Awakening Series: How Can I Be Good by Rev. Linda Olson Peebles

Awakening Series: how Can I Be Good," by Rev. Linda Olson Peebles, March 1, 2009

        It is good to be reminded from time to time of the big picture. Out of the Stars we have come. Even if those stars were strewn randomly.

        In the Christian church year, this is the beginning of the season of Lent. A time of reflection. In our civic world here in 2009, we find ourselves in fascinating times, difficult times, paradigm-shifting times, times of both anxiety and hope, crises and creative change. In the natural world, many of us tired of winter – even as mild a winter as this one – and we know that spring is coming our way. Just before we move into the season of planting seeds and growing things – let us breathe, and take stock of how our souls are doing.

        Today – the first Sunday of March – the sermon topic comes from the series we’ve called Awakening – sermons in which we have been considering questions about the nature of our being human. Eckhart Tolle’s book “A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” is a book many of us have read this year as a starting point for our discussions of this series.

        The question for today is “How Can I Be Good?” Great question! I’m glad we asked! I confess I preach on this topic not as someone who feels like she’s figured out any answers. In fact, I struggle all the time with this in so many areas of my life. I feel over and over the frustration about “being good” since I fall short of my own expectations so often, kind of like the early Christian church teacher, Paul’s observation: "I do not understand my own actions," he laments in his letter to the Romans. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate... and I do not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.“ (Rom: 7-15-16; 18-20) I challenge myself – don’t want to let myself off the hook.

        Picture this - At my health club, I take exercise classes with an instructor named Gretchen, who has great abilities to teach and inspire and encourage, even the most physically-challenged among us. As we jump around to music, moving arms and legs in a special kind of choreography, Gretchen will often call out to us – “Are you good? Are you good?” Theologian and philosopher that I am, I sometimes ponder to myself, and think that she is asking a pretty deep, complex question about my ontological, existential, moral state of being.

        I think about how Unitarian Universalists believe that we are inherently good – born not in original sin, but with an innate capacity to discover the divine seed within us, and to help it grow. Then I ponder that of course, the capacity for evil exists in us all, and so the answer to “Am I good?” must be closely aligned to the query, “Do I DO good?” Has not society often equated “being a good person” with our deeds as much as with our nature?

As I ponder, the music goes on, and I lose track of whether I’m supposed to be going right or left…. And Gretchen brings me back to the room, back to the steps, back to her voice – and I try not to fall as I rejoin the dance, imperfect in so many ways, trying to get better.

        When Gretchen asks me “Are you good?” I realize that she is asking me to check in with my senses and find out – how is my breathing? My pulse? How are my muscles feeling? Can I keep this pace, or do I need to slow down? Do I need water? Is my body ok?

        Her question then makes a lot of sense to me. And probably helps the question of “How to be good” make more sense in all the other ways I think about it.

        “Being Good” carries loaded meanings, not positive ones, for many people. UU poet Mary Oliver has written: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

        Maybe knowing yourself and loving yourself, forgiving yourself for your mistakes, IS the way to “be good”. Gretchen’s question asks for no judgment of virtue – evil or righteousness – no judgment even of all my past sins of poor eating and exercise. She’s not interested in shaming anyone or beating up on us for the ways we “should” be. For her, asking me if I am “good” asks me to become mindful of myself, my body in the world.

        And in the same way, outside the gym, in our lives at home and work and in the marketplace, Being good, leading to Doing good, relies on awareness – on re-awakening to the fact of what’s going on – not in my endless philosophical debates with myself in my head; But in my body, in my spirit, in the space I’m occupying, in my openness to keep trying.

        Eckhart Tolle’s 8th chapter “The Discovery of Inner Space” suggests – to be awake in this world, you need to give yourself space to be – without judgment – but only observing – and not pushing away or denying or being offended by that which is troubling or imperfect. <'p>

        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 whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

        Each guide can teach us if we let it in.

        Being good has to do with discovering that we are being – Tolle calls it the inner space. Different folks find inner space in different ways – meditating, slowing down, walking, creating, praying. Re-discovering that there is space – all around us, and inside us.

        And Doing Good? I think the Buddhists and Gretchen would agree that mindfulness leads to Right action. It’s not so much a question of whether doing good helps you be good? Or that being good help you do good? It’s more that when you are in fact mindful of your heartbeat, your pulse, the miracle of your being alive, the place you find yourself, then you can move in the world and interact with other human beings in ways that make sense – are “good”. Actions that are coherent with being bring wholeness; disconnection between being and doing brings angst, craziness, brokenness, reactivity, the need for healing and “salvation”, for reconciliation and re-awakening.

        Habitual behaviors - unhealthy habits that harm us - are the result of zoning out, or getting wrapped up in our own chattering debates, losing the sense of spaciousness and awareness that keeps us on the path. Behaviors, by us or by our institutions, that harm the world are the result of forgetting that we are alive and that others are alive and the world is ongoing and history moves through us and it is all energy and space.

        It is all a miracle.

        I think in our world right now, part of the exciting hope in the midst of all the bad things happening, is that we are hearing spoken more words about our interconnectedness. Rather than blaming, we are looking at naming – what is going on and how can we join to help everyone? Thoughtful leaders are talking about the values of listening to voices who have not been heard, the values of empathy. Maybe instead of asking what do we expect out of life, we can ask what does life expect of us? John F. Kennedy’s “Ask what you can do for your country” from 48 years ago is once again being echoed.

        There’s a new hope that our institutions – church, school, government – can become doers of good by all the people and for all the people, that we individuals can come together to be the good we want to create We each – as individuals - are part of the whole creation – against all odds, as Forrest Church’s reading reminds us. And we as kin-folk are sharing this planet together and are both the inheritors of the whole and the ones who pass the creation on – in how we are with one anther, in how we help each other see ourselves and how we find patterns in the stars, in how we teach those who come after us.

        Pondering all this, we will still make mistakes, but we may appreciate with more humility and celebration that our being is both an amazing miracle, and part of a larger ongoing process whose genesis and whose ultimate meaning is a mystery. And we may feel more deeply how important it is to share this adventure of awakening – as guides to one another, as mentors reminding us to see the space around and in us, as teachers helping untangle the mystery.

        I need Gretchens in my life. We all do. People who call out and ask us if we are good, those people are important guides when I feel confused or frustrated, realizing that once again I’ve goofed up.

        How CAN we be good?

        A Powell Davies, great Unitarian Minister at All Souls DC in the 1940s and 50s, told this story in the introduction of a sermon collection he entitled “The Temptation to be Good.”

        A certain traveler, somewhere in northern Vermont, after driving in uncertainty for a while, became convinced that he was on the wrong road, and so, at the first village, came to a halt. Calling one of the villagers to the car window he said, “Friend, I need help. I’m lost.” The villager looked at him for a moment. “Do you know where you are?” he asked. “Yes,” said the traveler, “I saw the name of the village as I entered.” The man nodded his head. “Do you know where you want to go?” “Yes,” the traveler replied, and named his destination. The villager looked away for a moment, ruminating. “You ain’t lost,” he said at last, “you just need directions.”

        Look around. You aren’t lost. Thank goodness for the wisdom of wise sages and caring friends – helping us find directions on our life journey. How are you doing? Are you good? Are you aware of your being? Are you free to open the guest house of your being?

        Are we good? Are we as a church, a community, a nation, are we awake to our powerful essence as beings – artists, creators, healers, teachers, sowers and reapers – awake to the essence of our community alive together in the here and now? The stars have been thrown out in seemingly random patterns. We each of us are here in some miracle of creation. There’s lots of pain and evil and wrong in the world. And we all feel the imperfections while we jump around together in this exercise of life. How are we doing? We are alive! And how can we be good? You don’t have to beat yourself up for mistakes, or crawl a hundred miles in the desert.

        You can be good by awakening to the space and the stars, to the miracle, to the interconnectedness – seeing yourself and those people alive with you and the world. And take to heart what the Hebrew prophet Micah said is required: 1. do justice; 2. love kindness, and 3. walk humbly with your god, with your sense of the universal Whole. There’s a lot more that could be said. But for now this is all. You continue the exploration. It’s good! It’s good! Amen.

        Forrest Church, Life Lines: Holding On and Letting Go, Beacon Press, Boston, 1996. A. Powell Davies, The Temptation to Be Good, Farrar, Straus, and Young, New York, 1952. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Penguin, 2005, 2008.

Questions for Consideration:

• In what ways do you think you are good?

• When do you feel like you are not good?

• Are being good and doing good separate in your mind? Are they connected? Does one lead to another?

• What are the guests you are most reluctant to let into your human guest house (Rumi)?

• It is said that Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden because they ate from the tree of knowledge, and saw the difference between good and evil. What can get us back to the garden, to a paradise of Beloved Community?

• Tolle talks about finding “inner space” in his Chapter Eight. How do you make sense of that?