Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, April 5, 2009

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Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

     It’s a gift to come down where you ought to be, but do you know what? I feel sorry for Jesus. In the Christian calendar, today is Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’s joyful entrance into Jerusalem, riding on the back of a donkey colt -- just as it had been foretold 400 years before in the Hebrew Book of Zechariah.

     Aren’t you glad you don’t have to live out a 400-year-old script in your life? Or maybe you feel like you are. Or like that would be easier than trying to figure out on your own what it is you’re supposed to be doing.

     It’s a question that has bedeviled religious people for centuries. – What is the purpose of living?

     This is a story from the great Sufi poet, Rumi. He wrote these Discourses in the 12th century, and I apologize on his behalf for the non-inclusive language.:

     The Master said: there is one thing in this world that must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.  …  So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.

     How many of you find this intimidating? There are stories like this in many cultures. Among the Dagara people of Africa, it is said that each person comes into the world with a specific purpose, which we promptly forget the moment we are born. It is the task of our living to get that knowledge back, and fulfill that purpose.

     Holy crackamoli, better call in the experts. We got trouble.

     Here’s what Eckhart Tolle has to say about it:  Your life purpose is doing whatever it is you are doing right now. Your purpose, good people, is listening to this sermon! And mine is delivering it. Of course, this is Tolle’s way of saying that the purpose of living is to awaken, to wake up to the present moment.

     I asked a few of my colleagues about “purpose of life.” To spread kindness, said one. To help bring beauty into the world, said another. To love our own lives and each other, and to enjoy the coming of spring, said a third, and this is a day we can all probably resonate with that one.

     A. Powell Davies, the great Unitarian minister who had a hand in the founding of this church, famously said the purpose of life is to grow a soul, and I’ve always loved that idea. His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts it more simply: the purpose of life is to be happy. All these answers ring true to me, but they lack … instruction. How to awaken to the present moment? How to love our own lives? Grow a soul? How to be happy? How do we figure out what we are supposed to be DOING, while we are waking up, spreading kindness, loving our lives, growing a soul, being happy? What single task, what great purpose are we each supposed to fulfill?

     You all know what Tolle’s answer is going to be, don’t you? The way to wake up to the present moment is to … pay attention to the present moment. Are you paying attention to the sermon?

     Could he be right -- we really don’t have to “do” any particular thing to find the path we are supposed to  be on? Could it be that the one thing we are supposed to remember, in the Sufi story, is not about what we do, at all?   -- that what we are supposed to be doing is “doing no more than adding your perfection to another day,”  in the words of the poem Rev. Michael read for us.

     Wait a minute: it still feels like we are supposed find some great purpose for our lives. Well maybe, but Tolle says, “the great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for.”  Paying attention, in other words -- to the messages of your body, as Cynthia said in her “I believe” statement. Listening to the messages of the life you happen to be living, right now.

     I have a simple practice for paying attention this way. Every day, I try to remember to ask myself two questions: What am I most grateful for this day? What am I least grateful for? Over time, the answers to these questions point the way to the path I am already on, and help me to find words for it. What am I moving toward? This is another way of asking that question. We are like plants, says the writer and teacher, Parker Palmer, “full of tropisms that draw us toward certain experiences and repel us from others. If we can learn to read our own responses to our own experience -- a text we are writing unconsciously every day we spend on earth -- we will receive the guidance we need to lead more authentic lives.” Notice that these questions -- what am I grateful for, what am I moving toward – don’t presuppose some “right” answer outside myself. These questions assume that the stuff of my life already contains the wisdom that is necessary to discern what purpose I am “supposed” to fulfill.

     Recently a member of this congregation was sharing about her work with L’Arche, and her story motivated me to find out more about this organization. It was founded in the 1960s by Jean Vanier, a Canadian who was passionate about the human need for community, for all people, especially including those who are differently abled. Vanier invited two mentally disabled men from a local asylum to come live with him in a small French village north of Paris, and this began a worldwide movement of communal living. ‘Life is about transmitting life to others,” Vanier said in an interview. “The beauty of spiders is that they give birth to spiders, of elephants that they give life to elephants, and of roses that they give life to other roses. The beauty of human beings is in our capacity to give life to others, not only biological life, but to give life, hope, love and meaning to others.” And then he said, “But we tend to fall into productivity.” I love that: the fall out of grace isn’t about eating a forbidden apple, but about a “fall into productivity.” Vanier discovered the meaning of his life, the purpose of his life, by paying attention to what he was drawn to. Productivity -- more than 130 communities in 33 countries -- came later.

     “Perhaps purpose is not an intentional or goal-oriented thing, but a secret waiting to be discovered,” wrote my friend, Linda Blachman, who found the purpose of her life during a long period of illness when she had time to listen to the still, small voice within. When she recovered, she began the Mothers’ Living Stories Project, a program to record the life stories of women facing life-threatening illness at the same time as raising young children.

     There are a few moments in my own life I can remember when something clicked into place, some knowledge that led me to articulate a purpose or a mission. One happened at the Urban Church conference in New Orleans in 1996. I was a lay leader then, working in my church’s urban neighborhood but not yet naming my work as ministry. A group called the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond made a presentation at the conference, telling about a transformation they had helped to midwife at the St. Thomas/Irish Channel housing Project.

     I was familiar with St. Thomas; more than a decade earlier, I’d spent a year in New Orleans as a reporter for the Associated Press. Later this low-income neighborhood would become a setting for the movie “Dead Man Walking;” still later it would be razed rather than rebuilt as affordable housing after Katrina. In 1996, I remembered it as a dismal place, and, far as I knew, nothing had happened in society at large to give me any hope that conditions there could be anything but worse. But at the Urban Church conference, I listened in growing excitement as leaders of the People’s Institute told how the residents of St. Thomas had organized to kick out all the white-run nonprofits that were “serving” them without giving them a voice to say what they needed and wanted. Their words painted a picture of a community that was beginning to thrive, to take responsibility for itself, and to stand up to the dominant, white culture of New Orleans with dignity, meeting power with power. It was my first introduction to community organizing, and once I had heard this, I later realized, I had to give up a kind of unacknowledged despair that had weighted me down my entire life up to that point.

     It took time, but eventually I was able to name what had struck me so powerfully. You see, I had been brought up as the child of a white, southern family, which had instructed me in the ways of a genteel and spirit-killing racism. Cognitively, I had long rejected the most glaring contradictions between what I had learned growing up, and the liberalism I had come to embrace as an adult. But what I saw from the words of the People’s Institute leaders was that structures of racism are not the inevitable context for our lives that I had assumed them to be.   “And if racism can be overcome,” I realized, “if overcoming it is possible, how can I not spend my life working to overcome it?” This became an articulated mission of my life, one I work every day to live into. My efforts to fulfill this purpose sometimes frustrate me, often confuse and disappoint me, but they also are perhaps the single greatest engine of my own spiritual growth, because they require me on a daily basis to continue looking for my own shadow -- to bring to light the parts of myself that are hidden from easy view. This work to know myself and the world more fully is a source of great joy in my life, and if you are white and interested in a spiritually grounded way to learn how that identity can be a source of growth, I invite you to join me at a workshop to be given in our District on May 17. (flyers)

     It’s important to say that I had not gone to New Orleans looking for a mission or a purpose to my life. It came to me by grace, not because I was looking, but because I had put my foot on a path that had taken me there for that conference, and maybe because I was also beginning to learn to pay attention to the messages my heart was telling me about my own life. Very often, I think, we put the cart before the horse. We want our actions to conform to a feeling inside that life is a magnificent gift and we therefore ought to be doing something great with it. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? We hear the line from Mary Oliver’s poem as a call to action, and we forget that what precedes this line is a story about how she spent the whole day idle in the sun, studying a grasshopper.

     Many of us in western culture grew up shaped by the narrative of the man Jesus, who seemed to understand the great purpose that his life was about from at least the age of 12, when the stories say he began reading and preaching to elders in the temple. Is that why we think we are supposed to figure out what we are supposed to do, and then fit our actions to a great purpose we have named? But what if our purpose is to pay attention to the path we are already on? And if we are patient and anchored in the present moment, a mission will swim into view.

     The sower goes out and scatters seeds in the furrows. Some of it doesn’t grow. The sower does not pay attention to that which doesn’t grow. The sower gives her care and attention to the plants that sprout, the ones that drink the rain and turn their blossoms toward the sun. And the sower continues to do what the sower does -- to scatter seeds -- to throw them lavishly, to hurl her life like a voice to the clouds, to spend her days with commitment, and with joy.

     May it be so for us all.

BENEDICTION

     Carry your life high, and play with it; hurl it like a voice to the clouds …

     And listen …

     Listen for the wisdom of the life you are living,

     The life you are living now, in this moment,

     Listen for the still, small voice,

     Calming your fears, quenching your tears, through all the years.

• Our Bodies and Our Life's Purpose by Cynthia Adcock

• "Wake Up. Day Calls You" by Pedro Salinas

1. What are you most grateful for today? What are you least grateful for? OR – what are you moving toward in your life? What are you moving away from?

2. Do you have or have you had a sense that you are not living the life you are “supposed” to be living, or that you are not fulfilling your purpose? When do you feel this way?

3. Have you had a moment when something “clicked into place,” and you knew what you were supposed to be doing? Tell about how that felt.

4. Once you have discovered a mission or a purpose, how do you keep it alive in your daily life and work?

5. How do you listen for your “still, small voice?”

6. What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of YOUR life? Are these two different questions? If so, can you articulate the answers in a way that brings them closer in meaning?