Getting Through the Night

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

February 15, 2009

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

 

Strategy One:

So you’ve gone to bed peacefully enough – watched a little TV, read a little, kissed your partner goodnight and drifted off to merciful sleep. But then you jolt awake at 2:30 in the morning, heart racing, short of breath. Your mind is racing. You remember the tasks undone; the calls you forgot to make; the emails you forgot to send. You remember the pension statement showing that you’ve lost about 1/3 of the value of your retirement. You begin to think about your future. Will I still have my job? What will we do? The house is losing value, who knows what it will sell for now? If we have to move, where will we move to? How can I afford medical insurance? 

You try to relax; go back to sleep, but the anxiety is just too much. What will get you “through the night”?

Last fall, Kathryn Johnson bought the sermon topic at the Services Auction. She asked me to address the issue of how we live with uncertainty. Certainly germane given the unknowns of the economy, the wild stock market, the prognosticators’ conflicting predictions. Obviously this is relevant even in the best of times, because, as we know, life can change in a flash. We get a diagnosis that confronts us with our mortality, we get in the way of a drunk driver – whatever – we know that life is fragile and tentative. Even in the best of times economically, we know that life is tenuous. Now that we’re facing tough times, we’re all in this together. Now we share in this uncertainty as we – all peoples of the world – live with anxiety.

Kathryn brought to my attention an article on the UU World website, by Bill Schultz, past director of Amnesty International, and husband of this congregation’s previous settled minister, Beth Graham. The article was simply titled, “Hold On.”[1] As Bill wrote toward the end of the article, “Religion’s job is to sustain us…. I have come to believe that as long as our religious faith is generous-hearted, it matters far less what its content is – its metaphysics or theology…- than whether it succeeds in getting us through the night.” (3 of 3) That gave me the title: “Getting Through the Night.” Perhaps it also suggested a way to talk about what sustains us as “different strategies”. Because we are diverse, some of us find help in a particular strategy that others among us may not find helpful. That very diversity makes us Unitarian Universalists, pluralists promising to love one another even if we think differently. So this morning I will explore three strategies. I invite you to consider which, if any, works for you.

I’m calling the first strategy “Resting in the arms” because it provides one with assurance that there is a larger, loving force that’s at work even in the face of apparent devastation. This, of course, is the faith of many that God, Allah, Love Divine – however named and imagined – will be there for us, even in the midst of tremendous suffering.

In the middle of the night, then, a person of faith might pray as a way of calling to mind the presence of a greater love which will sustain one whatever one faces.

Jewish and Christian scripture, as well as the devotional scripture of non-western traditions tells in story after story how the divine love never forsakes, even in the times of slavery, of the Babylonian captivity and the Diaspora. As the Psalmist puts it, there is no place that one can be without God. Even in hell, God is there. In the most abject prison cell, God can be found. 

Many among us find these images deeply unsatisfactory, even repellant. If God is so loving, how can God allow injustice, especially to the young and innocent? Yet others among us find profound comfort in these images – a loving, mysterious other, who embraces our petty anxieties in the assuring arms of the shepherd. They wrestle with the suffering of innocents. They come to terms with the existence of unmerited atrocity. Nevertheless, they find tremendous comfort in the metaphor of resting in the arms. There is suffering to be sure. But it has meaning in some mysterious way, beyond our human comprehension. Some among us find deep solace in the traditional words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd…. Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” 

Getting through the night, then, is touching into the assurance that comes with remembering “We are in God’s hands.”

Gospel music gives this theme prominence. Can we imagine what it was like to be enslaved; to have our loved ones sold and transported across the states? What sustained so many during these times of unrelenting misery was their song, “Jesus is a rock in a weary land….he’s a shelter in a time of storm.” They found, as many find, comfort in the divine. “He’s got the whole world in his hands” and on and on through so many songs.

A strategy for “getting through the night” is to find comfort in the mysterious Other – what I’m pointing to as “resting in the arms.”

 

Strategy Two: “This Too Shall Pass”

A second strategy is what I would call “existential heroism.” It’s the courage to endure alone, or in the company of other humans, but without the support of another order of being. This is the gist of Bill’s article, “Hold On.” As director of Amnesty, Bill was often asked how he endured the tales of cruelty and barbarity. “…[T]he truly important question was not how I survived the stories, but how the targets of human rights crimes survived their ordeals. And the answer that I received from one after another when I would ask them was that they fastened onto something – their family, their comrades, the cause in which they believed – and held on, certain in the faith that eventually their suffering would end.” (2 of 3) Elsewhere in the article Bill writes, “The trick is to hang on…. It is useful to remember that suffering and anxiety are usually just as finite and time-limited as high passion and unalloyed joy and that, if we make it through the night, the odds are that new possibilities may well emerge.” (2 of 3) In other words, “this too shall pass.”

Bill finds assurance in the rhythms of the natural world. He reflects on the shifting sand dunes. “Consider the way the wind shapes a sand dune. At the very peak of each dune, the wind creates a precise edge so sharp that it might have been cut with a scalpel. The grains of sand are poised in perfect balance at the crest of the dune. And as long as the wind doesn’t kick up again, they stay that way – paused at what is called ‘the angle of repose.’ …

“But here’s the good news. When you disturb the sand dune and everything starts to cave in on itself, there is, granted, a period of time when it feels as if the tumbling will never stop, the chaos will never end, the winds will never cease. But the good news is that the sand inevitably reestablishes itself in another angle of repose. The pattern may be different; the dunes may be a little bigger or a little smaller, but the sand inevitably returns to stasis, to balance, once again, if you just give it time. The trick … is to trust in the eventual reappearance of the angle of repose.” (2 of 3, italics in original)

He implies that it’s in the natural order of things to come apart and to rebalance themselves. As humans our spiritual task is to recognize that reality, and to persist through it.

So, in the middle of the night, some may find comfort in the mantra, “this too shall pass.”  It reminds them that in the middle of apparent chaos and destruction, a new order is emerging, if they can just hang on. Courage, my friends, courage. Endure the anxiety confident that a new order will appear.  This is another strategy for getting through the night. Know that this too shall pass.

 

Strategy Three: “Liberation”

The third strategy is the spiritual strategy that I am personally pursuing. That doesn’t make it, I would hasten to add, the preferred strategy – the UU strategy. It’s just the way that appeals to me, given my make-up and experiences. This is a strategy that investigates anxiety as a mind state, as fabricated as any other mind state. This is my understanding of a Buddhist strategy. 

The Buddha repeatedly claimed that he taught the way to end suffering. He taught a way of spiritual liberation. He taught his four noble truths, summarizing the results of his observations of his own mind. (By the way, he claimed that nothing was revealed to him; everything was to be proved by your own experience. We have a hymn, number 184, setting the dying words of the Buddha, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves; ….hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp.”) The first of the four noble truths is that suffering is widespread because things change. No joy lasts forever. Indeed, some of us barely begin to feel good than we become anxious about what’s next. And, of course, there’s pain in life – the pain of aging, of illness, of dying. Many of us compound the pain that is inherent in life with kvetching, “This isn’t fair!” “I’ve done everything right – I ate fruits and vegetables, I exercised religiously, I meditated and did yoga. This shouldn’t be happening to me!” We humans suffer.

Next the Buddha observed that what causes us to suffer is our wanting things to be other than they are; we want to happiness to never end; we want distressing things to go away. Instead of going with the flow, so to speak, we crave to control it; trying to force that which is pleasant to last, and to do away with that which is painful.

Thirdly, the Buddha observed that suffering can be ended. By breaking the link of craving for things to be other than they are, we can be free of suffering.

And finally, he observed that a pathway of morality, concentration and wisdom can liberate one from craving, therefore from suffering. He names this the “noble eightfold path.” (I’m sure you’ve heard of this.) The point of all this is that one does not have to suffer. As the quip puts it, “pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” For certain there will be pain, as there will be joy; but one does not have to add on suffering on top of the pain and joy that comes and goes.

That anxiety that shakes me awake in the middle of the night; consider it a teacher. Hold the anxiety I’m feeling as a precious child, to use an image from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Reassure it. Be curious about it. “What do you have to say to me?” “I’m all ears. I will be here for you.”

You see, I have the faith that underneath my anxiety there is some holding on, or pushing away, that feels threatened by what is. To the extent that I recognize that these anxieties are fabrications of my mind, caused by deeply conditioned patterns of thinking, I can know that I can be free of them. But I don’t mean “free of them” in the sense of casting them out.  Rather I can see through them to the underlying truth. They may then dissipate like a popping bubble in a stream.

Now I don’t want to claim more than I have experienced. It’s not as if this strategy enables me to go back to sleep (like a baby.) But it is the path with which I am deeply engrossed.

This is yet another strategy for getting through the night: liberation from anxiety by practicing the dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha.

In conclusion, I offer you these three synopses of spiritual strategies. Given the anxiety that we will experience – hyped by the media – we will have many opportunities to explore what nurtures our spirits. May we use these as teaching moments. May we be a community of spiritual seekers, investigating together how we thrive in difficult times. We need not “think alike to love alike” as our Unitarian, Transylvania forebear, Francis David, put it. But we will need, each of us, to contemplate, and to share, what makes us whole, joyful and grateful, even in threatening times.

May we listen deeply to one another, both expressing and listening to the varied images that provide comfort. May we care for one another. Although we may not agree on the deep metaphors that assure us, may we encourage each other, and, to the extent we can, provide the support that sustains each other. Getting through the night, may we face the dawn refreshed and open to love again. Amen.

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