First Parish Unitarian UniversalistOur Story Telling
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
February 3, 2008
Our reading this morning was a compilation of excerpts from a long, six-part poem by the great nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman called “A Song of Occupations.” It is an ode to the American working people of his time, but no less ours, for we gathered here work for our wages too, adding value whether in the form of products or of services. Whitman was conveying, is conveying, to them and to us our value and soul, empowering us to own our democracy and to find expressed in ourselves the beauty of all of the arts.
For example, here is what the rest of what he says about music:
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,
It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the
beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his
sweet romanza, nor that of the men's chorus, nor that of the
women's chorus,
It is nearer and farther than they.
And this is the rest of what he says about government, timely as many of us head to the ballot boxes for the primaries on Tuesday:
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are,
The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who
are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the
going and coming of commerce and malls, are all for you.
But, why I chose this piece by Walt Whitman as the reading this morning has little to do with the arts or with government. Just as why I chose the opening hymn (Bring Many Names, #23) has little to do with worshiping the divine, even though it suggested images of the divine such as “strong mother,” “warm father,” “old aching,” “young, eager” God.
The reading and the hymn were chosen because of something to be sensed more than heard directly in each: that we each are empowered, if we would but hear the invitation, to find in our own lives our own stories of meaning, and our own images for the divine.
Remember, Whitman saying, “We consider bibles and religions divine…It is not they who give the life—it is you who give the life.”
Remember at the close of the hymn, “Great, living God, never fully known…”
We give the life to any myths and stories that have any meaning to us, whether they are the myths of religions or literature, or the stories of our own lives.
And the very nature of what is meant by the word “God” is that it is “never fully known,” it is ineffable, “beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing.”
Again, we are the meaning makers for what is most ultimate for us, or what theologians call the “ground of our being” or what perhaps you experience in high moments of profound awe or wonder, whether you call it simply “amazing!” or give it a name like God, the goddess, the Spirit of Life, the Light of Love or Force for Good. We make our own divine meanings, mainly through stories.
One of our country’s best-known story-collectors is probably Paul Auster, who is himself a story-teller of renown, author of fourteen novels, four screenplays and the delightful short fable Augie Wren’s Christmas Story which I read aloud in December of 2005 to those gathered for Soup’s On! that month.
Auster is well-known as a story-collector for his role hosting National Public Radio’s “National Story Project” for which everyday Americans submitted true tales from their own lives. He read four thousand stories that year, too many to air on the radio. So, he edited an anthology, the best 179 of them all and called it I Thought My Father was God, after one of the stories. In that story, a boy’s father shouts at the mean old man next door to “drop dead” and, to the boy’s horror and amazement, the man does just that! He thought his father was God!
In the book’s introduction Auster wrote,
We all have inner lives. We all feel that we are part of the world and yet exiled from it. We all burn with the fires of our own existence. Words are needed to express what is in us…What the people have said is often astonishing. More than ever, I have come to appreciate how deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, and obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others.
Years earlier, in his novel The Locked Room, Auster wrote, “stories happen to people who are able to tell them.”
I’d like to tell you my best story to date; it happened in April of 2004.
The state trooper said it was the weirdest accident he’d ever come across, and he hadn’t even seen it happen. But I did.
On a rainy Tuesday morning, I was on my way to work. I’d just driven around a cloverleaf from Route 2 onto Route 128/I-95 and was already in a middle lane. Suddenly—but as if in slow motion—a driver-side door of the SUV ahead of me opened, and something fell out. Was it a sweater?
No, it was a person, small and slight, a woman. Amazingly, she curled her body, protected her head with her arms, and merely bounced on the roadway, maybe twice. Then she was on her feet, facing the traffic. Her SUV kept going straight ahead.
Fortunately, I was able to pull over into the shoulder of the highway. Other vehicles swerved left or right to avoid her. An eighteen-wheeler came to a stop, with maybe one length to spare. Maybe she’s an equestrian, I thought, since she knew how to fall so beautifully.
By then I was out of my car. I called to the woman and she came over, able to walk on her own. She didn’t look at all upset -- maybe a little pale. For a rainy day, she wasn’t wearing much: jeans and a navy hoodie, partially zipped.
I invited her to sit in the front seat of my mini-van. The woman seemed dazed, but not that dazed, considering that she’d just fallen out of a moving vehicle on the interstate.
“You were lucky you weren’t hit,” I said. She nodded. When I asked, she knew her name: Diane. “That’s my name, too!” I said. The coincidence didn’t impress her.
“What happened?” I asked her. “My door wasn’t fully shut and I leaned on it. That’s when I fell out.” “Were you alone?” She nodded, “yes.”
“Where’s my car? Can you take me to my car? My purse is in my car. I need to get my purse.” [I’m thinking, “I’m not taking you anywhere, honey, we’re sittin’ right here until the police arrive!”]
“Your car drove off without you. I’m sure it’s crashed by now.” The highway there was slightly inclined— we couldn’t see her car over the crest of the rise, but the traffic had slowed way down. “The police will come. They can take you to your car.”
In the meantime, another car had pulled over and I could see that the driver was on his cell phone, calling the police, I presumed. Then he came over and let her use the phone.
While she made her calls, I told him her story. We agreed it didn’t make sense: had it been true, she would have tried to stop her fall by grabbing the steering wheel, causing the car to swerve. Suicide? we wondered. Or was she shoved out?
Meanwhile, she had called her mother and her husband. I was astounded that she was able to recall their phone numbers after what she’d been through. And, I heard her tell them the story in the most matter-of-fact way.
Soon the emergency vehicles came. The EMT’s checked her over right there in my car—abrasions but no broken bones, it seemed—set her neck in a brace, lifted her onto a stretcher and into an ambulance. They drove off.
I was surprised that no one asked for my eye-witness account, so I walked up to a state trooper and offered the story. He, too, expressed disbelief at the woman’s explanation. He took my name and phone number. He told me the first 9-1-1 call they got reported that there was a driverless car on the highway! Then, a few second later, a call came in telling them that a woman was standing in the middle of the road! They figured the two calls were related!
I was shook up, all the way to work. It calmed me to tell the story to Janice, our administrative assistant, right away, and, that night, to my family.
The next day the trooper called and asked a few questions. Then he told me that the SUV had veered off into the side rail along the highway without hitting even one vehicle. He said he went to see it after it was towed, to test her explanation. He sat in the driver seat, partially closed the door, and tried to lean against it, but the distance was too great for her to have leaned against the door accidentally. Suicide? he wondered.
“I don’t know,” I mused. “Haven’t you ever been somewhere, like an overlook at the top of a mountain, and had a sudden impulse to step off, to see what would happen?”
“I know what you mean,” he interrupted, and then there was silence between us. “She wondered what would happen to a person who fell out of a car going 60 miles per hour. The difference is: she followed through.”
“That was the weirdest accident I’ve ever come across,” the trooper concluded our conversation.
“What makes it even weirder for me is that her name is the same as mine.”
“Yeah, but she spells it differently,” he said matter-of-factly.
We said good-bye and hung up. In the mystery of it all, I felt glad to be alive.
Toward the end of his memoir Now and Then, Rev. Frederick Buechner says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
For a while, the story I just told was just that, a great story about the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, making it lots of fun to tell, and a good candidate for the National Story Project, if it hadn’t already ended.
But, then I began to wonder what meaning the story has for me.
First, why me? Why was I the driver behind her? I had been given an opportunity to be of service, but like so many people in emergency situations, at the time, I did not make a choice of whether to serve or not, I just acted. In retrospect, the event resonated with, and reinforced, my sense of calling to ministry, a sense of having been chosen. And, in case I wouldn’t notice, fate gave her my name, albeit spelled differently.
Too, I took the story as a spiritual lesson, a lesson in paying attention. Had I been changing the radio station or using my cell phone, or even just been lost in thought planning my day or whatever, I might not have seen something fall out of the car up ahead of me in time to wonder what it was and, therefore, have time to avoid hitting the woman it turned out to be. We miss so much beauty, sorrow, serendipity, and tragedy in life because we’re not giving life our full attention. I know that, we all do. But, this story shouted at me, “Pay Attention!”
Most of all, perhaps, it had meaning for me as a true story of amazing grace. Grace happens. No one hit her! No one was hit by her driverless car! And, she was so graceful in her falling.
But, it was also a story of you-know-what-happens. It was for me a somber story, profoundly unsettling. That other Dyan was either in such despair, or she thought so little of life, that she would risk loosing her life and put others in danger of losing theirs too. What was she thinking? More to the point perhaps, what was she feeling?
True, she fell gracefully, and experienced grace in surviving, but she also was “graceless” which the dictionary defines as “lacking in any sense of what is right.”
Ultimately, the meaning of the story is a mystery to me. Listen to your life, Buechner said. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
Sometimes in our day to day lives, in the boredom and in the pain of it, we don’t see the mystery, we only see the problems. We may allow negative stories to dominate our thoughts. We allow repetitive negative themes to repeat themselves in stories of resentment. We imagine conversations in which we tell someone off or accuse them of wrong-doing. We rehearse our hurts, the debts owed us and the trespasses against us, over and over again. They wear a track in our minds, and our thoughts—like cross-country skiers—ski in the same track, retracing it.
It happens to me sometimes. Does that happen to any of you?
Congregations may get caught up telling negative stories, too. A prominent consultant [Larry Peers, writing in Congregations-Winter 2008, “The Problem Trap: A Narrative Therapy Approach to Escaping Our Limiting Stories” pp.19-22] to congregations writes, “One of the primary kinds of stories that takes hold in congregations and makes change difficult is what is known as ‘the problem-saturated story,’ or one in which the focus is on who or what is or has been wrong.” And he says that such a story often has a dynamic of its own in which it has a “trance-like effect.” It is reinforcing. The story-tellers “see” only those things that reinforce the story and whatever is contradictory is not “seen.” These kinds of stories, he says, have the “impact of being taken as fact rather than as a narrative created by a particular sifting of the facts.” That’s what tends to happen when parish business is discussed in small unrepresentative gatherings, whether in the parking lot or over lunch.
When hearing a “problem-saturated story,” the consultant helps to spoil the “pity party” by asking a question like, “What would someone who disagrees with your version of events say?” Or, “Tell me about times when this problem is not present.” This may allow people to stand outside of their negative story and see the congregation from a different perspective, often revealing different actions that are available and different results that are possible.” [p.20] A different story may make change easier!
A similar release is available to us as individuals. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron teaches her students how not to “bite the hook” of anger, resentment, and other destructive emotions. She introduces us to the Tibetan word “shenpa” which she translates as “the charge” behind our likes, dislikes, and opinions. It is that “charge” that “hooks” us into them, making them so hard to let go of, and that gives our tone of voice such a cutting edge when we express ourselves sometimes.
In one of her talks she said, “Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens— that's the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, or denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have [a] strong addiction [to low self-esteem, blaming, anger or self-denigration], you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we're talking about where it touches that sore place— that's a shenpa. Someone criticizes you—they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child— and, shenpa: almost co-arising.”
But, we have a choice. It is possible to get out of shenpa. It is possible to step off the track of our negative personal thoughts. It is possible to tell our congregation’s story as both “break-down” and “break-through” because, the great majority of the time, both are in play. A break-through may be most evident, like when we became a Welcoming Congregation, but at the same time certain committees may have been dysfunctional. That’s the way life is. Both/And not Either/Or. And, in a discouraging time of perceived break-down, the less evident break-throughs may go un-noticed. But, they’re usually there.
Again, we give the life to any myths and stories that have any meaning to us, whether they are the myths of religions or literature, or the stories of our own lives, personal and congregational. Within truth’s limits, we can choose our stories.
Pema Chodron says that the first step to being released from a shenpa, is simply to recognize it. Then you refrain from giving in to it. “That's when the practice really gets interesting,” she says. “What do you do when you don't do the habitual thing? You're kind of left with that urge [or charge] much more in your face, and instead of reacting in your usual way, you try to relax into it.” [From her cd Don’t Bite the Hook]
She proposes “four R's”: Recognizing, Refraining —which simply means not going down that road —Relaxing into the underlying feeling, and then something called Resolve, which means you do this again and again and again.”
Chodron counsels us, “it's not an overnight miracle that you just undo that habituation. It takes a lot of loving kindness, a lot of recognition with warmth [toward ourselves]. It takes a lot of learning how to not go down that path, learning how to refrain, and it takes a lot of willingness to stay present…And you do it over and over and over. In the process you learn so much humility... it softens you up just enormously.”
Humility is not self-denigration, of course. Instead, she says, “It humbles you in the best sense and also begins
to give you a lot of confidence” in your own wisdom, in “your Buddha nature” or basic goodness, which “begins
to be more and more activated. And you, from your own wisdom, begin to go more towards spaciousness and openness and
unhabituatedness, but it doesn't happen quickly.” [From “The Shenpa Syndrome,” Learning to Stay, Berkeley
Shambhala Center, September 2002, http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/shenpa3a.php]
Such patience with and love toward ourselves is needed! (repeat)
Changing habits and choosing new stories—whether personal, in our relationships, in our congregation, in our culture—doesn’t happen over night.
Such patience with and love toward each other is needed! (repeat)
Listen to your life. Don’t bite that hook! Remember the four R’s of Recognizing, Refraining, Relaxing, and Resolve. Choose a new story.
Then listen to each other’s stories. Sometimes we don’t know we have a story until someone is listening. Let this be a place where we hear each other’s stories.
And let us tell the stories that make change possible, so that, with humility, confidence is gained. Amen.
Benediction
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”