What Is Our Life s Purpose? Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz January 9, 2011 First Parish Brewster. Somebody s calling your name.

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1 What Is Our Life s Purpose? Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz January 9, 2011 First Parish Brewster Somebody s calling your name. Sometimes we go through life looking for a sense of purpose; other times the events of our lives or the events of the world thrust a purpose upon us. When a loved one falls ill with a life-threatening illness, family and friends put aside other pursuits. Sometimes, too, news like yesterday s tragedy in Arizona opens a window through which we hear a call to speak or to act. The question we will be considering today is this: what can we do to make ourselves ready to take up that purpose when it calls? This is a story from the great Sufi poet, Rumi: The Master said: there is one thing in this world that must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever. So each person has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing. How many of you find this intimidating? I know I do. Sounds like Rumi s talking here about a stake in the ground not a trial balloon, as Chuck said. But there are stories like this in many cultures. Among the Dagara people of Africa, each person is said to come into the world one essential role in the community s life together. It is the task of living to figure out what it is, and fulfill it. In quieter times, I asked a few of my colleagues what they thought the purpose of life was. To spread kindness, said one. To help bring beauty into the world, said another. To love our own lives and each other. A. Powell Davies, the great Unitarian minister, famously said the purpose of life is to grow a soul, and I ve always loved that idea. His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts it more simply: the purpose of life is to be happy. These are big-picture answers, ones that transcend circumstances. They ring true to me, but they lack instruction. How to spread kindness, bring beauty into the world, love our own lives and each other, grow a soul? How to be happy? How do we figure out what we are supposed to be DOING, while we are spreading kindness, growing a soul? Is there a single task, some great purpose, we each are supposed to fulfill? Perhaps it would be useful to read how great and purposeful men and women discovered theirs. How many of you know about L Arche? It was founded in the 1960s by Jean Vanier, a Canadian who was passionate about the human need for community, for all people. Vanier invited two mentally disabled men from a local asylum to come live with him in a small French village north of Paris, and this began a worldwide movement of communal living. Life is about transmitting life to others, Vanier said in an interview. The beauty of spiders is that they give birth to spiders,, and of roses that they give life to other roses. The beauty of human beings is in our capacity to give life to others, not only biological life, but to give life, hope, love and meaning to others. But he said -- we tend to fall into productivity. 1

2 I love that: the fall out of grace isn t about eating a forbidden apple, but about a fall into productivity. Vanier discovered the meaning of his life, the purpose of his life, by following an impulse to community. Productivity more than 130 communities in 33 countries came later. What if we ask the poets? These are words of the poet Pedro Salinas: To live? Nothing more? Wake up. Day calls you to your life: your duty. And to live, nothing more. Your task is to carry your life high, and play with it, hurl it like a voice to the clouds Wake up. That, in fact, is also the answer of the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. Your life purpose, Tolle says, is doing whatever it is you are doing right now. Your purpose is listening to this sermon! And mine is delivering it. Of course, this is Tolle s way of saying that the purpose of living is to awaken, to wake up to the present moment. Could he be right -- we really don t have to do anything to find the purpose of our lives? Could it be that the one thing we are supposed to remember, in the Sufi story, is more about who we are than what we do? Tolle says, the great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Small things -- Paying attention, listening to one another, and listening to the messages of the life you are living, right now. Listening. It s harder than you might think. I used to sit in church in Oakland, California, underneath a beautiful stained glass window based on The Sower by the painter Millett. It called to mind the Parable of the Sower I d heard in Presbyterian Sunday School, and for me the association was not a happy one. Perhaps you remember this teaching from Jesus: A sower went out to sow. Some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil; it sprang up quickly, but soon was scorched by the sun. Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it. Other seed fell on good soil and brought forth grain, growing and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold. Back in Sunday School, I had heard this parable in the context of a punitive religion. I was sure of my place in the story: I was one of those bad seeds. 2

3 Years later, under that window in my Unitarian Universalist church in Oakland, week after week hearing messages of hope and hospitality and compassion, I began to see my place in the story quite differently. I began to see that the rabbi s message wasn t about the seeds it was about the sower, flinging grain, not carelessly but lavishly, knowing that not every one of his ideas is taking root. Paying attention to the ones that are. Perhaps purpose is not an intentional or goal-oriented thing, but a secret waiting to be discovered, wrote my friend, Linda Blachman, who found the purpose of her life during a long period of illness when she fell OUT of productivity and thus had time to listen to her own still, small voice. When she recovered, she began her powerful life s work: the Mothers Living Stories Project, recording life stories of women facing lifethreatening illness at the same time as raising young children. There are a few moments like that in my own life, when something clicked into place, some knowledge that led me to articulate a purpose or a mission. One happened at the Urban Church conference in New Orleans in I was a lay leader then, working in my church s urban neighborhood but not yet naming my work as ministry. A group called the People s Institute for Survival and Beyond made a presentation at the conference, telling about a transformation they had helped to midwife at the St. Thomas/Irish Channel housing Project. I was familiar with St. Thomas from the year I d spent in New Orleans as a reporter for the Associated Press. Later this low-income neighborhood would become the setting for the movie Dead Man Walking; still later it would be razed rather than reopened as affordable housing after Katrina. In 1996, I remembered it as a dismal place. At the Urban Church conference, I listened in growing excitement as leaders of the People s Institute told how the residents of St. Thomas had organized themselves to kick out all the white-run nonprofits that were serving them without giving them a voice to say what they needed and wanted. Their words painted a picture of a community that was beginning to thrive, to take responsibility for itself, and to stand up to the dominant, white culture of New Orleans with dignity, meeting power with power. It was my first introduction to community organizing, and hearing it, I later realized, meant I had to give up a kind of unacknowledged despair that had weighed me down my whole life. It took a little time, but soon enough I was able to name what had struck me so powerfully. I ve recently spoken from this pulpit about my upbringing in a white, southern family. Cognitively, I had long rejected the most glaring contradictions between the racism I had learned growing up, and the lowcommitment liberalism I had come to embrace as an adult. But what I saw in the words of the People s Institute leaders was that structures of racism are not the inevitable context for our lives that I had always assumed them to be. And if racism can be overcome, I realized, if overcoming it is possible, how can I not spend my life working to overcome it? This became an articulated mission of my life, one I still work every day to live into. Here on Cape Cod, first step for JD and me was to join the local chapter of the NAACP, and you can do that too, today, at the Racial Justice table during coffee hour. Back in 1996, this epiphany came to me by grace, not because I was out looking for a mission for my life, but because I had put my foot on a path that had taken me to New Orleans for that conference, and maybe because I was also beginning to learn to pay attention to my own life. I was learning to wake up. Very often, I think, we put the cart before the horse. We want our actions to conform to a feeling inside that life is a magnificent gift and we therefore ought to be doing something great with it. Tell me, 3

4 what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? We hear this line from Mary Oliver s poem as a call to action, and we forget that what precedes it is a story about how she spent the whole day idle in the sun, studying the way a grasshopper s jaws move. Many of us in western culture grew up shaped by the narrative of the man Jesus, who seemed to understand the great purpose that his life was about from the time he was 12. Is that why we think we are supposed to figure out what we are supposed to do, and then fit our actions to some great purpose we have named? But what if our purpose is to pay attention to the path we are already on? Float trial balloons, as Chuck put it, and watch the way they re carried on the wind? And if we are patient and anchored in the present moment, a mission will swim into view. And what of our church community? How do we discover the purpose of what we are about, together? The same way, really: by listening, really listening, to one another. By knowing each other s stories. What brings you to this church? What really matters to you in this life? Don t you want to know that about the person sitting next to you in church? I assert that none of our great work together is more important than this. Because once you know these deep stories about 5, 10, 50 of the people you see every Sunday and maybe serve on committees with, maybe, just maybe, a path will emerge a path toward a common purpose, an idea of who we are, what it is we should be doing together. We will be inviting you into many such conversations this year. Out of these conversations, we believe, a shared purpose becomes visible. Or audible. Listen! Somebody s calling our name. The sower goes out and scatters seeds in the furrows. Some of it doesn t grow. The sower doesn t pay attention to what doesn t grow. The sower gives her attention to the plants that sprout, the ones that drink the rain and turn their blossoms toward the sun. And the sower continues to do what the sower does to scatter seeds to throw them lavishly, to hurl her life like a voice to the clouds, to spend her life with abandon, with commitment, and with joy, even in the hardest of times. May it be so for us, each and all, and may it be so for us, together. SERMON SOURCES AND INSPIRATIONS Bob Abernethy and William Bolt, eds., The Life of Meaning Linda Blachman, A Living Story, unpublished essay Kabir Edmund Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice Is Calling Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation Malidoma Patrice Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose through Nature, Ritual and Community Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life s Purpose Questions for Small Group Ministry Groups Note to Group Members and Group Leaders: How to Approach the Questions 4

5 These questions are offered as a spur to your own memories, feelings, and imaginations. It is best if you don t try to answer every one of them, but pick the one or two that seem to call most to your imagination, and let these one or two questions work inside you. Let the ideas percolate without trying to find an answer. What memories arise as you consider your question? Is there a memory, a story, or a feeling you would like to share with your SGM group? Please do not think of these questions as homework. It also works if you don t think about them at all until you are in the circle with your SGM group. Rev. Mary and Rev. JD Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. --Ranier Maria Rilke??? Do you have a mission statement for your life that is, a felt sense of purpose that you have at least partially articulated for yourself? If you do not have one now, have you ever had one? How did you come to discover that mission or purpose? Are you searching for one now? What are your feelings as you consider this question? Jean Vanier, the founder of L Arche, said, Life is about transmitting life to others not only biological life, but to give life, hope, love and meaning to others. How does this ring true, or not true, in your own life? What are you feeling as you consider this question? Vanier says we get tripped up by a fall into productivity. What do you suppose he means by that? Isn t productivity a good thing? Do you ever get too attached to productivity so attached that it blocks you from seeing a larger purpose to your life? How do members of a community discover a shared purpose? What should we be doing at First Parish to move ourselves toward that discovery? In his I believe statement, Chuck Ross said he has come to think of life purpose more as a hypothesis, a trial balloon rather than a stake in the ground. Tell how that does, or does not, ring true for you. What are your feelings as you consider this question? Eckhart Tolle and innumerable poets say the key to discovering purpose is waking up to the present moment. Does that seem true in your own life? Tell a story about a time you awakened to the present moment, and what you learned from that. Tolle also said: The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. What meaning does this have from the story of your own life? Parker Palmer says the key to discovering purpose is paying attention to the life you are living right now. If this resonates for you, tell how it this kind of paying attention to your own life has served you in discovering a purpose (or in any other way). Can you tell about a moment when something clicked into place for you? What one thing do you want to do this year? What one thing do you want to see First Parish do together this year? 5

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