"Objects May Be Larger
Than They Appear"
A Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
August 8, 2010
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN
Our first reading is Chapter 48 of the Tau de Ching by Lao Tzu,
translated by Charles Muller:
In studying, each day something is gained.
In following the Way, each day something is lost.
Lost and again lost.
Until there is nothing left to do.
Not-doing, nothing is left undone.
You can possess the world by never manipulating it.
No matter how much you manipulate
You can never possess the world.
Our second reading is, "Stream of Life," by Rabindranath
Tagore:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the
earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of
life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood
this moment.
SERMON:
When I chose this sermon topic a month and a half ago, I had no
idea what might be going on around us in the world by this morning.
But I did know (or at least hoped) that I would be newly returned
from the bicycling event known as RAGBRAI (The Des Moines Register's
Annual Great Big Ride Across Iowa). It is a great big ride, but
not merely because of the nearly 500 miles we rode in seven days
(and don't be fooled by the propaganda that tries to make you think
that Iowa is flat. There were only about eight continuous miles
of flat road all week. Iowa rolls along much like a roller coaster,
albeit may be a junior roller coaster). But what makes RAGBRAI such
a great big event is the number of people who participate in it.
According to a TV newscast that I saw in a student center of a college
campus where we camped one night, there were 25,000 bicycle riders
this year! This was the biggest one ever, 9,000 more than they had
originally expected. We mostly used both lanes of the many roads
that we traveled on, forming a seemingly endless stream of bicycles
that took nearly eight hours to pass by any given point along the
way.
I had no idea what it would be like to be a part of such an enormous
bike ride. It was awesome. And what I did know before leaving here
for the ride, was that I would make plenty of use of my helmet-mounted
rearview mirror while riding. When you're surrounded by bicycles
on the move, you really want to see what's coming up from behind
you. The thing is of course, as with most rearview mirrors, objects
are often larger than they appear. It seemed like that might prove
to be something of a metaphor for a number of life experiences.
A metaphor about perspective seemed to be a good start on coming
back from vacation. Objects may be larger than they appear
Anaïs Nin once wrote, "We don't see things as they are;
we see them as we are." I came across a little story which
makes this point. It was sent to me while I was away by a Jewish
friend in Ohio… That's Ohio, not to be confused with Iowa.
A minister meets his friend, the rabbi, and says to him, 'You
have taught me many things but there is one thing in particular
that I want very much to learn, but you refuse to teach me. I
want you to teach me the Talmud.
The rabbi replies: 'You are a gentile and you think like a gentile.
I'm afraid there is no chance that you will ever succeed in understanding
the Talmud.'
Still, the minister continues in his attempt to persuade the
rabbi to teach him the Talmud.
Finally, the rabbi relents.
He says to the minister: 'I agree to teach you the Talmud on
condition that you can answer one question.'
The minister agrees 'What is the question?'
So the rabbi asks: 'Two men fall down through the chimney. One
comes out dirty and the other comes out clean. Who of those two
goes to wash up?'
'Very simple,' replies the minister. 'The one who is dirty goes
to wash up and the one who is clean does not go to wash up.'
The rabbi responds: 'I told that you will never succeed in understanding
the Talmud! The exact opposite is true: The clean one looks at
the dirty one and thinks that he is also dirty and goes to wash
up. The dirty one, on the other hand, looks at the clean one and
thinks that he is also clean and, therefore, does not go to wash
up.'
The minister says to the rabbi: 'I did not think of that. Please
ask me another question.'
So the rabbi asks: 'Two men fall down through the chimney. One
comes out dirty and the other comes out clean. Who of these two
goes to wash up?'
The minister answers: 'Very simple. The clean one looks at the
dirty one and thinks he is also dirty and goes to wash up. The
dirty one, on the other hand, looks at the clean one and thinks
that he is also clean and, therefore does not go to wash up.'
The rabbi responds: 'I'm afraid you are wrong again! The clean
one looks in the mirror, sees that he is clean and, therefore,
does not go to wash up. The dirty one looks in the mirror, sees
that he is dirty and goes to wash up.'
The minister complains, 'But you did not tell me that there is
a mirror!'
The rabbi responds: 'I told you: that you are a gentile. With
your gentile brain and your thinking you will never likely succeed
in understanding the Talmud. To understand the Talmud, you have
to think of all possibilities.'
'All right,' groans the minister, 'Let us try once more. Ask
me one more question.'
'For the last time,' asks the rabbi, 'Two men fall through the
chimney. One comes out dirty and the other comes out clean. Who
of these two goes to wash up?'
'Okay. This is now very simple to me,' replies the minister.
'If there is no mirror, the clean one will look at the dirty one
and will think that he is also dirty and, therefore, will go to
wash up. The dirty one will look at the clean one and will think
that he is also clean, and, therefore, will not go to wash up.
If there is a mirror, the clean one will look in the mirror and,
therefore, will not go to wash up. The dirty one will look in
the mirror and will see that he is dirty and, therefore, will
go to wash up.'
The rabbi responds: 'I told you that you would never succeed
in understanding the Talmud. You are a gentile. You have a non-Jewish
brain. Tell me, just how is it possible for two men to fall through
a chimney and one of them to come out dirty while the other comes
out clean?'
"We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."
(Nin) Things may indeed be larger than they appear. Although the
rabbi is something of a schmuck for duping his friend and failing
to help him to grasp the larger picture, the minister in the story
does fail each time to grasp that larger picture. He looks at the
smaller pieces of the question and fails to comprehend that there
is always an answer that lies within a larger context.
It occurs to me that I often do the same. Not being one to suffer
foolishness alone, I am guessing that I'm in good company. Maybe
others in this very room also fall victim to premature closure of
insight. We all, I suspect, at least at times, fail to grasp that
many things may be larger than they appear.
Let's begin on a cultural level with an "appearance"
an "object" that may not be too threatening among many
of us here, but which is surely a frightening prospect to many on
a national level. And so we look into the lens of our mirror at
marriage. What do we see? Marriage has always been about the union
of one man and one woman, right? At least that's what we see until
we look at the larger picture and see that marriage is more truly
about the loving union of two people. Mostly that is about a woman
and a man, but many times it is not.
As Shell Silverstein wrote years ago, "There are men who love
women who love men, and women who love women every now and then.
There are men who love men because they can't pretend they are men
who love women who love men."
Most of us here know and celebrate that larger reality, the larger
picture. But marriage equality has been voted down in many states,
even by the New Jersey Legislature. (Speaking of Iowa, I would be
quick to point out that it was voted up this past year in the Iowa
Legislature.) And even though the news was good in California this
week with the overturn in Federal Court of Prop 8, we have not heard
the last from those there who do not want to see how close we are
coming to a larger picture of sanctioning all loving unions and
not just those relationships that some individuals see when they
look into the mirror. I believe that day is coming, but it will
take more of us seeing that larger picture than those of us who
see it now.
Perhaps of greater threat among those of us here, in the expansion
of our perspective from the micro to the macro level, is the vision
we have of racism and classism. We look into the mirror and we see
ourselves as staunch liberals who stand four-square behind labor,
democracy, justice for all, even the environment. If we were to
look further into the larger picture of how our values play out
in the world, or how they do not play out in the world, what might
we learn about our connections to undocumented immigration, to child
labor and sweat shops, to inner city ghettos, to crime and to the
penal system, and to the war on drugs? What might we see about our
connections to the flooding I witnessed recently out in the Midwest
let alone the flooding that has been going on in Pakistan? What
might we see of ourselves in the process of global warming, or in
the disappearance of the Atlantic salmon in north easternrivers
and the departure of so many other species of fish and shellfish
that have lost their territories in competition with the over-production
of farmed seafood?
If we were to turn away from our myopic lens that tells us all
is well for just a moment and look more closely at the reality of
the larger world, what might we see about ourselves in that larger
picture? And what might we be compelled to do in response? Objects
often are larger than they appear. Objections to the larger view,
as in the case of marriage equality, often belie a reticence to
take a good look at the larger picture and to acknowledge what we
see.
I also want to take this idea of the larger perspective in another
and more personal direction. This may sound more religious than
some of the preceding to some of you, but I would contend that it's
all religious. If we think religion is just about ourselves and
our own personal relationship with God or the universe, our ideas
of religion fly in the face of what has been taught by the great
religious teachers of all time - to love one another.
So, what I've been thinking about in this more personal regard
is the idea of prayer. And I'm not thinking about prayer in any
traditional sense, although I wouldn't necessarily rule out a traditional
sense of it either. What I've been thinking about are those intentional
endeavors to open our hearts, enabling us to articulate expressions
of our deepest yearnings and our greatest joys.
We go through our day to day lives, looking through a mirror, a
lens that enables us, or so we think, to limit the scope of our
vision, so that we can cope, abide, get through to the next step.
We are bombarded by pressures for our attention from so many, many
things. We have to be able to limit our focus or we might well be
annihilated by those many things. And so we are often left to look
through the mirror at ourselves, not as a whole but piece by piece.
Our health, our mental health, our work, our families, our relationships,
our stuff.
And too often, piece by piece, is how we see ourselves but I wonder
how often we turn from the reduced image in that mirror to see ourselves
in the larger context of our lives, and to see our lives in the
larger context of all life.
I've been thinking about why the ideas of a super daddy or super
momma godhead might be so compelling to so many people around the
world. And I think it might be because those ideas give people access
to a larger understanding of themselves.
The idea of a God the Father, or a God the Mother for that fact,
don't appeal to me. They fly in the face of six decades of life
experience that inform me of a much more natural order in the universe.
But I am compelled by a spirit; a force that holds us and all that
is, in unity and in being.
I experience this force at odd times. Sometimes it's quite unexpected;
often times when I'm riding my bicycle or working out at the Y.
Sometimes it's in conversations with others or even when I'm quite
alone. I call all of this prayer.
The point is, it takes me out of myself, or maybe more accurately
out of my typical perspective of myself, so that I am able to see
something more of the largeness that I am part of. When we can see
ourselves in a larger context, I trust we can see others and our
earth in a larger context as well. We are less often fooled by questions
of who goes to wash up and who does not, after taking a fall.
The thing is - we all fall; we all fail. And if we are capable
of seeing a larger picture than the one our day to day lens has
to offer, I'm guessing we have an easier time brushing ourselves
off and getting on with the business of living. It might be made
easier by those who would help and not test us, but the challenge
is each of ours to answer.
Mirrors, lenses can be helpful, very helpful. But like many helpful
metaphors, they provide a map of the terrain we are passing through.
We have to remember that they are the map and not the terrain. And
it's always the terrain that matters most.
When we can see ourselves in a larger context, I trust we can become
capable of more fully living these lives we have been given, expressing
our yearnings, sharing our joys and adding our creative bit to the
beauty that we are surrounded by on this great big ride through
this incredible creation. I don't suppose there is any vacation
from that. I don't suppose there is ever a vacation from that.
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