of as myself. It took a long time with the TV off for me to learn the truth about duality; duality is a lie.
The notion that we are separate, discrete beings set apart from the physical world, from one another and from the God many of us are trying to know no longer works for me. Now don’t get me wrong, the idea of separateness does present a sometimes useful model for operating within a physical world; meditating about my morning coffee won’t jump start my day nearly as effectively as downing that first mug will. To do that I, the subject, must take my coffee, the object. and grind it, brew it and drink it. But this model doesn’t serve us quite so well when we’re interacting with things more animated than coffee, like each other.
Any of you who has thought of someone before they called you on the phone, experienced a synchronistic event where a seeming coincidence has joined a need with an opportunity, or even felt a depth of love for someone that exceeds the sum total of your conversations and experiences has realized a sense of the union that joins us all. And for me, the God I am trying to reconcile with is not some separate father in heaven, but that common spirit that lies at the very heart of who we are.
The religion of my childhood certainly didn’t teach me this. My family were committed Christians, and the Presbyterian church we attended was not only a building we entered on Sunday, but a community of people we
shared our lives with all week long. My parents were involved in a local ecumenical movement, a fact that spoke of their genuine search for spiritual meaning in their lives. Still, religion for me as a child was more a show to be watched than an interactive experience. Part of this was because I was a child, and simply had not matured to the point where I could offer my own insights and experiences, but I think a larger part had to do with the time and place I was born into. Mid-twentieth century America was a place that paid homage to its religious roots, but had its heart in a world defined by science and empirical experience. We were asked to account for incongruities between these two worlds by relying on faith, and as a child growing up in a secure, ordered world, led by my parents example, it was an easy thing to do, But then everything changed.
When I was 12, my younger sister Pam, who was 8, was diagnosed with cancer. She died a year later and my parents divorced shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until 6 or 7 years ago that I really started to investigate my feelings about this watershed event in my life. A poem I wrote at that time expresses these emotions much better than prose can. It’s entitled Past Tense:
Faith and prayer
were not enough.
Years of constant care and plans
meant to insulate small children
from the fears of their parents
were crushed under the weight
of mutant biology.
Childhood cancer.
Is there a crueler oxymoron?
How were we to accept
this bolt thrown from
the heavens of a god we’d worshiped
and expected loyalty from?
A midnight call
took her away.
Delivered second-hand to me
to where I lay in another home
tearless and guilty.
Through children of my own
I understand the insanity
that must have stood for reason
within the maelstrom of my parents’ minds,
but better to have witnessed and been seared
by the hot flame of her death
than to have the wound forever burned
into what should have been her memory.
Life’s line reveals itself
as unbroken stream
where edges of events
are lost between future and past.
But not that pale tragedy.
It parched the flow
with one great scalding blast
that left ground as barren as salted earth
and white as my sister’s dying hand.
Forever severed,
what I thought had been
the omnipotent bonds
of common hearts and blood.
And consequence?
Siblings escaped
to cobble what family they could
from friends, from lovers, from memory.
My mother vanished into sleep
and I became a visitor
to my father’s house.
And silence took her place.
Abandoned, I abandoned them
and burrowed into Maine’s cold snow bank.
And still I dream
of running farther still
always colder, always farther north
to embrace a land where nothing grows
and within that pure white winter
to feel only the pulse of my own heart
and to let that be enough.
Suddenly, my model for how heaven and earth worked didn’t work so well. I left for college with tenuous connections to my family and no connection to the Father in Heaven I had been raised to rely on. But I was to learn later that my Christian roots were not dead, but the spirituality that would sprout from them would yield a far different form of growth than I had ever imagined.
Though I was taking the first few shaky steps on this path immediately after Pammy’s death, the initial glimpse I had of what it might look like came several years ago when I read an excellent primer on Buddhism called “Awakening the Buddha Within” by Lama Surya Das. Surya Das started life as Jeffery Miller, a Jewish boy from Long Island whose own spiritual journey led him to Nepal where he studied and eventually became a Buddhist teacher or Lama. Written from a western perspective, the book was easily accessible to me and introduced me to a God that was not an external deity, but an intrinsic part of each person’s spiritual identity. (Any of you that were lucky enough to be here for last year’s Laity Sunday heard our own Tex Hauser deliver a compelling talk on his own deeper spiritual journey through Buddhism.) The unified, interconnected God or Dharma that Buddhism described resonated with me and amplified other secular ideas about an underlying unity that were starting to excite me as well.
I have definitely been more of a right brain thinker most of my life, but though I’ve never possessed the mathematical or analytic skills necessary to make it as a scientist, I’ve always loved reading authors who could sketch out the world of physics and cosmology in big strokes. Awhile ago I made it halfway through Stephen Hawkins “A Brief History of Time” an in-depth survey of the history of scientific thought, but he lost me when he got deep into Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Luckily, Tess returned from a trip to New York with Dana a few years later with a later edition of the book called “A Briefer History of Time” that finally simplified some of Einsten’s theories to a level I could comprehend. The beginning of the book takes us through Newtonian physics which describes how things work in the visible world, from the proverbial apple falling from the tree to the motion of the planets and beyond. Einstein went further with his special theory of relativity, which grew out of his attempt to reconcile Newton’s laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetism. But after that he struggled with Quantum Physics as he searched for the holy grail of science: a unified field theory that would encompass all of the laws in the universe. Quantum physics is the study of the atomic and sub-atomic world. Here the laws of Newtonian mechanics break down completely and some very weird stuff happens.
To talk about this stuff, I’d like to paraphrase Barbara Brown Taylor. I became aware of this former Episcopalian priest when another member of our congregation, Ruth Taylor, came to one of our confirmation classes and spoke about a beautiful book Brown Taylor wrote called The Luminous Web. (It’s available in our church library and I highly recommend it). Here’s Barbara Brown Tayor:
According to quantum theory, a subatomic particle that decays into two particles becomes a set of “twins” — a single system with two parts, spinning in opposite directions. No one knows which one is spinning up and which one is spinning down until a measurement is made, but according to the laws of physics they must always balance each other. Now imagine those two particles flying apart — one of them heading around the dark side of the moon while the other lingers in the laboratory. According to the laws of quantum physics If you could nab one of these particles and reverse its spin, then the other particle would have to reverse itself too, even if it was light years away. Quantum mechanics has proved that there is indeed some kind of instantaneous, communication that is above the threshold of consciousness between quantum particles. Once they have interacted with each other, they have the power to influence each other, no matter how far apart they go. According to quantum physics, this relatedness goes beyond human beings to include the whole of creation. Physical reality refuses to be compartmentalized. As hard as we may try to turn it into another kind of machine, it insists on acting like a body, animated by some intelligence that exceeds the speed of light.
Finally, Taylor turns to Ephesians to parallel what’s going on: “There is one body and one Spirit. . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
The unity described by Buddhism and by the cutting edge of science turns out to have a lot in common with Christianity after all. Let’s look at it from one other perspective, that of psychology.
Dr. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, (Mee HaLlie Chick-Sent-Me-High-ee” – whom I’ll now refer to as Doctor C) is a psychology professor at Claremont Graduate University in California and is noted for his work in the study of happiness, creativity, subjective well-being, and fun. He is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. C in which he describes the flow experience:
In the early seventies, I spoke with chess players, rock climbers, musicians, and inner-city basketball players, asking them to describe their experience when what they were doing was really going well. I really expected quite different stories to emerge. But the interviews seemed in many important ways to focus on the same quality of the experience. For instance, the fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action. In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity. Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow.
This powerful flow experience, where the subject merges with an effortless current, the Buddhist Dharma, the physicist’s Unified Field, or the “one body” the apostle Paul spoke of, drew me to establish my life as a an artist and more importantly, to a new awareness of God.
After Pammy’s death, it was the flow experience that began to give my life new direction. Each year in high school I spent more and more time in the art department, and my decision to attend art school in Rhode Island was driven more from a desire to spend the next four years exploring the sweep and depths of this powerful tide than any clear vision I had for my future as a creative professional. Fortunately for me, one led to the other.
Since those days in art school over twenty years ago, I’ve realized my closest connection to God through acts of creativity. But those acts are often “creative” in the broadest sense of the word; and many of them take place long after I’ve put down my pencil and closed my Macbook for the night. They can be any experience that causes something new to come into being, and I have found this magic to happen through poetry, running, bread-baking, conversations, and almost always in any venture into the natural world.
As I’ve looked at the commonalities between these experiences, I’ve learned to identity the most authentic of them by a kind of peripheral poignancy that frames the event; a feeling that I am breaking through the veneer of trivia and distractions I skate through life on to a deeper meaning that lies underneath. And the language that best describes these moments of cosmic connection is religion.
Most of these penetrating passages start with visions. Certainly there is always a softly-focused notion in my mind’s eye of any design or illustration I try to coax into being. But there are other prescient pictures that guide me as well. When I bake bread a pair of images vie for attention as I knead or shape; one is of the crowning golden mound I hope the oven will reveal, and I picture it as an athlete might picture his perfect performance in order to will it into being in an upcoming game. The other is the face of the recipient of the third “gift” loaf, and it often feels that rather than simply deciding who I’d like to give it to, I am trying to discern where it is meant to go. The same mental appeal for direction occurred back in the days when my knees still allowed me to take my midday runs. The first quarter mile from home that led to the start of several different routes was always spent waiting for a vision of where the next few miles should lead.
There are miracles. Anyone who has ever dipped a brush in watercolor knows that that particular medium is dependent on miracles, the hundreds of happy accidents that, under a skilled hand, can create a picture with the peculiar balance of order and chaos that we claim as beauty in the natural world. And in that world, in the small Maine expeditions I’ve created with family and friends, there have been miracles too numerous to catalogue: a July afternoon on an island in the Damriscotta River when 100 seals erupted in a hilarious display of acrobatic slapstick offshore; An October ridge hike in Baxter state park where swirling updrafts found my companions and I marveling through an upside-down snow storm, a May kayak trip in Penobscot Bay where a shadowy figure on a distant island transformed to reveal itself in a burst of white and wings as the bald eagle that took flight when I finally made shore.
There are tests of faith. Any act of creation travels through unknown territory; that distant land where past experience no longer provides direction and the traveler is guided by something or someone else. The best artwork I’ve created, those images that have ushered in new periods of
stylistic exploration, have been born of long passages of disorientation and indecision that seemed to point to certain failure. It was only my trust in the process of creation itself that led me through these intervals to work that reflected the maturity and growth that were fruits of the journey. I’ve traveled this same trail of trepidation in some of the conversations I’ve created with friends. Talks where I’ve explored topics I am unsure of, stretching to define half formed emotions and ideas in attempt to crystallize them through conversation. These are times where I risk, and often succeed in sounding like a fool. But by taking these chances with the ones I love, I am sometimes rewarded with a deeper understanding of the subjects we explore and of each other as well.
There are hymns. Songs of praise that spring spontaneously from the spirit that are the rewards for these tests of faith. These hymns are really at the heart of the flow experience. Exaltations that can erupt at the height of a hard run, or that flow as the music of the laughter of friends as we fashion a feast together. And sometimes they are softer songs; interludes in the middle of a painting when the choices made to shape the work seem to come from beyond and I am merely a happy instrument rejoicing in my part in the process of giving birth to something beautiful.
Finally, there are offerings. Joseph Campbell, the American writer and scholar of comparative religions and mythology, spoke of the spiritual seeker as “a hero that ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder, where fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero returns from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” That is certainly the hope that guides me during the second half of the process of creating poetry. The first part of that venture is an inward exploration; a deeper examination of the ideas and emotions that have flowed from a spiritually potent experience. But the test of the validity of that experience lies outside of me. For good poetry, like any true work of art, must resonate with its audience, and when it does it reveals the sacred union that embraces us all.
And how does Christianity fit into a life defined by creativity? We are small, and the Dharma, the Unified field, the One Body, God, is very big. How are we to connect with that infinite, eternal identity? If we are really a part of God, and we are desperately trying to find meaning in our lives by attempting to know Him, then the same must be true of Him. As we spin in one direction, a God as distant as the stars and as close as our next breath responds in kind. He mirrors our need for connection, and has created a story to tell of His love for us, and delivered it to us in the form of His son. I believe it is one of many such stories. For God is an artist, not a father who sits in heaven, but a dynamic being that continually creates us, even as we create Him.
I’ll close with a piece I wrote to help me discover the ideas I’ve expressed this morning and to share them in the language of poetry; a dialect that relies on the active participation of the listener through interpretation to create its meaning. It’s called: The Window by My Pew
Small shoulders brushed small shoulders
and legs swung in a line
Between parents trying to will
Young mouths to close so ears could fill
With tales of the divine;
Stories crafted for children
Of loss and hope and One,
Who triumphed not with fire or sword,
But with the message of a Lord
Who claimed Him as His son.
As minute lead to hour
And speech to song to prayer,
My wandering mind would lead my eye
Cross congregated heads to spy
The panes that framed the air,
Of brilliant blue beyond us
And though our gathered few
Were bound to bring our God about,
I seemed to see Him clearer out
The window by my pew.
That finite fragile border
Between a space men made
To shelter every seventh day
All those who seek to find their way
Back home from where they’ve strayed,
And that wide world beyond it,
Laced with the harms and charms
We navigate to steer our course
Through lives that drift or near the source
That waits with open arms.
But parables that moved me,
Joined other fairy tales
That bobbed within my childhood’s wake,
When worldly winds began to take
Hold of my filling sails
And though I found no need of
The meek or what they knew,
Sometimes I’d put my pride aside
And think of those who sat beside
The window by my pew.
I scratched and climbed and leapt from
The limbs of family’s tree
And reveled in the rush and fall
With ears deaf to the still, small call
That whispers endlessly.
Burning daylight for dollars
To pay dark nights that numb
The ache that lives where purpose should;
A silent, sunken shadowed wood
Lost to the rising Son.
And then came one to find me,
Who broke bright as new day
Not with a map to lead me home
But questions and a zest to roam
That led us on our way,
Till that path found us walking
With gifts God’s garden grew,
We trailed their tiny steps to where
We placed our faith upon their care;
My window by the pew.
They heard the ancient lessons
Worn smooth from tongue to tongue
As new, and though they led me there,
I heard secrets in places where
None were when I was young.
Each year I’d see their balance
Of faith and reason shift,
As soul and mind would branch, evolve
And they would think and feel to solve
The mysteries of life’s gift.
I wondered how to guide them,
As every parent must,
Gauging when to fill blanks in
That form the line between a sin
And what we judge as just.
And I would struggle with them,
Though my young years were through,
Trying to square the Christian side
Of truth with those that lay outside
My window by the pew.
Some find their faith a beacon,
Revealing wrong from right
And though that torch won’t shine for me
And I’m less sure of what I see,
I envy them their light.
Still others shun the history
Of steps taken by man,
To build a bridge back to the One
That was, and is and shall become;
The sum beyond time’s span.
And some will follow prophets
But neither will condemn
The other ways the soul may fill
To bear the fruits of heaven’s will
And I am one of them.
You’ll find me seeking outside
And inside churches too
The outer aisle, there, at the last
Singing a hymn while gazing past
The window by my pew.