Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”
During the 7 game run to win the playoffs against the Yankees last year, players and fans alike were exhausted by the long games and the intensity. I speak as a fan when I say that there was something wonderful about being caught up in the excitement – our baseball players taking games into historic extra innings, flying back and forth from New York to Boston with no time to sleep. I don’t remember who, but when one of the Sox was asked if it was all too much, his reply was, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
One of the memories that has remained implanted in my brain from those days and nights was the sound of Zorba the Greek which they play to incite the crowd.
(Sound of Zorba)
That music is more than just catchy – it is a melodic and seductive invitation to join into the dance of the moment. Forget your worries, yesterday’s griefs and tomorrow’s deadlines – join in – move and celebrate….. whoever chose to make that music a part of every baseball experience knew what they were doing…
Zorba the Greek has become a virtually universal symbol for being alive: he is the poster child for our capacity to experience life deeply. I was fifteen when Zorba was first released and I remember it as the first time I realized or thought about the difference between just living and really being alive. That was a bit of a revelation. But there was more to it than that. The story of Zorba the Greek wasn’t about being on a roll and feeling good because your team was winning and everything was going your way. It was one in which his dreams crashed and burned and relationships failed and life could be very hard. And yet, in the midst of all of it, Zorba would be present enough to savor and taste his food, and he would dance – he would dance even when the sky was falling. He didn’t give control over his life over to circumstances. Whether circumstances were kind or unkind, Zorba celebrated living.
Now, if you saw the movie you also know that the actual Zorba was an extreme character and was, himself, probably hard to live with – I want to be real here - I’m not suggesting that we need to literally dance at the moment of our greatest grief. But his character caught the public imagination today and still lives in the public imagination because he symbolizes something true and useful.
To have an “inner Zorba” is to be empowered. Your inner Zorba is that life force inside you that refuses to let go of life when you are being buffeted by hardships, small or large. I think it’s rather automatic that when life deals us blows we protect ourselves by caring less about life. Zorba says, “No, you don’t have to do that! You shouldn’t! Above all, hold on to your love of life throughout this storm. Hold on. It’s important!
I was in someone’s home recently – and I forget whose, where there was a framed proverb on the wall which had boiled this into a nutshell: “Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional,” and that’s part of it. A small paycheck doesn’t actually make the sky less blue. You don’t have to give up one because of the other. No one can take away our ability to love life – we are in control of this and it is up to us whether we give it away. Deriving pleasure from life is a skill – our peace and joy aren’t rooted in circumstances - We have more control than that. We can have joy and crushing pain at the same time; we can have peace of mind in the midst of toil and strife.
____________________________________________________________________There is a well-known Chassidic story that conveys this … Three Rabbis were in a hurry to reach their destination before sunset on the Sabbath, riding through a dark and dreary woods when they heard the sound of a child singing. They beheld the amazing sight of a young boy, dressed in rags – filthy, malnourished – dancing and singing at the top of his lungs. Astonished, one of the rabbis said:
“Young boy – why are you so
joyful?”
“Because I’m lost in the woods!” the boy answered at the top of his lungs –
still singing and dancing.
“Why are you dancing?” asked another.
“Because I’m hungry and scared!” was reply.
Now, as you can imagine, the rabbis were very confused. Surely, any normal child who was lost and hungry in the woods would not be singing for joy but crying out in fear.
The young boy turned to the three esteemed rabbis and said: “My teachers, I have been lost in these woods for three days now – without food, braving the cold, the robbers and the wild animals. For the first two days I was very scared. I cried out in hunger and fear. And then, this morning, I woke up and thought to myself: ‘I’m hungry, I’m cold and I’m scared. But the fact that I can feel my hunger, my discomfort and my fear means that I can see, feel and participate in the world around me. What a gift! God created me with the ability to feel hunger, fear and pain – and it works. What a miracle. I’m alive!’”
And he started to dance and sing all over again.
The three rabbis looked at one another and realized that this was no ordinary boy. They took him back to the city where, as he grew older, he became an exceptional student and teacher – the story tells us that this man is the one who later became renown as Rabbi Nachman – the great Chassidic master.
This may not seem to make sense that we can remain open to experience wonder, joy and even serenity at the same time that we are being seared with the deep, inevitable pain. When I think of this seemingly contradictory condition, I am reminded of a very painful moment in my life: this was the moment that I learned that the Reverend Elizabeth Tarbox, the previous minister here and my mentor, whom I loved deeply, was ill with an incurable cancer. Commitments had caused me to arrive a day late to a district clergy retreat. I had missed Elizabeth’s visit to the retreat the day before in which she shared her sad news with everyone in person.
Knowing my special relationship with Elizabeth, I was taken aside and privately given the devastating news. Reeling, instead of participating in the workshops, I took a walk along the rocky sunswept shoreline outside. The deep pain I was in made me hypersensitive to the awesome beauty – the ocean, the gulls crying out overhead, the waves breaking on the rocks… I wanted to shut is all out, disappear into my own grief – in some ways the sky was falling - but there was the knowledge within me that Elizabeth fed on this beauty, Elizabeth taught that being awake to it is our calling, and to close down to it now would be a betrayal of my own soul. No. That was one moment of grief where I decided that I would give myself room to hurt but I would not shut down – I could go to sleep to life’s beauty when I’m dead – not now. This is a story I tell because it teaches us something simple and vital. Life is a gift. Even when we suffer – even when we question - even when we are afraid – the fact that we are here together for the time we have is nothing short of miraculous.
British psychologist Havelock Ellis wrote, “Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.” Adversity is unavoidable.
But you may say to yourself – “I don’t know how to do that. What was in Zorba’s nature isn’t in mine.” Reserved and open in different ways – we won’t dance like Zorba – he was a character – the spirit of is openness is what I’m pointing to – we can express our openness to life in different ways.
Why is that true for so many of us? Part of our problem, I think is that too often, secretly, we buy into the idea that we deserve the catastrophes that befall us. Zorba didn’t punish himself for his own pain. We tend to. When troubles knock us over and take our breath away that, many of us secretly, maybe even unconsciously, believe that it is all our fault, or that we deserve our lot even if we don’t.
The root of some of this might be Christian teachings that trace human suffering back to original sin. And then there is the teaching that is found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and New Age teachings, the doctrine of karma that says suffering is a result of our own actions in a previous life. I don’t buy it.
ญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญญThere is a Mary Oliver poem that begins:
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
I can imagine Zorba doing that Greek dance with Mary Oliver!
__________________________________________________________________
Pain is inevitable but misery is optional. The importance of this nugget of wisdom can’t be underestimated.
If you’ve been known me or listened to me preach over many years you know some about my mother. She was an extraordinarily good and kind human being and a great and positive influence on my in many ways. But the reason this message is so important to me, and the truth of it so clear, is that my mother is one who got stuck in her own misery. When her husband, my father, the love of her life died when she was in her 30’s and she was left alone, she slid into alcoholism, drowning her pain. She held her misery tight, rejecting life, for the rest of her days.
Henry Miller wrote: "Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such."
We mustn’t fight our pain. We need to learn to accept it and be with it. But we need to learn to let go of our misery. There are a hundred miracles a day that we miss when we are holed up internally holding on to our unhappiness because getting over it would open us up to the possibility of new life, but with it the inevitability of new hurt.
Understanding the universality of suffering and accepting it is our challenge. Unitarian Universalist minister Edward Frost says, “To achieve equanimity – acceptance of what is – in the face of illness, loss… is… the greatest gift of the spiritual journey.’
The gift, of course, that it opens us up to living more fully and deeply.
This religion of ours, Unitarian Universalism, ought to lead to joyful living. The great end of religious education, says the great Unitarian William Ellery Channing, is to "awaken the soul." What does that mean?
The awakened soul describes not a narrowing of experience surrounded by "thou shalt not" proscriptions, but manifests in an expansion of our ability to respond to love and loss, the full range of life with wonder, serenity, and joy. _________________________________________________________________
In his book, Wild at Heart,
John Eldredge quotes writer, Gil Bailie:
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come
alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come
alive."