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A Spiritual Solution for Every Problem
1/3/2010 Rev. Phil Schulman
An elderly woman walked into the local country church. The friendly
usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the flight of steps. "Where would you like to sit?" he asked politely.
"The front row please," she answered.
"You really don't want to do that," the usher said. "The pastor is really boring."
"Do you happen to know who I am?" the woman inquired.
"No." he said.
"I'm the pastor's mother," she replied indignantly.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"No." she said.
“Good,” he answered, and he quickly scurried away.
I am glad to hear some laughter. Laughter is one of my favorite spiritual solutions to life's challenges. It's one that I hope to employ more often in 2010, and I recommend it for you too. If you haven't laughed in a few hours chances are that you are in need of attitudinal healing of a spiritual kind – a spiritual make-over, if you will.
The joke asks do you know who I am? This sermon asks do you know who you are?.”
Claiming that there are spiritual solutions for all of life problems, was brazen, don't you think. Huyen thought so. She asked me the title of my sermon. I told her “A Spiritual Solution for every problem we face in life.” She quickly got that very delighted look on her face- the one that suggests she is about to have great fun laughing at me.
She starts “So...you are going to run out of gas if you don't pull over and fill the car's tank,” ... (her face says “Duh, how's that require a spiritual solution?”). She didn't wait for me to explain. “The toilet won't flush, what's the spiritual solution to that problem?” she asked.
Plunge it, I replied.
We may have a very limited notion of what is meant by spiritual. Many of us grew up thinking that if it was physical than it wasn't spiritual. We learned that the spiritual realm referred to angels, and other supernatural forces. Spirituality was always shrouded in mystery. In fact, the physical realm was seen as the opposite of spiritual, with spirit being good and flesh being week, sinful, and bad.
Now to a UU who holds the entire web of existence as sacred, physical acts even plunging a toilet can be a spiritual act, or a spiritual solution. But before I explain myself, I will confess.
I just wiggled out of admitting that I went to far when I made the monumental claim that there are spiritual solutions for all of life's problems. And I'm going to double up my loophole with another wiggle out defense. It is this: “Don't take me literally. Please take me seriously, but not too seriously.”
I must admit that there is reason for distinguishing between physical and spiritual. Wikipedia defines spirituality as is relating to, consisting of, or having the nature of spirit; not tangible or material. Many of us would hear this and assume that it implied something totally different than what we experience in nature. Spiritual = ghosts, angels. This kind of understanding of spirituality offers a supernatural explanation for things that we can't or don't understand. An important document didn't reach it's recipient, well it must be a demon in the internet. You step out of a horrible car wreck without a scratch, it must have been an angel protecting you.
I am not putting you down if you think this way. I don't put much stock in demons, but angels are totally sweet in my book. Now before those of you who consider yourself reality based look down upon and scorn me, remember, I warned you not to take me literally. If the story I tell myself enables me to live with more peace and skillfulness, and you have a problem with my story, it's your problem. You live with your story. I'll live with mine.
Many years ago, I was driving with a girlfriend to the beach. Someone pulled in front of us. I hit my brakes. “Get out of the way you bleepdy bleep,” I cursed at them. She says “I figure that car is being driven by an angel keeping us out of harms way.” My first thought was “you can't believe that?! So here I am thinking I'm smarter than her, that she is flaky. Then it dawns on me that I have cursed at cars cutting in front of me hundreds of times. Talk about crazy, like the curse is going to have magical power, like its going to punish that bad driver and make him get out of my way. And I notice that I'm stressed and she is happy. Okay, you've got a point. Hmm angels keeping me out of harms way. I wrestle with this a bit, and I realize that certainly there were times when life was conspiring on my behalf, but I only saw something “bad” happening. Hmm, it sure would be nice, I thought, if I could tune into her reality?
Maybe that wasn't the best example, because what I really want to do now is demonstrate that you can appreciate spirituality without believing in the supernatural. The religious liberal can hear supernatural explanations, choose not to take it literally, but remember that remain open to receive a spiritual truth that is being expressed through story.
I am asking once again, that we be generous in our interpretations, that we apply a liberal mindset to religious vocabulary. That we not close our minds, but connect with the part that speaks to us. The English word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning breath. Synonyms include "soul, courage, vigor". In Hebrew there is a similar word Ruach, meaning breath or spirit.
Even if you don't believe that a person has a soul, even if you are against supernaturalism, you have to admit that if a person is alive there is a breath in him. That means that he's not just physical. And more importantly, this breath, this spirit is literally something that inspires life not only in one person, but through our ecosystems.
Spirit can also be understood as energy. There is an energy in a person. We see it. We feel it. We read it.
And like the breath, the energy kind of puts something important into the person's body, wouldn't you say? It's essential for life, and it's also essential to understand someone. Want to know what's going on with your husband or wife? Pay attention to the energy in and about them. And here's the real kick. We need to pay attention to energy or spirit, not just to understand an individual. It's essential for understanding, connecting and being on the same page with the collective. Energy is an important part of interactions. A congregation has a certain spirit, a city has a particular spirit, a state has a spirit, and so on.
Spirit is what's between the lines, and on the faces, bodies and tones of voice. Communication, for example is said to be 90+% nonverbal.
If your body ain't got spirit (if it isn't animated by breath and spirit), it dies. The same is true for larger bodies, bodies of people, social interactions etc. We just got through thinking a lot about the Christmas spirit, the light, the attitude, the energy that descends from heaven or emerges from Earth during December. There is just no denying that something different happens in December and it changes things. It doesn't always change things for the better, or the way we would like, but it's there changing things. If you want to get the big picture, and you decide to ignore spirituality, ... good luck!
Another definition of spirituality is the search for the absolute or God. Now I gather that some of us turn off our receivers when we hear the word God. Maybe before you found this church, you figured religion was not for you. Then you heard that it was okay to be an atheist here. Then someone like me comes along saying spirit this and God that, and maybe your first thought is “hey man, I didn't sign up for that!”
Before you jump to the conclusion that one of us is in the wrong place, let's get something clear. You definitely don't have to believe in the existence of a deity to be a member of this church and denomination.
Regardless of what you believe, if words like God and Spirit are such triggers, that it's hard to hear anything after they've been said... if you react the exact same way that you did 20 years ago. ... If when you hear the words spirit or God, there is a mechanical response that overwhelms and fills you with a cascade of chemicals that say “enemy approaching,” ... then maybe you still have some work to do.
What's more important than your first mental, emotional physical reaction, is what you do after that. If it sounds like I'm picking on one group, ... I have my trigger words too, I bet we all do.
Part of our spiritual practice as Uus is that we learn how to keep our hearts and minds open even after we've heard triggering words. After we hear a religious word that we don't like, if we then close our minds, and refuse to consider anything that's being communicated, we aren't practicing Unitarian Universalism. This faith asks us to grow, to stretch and learn to consider what things mean to the person who is speaking. If when someone hear uses the word God, you continue to assume that they mean the same thing your parents did, or the same thing that Joel Olsteen means, or if you assume that they are using the word the same way you always have, then you are probably holding on to a pre-judged, predetermined concept, and you would not be hearing what someone is trying to communicate. And if you are doing that, how can you claim to be reality based? How can you call that religious liberalism?
Unitarian Universalists are asked to be the Swiss of religion. We are asked to be multi-lingual and to translate. When someone tells you that spirituality is about searching or approaching God, you could turn off your receiver, and not hear another word. Or you might consider doing some translating. You might hear the word Ultimacy or Ultimate Reality. I like the phrase source of life. You don't have to believe that there is a supernatural deity in order to learn to listen and hear people's religious impulse.
I want you to consider that everyone, including those who dismiss the supernatural, including those who identify as agnostics or atheists, have a religious impulse. And as your minister, I want to ask you to find yours. I want you to listen for others even when they express it very differently than you do.
What I'm calling the religious impulse is a desire for greater awareness or consciousness, a need to understand, a need to connect, search for, approach, imagine and reach for the unreachable. Even if you are cynical, you have a hunger for meaning. You have existential moments, when you ponder the wonder of your existence. You don't just see, hear, touch, taste, smell. Sometimes, maybe just for a nanosecond, it boggles your mind that you have senses and consciousness.
I call spirituality, the awareness of being in relationship to something vastly greater than ourselves. Spirituality is a need. Members of our society are in great pain and struggle because we have been taught to see ourselves, others and events as if they had a separate existence. Living with this delusion is painful. We seek to reconnect with the Ultimate reality. Religious traditions of the world are rich in the ways they offer to connect to that which is beyond our grasp, God or Ultimacy.
Now I am not saying that all approaches to gain a spiritual awareness are equal. Some ways of understanding the relationship between self and God, lead to passivity, aggression, callousness to suffering. Some spiritualities lead to peace, love, and a desire for justice.
You want to find a spiritual solution to a problem in your life? Start by asking yourself if you are trying to control something beyond your control. Most times you can influence, but suffering comes in with the illusion that we are or should be in control of people or events. What we can choose to control is our behavior. A still greater spiritual challenge is to take responsibility for what we think and feel. Few if any of us can consistently choose our first reactions. The question comes with what we do after our conditioned response to life comes upon us.
This is the realm of consciousness. This is the realm of the spiritual solution to all of our problems. If we take an honest inventory of the things that bother us in our life, we will notice repeating patterns. We will become aware that the problem is not what happened, not what the boss or spouse said to us, but our reactions. In each of the difficult, torturous and miserable events in our life, what actually happens is only the tip of the iceberg. In each misery, what is it that we tell ourselves? How do we behave? This is where the greatest difficulties in our lives originate.
To start with an easy example, the problem isn't that the toilet won't flush. The problem is that we are thinking “I paid the plumber ..FOR WHAT?” or “why does this always happen to me?” Or “how am I supposed to have the time to deal with this? Ultimately when we look behind these thoughts we will find that we are repeating some belief that keeps us from trusting God or life, and that punish us by implying that “we are not good enough.” This is the most common belief in need of a spiritual solution.
There is a world that is far more real and true than the world we see, and the world we live in. What we see on the physical level is a small percent of what is going on. Moving toward that more real world requires a spiritual solution.
Anthony De Mello writes “Everywhere in the world people are in search of love, for everyone is convinced that love alone can save the world; love alone can make life meaningful and worth living. But how very few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart. It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them; otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire, not as he or she is in themselves....
Rabbi Schneerson, the Lubbavitch Rebbe of the last century, wrote:
In the Talmud, a question is asked, “How do we know when the night ends and the new day begins? The answer given is: The night ends and the day begins at the time when one can see his friend from four feet away and recognize him.” This requires more than being able to discern the physical characteristics. Seeing a friend means seeing a soul created in the image of the eternal. .. It means treating that soul in a godlike way.”
Our closing hymn reminds us that the infinite abides in each of us. This is the starting point from which we will find spiritual solutions to all life's challenges.
Hymn “There's a River Flowing in my Heart.”
There's a river flowin in my heart. And its telling me that I'm somebody. Theres a river flowing in my heart.
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Copyright © 2012 Community Unitarian Universalist Church of San Antonio. All Rights Reserved.
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