When the Chalice Burns Low A Sermon by John Parker Manwell The Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church February 22, 2009 Reading by Wendell Berry (Hymnal, #483) When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Sermon Rachel Remen, the pediatrician turned counselor to those living with cancer, tells this story: Josh, a highly skilled cancer surgeon, came to her seeking help because he was depressed. I can barely make myself get out of bed most mornings, he said. I hear the same complaints day after day, I see the same diseases over and over again. I just don t care anymore. I need a new life. Yet, Remen thought to herself, through his extraordinary skill, he had given just that to many hundreds of others. Sometimes, she reflects, new life comes to us simply in seeing our existing lives through new eyes. She therefore suggests to people like Josh that they take time at the end of each day to review their day, and record in a journal the answers to three questions: What surprised me today? What moved me or touched me? And what inspired me? She suggested that to Josh. He was doubtful. But when she reminded him that it would be cheaper than Prozac, he agreed to try. We ll come back to Josh later in the sermon. 1
* * * I know that some of us here today struggle with depression, like Josh. But more of us may be at our wit s end in other ways. Sometimes, as for Wendell Berry, it s our despair for the world we re leaving to our children. Will global warming change their world beyond recognition, bring catastrophe? What about nuclear weapons? Are our efforts for justice really making any difference? Sometimes, as for Wordsworth, it s our realization that we ve become so wrapped up in our material world that we ve lost our connection with the natural beauty all around us. In the text of our anthem this morning, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Our eyes are absorbed by the glitter of celebrity and advertising, and there s always music in our ears. We re caught up in getting and spending, always feeling we need just a little more to keep our lives together. Sometimes, it s just the sheer pace of our lives, as we rush from event to event, as we shuttle our children from lesson to lesson, sport to sport. We can t even relax in the comfort of our homes, for we re occupied with task after task we ve taken on for the groups we belong to, even this church. And sometimes, as with Josh, it s our sheer exhaustion at trying to help more people than we can handle deal with needs which seem more than anyone can handle, with no end, no change in sight. New cases keep coming in even as old ones are closed, and the world seems unaffected by what we do. All too often, it s more than one of these things that press in upon us until we are ready to collapse. We are burned out. Like Wendell Berry, we need the rest and respite of still waters, far from the busy-ness of our days. 2
Our situation may at first seem uniquely a product of our times, but it was seven hundred years ago that the poet Rumi warned, Sit down and listen You are drunk And this is the edge of the roof So it is for us, today, so very often. We feel pushed to the very edge of the roof, if indeed we re not ready to jump of our own accord to escape it all. How can reclaim our dreams, and our very lives? There are no easy answers. Burn-out always confronts us with the challenge of taking a fresh look at our lives. Why are we doing what we re doing? What s most important in our lives? The good news is that if we can find the courage and the discipline to take this fresh look, we ll understand our situation better. Getting in touch with our hearts, we ll be able to put first things first, and drop or turn down things we now see as less important. We ll find ourselves seeing other people with fresh eyes. We ll rediscover the hope that first led us into what we do or where we are. Best of all, we ll realize that we need time and space in our lives so that we can reflect on these things not just when our lives are so far gone that we face burn-out, but every week, maybe every day, maybe even throughout the day in everything we do, so we won t have to cope again with burn-out. It s this spiritual challenge which I want to address this morning. When I feel pushed to my limits by the demands of ministry, I try to remind myself why I do it. Always the answer comes back to me as I recall how thrilled I was by the call to ministry I felt as I first set off to seminary, some twenty years 3
ago. I wanted to grapple with the great questions of religion. I wanted to listen, deeply, to people s stories and their hopes. I wanted to build strong and close religious communities. I recall this excitement, and I feel fresh energy. I realize that it is when I have failed to keep these possibilities foremost, failed to attend to the hopes that bring us together, that I have felt most weary and frustrated. A calling may lead us into a new career, but more often it may lead us to bring new eyes to the work we already do and the life we already live. Not all of us may even think in terms of calling, but all of us can think in terms of longing, the longing of our hearts. What drew us to have children? To take up the work we do, or to keep coming to this church? What dreams called out to us and kept us going? Thomas Kelly, a Quaker philosopher, wrote about the struggle we so often feel to set priorities among the many issues of injustice which surround us. Every social concern, he said, has a foreground and a background. In the foreground is the special task, uniquely illuminated, toward which we feel a special yearning and care. In the background is a second level, or layer, of universal concern for all the multitude of good things that need doing. Toward them all we feel kindly, but we are dismissed from active service in most of them.... We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to. 1 Thus, when we feel overwhelmed by the world s demands, we would do well to ask ourselves, what among them calls uniquely to us? What, for us, as novelist and minister Frederick Buechner once famously asked, is the place where [our] deep gladness and the world s deep hunger meet? It s when we find that place that we feel called. 1 Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Row, 1949), p. 109. 4
Kelly s invitation to listen to our hearts can also help us in sorting out other pressures in our lives, for example those that appeal to our vanity or need for material security or escape. Is that longing we feel for the latest toys from Apple, a fancier SUV or a seductive GPS, really our deepest longing? Or on deeper reflection will we find that the lure of more of whatever the world is pushing upon us is outweighed by a deeper longing for that place of deep gladness in our hearts, as we connect with some small piece of the world s great need? When we truly listen to our hearts, we may realize that we can take joy in helping people, one at a time, even though we can t see any measurable reduction in the world s great suffering. We may resonate with the parable of the person encountered on the beach, throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean. When asked how she could possibly make a difference when the beach was littered with so many starfish, she responded, Made a difference to that one, didn t I? Listening to our hearts can help us sort out even the conflicting demands we may feel right here at Paint Branch. We may wonder, how can we say No when the need is obvious and it s our friends who ask? Folks in my generation may feel it our duty. But it s not our duty to ignore the call of our hearts. Always we ll be happier and more effective, if we listen to our hearts, and respond to the church s many requests with a passionate yes to those things which feed our souls and tap our gifts and sometimes a regretful no to things which feel more like duty than yearning. If all of us do this, the church will work pretty well, for between us all we usually have the time and the gifts that are needed. Listening to our hearts may be new for a lot of us, as it was for Josh. But Josh did not give up. He kept on looking for those things in his daily round which surprised him, touched or moved him, or inspired him. His story continues. * * * 5
Remen tells us that he called her back just a few days later, and he sounded irritated. Rachel, he said, I have done this for three days now and the answer is always the same: Nothing. Nothing and nothing. I don t like to fail at things. Is there a trick to this? I laughed, she writes. Perhaps you are still looking at your life in old ways. Try looking at the people around you as if you were a novelist, a journalist, or maybe a poet. Look for the stories. There was silence. Right, he said, but it was several weeks before he mentioned the journal again in their sessions. When he did, he said that at first, the only thing that might surprise him was that a cancer had grown or shrunk by a few millimeters; the only inspiring thing was that an experimental drug had worked. But eventually, he began to see people who had found their way through great pain and darkness by following a thread of love, people who had sacrificed parts of their bodies to affirm the value of being alive, people who had found ways to triumph over pain, suffering, and even death. She found herself moved. Gradually, he began to notice these things not just at the end of the day, looking back, but as they happened. He found his relationship with his patients changing. Maybe that showed up in my tone of voice.... People seemed to pick up on it because their attitude seemed changed, too. And after a while, I just began talking to people about more than their cancer.... I began talking about what I could see. He spoke of a young woman with ovarian cancer who had undergone major surgery and debilitating chemotherapy. In the midst of a follow-up visit, he said, he saw her as if for the first time, with her two young children around her. Both were well-scrubbed, well-fed and obviously well-loved. Aware of how she was suffering, he found himself deeply moved, and told her what a great mother 6
she was. There is something very strong in you. I think that power could maybe heal you some day, he told her. She smiled at him, and he realized he had never seen her smile before. Thank you, she said. That means a lot to me. Soon he began to ask other patients questions like, What has sustained you, and where do you find your strength? questions he had not been taught to ask at medical school, yet things he now really wanted to hear about. I knew cancer very well, he told Remen, but I did not know people before. Remen writes: He has always been a superb surgeon whose outcome data are remarkable, but in the past few months for the first time people have begun to thank him for their surgery, and some have even given him gifts. He sat in silence for a few minutes, and then he reached into his pocket and brought out a beautiful stethoscope engraved with his name. A patient gave me this, he said, obviously moved. I smiled at him. And what do you do with that, Josh? I asked him. He looked at me, puzzled, for a moment, and then he laughed out loud. I listen to hearts, Rachel, he said. I listen to hearts. Often, Remen concludes, finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. Just so, my message to you this morning is, it can be with us, too, in our struggles with burn-out, as each day we take time to ask ourselves, What surprised me today? What moved me or touched me? What inspired me? It can be that way with us, as we think back to remember what it was that led us into the work we do, as we bring back our early dreams for what we want out of life, or as we remember why it was that we had children or kept coming back to this church. As we begin to listen in these ways to our own hearts, we will find ourselves listening to the hearts of others. With fresh eyes we will see our lives differently, see others differently, see our world anew. We will find ourselves rearranging our priorities and living more intentionally. The pall of burn-out will 7
begin to lift, and we ll be able to step back from the edge into the mainsteam of life and love. May we find a place of still waters in our lives, in the landscape we inhabit and, yes, a place we carry with us in our very souls, a place to which we can turn as we may reflect each day on the call of our hearts and the dreams that illumine our lives. May we listen, and may we follow, as we now live from the call of our hearts. Benediction (Richard S. Kimball, Hymn #83, adapted) May the winds that trouble our hearts be still. May our storm clouds pass and silence come, May peace grace our lives with harmony. Fly, bird of hope, and shine, light of love And in calm may we find tranquility. May it be so for all of us. 8