Centering Thought
“It’s time to stop looking for answers. The answer is sloth.” –Wendy Wasserstein
Story
"The Sloth: Just Hangin' Aroung" by Alison Wilbur Eskildsen, Intern Minister
As you may know, Rev. Linda is going off on a special Sabbatical Journey this year. Before she goes, I’d like to invite her and you to go on an imaginary journey with me to the rain forests of South America where we’re going to meet a special animal. If it helps you to imagine, you can close your eyes.
In your mind, picture the rain forest. There are tall, leafy trees all around you. When you look up, the tops of the trees are far away. Sunlight occasionally breaks through the canopy of leaves, creating a dappled effect of dark and light.
Look closely at the trees surrounding you. Feel the smooth bark. On a branch above you rests an emerald green boa snake, her body winds around the branch. She won’t harm you.
Look up higher to another branch. You can barely see a large cat-like shape hanging from the branch. The animal’s gray-green fur makes for excellent camouflage, helping it hide from predators. This creature is a sloth, the animal we have come to see.
Slowly, the sloth reaches out and pulls a leaf off the tree. Slowly, it stuffs the leaf in its mouth. And even more slowly, it chews, and chews and chews the leaf.
Sloths do everything very, very slowly. They move so slowly, algae, a simple form of plant, grows on its fur, giving the sloth its greenish color. Watch as the sloth slowly licks its fur for an algae snack. Algae’s not the only life found on a sloth. Moths, beetles and ticks are happy to live on the slow-moving sloth.
A sloth’s paws and claws are perfectly designed for hanging. They’re curved and long, making them fairly useless for walking. Instead, they spend all their time upside-down in the trees, just hanging around. The sloth sleeps most of the day, spending a few hours to eat. You digest most food you eat in hours or a day, and you go to the bathroom frequently. But the sloth even does these things slowly. It might take a week or more to digest its meal. And it will go to the bathroom maybe once a week. This is the only time it crawls down the tree to the ground. Very slowly, the sloth will dig a hole, drop its waste, cover up the hole, then climb slowly back up the tree. Perhaps without knowing it, the sloth fertilizes the tree it depends on for food and shelter. What a wonderful example of the interconnected web.
Some people who live in the rain forest don’t call these animals sloths. They call them A-ee, after the sound of the animal’s breath exhaling. It was Europeans who named them sloths. To them, a sloth was something lazy. But the A-ee’s slow movement in the trees protects it. Moving animals are easier to see than those who are still and quiet.
What do you think of the sloth, leading its simple life of sleeping, chewing, and hanging around? Is it okay to be slow?
“I Believe” by Ron Teeter
Newcomers and longtime members alike often say that seeking community is among their primary motives for coming to our church. But in a large congregation, it can be easy to let yourself fade into the background, especially if, like me, you’re a little introverted to begin with.
Participation in covenant groups anchors you to the church community. The explorations we’ve undertaken in the groups I’ve joined have deepened my connection to the church, to other members and friends, to ideas, to the natural world, have broadened and challenged my views, often reinforced them, and have made me feel a little less doubtful, overall, about my fellow humans.
Most of our lives aren’t structured to allow us to spend as much time as we’d probably like to, or as we probably should, thinking about things like, say, the fourth UU principle or the origin of the universe. So the chance to carve out an hour with a group of other thinkers and seekers and philosophers and dissidents and occasional comedians and discuss faith or its absence, ethics, divinity, space travel, animal consciousness, what have you, is a rare gift in a world that’s often pointedly inimical to our liberal principles.
And covenant groups offer the chance to mull these vast subjects in a way that’s informal, unfettered, and fun. You can feel safe enough to speculate, even wildly, on matters you don’t know much about, and to admit, even to revel in, the many things you have yet to discover. You don’t have to be deep and clever all the time, you don’t have to back up your talking points with data; all you’re really asked to do, when you’re ready, as you’re comfortable, is to speak from the heart or the gut. And no one minds if you get a little irreverent, or crack a joke, or if you sometimes prefer simply to listen and say nothing.
But for me, the greatest value of covenant groups has been the chance I’ve gotten to connect with so many bright, committed, compassionate UUs whom I might not otherwise have gotten to know.
Poem: “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Sermon: “How Slow Can You Go?”
Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz
If you are in the habit of reading the church newsletter, you may be surprised to see me in the pulpit today. Or if you receive emails from the church, and you read your email, you may be even more surprised that my topic today is sloth and not sin.
Reading the newsletter or reading email are not habits I would encourage, by the way. Or, rather, I would encourage them only to the extent that they can be done in a 100 percent horizontal position – and in my efforts to be a moral examplar, I tell you today that this is the position from which I wrote every word of this sermon.
Why sloth and not sin this morning? Originally Rev. Michael was going to preach about sin today to open the series of sermons that are to become topics for many of our covenant group discussions. When his recovery took a wrong turn, it was then considered that I might preach this opening topic. On further reflection, however, we decided to save the sin sermon for Rev. Michael, who is vastly more qualified than I to preach on the subject. His recovery is back on track, and you should be hearing sin from his very lips in just a few weeks.
I am, however, fully qualified to preach on the subject of sloth, the first of the seven deadlies we are considering in this series. So without further ado, and expending as little effort as possible, let us begin.
Originally there were Eight Deadly sins – did you know that? -- but it wore everybody out to try to remember that many. So two of them were combined into Sloth.
The first part of what became the Sin of Sloth was the Sin of Sadness. It’s true, sadness – the full, public expression of which is encouraged daily at the temples of Oprah and Dr. Phil – was once considered a sin. Do you remember Anne of Green Gables? – The frecklefaced orphan, who was fond of dramatic gestures, would say things like, “My life is a graveyard of buried hopes.” At one point she asks her no-nonsense Aunt Marilla, “Can’t you even IMAGINE you’re in the depths of despair?” And Marilla answers, “No I cannot. To despair is to turn your back on God.” And there is the nut of the sin of Sadness – turning your back on God, failing to be moved to joy by the certain knowledge of God’s divine love and mercy, or by the beauty of God’s world as in the faces of the children who sang for us here this morning; as in the gift of our dear elders, Joy and Vera, playing for our Ingathering.
The eighth deadly sin, the other part of what was rolled into Sloth, was Acedia – not a word we hear often, and one that’s a little hard to define. This was the “noonday demon” that would strike monks with a paralyzing sense of the futility of life, especially during the height of day, when it seemed impossible to make it through interminable hours until the comforting evening rituals of prayer and sleep.
Acedia was so painful that in the Middle Ages, theologians debated whether it was a sin at all, or a punishment for some other sin.
Acedia was the subject of the Parson’s monologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; he describes it as “the thing that deprives the sinner of all quest for goodness” and makes a person “peevish and encumbered.” Most famously in literature, we see the acedic personality in the melancholy prince, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who did not trust his own knowledge and could not bring himself to act.
Lest I lose my authority to preach on this topic, I hasten to assure you – well, I don’t hasten really, I never hasten -- however I want you to know that I myself have not read these works of literature. But I do know how to use Cliff notes and Google.
And this is what we think of today when we consider the “sin” of “sloth” – not sadness, not acedia, but a delicious idleness that every person in this room, I’d bet, could use a lot more of in our lives. At most, we think of “sloth” as laziness, as the Cliff-notes kind of corner-cutting, or the failure to put things away at home on the theory that we’re going to need them again eventually and so why not minimize effort and just leave them out on the counter? Secretly, we may envy the rainforest sloth that Alison told us about, who moves so slooooowly algae grows in his hair. We long for idleness like that.
I think though that one reason we keep ourselves so busy – a reason we allow ourselves so little of that delicious kind of sloth – is that we tend to be deeply afraid. We are afraid to stop; afraid in the beautiful words of the poet to let evening come to the scoop in the oats, to the air in the lung. One of our deepest fears may be fear of the Big Sloth, the combined effects of sadness and acedia, that we more commonly know as depression.
Now if I were to ask how many people here have dealt with depression in themselves or in a close friend or family member – and here I am talking not about grief or transitory sadness but the mind-crippling, seemingly endless sense of futility that is popularly called “clinical depression” – I’d guess that a large majority of you in this room would raise your hands. But it’s kind of a taboo; we fear it too much to talk about. Or to stop – to stop being busy long enough to allow the possibility of not starting back up again. Even our recreation tends to be boundaried and often quite programmed.
This is one reason why Rev. Linda’s sabbatical journey beginning tomorrow, which she enters with ideas instead of plans, is a courageous one. She is taking six months off without a self-improvement plan. Imagine that. Is it hard to imagine that? Self improvement is deep in our Unitarian bones. In the 19th Century, one of our worthies, James Freeman Clarke, articulated five points of the Unitarian faith, and two of them were “salvation by character” and “the progress of mankind, onward and upward forever.” Not much room for sloth in a faith like that.
The late playwright Wendy Wasserstein, commissioned by the New York Public Library to create a little book on sloth, rightly noticed that sloth as laziness, sloth as idleness, is not the central spiritual challenge of our time. Therefore she subtitled her volume “Sloth and How to Get It” and wrote it tongue in cheek as a self help guide. It’s the “fastest growing lifestyle movement in the world,” her fictional author asserts. “If you embrace sloth, it’s the last thing you’ll ever have to do again.”
It’s true, we all need a little less of nearly everything we are doing, especially all the messages from the commodified culture of what we need to get or do better. Yet I would argue that we ARE prone to a kind of laziness – a spiritual laziness that manifests in failure to exercise due diligence in discerning where to put our energy. There is so much we could be doing – to improve ourselves, yes, and to build a more just and sustainable world. How dare we be still?
It’s a funny thing, this sin of sloth, this laziness that allows us to be set constantly in motion, making it so hard to put our shoulders to the wheel of discernment. Caught up in the frantic pace around us, we are overcome by the “innate violence of modern life.” Those are the words of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and social activist. He went on: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence.”
These are strong words. Do we have the will to resist? Do we have the courage to go slow, when everything in the culture is telling us to do more and do it faster?
To resist this spiritual sloth of speediness, we’d have to make the time to do the inner work, to listen to the voice still and small, to reflect alone and especially in community, on the best use of the gifts we bring to the world. Which Working Together Week project will be the one that changes your heart? With whom do you want to meet in covenant to reflect deeply on your life? What is your next step – not a self-improvement plan, but a step you will take today, inside yourself, maybe right now? What are you moving toward? These are the questions that matter, not how fast are you going, or how much can you accomplish. What is the next step on YOUR journey? Take all the time you need.
Sources and inspirations:
Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Questions for Covenant Groups:
1. Thomas Merton said: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence.” Do you succumb to violence in this way in your own life? How?
2. Is it hard to slow down? What makes it hard? Are you afraid to slow down? What are you afraid of?
3. What are you moving toward? Or, put another way: What are you becoming?
4. What is the next step on your journey?
