Whatever Comes: Embracing
Personal Challenges
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Laura De Spain Olmsted
Reading #1:
"The Guest House" by Jelaluddin
Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet and mystic
Translation by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Reading #2:
From What We Ache For, Chapter 5:
"Doing the Work"
By Oriah Mountain Dreamer
I went to a screening of a film about a painter, Philip Guston…a compatriot of Jackson Pollock….What impressed me most about this story was Guston's willingness to allow the creative process to have its way with him, his willingness to repeatedly paint the same image over and over if that's what came. Of course, no two images were ever identical, but the theme was there and he was willing to let it repeat within his work, even though (or perhaps because) he did not understand why it was there or exactly what it was meant to communicate to him or others. Perhaps it was this honoring of the value of repetition that allowed him to be unattached to outcome. At one point, the filmmaker stays with Guston, filming him throughout several days and nights of rigorous painting. We watch as he pours his life's energy into a huge canvas for hours at a time, and then, when it is done, he stands back and looks at the canvas for a few moments, a burning cigarette dangling from his hand. Smiling and shaking his head, he shrugs and grabs a wide brush and, dipping into a bucket of white paint, paints over the entire canvas, obliterating the work of days. And he begins again.
… the bottom line is that writers write, painters paint, composers compose, photographers photograph, and dancers dance. Over and over again. Sometimes we use the same stories and images, sounds and movements. Sometimes we work on the same themes using different stories and images, sounds and movements. Sometimes we create the unexpected and never repeated. Sometimes we create between interviews and publicity tours. More often we create between dental appointments and taking our children to hockey practice. But we do our creative work. It's how we learn how to do the creative work. And sometimes we become tired and discouraged. Sometimes we do not want to see the same emerge image on the canvas, find the same theme surface in the story we are writing. Sometimes we are afraid we will never be able to write or paint or compose or dance or film the wholeness or beauty or truth we ache to produce. And in these moments we take ourselves out into the world and let our sexuality, our love of the sensual beauty of the physical life, and our spirituality, our experience of the truth we ache for, find us and rekindle our passion to create. We let the dance between the world and our imaginations move us. And we begin again, painting or writing or composing, moving or photographing or filming. It's how we dip down into that well of creative potential and weave a story or create an image or find a single phrase of melody that takes the breath away. It's how we pray, how we participate in life. Over and over again.
Sermon:
Jon Kabat-Zinn, a teacher of mindfulness meditation, and author observes in his book Wherever You Go There You Are, "Ordinarily, when we undertake something, it is only natural to expect a desirable outcome for our efforts. We want to see results, even if it is only a pleasant feeling... When we understand that 'This is it', it allows us to let go of the past and the future and wake up to what we are right now, in this moment." ["This Is It," page 14].
Well, what if you're having a party, a joyful celebration, all your friends and loved one are coming, and you go to Baker's Square and get a yummy French Silk pie for dessert. The moment comes to open the box, everyone gathered around in anticipation, and instead of a lovely confection topped with swirls of whipped cream and delicate chocolate shavings the box contains a heaping, smelly, fly-covered pile of … well … shit. Not a French Silk pie, a cow pie.
You might swiftly close the lid, check the label. Am I in the right place? Is this the right box?
You might peak in again only to be assaulted by the same aroma and consistency you experienced before.
Now what? This is definitely not what you planned, not what you anticipated, and not what ought to happen when you drove to Gurnee, stood in line to place your order, waited patiently for your box to arrive and carefully, carefully drove it home.
You might be angry. What kind of nasty trick is this?!?
You might be confused. It never smelled like a cow pie before!
You might be embarrassed, hoping no one actually noticed you offering a box of cow pie to your friends and loved ones.
You might get stuck, not knowing what to do next when the only dessert you planned has turned out to be repulsive and inedible.
Stuck.
"This very moment is the perfect teacher," writes Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun in When Things Fall Apart, "[While] Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news…for practitioners or spiritual warriors-people who have a certain hunger to know what is true-feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritations, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck." [Chapter 5, page 14]
"Most of us do not take these situations as teachings", Chodron goes on. "We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape-all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain. … [T]he rampant materialism that we see in the world stems from this moment. There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away from the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden it so we don't have to feel the full impact of the pain that arises when we cannot manipulate the situation to make us come out looking fine." [Chapter 5, page 15]
At times during the last 8 years, it's felt like every box I opened contained cow pie. It started when I recognized how miserable I was at work, unable to capitalize on opportunities for promotion, more money, prestige and responsibility because, inexplicably, the prospect of attaining them made me sick to my stomach. And at home, nothing I did to create happiness resulted in fun, relaxation, real enjoyment and satisfaction.
I put a lot of changes into motion. I left my secure and lucrative career. I became a stay-at-home Mom, resolved to strengthen my marriage, volunteered at school, signed the kids up for lessons, taught religious education classes at church, forced my husband to pry himself away from his fledgling business to go out to dinner with me.
The result? The reinvention of my marriage failed and it completely fell apart. My husband and I divorced. I turned up the volume on my addiction: I tried harder and did more. I started a consulting practice so I could work from home and be home for my kids before and after school, lifted weights every morning before getting my children up for school and took a brisk 40 minute walk after the school bus left. I kept volunteering in the classroom and for the school district, kept the kids in all their pre-divorce activities, shuttled them back and forth to see their father and got involved in referendums and rezoning.
It was a dizzying, difficult time, colored by mysterious changes in my health that had no diagnosis. It seemed like things were finally settling down when, twenty months after our divorce, my ex-husband suddenly died, suffering a massive heart attack during one of our children's visits. I was stirring the spaghetti sauce for Sunday dinner when the phone rang. I answered expecting one of the kids and the typical Sunday night plea for a little while longer with Dad.
"Laura, it's Patti", the voice said. "Oliver's dead."
I remember the day of the funeral clearly, Oliver's church, the words his minister spoke, the friends there to support us. I remember my friend Susan driving us to the gravesite, what my children placed on top of the casket before it was covered. I remember my 9-year old son, Eric, being unable to spend another moment at the cemetery and my 7-year old daughter, Olivia, being unable to leave. I remember the luncheon my friends organized at my home, how Eric and Olivia played with the friends who had come to comfort them, the frozen look that would cross their faces as they remembered:
No, this isn't just any difficult moment, this is the crossing over to life without my father.
Shortly after Oliver's death, there was a diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. I was experiencing numbness in several parts of my body, exhaustion, and a number of personal inconveniences. I began taking immunosuppressants to inhibit the action of the disease. Months passed, turning into years and it seemed again like things were settling down. The ache from Oliver's death lessened. My symptoms slowly, slowly diminished. I monitored their changes obsessively. Ram Dass, another spiritual explorer and teacher of Buddhist wisdom, offers echoes of my feelings at that time as he considers his own experiences after a life-altering stroke in Still Here, his book on aging, changing and dying, "After any major physical 'insult'," Dass writes, "it's all too easy to see yourself as a collection of symptoms rather than as a total human being, including your spirit-and thus to become your illness. Fear is powerful and contagious, and at first I allowed myself to catch it, worried that if I didn't do what the doctors ordered, I'd be sorry. But now I'm learning to take my healing into my own hands. Healing is not the same as curing, after all; healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God." [Preface, page 5]
"Do you believe in healing," a friend asked me. I had never considered the question. I began to investigate just exactly what healing might be, how it might be created, reading Depak Chopra, Thich Naht Hahn, Laurel Mellin, Julia Cameron, Ekhart Tolle, Pema Chodron, Marianne Williamson and others who ponder healing, spirituality, creativity and wholeness, the connections between the physical body, the spiritual body, and the energetic body. Then, a year ago in the fall, my health plummeted when a nasty stomach virus revved up the engine behind my MS. I began loosing control of my legs during my morning walks. In the days before Christmas, just getting around my house became extremely challenging.
I allowed myself to feel the impossibility of continuing to do what I was doing. I allowed myself to feel the possibilities that impossibility contained. I journaled these words:
Healing.
Breathing in love. Breathing out peace.
Without expectation.
The path is unknown.
The experience is unknown.
I will learn it by being there, accepting.
Healing may be painful.
It may be slow.
It may not look like a friend.
Loving healing will create friendship.
Accepting pain will create peace.
Opening myself to what is will create love.
The sadness, is that what is making me slow?
How gently can I hold my sadness?
Stroking it like a frightened bird
In my own hand, my own.
Where do I need to be to take care of myself?
Is there anywhere else besides right here in my body?
Sharing this moment of healing with myself:
That is the infinite.
"What do you want to create," Barbara asked me. We were talking about balance. We were talking about being alive while you're living. We were talking about how to make my life out of my circumstances. I began giving myself a quite moment every morning to rest with that question and listen deeply inside my body. The answer that kept coming was love. I wanted to create love. I began noticing myself, my choices, my actions, in that light.
A final lesson arrived when what doing I had left was completely taken away from me. I experienced a rare side effect from the steroid therapy my doctor prescribed to shut down the MS attack and halt the damage my immune system was causing: steroid induced myopathy resulted in massive destruction of muscle tissue throughout my body. It took a while for the truth to sink in. In the hospital, on 3,000 milligrams of steroids a day, I felt like I could do anything. For a do-er like me, it was a familiar feeling. It didn't hurt that I sat in bed all day while people brought me meals and the occasional friend stopped in to visit or watch a movie. Someone else was taking care of my children, my dog. I did no laundry or cooking or cleaning. Someone else even took down my Christmas tree. My second day in hospital, I took a walk through the medical building complex. I did three circuits, almost 40 minutes. I did this at a stroll, not at my old brisk pace, but without stumbling or becoming exhausted. My third day, I took a walk outside, prompting my doctor to discharge me. I went home on a weaning dose of steroids and, as the steroids gradually left my body, I became dizzy, exhausted and confused, unfathomably weak. Standing at the kitchen sink to peel potatoes was impossible; taking a shower so exhausting it drove me back to bed. At first, I was too weak to leave the house, unable even to walk my children to the school bus stop. It was summer before I was strong enough to be on the other end of the leash with my energetic young dog, and autumn before I could navigate the entire breadth of the grocery store without tears.
Waking up.
Pema Chodron writes about how her divorce created an opportunity for awakening in her life: "I remember vividly a day in early spring when my whole reality gave out on me," she writes. "Although it was before I had heard any Buddhist teachings, it was what some would call a genuine spiritual experience. It happened when my husband told me he was having an affair. I was standing in front of our adobe house drinking a cup of tea. I heard a car drive up and a door bang shut. Then he walked around the corner, and without warning he told me he was having an affair and he wanted a divorce.
"I remember the sky and how huge it was. I remember the sound of the river and the steam rising up from my tea. There was no time. No thought, there was nothing-just the light and a profound, limitless stillness.
"… The truth is … he saved my life. When my marriage fell apart, I tried hard-very, very hard-to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively, I knew that annihilation of my old … self was the only way to go." [When Things Fall Apart, pages 11-12].
When my vitality began deteriorating, the ability to move my legs felt stuck at my hips, like the energy and the skill to move them couldn't travel any father. It was like walking through hip-deep mud. When I got out of the hospital and the steroids left my body, that energy block, that sticking point, felt much higher up, somewhere just below my shoulder blades. Operating my body was like being in a sailboat on a windless day with me blowing into the sails and using all my conscious thought to will the motions that used to come naturally.
Like Pema Chodron, I leaned into the annihilation of my old self.
Like Ram Dass, I took my healing into my own hands.
I began listening deeply to my body with complete, open acceptance; respecting the messages my body gave me and being grateful for the opportunity to listen. I took Shiatsu massage. As the massage therapist put her hands on my midsection I felt the complete and utter emptiness there: no strength, no energy, and a part of me with no hope, worn out by the constant shattering of my expectation for a desirable outcome on the cruel rocks hidden below life's glassy surface. Tears came and I stayed with them, I allowed them to be.
The truth is still sinking in. I've learned that I can be absurdly optimistic and persistent and these qualities, thank God, have tended to color my experience of what I can't do in the present moment with appreciation of the little teeny, tiny improvements in my health that have come every day, sometimes at specific, recognizable moments, like a completely unanticipated gift. I remember a day this past fall when I was taking the short turn around the block after the school bus leaves that I take these days and reflecting on a conflict that occurred between two neighbor children as we waited for the bus, how I counseled one child to use his energy with love and be conscious of how he might hurt others unintentionally with the energy and strength he had. I was holding that hope for him in my heart, praying that there might be enough love in his life to fill him with a sense of how he might be both strong and gentle, energetic and loving. My heart opened to these prayers and, as I sensed that, something opened in my back, became energetic, flowing, alive, and my point of stuckness descended just a bit. My body became freer, my walking just a little easier, my burden just a little lighter.
Last January, I was optimistic: I never would have imagined that it would take more than a year to achieve the healing I have experienced so far. As my strength, energy and vitality continue to improve, every day brings fuller realization of how depleted I was, how far I've come, how much healing is still available to me. These realizations haven't come easily. With every positive movement in my health, comes the desire to say: This Is It - This is the moment when I can go back to being just exactly as I was before. Dancing! Playing! Gardening! YES!
I remind myself that This IS It. This is the moment I get to experience myself fully, to let go of the past and the future and celebrate what I most deeply am right now. Without the energy to move objects around and convince myself I was shaping life according to my own designs, stripped of the ability to manipulate the situation and make myself come out looking fine, I was forced to rely on what I was rather than what I was able to do to create what I wanted my life to be. I turned to Barbara's question, Barbara's magic question: What did I want to create. And I realized, I experienced, I didn't have to do anything to create love. It wasn't nearly as important that I wasn't strong enough to make dinner or shower more than twice a week as it was how I didn't make dinner or shower. I could not do all the things I was completely unable to do with the deep love I felt for myself, for the strength I had shown, for my ability to forgive myself for everything I had tried and tried and tried to do even when it might have been better not to do anything at all. I could not take my son to basketball practice and not even go to his games with the deep love I felt for him and his incredible energy, humor and optimism, his caring and common sense. I could not make my daughter's school lunch or offer my share of sleepovers with her friends out of the deep love I felt for her, her kindness, her gentleness, her sensitivity, her powerful hard work and devotion. I could let my children know they would have to wash their own clothes in the sense of all that love. I could let them know it was going to be make-your-own-sandwich for dinner again and maybe we'd make it a picnic in my bed for as many months as it needed to be so and we'd be better and stronger and happier than before if we made and ate those sandwiches in love.
I've learned the truth of my own words: Healing may be painful. It may be slow. It may not look like a friend. Healing, after all, is not the same as curing. Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now, what we are experiencing, to move us closer to God, to what we want to create. Love, it seems, doesn't go where I put it. It comes where it is felt and when it is felt, it grows, and when it grows it goes absolutely everywhere. "…[W]riters write, painters paint, composers compose, photographers photograph, and dancers dance," observes Oriah Mountain Dreamer. And we, you and I, we add our creative energy to the cooking, cleaning, decorating, problem solving, relationship building, love-making and perhaps most importantly the just being of every day life. These acts, when done with reverence and in the spirit of what we most deeply want to create, are our ultimate creative acts.
Benediction:
"Thanks, Robert Frost" by David
Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
That it will turn out to have been all right
For what it was, something we can accept,
Mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even the past,
That it will becomes something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.