1 Daring Greatly: Vulnerability, Risk and Forgiveness Reverend Kent Hemmen Saleska UU Church of Minnetonka August 23, 2015 First Reading: Excerpt from Citizenship in a Republic Speech given by President Theodore Roosevelt Delivered at that Sorbonne in Paris, France, April 23, 1910 It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly Second Reading from the book: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and lead By Brene Brown Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection. When we spend our lives waiting until we re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make.
2 Daring Greatly: Vulnerability, Risk and Forgiveness Reverend Kent Hemmen Saleska This fall will bring many changes to our congregational life. The Ingathering Water Ceremony will be next Sunday, prior to Labor Day weekend and two weeks earlier than usual. In order to help build energy and prepare for moving to a new building next year, this fall we are returning to one service. As part of that move, we ll be initiating lifespan First Hour religious education programming an hour before each service. Sometime in spring we hope to break ground for the new building this congregation has been working toward for the past ten years. At its worst, these changes can bring about feelings of great anxiety and frustration and a loss of how things used to be. We could decide to turn on each other and blame each other if things don t go exactly the way each of us, separately, want things to go. We could behave as the critic in the speech President Theodore Roosevelt gave and be the one who points out how the strong [person] stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. On the other hand, we could enter into the coming year with a spirit of adventure. We could enter this year as though we are getting into a canoe at the beginning of a trip in the boundary waters, or like the way we feel when the car is all packed and we just leave our driveway to head out on a cross-country road trip. In that context, we enter into the unknown ahead with a spirit of adventure and risk, and we tend to give our traveling companions a little grace. We ve done all the planning we can reasonably do: we ve given the car a tune-up, filled the tank with gas, packed all the food, the tent, the paddles, the equipment and bug spray. But we know we can t know everything we can t predict the weather or know if we ll drive over a nail or if we ll turn down a dead-end road or get caught in a backwater where the only safe and viable option is to backtrack five miles back the way we came. Engaging in changes takes risk. It takes courage. It takes a willingness to do things differently than were ever done before. And it takes a willingness to make mistakes, offer grace and forgiveness, and to understand that the mistakes and forgiveness are part of the learning and growth it takes to create community. We create community not by liking everything everyone does, or doing everything that everyone else wants us to do, but by working together, finding our truths, and being willing to sit at the table and stay at the table listening honestly to the truths other people share. This is how it worked in our efforts to make same-sex marriage legal in Minnesota, this is how it works in the Black Lives Matter movement, and this is how it works for us too as we move through our changes. In this way, the next words of President Teddy Roosevelt resonate strongly when he says that, The credit belongs to the [person] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends [themselves] in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if [they fail], at least fails while daring greatly I have to admit something though. During this sermon on vulnerability, when I m attempting to share the growth and vitality that comes from taking risks, of being vulnerable and daring greatly, I feel compelled to confess something to you. I ve had a full week, including a
3 board retreat Friday evening and all day Saturday, and the closer it got to this morning, the more I didn t want to write anything. The closer it got to Sunday, the more my resistance grew. You see, I want to be a good preacher and I want to be a good minister to you. And in this context, good means that the stories I share are deep and profound and transformative, and that you to leave any service where I preach inspired, and shaking your heads in amazement at my creativity, the depth of my insight, and the power of my preaching. I want to touch each of you, each and every Sunday, at the deepest level of your being, whether you are atheist, pagan, humanist, theist, Buddhist, mystic or agnostic. And when I feel I am not able to give you that level of profound preaching, I am not a good minister, because anything less than that means I am a failure. Sometimes I feel as though I am living in that joke where the guy wakes up on a Sunday morning and says to his wife, I don t want to go to church. It s too early in the morning, nobody likes me, and the sermons are boring. And the wife says in response, Oh stop complaining. It s not that bad. Nobody hates you and besides, you re the minister, you have to go! When we are feeling scared and vulnerable, it is so easy to do what John Lennon and Paul McCartney said, to hide your love away. You can easily feel that hiding away your love and vulnerability is natural. In fact, you might even call it being healthy. Now in some cases that s true, because I am NOT saying that if you ever feel threatened by someone that you should just open yourself up to them anyway. In those instances of abuse and cruelty, whether physical, verbal or emotional, it makes the most sense and it IS healthy to be savvy and aware, and to make sure you find ways to keep yourself safe. But part of our human task, especially as people of good will, and especially as people of good will who say we want to live in a welcoming and beloved community, is to cultivate ways we may remove some of our acquired defenses and share with one another the deeper and more intimate parts of our lives. Why? You might ask. Why is it part of our human or religious task to open ourselves first to our self and then to others? Because at the very bottom we get to feeling alone and isolated. We get to feeling we are the only one who feels the way we do, the feelings of failure, incompetence or stupidity. And we move into feelings of shame because we haven t yet found a way around or through those feelings of isolation, failure, incompetence or stupidity. Being vulnerable is what helps us to see the humanity in another person. One thing that helps me write each week and get up each Sunday morning and come to church is that I know each person has their own deep fears and feelings of shame. I know I m not the only one struggling. Now, I may not know what your challenge is. You may never have even talked to me about what it is you struggle with. And most likely, whatever it is that you struggle with is going to be different from what I struggle with. But I approach each Sunday trusting that someone in the congregation is hurting from something. In 2005, in the fall after I graduated from seminary, I began work nearby here in St. Louis Park as a Chaplain Resident at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital. I was with four other chaplains from four other faith traditions, and together we were in the one-year program in Clinical Pastoral Education, or what we refer to in shorthand as CPE. Essentially, the process of that program involved putting our hearts on a table while our colleagues and supervisor picked through our deepest resistance and fear, then exposed our fears and pain, and in the end, gave us the tools to sit down and talk with our own fear and pain rather than be held captive by our fear and pain.
4 While we were there, all the employees had to park a short distance away in a parking lot, and then we would take a shuttle to the hospital. At the beginning of the year I remember sitting on that shuttle and feeling incredibly insignificant, even stupid. Here I was, every day, sitting in the midst of this busload of nurses and doctors and social workers and anesthesiologists who were saving people s lives every day, and for the most part fixing them and sending them home better. And there I was, doing what? Just talking about what people believed? But through that year I learned that the other chaplains and I were the only ones in the hospital whose job it was to sit in the midst of people s pain without running away or attempting to fix it. We were the ones who remained in the room after the doctor left; we were the ones who sat with the patients and their families as they grappled with a new diagnosis of a terminal illness; we were the ones who had the time to sit with the patients who were in the hospital in the aftermath of yet one more alcoholic binge. And it wasn t only the patients. Throughout the course of the year I slowly got to talk with and know some of the nurses and doctors and social workers and anesthesiologists, and every once in a while these brilliant and successful people who were saving lives every single day would share with me some little piece of their life: how one had lost a parent and wondered how they d make it through the world without them; how another was fearful of the bad decisions they saw their children making and wondered if they had ever been a good parent; how another struggled with their weight and body image and wondered if they could ever be loved. By the end of the year, every day when I rode that shuttle bus to and from the parking lot, I began to see not monolithic one-dimensional heroes on a pedestal, but full, three-dimensional, whole and loveable people who not had just as many fears and feelings of incompetence as I did. And not only that, I began to see in myself the strengths and capacities I never knew I had or perhaps just never trusted them very much. This is what I see when I look out from this pulpit each Sunday morning. I see people who are amazing people who guide others through legal mazes, who help others get the right insurance, who help people get fed, the loud ones who make others laugh, the quiet ones who help others find calmness, the ones who help save lives, the ones who create, who push paper, who teach, who inspire, who raise children or look after parents or take care of animals. And I see imperfect people, people with shame, regret, pain and fear. I see people, not in spite of but because of their imperfection, who are more full, whole, loveable people. A short time ago the spiritual writer Anne Lamott wrote, The truth is, everyone worth his or her salt all your very best people feel broken, stunned, overwhelmed and defection some of the time [So what I want and need] to hear [is for] someone remind me that if I want to have loving feelings, I need to do loving things. I want someone to make me laugh about our shared humanity and cuckooness; I want someone to remind me that laughter is carbonated holiness I just want to hear that I m loved and chosen and welcome, no matter what a mess I ve made of things, or how defective I still feel sometimes. * * * This is one of the great opportunities our church offers every day, every year! No matter what mess someone makes, we have the chance here in our communal spiritual practice of approaching one another with good will to offer grace and forgiveness. We have the opportunity to laugh about our shared humanity. And we have the chance, each time we are together, to remind one another that if we want to have loving feelings, we need to do loving things.
5 In her book, Daring Greatly, the title which she gets from the 1910 speech given by President Theodore Roosevelt, Brene Brown says: Vulnerability is not weakness and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection. When we spend our lives waiting until we re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make. The process of change, the process of transformation, sometimes takes a while, and as hard as it is, it requires risk, patience, grace and forgiveness. Certainly we need it from others if we are to grow in community, but the transformation is deeper and more lasting when we find a way to give ourselves patience and grace in the first place. It is important to remember, though, that to take risks in the first place requires trust or at least a trust that trust will grow. When we offer a space for failure, that helps us grow in our ability to take risks and helps us grow in our capacity to trust one another. Uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose. We may have weakness, but we are not our weakness. We may have brokenness, but we are not our brokenness. This year we will have an abundance of opportunity to take risks, to share where we feel weak or broken, to grow in trust, and to practice forgiveness, and to dare greatly. In the process we will clarify our common purpose by engaging in a spiritual practice of vulnerability. You are not alone. We are not alone. This congregation, this sanctuary, is our shuttle bus on the way to great fulfilling risk, and we are in this together.