Shaking the Foundations

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 20 September 2009

Our reading this morning is from the poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  It’s called “Love.”

                                                Love means to learn to look at yourself
                                                The way one looks at distant things
                                                For you are only one thing among many.
                                                And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
                                                Without knowing it, from various ills-
                                                A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

                                                Then he wants to use himself and things
                                                So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
                                                It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
                                                Who serves best doesn't always understand.

A few summers back, when Chris and I were vacationing in Berkeley, California, something happened that I will not soon forget.  We were asleep in the dark hours before dawn when suddenly I was startled awake by a terrible shaking.  It was as if someone had taken my limp body by the shoulders and just shook me, back and forth.  Wide-eyed with fear, I looked around me, not recognizing where I was or what was happening or whether Chris was beside me in bed.  All I could see were the walls swaying and the books falling off of their shelves and a loud, crashing noise coming from somewhere in the house.  The tremor must have lasted only a few moments, but it felt like longer.  And it wasn’t until it was over that I realized the obvious – that we’d just lived through the biggest earthquake we’d ever experienced.  And, just as if we’d been awakened by a terrible dream, it took a long time before either Chris or I could go back to sleep again.

Over the next several days, the memory of the quake returned to me again and again, at first, reawakening each time, the terror, the feeling of utter vulnerability in the face of nature’s indifferent power.  But later, and upon further reflection, the recurring memory began to evoke a strange sense of peace and acceptance in me, as though the quake had offered me some new insight into our human condition, into my condition, which is that, when it comes right down to it, we really are just vulnerable mortals, utterly at the mercy of earth’s power, clinging to our beloved next to us in bed.  The quake that had at first shaken me to my core had somehow left me now on firmer ground, more aware and comfortable with my place in the order of things.

Shaking the Foundations.  You and I both know it doesn’t take an earthquake to shake us to our core.  There are plenty of things in our lives that turn us topsy-turvy:  the loss of a loved one or of a job, a bitter conflict, a dramatic moment of revelation or the discernment of a new calling in our lives.  These are just some of the things that can leave us feeling as if the ground were giving away around us, leaving us unsure of our footing.  This morning I want to talk about one of the tremors of the spiritual life that has the power to shake our foundations, to turn our lives upside down, only to place us, in the aftermath, on a new, more solid spiritual foundation.

And that earth-shaking, life-changing shift is the shift that happens when we cease to put ourselves at the center of our lives and, instead, place the holy – place God – at the center.  To remove ourselves from the center of our lives and to place the holy at the center.  Let me try to explain to you what I mean.  I believe that it is in our nature as human beings to suffer from a condition that I call “existential narcissism.”  Now existential narcissism is different from what we typically think of as selfishness or self-centeredness.  It is, at once, less willfully mean, yet also more pervasive and more fundamental and, perhaps, more destructive.

Existential narcissism is simply our natural human tendency to see ourselves at the center of the universe, which is an understandable limitation.  Right?  I mean, our minds, our consciousness and the very location of our eyes calls us to look out at the world from a center, which is us.  As if the whole world rotated around an axis called “me.”

But this is, of course, only an illusion, just like the illusion of the night sky where we  look up and see the heavens rotating around what appears to us to be the firm, solid, unmoving Earth.  But Copernicus taught us long ago that it’s the sun and not the Earth that is at the center of our solar system.  What I want to suggest to us today is that we need a similar Copernican revolution of the spirit where we remove ourselves from the center of our universe and replace that center with the holy.  What’s at stake in this shift is our very capacity for love.  Love, said the poet, means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many.”

So what if, for a moment, we could have one of those out-of-body experiences that we sometimes have?  You know, it’s as though we’re hovering above ourselves, seeing ourselves and the Earth from above, where we are no longer the center of the universe, no longer the center of our perspective, but rather one small, vital part of a large, teeming, interconnected and glorious creation. 

Not too long ago, I had one of those out-of-body experiences myself.  I remember it well.  It was a day when I happened to be operating quite firmly in the existentially narcissistic mode.  I had a meeting downtown that day with a politician with whom I don’t always get along.  Some other church folk and I were going to discuss with this politician the possibility of finding some money for affordable housing here in our neighborhood.  But all I could think about was me and my bad relationship with this person.  All I could think about was how I was going to have to go, hat in hand, groveling for something that this person was unlikely to give me.  And my ego was already feeling bruised by the imagined rejection.  Probably because of my anxiety, I arrived downtown a good twenty minutes before the meeting started, so I had a chance to collect my thoughts for a moment on a bench in Freedom Plaza, right down on Pennsylvania Avenue.  This was a January day, but I remember it vividly.  It was a beautiful January day, one of those rare winter days in D.C. where it is warm and sunny and bright and all the denizens of Federal Triangle, all the lawyers and bureaucrats had come out of their little cubicles like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog’s Day, sniffing around and making sure it was safe, basking and lunching in the sun.

There we all were, enjoying this shared moment of grace, this shared moment of beauty, feeling a sense of solidarity with one another in the sharing.  And it was here, amidst this basking humanity, that I experienced the shift that I’m talking about.  Suddenly I saw the Plaza, not from my own eyes, but as if from above, how God might see us,  reveling in the sight of all of these people enjoying themselves and one another, seeing myself as one among many.  And suddenly I realized how silly were my petty little grievances, how fruitless my anxiety, how irrelevant my bruised ego.  In fact, when I saw myself as part of this interconnected web, it was as if I didn’t have an ego, or as if my ego had grown, as it was said of the Grinch’s heart – as if it had grown three sizes that day and encompassed all the people with me on the Plaza.

I went into my meeting that afternoon focused on our true purpose which was, after all, just to try to make the world a little better place for the people with whom I’d just shared that moment of communion.  “Love means to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many, and whoever sees that way heals his heart . . . from various ills.  Bird and tree say to him: Friend.”

When our perspective shifts like this, when we are suddenly freed from our habitual state of existential narcissism, we begin to realize its many costs to ourselves and to others.  We begin to realize the ways in which the ego, the silly ego – not the healthy ego, but the petty, silly ego – we begin to realize the ways that it’s the cause of so much suffering for ourselves and for others, the way it makes us selfish and hardens our heart against others.  The way it causes us to lash out in fear against those it feels threatened by, the way it fosters and festers our insecurities and our anxieties, the way it can cut us off from the world, leaving us utterly alone.

It reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons about a king who’s lying on a psychiatrist’s couch and the psychiatrist, with a very compassionate look on his face, is saying to the king, “Yes, but doesn’t the moat keep out love too?”  [Laughter]  To suddenly be freed from that, to feel one’s self not as a tiny ego but as part and parcel of the whole is such a gift, is such a revelation.  Whoever sees that way does heal his heart from various ills. 

Now, let me be clear about what I’m not talking about.  In suggesting that we de-center ourselves, I’m not asking us to disparage the self; I’m not advocating some kind of ascetic self-abnegation.  When I talk about being able to get out from our bodies and see from up above, I’m just using that as an imaginary device.  I’m not suggesting we separate our spirits from our bodies because that results in a disembodied spirituality, in a bloodless love.  What I am asking us to do, and it is no small task, is to try to cultivate a mindfulness that overcomes our existential narcissism, that allows for a wider and larger and more generous self to blossom. 

Cultivating such a perspective is not easy.  Making this shift requires intentionality and discipline and it’s something that I personally have struggled with for nearly 20 years.  I remember one of my earliest attempts to deal with this issue in my life.  I had been introduced to the concept through the great Catholic spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen.  Some of you might know Nouwen’s writing.  He described his own struggle with existential narcissism by saying that he needed to shift the basic premise of his life from “I exist, therefore . . .” to “God exists, therefore . . . .”  That’s not the only way to think about it, but at the time that formulation spoke to me and so I kind of adopted as my mantra that phrase, “God exists, therefore . . .” and sought to incorporate it into my prayer life.  But I was new to prayer back then and new to the spiritual life and so I devised a little system of sticky note reminders to keep this mantra foremost in my mind. 

I wrote on hundreds of little sticky notes, “God exists, therefore . . . .”  I placed them all over the house.  So I’d wake up in the morning and turn off the radio alarm clock and there it was, “God exists, therefore . . .” my first thought of the morning.  And then I’d go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and, staring me back in the mirror, “God exists, therefore . . . .”  I’d go to the cupboard to get my cereal, I’d turn on the computer, I’d walk out the front door to go to work, “God exists, therefore . . .” plastered right in front of me.  Now what I haven’t told you is that, at the time, I was living in a group house [Laughter] with several other people who became a little concerned when they saw the sticky notes appearing all over the house.  They feared, I think, that I’d joined some scary apocalyptic cult.  So they had an intervention.  [Laughter]  But when I explained to them what I was up to they patiently obliged my little experiment and some of them even tried it out themselves. I’m not necessarily recommending sticky notes.  But a regular practice of prayer and meditation is kind of like sticky notes for our soul, providing regular reminders to shift our perspective, to remove ourselves from the center of our lives and to instead cherish, at the center, the holy.

Such a shift is not unlike an earthquake for this change in perspective can be vertigo-inducing and disorienting.  It can shake us to our foundations leaving us feeling more vulnerable and exposed than ever before.  But, like the earthquake, it can leave us in the end on a firmer foundation, more aware of our true place in the order of things, more aware of our small and vital role in this interconnected web of creation.  It can leave our souls firmly grounded in love.  “Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many and whoever sees that way heals his heart from various ills.  Bird and tree say to him: Friend.  Then he wants to use himself and things so that they stand in the glow of ripeness.  It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves.  She who serves best doesn’t always understand.”

Amen.