Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

My mother had an expression that captures how I felt a week ago Friday. “I am so mad I could spit!” It actually originated from carpenters who carried nails in their mouths to reach them easily. If you were “so mad that you could spit nails”, that meant you needed to deal with the problem at hand, and could not talk if you have a mouth full of nails, so you would have to spit them out to yell at someone.

Alison and I booked a flight through Price Line to visit Charlotte our youngest over the President’s Day weekend. We did not realize that they along with the airline routinely overbook flights to the limit. Using Price Line, we could not get seat assignments over the internet and even though we had confirmed tickets for that flight, they bumped us. I was so mad I could have spit nails! My frustration could easily have spiraled into anger if we had not had pleasant, overworked and patient attendant and her manager working with us.

All our brains contain a primitive portion that just happens to be hardwired to trigger yhe ancient “fight or flight” reflex. That reflex helped our ancestors and other species survive for eons. However, in the present age it can add undo tension and stress to our day-to-day activities and decrease our ability to problem solve. It can help if when out in the woods I am attacked by tiger or bear. The fight or flight reflex kicks in like our feet jump when the doctor taps our patellar tendon. Try to resist either reflex. Parker Palmer writes that, “Learning how to hold life’s tensions in the responsive heart instead of the reactive primitive brain is key to personal, social, and cultural creativity: rightly held, those tensions can open us to new thoughts, relationships, and possibilities that disappear when we try to flee from or destroy their source.”

It helped at the airport that I remembered the story about two prime ministers sitting in a room discussing affairs of state with a larger group seated around them. Suddenly a man stood up shouted and banged his fist on a desk. The resident prime minister admonished him, “Peter,” he said, “Kindly remember Rule Number 6,” whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes and sits down. The prime ministers return to their conversation, only to be interrupted twenty minutes later by an angry woman who behaves the same way the earlier man did. The angry woman was greeted with the same words, “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.” Complete calm descends over Marie and she sits down with an apology.

When the scene is repeated a third time, the visiting prime minister said to his colleague: “My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?” “Very simply,” replies the resident prime minister. “Rule Number 6 is ‘Do not take yourself so g—damn seriously.’” “Ah, says his visitor that is a fine rule.” After a moment of pondering, he asks, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?” To which the resident prime minister says, “There aren’t any.” (The Art of Possibility Rosamund and Benjamin Zander, p.79)

My focus today is on bigger things than being bumped from a flight – as frustrating as that can be, and in spite of the fact that I will never ever again use Price Line. Rule Number 6 is a good one to remember. My frustration a week ago Friday is small change when held in the light of so many others who not only have had their hopes dashed during recently, but also had their lives and livelihood dashed and even destroyed.

I would be surprised if many of you have not experienced some major losses. For many of us it has been the death of loved ones. For you, it might have been the loss of a deeply meaningful relationship that broke your heart. For others it could have been the loss of a job, a career, one’s pension or some other major life savings. It might have been the loss of your health or vitality. Alternatively, it can be the relentless hammering away at our sense of hopefulness by the drumbeat of negative news, be it about the economy, what happened in Haiti or the Congo or the two wars our country is waging. At times we can start to feel like blues singer Albert King who in his song Born under a Bad Sign sang, “If I did not have any bad luck, I would have no luck at all.”

We can easily turn to bitterness and anger, blame and cynicism in the face of heartbreak and loss, can’t we? We may have said something like the first line of our opening words: “…what is the sense of our small effort?” because so much is going wrong personally or on the national and world levels. As Thandeka wrote, “Despair is my private pain born from what I have failed to say failed to do, failed to overcome.”

So how do we move from despair to hope? How do we move from hopelessness to hopefulness? How do we transform a heart filled with serious and deep discouragement into a heart lifted to a place that is life giving and light shedding?

I was a big fan of Parker Palmer, even before I took his “Courage to Lead” program at Kirkridge Retreat Center last year. Palmer lists what he calls four cultural inventions that have helped humanity deal with the tension within us when our age-old reflex reaction of fight or flight kicks in.

The first creative alternative comes with the use of language because we are able to respond with words instead of actions. Second, the arts help us express tension through painting, drama, music like the Blues or some other creative expression that allows us to open up our hearts and minds. Third, education helps us understand and release the tension from the complexities and ambiguities of life. Fourth, religion and spirituality help to deal with both inner tension and the great deal of real destruction and violence that threatens not only our lives but also the larger world community. We encounter violence all around us, be it in the form of the earthquake in Haiti, the warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond, the gridlock within our government, or the greed for riches and power that threatens the world we know.

Too often, violence is the human reaction to suffering when there seems no way out of despair. So it was for Richard Stack, the man who flew his plane into a federal building this week, our own version of a grass roots homegrown suicide bomber. He had lost hope and as a result lost any connection with the many human beings he was trying to destroy.

Religion of course can be and too often is as much a part of the problem as part of the solution. Religion often fuels the flight from reality out of a desire for another-worldly existence. Or, on the other hand, religion has also been used to initiate actual crusades to defeat and destroy the very existence of those whom we fear.

Still, one of the key functions of a spiritual or a religious life is to help us make some sense of our suffering, our losses and our broken hearts. We all know people who have had their heart broken into many small and jagged pieces. Some such people walk around harboring their wounds, their brokenness and they often end up hurting others, intentionally or unintentionally, like the Texas pilot or the Nigerian Christmas Day bomber.

But there is another way to respond to suffering, loss and having our hearts broken. Listen to Lead a poem by Mary Oliver:

Here is a story
To break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
The loons came to our harbor
And died, one by one,
Of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
Of one on the shore
That lifted its head and opened
The elegant beak and cried out
In the long, sweet savoring of its life
Which, if you have heard it,
You know is a sacred thing,
And for which, if you have not heard it,
You had better hurry to where
They still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
Just where that is.
The next morning
This loon, speckled
And iridescent and with a plan
To fly home
To some hidden lake,
Was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
To break your heart,
By which I mean only
That it break open and never close again
To the rest of the world.

This helps us realize as Barbara Kingsolver put it,”Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.”

The business of genuine religion, genuine spirituality is to remind us of this and even to help break open our hearts to let in the rest of the world. That is what Thandeka’s poem says to me.
“I turn to the world, the streets of
the city, the worn tapestries of
broken firms,
(yes, the)
drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag
lady’s cart…”

Let us turn to the world to renew our hopes and our lives. Let us turn to the world to give a rebirth to our hopes. Let us once again turn to the world so that we might move from despair to hope and begin again.
Or as the Sufi mater Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote, “God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.”

I learned when going through dark and dangerous times in my life, when my heart is cracked open – broken wide open, then, after that experience everything has the feel of being a gift – something that nourishes hope within me. The people I want to emulate have had the same experience.

What do you want to do with your experience of despair, your private or public pain? What do you want to do with the pain produced from what you have failed to say, failed to do or failed to overcome? If you let your pain open you up, it can be a pathway to hope and joy. It can be the source of hope that will rise up from within and soothe your very own broken heart.

“This common world I love anew, as the life blood of generations who refused to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world, courses through my veins. From within this world my despair is transformed to hope and I begin anew the legacy of caring.”