Currents

The Illuminators: Fear

I know you’re afraid, because I’m afraid, too. And it isn’t just my childhood terror of spiders, or even the post-partum response I had to my first child being born when I used to get up in the middle of the night and check all the locks on all the doors. It’s more fundamental than that, more persuasive and more pervasive. One of my heroes, Father Gregory Boyle, says that we all live steeped in fear, and so our response to life is to scramble for people to like us, agree with us, or be intimidated by us. We think this will hold off the fear, and keep the pain from overwhelming us – whatever that pain is that seems to be on its way.

The drive to have everyone like us, agree with us, or be intimidated by us causes spiritual atrophy, and it causes more fear. Michael Singer, writer of The Untethered Soul asks us “how long have you been hiding in there, struggling to keep it all together?” He says we’ve build a protective model around ourselves, psyches so complex and awkward that they resemble stone fortresses we’re all carrying around with us. When I meet you and shake your hand, in this modern era, in this modern country, with all of our glib words and fast choices, I have to reach my hand out through walls as thick and dark as the Middle Ages themselves, and you do the same to reach back toward me. This is what we’ve built to protect ourselves from what we fear, from the pain we fear, from how fragile we are when everything we do is based on making sure we are approved by others, and have all the things we’ve ever been told we should want. “How long have you been hiding in there, struggling to keep it all together? Any time anything goes wrong in the protective model you built around yourself, you defend and rationalize in order to get it back together. Your mind does not stop struggling until you’ve processed the event or somehow made it go away. People feel their very existence is as stake, and they will fight and argue until they get control back….There is no peace and there is no winning in that struggle…..If you continue to cling to what you built, you will have to continually and perpetually defend yourself (134).”

The Buddhist path urges renunciation.  I resisted this path hard and fast for a very very long time. I clung (exactly!) to the argument that since I already had children when I became ready to face fear that I could not follow a spiritual practice that asked me to let go of my attachments and my passions, since my most passionate attachments were all wrapped up in parenthood. Nope. Not for me.  But then I went on pilgrimage, not choosing the trip for the place, but for the practice; the practice of letting go of all my roles, of others expectations of me, of my expectations of myself, of all my little addictions and routines and all the things I was sure I could not be ME without, including a child clinging to each leg. I actually felt depressed, sad, like I was witnessing my own death, but then that passed, and I found that, having let go of having a very particular ME, I was free to be myself for the first time since…well, I don’t know how long it had been. Perhaps I met me on pilgrimage for the very first time. And the best part is that there was nothing to fear. No particular me to uphold and defend, and nothing to fear. Now I listen to the call of renunciation with different ears. Chögyam Trungpa wrote, “renunciation means overcoming that very hard, tough, aggressive mentality which wards off any gentleness that might come into our hearts. Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us. When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality. We feel it. That contact is genuine, fresh and quite raw…..[and we begin to give away, and to stop indulging in pleasure for entertainment’s sake.] We are going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous babysitters in the phenomenal world.”

There is tremendous pressure to believe that these “babysitters in the phenomenal world” are the source of the good life, and will keep us from pain and ease our fears. Tremendous pressure to believe that we are in control, or could be, and that if we procure the right partner, career, car, house and college education for our children (or ourselves) that we will have the answers and be protected, be safe. That if we are physically attractive, drink the right drink, eat at the right restaurant, have enough friends, vacation often enough, have enough money in the bank…. This path toward safety, which includes making sure that others approve of us, agree with us, or are intimidated by us and what we have, this path beckons from every corner of America. And, it is a lie. If you embrace reality, if you embrace all the illuminators we’ve been talking about – that which is meek and mild, even awkward and overly polite, if you embrace our vulnerable bodies and all our illnesses and disabilities, if you embrace how short our lives really are, and what a blessing those short lives really are, and then take in the diversity of pain and hope in this world and every sacred story created from that hope and pain – then you know that fear teaches us the greatest thing of all: that we are not in control. Never were, and never will be. You are not in control. And the source of life, the ground of our being, is not ourselves, nor our corporations, nor anything else we can create with money or natural resources. And life is not here to make you comfortable, and other people aren’t either, so let go.

Let go, and no matter what happens, have fun anyway.

The opposite of fear is not happiness, it’s delight.

The illumination is that we are afraid whenever we have a false Source. Believe in whatever source you choose – the collective unconscious, the Spirit of Life, the well-spring of love that guides what’s best in humanity, our Buddha nature, Great Spirit, God. As long as your source is bigger than you or what you can buy or sell or otherwise accumulate, as long as you cannot write it down on a resume, then it will lead you out of the tricks of your own psyche and away from fear. When we are unafraid, delight enters our lives, and we focus on the person in front of us, the project in front of us, the natural world in which we live – our hearts are expansive, we are full and capable and passionate on behalf of others, and it comes easily

What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself-the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?

Something else-something else entirely

holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life-courteous and intelligent-
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul-your own, no one else's-
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hands for yours
more than my own. – Mary Oliver

 

This is the 99% BatSignal. It’s part of a public art and social protest movement that I became aware of months after I watched the tents from Occupy Maine go up and then come down in Portland. The name of the van that the artists and activists drive around so that they can project signals like this one is called The Illuminator, and these young people are the inspiration for this entire worship theme. One of them, Mark Read, was raised by folks in this congregation.

Here’s what I think about what we’re doing here – here in church and here on the planet, and James Carse explains all of this best, and in the language I’m going to use, in his book The Religious Case Against Belief: There is religion. There just is. People can’t live without it, or at least, we never have. Religion is about the big questions human beings can’t answer. Your religion can be practiced anywhere – in the pews, on the mat, in your studio, in your weekly meeting, in the car on the way to hockey practice with your kid - because religion has no beginning and no end. Religion is interested in and holds the space for paradox, it is unresolved, it exposes our deepest self-contradictions and so demands that we keep our hearts open no matter what hurts or how much, or even if we feel so full of delight and awe and mystery that we don’t think we can take anymore. As Carse says, religion belongs to the poets, it belongs to the artists – because continuing to ask questions that have no definitive answer is often “much more disturbing than…comforting or amusing…the recognition that our boundaries are merely arbitrary can be deeply unsettling (p. 207).” Back to Father Greg, who says, from his Christian perspective, “so we walk into a room and try to figure out how to get the gathered to like us, agree with us, or be intimidated by us. I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it in fact…making a beeline for the outcasts, chooses them, and chooses in them to go where love has not yet arrived (Tattoos on the Heart, p.155).”  All our boundaries are arbitrary. We. Made. Them. Up. And that is how we learn, if we are truly faithful: Build up our constructs, learn from them, tear them down again, take a step forward. Never stop. Never ever stop. That’s religion.

This is religion. This is poetry. This is delightful. I see no answers here, I see and hear a multitude of questions:  Why are the wealthiest 1% of Americans in control of 40% of America’s wealth? And what are they doing with it?!  Because, suburban poverty is now higher than urban poverty, mothers and fathers on welfare get $21 a WEEK per child for food stamps, 1 in 4 children in the US live in poverty, and in Portland 22.5% of students in elementary school don’t have enough food at home to ensure their success in school. Where is the love, is a question I see here. Why are we so afraid, is another one. Hungry children in America – that’s not about lack of resources. That’s about fear. This (BAT SIGNAL) is an invitation to a conversation – one that never stops, one that is and will be deeply unsettling, one that will lead not to answers, but to deeper and deeper questions. Along the way, fear will be replaced by love. This is religion.

What we’ve got a whole lot of in our culture is not religion, it’s belief. Belief is all about boundaries. You answer questions, you figure out very quickly who agrees with you and who does not, make your circle, create your us and them, and then defend your new little empire of “truth” at all costs. The conversation is over, there will be no more questions, the decisions have been made, the fighting to keep control of the floor of debate begins. Fear runs rampant. Delight disappears. We don’t even know what that means anymore….

I know you’re afraid, because I’m afraid, too. I know that if I engage in the real conversation, if I admit I have no answers, but only question after question, after question, and if I admit that I delight in these questions, that I’ve given up having anything to defend, then that makes me vulnerable. Exposed. It means that I’m telling you the truth about myself and I’ve created a space where you’re going to tell me the truth about you, and either one may make me uncomfortable, may bring us both pain. But I find that I care enough to try, and I care enough to fail. I’m pretty sure that no matter how afraid I am I can learn to love you, and our problems, and our questions, again and again and again, but I’m not sure I can live blockaded behind structures of belief and judgement and some sort of exclusive truth that is so brittle I have to use all my energy defending it. I have a sneaking suspicion that the powers that be are keeping me in line this way, using my fear, and so I’ve decided to be an artist, and a poet, and a Unitarian Universalist; I have decided to perceive all my failures as successes, because at least I tried. And most importantly, I am becoming myself, and making space for others to do the same – that fresh, raw, tender contact, just slightly tinged with sadness, that opens and nourishes the heart, and is the genuine gift we have to offer one another. The intimacy we are afraid of, the same intimacy that takes fear away.

We do not become healers.
We came as healers. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become storytellers.
We came as carriers of the stories
we and our ancestors actually lived. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become artists. We came as artists. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not become writers.. dancers.. musicians.. helpers.. peacemakers. We came as such. We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.

We do not learn to love in this sense. We came as Love. We are Love. Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are. – Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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[i] [i] I am grateful for the many sources of inspiration for this sermon, and paraphrase and quote liberally from some books you should really read, namely:

Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle

The ReligiousCase Against Belief by James P.Carse

The UntetheredSoul by Michael A. Singer

 

And thanks to Stew Guernsey for lots on renunciation, including  http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/candy.html

and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: "The ground of fearlessness and the basis of overcoming doubt and wrong belief is to develop renunciation. Renunciation here means overcoming that very hard, tough, aggressive mentality which wards off any gentleness that might come into our hearts. Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us. When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality. We feel it. That contact is genuine, fresh, and quite raw. That sensitivity is the basic experience of warriorship, and it is the key to developing fearless renunciation."

"For the warrior, renunciation is ... giving away, or not indulging in, pleasure for entertainment’s sake. We are going to kick out any preoccupations provided by the miscellaneous babysitters in the phenomenal world."

Our Call to Worship came from Michael Leunig, care of Sarah Witte:

there are only two feelings, love and fear:
there are only two languages, love and fear:
there are only two activities, love and fear:
There are only two motives, two procedures,
two frameworks, two results, love and fear,
love and fear.

 

http://www.leunig.com.au/index.php/poems

 

As for The Illuminator, and poverty in America, check out these links:

http://theilluminator.org/videos
http://thelinemovie.com/