Personal Statement (“This I believe…”)
– Larry BorySing and dance, sing and dance, sing and dance together, and be joyful, be joyful*.
Art has always been an important part of the life of this church. Whether for its beauty, its non-verbal connection, its encouragement of the sharing of talents, or its stimulation of individual and collective appreciation.
I came to this church in 1972 because Lee asked me to come with her to hear the preaching of Bob Clark. But what drew me was what I heard up there (in the choir loft) – the music of a great instrument and a well trained and tuned choir. Musical art is not mechanical. It is not the correct order of pitch and rhythm, but the interpretation, the inflection. I heard a joy, a commitment in the singing that I wanted to be part of.
Even as the strings of a lute, they quiver with their own music…
Singing for me is the balance of breath and emotion. There are some for whom it is natural, effortless; for others it is a struggle of control. What I have learned from Vera (Tilson) and from Ray (Killian), as well as Russell (Woollen) and Jason (Sherlock), is to trust the breath. Breath has been used by many theologians as a metaphor for spirit. For singers, as I have learned, it is the key to a different communication. It is strange that the depth of the breath, is a channel to the right brain – a very curious anatomical connection. There is a definite shift that occurs in the singer – a transcendence – that I believe communicates to the hearers.
We have had many transcendent musical events here in this space. – choir concerts, operas, recitals, soloists, worship services, memorial services. Let me presume to speak for my colleagues. There is an order of joy that moves out from the singer:
- I sing for my own joy, to please myself;
- We sing for the resonance, the ensemble, the pleasure of creating music greater than the sum of the individual parts among ourselves;
- Finally, we sing to be heard by you to participate and share an a community--- and we know we have communicated the joy, the pain, the peace, whatever the emotion---even if you never audibly respond.
Sing and dance!*
Dance is the performing art that requires no sound. It is felt, body centered. Bev Kitson and Barbara Beach started the dance group more then 20 years ago. I have experienced it a few times as a participant with Monica (Dale). It is liberating, energizing a physical joy. Ask the dancers more about this energy. It is transcendent to watch, to experience especially in the changing light of this space.
This church was designed to display painting, photography, and sculpture. The talents of the many artists whose work hangs on our walls, enrich us with their many visions of the world – the pain, as well as the joy.
Finally we have celebrated the art of theatre in this church, for entertainment, but more essentially to reveal the diversity of the human spirit.
The play’s the thing – wherein I’ll capture the conscience of the – congregation!
Intergenerational short plays and stories for all church services, readers theatre like the “Spoon River Anthology”--the death penalty play earlier this year--these have been a rich part of our worship experience. The power of the theatric in worship is more than the suspension of disbelief. It conveys though words, action and music, a transcendence to a different time, place, culture, reality.
Through Chalice Theatre, we have created an intergenerational vehicle for sharing humor, tragedy, growth and pain. Last year in “Fiddler on the Roof,” we transformed the Fellowship Hall into a Russian village before the Revolution. My experience of creating Tevye was again one of transcendence, to reach inside for a resonance with this Jewish father, clinging to the values of his faith, while opening to new ideas, because of his love and commitment to his family and his people—and thereby becoming free.
The freedom of expression in the variety of art we embrace and share here is an excellent reflection of our individual spiritual journeys. In our pursuit of our own bliss, we create community. We are inspired and encouraged by each other to be free to risk sharing our talents.
Sing and dance, and be joyful!*
*These phrases were sung by Larry.
Reading – Vera Tilson
From The Portable LIFE 101 by Peter McWilliams
One of the greatest—and simplest—tools for learning more and growing more is doing more.
Mel Brooks:
Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, and you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.
The good news is that we learn all we need to know—eventually.
William Saroyan:
Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.
Who are you?
Tallulah Bankhead:
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
I’d like to introduce a portion of life I call The Gap. The Gap is the area into which I put the many (often conflicting) beliefs people have about What’s The Big Force Behind It All And How Does This Big Force Interact With Human Beings?
Jean-Paul Sartre:
Sartre (arriving in heaven) – It’s not what I expected.
God – What did you expect?
Sartre – Nothing.
If it works for you, fine—use it; it’s yours. If it doesn’t work for you, let it go and try other things that may.
Marcel Proust:
We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
Life, it turns out, is not a struggle; it’s a wiggle.
Arthur C. Clarke:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Use everything for your upliftment, learning, and growth.
Sign in Tokyo Hotel:
Is forbidden to steal towels, please. If you are not person to do such is please not to read notice.
To observe, don’t do anything; simply notice the inner process. The voices demanding you do this, move there, or scratch whatever may rise to screaming crescendo. Don’t do anything; continue to observe.
Franz Kafka:
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has not choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
In Hollywood, mis-takes are common. …Give yourself as many re-takes as you need. Stars do it. Why not you?
Dorothy Fields:
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
When you’re so committed to something you know it’s going to happen, you act as though it’s going to happen. That action is a powerful affirmation.
Goethe:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
What’s important is your focus. Where—in the big picture of things—are you putting your attention? If you’re focused on your goal, you can have any number of positive and negative thoughts along the way. (And probably will.)
Erma Bombeck:
The only reason I would tale up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.
Get off your buts!
Sgt. Ernie Bilko (The Phil Silvers Show):
You said, “but.” I’ve put my finger on the whole trouble. You’re a “but” man. Don’t say “but.” That little word “but” is the difference between success and failure. Henry Ford said, “I’m going to invent the automobile,” and Arthur T. Flanken said, “But…..”
Ever watch anyone having a temper tantrum? Or go on and on wbout how unfairly the world treated her? Or cry over the loss of a love he didn’t much like anyway? Ever watch a fit of jealousy, pettiness, or vindictiveness?
Joan Rivers:
Grow up!
You don’t have to do anything.
Timothy Leary:
If you don’t like what you’re doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.
Sermon – “Rebooting Your Life”
We don’t talk much about computers from the pulpit. Don’t know why. Seems to me our lives are pretty tied up with them. Oh, I know there are those of you sitting out there who have not succumbed. A few holdouts – like Ruth Van Cleve who is still devoted to her old Royal typewriter! Or those of you who huddle in terror of entering a strange new world of alien language and complex instructions that you’re sure you’ll never understand.
When Vera came to pick up the reading for this morning’s service, we sat down together in my office to talk about life and computers. I worked with Vera for ten years until her retirement (after 46 years as our Music Director), and a bigger techie you couldn’t find! Anything electronic beckoned to her, and especially the world of computers.
Her take on computers is a little like mine – “It’s magic!” Think of all that stuff floating around in cyberspace! Magic!
This I believe: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced!
And…The whole brave new world of daily interaction with computers opens up delicious metaphors for living.
Could it be that the computer, so much a part of our lives, is a container for magic and metaphor? It is a teacher, certainly; think of all that stuff barreling along on the information superhighway! But in other ways as well. It reflects lessons along life’s journey.
Take the experience of “rebooting.”
You start up a machine, you “boot it up.” It suddenly stops, and you want to start it up again, you reboot. When it comes to working with computers, rebooting is a common occurrence because, within that magic tower of bits and bytes and hardwires and RAMs, little bitsy errors seem to accumulate slowly or suddenly and foul things up. Whatever’s going on in there – it causes the whole thing to freeze, to “crash.” You move your mouse, but the arrow won’t move, or has disappeared. You press keys and nothing happens. You become agitated and say a few choice words to the machine, but that doesn’t change anything either. There is only one thing to do – you reboot, hoping that all the little dust-balls of errors will get swept away in the process of starting up again, at which time the computer runs checks on its systems and corrects what needs correcting. With computers, rebooting is often the best way to solve the mystery of things gone wrong within the system.
So, it can be with life!
Rebooting, as metaphor, can provide a strategy for living.
We can choose the premise that many of the circumstances, which seem to block us in our daily lives, may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. If we could draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances, new pathways may come into view. It could be a new practice for bringing possibility to life.
We can choose to shift the operational structures of our world and find more definitions of who we are and what we are here for. We can take a different approach to those dust-balls of stuff in our own CPU (Central Processing Unit) and rearrange the thinking and functioning that caused us to crash. We can reboot our lives. Many times.
Stories make our lives as much as we create them ourselves: personal stories, national stories, cultural stories, religious stories. We need to latch on to some ideas and values, and self-understandings that we think explain things. So, we exist in an environment of invented stories.
Stories give us a framework of meaning. These frames created in our minds define what we perceive to be possible. They confine possibilities as well. Problems, dilemmas, and dead ends we find ourselves facing, appear unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Create another frame around the data, and whole new possibilities appear.
Our familiar everyday world is one in which we make many judgements; we measure ourselves and others continually in terms of grades, comparisons, performance, standards, winning and losing, success or failure, acceptance and rejection. In this environment, we need to have a clever strategic mind, a competitive edge, know-how to take possession of resources. The popularity of so-called “Reality Television,” referring to the Survivors series, is probably due to our recognition that we all are living in a similar situation, without virtually being off somewhere on a remote island or in the outback.
So much that we’re familiar with in this measurement world, full of linear thinking and dualities, is an arrangement of hierarchies: certain groups, people, bodies, places, and ideas seem better or more powerful. Dividing lines appear between insiders and outsiders. “Survivors” are those who overcome odds and prevail. “Winners” are those who are acknowledged and included. The hidden assumption in this scenario is that life is about the struggle to survive and get ahead in a world of limited resources; it’s a world of scarcity and peril.
A remark of Woody Allen’s illustrates this. He said,
“More than anytime in history, [hu]mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”Obviously, there’s a need to reboot here.
Suppose we reframe those hidden assumptions about the world, and realize we are free to experience a universe of possibilities; one that is infinite, generative, and abundant.
The rebooting process is a practice of asking yourself questions that can help you to look at what is, and then consider new approaches.
One question you might ask yourself—in many situations--is this:
· What assumption am I making, that I’m not aware of making, that gives me what I see?
Remember, your assumptions and interpretations are just mental concepts that help you to describe and explain your experience. They are stories you tell yourself to make sense of the world; they are not direct experience of reality. Always pause to wonder what is really going on.
And this—
· How are my thoughts and actions, in this moment, a reflection of the survival and scarcity world?
That world view – of survival and scarcity -- is the hidden assumption and the prime error message that freezes up our lives over and over again.
When you have answers to those two questions, ask yourself this one:
· What alternative actions or ideas are possibilities that I haven’t thought of before, that would give me other choices?
Once you step through all the invisible membranes of your fears, excuses, and self-limiting beliefs, and begin to befriend a larger world, you will have performed the miracle of expanding your comfort zone to previously unimagined proportions.
In the book, The Art of Possibility, the authors, Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander suggest another way we can reboot our lives.
It’s “Rule #6!”
The Zanders tell this story:
Two Prime Ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, visibly angry. Shaking with fury, he bangs his fist on the desk. The resident Prime Minister admonishes him: “Peter,” he says, “kindly remember Rule Number 6,” whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws. The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again 20 minutes later by an upset woman, gesticulating wildly. Again the intruder is greeted with the words, “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.” Complete calm descends once more, and she withdraws with a bow and an apology.
The visiting Prime Minister addresses his colleague: “My friend, I’ve seen many things, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?”
“Very simple,” is the reply. “Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so goddamn seriously.’”“Ah,” says the visitor, “that is a fine rule.” After a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?”“There aren’t any.”
Humor and laughter are perhaps the best ways we can get over ourselves. Humor can bring us together around our inescapable foibles, confusions, and miscommunications. It can bring us together especially over the ways in which we find ourselves acting out childish demands and entitlements, or putting other people down, or flying at each other’s throats---those “dust-balls” of dysfunction that cause error messages (the ones with a picture of a bomb).
Time to reboot!
We can be so self-centered, puffed out with importance, blind to others.
The part of you and me that operates in the survival and scarcity mode lobbies to be taken very seriously indeed. When we practice Rule Number 6, we can coax ourselves to lighten up, and by doing so we break its hold on us.
…another aspect of the rebooting process!
Now, for the possibilities of reframing.
Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little girl named Ilse, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. The story is recounted by Ilse’s childhood friend, Guerda Weissman Kline. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found, one morning, a single raspberry somewhere in the camp. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend, Guerda, on a leaf. “Imagine a world,” writes Guerda, “in which your entire possession is one Raspberry, and you give it to your friend.”
Zander, in his book, writes about a part of ourselves we need to find in the rebooting and reframing process. It’s what he calls “the central self.” He writes:
“Such is the nature of our central self, a term we use to embrace the remarkably generative, prolific, and creative nature of ourselves and the world. If we were to design a new voyage to carry us into the bright realm of possibility, we might want to steer -- away from a hierarchical environment and aim for the openness and reciprocity of a level playing field—away from a mind-set of scarcity and deficiency and toward an attitude of wholeness and sufficiency. …
He continues:
“Transformation, for our central selves, is a description of the mode through which we [engage our lives]. A transformation is a shift in how we experience the world, and these shifts happen continually, often just beyond our notice. … From the perspective of the central self, life moves with fluidity like a constantly varying river, and so do we. Confident that it can deal with whatever comes its way, it sees itself as permeable rather than vulnerable, and stays open to influence, to the new and unknown. Under no illusion that it can control the movement of the river, it joins rather than resists its bountiful flow.”Now, let’s consider “the way things are.” How does our attitude about that effect the rebooting process?
Here are some reflections about the way things are from one of my all-time favorite movies: “Babe.”
The scene is Christmas Day on the farm. The pig, cow, hens, and Ferdinand the duck crowd by the kitchen window, craning their necks to see which unfortunate one of their kind has been chosen to be the main course at dinner. On the platter is Roseanna the duck, dressed with sauce a l’orange.
Looking mournfully through the window, Duck says: Why Roseanna? She had such a beautiful nature. I can’t take it anymore! It’s too much for a duck. It eats away at the soul…
Cow: The only way to find happiness is to accept that the way things are is the way they are.
Duck: The way things are stinks!
Well, I think a successful reboot is going to require a little reframing here. We’re going to need some alternative both to the hopeless resignation of the cow, and the spluttering resistance of the duck.
Another way to experience life is to be present to the way things are, including being present to our feelings about the way things are. Being present, though, does not mean accepting the way things are in resignation. It simply means being present without resistance. If we dislike a situation, we can’t let ourselves think only about how they should be rather than how they are. It’s also best not to indulge in exit strategies of escape, denial, or blame, or to come to conclusions too quickly.
Presence without resistance -- opens us up to the question, “What do we want to do from here?” We start to have some new ideas. The capacity to be present to what is happening, without resistance, creates possibilities.
Soren Kierkegaard, in his book, Either/Or said this:
“If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility, never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?”
Suppose for a moment that vital, expressive energy flows everywhere, that it is the medium for the existence of life, and that any block to participating in that vitality lies within ourselves. Our consciousness tries to tell us something different: that people are distinct entities, shapes have edges, and apples and oranges cannot be compared. How and where can we experience, instead, an integrative energy?
The rebooting process says: Notice where you’re holding back, and let go. Experiment with releasing the barriers of self that keep you separate and in control. And then, participate wholly, fully. Allow yourself to be a channel for the shaping of the world.
On March 5, I’ll be starting a three-month sabbatical leave. I hadn’t thought of it as a possible rebooting experience until I started into thinking about this sermon. I have been planning to do some writing, which will include work on describing our team ministry process and experience for the benefit of other churches who are considering it, and also preparing material to help us start-up a structured Shared Ministry program. I also want to do other writing and get back to my art work. I think I’ll use the writing and art to ask myself lots of good questions about possibilities and hidden assumptions and where my life needs renewed balance. I haven’t given myself time for that, and I look forward to basking in this time of renewal and reboot-ment!
I’d like to close with these words of the dancer, Martha Graham:
“There is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is not how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”May there be abundant opportunities in your days ahead for successful rebooting!
Benediction
Mahatma Gandhi said, “As human beings,
our greatness lies not so much
in being bale to remake the world…
as in being able to remake ourselves.”
Go now in the blessed intoxication of possibility!
Amen and Shalom
