Worrywarts, Unite
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
November 15, 2009


Message: Worrywarts, Unite

This is a balm,
maybe not in Gilead,
but a balm,
a salve for the wounds of pride:
Ty Cobb, .367.

I read this once, I don’t remember where:
that the problem with football
is you can go undefeated.
Sure, it is really hard,
and doesn’t happen very often.

But not baseball –
there are 162 games.
You can’t win them all.
Sometimes, the Yankees loose the Nationals.
In fact, last season,
the Nationals beat the Yankees twice.

A salve for the wounds of pride,
a balm for our expectations that we need to get it right
every time:
ty cobb: .367.

That’s a wise Rabbi.
I wish I was so wise.
I wish I was so wise as that,
and on my best days, I do OK –
more on that later –
but too often,
there I am,
bowing down before the altar of competence,
worried about whether I’ve done well enough today,
worried about all the mistakes,
all there is to do,
all that needs to be tended, repaired, healed, envisioned.

Have you done that?

Bow before the altar of competence?
We religious liberals are often pretty good at that.
We think that if we do it well,
whatever it is,
then so-and-so will like me.
For so-and-so read:
my spouse, child, parent, employer, employee,
the world
god.

Have you done that?
Worry?
Worry about the past?
Worry about the future?
Worry about your own life?
Worry about the life of others?

Come on, be honest:
if you are a worrywart, raise that hand.

This is the first step, brothers and sisters –
admitting that we worry,
and sometimes we feel powerless over that worry.

I don’t know about you . . .
but I surely am sometimes powerless over my worry.
I can’t sleep, I can’t function, I can’t see beauty, or laugh, or see what is well.
I see what’s wrong,
and worry about it,
and then that leads,
quite naturally,
to worrying about something else that’s also wrong,
and then to the next thing,
and then, pretty soon,
I’ve got a whole set of intractable difficulties
competing for attention in my mind and soul.

That ever happen to you?

I thought, here at the beginning of this sermon,
to make a list of the kinds of things people worry about.

But then I thought –
yikes!
that will just give us all more to worry about!

Oh, you’ll say, I wasn’t worried about
the Large Hadron Collider accidentally making a black hole
in the middle of the alps
until Matthew mentioned it,
and now I’ve got to add that to the list.

So I won’t give you a long list.
I’m sure, already in your mind,
is your own list. I’m sure it is plenty long,
with a lot of variety,
items large and small,
near and far.
We all have our own list.

Sometimes we go on,
we get engaged in what we are doing,
or we are appropriately entertained by something else,
and we forget about our list.

But whether it is late at night
or in the bright light of the day
our worries invade.
They make their presence known,
agitate us,
make us fret in the fervor of the day.

The question I ask myself,
and that I am sure you ask yourself, sometimes,
is: OK, what shall we do with our worries?
How shall we live in the presence of our concerns?

Imagine with me, if you will,
a beach or a shore.
Perhaps one is special to you –
imagine that one.
Maybe a lake up in Wisconsin,
or a sandy expanse you visited once on vacation –
think, if you will,
of a place where the tide comes in and goes out.
Where the tide comes in,
and the water rises,
and then the tide goes out,
and the beach, the shore, stretches wide.

Can you see a place like this?
Good.

This is an analogy, and not a perfect one,
but try it out with me, will you?

The shore, the sand and the rocks,
the little creatures in their shells,
these are the worries.
the doubts.
The things we think about.
The problems we try to solve in our minds and hearts.
The restlessness.

The water is the comfort.
It is the Tao, the way of the things,
which, as Lao-Tzu says in another part of the Tao Te Ching,
does not contend,
which is like water,
flowing to the low-lying places,
ebbing and flowing.
The water is the comfort,
that which allows St. Teresa,
the patron saint of worriers,
to say, Nada Te Turbe,
nothing can trouble.
The water is what Wendell Berry calls
the grace of the world –
the comfort of friends who reassure,
who remind us to ease up,
who love us and laugh with us.

The beach and the water exist in a dance.
If the water was always at low tide,
the little animals in their shells would shrivel up and die –
as surely as our souls would shrivel up and die
without comfort and assurance,
as surely as we would grow parched if all we had to drink
was worry and doubt.

But if the water was always at high tide,
then those little animals would drown.
And we, who visit the beaches,
and birds, who come to feed,
and all the rest,
would have nowhere to go,
nowhere to explore and learn.

Start the journey with the water at high tide.
We are comforted –
or maybe just distracted –
but without the presence of doubt,
in that moment.
And the tide starts to recede.
And doubts began to make themselves apparent.
As the tide continues to recede,
more doubts show up, more worries,
each connected to each other.

This is the moment when we are likely to panic.
Look for the distraction to “keep our mind off things”
we can grow full of fear.
Will the tide recede forever?

It’s taken me a lot of prayer,
and a lot of listening to wise colleagues and friends,
but what I have come to see
is that this moment,
this unveiling of doubt,
is a vital moment in the spiritually mature and engaged life.
Robert Weston says
“Cherish your doubts.
It is the key to the door of knowledge, it is the servant of discovery.
Doubt is to the wise as a staff to the blind.”

This moment,
when the shore of doubt is visible and before us,
this is a vital moment,
if we embrace it.
It is the time to walk out,
to see what there is to see out there,
to discover.

many folks who write about leadership
talk about how the critical activity for leadership
is asking the right questions.
They make a distinction between what are called “technical challenges”
and “adaptive challenges” –
technical challenges are about finding new answers to old questions –
this is innovation,
and it is good and useful.
But even more critical to the good life is the paradigm shift,
engaging the adaptive challenge:
asking new questions.

Instead of debating between A or B, A or B
over and over again,
what if we considered purple?

Cherish your doubts:
this is what we say about our faith:
that we think the questions are more important than the answers.
We are the faith where you are encouraged
to ask those questions
that, maybe, you were not allowed to ask growing up.
This is what we say,
but we don’t always practice it as much as we should.
Oh, we asked questions once,
and then we gave ourselves answers:
and dug in our heals against change.

But our faith says: cherish your doubts.
Ask adaptive questions.

I know that, distressing as my worries sometimes are,
as much as they keep me up at night,
they have a clarifying power.
They tell me what I need to pay attention to.
They give me direction.
They suggest areas for further study.
They make me reach out to others,
to call up a colleague and say,
Hey, I’m been thinking about this,
what do you think?

The tide recedes, and look what we can see
where the water used to be –
shells and rocks and patterns,
animals and plants –
a new field is opened up,
new ideas become possible,
we are asked to think and feel with more depth
about what really matters,

we are liberated from the narrow confines
of the small shoreline
that was previously available to us.

And yet, we cannot live like this forever.
It is too much.
It is too uncertain.
Our bodies cannot take it,
nor can our minds or our souls.
We need comfort,
we need hope,
we need direction.

And at some point,
the tide stops receding.
It starts to come back up.

How does this happen in our lives of worry?

It happens when we reach out:
when a friend says,
it will be OK,
and we remember, oh, yeah, it will be OK.
It happens when we engage the beautiful, the creative:
when we read a great book,
or tap our toes, sing along, to a favorite song,
when we see the cardinal alight on a otherwise barren branch.

Wendell Berry says
when despair for the world grows in me
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water
for a time I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

This is when the tide starts to come back.

It happens when we feel,
as some of us do,
the presence of the sublime,
a holy and loving power,
the power our Universalist ancestors knew
as a loving god,
who redeems and restores all beings,
by whom no person is cast aside,
but all are embraced.

This is important:
it is not just one thing that can ease our worries.
All of these things:
the comfort of friends,
the engagement of beauty and creativity,
the loving spirit of life,
all of these things have, at times,
pulled me back from the edge –
sometimes it takes all three,
and sometimes one is enough.

And you make this happen:
you can reach out to a friend,
a co-worker, a relative,
a fellow congregant.
You can say I need help.
I need someone to talk to.
I’m serious about that –
even though most of you are Midwesterners,
you can still say,
I need help.

In fact, let’s practice.
Repeat after me:
I could use / someone to talk to / will you help me?

Very good.
And what you will find
when you reach out for help,
is, hopefully, both someone to listen to you,
and someone who can say,
you are not alone.
You are not alone,
and no one is perfect –
Ty Cobb, .367.
You are not the only one who feels this way:
and this can be a balm,
a salve for our wounds of pride.

We can make the deliberate choice, as well,
to turn away from our worries
towards engagement of the creative and the beautiful.
Take a walk down a tree-lined city street.
Put on your favorite old movie.
Pick up a good book.
Turn up the tunes.
Life is full,
full of everything –
both beauty and pain,
sorrow and joy –
and we don’t have to live on only one side of the coin.

There is laughter,
and good food,
and art, and forest preserves, and gardens of wildflowers,
and beauty of all kinds.

When it comes to the balm offered
by the spirit of life and love,
of course,
this is not under our explicit power.
That’s sort of, you know, the point.
But here too,
we can turn toward this spirit.
We can, as our opening hymn suggested,
intently listen for the voice within,
and hear the soundless wisdom of the deeper mind.

Unitarian Universalists believe
that what is holy and wondrous –
whether you call that god or spirit or universe itself,
however you know it and name it –

what is holy and wondrous is imminent,
it is embedded in life itself.
And so, the best way to experience
the healing power of comfort,
the best way to entice the tide to come back in,
is to engage in life –
to reach out, to set yourself before the beautiful,
to be still and hear the voice within.

Of course, it’s not true that nothing troubles.
Something always troubles.
The world is imperfect, full of frailty and injustice,
we are always not quite,
always not quite the woman or man we want to be,
the citizen, lover, learner, doer we want to be.
It’s foolish and naïve – this prayer of St. Teresa,
may nothing trouble.

And, of course, it is true that nothing troubles.
You do not have to walk on your knees,
repenting, through the desert,
says the poet Mary Oliver –
Meanwhile the world goes on
Meanwhile the wild geese are heading home again.
The house, says Wendell Berry,
is not carried through the night by your will.
Of course, it is true that nothing troubles –
as our foremothers and forefathers proclaimed,
all is loved, all is redeemed, all is reconciled.
All matter is part of the one cosmos,
we return and return and return again,
and, in the presence of everything,
we need not fret, need not despair.
Love is true:
this is the good news of universalism.
Love is true.
All the rest is nonsense.

And so the tide rises,
and we are comforted.
Our strength grows
and we are refreshed and renewed.
Ready to come back into the world,
to begin again,
to face the new day with hope and strength.

And we are ready to ask the important questions,
to say,
knowing that the tide will not recede forever,
that it will ebb and flow forevermore,
I wonder what interesting things
are under this water?
I wonder what fascinating creatures live here,
or,
I wonder what games and fun we could have
if this beach was a little bigger.

And the tide goes out.
We are invited to cherish our doubts –
to worry about what is worthy of our attention,
but be not consumed by that concern.

And this is how it goes, I think.
The tide comes in,
and we live in love and comfort.
The tide goes out,
and we explore and adventure and strive.

I said before that the Tao, the sacred way,
was the water –
but that’s not entirely true, is it?

With Tao, sometimes you move ahead and sometimes you stay back.

The Tao is the tide.
Life is the tide –
breathing in, breathing out.
Moving in, moving out.

It is rhythm that makes life possible.
Don’t hope for only the narrow shores
of perpetual ease, of lack of doubt.
Don’t work so hard out on the frontiers
that you are overtaken by the rising sea.
Live in the tide.
Moving in and out of the dance.
Taking in love when you need,
giving away love when others need.
Exploring the new when it is before you,
resting in the beautiful when it is time to rest.
Live in the tide.

Let worry be your guide for a while,
pointing in new and adventurous directions,
expanding possibilities,
telling you what to attend to.
And then, let it go, and let love come,
find the stillness, the essence,
and be assured, be untroubled.
Live in the tide.
Breathe in, breathe out.
And sing in your soul,
shalom, peace, salam, peace,
amen, peace, blessed be, peace.