A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
September 19, 2010
This is my first-ever auction sermon. I confess to having had some apprehension about this. I’d heard of the practice, but the congregation I served for ten years did not do auctions. And, colleagues had shared some pretty scary stories. Like the sermon bought by the minister’s unhappiest critic. Or the topic designed to make you squirm theologically. Or force you to take a side on the most controversial congregational issue of the moment. Not that I want to suggest ways for you to torture me in the future!
So, I want to thank the winning bidder, Ken Montville, for the fact that my first auction sermon assignment is very reasonable, and appropriately provocative. Also, thank you for your clever sermon title, and deftly written newsletter blurb, with which I will start in a moment.
Before I do, I offer a bit of shameless (but not self) promotion: this year’s auction is to be held on Saturday evening November 13th. It’s always a fun time and raises an important piece of our annual budget, so I hope you will donate a service you can provide, just as I will be donating another sermon; attend with check book in hand; and bring a few friends with you, for good food, good music, good company, a real good time. If you want to join in on the fun of pulling it off, please connect with Jan Montville (yes, they are spouses) who is organizing it this year and cannot do it alone.
Here is Ken’s description for the sermon he called “On Purpose,” as it appeared in our monthly newsletter Branches:
“Life can be joyful and fulfilling when lived with purpose and meaning. Yet, for many people, the search for life’s purpose is elusive, at best. Going through life on auto-pilot, striving to meet other’s expectations, can be frustrating and depressing. Yet, there is no clear cut path to finding one’s purpose/passion/bliss. Or is there?”
Already this morning, we’ve experienced four possible answers to this question, before the sermon even began. Can you identify them?
First was the colorful presentation on the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, still represented here with this rainbow candelabrum. Certainly, there is enough in these principles on which to build a life of purpose and meaning.
Next was Abby Crowley’s Chalice Reflection, written in honor of our fourth Unitarian Universalist principle, which is that we covenant to affirm and promote a “search for truth and meaning.” Or as we heard earlier, “GREEN starts with G and so does grow. We grow by exploring ideas together. Each person should be free to search for what is true and right.”
Abby invited us to try this exercise at home:
- Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type.
- Write or type at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
- Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
- Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose. She repeated Step 3 fifty-four times before she came up with a purpose to live for!
Third was the zany song from the show Avenue Q sung by Ebeth Porter.
I DON'T KNOW WHERE
I'M GONNA LOOK, BUT
I'M GONNA FIND MY
PURPOSE.
GOTTA FIND OUT, DON'T
WANNA WAIT! GOT TO MAKE
SURE THAT MY LIFE WILL BE
GREAT! GOTTA FIND MY
PURPOSE BEFORE IT'S TOO
LATE.
And fourth was Mary Oliver’s stirring poem, grounded in her deep connection with the beauty of living things on the earth. She writes,
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the
grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and
blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I
have been doing all day.
So, there we have it: four ways to approach finding a purpose for your life: you can live by a set of ideals, you can engage in an intense writing process, you can look frantically around everywhere except within yourself, or you can see what purpose arises within you when you are one with the universe, nature, music, art, community, dance, your body in motion, your intellect, your breath, or God, if for you there is God – one with something larger than yourself.
A few people discover their purpose in life as children. The great, late American musician Ray Charles was one of those. In the movie “Ray” starring Jamie Foxx, you may remember the scene where the small child Ray sneaks into the back of the general store to watch an old man playing the piano. That’s back when his name was still Ray Charles Robinson, before his little brother horrifically died in a tub of boiling wash water right before his eyes, and before he became blind at age seven from trachoma. One day the old man at the piano notices him watching, asks him “I’ve seen you coming ’round here before. You love this piano, don’t you?” and the boy mutely nods, so he invites him over, sits him down on the bench, and says, “well, then, I’m gonna teach you how to play it.”
The next time we next see them together is at Ray’s brother’s funeral. The old man’s big hand is around Ray’s shoulder gently holding him close while Ray’s distraught mother is sprawled, sobbing in grief, over the miniature coffin only a couple feet away. The man must have been a good teacher. His student’s musical gift becomes Ray’s ticket out of the poverty of their small African-American town in Florida, and the sharp sense of hearing he must hone to survive and thrive as a blind man becomes an asset as he develops his gift.
Some few of us know our purpose in life at an early age, and either give ourselves to it, or don’t. And others, as adults, find a purpose in life that also pays the bills. Our employment is also our calling, a vocation.
But most of us probably think, as Unitarian Universalist minister Robbie Walsh who wrote, “As long as you are alive the story of your life is still being told, and the meaning is still open…What is done is done, but nothing is settled.” We are the ones whose work pays the bills but is not our purpose in life, though it consumes much of our time; or we are already retired, are homemakers, or otherwise not bound by work routines, with discretionary time.
It’s never too late to find a purpose for living. But how?
Some people come by a purpose in life through tragedy. This past week, the local paper, The Gazette, told one such story. About a family that formed a foundation to give scholarships to graduating seniors of Laurel High School, in memory of their 21 year old son who was killed in their Laurel home by a robber who stole his wallet, his car and his saxophone.
Do you remember the Gold Star Mothers for Peace, who not so many years ago began publicly protesting the deaths of their sons in Iraq? They turned their personal tragedy into a public peace movement. The town in Massachusetts where I served as minister before coming here was the hometown of one of those sons. His mother turned her sorrow into good by working with a VA Hospital chaplain to develop an excellent traveling program educating clergy and mental health professionals about the spiritual needs of returning soldiers. And her husband successfully lobbied Congress to add adequate armor to the vehicles such as the one in which their son died, and then went on to use his computer technology skills to design a robot that can disarm Improvised Explosive Devices such as the one that killed their son, a design that I believe the US Army bought.
But most of us have not suffered such a tragedy. And, although there is a great deal of suffering all around us, if we live mostly in ignorance of it, it’s not likely to move us to greater purpose in life.
My own ignorance was brought home to me last Sunday afternoon when I delivered our collection of garden produce and canned goods, boxed up and carried to my car by our high school students, to the nearby Tabernaculo de La Fe, recommended to us by the Capital Area Food Bank. Even though it’s only two and a half miles from here, at the intersection of Adelphi and Metzerott Roads, they are more aware of local suffering than I. The minister who came out to receive our contributions told me that several mornings a week church members go out and pick up the homeless people nearby and bring them back to the church for a full hot breakfast. I felt so ignorant when I asked where they go to pick up homeless people around here – “just over on University Boulevard, she said, “not far away at all.”
She also told me that she was especially looking forward to getting our donation of fresh vegetables because one of their members has been sick for two weeks, with no paid sick leave or health insurance, and the doctor told her she needed to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables to get well again. I wished we’d collected more. I did give her the five dollar bill one of you put in with the vegetables.
So, if tragedy has not yet visited us, we may find a purpose in life by putting ourselves in contact with the suffering of others and seeing what new purpose it draws out of us and how our gifts might blossom in our efforts to alleviate it.
But I don’t mean to imply that the only life purpose worth having is in service to the poor or in organizing to close the income gap.
For the vast majority of us who did not discover our true purpose in life as children, and for whom our employment is not our calling, and for whom a set of ideals such as our Unitarian Universalist principles is not sufficiently specific …
Here are two approaches to finding ones purpose/passion/bliss.
One, we can pay attention. We can use our senses to notice more around and within us. We can cultivate a graceful, grateful, attentive approach to daily life that gives it more meaning. It takes no extra time to walk from the door to the car, bus or train while actually noticing what the air feels like, whether there is a pleasant fragrance or bad odor to it, and what the sounds and sights are around us. But paying attention gets us out of our heads and into our bodies and through them into the world.
Two takes some time. Maybe not more than ten minutes a day. Taking the time, creating some space in our lives, whether alone or in conversation, in which to notice a deep yearning within and then acting to develop an avocation that satisfies or expresses it. The yearning could be for a daily spiritual practice, more quality in your home life, a hobby, a talent, a mission, a cause, or service to our church, community, nation, or the earth.
And, this is where the double-meaning of Ken’s sermon title enters in. It’s about intentionality.
When I was a child, my three sisters and I were all too aware that intentionality matters. It was the difference between “by accident” and “on purpose.” As in “Did you step on my doll and break her leg on purpose?” (My father used to use the wry phrase “accidentally on purpose,” to get at the subterranean realities of sister relationships, the grays where kids see black and white.)
If we aren’t born with the fingers and ears of a gifted musician, then the “clear cut path to finding one’s purpose/passion/bliss” involves being intentional about self-discovery. It may involve getting some professional help, a therapist or spiritual director, if there is something in your past that is getting in your way.
Which isn’t to say that chance and luck don’t play into it. After all, it wasn’t every small town in Florida that was blessed with a piano in the back of the general store and a gifted musician to play it in the hearing of young children.
But it is to say that you may need to intentionally look within, watch and wait for signs of longing, or ask yourself over and over a question like “What is my true purpose in life?” or “What is my gift?” or “For what do I yearn?” or “What is my passion?” Asking such a question might take some work. Some practice. Some intention. It may need to be “on purpose.” Intentionality enables us to say yes when we can say yes and to say no when we need to say no. I’ve been telling some of you about a chapter in a book I’ve been reading, a small volume entitled Serving With Grace: Lay Leadership as a Spiritual Practice.
The chapter is called “No is as sacred as Yes” and the author, a UU minister, attributes the saying to the president of his former congregation. While the book is primarily about volunteers in congregational life, its messages have other applications for the path to a purpose in life.
The main message of the chapter is that if you take the time to know yourself, what tasks you tend to enjoy and which you don’t, what you’d like to try and what you want to avoid, then you are in a much better position to take on the tasks or roles that really capture your imagination, feed your soul, and for which you will make time.
It ends with a quote from the wise Howard Thurman, Dean of Theology and the chapels at Howard and Boston Universities for more than two decades, African-American civil rights leader, who wrote 20 books, and in 1944 helped found the first intentionally racially integrated, multicultural church in the United States. He said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then do that thing. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.”
We as Unitarian Universalists can help each other come alive! Our fourth principle is that we covenant to affirm and promote “A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” We search for truth, meaning and a sense of purpose for our lives… together! It’s a search we share, though the paths we walk may differ and the truth, meaning or purpose we discover may be different because we are different people, with different experiences and gifts.
If only we would be more open with each other, take the risk of saying how it is that we are coming to know what we know. Rather than being afraid that someone else will judge us, our path, the signs we are seeing, or the direction we are headed… Let’s trust each other more, enough to reveal something more of our inner selves, our inner truths.
The song Purpose makes fun of people who look for signs along the way to finding their purpose in life. It goes: “Oh, look! Here’s a penny! It’s from the year I was born! IT’S A SIGN!”
Sure, people can get carried away with seeing what they want to see, or reading great meanings into chance occurrences. But I recommend noticing serendipities and other amazements that seem to be reinforcing what your inner voice is saying. Sometimes it takes courage to pursue a new direction, a new purpose in (or passion for) life. A serendipity can be encouraging. It helps you feel you’re on the right path. So, pay attention!
For example, I felt some trepidation about my decision to heed my sense of calling to Unitarian Universalist ministry and enter theological school, after more than fifteen years working as a community and labor organizer. The day before I was to start at Harvard Divinity School near Boston, I stopped in at a Staples where I’d never shopped before to pick up some school supplies. While there, I thought I should call my husband Don at work to see if he needed anything. The pay phone (this was in 1991, nearly 20 years ago!) was at the front near the check out lines. As I talked to him, a woman came through a line, three sons following. When she passed in front of me, I said to her, and Don heard me say, “Are you Ginny DeLuca?” She immediately replied, “Yes, are you Diane Teichert?”
We had been best friends in grade school on Long Island, NY; had not seen each other since the summer of 1965; and had no idea the other had moved to the Boston area; yet we had recognized each other by name immediately. But what was significant about this surprising encounter as a potential sign regarding what I was to do the very next day is that Ginny was the first Unitarian Universalist I’d ever known and, actually, the only one up until I met Don! I was shaking inside the rest of the day.
I took it as a sign that I was starting on the right path. As the brilliant chemist Louis Pasteur famously declared in 1854, Chance favors only a prepared mind. I have to wonder how many signs I’d missed since childhood pointing me to my life’s work as a minister. That’s why we have to pay attention.
For many people, the search for life’s purpose is elusive, at best, as Ken wrote. I say: It does not have to be elusive for us, here. We have each other.
Going through life on auto-pilot, striving to meet other’s expectations, as our culture tends to teach, can be frustrating and depressing. That is for real!
But, here, we can be counter-cultural. We can tell each other to turn off the auto-pilot and cancel the cruise control! We can help each other to slow down, to pay attention, and to be intentional.
Here, you will not be alone in listening for the “small, still voice within” that tentatively hints at your purpose/passion/bliss. Here, you will not be alone in heeding the pounding of your heart practically shouting, “This is why I am alive!”
It may not be a clear-cut path we trod, end in sight, but we – here – are not walking it alone. Those of you who are already on your way, don’t be too private about it – let your aliveness show, let it be a light for those who are still groping for theirs. Reach out, hold hands. I do really believe that each and every one of us does have and can find at least one larger purpose in life.
And so, let me say in conclusion: though luck, tragedy, and serendipity each may play a role, we make our path to a purpose in life, to a large degree, on purpose. Amen.
Benediction
To paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, tell each other, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”