Sermon by Rev. Diane Rollert, 6 December 2009
Dark nights, bright stars.
Somewhere between the body and the spirit
There is the soul, the thing that makes us human.
Bright morning stars are rising,
Day is a breaking in my soul, in my soul.
We arrive in Ottawa at night and if there are stars or a full moon, I can’t tell you. I’m intent on arriving. I’m intent on seeing old friends I haven’t seen for a while.
Of course there is way too much scheduled. Breakfast at 7:15 each morning, the first worship service at 8:15. And then there are the workshops all day, dinner and the evening worship services. It is a big deal for us ministers to worship together, to share our stories, to sing all our favourite songs and hymns lustily, and to be participants rather than leaders. From dawn to dusk we are inspired, we are renewed.
Do we ever get outside? Hardly. (Though I did get in one day of touring the Ottawa sights.) Most of the time, I find myself inside in the same small conference room over the course of the week. No windows. No sunlight. Sitting in a circle of chairs with Thomas Moore, psychologist and author of the number-one best-selling book, Care of the Soul. “This room isn’t very sexy,” he says.
We’ve come to discuss leadership in the 21st century. We are 25 ministers from the US and Canada. Our names have been drawn from a pool, and we are the lucky ones who get to sit with the esteemed keynote speaker for an ongoing workshop. “Call me Tom,” he says. We’ll meet for a total of fourteen hours with no agenda. Just us and Tom – and our souls.
In his keynote address he tells the entire assembly that during the 20th Century we made great strides in understanding the body but not the soul. Science became our religion. As the old religious traditions move toward ossification, it is no surprise that so many people call themselves spiritual but not religious. In this century we will need to go deeper to see that the spiritual and psychological are inseparable.
When the 25 of us gather in our workshop alone with Tom, he lets us talk. He listens as we share our concerns about leadership. We talk a lot. We’re Unitarians, after all. He listens a lot. He is a therapist after all. But then, every once in a while he challenges us with an astounding insight. “I’m really more like you than you think,” he says. But he is an outsider who is carefully weighing what we do and what we say. We do a lot of explaining, justifying, and excusing.
“I can’t see you for your structure,” he says. “It is so complicated. It’s like a metal screen that I can’t see through.”
“We have no dogma,” we try to explain. “That makes it harder for us to be leaders.”
“You don’t have to have dogma to do soul work,” he says.
On the first day, Tom asks us to record our dreams to share the next morning. That night I have this complex dream. It is as though I am a detective in a mystery novel. I’m in a strange European city that reminds me of Cluj in Romania. A family is missing and I am trying to find out what has happened. I walk through a covered passageway. The ceiling is peeling apart and wires are hanging down. Lights go on as I walk through. I hear bombing in the city surrounding me. I think to myself that there are places in the world where people get used to the sounds of war, where they ignore the sounds of bombs and go on with life. In my dream I wonder as I walk through this particular city if the people here will get used to the sound of bombs exploding.
Tom says that he uses dreams as a backdrop, not as symbols to analyze as Jung or Freud did, but as rich metaphor to explore. You hold onto the images of your dreams and you come back to them over time to see what they can tell you. That next morning I share my dream with the group. There is something in the dream that reminds everyone of ministry: The families who go missing and we don’t know why; the chaos and confusion that goes on around us as we continue on, as non-anxiously as possible, in our work. There’s so much happening that is outside of our reach.
Tom told us that the shaman always carries an image of a ladder to remember to climb up high in order to get a wider vista. Then you descend to the depths to grapple with the chaos on the ground. You have to be able to go deep, be at the surface and go high.
Tom challenged us to see spirit and soul as two very different things. Yet he is evasive when it comes to precisely defining this word soul. “Will you define soul?” someone shouts out during his second keynote address at CONVO. “No,” he responds. “That’s coming from such a spirit place,” he says. Believe me, by the end of the week we were all perplexed. But it was good to be perplexed.
In his book, Care of the Soul, Tom writes:
“‘Soul’ is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.” He does not use the word “as an object of religious belief or as something to do with immortality. When we say someone or something has soul, we know what we mean, but it is difficult to specify exactly what that meaning is.”…
“Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination.”…
“In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.”
During the time that we met with Tom, he gave us glimpses of the differences he sees between soul and spirit. Spirit is elaborate, he said. Spirit requires structure. It builds cathedrals. Spirit puts us in touch with the vast cosmos, while the soul makes us human. Soul is simple. It needs friendship more than it needs anything else. It needs food.
Soul is the intimate, while spirit is the distant. Soul doesn’t like the flow. It likes to be stopped and stuck. Sitting in a chair. Watching the sunset. The soul doesn’t need to get anywhere. Soul loves attachment. Our modernist values are all about moving and getting things done. But the soul craves being grounded.
We often separate soul and spirit – we focus on the message (the spirit) and not the feeding of the soul. “You are all so adept with words,” he observes. We’re very good at spirit, but we’re not always so comfortable with soul. Soul is where the chaos happens, and too often we want control.
I think of this community. Once we had a cathedral. That was spirit. But when the old church burned down, the people gathered into the fellowship hall and they came to love the intimacy of a smaller space. That was soul, which came to be carried over into the design of this sanctuary. There’s often a tension between spirit and soul here. Some of us want silence in the sanctuary after the service, a kind of spirit need. While others crave an intimate place to talk, a kind of soul need. And I think of how we often laugh that what works so well for us here is food. Cooking food. Serving food. Sharing food. The soul needs food and friendship more than anything else.
On our last day together, Tom tells us about the phone conversation he has just had with his wife. Early in October, in their rural New Hampshire community, two teenage boys were arrested for killing a woman and injuring her daughter with a machete. His community has been in shock. These are boys they know, and no one can comprehend why they committed this murder. Psychologists and social workers were called in to the schools. Ultimately, the clergy were called upon to help the community make sense of the incomprehensible. Who else do you call in a crisis of faith but the clergy?
Now Tom is spending a week with us, a group of ministers who have placed all our concerns about leadership in the 21st Century on the table. He and his wife ask each other, are they prepared?
“What are you doing to prepare yourselves?” he asks us. As one of our colleagues said during the week, we may be living in the time of the great unravelling. How do we prepare ourselves to respond? Tom reminds us that in the great Indian traditions, gurus know from an early time in life that they are called to lead. They begin preparing themselves at an early age. They are “big” in their presence. “Are you prepared?” he asks. In his mind, the work that has to be done is the work of the soul.
We’ve known tragedy here in Montreal. I stand here beside fourteen candles burning in the memory of the fourteen women shot down in cold blood by an enraged young man at L’École polytechnique, twenty years ago today. I remember the day a young man stormed Dawson College three years ago, harming many and killing one young woman. I remember how we gathered a group of students here so that they could talk in a neutral place outside of the school. At the end of the sharing of memories that so needed to be spoken, we gathered in a circle, we held hands, we lit a candle and I said a prayer. Were we prepared? Not really, but we are learning out of necessity.
I see the images from my dream and I am beginning to understand the questions. We have to reach out to the missing families. We have to reach out to the missing parts of ourselves. We have to be mindful not to take the violence for granted and let it fall into the shadows to become mere background noise we accept.
A few years ago I had a conversation with a young man who was feeling sad and lonely. He told me that he was convinced that the real source of violence in the world was love-sick men. Now I’m wondering if what he was really describing was a kind of soul sickness.
Thomas Moore says that our complaints of emptiness and disillusionment are really symptoms reflecting a loss of soul that lets us know what the soul craves. “We yearn excessively for entertainment, power, intimacy, sexual fulfilment, and material things, and we think we can find these things if we discover the right relationship or job, the right church or therapy. But without soul, whatever we find will be unsatisfying…”
As we enter into this season of dark nights and bright stars, I wonder what my own soul craves. I know I need this thing I call worship. There may be a better word but I don’t know yet what it is. I know this is a terribly wounded word for some, and we can and will have a meaningful conversation about it. But for me, and many Unitarian Universalists who have reclaimed the word, worship is not about the veneration of a deity. It is simply a time that is different from all other time in our lives.
To me, this is not a program or an adult education course. This is worship. It is a time to restore our souls. There is nothing else like it and there’s no substitute. I need the rituals. I need time to experience beauty in the smallest things. I need good food and friendship. I need intimacy and laughter – especially laughter at myself whenever I take things too seriously. I need this community to be here each week, each day, as we walk together beside the sick and the dying. I need the chaos, even when I complain. I need to embrace imagination and imperfection.
Am I prepared? Are you prepared? I feel a cold winter chill and I know we have to work on warming up our hearts. Our souls are here, waiting to be thawed.
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