by Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given October 5, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

We come together this morning to remind one another

To rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives,

To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,

Until we claim for ourselves

Awareness and gratitude,

Taking the time to look into one another’s faces

And see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.

This house of laughter and silence, memory and hope,

Is hallowed by our presence together.

--Rev. Kathleen McTigue

I have never run a marathon myself. My idea of exercise is a jog for a couple of miles early in the morning. Although, to say that I am a jogger may be stretching the point a bit—generally the speed walker leaves me in her dust. But my brother has run marathons. I saw him once during college at about the twenty-mile point of a marathon. Pain and dehydration marked his face in deep lines, and he labored for every step. He wanted to do well in the race and ran the first twenty miles faster than he had planned to. Now, keeping going at all seemed to be an insurmountable task. The courage he showed to finish the race that day brought me to tears, and I walked him for several blocks at the end of the run to keep his legs from cramping up. Where in himself he found the courage to keep going those last few miles, I still don’t know.

That’s the question I am asking this morning. How do we keep going when we are spent? Where does the courage come from when we need it most? Where can we find or renew our faith in ourselves or in our world so that we can step once more into the challenges that we face? The answer, I believe, comes from our lives as they are. Each of us has a unique story to tell about finding faith in times adversity.

For most of us, keeping on with our lives goes pretty smoothly when our energy is at its peak. When we have yesterday’s momentum boosting us forward into today and tomorrow, we can and do keep going. When we have a purpose before us that calls us deeply and engages our passion and creativity, we have no trouble getting up in the morning. When we establish a healthy rhythm of meaningful work and personal renewal, we find that we are able to keep the pace of our run day in and day out.

But sometimes it’s not so easy to keep going. Sometimes world events leave us dejected or afraid about our future and our children’s future. Sometimes depression sets in, and the energy to take that next step drains from us. Sometimes we push and push in our daily activities until we eventually begin to wonder through our exhaustion why it is that we keep pushing. For all of us, at one time or another, it’s hard to keep on keeping on. Yet, I believe that by pushing through danger and darkness we rediscover faith and rebuild courage.

Many of us turn in similar directions for renewal. For some, music, like Mozart’s powerful “Jupiter” symphony, recently played by the Portland Symphony, renews our courage to confront the social ills and political abuses of our time. For some a Sunday dinner with family reconnects hearts, giving courage to face another week of work. In our Emerson class I was struck by how many people find renewal of their faith in the sacred settings of nature. You may be familiar with Wendell Berry’s words,

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests

in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come to the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace

of the world, and am free.

There are these ways common to many of us by which we rediscover our ability to move ahead. But I would invite us to look deeper as well. What can we learn about our faith from the trials we have endured and the personal storms that we have weathered? What can we learn about our courage from our own life stories?

When I was practicing medicine, my patients were frequently my teachers. One woman, a friend and assistant to the Chicago Seven, came to me about ten years after a devastating automobile accident. Her spinal cord was torn so high that she was essentially quadriplegic. She came to interview me, to see if I had what it took to be her personal physician. “What do you need to know about me,” I asked. She wanted to know that I was caring and competent and that I did not take myself too seriously. But more importantly she wanted me to know my place: in support of her decisions. I then turned the tables: “What do I need to know about you,” I asked. She said, simply and frankly, “My life began with the accident. I am who I am because of the accident. It was one of the hardest gifts I ever received. But don’t you dare pity me!” Somehow this woman, this Mother Courage, could participate in that sacred alchemy that transforms adversity to faith, that turns crisis into healing.

May I share with you parts of my own faith story? It would take a long, long walk or an unhurried campfire to tell all the times when I had to find the courage to keep going. But here’s a start.

I was a summer-time summit guide on Mt. Rainier at age 18. It was June, and we were on the second day of our ascent. We were a small party of six—two rope-teams, two guides. Roped to me were a middle-aged minister and a boy of fourteen, neither with much climbing experience.

The storm hit suddenly. A cloud-cap, whirling like a hurricane, came down upon us. We were caught in a driving ice storm, and our tracks were obliterated almost at once. The two rope teams were separated, and I was lost on the top of Rainier, responsible for two lives in addition to my own. I was reminded of the words of the Sherpa Tensing who first climbed Everest with Hillary: “How to get down?”

So dense was the storm that we could not see our feet, and I had to feel the way ahead with the probing of my ice axe, as a blind person sees the curb of the street with her cane. We traversed downward back and forth for hours, trying to find a sign of the route in the dense fog. We struggled against the flying needles of ice, trying not to fall into a crevasse or step off an ice cliff. Any slip would be the end of all three of us. At one point I realized how unlikely it was that we would survive the ordeal. We were cold and worn out. In my befuddled condition, giving up seemed a viable solution. My courage to keep going was nearly gone. We sat in a huddle for a bit of rest and a drink of water. I withdrew into my own thoughts.

“Okay, God. If you exist, this would be a good time to let me know.” Silence. “Okay, if you exist, I am assuming that you can hear me.” Silence. “Then again, you might not want to say anything right now.” Silence. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. If you exist and if you can help us get through this alive, especially these other two, you’ve got me. I’m yours for life.” Silence. “What, no response?” Silence.

It was the prayer of a deeply agnostic adolescent. But it was a prayer, nonetheless. I had even bargained for these three lives with the Life Spirit that I had no confidence existed at all. But, you know, the strange thing is—I had some courage again. I got up and shook the others to alertness, and we started going again. Half an hour later I stumbled…into the boot-beaten snow path above Camp Muir. Oh, wonderful deliverance. I thanked God then as if God really did exist, and really did listen, and really did help us in our times of trial.

You’d think that after an experience like that I’d have become a true believer, turning back to my Presbyterian roots rather than moving on into Quakerism, Eastern Religions, and Unitarian Universalism. Heck, you’d think, with a contract like that with God, I’d have entered the Roman Catholic priesthood. For a while I felt that connection with deity, that faith in the mysterious will of God, in an almost tangible way, but it faded. I could remember the incident, but that warm rush of connection and gratitude was in the past. Faith remains strong only with renewal.

My courage to keep going has been tested many other times in my life, and each time there seems to be a new lesson of Spirit, a new dimension of faith. I was twenty-one when I married for the first time. She was a wonderful person, but we were way to young to make that life-commitment. When we broke up six years later, it became clear that our incompatibilities easily outweighed our similarities. The leaving was her idea, but the problems of the relationship belonged to both of us. Over the months that followed, I spiraled down into a deeper and deeper funk. My prayers encountered only silence. My life was the deep pain of losing her. What courage? The storm of my emotions caused me to huddle down, to withdraw. Again, I felt like giving up.

In a sense, I did give up, and I took an unusual step forward in my healing. I gave up my medical work for a while. I moved away from my circle of friends for a while. I gave up the Northwest for a while, and I moved to an international spiritual community in Switzerland. It was my internship in Eastern religions.

Here’s the irony. In my Presbyterian youth, I thought that the silence I felt following my God-directed prayer was a non-answer—evidence, in fact, that there wasn’t anyone or anything listening at all. But, during the years I spent in deep meditation, under the guidance of a yogic guru, I came to realize that silence was itself the answer. A shift took place in my heart and mind from the sense of silence as emptiness to an experience of silence as vibrant fullness. I believe that the silence was the same, but the intention I brought to the silence during meditation was new. Now instead of looking for the absence I intended to encounter the presence. I think that the words of Jesus of Nazareth reflect this quality of intention in prayer:

“Seek and you will find.

Ask and it will be given to you.

Knock and the door will be opened.”

According to the teachings of the ancient scriptures of India, the purity of silence is as close to deity as human beings like us ever get. The name of one of the greatest of sages, Shankara, means “silence” in the Sanskrit language. This is mirrored in the medieval Christian mystics, like Bishop and heretic Meister Eckhardt, who taught that the experience of silence is that part of divinity that we as human beings can almost touch. I am reminded, as we come this evening into the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, of the Hebrew scripture that says: “Be still, and know that I am, G_d.”

We chuckle when we say, “Children should be seen but not heard.” My mother tricked her six active children to be quiet with a game, called a “lull.” Everyone had to try to be as silent as possible for as long as possible. Oddly, it worked! It was a great ploy, worthy of the Mothers’ Hall of Fame. But in the ashram I encountered a whole different relationship with silence. It was the stuff of life itself, the essence of spirit, the sound of Being. This was the way that deity spoke to me, from deep within myself. Nor did I have to wait for some revelation or epiphany to hit me on the head because that deep silence was as close as my next meditation. 

The silence within did its healing work, and when I returned to the busy world of medicine, family, and friends in Seattle, I knew that my faith in the Spirit of Life was strong. And I knew that renewal was as close to me as my own inner life. With daily meditation I have begun to build an enduring faith foundation that is not far off when I feel my courage failing. The unraveling of my confidence now only goes so far before I feel that centering place of Self or Soul or Spirit.

The courage to keep going. This was never so strongly tested as when I was in my last years of medical leadership and practice. My career had been successful and involving, but by 1998 I was really running into a wall. The time allowed for client visits was getting less and less, and the expectations among patients for expensive, highly technical services was increasing, taking more and more resources away from primary care and preventive medicine. Efforts toward health care reform at the national level had ended up just being a bad dream.

I remember a moment in ‘98 when my courage to keep going in the healthcare work was all gone. I was sitting in the waiting area of the Gastroenterology offices, waiting to convince the specialty group about an evidence-based approach to colon cancer prevention. A manager from clinical computing had seen me and was grilling me on the specifications of a proposed Radiology computer system. My mind shut down and I felt an intense pain in my left side—that only abated later when I found a moment alone in my car. It was only a spasm of intestine due to the stress I was facing, but the message was clear. Make a change. Make a change.

Sometimes the courage to go on means listening to the life as it is, telling the truth to ourselves that our life is not working. Sometimes the courage to go on will only be there when we find something that’s worth going on for.

This was for me a new way of hearing Spirit, listening to the pattern of my life with honesty. Parker Palmer, the Quaker leader and educator, has a wonderful book, Let Your Life Speak. Palmer suggests that if we just listen to our lives we will be able to figure out what path we must take to find the faith to keep going. I believe that this is what the scriptural, “Thy will be done,” is all about. For some of us, Palmer says, we can feel this movement of Spirit as our way opens in front of us. But the more powerful listening to Spirit for me comes with the truthful noticing of what is no longer working. It is the way closing behind me that suggests the trajectory of where I must go now. As soon as I began to tell myself the truth about those things that had stopped me in my tracks that afternoon in 1998, there was a new opening.

I could be with people in a pastoral way. I could bring my skills in group facilitation to support personal and spiritual growth. I could learn to shift my experience in healthcare organizations toward supporting healthy congregations. It was the shape of my life itself, the honest truth of it, that told me I had to be a minister.

That’s how I get to be with you here this morning. And I am grateful for the opportunity to tell you a little about me, not only because it connects us more closely, but also because by sharing with you I am reminded of my own faith and courage. This is what I invite you to. Recall and share those episodes of adversity, how you kept going, and how your faith grew.  For you are a unique and wonderful person in all the world, and in the honesty of your life story, there also is your faith.

PRAYER

Will you pray with me.  Holy One, sometimes our courage falters, and it is hard even to keep going forward at all.  When we are in our times of trial, O God, help us to find our faith again.  Help us to look deeply within ourselves, and to listen to the honesty of our lives as they are.  Help us find renewal and a fresh start so that we may once again feel the vitality, the courage and the faith to live our lives fully and abundantly.  Amen.

READING

“Faith” by David Whyte

I want to write about faith,

About the way the moon rises over cold snow

Night after night,

Faithful even in its fading from fullness,

Slowly becoming that last, curving and impossible sliver of light

Before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.

I do not give it the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,

Like a new moon, slender and barely open,

Be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

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Copyright 2003, Bruce Davis.  All rights reserved.