October Theme: Forgiveness and Mercy Surely Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me... : The Path to Forgiveness First Unitarian Church of San José Sunday, October 7, 2012, 11:00 a.m. 12:15 p.m. Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones, Senior Minister Rev. Geoff Rimositis, Associate Minister for Lifespan Faith Development Bill Bowman, Worship Associate Call to Worship Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones Mercy! What a mercy it is to have someone someones with whom to walk in rain, to share a dream, someone who will bring us a rose even in the midst of the winter in our souls. 1 What a blessing (which is one definition of mercy), what an act of kindness and compassion what a mercy to be connected in that way. When I was growing up, I frequently heard people from the South exclaim, Mercy! in response to anything that called up big feelings. Mercy! could mean that a neighbor s child had landed in trouble, or that the washing machine had overflowed. It could mean that the temperature had soared above 100 degrees for too many days in a row mercy, it s hot! or maybe the first bite of a fresh strawberry had been devastatingly delicious mercy, that s good. Mercy! was the all-purpose equal-opportunity expression of a heart wide open to life s extremes. And then, sometimes, people would just murmur: Well, now, isn t that a mercy? when they heard that a neighbor, a friend, even a stranger had received some unexpected relief for something serious a sadness, a problem, a loss. The relief might come in the form of a tiny act of kindness that lightened somebody s load, or it might arrive like a lightning bolt of divine intervention. It didn t matter. The response isn t that a mercy conveyed a sense of connection and compassion for friend or stranger; it was offered in sweet humility and wonder at life s surprising moments of grace. 1 The opening hymn on this Sunday was # 346, Come, Sing a Song with Me (words and music by Carolyn McDade), sung with American Sign Language. In Unitarian Universalist Association, Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
2 And even when the phrase came out dripping with bless-their-hearts sarcasm and jealousy oh, well, isn t that a mercy there was still, underneath the bitterness, a hunger for such connection. There is a line near the end of the Twenty-third Psalm in the King James Version of the Hebrew Scriptures that reads, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. What we often forget is that this assurance caps a journey that begins in green meadows beside life-restoring waters but that crosses through the deepest valley of the shadow of death and lands us at a table we must share with those who wish us harm. Yet somehow, says the psalmist, when we know we are not alone in all of life s passages, we can dwell in a state of gratitude: my cup runneth over. In the original Hebrew, Rabbi Harold Kushner tells us, goodness and mercy don t just follow us, they actually pursue us they will run after [us] and find [us] wherever [we are]. 2 So, here we are, friends, on this October morning. And the invitation is to come, walk in rain with us, sing a song and share a dream with us. None of us need walk alone, and together we will bring each other hope, bring a song of love, and a rose in the wintertime. Reflection Forgiveness Bill Bowman, Worship Associate The woman who cut me off on the freeway while talking on her cell phone. The guy who parked in the disabled parking spot at the bank without a placard. The person breaking up with his girlfriend in the middle of the locker room at the gym (please, I really didn t want to know that about you, Mister!) The boss who was in a bad mood. The sales person who will NOT leave me alone. The woman who stood me up. Let s face it we ve all met people we ve wanted to confront for their rudeness or inconsideration. Yet in doing so this rarely makes the situation better. In contemplating this, I have come to a better, although far more difficult solution forgiveness. In reading the Dalai Lama, I contemplated this issue and asked myself, How can I manage not to pass the suffering on to others? Swearing at the woman who cut me off, or arguing with the guy without the placard doesn t solve the problem. Their feelings about their behavior will only continue, and they might even feel further justified in what they are doing. I am not helping them or myself by getting upset. I have discovered two things for myself in trying to change that. One is to stay fully present in the moment. This is extremely difficult, yet critical. It is often not that the woman cut me off, but that I bring the experience of all times I ve been cut off to that moment so that the feeling is compounded. When I stay focused in the present, it is becomes easier to deal with. However, since this 2 Harold S. Kushner, The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm (New York: Knopf, 2003).
3 is an unconscious reaction, this is also very hard to moderate. I must turn this into a conscious act, and that helps me better able to cope with the situation. The other aspect is simple forgiveness. I must accept that the other people are no different from me in wanting happiness. If our situations were reversed, how would I want to be treated? If I chose to forgive, I have found that I no longer suffer because of that person s decisions, no matter how inappropriate they might be. I am no longer hurt, and am not passing along their behavior to someone else. Just as we had a pay it forward story a few weeks ago in another service, pay it forward can work for good or bad. The world becomes a better place when we chose not to pass along this behavior, and to alleviate suffering in some small way. We often mistranslate the common term karma in these situations. In Sanskrit, karma literally means action. You can choose to act either positively or negatively in any particular situation, and yes, this is a choice and not necessarily a mere reaction. As a child, I often told my father, But I couldn t help myself. He never bought this answer, which would usually end with my being grounded anyway. As an adult, I now know better or should. In the classical Buddhist philosophy of the Dalai Lama, karma counts not towards better fortune in this life, but the balance of good or bad karma you have chosen determines your fate in the next life. I am doing my very best not to spend my next life as a worm. I m not sure that I can completely believe in this accounting of my life, but I do know that my present life is much more pleasant if I can learn to forgive those around me just a little bit more. You might ask, How can this possibly help when the world is full of suffering? Aren t there bigger issues to be solved? To this I respond, We can t tackle the bigger issues if the small ones are still a problem. In other words, if I can t deal with my bosses bad mood, then I am not equipped to deal with much harder issues, such as at a protest or in a heated debate with someone who vociferously does not agree with my point of view. We must start somewhere, and I believe forgiving each other our small wrongs as a daily spiritual practice might have just the effect to help resolve much thornier universal problems. My own forgiveness work goes on. As I mentioned in a reading a few weeks ago, the Dalai Lama once asked a monk who had been tortured and imprisoned by the Chinese for more than a decade what he feared the most. The monk replied, Hating my captors. I must confess that I am not that monk. I still have many issues to deal with where being more forgiving of those who have hurt me might make my present a bit easier. I find that this is not easy, but every time I m consciously willing to make the decision to forgive, I believe I m able to make this world a better place to live in.
4 Readings and Reflection Psalms 22 and 23: The Path to Forgiveness Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones I am really really working on learning to forgive! one of our congregants writes. How many of us are working on it not quite getting there, but working on it? How many of us feel a little stuck, unable to forgive ourselves or another for some horrible thing? Listen to how the voices among you seem to speak to each other as though in one great lament: I am really really working on learning to forgive! Why is it so hard? How do I live with my past actions that have harmed others or that I feel shame about? How can I let go of the most damaging experience of my life? It s not easy to let go of anger. Yet anger erodes the self. How do I know when I have forgiven? And what if I just can t do it? 3 Research psychologist David McCullough says that we animals have an instinct to forgive. 4 In order to get good things done, we have to cooperate with each other, and to cooperate with each other, we have to be able to forgive each other for our inevitable mistakes. It s a practical thing; some instinct in us knows that we simply have to be able to move on. But in your voices, and in my own life experience, I hear a deeper cry. There is some deeper spiritual meaning to our difficulty with forgiveness, and it has to do with a deep spiritual loneliness, a deep sense of separation that both causes and prolongs our suffering. Right before the great assurance of comfort and companionship that is the Twenty-third Psalm the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want comes the great lament of the Twenty-second Psalm. The reason that ancient texts survive is because they speak to a fundamental human experience we share. Can you hear how Psalm 22 echoes the laments we heard a moment ago in our own voices? My God, my God, why have your forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? 3 These quotations were collected in the all-church survey on our worship themes for 2012-13 and published in FUCSJ s October journal, In Our Own Voices. Available at http://www.sanjoseuu.org/2012%20newsletters/2012-10-03%20ourchurchcircular.pdf. 4 David McCullough, interview with Krista Tippett, On Being. Listen or read the interview at http://www.onbeing.org/program/getting-revenge-and-forgiveness/104.
5 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest... Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help. 5 This cry of despair reminds me of something from my current favorite contemporary source of wisdom: a book called Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed. 6 Sugar is Cheryl Strayed s pseudonym as an advice columnist on TheRumpus.net. Sugar is compassionate to the core; she is also foul-mouthed, irreverent, and wise. I think she must be a Unitarian Universalist. But the exchange of letters I m thinking of are deadly serious. Now, these may be hard to hear for some of us, but hang in there we ll get to the way through together. Dear Sugar, writes a young woman who will sign herself Stuck. She is struggling with her grief over the miscarriage of her baby about a year ago. Most days she can barely get out of bed. My baby had a name, she writes, although some days she can only think daughter, daughter, daughter. Right after the miscarriage, a doctor suggested that it might have been this young woman s fault, because she was carrying extra weight. Now she zigzags through weight loss and weight gain, eating disorders and exercising to excess. The rational part of me understands that if I don t pull myself out of this, I ll do serious damage to myself, she writes. I know this, and yet I just don t care. But then she concludes with her real question: I want to know how to care again. She wants to know how to live, even with what has happened to her. Sugar begins her response by pouring out her compassion, by giving the young woman permission despite what anyone else might be saying or not saying to feel her grief and suffering. I m so sorry... so terribly sorry, Sugar writes. Sugar may be an advice columnist but she is one of the best ministers I know. And then Sugar veers off into a story from her own life, about a time when she was a youth advocate for seventh- and eighth-grade girls in a poor white neighborhood. Sugar s job was to give them unconditional positive regard, to help them out of a downward cycle of poverty, drugs, jail, and despair that surrounded them in their families and the world around them. The girls bring her story after story of abuse and abandonment and grief. And Sugar or rather Cheryl Strayed assures them that it s not OK, the abuse is illegal, she ll call the police and child protective services, and it will stop. But nobody comes, ever, and finally 5 From the Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society. 6 Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (New York: Vintage, 2012).
6 a woman from child protective services tells Cheryl why: the state is so broke that only the calls about children under the age of 12 get priority. Just as Cheryl hangs up the phone, one of the girls walks in with another horrible story. And this time, Cheryl tells the girl it s not OK, and she ll call the police, but she doesn t promise that it will stop. Instead, she tells the girl that the girl herself has to reach. She has to grab for every good thing that [comes] her ways and... to swim [I m cutting out the expletives to swim] away from every bad thing... to run as far as she can in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that is built by her own desire to heal. And that, Sugar says, is what Stuck, the young woman who cannot forgive herself [or that doctor or the simple sad fate that brought on the miscarriage], who cannot get over her grief must do too that is what all of us must do who have ever had anything truly horrible happen to us. We cannot make the horrible thing that has happened to us, or the horrible thing that we did, go away. We cannot fix it or change it through our words or denial, through any form of addiction or distraction we may try. We will not stop grieving, though that grief will surely change. It s just there, Sugar writes, and you have to survive it... You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. My friends, I m not talking about fresh grief. For fresh grief, we need all the space in the world and the assurance that we are not alone. Because that s the truth. We are not alone. Instead, I m talking about the places where we are stuck, unable to see the bridge that our own longing to heal has already built. Look at that place. Even in those places, ask ourselves first, Are we giving ourselves permission to grieve? Are we saying, It is a terrible thing that has happened to us I am so very sorry. And then, can we recognize that in our grief, on some deepest level, there is also a desire to heal? Not to be whole in the old way, but to be whole in the new way, the way that encompasses all of our life story. In Psalm 22, the psalmist feels rejected, emptied out, shriveled up. And then, over the course of a long journey, she manages to reach out, across the bridge of her longing to be well. She promises to connect again with the community, and with that Something More, to turn in the direction of the Good. Only then can she begin to see the promise of more life stretching out in front of her and to praise it. And right at that point, right nestled up to that emerging hope, the editors of the book of Psalms place Psalm 23 another journey, as I said at the beginning of today s service, except that this one begins in green meadows beside life-restoring
7 waters. Then it too crosses through the deepest valley of the shadow of death and lands us at a table with our enemies, with people who wish us harm. What s different in Psalm 23 is that we know, from the beginning, that we are not alone. Listen, it doesn t matter whether we can connect with a sense of God s companionship, as the psalmists do. After all, as Forrest Church put it, God is not God s name but a symbol for that which is present in each and greater than all something that flows through us. As the process theologians put it, God is the name we give for that direction, that lure toward the life-giving and the Good, the desire for healing that I sense coursing through my bloodstream, though I surely don t always follow its lead. The desire that calls to us to reach, and to run toward that bridge... Here, then, is the Twenty-third Psalm, first in the King James Version because, as Rabbi Harold Kushner says, sometimes, no matter what our theology or the accuracy of the translation, we simply crave familiarity : The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and they staff they comfort me. Thou prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thoui anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the day so of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. As I invite the singing bowl to ring, and as the choir takes its place to sing Bobby McFerrin s version of the 23 rd Psalm, I invite you to move into a time of quiet, to reach for whatever is stirring in you, and to know that you are not alone. *Benediction Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones