First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Search for Truth and Meaning:
Throwing a Sharp Dart
A sermon by Megan Lynes
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton MA
February 25, 2007
When I was about six years old my father arrived home one day with a mysterious fuzzy round object tucked under his arm. It had the texture of a doormat and was just about the same flat thickness, but it was round not rectangular, and one side was covered with curious metal wires and little numbers. There were triangular sections of green and blue and in the exact middle was a red circle. “It’s a game!” he announced, his eyes shining. There was nothing my dad liked better than games. Except perhaps surprises.
Later that evening, teeth brushed and flappy-feet pajamas on, we made our way downstairs to the basement to explore the mystery of the fuzzy surprise. I could barely contain myself as he hung the object on the wall. “There,” he said. “That’ll do it…” and turning to face me, he began to pat his pockets, with a bemused look on his face. “Now where did I put those darts?” I’d never heard of such objects before, but this was a cue. I leapt on him, eager to join in the hide and seek treasure hunt. The search ended when at last I located a small case, the size of a harmonica, tucked inside his left coat sleeve. “Careful now, careful,” he chuckled, “they’re sharp.”
I chose a long silver dart adorned with a Brittish flag on the flight end. I thought my dad would choose one too, but instead he bent down to my height and shuffled around behind me. His warm palm wrapped gently around my own and he arranged my hand until the dart was held in place between my three fingers and thumb. Then, moving my arm back and forth in a practice arc, he winked at me. “Ready?” he asked, his hand still encompassing mine. “Steady?” I grinned, leaning back against his strong shoulder. “Go!”
Wham! And suddenly there was our dart, embedded in a little green section of the board! Whoopee! So this was the game! My dad’s eyebrows shot up in glee, my feet did their happy dance and a hot current of joy leapt from his eyes, across my face, and down into my lungs. It was like shouting, but there was no need, my father and I were already an ember ignited by breath.
For the next half hour or so, nothing could have kept us from our mission. Again and again, we aimed at that little red bull’s eye. Two soft clumsy hands hurled the sharp dart towards the board. With the perfection of a drunken driver, our little Brittish flyer careened into the triangles marked 13 or 9 or 2, and we’d toss up our arms with all the exaggerated disappointment of a missed touchdown. “Awww, man!!!” we’d shout! Let’s try again!” Sometimes to my father’s more genuine chagrin, we punctured the wall, or the soft padding of the boiler tank, and once, though this wasn’t apparent until the next summer, we managed to skewer the paddling pool.
Looking back on that night and even on the weeks of practice that followed, I don’t remember that we actually made that many bull’s eyes. I also don’t recall that it bothered us all that much. We were far too caught up in the shared joy of aiming together, to worry if we’d perfected our craft.
I offer this story about playing darts because it represents to me the transformative power of creative interpersonal experience. The Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Dr. Paul Rasor, writes that the individual comes to understand his or her own liberal religious identity not only by thinking and feeling, but also by acting. His view is that a person’s sense of self is formed out of the relational experiences one has with others. Understanding ourselves as social beings strengthens our self-understanding and increases the power of our critical and prophetic voices.1
The fourth principle of our UU faith tradition is our covenant to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This promise to engage with meaning making and finding truth breathes with creative energy. Activities central to our faith certainly can be done individually, but why not see what transpires by exploring them in community? So maybe we don’t throw darts in the sanctuary, but perhaps we do decide to wobble in a collective arc towards a meaningful goal. And when our project still holds its original purpose, but loses a bit of the glamour, our new goal is then to find ways of continuing to cheer each other on. In a community of faith the aim is not only to care intellectually within our own minds, but to choose a good goal and throw a sharp dart with one unified force.
You may have heard of the Christian Mystic of the late 1300’s who penned a manuscript now called The Cloud of Unknowing. The text was designed as a training manual for young monks or hermits entering a contemplative religious life. The author describes the virtue of putting all thoughts, all images, all concepts of the holy beneath a metaphorical “could of unknowing” in the mind, and then to single-heartedly love the divine by sending sharp darts of longing love. (Zing!) We don’t have to be able to see where these darts of love hit, we just have to be willing to keep on aiming. And let me tell you if your target is a cloud, you’re a lot more likely to get a bull’s eye every time!
There is a Sufi idea that in order to deepen one’s faith life, one should choose a single spiritual practice and focus on it intently. Instead of wandering through the desert looking for water, it makes more sense in the long run to choose a spot, start to dig and just keep on digging. Don’t hop up and find a new spot every couple scoops. Through dedication and devotion the digger will eventually come to an abundance of water, and it will be sweet and pure and worth the wait. You’ll have lots of to nourish your weary being, and you’ll have plenty of it to share as well.
I invite you to take a moment to reflect on how you lead your religious life. Perhaps in your own childhood a parent sung hymns to you at bedtime, and now you do the same for your own children. Everyone who’s gathered here this morning is already choosing to deepen your faith by being in community. Some of you came early to sing in the choir, set up for a Sunday School activity or will stay late for a meeting. Perhaps going beyond First Parish walls, you know someone in a nursing home and make a point to visit once a month. Or maybe, thinking back, you were once prayed for by a priest who cared for real, and now you too pray for those in need of love. For so many of us our relationship to the divine is found most intensely through our relationships with others. Our lifelong search for truth and meaning aligns with that very first recognition of love in a caregiver’s eyes, the touch of a warm safe hand on a shivering back.
I once heard a story about an orphanage in Romania in which the children were kept clean and fed, but rarely held. The overworked staff of eight caregivers had their hands full with more than one hundred children, and thus the babies were usually left on their own in their cribs to fend for themselves. The longer the babies were left without contact, the more they gave up the fight for closeness and connection. They became dull eyed and their growth slowed. In short, they “failed to thrive.” As the months stretched by, almost all of them suffered from brain damage due to lack of stimulation and human touch. At one point there was a study done of this orphanage, one striking aspect of which stumped researchers for a long while. In a room filled with cribs, the baby nearest the door always seemed to be more alert than all the others. This baby also managed to maintain a healthier body weight over time, and did not seem to be slowed in mental capacity. The researchers set up a camera in the room to see what could be different about this particular baby’s environment. Was she able to see through the glass window? Was she hearing the adult voices outside? Eventually what turned up on film was that late at night the janitor would finish sweeping the room and then stop by the crib of the baby nearest the door. He’d put down his broom, scoop up the little girl and hold her for five minutes or so, singing to her and rocking her gently. Imagine that. Five minutes, and that sustained her spirit.
Our human connections are the foundation for so many of our religious experiences. Our lives are shaped as we shape the lives of others. We make meaning by speaking our truths in love, by writing the love letters that are hardest to write, by sending them like sharp darts out into the world.
I know I will never forget the mentor in my high school “Coming of Age” program who watched me growing sadder and sadder throughout my junior year. Finally one desperately lonely day, she invited me over, and taught me how to pray. Only she didn’t call it that. Like a lot of people who grew up UU, I think the word wouldn’t have worked for me then. I simply didn’t have a context for it. No one around me spoke of prayer, though I knew in my own life plenty of UU’s whose whole life was a dedication of the spirit. It’s only now when I visit people dying in the hospital that I am able to see how for so many people, the offer of a spoken prayer can be tantamount to no other gift I could bring. Prayer is a whisper of hope, a love letter so big both the listener and the praying friend might nestle inside it, with plenty of room for love and trust and empathy to snuggle in as well.
I remember how it felt when my high school mentor prayed with me. It was on a Sunday after church, after the bustle of coffee hour had ended, when the gentle light of autumn was just beginning to settle upon the faded scarlet pew cusions. Our time together began with a guided meditation, and then she spoke words on my behalf, asking for peace in my heart, and for the gentle spirit of love to enfold me. She invited me to take a journey to somewhere I needed to go. Later, she invited me to envision meeting someone on the path, and sharing words with them. The birdcage of my heart opened then, and a thousand honey colored birds flew free. How I had needed to speak, how I had needed to learn to open my spirit to something bigger than my own drowning world. I can only describe the feeling I had at that moment as one of being plucked out from a sucking sinking whirlpool and then cradled tenderly in the palm of a warm hand. I remember feeling that at last someone had reached out for me not by talking about healing, but by praying with me, allowing me to experience hope in a mental visual image. The meaning I took from that interaction was that I was worth something, that I mattered to someone, that my life was important. And that I wasn’t truly alone. This was a salvific message to me, one that I kept dear to my heart for years. Do Unitarian Universalists believe in saving souls? Absolutely. Do we pray? Absolutely? Do we write love letters and throw sharp darts? Absolutely. Among us we know so many ways to settle down and dig our desert hole.
I have spoken about the power of prayer and I have been hearing about the wonderful experiences of the members of the Buddhist meditation group that meets here. You don’t have to take MY word for it that developing a faith practice of prayer or meditation will transform your life. If you want to leap forward in the realm of opening your heart, and making a difference in the lives of others, I wholeheartedly encourage you to find ways to pray or meditate with others in the community. Make a regular phone date to “speak your truth in love” with someone for five minutes each once a month, call a nursing home and find out if they need pastoral visitors, or start an email prayer chain. Prayers are powerful because whether we are theists or humanists, whether we pray with others or alone, to pray is to be enveloped by a circle of love, to pray is to let the honey birds fly free.
I also want to tell you about a very specific opportunity I see for us to engage with meaning making and truth telling in our denomination. I tell you about it because it is the single most life changing type of love letter I’ve ever sent or received, and I know I’m not alone in saying this. The Church of the Larger Fellowship, our denominational "church at home anywhere in the world,"2 actively supports more than 300 incarcerated UU members.3 The mission of the CLF community is to provide a spiritual home for Unitarian Universalists who are isolated from congregations, and ‘no one is more isolated than those in prison.’4 So far over 130 of the 300 prisoners have received pen pal matches. The rest eagerly await responses to their letters. If you believe that five minutes a day of holding a tiny child can save her from the irreversible pit of loneliness, then I know you’ll understand how a single letter once a month can be an incredible lifeline to someone without regular avenues of communication and encouragement.
I have a pen pal myself and I assure you that I am challenged in ways I never expected to articulate my beliefs and expand my practice of loving kindness. I am humbled over and again when I realize just how much I have to learn about racism and classism and a social justice system that doesn’t treat humans with respect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt ministered to by the thoughtful and deeply moving letters my prisoner writes to me. This type of letter writing can be done on a one to one basis, or as a team effort. I know this opportunity isn’t the right thing for everyone, but if you would like to develop a new spiritual practice of creative interchange through letter writing, I’ve brought the information you’ll need to contact the CLF prison ministry program and get started. I’m going to leave these little info cards on the side pew up front. You can also speak directly to me about it with questions today or to Diane about it any time in the future.
Leading a free and responsible search for truth and meaning requires deep reflection and insight. But more importantly it requires that you remember how important you are to all those around you. Your love for them has transformation potential. As you ponder the creative experience you are about to undertake, don’t be afraid to gather with others of us for a reminder of our collective aim. Our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition values our passionate transformational questing. And so even if the dart wobbles mid flight, we vow collectively to do our part in living our covenantal faith. We stand side by side, aiming again and again with our love, bending the moral arc of the universe towards justice.5 Making things right with our prayers in action.
May our sharp dart of longing love be cradled first in the palm of a warm soft hand, and then may we throw it with every ounce of gusto we can muster.
Kapow! What do you know? A Bull’s Eye! I knew we could do it!! Let’s do it again!
May it be so.
Amen.
1 Rasor, Paul, Faith Without Certainty, 108. [Back to text]
2 http://www.uua.org/clf [Back to text]
3 Interview, Rev. Patty Franz, Director of the Prison Ministry Program. [Back to text]
4 UU World, Warren R. Ross. March, 2005. [Back to text]
5 Theodore Parker. [Back to text]