Sermonizing
I had this whole idea for a sermon this summer, that was about salvation in a UU context and accepting that you are loved and when I went for a walk with dpolicar to try to refine it into something that might fit in fifteen minutes, he recalled my "swimming lessons" story/metaphor and suggested that I focus on that. And when I shared my title and theme at a meeting of the summer worship leaders, another of them offered me a poem to use as a reading.
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
free fall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
When I was a teenager, I helped out at the local pool’s summer swimming lessons. The instructor for the youngest kids, just learning to float, would tell the little ones “Just relax and let the water support you.” Some of the kids would cheerfully try, but others would grip the gutter with white hands, convinced that this lady was trying to drown them. Their thoughts were clear on their faces: Let the water support me? Are you kidding? Relax? How can I relax when I’m going to die?
But ask yourself, if someone asked you how to float, what would you say? Could you explain it more clearly than “Relax and let the water support you”? What if someone asks you how to live?
We have a lot of answers--sometimes too many. The Old Testament gave us Ten Commandments. Buddha gave us the EIghtfold Path. Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Shakespeare told us “To thine own self be true.” Most of the explanations sound so simple, but as the Indigo Girls say, “Hardest to learn is the least complicated.”
Finding love is one of the central pursuits of our lives and one of the hardest to explain. When will I be loved? is a question I’ve been asked many times. And the answer is simple: when you love yourself enough to believe someone else can love you and you find the person who accepts you as the person that you are. It’s that easy, right? And if you tell this to someone struggling with self-acceptance and yearning for love, they will probably look at you like the kid clinging to the edge of the pool. How can I relax when I’m going to die?
Recently I was talking with a new father and he asked why parents don’t talk about how hard it is. I told him that there were three answers to this: #1 is that we do talk about it, but non-parents tend to find parenting talk boring, because #2 much of it won’t make really make sense until you’re doing it and #3 we don’t want to scare you unnecessarily. Being a new parent is hard, but it’s do-able and most people who undertake it find it worthwhile. I try to limit my own advice to new parents to the things I think may surprise them, knowing that my words will not be fully understood until the moment when they are relevant, when the new parent thinks “Oh! This is what she was talking about. I’m not the only person to feel this way. She made it through this and so will I.”
Sometimes that moment of revelation is so clear. We talk--well, here at First Parish we’re not always comfortable with this language, but as human beings we use the metaphor of “vision”. Suddenly we see our way clearly, we do not merely understand: we know. Have you ever cooked a turkey by relying on the little popper thing? It may not be the best method, but it works ok. The thing is, there’s quite a while when the skin is retracting from it and the popper is kind of bulging outward and we ask “Is that it? Is that what they mean by popped?” And then it pops and there can be no doubt: once you see it, you know that this is what “popped’ looks like. When something we’ve been told suddenly pops, when we know for sure what we’ve only heard before--that’s a great feeling.
Of course, what is impenetrable without the proper context often passes quickly through profundity into inanity. Or, as my sister’s yearbook quote has it: Profound is a firm grasp of the obvious. “Relax and let the water support you,” may sound crazy before you learn to float. But in the moment that you’re doing it, it can explode in your consciousness like the answer to all of life’s mysteries. And then you grab people who know how, who’ve been trying to teach you and you say “I just relax and let the water support me! I get it now!” And they look at you with compassion and indulgence and say “Yes, dear. That’s it.” And then the next lesson begins.
When I was in college, I met a guy who was a big fan of the writings of Krishnamurti. For those of you unfamiliar with his teachings, he was a boy from India raised by members of the Theosophical Society to be the World Teacher, a leader who would discover and share the path to enlightenment. As an adult he rejected this role, though he did continue to write and teach throughout his lifetime. Buckey would read to me the passages he found most relevant and profound and I, sophomore that I was, would complain that these teachings seemed obvious to me, that I already knew them. Buckey said something then that has stuck with me ever since. That’s what scripture is, he explained, it’s that which tells you what you already know, but tend to forget.
As Unitarian Universalists, we tend not to believe in easy answers. While many of us find a central text that speaks to us more deeply than others, where the answers it has to offer make sense to our lived experience and our hopes for the future, we do not collectively accept any one text as definitive. Rather than adopting a set of beliefs, we adhere to a set of guiding principles which we trust will help us to recognize truth when and where we find it.
Each year we send our high school seniors off with a book of quotations, readings, prayers and poems shared by their parents and the people of First Parish whom they have named as playing an important role in their lives. We share our personal scriptures, the passages in which we have recognized important truths that sometimes we forget, in the hope that these will speak to the youth, as well. But we leave at least half of those books blank because we understand that they will find their own answers, their own scriptures.
Now, some kids, you throw in the water and they instinctively know how to float. There are things we understand without knowing that we know. And we tend to overlook those things. It’s easy for me, we say, it’s nothing. Those are often the most important things that we do, without realizing it, and some of the hardest to teach. We can tell the steps we take, the decisions we make, the what of the moment, but the how is harder.
Potato salad has been much in the news lately. In case you haven’t heard, a guy put up a Kickstarter asking for $10 to fund his first attempt at potato salad. The last time I looked he’d received pledges for more than fifty thousand dollars. He’s got a lot of potato salad to make. But it will never be as good as my mother’s. And no matter how many times I’ve watched her do it, no matter how careful the notes I take, mine never tastes quite like hers. She can’t explain what she does that makes it so good. And if you asked her for her major life accomplishments, I’m guessing that her potato salad would never even make the list.
Many of us have been lucky enough to have great teachers along our paths. The ones who have helped us to see clearly how to move our skills forward, the ones that have inspired us with their example and been able to break it down for us, to give us hope of one day achieving the effortlessness that belies their years of practice. Here at First Parish we have a wealth of mentors in the art of living. Raising my daughter here, knowing that she’ll grow up following in the footsteps of the amazing young adults here, within the embrace of this community often feels like the single best parenting choice I’ve made. One of the things I realized I was missing only when I found it was to have before me the example of women older than myself, those I could look to and think “I want to grow up to be like her”. I’ve learned great lessons here about how to parent, how to survive cancer with integrity, how to undertake great changes in life, how to weather adversity, how to speak uncomfortable truths, how to work for justice, how to face death with grace. I haven’t needed all these lessons yet, but I’m listening.
Sometimes we learn from the words of our mentors, and sometimes from those who teach only by example. In American Gods, a couple of Neil Gaiman’s characters pass the time with coin tricks.
"Coin tricks is it?" asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. "Why, if it's coin tricks we're doing, watch this."
He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadow's empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty.
"There," he said. "That's a coin trick for you."
Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. "I need to know how you did it."
"I did it," said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, "with panache and style”
Because, in the end, we learn by doing. About thirty years ago, a guy named Noel Burch developed “The Four Stages of Learning Any New Skill,” also called Maslow’s Four Stages of Competence, because someone thought it sounded like something that psychologist Abraham Maslow would have said. The four stages are:
Unconscious Incompetence: that’s when you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t see that there is a skill you are lacking that it would be useful for you to know.
Conscious Incompetence: this is the stage where you figure out what you don’t know, that you would like to learn and you begin to figure out how much effort it will take to learn.
Conscious Competence: at this point you have learned the skill, you can go through the steps--maybe still following your notes, reading the instructions, measuring carefully into the pot--and consistently accomplish your goal
Unconscious Competence: now you’re cooking! you can perform the skill in question without thinking about it and may even be able to teach it to others
And then there’s debate about what happens next. Some like to call it Conscious Competence of Unconscious Incompetence, the ability to evoke the desire for learning in others. If you can recognize your own skill and figure out how to translate that into instruction, I think you’re doing very well.
I see my daughter, Alice, struggle to master a new skill, sometimes raging against her own incompetence, helpless to move forward. Until suddenly she gets it and then it was easy and then it is nothing. And then she moves once more into Conscious Incompetence, wanting the next step desperately and half-convinced that it is impossible. I learn a lot from her and from my husband, Jason. Since she was four years old, he has spent half an hour or more most days helping her to practice piano. Watching them, I am made aware that no one ever taught me to practice--they expected me to do it, but if they ever tried to teach me that skill, it wasn’t explicit and it’s a skill I never did master. Watching them I often think that even if Alice gives up the piano tomorrow, she has learned something through this process that will make her life significantly different than mine.
Since coming to First Parish, I’ve become fond of the phrase “practicing Unitarian Universalist,” because I find that it does take a lot of practice. And it can be confusing. We have principles, but no creed; questions, but no answers. We are embarked together on a journey toward no certain destination, our signposts point inward and outward, and at every fork in the road we stop and debate our path forward.
And yet there are answers here. They are in the individual faces that greet us with care and compassion, and in the community that we knit of our own efforts. There are answers in the mistakes that we make and the decisions that we reach together. There are answers in our songs, and in our prayers, and in our questions. So many answers are offered and it is our task to listen for them, to store them up, to take them out again and again to shine in the light of our ever-evolving understanding. To believe that our practice prepares us to recognize the truths that we need, when we finally reach the point of understanding, to trust that we are not drowning and that when we are, there is help at hand. To believe that something new can come into our lives if we can only relax, and let the water support us.
Amen.
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
free fall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
When I was a teenager, I helped out at the local pool’s summer swimming lessons. The instructor for the youngest kids, just learning to float, would tell the little ones “Just relax and let the water support you.” Some of the kids would cheerfully try, but others would grip the gutter with white hands, convinced that this lady was trying to drown them. Their thoughts were clear on their faces: Let the water support me? Are you kidding? Relax? How can I relax when I’m going to die?
But ask yourself, if someone asked you how to float, what would you say? Could you explain it more clearly than “Relax and let the water support you”? What if someone asks you how to live?
We have a lot of answers--sometimes too many. The Old Testament gave us Ten Commandments. Buddha gave us the EIghtfold Path. Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Shakespeare told us “To thine own self be true.” Most of the explanations sound so simple, but as the Indigo Girls say, “Hardest to learn is the least complicated.”
Finding love is one of the central pursuits of our lives and one of the hardest to explain. When will I be loved? is a question I’ve been asked many times. And the answer is simple: when you love yourself enough to believe someone else can love you and you find the person who accepts you as the person that you are. It’s that easy, right? And if you tell this to someone struggling with self-acceptance and yearning for love, they will probably look at you like the kid clinging to the edge of the pool. How can I relax when I’m going to die?
Recently I was talking with a new father and he asked why parents don’t talk about how hard it is. I told him that there were three answers to this: #1 is that we do talk about it, but non-parents tend to find parenting talk boring, because #2 much of it won’t make really make sense until you’re doing it and #3 we don’t want to scare you unnecessarily. Being a new parent is hard, but it’s do-able and most people who undertake it find it worthwhile. I try to limit my own advice to new parents to the things I think may surprise them, knowing that my words will not be fully understood until the moment when they are relevant, when the new parent thinks “Oh! This is what she was talking about. I’m not the only person to feel this way. She made it through this and so will I.”
Sometimes that moment of revelation is so clear. We talk--well, here at First Parish we’re not always comfortable with this language, but as human beings we use the metaphor of “vision”. Suddenly we see our way clearly, we do not merely understand: we know. Have you ever cooked a turkey by relying on the little popper thing? It may not be the best method, but it works ok. The thing is, there’s quite a while when the skin is retracting from it and the popper is kind of bulging outward and we ask “Is that it? Is that what they mean by popped?” And then it pops and there can be no doubt: once you see it, you know that this is what “popped’ looks like. When something we’ve been told suddenly pops, when we know for sure what we’ve only heard before--that’s a great feeling.
Of course, what is impenetrable without the proper context often passes quickly through profundity into inanity. Or, as my sister’s yearbook quote has it: Profound is a firm grasp of the obvious. “Relax and let the water support you,” may sound crazy before you learn to float. But in the moment that you’re doing it, it can explode in your consciousness like the answer to all of life’s mysteries. And then you grab people who know how, who’ve been trying to teach you and you say “I just relax and let the water support me! I get it now!” And they look at you with compassion and indulgence and say “Yes, dear. That’s it.” And then the next lesson begins.
When I was in college, I met a guy who was a big fan of the writings of Krishnamurti. For those of you unfamiliar with his teachings, he was a boy from India raised by members of the Theosophical Society to be the World Teacher, a leader who would discover and share the path to enlightenment. As an adult he rejected this role, though he did continue to write and teach throughout his lifetime. Buckey would read to me the passages he found most relevant and profound and I, sophomore that I was, would complain that these teachings seemed obvious to me, that I already knew them. Buckey said something then that has stuck with me ever since. That’s what scripture is, he explained, it’s that which tells you what you already know, but tend to forget.
As Unitarian Universalists, we tend not to believe in easy answers. While many of us find a central text that speaks to us more deeply than others, where the answers it has to offer make sense to our lived experience and our hopes for the future, we do not collectively accept any one text as definitive. Rather than adopting a set of beliefs, we adhere to a set of guiding principles which we trust will help us to recognize truth when and where we find it.
Each year we send our high school seniors off with a book of quotations, readings, prayers and poems shared by their parents and the people of First Parish whom they have named as playing an important role in their lives. We share our personal scriptures, the passages in which we have recognized important truths that sometimes we forget, in the hope that these will speak to the youth, as well. But we leave at least half of those books blank because we understand that they will find their own answers, their own scriptures.
Now, some kids, you throw in the water and they instinctively know how to float. There are things we understand without knowing that we know. And we tend to overlook those things. It’s easy for me, we say, it’s nothing. Those are often the most important things that we do, without realizing it, and some of the hardest to teach. We can tell the steps we take, the decisions we make, the what of the moment, but the how is harder.
Potato salad has been much in the news lately. In case you haven’t heard, a guy put up a Kickstarter asking for $10 to fund his first attempt at potato salad. The last time I looked he’d received pledges for more than fifty thousand dollars. He’s got a lot of potato salad to make. But it will never be as good as my mother’s. And no matter how many times I’ve watched her do it, no matter how careful the notes I take, mine never tastes quite like hers. She can’t explain what she does that makes it so good. And if you asked her for her major life accomplishments, I’m guessing that her potato salad would never even make the list.
Many of us have been lucky enough to have great teachers along our paths. The ones who have helped us to see clearly how to move our skills forward, the ones that have inspired us with their example and been able to break it down for us, to give us hope of one day achieving the effortlessness that belies their years of practice. Here at First Parish we have a wealth of mentors in the art of living. Raising my daughter here, knowing that she’ll grow up following in the footsteps of the amazing young adults here, within the embrace of this community often feels like the single best parenting choice I’ve made. One of the things I realized I was missing only when I found it was to have before me the example of women older than myself, those I could look to and think “I want to grow up to be like her”. I’ve learned great lessons here about how to parent, how to survive cancer with integrity, how to undertake great changes in life, how to weather adversity, how to speak uncomfortable truths, how to work for justice, how to face death with grace. I haven’t needed all these lessons yet, but I’m listening.
Sometimes we learn from the words of our mentors, and sometimes from those who teach only by example. In American Gods, a couple of Neil Gaiman’s characters pass the time with coin tricks.
"Coin tricks is it?" asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. "Why, if it's coin tricks we're doing, watch this."
He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadow's empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty.
"There," he said. "That's a coin trick for you."
Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. "I need to know how you did it."
"I did it," said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, "with panache and style”
Because, in the end, we learn by doing. About thirty years ago, a guy named Noel Burch developed “The Four Stages of Learning Any New Skill,” also called Maslow’s Four Stages of Competence, because someone thought it sounded like something that psychologist Abraham Maslow would have said. The four stages are:
Unconscious Incompetence: that’s when you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t see that there is a skill you are lacking that it would be useful for you to know.
Conscious Incompetence: this is the stage where you figure out what you don’t know, that you would like to learn and you begin to figure out how much effort it will take to learn.
Conscious Competence: at this point you have learned the skill, you can go through the steps--maybe still following your notes, reading the instructions, measuring carefully into the pot--and consistently accomplish your goal
Unconscious Competence: now you’re cooking! you can perform the skill in question without thinking about it and may even be able to teach it to others
And then there’s debate about what happens next. Some like to call it Conscious Competence of Unconscious Incompetence, the ability to evoke the desire for learning in others. If you can recognize your own skill and figure out how to translate that into instruction, I think you’re doing very well.
I see my daughter, Alice, struggle to master a new skill, sometimes raging against her own incompetence, helpless to move forward. Until suddenly she gets it and then it was easy and then it is nothing. And then she moves once more into Conscious Incompetence, wanting the next step desperately and half-convinced that it is impossible. I learn a lot from her and from my husband, Jason. Since she was four years old, he has spent half an hour or more most days helping her to practice piano. Watching them, I am made aware that no one ever taught me to practice--they expected me to do it, but if they ever tried to teach me that skill, it wasn’t explicit and it’s a skill I never did master. Watching them I often think that even if Alice gives up the piano tomorrow, she has learned something through this process that will make her life significantly different than mine.
Since coming to First Parish, I’ve become fond of the phrase “practicing Unitarian Universalist,” because I find that it does take a lot of practice. And it can be confusing. We have principles, but no creed; questions, but no answers. We are embarked together on a journey toward no certain destination, our signposts point inward and outward, and at every fork in the road we stop and debate our path forward.
And yet there are answers here. They are in the individual faces that greet us with care and compassion, and in the community that we knit of our own efforts. There are answers in the mistakes that we make and the decisions that we reach together. There are answers in our songs, and in our prayers, and in our questions. So many answers are offered and it is our task to listen for them, to store them up, to take them out again and again to shine in the light of our ever-evolving understanding. To believe that our practice prepares us to recognize the truths that we need, when we finally reach the point of understanding, to trust that we are not drowning and that when we are, there is help at hand. To believe that something new can come into our lives if we can only relax, and let the water support us.
Amen.