Giving It Up         a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V

at the First Unitarian Church of Alton on March 26, 2006

 

Reading #1, from Nancy Klein Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours:

“Dom Philip had come to like the Carthusians' stark simplicity.  He liked their single-mindedness - the radicalness of the life - the rhythm and harmony.  After his first six months, Dom Philip was reveling in the solitude, in the freedom from other people’s expectations.  As an only child, he already knew how to live without any emotional dependency on other people.  Most of the novices nearly went crazy without conversation, but Dom Philip was glad not to talk to anyone, to be away from all the mess of monks and human stuff.  Dom Philip was able to sense the mood of a group, even if it was never articulated.  This was a mixed blessing: On occasion, he felt every discord, discontent, and conflict in the group, and he found this very painful.  He knew one thing for sure, and nothing would ever shake his belief that God loved him.  God Loved Dom Philip.  He went toward God as if he were pulled by an irresistible magnet.  Looking straight ahead at God, he could be totally oblivious of everyone and everything else.  Except when they were singing off pitch, he was barely aware of the other monks.

But by September 1961, after Dom Philip had adjusted to the externals of the life, his mind had gotten very noisy.  Dom Philip suddenly realized that the monk lives in solitude - he doesn’t just do solitude for a few days of retreat.  Devout Catholics go on weekend retreats when they don’t talk to anyone for a few days, when they don’t have the release of a movie, a joke, a favorite television show, but then they return to their ordinary life.  A Carthusian monk is on retreat all the time - he isn’t taking time off from his normal life.  His normal life is solitude, living alone without any supports from the outside world.  His emotions are under pressure, the solitude weighs on him, not momentarily or for a semester or the duration of a tour of duty but for life.”

[Maguire, Nancy Klein. An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order.  New York: Public Affairs, 2006.]

 

Reading #2, adopted from an anonymous source…

There was once a minister who decided that a visual demonstration would add emphasis to his Sunday sermon.  After talking for a few minutes about vices, bad habits, and other things he wanted his parishioners to give up, he placed four earthworms into four separate jars. 

He put the first worm into a container of cigarette smoke.  He put the second worm into a container of whiskey.  He put the third worm into a container of chocolate syrup.  He put the fourth worm into a container of good clean soil. 

Near the conclusion of the sermon, the Minister reported the following results:  The first worm in cigarette smoke - dead.  The second worm in whiskey - dead.  The third worm in chocolate syrup - dead.  The fourth worm in good clean soil - alive. 

The Minister then asked the congregation, “What can you learn from this demonstration?”  One person who was still listening quickly raised his hand and said, “As long as you smoke, drink, and eat chocolate, you won't have worms!”

 

 

Giving It Up

 “Once more Paddy O’Connell thought to himself, ‘If God exists, being a Carthusian makes sense, is rigorously coherent.  If God does not exist, then I am a fool, a victim of a self-destroying illusion.  Everything hangs on this one question.’  Then, taking a deep breath, he took hold of the bell rope of the Gatehouse of St. Hugh’s Charterhouse.”

So begins Nancy Klein Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, a chronicle, as her subtitle suggests, of five young men and their trial of faith in the Western World’s most austere monastic order.  The little-known Carthusian order was founded in the eleventh century in Central Europe and survived many reforms through the centuries so that in 1960, where Maguire’s book takes up, one would still be able to walk through the doors of the Gatehouse and go directly back in time to a context unchanged in 900 years.  The order prided itself on having needed no reform because it had not been deformed - the world had not penetrated its thick walls, had not had any effect on its practices since its founder, Dom Bruno, had first built a few hermit huts on a French mountainside to get away from the decline of civilization - in 1084 CE.

Practices had not changed in all that time.  The Carthusian monks still had no contact with the outside world - no newspapers or radios, no phones, certainly no modern media.  After all, these are people who think the Trappist monk Thomas Merton was out of his mind for becoming such a well-known author and media darling.  Carthusian monks still spend almost all of their time alone.  They eat alone.  They generally speak to no one and even eye contact within the monastery is a punishable offense, except during the few minutes of social time each Sunday.

As Maguire says, “Carthusians mark time not by decades, years, hours, or days, but by the liturgical year, the seasons of the church.  Their time is out of time, directed not by business opportunities, not by social engagements, but by the tolling of the immense church bell.  Its deep and continuing resonance gives structure to monastic days and nights.  Time moves slowly and predictably, in measured instants of the Latin ‘now’: nunc, nunc, nunc.  Moment by moment, breath by breath; like a heartbeat.  Nunc, nunc, nunc.” 

By secular standards, the monks don’t do much.  They are better at being than doing.  They attend classes, they garden, they study, they clean.  They wrestle with interior demons, certainly.  And they pray.  Boy, do they pray.  The “Little Hours” of Maguire’s title refer not to 60-minute measures of time but to the prayers - known as the ‘Little Hours’ - said at predetermined intervals throughout the day.  At night, sleep is interrupted at 11:00 p.m. when the monks go to Mass in the church as a group.  When Mass is over at 12:30, they return to their living quarters, known as ‘cells,’ where they say Mass for themselves - alone - until 2:30 a.m.  And then they catch a little more sleep before the big church bell rings at 6 a.m. to begin the cycle of daily prayers all over again.

The monks don’t waste much time on food, either.  They eat only one meal a day, prepared for them by lay brothers.  And every Friday, they fast, which means forty-eight hours without food every week when you consider they eat a meal Thursday at noon and then nothing until the Saturday noon meal.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds like one difficult spiritual discipline to me - eating once a day.  Add to that their praying much of the day and in the middle of the night, their being alone most of the time, their silence and no talking - I don’t think I’m cut out for such a thing.

No talking?  Wow.  Can you imagine?  Not a very Unitarian kind of a place.  The only thing in my experience that even comes close was when, as an adult leader of the Boy Scouts, I was elected to the Order of the Arrow.  As an induction ritual, I was sent with a large group on a retreat for a weekend where we were told not to talk for 24 hours while we worked on rebuilding some cabins.  Most people ignored the part about not talking, but I tried my best to abide by the suggestion, and I learned what I thought at the time was a tremendous amount about life and about myself - for instance, how much I relied on verbal communication and how much information was carried in non-verbal communication.  And I took a minute, for the first time really, to step back and see what my mind was like and how I thought when deprived of my primary mode of getting along in the world.

But all day, everyday, no talking, from now until the end of time?  It’s hard to get a grip on that, isn’t it?  And one meal a day - being a Carthusian monk doesn’t sound like something all that attractive.

 

But I don’t tell you these things to entice you into joining a cloister.  I don’t know which of you would do well with all of those disciplines - with the not talking, especially.  I have some ideas about which of you wouldn’t do well - and I would include myself in that group.  I just know I’d rather stay here, and I’d rather you stayed here, too.

No, I’m not trying to sell you on becoming a monk.  I’m not even trying to get you to stop smoking, drinking, or eating chocolate, like the worm-killing minister in our earlier reading.

The reason I tell you of the monks and their chosen way of life is that I want to compare their way of life to our own way of life, and to say that we might - just might - learn something by adopting, if only a little, some of the practices of so many religious people around the world.  We might learn something from practicing the giving up of just a few of the things we’ve been blessed with.

The Carthusians do what they do for one reason - to have a relationship with God.  They believe that if they deny themselves, if they shut out many forms of sensory stimuli, if they concentrate fully on reaching beyond themselves, then they will achieve what others only dream of.  They will let go of their worldly connections and they will see God.  This is where Maguire’s opening words fit, then, in this story.  “If God exists, (then) being a Carthusian makes sense.  What those monks are doing is rational and reasonable and is rigorously coherent if God exists.  If, on the other hand, God does not exist, then these guys are fools, they are victims of a self-destroying illusion and all their work and struggle will come to naught.

I would suggest at this point that this is not the way many Unitarian Universalists would frame the basic question - whether God exists or doesn’t exist.  The way we’d frame the question might be, rather, “What is the definition of this word ‘God’?  Surely something exists, so what is it?  What is your experience of things beyond yourself, of things larger than you?  How is it you interact with whatever transcendent reality you have a sense of, if in fact you have a sense of a transcendent reality, and if in fact you interact with it?

 

Seeking something beyond oneself is not a particularly odd thing to do if you take as your guide the religious traditions of the world:

--  Orthodox Jews keep the Laws handed them over two millennia ago by the God of the Bible.  There are things they can do and things they can’t do, especially on Shabbat, the day of rest. 

--  Devout Muslims pray at least five times a day toward the holy city of Mecca in deference to the one God, Allah.  They also observe many strictures against certain behaviors thought to be impure - smoking, drinking, eating chocolate among them.

--  Christians have their own laws and holiday observances.  We are now in the middle of the Christian season of Lent, a period which traditionally begins on the Wednesday after Fat Tuesday of Mardi Gras and extends until Easter.  Whatever else it may be for some people, Lent is supposed to be forty days of reflection, of soul-searching and repentance, of taking stock of one’s life and preparing for the celebration of Easter.

I didn’t grow up in a tradition that cared much about Lent.  I knew other kids, other people who were supposed to give up one thing or another for the period.  Some would try to give up candy or soda.  I heard of people giving up one brand of beer - not a particularly strenuous spiritual practice, perhaps.  The worst Lent I ever spent was thirty years ago when my first wife gave up potatoes.  She wouldn’t eat them, she wouldn’t cook them, she wouldn’t have them in the house, either.  You never know how many good meals come with a food until you have to give it up.

All of these observances - these laws, these prayers, these holidays, this giving up of something - can by many accounts be enormously rewarding.  Adherence to religious laws is said to lead to Nirvana, heaven, enlightenment, inner peace. 

But those observances can also become simply rote behaviors, mere acts of officiousness performed to adhere to one rule or another.  Their effectiveness seems to depend less on how piously they are performed than on the spirit in which they are performed.

I had a discussion with one of my daughters some years ago when she was attending a Catholic grammar school.  She was diligently trying to follow the no-meat-on-Fridays rule that many Catholics still honor during Lent.  As I recall, she told me she was going to stay up late on Friday night so she could stuff down a steak when the clock struck midnight.  That’s clever, of course, and adhered to the letter of the law - “No meat on Friday?  Hey!  It just turned Saturday!”

I suggested, like the dad she knew I was, that she might be missing the point;  giving up meat on Friday may be supposed to change the way one pays attention.  Maybe it reminds you to be thankful for your food.  Maybe it reminds you that other people have less to eat than you.  Maybe it reminds you that all of life is a gift.  But mostly it reminds you to simply pay attention differently, and to notice that there is something larger than you and your own wants and needs.

 

Now, I know all this.  Or at least I believe it to be true.  I have practiced these things - this paying attention - in my own life to one degree or another.  One of the reasons I went to seminary was because I felt such a strong attraction to what you might call “matters of the spirit.”  I had a spiritual practice for many years.  I studied world religions and their practices, I meditated, I went on retreat.  I paid attention to “paying attention differently” and, I felt, reaped the benefits of doing so - recognizing more fully who I was and what my role in the world should be and achieving some semblance of inner peace - not a sappy happiness with the way things were in the world, but somehow more accepting of the mess we find ourselves in.

And then I went to seminary and the classes there were different than anything I’d ever known in engineering school.  I had no time for spiritual practice - are you kidding?  I had 25-page papers to write and 900 pages of reading every week.  And if that wasn’t hard enough, now I work in a church, a busy, growing, dynamic church.  The swirl of activity never, ever ends.  The noise can be deafening!

This season of Lent has me thinking about paying attention differently.  It has me thinking about giving up a few things, not so that I follow some rule, but so that I’m forced to notice something larger than myself.  It has me thinking, like the quote in our Order of Service today, about “relaxing, letting go, ceasing to cling, ceasing to insist on our own way, ceasing to tense ourselves up for this or against that.”

 

The late UU minister Harry Schofield said that he meditated for thirty minutes every morning, unless he was too busy, in which case he meditated for an hour.

We don’t have to give up everything.  We don’t have to be monks.  We don’t have to cloister ourselves away.  But like Rev. Schofield, we do have to take the time to pay attention differently, and to pay attention to that which is larger than ourselves.  We have too much work to do here not to take that time.  We have too much to do not to pay attention.

 

So may it be.