Rev. Louise Green:

The first reading this morning comes from the New Testament of the Bible. It's one of the healing stories of Jesus. I think of these as mythic stories, about transformation, about change and the possibility for difference. This one is the healing of the madman by Jesus.

They arrived on the other side of the sea, in the country of the Gereses. As Jesus got out of the boat, a madman from the cemetery came up to him. He lived there among the tombs and graves. No one could restrain him. He couldn't be chained, couldn't be tied down. He had been tied up many times with chains and ropes, but he broke the chains, snapped the ropes. No one was strong enough to tame him. Night and day, he roamed through the graves and the hills, screaming out and slashing himself with sharp stones. When he saw Jesus a long way off, he ran and bowed and worshipped before him, then bellowed in protest: "What business do you have, Jesus, son of the high God, messing with me? I swear to God, don't give me a hard time." Jesus had just commanded the tormenting evil spirit, saying "Out, get out of the man." Jesus asked him, "Tell me your name." And the demons replied, "My name is Mob; I'm a writhing mob." Then they desperately begged Jesus not to banish them from the country. So a large herd of pigs was browsing and rooting on a nearby hill. And the demons begged us, "Send us to the pigs so that we could live in them." Jesus gave the order, but it was even worse for the pigs than for the man. Crazed, they stampeded over a cliff into the sea and they drowned. Those tending the pigs, scared to death, bolted and told their story in the town and the country. Everyone wanted to see what had happened. They came up to Jesus and they saw that the madman was sitting there, wearing decent clothes and making sense, no longer a walking madhouse of a man.

Rev. Robert M. Hardies:

The second reading this morning is from the writer, Annie Dillard, from her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk:

From the depths of our being are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us, that if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean, the ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil. The unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for one another and for our life together here. This is given. This is not learned.

Riding the monsters down. I'm currently teaching a class at the church on prayer and meditation, a course I've taught for many years now. Each week in the class I ask people to share a little bit about how their meditation is going, to share their adventures in prayer, I like to call them. Sometimes folks will tell about an epiphany they have experienced. Other times, they'll share a problem they're having with prayer. Over the years of teaching this class, I've watched one problem come up over and over again. Some report that whenever their prayer or meditation or journaling takes them to a place of pain or fear or of shame, whenever it forces them to confront some painful aspect of themselves, or explore a dark crevice in their soul, they stop. They shut down. Suddenly the dog needs to be fed or the recycling needs to be taken out -- any excuse to stop the prayer. When their spiritual practice takes them to these scary places, people tend to become prayer-avoidant.

It reminds me of a story from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The story goes something like this. Once upon a time there was a meditation student who was in his room meditating. He had entered down into that deep trance-like place almost, between waking and sleeping, when suddenly the student saw a spider dangle down before him on a silken thread. It was an ugly spider, all hairy and many-legged, and each day in his meditation, the spider would come back, bigger and uglier than the day before.

Finally the student was so frightened he went to his teacher to report his dilemma. He said, "Master, for days now a spider has distracted me from my meditation, so I've decided that from now on I'm going to meditate with a knife in my lap, so the next time the spider comes I can kill it." The teacher was a little aback by his student's violent streak and he tried to discourage the knife idea. He said "Look, I don't think the knife thing and the Buddhism thing really go together. I've got a better idea. Why don't you bring a piece of chalk with you to meditation, and when the spider appears, just mark an X on his belly and then report back to me."

The student did just that. The next day during meditation he sat down with a piece of chalk and, sure enough, when he had entered into that place between waking and sleeping, the spider descended down again on the thread and dangled in front of his face, but, resisting the urge to attack, the student marked an X on his belly. When he was done meditating, the student rushed from his room to report back to the teacher on what happened. "Master, I did as you said; I marked an X on the belly of the monster." "Excellent, my son," said the teacher, lifting up the student's shirt and revealing the X. Ooops! We have met the monster and it is us.

How often has this happened to us? How often have we battled monsters out in the world, only to realize later that we were wrestling with our own demons? How often in our dreams or prayers or lives have we confronted the hairy, eight-legged creature only to discover that it is, in fact, our own fleshy underbelly, our own most vulnerable place, our own weak spot, our brokenness?

If I were to ask each of us now, we could probably call out our monsters, couldn't we? Addiction. Anger. Depression. Infidelity. Violence. We could call them out, though we wouldn't dare, would we? It's hard enough to admit those monsters to ourselves, much less to bring them here into church. This is, after all, where we're supposed to be talking about the best selves that we can be, right? It's where we're supposed to talk about the spark of the divine and doing good deeds. There's no place for my monsters at church! When I put on my Sunday best, I leave my monsters at the coat check.

There's a disconnect, I fear, between our shadow side and our spiritual lives. I think we feel this disconnect and that's partly why, when people go there in their prayer life, they shut down with their prayers. I think it also explains the student in our story who takes his monster and does a little one-two number with it that I call "project and destroy." Right? We take that monster within us and we project it onto someone or something else outside of us and then we do all we can to destroy it because it makes us so scared and gives us so much dis-ease. Project and destroy. Time doesn't permit me to list the many sins of the world that have their roots in project and destroy.

Friends, today my message is this: We've got to create some room for our monsters in our spiritual lives. We've got to get past our avoidance and we've got to take back our projections and really wrestle with our monsters, with our demons. We have this mistaken assumption that somehow spirituality is about pretending that we're perfect, that we've got it all together. But we know just how preposterous that is. My colleague, Forrest Church at All Souls Church in Manhattan likes to say, "I'm glad the church is called All Souls, not All Saints; otherwise none of us would be here today."

Church needs to be a place where we welcome to the table not only all souls, but all of our souls. Monsters and all. To recall a favorite title, church needs to be a place where the wild things are. Because our souls are where the wild things are. Spirituality isn't about pretending to be perfect. It's about struggling to be whole.

So how do we engage with these monsters in our spiritual life? Let's look for a moment in this Buddhist story. I love the teacher in this story. Would that we all had a teacher so compassionate and wise. I mean, here comes this student, raving on about a spider that's bothering him during his meditation and you know the teacher has seen this before; he knows exactly where this story is going to end up. But gently and compassionately, he redirects his student's complaints. First he says, don't destroy anything here. Put away your knife. Try the piece of chalk instead. If the monster is part of us, we probably don't want to be going in with a knife. We probably don't want to be destroying much. So take this chalk, he says, and instead of destroying, use it to mark an X on the spot. Use it to identify the monster, to name it, so that you can confront it and engage with it. This is the way that the Buddhist teacher tries to reframe and recast our engagements with the monsters.

So the Buddhist teacher brings us a little way along this path of how to engage with our monsters. But I actually want to take us back now to the story that Louise read earlier. Because while I like the Buddhist teacher's emphasis on being gentle and identifying and confronting, there's something about the raw aspect of that biblical story that really draws me in. I mean here, if you can imagine the story, is a man who is possessed by demons. And Jesus confronts the demons inside of the man and they said, "Please don't send us out of this man; we're happy right here." And Jesus says "No, you're going to go into those pigs right over there grazing on the hillside." And he sends the demons into the pigs -- I used to love this story as a kid; I mean it's very graphic -- and the pigs just go running off the side of the hill and they drown in the ocean.

Now I want to argue with this text a little bit because I'm someone who believes that no one can exorcise our demons for us. I think we need to do it ourselves. At most, a teacher or a healer can help us and accompany us, but to exorcise the demons ourselves, I think what we need to do is run after the pigs that are headed for the cliff and we need to grab onto one of their cloven hooves until we are taken over the edge of the cliff ourselves and plunge into the depths that our monsters will take us to. This is what I mean when I say "riding the monsters all the way down." Annie Dillard says we need to ride these monsters down, drop with them over the world's rim. Only then will we be able to learn the lesson that they have to teach us.

Now you might protest, "Rob, if we ride the monsters all the way down, won't we just find ourselves drowning in the ocean with the pigs?" No. I think that what happens when we ride the monsters down as far as they'll take us, is that we start to get to the bottom of things, that we start to really understand our monsters, where they come from and why. Let me give you a for instance. For instance, if I'm an alcoholic, let's say, riding the monsters all the way down means finally confronting the question "Why is it that I need to drink all the time? What is the pain that I'm trying to salve? What is the hole I'm trying to fill?" These are the kinds of questions that we start asking when we ride our monsters all the way down. We don't get to answer these questions if we're projecting our monsters onto someone else. We don't answer these questions if we avoid the monsters. We only get to them when we struggle with them and when we wrestle with them.

One question leads to another then. If we're asking, well, what is this hole that I feel, the next question then becomes, "If not my alcohol, what else can fill this hole that I feel inside of me?" We ride the monsters down because they have as much, or more, to teach us about ourselves and what's important to us than our angels do.

To some, this place of brutal honesty must seem like an utterly lonely and frightening place. And it can be. My experience, though, and the testimony of others, suggests that when we ride the monsters down far enough, when it takes us to this place of honest reckoning with our pain and our desire, then we actually begin to touch something that draws us closer to others, we discover that not only are we broken, but that we're all broken. We discover that not only do we long for wholeness, but that we all long for wholeness. And we discover that the condition of being broken and seeking wholeness is fundamental to who we are as human beings, is something that we share. This realization can draw us into empathy and solidarity with our brothers and sisters.

Once we've ridden the monsters all the way down, furthermore, we'll need some help picking ourselves back up again. Yet the plummet has allowed us to let go of our pride, has allowed us to let go of our egos. We've let that all go when we've grabbed onto the cloven hoof of the pig and followed him off the edge. No more pride left. And so, in the humility that is proper to a member of the human race, we reach out to others for help in climbing back out of the abyss.

I also want to say that there, at the bottom, in our humility, in our reaching out, we often reach out to God as well. And some of us find that that hole that needs to be filled is what the philosopher called a God-shaped hole, that is uniquely filled by God.

Listen to Dillard's words once more: "In the depths of our being are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther, over the world's rim, you find what the sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil, the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for one another and for our life together here."

Some may say that it is inconsistent to begin a worship service with a child dedication that celebrates the spark of divinity in human beings and then spend the rest of the service talking about the monsters that are within us. On the contrary, I believe that it is only our in faith, our Unitarian faith, that the monsters don't have to have the last word. It is only that faith that gives us the courage to take the plunge over the earth's edge. It is only if we truly have faith that there is within us a redeemable spark, if we truly have faith that we are held in the embrace of the great family of all souls, then do we have the courage to confront the monsters, the courage and the confidence to know that they will not have the last word.

And so, friends, I encourage you to take courage, to take heart, to put away your knives, to draw back your projections and to wrestle with your monsters. To welcome your monsters into your spiritual life, to invite your monsters with you into church, to scoot over a little bit and make a space for them right there on the pew next to you. Only this way will we as broken people find our way to wholeness.

Amen.