Sermons

'Drawing the Shortest Straw:'

"Drawing the Shortest Straw"
Or
"You Can’t Always Get What You Want"
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman
May 12, 2002
At the Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street, Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 WWW.UUMontclair.org

For those of you who recognize those organ chords and their underlying melody, you might expect me to step into the pulpit now and begin to eulogize our friend, Alex. For those of you who don’t recognize it, the music Artis just played comes from the movie, “The Big Chill.” The scene is of a funeral where a group of maturing Baby Boomers come together for the funeral of one of their old college friends, Alex, who has committed suicide.

During the course of the funeral, the unsympathetic preacher announces that one of the friends is going to play one of Alex’s favorite songs on the organ. And then we hear the emotionally powerful strains of the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, you just might find, that you get what you need…”

You can’t always get what you want. That was the phrase I started mulling over in my mind about a month ago after one of our Sunday morning services. And out of it came the inspiration for what I want to say this morning. I have to say that it is you, who inspired me, though I can’t imagine you could have known it at the time. Nor could I have known where that inspiration might lead. Funny how these things work out…or don’t work out.

The experience I’m talking about was last month when I announced that there would be a change in the way we celebrate our Candles of Remembrance during worship. In case you weren’t here, or if you’re very new to the church, I’ll walk you through this quickly so that everyone has an understanding of what I’m talking about.

Our Candles of Remembrance is a very special part of our worship where we hold up major milestones of joy or concern in the lives of our members, or where we commemorate current or past events of a more general significance to everyone. It’s special because the remembrances hold in them, in a necessarily abbreviated format, the stories of our lives and of our congregational life.

Over the past few years there has been a growing number of reports of people not being able to hear what’s been said from the floor, and a growing concern over the difficulty in the community being able to respond to some of the more difficult concerns shared, because there is no record of them. It seemed that too many people were being left out of something that was meant to bring us together.

A number of different alternative approaches were considered. Practicality ruled out most of them. Finally, the idea of writing them out ahead of time so that they could be read aloud by the liturgist began to look like a viable alternative. It had been successful in other churches; it reflected the importance of the Remembrances because it required enough forethought to have prepared the remembrance ahead of time; it might even help alleviate some of the time crunch that often exists in our one-hour worship service because people often write more succinctly than they speak. And, everyone would be able to take in what was being said.

The down side was that, at least during a transition period, it was likely to feel like this personal time during our worship service had gotten less personal’ an important consideration. Still, in all, it seemed there was more to be gained than lost by giving it a try. So we moved ahead, and I began announcing the changes a few weeks ahead of time.

Afterward, a few people came forward to say thanks for trying to make things better. A few came forward to ask if this was negotiable. A few said nothing at all. Beyond that, and with all due respect and admiration, I’d have to say the dam pretty well broke under a flood of protest, which I can also happily say was levied quite respectfully. I’d never begun to imagine that there would be such a reluctance to implement this change. It was most impressive; something to behold.

Now, I’m not saying the changes are good or bad. And I’m not saying what the final outcome will be. I don’t know. We’ll try it for a while and see how it works; then we’ll decide.

But the whole experience made me start to wonder, why? Why such an emotionally charged, negative response toward an effort to be more inclusive within the context of our growing congregation? I realize that some of the answer has to do with our desire to feel small and cozy. Some of it has to do with not wanting to let go of a richness that comes out of a very personal connection. These are tough issues to grapple with.

Still, I thought there might be more to it than that. And I wondered if there was something larger going on. I wondered if the something larger might be about more than just our worship service, that it might also be about this time in which we live. I wondered if it was more of a religious question. And I wondered if maybe it had something to do with the words in the song, “you can’t always get what you want.”

The world changed dramatically for all of us on September 11th. Some of those changes were a radical shift in our experiences, our perceptions, and our behaviors. Some of the changes though, were less a radical shift than they were a heightened solidification of some of our previous tendencies.

What I heard underneath at least some of the objections to the new format for the Remembrances was a discomfort with, if not a fear of change. Change is a tough nut to crack, without it we die; and in the face of it we often resort to kicking and screaming refusals. “Things were just fine the way they were, thank you very much. I don’t need no stinking changes!”

Homeostasis is a biological model, and it describes a process of balance that maintains the margins within which life can occur and continue. It can be observed from the micro-level of molecular life to the macro-level of interplanetary life. And I would suggest that it can be observed in the life of every person, family, community, and nation. Everywhere, homeostasis allows whatever is alive to accommodate growth and change while slowly letting go of what has been. I have to wonder if after a trauma, that slowness or reluctance is intensified.

Homeostasis isn’t about fear of change; it’s about moving ahead at a pace that allows for balance. When we add our human psychologies into the mix, that’s when we come up with discomfort and fear. After a trauma, I think it’s safe to assume that our psychologies have been stirred into action.

Maybe my example of the Remembrance Candles isn’t a very good illustration of what I’m talking about, but maybe it is. Or maybe you can think of a better example that you’ve seen or experienced. In any case, we live in a culture with a well-established fear of change that has manifested itself in a need for control. We are a nation of control freaks, all pointing our fingers at one another claiming that we’ve been out done. “You’re the control freak, not me,” we hear.

But it’s a cultural issue. We control with herbicides the lawns we don’t use because we’re in our climate controlled homes eating foods that have been pasteurized, homogenized and shrink-wrapped. We go on vacations that are planned from the moment of our departure to the moment of our return. We pay for it all by incomes that are the sum total of carefully calculated equations of education times occupation equals life style.

We attempt to control as much as we possibly can, but the thing is we are only attempting to control, because control is just a fantasy we throw in the face of our fear of change, our fear of the unexpected. Writer Annie Dillard says, “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.” The issues though, at least the religious/spiritual issues in all of this, are in the questions: How much of our life energy goes into the attempt to control? And how much is lost in that effort?

“The place where your treasure is will also be the place where your heart is,” the Book of Mathew warns. And more, “…you shouldn’t worry about what you will eat to stay alive…None of you can grow [any] taller by worrying about it.”

Much of our worrying and all of our need for control is commensurate with our fear to face life on its own terms—is commensurate with our fear of change. And in the end, I think, it’s related to our fear of dying.

How much of our energy goes into our attempt to control? You tell me. What I gather, based on my own experience as well as what I see going on around me, is that far too much of our energy is spent on trying to control our lives, our children, each other, the environment.

And what gets lost in the pursuit? I’m afraid it’s too much of our spontaneity, our creativity and our capacity for truly spiritual, truly divine, truly revelatory experience. Our attempts to control are sort of like a spiritual Prozac. We not only limit our exposure to the lows and to the highs, but we limit ourselves from the very deep. A spiritual numbness seems too great a cost for a culture of control.

“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need.”

Award winning author, Anne Fadiman, said in an interview, “I think the only way for the really important things to enter our lives, is by chance.” I wonder sometimes, how open are we to recognizing and embracing the chances that might greatly nurture our lives? We can hope for love in our lives, but we can’t make it happen. Love is something that’s shared and we can’t control that. There is in love a great element of chance.

We might say that we love an other, but is it love if it’s not shared. We might say that we love beauty. And I wonder if that has to mean that there is something intrinsic to beauty that is loving us in return.

Robert C. Morris writes:

May I walk as blessing,
meeting blessing at every turn
in every challenge, blessing,
in harm’s way, blessing.

May I walk each step
in this moment of grace,
alert to hear you
and awake enough to say a simple, Yes.

I recently spoke with a colleague who’d had a difficult experience with a person in leadership in his congregation. Through a lack of consideration this leader had caused quite a bit of unnecessary angst among the church staff. When confronted by my colleague, the person met with the staff to apologize.

Then later, my colleague was confronted by yet another person of leadership in the congregation, this one something of a sage who asked, “Are you still angry?” To which the minister was unable to give a very clear response.

Then came the sage’s reply. “Don’t give things more meaning than they have,” he said. “What she did was a sloppy error, annoying, something to fix, but it wasn’t personal, and if we are going to accomplish our goals in this world – and you have a lot to accomplish – we cannot afford to dissipate our energies taking affront where none was meant.”

He went on to talk about how we give things more meaning than they have out of ego, or fear, or pride. He talked like a Buddhist sage about a kind of detachment. And my colleague got the sense that the man believed that even if some things were personal, direct affronts to our ego, that it still wasn’t worth taking them personally – that there were bigger fish to fry. “So get clear on what you dream for the world, and get out of your own way,” he said.

We can not control what happens to us, but we are the captains of our response. We don’t need to give things more meaning than they have. We cannot afford to dissipate our energies. There are bigger fish to fry. We need to be clear on our dreams for the world, and to stay out of our own way so that they might be realized.

And how can we do all that? Not through petty attempts at control in the face of fear of change, I think. The answer instead lies in our ability to have and to hold faith:

faith in life;
- faith in our ability to get through difficult straits;
- faith in our capacity to recognize our place within the phenomenal beauty that we are in the midst of;
- faith that, even as we face death, we will find our lives and our deaths to have meaning, and that that meaning is a part of the ongoing story of creation that is this earthly experience.
- faith that life and that love are the greatest gifts of all, and that they are most wholly (holy) ours when we are uncontrolling enough to take a chance on them.

What is ours to do? It is not to rein in the wind or chain the storm, or even to force what we think ought to be. Instead, it is to have faith, and to act on that faith so that what might be – can be; so that the yearnings of our dreams might have space enough to be born, to grow and to flourish; so that a world of compassion, justice and equity might develop into the homeostatic dance of balance in a humanity that accepts its common limitations as well as its interdependent possibilities, the lows and the highs.

What is ours to do? It is ours to walk with one another as best we can. It is ours to stand in the path of grace, and to hope that grace will come along and swoop us up. It is ours to be grateful for the holy experience of life – its moments of grief, its days of light. It is ours to be open to the mystery from which our lives spring, and to have faith in that mystery that our lives will continue to be fed.

Poet, Jane Kenyon writes in “Briefly It Enters, Briefly Speaks,” “I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name.” Life and love are there awaiting the space and the call to come forward.

Let us not be so filled with ourselves, through worry and fear; let us not be so sure of ourselves through demanding control, that we miss the opportunities that life gives to provide its greatest meanings.

We can’t always get what we want but if we try sometimes, we just might find that we get what we need.

So let us be filled with moments to ponder;
Let us be filled with awe and regard;
Let us be moved by pity and hope;
Let us be transformed through the grace of loving and by the loving of grace;
And let us indeed be thankful for all of these.