(Sings)
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times.
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times.
That base line repeats over and over, insisting that the invitation extended by the melody…Come, come, whoever you are…
Insisting that you don’t have to be perfect. Come.
But even saying that you don’t have to be perfect doesn’t quite capture the meaning here.
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times…(though you come after a thousand repentences…that’s another translation from the original Persian…)
It is not that you are welcome IF you happen to have screwed up…once or twice…occasionally disappointed yourself or those you love, fallen short of your parents’ expectations or your childrens’…that one time… long ago…
The Sufi poet, Rumi, whose words this song uses…Rumi’s message is that failure, broken promises…that’s each of us and all of us…again and again…a thousand times. It is the human condition. It is who we are.
Martin Buber described humans as the “promise making, … promise breaking and promise renewing” species. Always having to come back from failure.
Rumi proclaims a radical hospitality…Come, come, whoever you are…
But he also points to our capacity to harm and the truth of our moral frailty…our IM-perfection.
We all know how often we fall short…even though we are reluctant to name it and claim it…
We know that? Right?
What may not be clear is that our shortcomings…our repeated failures pose one of the fundamental challenges to our liberal religious theology.
Our theology says that each of us has inherent worth and dignity. Built-in. There is nothing we have to do to earn it. We are already lovable and already loved. Just as we are.
Come, come, whoever you are.
Our theology is the melody line.
But at the human level…in practice…we set standards and make promises…we have aspirations…we strive to get it right…
We want to be perfect…or we believe that we ought to be perfect…or that we ought to be able to be perfect…perfection should be within our range.
And if we aren’t perfect…or close to it…well, that’s our fault and should be a source of our shame. If we are not perfect…or close to it…that needs to be hidden.
Our theology is the melody line…Come, Come…and we love it.
But we embrace that insistent, repeated base line…though you’ve broken your vows…we embrace that with reluctance. Mostly…we just don’t sing it.
How do we hold both the reality of our failures and a faith in our lovability…?
How do we hold them both?
As an inventor, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention that required 1,000 steps.”
Reframing like that is one approach.
Pema Chodron is a Buddhist nun, author and spiritual guide for many. Some of you know her work. Her recent book is entitled, “fail, fail again, fail better.”
She tells of meeting with the Buddhist founder of Naropa University in Colorado:
“When I sat down in front of him, he asked, ‘How is your meditation?’
I said, ‘Fine.’
And then we just started talking, superficial chatter, until he stood up and said, ‘It was very nice to meet you,’ and started walking me to the door…
…realizing the interview was over, I just blurted out my whole story:
‘My life is over.
I have hit the bottom.
I don’t know what to do.
Please help me.’”
The President’s response was to talk of walking into the ocean and being knocked down by the waves and pressed down by the water.
You have a choice. You can lie there or you can stand.
Chodron goes on: “So basically, you rise up, because the ‘lying there’ choice equals dying.
But as you move, the waves keep coming and knocking you down. You find yourself at the bottom with sand in your nose … over and over….
‘… the waves keep coming,’ the President said. ‘And you keep cultivating your courage … and sense of humor… and you keep getting up and going forward.’
This was his advice.”
You keep getting up and renewing your intentions, your commitments…renewing your vows…but without expectation that the waves will stop…that’s not going to happen…or that you won’t fall again…because you will…
You keep renewing your vows…without expectation of ease or invincibility. Certainly without expectation of perfection.
Perhaps it is the nature of our vows, the content of our promises that needs to shift.
My father died when I was young…7 years old…and my mother raised me as a single Mom. I have a few memories of Dad that I think are actually mine, but a lot of things I believe…or believed about my father were things my mother told me….
Here is the story about my father that I took in.
He was brilliant. Phi Beta Kappa. Spoke 7 seven languages. Harvard Graduate School. Nearly a photographic memory.
I remember my mother, who was no slouch, saying that she didn’t have to think for herself because he knew everything already. We could take a whole morning working on that one. (Smiles)
It was a tough image for me to be compared to.
There is more.
When Mother and Dad moved west…to pass as white and get away from racism, they hoped…Dad finished law school in two years, driving a cab at night to pay the bills…straight A’s…sailed right through.
“He was so smart, he didn’t have to work for it,” my mother told me. “Not like you, Billy. You will have to work for what you earn.”
Here is what I internalized:
Your father was perfect…or near perfect. You, Billy, are good but you are not at his level. Oh, you are smart enough, but you can’t afford to make mistakes. As a person of color you have to work harder anyway. You really are going to have to work in order to succeed.
And so I did.
But that striving for perfection. And that fear of falling short lives in me to this day.
And the ability to forgive myself? It is one of the hardest things I do. I should just have worked harder…like my mother said…don’t you know.
That 7 year old listening to his mother tell stories of his father…that 7 year old still lives in me.
As I grew up and grew older, mother shared more and more of the reality of my father. His gambling. His disempowerment of her. His failures. That perfect record in law school…there were a lot of B’s and C’s on his transcript when I finally saw it.
What messages were you given as a child? Were they about how good and strong and capable you are. Or were they more complicated than that?
Those messages are most often heavily gendered. Race and affluence have a major impact as well.
There are so many different messages we internalize about ourselves and about the world…so many messages that make it hard for any of us to trust that we are truly worthy…messages that make it so hard to believe that we are good enough…messages that make it hard to trust in the love that our Universalism promises us is real…the love that we want to believe in and to feel.
It is those judgments about our worth that are so difficult to live with or to live out of.
Those judgments.
Rosh Hashanah begins this evening. New Year in the Jewish tradition. The time when God opens both the Book of Life and the Book of Death and judges…determines in which book our name is to be inscribed. A time of judgment…each year…and the shofar blast from the ram’s horn is a wakeup call to pay attention and make amends.
Because Rosh Hashanah is only the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days. The New Year ushers in ten days of repentence, called the Days of Awe.
During these days, we get a second chance…a chance to repair damage we have done. An opportunity to beg for and to grant forgiveness for our failures, for the harm we have been done and for the harm we have caused.
In the Jewish tradition, the judgment of Rosh Hashanah is not sealed until we have had the chance to repent, not sealed until Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
The great wisdom here is that we need that wakeup call every year…its not one and done…we keep on making mistakes and falling short and harming one another.
Each year, we need the opportunity to begin again in love. Because our mistakes are not fatal if we attend to them, acknowledge them and learn from them.
That regular practice of finding forgiveness for our failings is important, without doubt.
Pema Chodron, however, goes further, goes beyond forgiveness in response to our failures.
She sees the space of failure as the locus and the genesis of creativity and authenticity and connection.
She speaks of coming to know the space of failure so well…being a kind of pro at failure…so that she no long just shuts down but becomes more aware.
Here is her language:
“…I can tell you that it is out of this space [of failure] that real genuine communication with other people starts to happen…because it is a wide-open, unguarded space…where you can go beyond the blaming yourself or blaming others and just feel the bleedingness of it.”
The hurting of it. And not shy away from that or shut that down.
Out of that space can sometimes come addictions and aggressions…violence to self or others. She acknowledges that.
“And yet,” she writes “…it is in that space, when we are not masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away…out of that same space of vulnerability and rawness and the feeling of failure…come our best human qualities of bravery, kindness and the impulse to reach out to one another.”
Out of that same space of failure and pain.
Rebecca Parker speaks of the place of limit…when we have reached the end of our rope…as the place where hope is found and love is felt.
And I don’t know. Much of me still resists. I don’t want suffering to be required for salvation. I don’t want creativity to require that we crash.
And yet, I believe as much as I believe anything that what we need today is more authenticity, to know the truth of the pain we have caused… whether that is in the personal space or in our society.
I believe that the fragile egos built on greed and power and privilege that have been in charge…that are in charge today… point us only to disaster.
It is the authenticity that Breanna brought in her testimony, the telling of the truth about her life…
That is the place of hope for us.
Even though we’ve broken our vows a thousand times.
Rumi was a kind of rock star in 13th century Persia…what we now know as Turkey and Syria. (He still is in certain circles. The tomb where he is buried is still one of the most visited religious sites in the world.)
He planned his own funeral celebration. There was music and dancing. The dervishes, whom he had inspired, were there twirling toward ecstatic union with the divine.
The Quran was recited of course. Rumi was a devout Muslim throughout his life.
But he also invited Jewish Rabbi’s to sing the psalms. And Christian priests to read from the Gospels.
It must have been quite a party, an interfaith extravaganza. All those seekers…following different paths.
Can we be in that space? That space of knowing that there are many ways to know the holy, the spirit of life…the spirit of each of our lives.
And can we create a space where the truth of our lives…the whole truth…can be a resource and an inspiration for our living…even in these difficult days?
Can we promise to create a space where the truth of our lives can help hope to survive…despite all the evidence to the contrary?
Come, come whoever you are.
…though we’ve broken our vows a thousand times…
Come.
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Great mystery that invites us to come as we are. God of our hurts and of our hopes.
We have been given life. Much of living is trying to answer the question of what to do with that life.
May we, here in this space, promise each other not perfection,
But presence.
May we not deny the harm we can do, but may we also celebrate the love we can share.
May our promises inspire us and our failures not become sources of punishment.
May we live forgiven and forgiving.
And may the spirit that moves here, help us bring all that we are to the altar of hope we create and sustain here…so that we do not break the circle of love.
Amen.
Topics: Radical Hospitality & Welcome