The Balance Between

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance..."
-- Thomas Merton

Meditation: by Lynn Ungar, a poem entitled “Revelers”

Call it spare time –

dark afternoons

and the bones of trees

rattling against the sky.

We could use more hope,

or reason for hope. The sea

is rising, and bombs are planted

in the marketplace. It might

be better to just go to bed.

It might be better to

turn out the lights and wait 

for the end to come.

The only other choice 

is to dance. That and to sing

sturdy songs that have held up

across winters,

drink wine the deep red of blood

that has not been shed,

feast, tell tales of heroes who

strode or stumbled through

their own bleak times.

When in doubt, revel in the darkness.

Each act of celebration is a spark.

Gathered together

they bring back the sun.

Reading:  by historian Rachel Schnepper, from an editorial that appeared in The New York Times last week, entitled “Yuletide’s Outlaws.” (Dec. 14, 2012)

Each year, as wreaths and colored lights are hung on any structure that can support their weight, another holiday tradition begins: the bemoaning of the annual War on Christmas.

The American Family Association has called for boycotting Old Navy and the Gap for, out of political correctness, not using the term “Christmas” in their holiday advertising. Parents have criticized schools for diminishing Christmas celebrations by giving equal time to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. And the Catholic League used to have a Christmas “watch list” for naming and shaming “Christmas kill-joys.”

Anxiety over the War on Christmas is, in other words, an American tradition. But few realize how far back that tradition goes. The contemporary War on Christmas pales in comparison to the first — a war that was waged not by retailers but by Puritans who considered the destruction of Christmas necessary to the construction of their godly society.

Reading: by Annie Dillard from “An Expedition to the Pole” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 19)

It is the second Sunday in Advent.  For a year I have been attending Mass at this Catholic church.  Every Sunday for a year I have run away from home and joined the circus as a dancing bear.  We dancing bears have dressed ourselves in buttoned clothes; we mince around the rings on two feet.  Today we were restless; we kept dropping onto our forepaws.

No one, least of all the organist, could find the opening hymn.  Then no one could sing anyway.

There was no sermon, only announcements.

The priest proudly introduced the rascally acolyte who was going to light the two Advent candles.  As we all could plainly see, the rascally acolyte had already lighted them.

During the long intercessory prayer, the priest always reads “intentions” from the parishioners.  These are slips of paper, dropped into a box before the service begins, on which people have written their private concerns, requesting our public prayers.  The priest reads them, one by one, and we respond on cue.  “For a baby safely delivered on November twentieth,” the priest intoned, “we pray to the Lord.”  We all responded, “Lord, hear our prayer.”  Suddenly the priest broke in and confided to our bowed heads, “That’s the baby we’ve been praying for the past two months!  The woman just kept getting more and more pregnant!”  How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep from laughing out loud?  I often laugh all the way home.  Then the priest read the next intention: “For my son, that he may forgive his father.  We pray to the Lord.”  “Lord, hear our prayer,” we responded, chastened.

A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one.  In two thousand years, we have not worked out the kinks.  We positively glorify them. Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter.  Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens.  

Reading: by Dorothee Sölle, a poem entitled “In this Night”

In this night the stars left their habitual places

And kindled wildfire tidings that spread faster than sound

In this night the shepherds left their posts

To shout the new slogans into each others clogged ears.

In this night the foxes left their warm burrows

And the lion spoke with deliberation,

“This is the end revolution.”

In this night roses fooled the earth

And began to bloom in the snow.

The Balance Between

A Sermon Delivered on December 23, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I was a child, Christmas was a time of mystery and wonder. There was something mysterious and wonderful in the simple holiday trappings and family traditions we observed. The fact that the same Christmas tree ornaments, year after year, were carefully lifted out of their boxes, unwrapped and thoughtfully placed on our Christmas tree, made the act of decoration seem to connect me with a holiday spirit reaching back to time immemorial. Though each ornament weighed only a few ounces, and barely bent the twig on which I hung it, each piece in my hand felt heavy with meaning.

I had no idea what a sacred ritual is, no conception of the theological implications of the Christmas story – the story of a helpless human infant who is the actual embodiment of an all-powerful God. I was unaware of the symbolic meaning of the evergreen tree and the candles that illuminated our home. But even without understanding any of this, unable to put any of it into words, I was still strangely touched and moved.

One piece of our familiar decorations that I especially enjoyed looking at and playing with, was an elaborate wooden candleholder. There were four candles set in square base. Between them, on a small round platform, was a little winter scene: a tiny wooden man and woman looking down on a baby in a crib. Two teeny sheep and a shepherd nearby, holding a long staff. In the center of the scene was a tall Christmas tree.

What made this Christmas display especially interesting to a playful child, was that it moved. You see, on the top of the little Christmas tree, there was a kind-of helicopter pinwheel made of horizontal wooden slats. When I lit the four candles, the warm air rising from each flame would push up through the pinwheel, and make the entire winter scene spin around slowly, the figures dancing magically, peacefully.

* * *

It would be nice if Christmas could always remain simply a time to savor a spirit of mystery and wonder, of human kindness and divine peace. It would be nice if we could forever hold on to the sense of excitement and playfulness and wide-eyed wonder we knew as children. But we can’t.

Inevitably, we grow up, and life gets a lot more complicated. As adults, we have a harder time believing in miracles and magic. Now we watch our children, as they discover the joy of gifts given and received, the sweet taste of cookies, the heart-warming stories of hope – and we share their experience vicariously.

And then even our children grow older. They lose their innocence, as life teaches them their own hard-earned lessons. Though, if we are honest with ourselves, we know even for children life is not pure simple bliss. No matter how old we are, life is filled with its share of danger as well as peace, its share hurt as well as hope. Life has always been complicated.

* * *

And, like life, Christmas is complicated, too. The holidays are supposed to be a time of peace, and yet every year, it seems, there is a War on Christmas. This is a long-standing American tradition, a conflict carried out in many different ways.

There is the battle between certain Christians who have a very particular, definitive interpretation of Christmas, and those who want to honor other traditions at this time of year: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Santa Claus, and any number of pagan practices. There is the battle between those who would like Christmas to be, above all, a spiritual experience, and those see Christmas as a commercial enterprise, the keystone of our annual retail economy. And there is the battle between those who revel in the joys of Christmas, and the Scrooges among us who feel the Christmas commotion just rubs them the wrong way.

Historians say, centuries ago a battle for Christmas was waged so fiercely, that the government actually outlawed Christmas. In the seventeenth century, the Puritans considered the holiday “nothing more than a thin Christian veneer slapped on a pagan celebration.” They thought Christmas was “superstitious at best, heretical at worst.” At the time, in England, Christmas was a kind of raucous carnival, with lots of feasting and heavy drinking, sort-of like Mardi Gras. People dressed up in costumes, and played games and pranks. Christmas had a subversive, revolutionary spirit, that, for a few days, turned established order on its head. 

The Puritans didn’t like that. So in 1647, Christmas was canceled. Churches were shut down, shops were ordered to stay open, and minsters were arrested for preaching on Christmas Day. Between 1659 and 1681, anyone caught celebrating Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay colony was fined five shillings.

The Puritan War on Christmas lasted two hundred years, until 1870, when Christmas was legally declared a federal holiday. It was only in the 1800s that Clement Moore’s poem “A Night Before Christmas” and Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” helped reshape Christmas into the gentle family celebration we know today.

* * *

The Christmas season is filled with so many competing stories, so many different feelings, so many different memories and hopes, so many dimensions of meaning. All these competing ideas and activities and impulses can sometimes seem overwhelming, and throw our lives off-kilter.  For some of us, the holidays can feel like a tug-of-war between competing claims placed upon us. How can we maintain some semblance of balance in the midst of the madness?

How can we balance the experience of the child and of the adult? How can we balance the romantic dreamer and the sober skeptic within us? How can we balance our beliefs and our doubts, our hopes and our fears? How can we find balance in the midst of all these battles?

Scholars say, in Western religion we imagine “a cosmic battle between two opposing principles and pray for the total victory of light over darkness,” of life over death. But that’s not the only way to make sense of the world. (Stephen Prothero, God is not One)

In Eastern thought, in Daoism, for instance, the principles that seem to be opposites - darkness and light, good and evil, weakness and strength, yin and yang – are not actually opposites, but rather complementary pairs, forever melting into one another. They are not opposites, but inseparable phases in an endless cycle, like the movement from day to night, from summer to winter and summer, again. 

According to this perspective “life does not move onward and upward toward a fixed pinnacle or pole.” Life bends back upon itself and comes full circle. (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions)

The poet Mary Caroline Richards describes a similar idea in a book entitled Centering. Richards is a poet, and also a potter. And because she is a potter, she uses the image of the potter’s wheel to describe her understanding of balance. 

She writes, “What I know about centering makes it impossible for me to pretend that truth is either objective or subjective; the practice of centering casts upon such dualisms another light …Centering is the image I use for the process of balance… Centering: that act which precedes all others on the potter’s wheel. The bringing of the clay into a spinning, unwobbling pivot, which will then be free to take innumerable shapes as potter and clay press against each other. The firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts.”

* * *

To maintain our balance amidst the dueling demands of our lives, we need to find a way to remain centered. We need to find the still point of our turning world.

As T. S. Eliot writes:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

* * *

This is the dance we struggle to learn when we come to church. A dance that allows us to touch a stillness deep within, whenever it seems our lives are at the verge of spinning out of control. It is a dance that helps us find a center of sanity at times when the world around us seems to be going mad. 

When the merry-go-round of life is moving too fast, and the world seems to be a blur, we can regain our balance when we step toward the center. It’s like when we reach the middle of a playground carousel. We try to stand there, straight like a pivot, unwobbling. But we don’t always succeed.

Instead our efforts often look like a clumsy circus act, with us circling the ring like dancing bears. And we keep dropping onto our forepaws. The tricks we try to play around Christmas, we have been rehearsing them for two thousand years, and we still haven’t worked out the kinks. 

* * *

When I was a child, I never grew tired of watching the wooden candleholder with the tiny figures dancing slowly around the little Christmas tree that stood unmoving in the center. Some mysterious and wonderful secret seemed to be contained in that revolving winter scene. It hinted at the possibility of some kind of revolution: the possibility of a transformation from death to new life, from vague fears to certain joy.  

In mythology it’s called the “axis mundi.” The axis mundi is the center of the world, the connection between Heaven and Earth. A celestial pillar that stands at the center of the four directions, connecting the world above with the world below. The ancients sometimes imagined it as a tree, or as a mountain, or as a column of smoke rising from an eternal flame. Others imagine the place of connection between heaven and earth within our own hearts, or in the birth of a human child.

We each seek epiphanies in our own way

in daylight or dark night, 

in boughs of holly or blazing Yule fires, 

in songs of joy or acts of kindness. 

However you seek the spirit of the season, may your search be successful.

In the days to come, may you find a balance of light and love in the center of your life.

Amen.

Hurry Up and Wait

"They also serve who only stand and wait."
-- John Milton

Reading: by Henri Nouwen from a piece entitled “Waiting for God” (Watch for the Light, p. 27)

Waiting is not a very popular attitude. Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don’t just sit there and wait!” For many people waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.

In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid – afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are. …

Reading: by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney from Willpower – Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (p. 2) 

[Researchers have] come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced,  winding up in prison. …It can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering. It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed to set aside enough money for their old age.

Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they’ll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery and other virtues – even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than one million people around the world. Of the two dozen “character strengths” listed in the researcher’s questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves.

Reading:  by Marie Howe a poem entitled “Hurry”

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   

and the gas station and the green market and   

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   

as she runs along two or three steps behind me   

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.   

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

Hurry Up and Wait

A Sermon Delivered on December 2, 2012

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

When I was a kid, December was the longest month. I couldn’t wait for Christmas. When I was old enough to know that there would be an abundance of colorfully wrapped packages with my name on them, come Christmas Eve, but still young enough to find unspeakable joy in the prospect of receiving a few carefully selected gifts, those were the years December seemed to last the longest. I remember wishing desperately there was some way to speed up the days, and make time pass more quickly. And yet the more fervently I hoped, the slower the days seemed to drag by.

Now, as an adult, I feel just the opposite. Winter seems to be coming too quickly. It is getting dark much too early, for my taste. And I find myself savoring these unseasonably mild autumn days we are having, before the icy weather arrives in earnest.

December always seems to be marked by a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, a heightened sense of hope, but also a vague sense of fear. For the child, it was simply the fear that my holiday wishes might be disappointed. As an adult, it is the fear of time flying by too quickly, and the growing awareness that the time of our lives is limited. Winter in the world of nature itself is a reminder of our own mortality.

* * *

Today, according to the Christian calendar, is First Advent. It is the first of four Sundays before Christmas. Advent. The word comes from the Latin advenire, which means “to come,” and adventus meaning “arrival.” These are the same roots as the word adventure, which means something is “about to happen.”

In the Christian tradition, the weeks of advent are spent preparing for the arrival of the Christ child, the birth of a baby, and also in preparation for the Second Coming. The first time around Jesus arrives as child savior. The second time around, Jesus returns as judge.

Being judged is serious business. Thus in some Christian traditions advent is a period of fasting, observed just as strictly as the forty days of Lent before Easter. These weeks are a devoted to waiting. Waiting in joyful or fearful anticipation for what is to come.

* * *

Waiting is not easy. Some of us are better at it than others. This has been scientifically studied. And some of these scientific insights are striking.

Perhaps you have heard of the “marshmallow experiments.” Back in the 1960s a psychologist named Walter Mischel studied children’s ability to resist the temptations of immediate gratification.

The experiment he came up with was this: he would bring four-year-old children, one after another, into a room, sit them down at a table, and put a single marshmallow on plate right in front of them. Then he would tell the child: “You can eat this marshmallow right now, if you want. I am going to leave for a while. I have other things to do. I will be back in a few minutes. You can eat this one marshmallow, right now. But if you wait, and don’t eat it, you can have a second marshmallow when I am back. Either way, it’s up to you.” And with that he smiled and left the room.

As you might imagine, some children popped the marshmallow right into their mouths. Others managed to hold off.

Over the years this experiment has been recreated. On YouTube you can watch a clip of four-year-olds sitting at a table, looking at that single marshmallow. Some of them put their hands over their eyes, or turn away, struggling to resist. Others thoughtfully sniff and gently squeeze the marshmallow, picking and poking at it. Some nibble just a little bit. And then a little bit more. You can watch how, for some of them, the temptation is  torturous. They wince and scrunch up their faces… The experiment seems more than a little cruel.

Back in the 1960s Walter Mischel learned a bit about how young children handle delayed gratification. As it turned out, though, his research didn’t end there.

You see, Walter Mischel was a father. And his daughters happened to attend the same school on the Stanford University campus, as several of the children who participated in the original study. In the course of conversations at home around the dinner table, Mischel’s daughters would talk about their classmates, and those who had a habit of getting into trouble. Some of the names sounded familiar. Slowly, Mischel realized the kids that were struggling in school, both academically and socially, were often the same ones who as four-year-olds were the quickest to gobble down their marshmallows.

So in a follow up study Mischel tracked down hundreds of the young men and women who had participated in the marshmallow experiment. What he learned is that the four-year-olds who were able to hold out for fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, years later went on to score 210 points higher in their SATs than those who caved, and ate their marshmallow within half a minute.

The children who were patient enough to wait for fifteen minutes, grew up to be more popular among their peers and teachers, earned higher salaries, were less likely to be overweight, and had less problems with drug abuse. These men and women have been tracked now for over forty years. And the differences among them are still apparent.

* * *

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney begin their book Willpower, with an interesting observation. “However you define success,” they write, whether “a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions – it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.”

The two personal qualities that most reliably predict “positive outcomes” in life are intelligence and self-control. As far as we know, it is not possible to increase our innate intelligence. However, it is possible to improve our degree of self-control.

* * *

Some of us – by virtue of the cards we were dealt by nature or nurture – are more likely to eat that single marshmallow in one quick bite, even if we wish we could have had two instead. And some of us are better able to wait, and thus enjoy certain rewards available only to those who are patient.

But all of us, regardless of our knee-jerk reactions, regardless of our habitual inclinations, all of us have the capacity for greater self-control. Each of us has the capacity to be more patient.

One way to think about patience is as an act of willpower. Our willpower, Baumeister and Tierney write, can be built up and strengthened almost like a muscle. With steady exercise and attention, we can improve our habits. Greater patience can be taught and learned. Both scientists and religious practitioners agree on this. 

Allan Lokos, a Buddhist teacher, and author of a book entitled Patience – The Art of Peaceful Living, writes, “To become a truly patient person requires effort, and it will be difficult to sustain that effort unless you are genuinely motivated.” Thus he suggests: 

“Each day for a week, sit quietly for fine minutes and consider [why you want] to become more patient. Don’t impose reasons on yourself because they seem “right” or because others think that way. Examine your [own] personal experience. Look deeply at what matters to you. Reflect on your relationships, both personal and professional. How does your impatience or your anger affect your wife/ husband/ partner/ children/ friends? Be truthful with yourself: Would it be worth the effort to become more patient? At this point just ask the questions. Let the answers come when they are ready.” (p. 36)

* * *

Patience allows us to live more attentively, and to act more thoughtfully. 

We live much of our lives breathlessly, rushing from one activity to the next, from one worry to the next, from one desire to the next. And so, for the Buddhist, the effort to break the anxious cycle, involves, first of all, being less breathless. Many Buddhist meditation practices begin with the instruction that we should simply sit there, and breathe. Don’t do anything. Simply breathe. Don’t try to breathe fast or slow. Don’t try to breath deep or shallow. Simply breathe. And pay attention to your breathing.

Simply paying attention to our breathing is the first step in bringing us back fully to the present moment. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells her students they should “simply stay” in the present moment. Most of us have a deeply engrained habit to try to flee from the present, and become preoccupied with memories of yesterday and worries about tomorrow. Most of us are often scattered and distracted. To pause for a moment and take a breath is the first step in learning patience.

“Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream.” And thus we come back to the immediacy of our experience. (The Places that Scare You, p. 23)

The patience envisioned by the Buddhist, which can bring us more fully into the present moment, is very similar to the patience envisioned by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. He writes, 

“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.” (p. 31)

* * *

What Walter Mischel discovered studying a four-year-old’s struggle with the temptation of a marshmallow, is what it means to be patient. The patient children didn’t grit their teeth, and practice superhuman self-denial. They simply turned their attention to other things present in the room. Rather than remaining feverishly focused on dreams of marshmallow consumption – either immediate or delayed – they relaxed, and were able to realize that there is more to life than the next marshmallow fix.

* * *

Advent is a period of preparation, of anticipation and apprehension. It is a period in which it is very easy to get caught up in frantic activity or feverish worry.

For a lot of younger folks a wish list can become the focus of joyful anticipation. For older folks a bucket list can become a way to cope with our apprehension about the reality of death. And for in-between-folks an urgent to-do-list can keep us tied up in frantic activity, hurrying from one thing to the next. All of these lists are designed to help us organize our lives, but in fact they turn out distracting us from life. All of our lists pull us away from the present. All of them make us slaves to some imagined reward. Each item we cross off our list is just another marshmallow we want to pop into our mouth. 

Waiting patiently is not merely a matter of resisting temptation, it is a matter of putting aside all distractions.

Often times our waiting is filled with wishes, Henri Nouwen writes. “’I wish that I would have this job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.’ We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes.”

Waiting patiently means relaxing in the moment, and realizing that everything we need is already right here. It means knowing that what we are waiting for is growing from the ground on which we are standing. It means being fully present to this moment.

As we approach another winter solstice, and once again descend into the darkest days of the year, as we await the return of the sun, and the arrival of a new year, may we do so patiently.

Grateful for time past,

Hopeful for time future,

May our seasonal preparations bring us back to time present,

back to the fullness of our lives, right here, right now.

Amen.