Sermon
March 11, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
– Mary Oliver
A Jewish sage once said:
Keep two truths in separate pockets always, and take them out as needed: In the first, ‘For my sake the world was created;’ and in the second, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’
I wonder, where are we…where are you…in balancing these two?
Which note do you need to start taking out more often?
Here’s a good one on humility by the media mogul Ted Turner, who said:
I only had a little humility, I would be perfect.
We’re talking today about the spiritual practice of Humility. These words from the Jewish sage keep us from falling into extremes.
I’m often worried about the kind of calls for humility that only speak from the “dust and ashes” note. Too often, especially from pulpits like this one, people – especially women – are told that their suffering is their goodness, that they should stay quiet, stay low, stay out of the way… This is not the kind of humility we are talking about.
Again, a Jewish source of wisdom: Rabbi Susan Lippe says not to think of humility as being a doormat…but being a threshold. A threshold allows doors to open…allows people to come and go. Humility is the openness of learning, listening, inviting in, making space.
The symbol of a threshold is also interesting to me because it is grounded. She didn’t say humility is the door or the doorway – it’s the threshold. It’s on the ground…which resonates with the etymology of “humility” : humus…ground.
Also: human, humane, humanitarian, humor. To be human is to be connected to our fellow humans and grounded in the humus. “I am but dust and ashes.”
So humility requires a certain groundedness.
That’s the first of three aspects of humility I’d like to talk about.
Humility requires groundedness. Like a skyscraper that can only reach so high if it has a strong foundation. Like a tree that can only extend its branches further if its roots are strong.
If we are not grounded – then any gust of the wind sends us flailing. Any praise puffs us up, only to have the next criticism send us crashing down. We can be proud and still have humility because we are grounded in something deeper and stronger than the ebb and flow of the world’s praise and criticism, of life’s fortune and adversity.
Where does that groundedness come from?
GROUNDED IN OUR INHERENT WORTH & DIGNITY
…From a deep sense of our own inherent worth and dignity – alongside everyone else’s inherent worth and dignity.
Fr. Rick Lopez has spoken here a few times, and I’ve seen the ways he ministers, and I love that his mantra he repeats everywhere he goes is: “You are beautiful. You are loved.”
Maybe some of you have one of the cards he hands out with those words on it. He gave me a huge stack, and I now hand them out, too. Because I think this message is life-saving, for everyone – the lowly, the lonely, the proud, even the hateful. You are beautiful. You are loved. What a revolution of humanity if we each knew this about ourselves and then could treat each other likewise.
So how do we come to know this…our own inherent worth and dignity?
I’ll talk about three ways.
1: One way is through relationship…through those kinds of relationships and communities where we can keep coming back, mistake after mistake, repair after repair, and receive (and give) unconditional love.
2: Some know their inherent worth and dignity through the experience of a loving God, or a benevolent universe. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says:
People who have really met the Holy are always humble. … They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
He’s speaking here, too, of awe:
3: Regardless of whether you are a theist, I do believe the spiritual experience of awe is available to all of us.
Paradoxically, when we sit before something awe-inspiring: whether it be a moment in nature, or an experience of the interconnectedness of life, or an awareness of the expanse of the universe…these moments of awe humble us, and – paradoxically – they communicate to us our own inherent worth and dignity.
Because we are there witnessing it. We are woven into it.
We see this paradox in Mary Oliver’s poem I read to you earlier (see top). At one point, she humbles us, almost harshly:
Tell me about despair. Yours. And I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.
… I am but dust and ashes!
But then she ends it with:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you …over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Awe helps us see life as a gift.
…For my sake the world was created!
So this groundedness in our own inherent worth and dignity is essential to the spiritual practice of humility.
KNOWING OUR LIMITATIONS
Like the tree that is rooted in the ground, humility is also about knowing our limitations. The tree cannot get up and walk across the field. It cannot become a turtle.
I wonder if the river ever despairs of its downward destiny,
and harbors a secret desire to flow uphill.
I wonder if winter yearns to be summer,
or if a flower wishes it could bloom out of season.
I wonder if silence would like to shout,
or if the sky wants to fall down and become the earth.
…
I wonder if the mountains envy the valleys,
or if snow secretly covets the warmth of June.
…
I wonder if spring really likes growing,
or if fall rages against its colorful dying.
I wonder if the world ever sighs after more than it is—
like you and I, like you and I.
– Burton Carley (excerpted)
This point of limitations is connected to the first point of inherent worth and dignity…because part of knowing our inherent worth and dignity is loving ourselves as we are, and in the world we live & die in.
Of course we can always grow and learn, but we have some basic limitations.
This morning I’ll lift up just one limitation – the limits of our reason. One time, Melissa Harris-Perry, the Princeton professor, then MSNBC TV host, who is also a UU spoke to us her fellow UUs at our annual Ware lecture. She warned us of the limitations of reason. She said:
Our commitment to reason, rationality, and evidence can become a kind of cynical self-righteousness. We can easily make ourselves feel superior…because we have an analytic lens … But reason without faith can also paralyze. …For faith is a practice of intellectual humility: a habit that reminds us of our own limitations…”
Humility is about accepting that we have more to learn, that we may be wrong in some cases, and that some things we need to learn will not come through reason or strategy. …Perhaps instead through love, or trust, or faith.
The writer George Saunders also critiqued the human reliance on reason, saying:
..we are coming to believe that our minds are entirely sufficient to understand the universe in its entirety. This means a shrinking respect for mystery – religion vanishing as a meaningful part of our lives (or being used, in its fundamentalist forms, to beat back mystery, rather than engage in it).
GRATITUDE
Finally, the third aspect of humility is gratitude. And here is a harsh poem on gratitude that puts us quite in our place:
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this, …
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
– Margaret Atwood
Like Mary Oliver telling us “the world goes on” amidst our despair, Margaret Atwood also has a certain harshness here. And yet, like Mary Oliver she also closes with an assurance: “It was always the other way round”
…in other words, we are found. We belong. We are woven into the family of things, and life itself is a gift. Gratitude and humility are the responses.
So there it is: we live a life of limitations. Limited by our minds, by our bodies, by chance, by death. And yet this life is also an awe-inspiring gift. A gift that assures us we belong in the family of things.
You are but dust and ashes.
For your sake the world was created.
-Emily Wright-Magoon