"Offering Ourselves

to the Unknown"

A sermon by Cynthia B. Johnson

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

2/19/06

Two Readings about Home:

In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton described the travel experience Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) had when he traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, in 1849. Flaubert “noticed and felt at home in the chaos, both visual and auditory” In the streets there were, he said, “guttural intonations that sound like the cries of wild beats and laughter, and flowing white robes, and ivory teeth flashing between thick lips and flat Negro noses, and dusty feet and necklaces and bracelets. It is like being hurled while still asleep into the midst of a Beethoven symphony, with the brasses at their most earsplitting, the basses rumbling, and the flutes sighing away; each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it, the less you grasp the whole it is such a bewildering chaos of colours that your poor imagination is dazzled as though by continuous fireworks as you go about staring at minarets thick with white storks, at tired slaves stretched out in the sun on house terraces, at the patterns of sycamore branches against walls, with camel bells ringing in your ears and great herds of black goats bleating in the streets amidst the horses and the donkeys and the peddlers.

Letters to My Son Kent Nerburn (From Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, p. 259)

That is why we need to travel. If we don¹t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don¹t lift to the horizon; our ears don¹t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days. Don¹t let yourself become one of these people. The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances the traveler has to take. But if you take them, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. In the end, you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you have gained.

It is good to be here with you again. Only a few of you have been connected to this church longer than the 55 years it has been my church home, or as I call it, my home-home church. I went to Sunday School here when I was a little girl, and a few years later walked from Roosevelt Junior High School to the Church of the Christian Union-Unitarian on Ridge avenue to meet with the minister Vic Goff for classes the year I joined the church. I had memorable years in LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) with Dave and Mary Caskey as wonderful role models for idealistic, questing teenagers. On camping trips I learned a few things about astronomy but more about necking. The youth group let me pretend to study the night sky while plotting how to neck with boys I hardly knew  but later only with that nice boy from this church, Al Johnson, who I married 42 years ago.

Al and I were married by Alan Deale in the old church. Two of our three children were dedicated here in this sanctuary with Al¹s and my parents standing up here with us. Our middle child was dedicated at Lake Geneva Summer Assembly by Jack Mendehlsohn, the minister who attracted both Al¹s and my families to the church in the 1950's. So many memories: family weddings, family funerals and memorial services. Only three years ago David and Colleen presided at my mother¹s memorial service and the pain in my heart lessened measurably with their words and the music, the receiving line, the handshakes and hugs, and the reception with an especially lovely bouquet of flowers. These things are what wonderful churches do with individuals and families generation after generation.

This church welcomed me into this pulpit several times after my ordination in 1991. I served as Sabbatical Minister in 1993 during Dave¹s sabbatical, enjoying working with Colleen and with Kay Hotchkiss, who played at our wedding.

I am honored that Dave invited me to preach again today, toward the end of the illustrious and energetic Weissbard chapter of this church. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, home-home church. My very best wishes for wonderful next chapters for Dave and for this church.

There is a poignancy I feel in wondering how the church and I can maintain our connection into a future when no one in my immediate family belongs to the church, when I live in another state, when Dave is no longer a minister here, when sometime relatively soon there will be no one around who remembers a new little girl named Cindy Barnes in Sunday School. A good church lays down chapter after chapter for a community that extend backwards into yesterday and forward into tomorrow. In honor of all those times we live in the interval between what is and what is yet to be, I want to talk this morning about OFFERING OURSELVES TO
THE UNKNOWN.

Al and I recently returned from a 16-day Art and Culture study trip to India, offered by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The leaders were a friend of ours in the art department and her husband who is an art restorationist, and, in India, by the family of an Indian student who just graduated from UW-Green Bay. Our group of sixteen included the leaders and their families, undergraduate students taking the class for credit, art faculty and staff, and Al and me representing the category called Community. In coffee hour Al would be happy to show you our photo album of about a hundred 8 x 10 photographs. The photographs help me make sense of the trip, which frankly was hard to make sense of while I was in the middle of it. The chaos, the noise, the traffic, the respiratory and intestinal illnesses, the beauty, the poverty, the palaces and forts, the temples and mosques and shrines, the orphanage, the colors, the hospitality, the art, the faces, the markets, the conversations. It took many days at home before individual moments emerged from an overwhelming tangle. While there are many splendid memories, I also identify with Kent Newburn¹s letter to his son about travel: ³To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. There were considerable pains of the moment, and they have almost completely fallen away, leaving the lingering question, Why do we do it in the first place?

Like Flaubert, we travel and are changed. We leave one place and plunge into the unknown. Sometimes it is an exotic trip with a ticket and passport and anti-bacterial wet wipes. Sometimes it is the journeying of our lives from one lily pad to another in a series of growing and changing that turn out to be the most important part of being alive.

Awhile ago I met a woman who told me she was not spiritually satisfied with her mainline Protestant church but that she could not even consider leaving it because she had been there so many years that it would seem rude or disloyal to leave. When I heard that, I had three almost simultaneous reactions: first, she sounds like a potential Unitarian Universalist; second, how sad to thwart one¹s spiritual journey out of a sense of good manners; and third, wow! What a amazing example of the Tribal Chakra. Let me say more about all three parts.

I always have my antennae out to potential Unitarian Universalists. This week I asked myself exactly how I recognize a potential Unitarian Universalist. I decided that potential Unitarian Universalists have some of the following characteristics:

• They have a strong sense of themselves as individual moral agents and know that what they do makes a difference.

• They understand that Truth is revealed to people in different symbols, stories, and language. And

I always find spiritual adventuring fascinating, wherever it occurs. I like catching glimpses of worlds widening. I like noticing that doubt has become a positive tool for exploration, a nudge to leave one place that has satisfied and set off in active pursuit of further revelation.

I sometimes describe conscious religious living as a series of plateaus and climbs. Plateaus are good places where we integrate and enjoy a period of rest. I¹m excited when I see someone stir herself/himself to set out on the journey again, equipped with questions, and inconsistencies, and a new set of revelations about how the world really is. At the same time, I know that it is lonely and scary to begin that journey into the unknown. If I am honest, I admit that, just like you, I like the comfy plateaus and do not welcome the restlessness that signals that it is time to embark on another solitary spiritual adventure. In retrospect, however, I am always glad that I have made the journey.

And that brings us to the Tribal Chakra, also known as the First Chakra or Root Charka. Let me summarize this ancient image of the human body.

According to the Hindu and Buddhist metaphysical system, the seven chakras are the traditional energy centers....the areas of interconnection between body and spirit... They are often pictured as lotus blossoms or spinning wheels (in Sanskrit, chakra means wheel or circle). Each of the seven chakras roughly corresponds to a location on the human body, from the base of the spine up to the crown of the head. Dr. Carolyn Myss has developed a system of energy anatomy that relates the body organs for each chakra with the mental and physical issues it presents and with the specific physical dysfunction associated with the blockage of energy in each of the seven chakras. Her system is based on the strong connection of mind and body and spirit. Any given chakra can be interpreted from specific symptoms that are indicators of blocked energy or through the cluster of specific emotional issues that are unresolved.

For those of you who are thinking this all sounds too New Age flaky -- and I know you are out there! -- I want to assure you that I do not believe that an autopsy would uncover these chakras as physical things that could be removed and laid into a stainless steel bowl. I find this an interesting and useful way to imagine the mind/body/spirit connection. Part of my religious journey has been to explore the mind/ body/spirit relationship in my life. I believe that this is one of many good road maps for thinking about the individual journey through life. I find that this paradigm from Eastern religion is compatible with several other theories of life stages, including Maslow¹s Hierarchy of Needs, James Fowler¹s stages of spiritual growth, Lawrence Kohlberg¹s stages of moral development, and Carl Jung¹s work about middle age as an especially rich time of personal integration.

The first chakra. This energy center contains the belief patterns most strongly connected to our biological family and our early social environment. The identifying characteristic of first chakra patterns is that they are group thought-forms, stemming from religious, ethnic, social, business, political, and family traditions. The mental and emotional issues are physical family and group safety and security; ability to provide for life¹s necessities; ability to stand up for oneself; feeling at home, and social and familial law and order. If the energy for this chakra is not flowing well, a person may experience lower back pain, sciatica, varicose veins, rectal tumors or cancer, depression, or immune-related disorders.

The first chakra is about our family of origin. It is about the journey away from the tribe as we become individuals. Any of you who have left the organized religion of your family of origin have done much work in the first chakra. Its other name of the root chakra is highly appropriate because we must work with these issues before we can work on other issues, before we can resolve the issues in the other six chakras.

Beginning life as part of a tribe, we become connected to our tribal consciousness and collective willpower by absorbing its strengths and weaknesses, beliefs, superstitions, and fears. Through our interactions with family and other groups, we learn the power of sharing a belief with other people. We also learn how painful it is to be excluded from a group and its energy. We learn...the power of sharing a moral and ethical code handed down from generation to generation. This code of behavior guides children of the tribe during their developmental years, providing a sense of dignity and belonging. (Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit, p. 105)

Two things are true: we need that grounding and a central part of our life journey is becoming aware of the cultural context that first socialized us. When we become aware that our own social context is only one of a multitude of different social contexts, we enter a new stage of life as an individual.

Myss again: [In addition to the need to belong to a community, we also] ...have within us a relentless congenital desire to explore our own creative abilities, to develop our individual power and authority. This desire is the impetus behind our striving to become conscious. The universal human journey is one of becoming conscious of our power and how to use that power. Becoming conscious of the responsibility inherent in the power of choice represents the core of this journey. From an energy perspective, becoming conscious requires stamina. It is extremely challenging, and often very painful, to evaluate our own personal beliefs and separate ourselves from those [beliefs] that no longer support our growth... Seen symbolically, our life crises tell us that we need to break free of beliefs that no longer serve our personal development. These points at which we must choose to change or to stagnate are our greatest challenges. Every new crossroads means we enter into a new cycle of change... And change inevitably means letting go of familiar people and places and moving on to another stage of life. (Myss, pp. 110-111)

Myss says the many of the people in her workshops are stuck between two worlds: the old world that they need to release and the new world they are afraid to enter. We are attracted to becoming more Conscious, but at the same time we find it frightening because it means we must take personal responsibility for ourselves--and for our health, career, attitudes, and thoughts. Once we accept personal responsibility for even one area in our lives, we can never again use tribal reasoning to excuse our behavior. (Myss, p. 111)

Just think about the times you have left a comfortable place where you belonged and ventured forth. We did it when we grew from childhood into adolescence and adulthood. We do it when we clash with the people in our first family or encounter their disapproval for the different choices we have made in our lives. We do it when we change schools or jobs or careers. We do it when we move into a new neighborhood, when we downsize, when we move to a place where people can provide support we didn't use to need. We do it when we outgrow a set of political beliefs or when we outgrow companions. We do it when a set of religious beliefs breaks up and re-forms into something new. We do it when we have the opportunity to re-invent ourselves in retirement. The church does it when a long ministry ends. All
those doors closing, all those door opening.

Our own lives are full of those alternating states of equilibrium and disequilibrium, of plateaus and climbs, in the human quest for “the place just right, It will be in the valley of love and delight.” Sometimes we look around and appreciate Kansas in a new way the way Dorothy did after she returned from Oz. Occasionally it's as simple as T. S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”.

Or it may be as simple as to see "The Produce Department at Pick and Save” with fresh eyes.

to scan the light-filled grocery store: clean vinyl floors, shiny refrigerated bins,

Part of what I learned in India is rediscovering gratitude for a purse with dollars in it

flannel-lined jeans, wool socks, sheepskin slippers in January in Wisconsin
I live in a palace more sumptuous than the Taj Mahal