by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given June 17, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

In a classic short story by James Thurber, we meet a man named Walter Mitty, a man whose life inside of his head is a lot more adventurous than the life he leads on the outside.

The story begins with the dramatic account of the crew of a Navy hydroplane in the midst of an oncoming hurricane. The crew has given up, they have decided there is nothing that can be done to save them. But commander Mitty tells them to move full speed ahead and they do. They are brought to safety and Commander Mitty is proclaimed a hero.

This fanfare is broken by the voice of Walter Mitty’s wife yelling, “Not so fast, not so fast. You’re driving too fast!” Her voice startles Walter Mitty. He looks at his wife in the seat next to him with shocked astonishment. She seems grossly familiar, like someone who yelled at him across a crowd. As she tells him that she doesn’t like it when he drives over forty miles per hour, he is reminded that he is in the car with his wife into town for errands. The action from the Navy plane fades in his mind and he is left silent.

In this story, Walter Mitty only travels a few blocks in his car and on foot to drop off his wife, pick up a couple things and then to meet his wife again. But in the midst of this he finds himself going by a hospital and being called into duty because he is the only surgeon who can save the prominent patient on the operating table. Later he is the daring witness in a criminal trial who steps in to defend a woman’s honor. He saves the day.

Finally, he meets his wife again, only to have her tell him more things that are wrong with him. She goes into a store for a few minutes, and in the end, Walter Mitty is standing against a building, he has a cigarette in his mouth, he closes his eyes, stands up straight up and finally is ready to face the firing squad like a hero should be ready to do.

It is in his imagination that Walter Mitty is able to live. His life on the outside doesn’t look all that happy, but the one on the inside is just fine.

Each of us, I think, has an ongoing conversation going on inside of our heads. They may not be as dramatic as Walter Mitty’s, but it is something all of us have. They bring together our dramatic moments, our biggest fears, our fantasies, even the things in life that are pretty boring. But together the running dialogue is something that helps us to make sense of the world. It is a way we try to figure out how it is we fit into the scheme of things.

The dialogue likely brings together voices to represent the roles in which we find ourselves in life. Mother, father, son, daughter, retiree, worker, boss, teacher, student, friend—you get the picture. Sometimes the various roles we are in may not work entirely well together, and we find ourselves needing to try to work it all out.

And the roles are not only those we are actually in but all those roles we cast ourselves in. It is no wonder why movies are so popular. If we can’t find adventure in our own lives, they give us lots to imagine ourselves doing. We see ourselves on the screen and therefore can imagine our own lives being larger than life. We imagine the impact we are having on the world and what the future may look like thanks to our lives. And the reality is that it is not always what we might hope it will be.

One day, a doctor is taking his preschooler to daycare. He had left his stethoscope on the car seat, and the little girl picked it up and began playing with it.

"Be still, my heart," thought the doctor, "my daughter wants to follow in my footsteps!" He thought of her one day there in the hospital helping patients just like he did. His heart swelled.

Then the child spoke into the instrument, "Welcome to McDonald's. May I take your order?"

What is happening inside our heads, of course, is not always what is happening on the outside. What we have is an ongoing dialogue where our thoughts get pulled in all kinds of directions. Imagine what it would be like to see that conversation up on a big screen. Just imagine how intriguing it could be—and also how incredibly boring it could be at times. The things we get fixated on are not always the sexiest things in the world. Sometimes what we have is just what we have to help us make a little better sense of things.

In my head there are many members of what the writer Robert Fulghum calls the committee. The committee is the sum total of the voices he finds going on in his head. He says they are the odds makers who say things like, “If you rob a bank, it’s ten to one that the FBI will get you, and you will end up in jail for a long time.” The committee, collectively, helps us figure out what it is we need to do. They seem to keep things in check.

I can think of a number of voices that pop up in my head depending upon the day and the mood that I’m in.

There is the critic, the part of me that is able to look at just about anyone or anything and identify something that is wrong. This one comes out particularly at times when I’m not in a very good mood.

Luckily, just when the critic is about to say something out loud, there is another voice that says, if you do that you will probably get punched in the face.

And it may be that an even more caring voice comes in. This is the one that says to remember to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It says, before you get so critical, remember that you’re not always so hot yourself.

Then there is the perfectionist voice. The one that has very high expectations of self. Particularly when I’m doing work on my house, this one sounds a little like Martha Stewart. It is not OK to just have a tan color when I could come up with Nantucket autumn tan, that says instead of simple pot of vegetable soup I should really try the recipe for Roasted New Zealand Baby Vegetable Soup with hand-cut, oven roasted organic whole wheat crackers.

It is probably good that at about this point the voice that says, “you’ve got to be kidding” speaks up and reminds me of the importance of laughing at myself. Sometimes we need to not take what we are hearing or thinking too seriously.

This is especially true when my pessimistic side comes out. The world is awful, I decide and there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it. I had a housemate in seminary and we were both inclined in this direction. We could, particularly in times of stress, come to see the world in not such a favorable light. But we started to notice this tendency in ourselves and found a way to catch ourselves when this was happening. When we saw the other getting pessimistic, before the sentence was finished the other would break in and say, “and just remember, you’re going to die homeless and penniless and nobody is going to come to your funeral.”

Each one of us has our internal dialogues, and the voices that assemble to form our committee are uniquely ours. And it is our way of trying to make sense of the world. We all have our unique sets of challenges, those things we wrestle with and those things that make us who we are.

This is the place where our ideas flow. We each have a public life, who we are in the outside world, we have our private life, the one we live with the people closest to us, and then there is the secret world that only we inhabit. It is this world that no one else will ever fully know, no matter how well they know us.

And it is in this place where we are the most ourselves. It is the place where we hold our deepest fears, where we hold the feelings for the people most important to us. Where we hold those experiences, conscious and unconscious, which give our lives meaning and purpose.

At the core of life is a mystery we are constantly called to understand and discover. We look at our lives, we get insights, we come to see how our lives intersect with the lives of others.

In seminary, I took a class with a Unitarian Universalist minister named Jeremy Taylor. He has committed his life to the study of dreams and how we can work together to understand what they mean for us and how they can help us to understand our lives. He says there is no such thing as a bad dream. There may be things that are very difficult and ugly, but that all dreams come in the service of health and wholeness. If we are remembering our dreams, no matter what they are, then we must be in a place to look at what they are saying and examine them.

And it is not only our own dreams that we learn from. One of the great lessons from his class was that each of us could learn a great deal just by hearing and interpreting what someone else’s dream means for us.

One of the most important rules he teaches is that you don’t say outright what you think a person’s dream meant for them. It is ultimately only the dreamer who can say what meaning they have found in their dreams. You have to frame your interpretation through your own set of lenses. So, if I have a hit on your dream I say, if it were my dream, this is what it would mean for me.

It is fascinating to see what happens, to see what people come up with, to see what our committee is saying today. When a dreamer has an insight into what the dream means, it is called an a-ha experience.

Jeremy Taylor tells the story of a man studying for the ministry who came to him some years ago, interested in the dream class. The student said that he thought Taylor should know that he had tried all kinds of things to help him remember his dreams and that none of them had worked. He knew that everyone was supposed to be able to remember their dreams but he was pretty sure that he could not. Taylor didn’t pay too much attention to this. He thought that being in the class environment and being intentional about remembering dreams, the man would be able to remember.

So the man enrolled in the dream class. He was the model student, arriving on time, and quite articulate in giving his interpretation on the dreams of other people. But for himself, he was not coming up with any dreams. He was pretty distant. This started to be a concern for Taylor the teacher, because there was something very important about sharing your dreams and putting yourself at the center of the class. It is important for the process of the group for everyone to take turns sharing their dreams and having their dreams be the thing the class collectively looks at and see what a-has happen for the group. It is not something that happens in isolation.

So Taylor started to hassle the student about his lack of dreams. He pushed him to remember anything he could. He started to ask him what he remembered as we woke up. He asked him to try to remember anything at all. He even got to the point of asking the man to just make up a dream. He did this thinking that even when we make things up, there is something happening in the subconscious that might be there for interpretation.

But the student was not able to do any of this. He didn’t even want to make anything up. He said that felt like he was cheating. The class was sitting there, and Taylor was wondering what to do next. At this point the student suddenly says that while they were talking he had a curious thought: “Maybe there were some pastel colors in my dreams last night.”

Taylor writes: “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe pastel colors!’ I’ve heard some skinny dream fragments in my time, but his one is definitely the skinniest!”

Taylor writes he didn’t think anything could come of such a thing. But on the other hand, he also knew it was the first thing the group had had to go on the whole semester. He and others in the class struggled for questions to ask to try to unpack the dream fragment. But none of the questions seemed to lead anywhere at all and after some time the group started to feel pretty frustrated.

Finally, one of the members of the class asked the question, “Do you think there is any connection between the word pastel and the word pastoral?” The student made a funny face, which Taylor recognized as an a-ha look. There was something in the questions that had connected. The man said that yes, there in fact was an association with the question. But then he said he did not want to share it.

The class put a little pressure on and he finally said, “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you! When you asked me that question, I had the a-ha that everybody’s been talking about all semester, and my a-ha is that my commitment to the ‘pastoral life’ is distinctly pastel….I’m in seminary not because I really want to be a minister the way I’d always thought I wanted to be, but because I am fulfilling the expectations of my parents.”

It seemed that even connecting to such a fragment had been a turning point for the man. He was on a path that would, at the end of that year, mean that he left seminary to pursue other things that he eventually proved to be very successful at.

It seems that no matter what it is that is happening in our lives, there is much to pay attention to, much to listen to, much to wrestle with. The signs may not be obvious, but if we are able to listen, sometimes with a little help, we may be able to figure them out.

In our lives we do this all the time, in conscious ways and in not-so-conscious ways. It is all part of the conversation we have going on inside of us. And it is a conversation that connects us with others. We find that our story is not only our story, that we are part of a larger story. As we come to understand our dreams, as we come to know what it is we are thinking about and why, we become more fully ourselves, are more fully alive in the world.

Voice still and small, deep inside all,

I hear you call, singing.

In storm and rain, sorrow and pain,

still we’ll remain, singing.

In your dreams and in your waking life, may you know your voice. May it help you know who you are and what your purpose is in this life. May you bring that voice into the world, singing. Amen.

Prayer

Spirit of life, we give thanks for all it is we have been given. For friends and family, for the earth and the fertile ground we find ourselves planted in. We give thanks for fathers. May we know all we can of our lives, and may we be at peace with all we do not yet know. May our imagination flourish. May it help us to vision a world we have not been able to see before. We ask this in the name of all that is good, and sacred. Amen.

Benediction

May the song inside you ring with a rich harmony. May the song you bring into the world be strong and clear. May you be filled, in all of your days, with the awareness that you are loved beyond measure. Amen.