Welcome
Prelude

Chalice Lighting Words by Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist, philosopher, theologian) Life is like a plant that lives on its rhizome [rootstock]. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away an ephemeral apparition. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Unison Words
Not for Children Only
Song #6 Just As Long As I Have Breath
Meditation Meditation, Carlos Nakai/Nawang Khechog Native American and Tibetan flutes
Joys and Sorrows
Offering

Who Are We? How Do We Know Ourselves?

Rainer Maria Rilke (20th c German poet), said, "I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows." Have you ever done that? Have you ever seen how deep the place is from which your life flows? Who are we? How do we know ourselves? How do we take care of ourselves? These are among the questions of our spiritual journeys. At a ministers' convocation recently, Thomas Moore provided two keynote addresses, in which he spoke about caring for the soul. Theologian, teacher, writer, former psychotherapist, former Catholic seminarian, Moore is well known for his book, Care of the Soul. Let me admit my biases up front. Soul is not a word I really understand. New Age writers use it a lot; it appears in some religious literature, sometimes used synonymously with spirit, sometimes not, as that which exists after the death of the body. The word comes from Old English, influenced by Germanic, and might be related to the word for sea, as it was thought that a person comes from and ultimately goes to, the sea. The Greek word for soul, psyche, means the animating principle which occupies the body. The Latin word, animus, means soul and comes from the root for wind, or breath. Could it be that soul is the me that holds the consciousness of the me-ness and intuits, feels, knows, is, the connections with other beings, with life itself, with that which is greater than me-- call it by whatever names you wish? Could it be that the soul is more than I can ever explain or even fully know? Could it be that the soul is part of the macrocosm and does not belong to me at all, but indeed rests in me for now? Or is the soul a function of physiology? Can it be explained in terms of the physical body, the neurology of the brain? Can we ever know? Does it matter?

What I want to convey is that I know there is more to me than I can explain or control and maybe it goes by the name of soul. Perhaps it is what Rilke means when he speaks of the deep place from which our lives flow. There is a whole world in me and I know that it appears sometimes in my mind and I know that my feelings respond to it, yet it is more than either mind or emotions. Have you had that knowing also? Maybe it's what Wendell Berry, (poet, cultural and economic critic) seeks to describe in Sabbaths 1999:II.

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.    

I can't tell you for sure what Moore, or anyone else, means by soul, yet I can dare to say that it exists and because it exists I can understand a purpose in caring for it. It is our spring, whose waters mingle with and come forth from the ground waters. It is this deep place, from which my life flows. I want to know it better. I want to recognize how it communicates; to respond to it; to let it speak; to care for it as the most precious life. Whatever it is, it puts me in touch with life; it enlivens me and gives my life purpose. Moore explains it this way: ". . . It isn't about curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy, and it isn't about some idea of perfection or even improvement. It doesn't look to the future for an ideal, trouble-free existence. . . . Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life the depth and value that come with soulfulness. . . .Care of the soul speaks to the longings we feel and to the symptoms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death. A soulful personality is complicated, multifaceted, and shaped by both pain and pleasure, success and failure. Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness. Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. . . A richly elaborated life, connected to society and nature, woven into the culture of family, nation, and globe. The idea is not to be superficially adjusted, but to be profoundly connected in the heart to ancestors and to living brothers and sisters in all the many communities that claim our hearts. . . ." (Care of the Soul)

Caring for the soul is caring for the profound connections that give ordinary life depth and value. How do we do this? Before we can attempt to answer that question, we must first ask, who are we? How do we know ourselves? How do we recognize the signs of this deep source of our lives?

Actually, the signs of it are all around us. We communicate with this deep source in lots of ways. Or more accurately, it communicates with us. In dreams, for instance. How many of us have had a dream that shed light on a part of ourselves not previously understood? Through our imaginations, for instance. How many of us have created a piece of art or literature or music that said something we didn't know we needed to say? Through meditation or prayer or repetitive exercise, for instance? When we step away from our busyness and clear some space, what is important emerges. Through what we feel anxious about; what we strongly desire, or fear, or turn away from, for instance. Through our contradictions and paradoxes, for instance. Through the metaphors and images that touch us and move us, for instance.

So here are some examples. We speak to ourselves from our depths in our dreams. I had a friend once who seemed to have it all together: great job, relationship, friends. She had a dream about a house in which the public areas downstairs, were immaculate. But the bedroom, upstairs, contained some kind of monster that roared every so often. Hmmm. Whatever was going on in her inner being, her private interior, was speaking in this dream. The rumblings within, whatever they meant, told her something was up. And indeed, something was up that caused her, within six months to leave the relationship, quit her job and move across the country. Before the dream she had no way of articulating it. Have you ever learned something from a dream, something that was already there but you hadn't realized yet? We speak to ourselves from our depths in our creative work, through our imaginations. In 1999, when I underwent treatment for cancer, I once participated in a writing exercise in which we wrote for ten minutes without picking up the pen from the paper. I found myself writing in the persona of the automatic doors that led into a radiation treatment center. When I finished I saw it provided me a way of uncovering the conflicting emotions I had about the radiation and had not found a way to let myself feel. Have you ever used your imagination and found that it showed you something that was there but you hadn't yet seen?

We speak to ourselves from our depths when we stop and take time away from the busyness of our lives. How often do we realize what we really want, what we really feel, what we really think when we step away for a moment and take a breath? That time on the stationary bike, or in prayer or meditation can tell us a lot if we let it. Have you ever taken a time away and discovered something that was there, but you hadn't quite put your finger on?

We speak to ourselves from our depths in what we strongly desire, what we strongly avoid, in the areas of contradiction, in the images that move us, in our anxieties. Why does the water call to me so? Why does the water terrify me so? I love to kayak but until recently, could hardly swim. I have to admit, in all honesty, that whatever it is I'm saying to myself with this, I haven't figured it out yet. Have you ever had the sense of speaking to yourself from somewhere deep inside without yet understanding the meaning?

Without the dream, without the imagination, without the space away from busyness, without the desires, the aversions, the metaphors, the anxieties, the deepest parts of our beings would not, could not, connect with us. This connection engages our whole bodies. Messages from the depths touch not only our minds, which help us to interpret them, they also touch our emotions, which help us to experience and express them physically. Thus if we do not communicate with the deepest parts of ourselves, we are cut off, out of touch, disconnected not only from ourselves, but from each other and from life itself.

Who are we? We are people who have a lot going on under the surface. We are soulful. Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said that the purpose of life is to grow a soul. How can we grow that part of us, that deep source of our beings, so that we can recognize when and how that underneath world speaks to us? So that we can translate the language of those messages, respond to them, and experience the ways in which they give depth and value to ordinary life? How do we take care of those parts of ourselves that speak through dreams, imagination, desire, aversion, anxieties, images, and need space in order to communicate?

We need to feed ourselves, literally and figuratively. Our imaginations take their sustenance from that which stimulates and stirs them. Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. What awakens imagination? Playing, storytelling, the arts, beauty, ritual. Ritual. Those actions which are performed in a set pattern and carry meanings that take us beyond the actions themselves. Our placing stones in water as an expression of joys and sorrows is a ritual. What does it mean? Not that we want to put rocks in a bowl of water. The act of doing so, of picking up the beautiful, smooth, solid stone and placing it with a clink into the fluid water symbolizes each person's sharing of themselves, of being washed by the care and support of this community, a harmony of elements, a connection with nature and a world larger than our personal joy or sorrow. The musicians and I ask you to wait and stand together at the last phrase of any song we sing because our standing together symbolizes our breathing together and starts us singing as a body. Such a physical action connects us. Ritual puts us in touch with symbol. It opens our imaginations and we experience the connections between actions and meaning. The meaning of an action is in the action, symbolically.

How often do you play? Do you engage your imagination through playing? What do you like to play? I like to play cards; I like to kayak, as I mentioned, bicycle, and hike. I like to play mancala and board games and word games. I like to play catch. I like to play with legos and blocks. I like to color. Do you play enough in your life?

Do you tell stories and listen to stories? Stories may come in the form of reading, or going to plays or films, or writing fiction, or journaling. Stories come when we share the events of our lives and the histories of our families. We don't have to be Charles Dickens in order to tell a good story. We all have stories. My radio show, Spiritually Speaking, I view as a form of storytelling. I interview people and they tell me about their passions and their work and their dreams. Selected Shorts, the radio program in which actors read short stories aloud, will tape at the Bardavon or maybe even at UPAC this coming March. Let's go.

Listening to Speaking of Faith last week, I heard Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist, talk about the importance of the arts to learning and education. The arts feed our imaginations, they stimulate our own creativity. Music, visual art, literature, dance reach right inside us. Their beauty moves us. We recognize it deep within. Why else would a concerto written in 17th c Italy still delight us, or the bust of an Egyptian queen from the eighteenth dynasty (14th c BCE) draw crowds, or a Japanese haiku from two hundred years ago grab us, or an aboriginal didgeridoo pull us into meditation, or a book written in Africa fifty years ago merit a celebration unless something in us recognized and connected with them, inexplicably beyond the borders of time, culture, language, ethnicity, important as these are? What is it in us that makes the connection? For now, can we call it imagination?

You say you have no talent for telling stories, for making art? You still have imagination. You dream. Right in the ordinariness of life plenty of opportunities for imagination exist. Take these socks for instance. They are a pair-- can you tell? Green on the toe and orange on the cuff are matched by orange on the toe and green on the cuff. So yesterday I reached into my drawer and picked out these-- green on the toe and orange on the cuff, blue on the toe and red on the cuff. Believe it or not, I felt dismayed. They don't match; they're not a pair. Then I said, so what? So what! I engaged my imagination and visualized new sock possibilities. I felt a bit daring. I had to laugh at myself. Imagination lives in the most ordinary places and the more we do to feed our imaginations the more we can communicate with the deep sources within us. Ritual and play and the arts and storytelling feed our imaginations.

Another way we feed ourselves is to give ourselves room so that the communications from within us can have space and time to come forth. Meditation, prayer, mindful time in nature, repetitive exercise all help us to make a quiet space within. We make a home for ourselves to come home to. They arrive as dreams when we sleep, as recognitions when we meditate, as longings when we pray, as insistent companions to our exercise. The communications may not always be welcome and they may not always be positive, but they will always be an important indication of what we really feel, what we really want, what we really don't want, what we really think. Do we find the time and the place when we put away the daily routines and empty our minds as best we can and allow what is important to emerge? Do we provide a hospitable welcome for ourselves? Do we want to? What's the price of not doing so?

Finally, we feed ourselves through connection. The connections we make with the communities, friends and families that have a claim on our hearts feed our inner souls. How do we make and sustain these connections? Through sharing. Sharing on the physical level. I've been using the metaphor of feeding, but literally the sharing of food is a huge connector. So many of our celebrations involve sharing food; so many religious practices; so many gatherings in the name of both sorrow and joy. Our holiday party, coming up this Friday, will incorporate a sharing of food. Sharing on the intellectual level -- contributing our thoughts and ideas, suggestions and wishes. Sharing on the emotional level -- telling our stories and showing our feelings, listening to the stories and feelings of others. Sharing on an ethical level through a commitment to repairing and reconciling and maintaining relationships that support and don't harm. Sharing on a spiritual level by our willingness to leave ourselves open to the touch of another person with respect and love.

How do we take care of our souls? How do we take care of the deep sources of our beings? We recognize the ways in which it communicates with us and we feed that within us which enhances the communication channels: our imaginations, the space we give ourselves to step away from routines and listen within, the connections we carefully and mindfully tend with others.

The benefits of doing so are compelling. Happiness. Peace. Strength. Value and meaning in life. Depth. Self-knowledge and self-acceptance. "A richly elaborated life, . . . profoundly connected" as Thomas Moore says. Engaging the questions Who are we? How do we know ourselves? is an important part of both our spiritual journeys and our very identities as human beings. May we all engage the questions. May we, as Rilke advises, go into ourselves and see how deep the place is from which our lives flow. May we know that place. May it be so.

Song #128 For All That Is Our Life

Closing words by Oscar Wilde (Irish playwright, convicted and imprisoned for "gross indecency" with other men) The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his (her) own soul?