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Natural Selections, Part II
March 4, 2001

 

Opening words to the service

from Lao Tze, The Tao Te Ching, chapter Thirty-three

Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self needs strength.

He who knows he has enough is rich...

 

Sermon:

Natural Selections, Part II

Readings: Lao Tse, The Tao Te Ching
Chapter One

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name:

this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Each of us has a collection of things that have helped us through life, so far. We have songs in our heads; we have paintings and photographs on our walls and desks; we been places and seen things--there has been architecture that seems to speak to us, or moments out in nature beside a stream, at the ocean, under the stars.

Here and there, from time to time, there has been a special moment, a perfect moment, when everything seems right with the world and we hear an affirmation come from somewhere deep inside of ourselves.

We savor those moments, and we accumulate the readings or other art forms that have helped us to survive.

The things that stay with us--memories and such--are what I think of as natural selections. It's a play on Darwin's idea of the process in nature by which organisms best adapted to their environment tend to survive and transmit their genetic characters to succeeding generations while those less well adapted don't survive. They are eliminated in the process of natural selection.

Why is it that a certain song stays with you, or a poem, or a memory? It's the process of natural, unconscious selection. We decide to keep certain things.

Of course there are some things that have been lodged in our minds that we would be better off getting rid of. But that's another story.

I have a collection of poems and poetry-like things that have survived the selection process. I cherish them.

Theologians discuss the big questions. Poets prefer the simple, everyday things; at least the poets I like. Frost writes about a man in a sleigh who stops in the woods on a snowy winter night; he writes about those New England walls that mark the boundary lines of property and represent some back-breaking work; he writes about birches: 'when I see birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter, darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them...'; and apple picking: 'I am tired of the harvest I myself desired.' He writes about a fork in the road: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood...'; a hired man, or two tramps in mud time. He invites us to come out with him to clean the pasture spring. It's like a call to worship, or an invitation to spend some special time together.

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

When asked how they know things, theologians say, "We know, because God told us. We know because God dictated a book. We know because God appeared to Moses or Mohammed. We know because God became a man and revealed himself to those people, way back when."

This idea of revelation is nicely summarized in that old bumper sticker: "God said it. I believe it. That ends it."

Right. Sure.

If you ask a poet how he knows something he'd probably scratch his head, as if you were trying to kid with him. Writing a poem is a way of saying, "I know because I know; and I know that I know. I know because I notice. I feel it in my bones. This is my experience. My life."

Poets invite religion: 'spirit of life, come unto me, sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion. Blow in the wind, rise in the sea, move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice. Roots hold me close, wings set me free, spirit of life come to me, come to me.'

Poets speak directly to God: "i thank You God for most this amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees...'

A poet wrote: 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea though I walk through the valley of death I fear no evil for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

The poet who penned those words did an interesting thing: he (or she) began by talking about the Lord as shepherd, since the poet was, presumably a shepherd, so the simile worked for him--God is like a shepherd, and in relationship to God I'm like a sheep, just like the sheep I'm tending. It's an easy reach.

So he wrote a poem, a song, a psalm. Then he makes a transition--in the middle of the poem he stops talking about God or the Lord, and he speaks directly to the Lord: 'for thou art with me...thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.'

For the poet, it's the question that matters most; the sense of wonder; the sense of appreciation; the sense of praise: One of the things I like about John Ciardi's wonderful poem, White Heron, is the affirmation of life, and of praise, and the permission not to put a word on it. It goes with the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching: 'the Tao which can be told is not the eternal Tao.'

White Heron

What lifts the heron leaning on the air
I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,
a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,
a shaped thought at the sky-then gone. O rare!
Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,
would have cried Father! Cry anything you please

But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
It's heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.

Theologians say religion requires revelation. God has to intervene, stick His nose in, insert Himself.

Poets show us that revelation happens when you pay attention. "Look," they say: "look at that duck."

Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.

He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, and he is a part of it.

He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic. Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is. And neither do you. But he realizes it.

And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it! He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity - which it is. He has made himself a part of the boundless by easing himself into just where it touches him. I like the little duck. He doesn't know much, but he's got religion.

--The Duck, by Donald Babcock

Theologians argue about religion, and when there's a serious disagreement they invent new religions by the thousands. One poet put it this way:

when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began

when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was of
shall and finding only why
smashed it into because

Whitman said it this way:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain 'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Cummings contrasts man and the animals in this piece:

when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage-
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age

when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
--and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close

when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn-valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude-and march
denounces april as a saboteur

then we'll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind(and not until)

Theologians give answers to questions we didn't ask.

Poets dig into the questions with which we live and breath and have our being...our doubts...our struggles and fears.

Poets address God about suffering and use the agonized voice of Job who cries out in despair.

Poets paint portraits of us; we see our inability to forgive in the pathetic picture of Jonah swallowed up by a big fish because he was so angry. The great storm they wrote about was Jonah's inner rage and wish to see others punished.

The poets who wrote Genesis, the first chapter in the Hebrew Scripture, gave us a creator God who picks up a handful of dust from the ground and blows into it the breath of life, 'and man became a living soul.'

Each of the religions of the world provides answers to the big questions: where did we come from, why are we here, where or who or what is God?

Spirituality is the intuitive sense of feeling reconnected.

Before we were born we were connected to all that is. After we were born we became disconnected, and needed, for survival, to make connections with others who would nurture, protect and care for us.

At first we don't realize, or think about the fact, that we are not connected. We simply seek connection. We bond. We are imprinted.

Later--and not much later--we come to realize that we are a single, separate person. From that moment on, we have a deep-felt need to feel connected to other persons, animals, and objects--like a teddy bear or blanket.

To answer the question, 'can you have religion without revelation,' one must ask 'what do you mean by revelation?'

The Greeks said, "Know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living."

One way of looking at revelation, then, is the process of discovering things about oneself, as well as others.

At the foundation of my personal theology is the belief that all the religions have been invented by human beings. I do not believe in a god who chooses favorites; I do not believe in a god who intervenes in history the way a person intervenes by inserting him or herself in another person's life--or as a nation intervenes, usually through force or threat of force, in the affairs of another nation.

The three Western religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are based on a theology of revelation. Each one of these religions claims that a god revealed himself at some point, or at various points in history. Each, of course, claims that this god intervened on their behalf.

It is my personal belief that the quality of a human life is dependent on revelation, not about god or the gods, but about the Truth.

The quality of a human life is proportional to the extent to which we come to know ourselves.

The quality of a human life depends upon our paying attention--taking a look at ourselves and asking why we've responded a certain way to some stimulus; why we like a particular person, or fall in love with a particular person, or fall out of love with that same person, and so forth.

The arts--music and poetry, dance, painting, sculpture, and architecture are attractive to us because they reveal things about us to ourselves. We are attracted to an art form to the extent that it does reveal things that we may not otherwise be able to express, or to understand.

Poetry does that for me. Theater does it, including films.

Of course not all poetry, not all theater or films, not all music or sculpture or architecture does it.

So we each pick and choose. Something we may have discarded at one point in life seems to take on new and deeper meaning later. Survival of the fittest. Natural selections. Some poems have a place in my life that I think of as my sacred literature.

I've been a member of the Greenfield Group--a group of thirty Unitarian Universalist ministers who meet twice a year for study and reflection. We have a required reading list, and a recommended reading list. I've been trying for years to make it a requirement that a person who is responsible for getting a particular book on our required reading list give an enthusiastic review of that book, indicating why they thought it was worth our spending $25 and many hours.

It is not uncommon for us to gather for a convocation at which a particular book has been required and have not one single positive word said about the book.

E. E. Cummings spent his summers in New Hampshire. There was a handyman near his place named Sam. When Sam died he wrote a tribute, which is a good way to end the sermon, since I've gone on long enough.

rain or hail
sam done
the best he kin
till they digged his hole

sam was a man

stout as a bridge
rugged as a bear
slickern a weasel
how be you

(sun or snow)

gone into what
like all them kings
you read about
and on him sings

a whippoorrwill;

heart was big
as the world aint square
with room for the devil
and his angels too

yes,sir

what may be better
or what may be worse
and what may be clover
clover clover

(nobody'll know)

sam was a man
grinned his grin
done his chores
laid him down
Sleep well

Closing words to the service

from The Tao Te Ching, Chapter Eight

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.