In the rhythm of the church, it’s the months between the end of one church year in June and the beginning of the next year in September when we can practice the spiritual state of stillness. Call it vacation, or taking a break, or just laziness, let’s try to not try, to not do, but for a little while, simply be.
“The sun beats down; it is a time for pause” says Robert Weston, in our Call to Worship.
That’s good advice.
It’s hot. I’m feeling lazy. I just want a nap, or a cool place in the shade.
I don’t want work to do. Or a book to read. Or a problem to solve. Or a conversation.
As we sang in our opening hymn:
“Winds be still. Storm clouds pass and silence come.
Peace grace this time with harmony.
Fly bird of hope, and shine, light of love,
and in calm let all find tranquility.”
A friend of mine tells a cute story about his daughter. When she was five or six years old he took her to the beach for the first time. She was fascinated at first by the ocean and then a little annoyed by the endless rhythm of the crashing waves. A crash, a pause, a crash, a pause. On and on. Endless. Never ceasing. Never resting.
His little girl stood at the shoreline, watching the waves, listening to the roar, getting angrier and angrier, and then she raised her little fist and yelled in her most determined voice, “BE QUIET, OCEAN.”
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician and philosopher wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
We just can’t do it.
We would rather do anything, than sit quietly alone in a room. Which is to say, we would rather do anything, than do nothing.
But doing, constantly doing, ceaselessly doing, is precisely the problem, according to Pascal. Just quit it. Stop. Or as my friend’s six year old daughter would say, “BE QUIET PEOPLE.”
Now Blaise Pascal was no slouch himself. He was quite the doer. In his thirty-nine years of life he published mathematical papers on conic sections and cycloids. He worked on probability theory. He invented something called the Pascal triangle. He’s the author of the religious argument for belief in God called Pascal’s wager. And he is one of the first two people every to invent a mechanical calculating device, which Pascal designed and built to help his father who was in charge of figuring and collecting taxes in their local town.
So I’m not saying, and certainly Pascal isn’t saying either, by the evidence of his own life, that one should do nothing always, forever. There is a time for doing. The world has need of creative ideas and new inventions. The world has need of the people that get things done.
But there is a time for doing, and a time for doing nothing. And the time for not doing, in the rhythm of the church year, is summer.
We had a busy church year. We have a busy church year, every year. There’s much to do. And we like to do it.
You started the year with a new minister. We lost one Church Administrator and hired another. We worked on getting our finances in order. We installed several thousand dollars worth of new audio/visual equipment. We hosted an Interfaith Thanksgiving service, and a candlelit Christmas Eve Service. We served 50 or so of our homeless neighbors every Tuesday at our drop-in program. We had 52 worship services, and monthly meetings of our book club, and senior fellowship, and men’s fellowship. We checked in with each other for Pastoral Care needs. We hired a new accompanist and tech assistant. We ran an intensive Stewardship Campaign including one-to-one meetings with every church member. We wrote a budget. We replaced a section of our roof. And then in May and June, we hosted a Roy Zimmerman concert. We hosted a Jazzanova concert. We hosted the last Laugh Out Pride event. And we threw ourselves a fabulous Cabaret.
I’m exhausted.
If you’re not exhausted, don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know.
And so the church year closes. In June we do some looking back, celebrating our Music Program. Doing some volunteer recognition for all the work we’ve done. A flower communion.
And now…?
Rev. Robert T. Weston, a Unitarian Universalist minister who died in 1988 after more than 50 years in the ministry, and who certainly saw his share of busy church years, says,
“Now blows the wind with soft, relaxing warmth.
The sun beats down.
The schools are out.
Children swarm in the playgrounds and the streets, and eager city folk, vacation-bound, crowd the broad highways.
The lakes and seashores lose their solitude
And all the world seems turned to carnival.
What of ourselves?”
And he answers, “There could be, now, deep peace, a time for soul-searching.”
A time for deep peace. A time for soul-searching.
Did you notice, that Rev. Weston gives us a break and then right away takes it back again?
He gives us a time for peace. But then he immediately fills the time with soul-searching.
He does this elsewhere in that reading, too.
He says, “The sun beats down; it is a time for pause.”
But then he fills the pause. He suggests, “We might turn to examine our own lives, to sort and probe our tendencies of thought. To sift the true from false in the things of doubt, the beautiful from ugliness unmarked.”
Examining, probing, sifting, is a kind of contemplative work we often don’t make time for in the doing-ness of the rest of our lives, or in the busy-ness of a church year. But I’m wondering whether it’s possible to do even less. To really pause. To not do at all. But merely to be.
Weston uses the trees in summer as an example. He writes, “Even the trees seem resting for a time as if to meditate and gather strength for the more strenuous times that lie ahead.”
But he isn’t letting the trees just be. He activates the trees, giving the a job to do: “meditating” “gathering strength.”
There are summer days when even that feels too active for me.
And Weston won’t let us rest, either. He gives us this summer job description, “To think what we have been and as we are. Still yet have to become.”
I don’t know. That sounds like work.
Where is that shady porch and that glass of iced tea?
Couldn’t we just for a moment, for one blessed hour of the afternoon, or maybe for one month of the year, just do nothing?
Doing nothing, occasionally, but regularly, is so spiritually important, it’s one of the 10 commandments. Number 4, actually. “Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.” We are commanded to rest, equally beside commandments not to murder, or steal, or commit adultery.
Why is it so hard to just do nothing?
In 2014, the University of Virginia conducted a study led by the researcher Timothy Wilson. He recruited student volunteers and asked them to sit alone in an unadorned room.
You can see the problem right away, or at least Blaise Pascal could see the problem.
Faced with a comfortable chair and a quiet room, but nothing to do, half of the participants reported the experience as unpleasant. You might think that older people who didn’t grow up with smart phones would be better than young people at sitting quietly without distractions, but no, age didn’t matter. And remember that Blaise Pascal noticed the inability of people to sit quietly in a room alone back in the 17th century.
In fact, when the University of Virginia performed a variation of the study giving participants the choice between sitting calmly, or self-administering mild electric shocks to themselves, eventually, two thirds of the men, and one-quarter of the women, preferred the shocks to the stillness.
Here’s what’s going on.
It goes back to the spiritual question of identity that we looked at deeply last fall.
We think of ourselves as separate, isolated, individuals. We feel our identity is this lonely ego-person, trapped inside our heads.
Viewed this way, life is lonely. Intolerably lonely. Existence is lonely. We’re all alone. We’re by ourselves. Stuck inside our heads. It’s comfortable in our heads, but it’s like that comfortable study room at the University of Virginia.
It’s comfortable but we’re desperate to get out, because being alone with our thoughts, means really being alone. Existentially alone. If what I am, if all that I am, is these thoughts in my head, then being cut off from any outside experience, like talking to a friend, or reading, or checking my phone, or doing work, then I am confronted with the dreadful confirmation that I really am, ultimately, alone in the universe. We imagine ourselves in a locked room from which there’s no way out.
It’s too scary. I can’t bear it. I’d rather give myself electric shocks than be alone with my thoughts. Because there is no other, it’s just me. I’m not even, actually “with” my thoughts, because my thoughts are me.
And if I am my thoughts, then me, alone, thinking, means me, really, truly, frighteningly, alone.
So we reach for the phone. Or the remote control. Or we find something to do. Or we create a little drama, just to keep ourselves distracted from the terror of being alone.
But that isn’t true.
That isn’t actually who we are.
That’s not our identity.
And if we can clarify our thinking about who we are, we could also learn to be still, and enjoy it.
We are not our thoughts. Our thoughts are external to ourselves, just the way that a book, or a phone, or a conversation with a friend is external to us.
We are not our thoughts, because, in a way, the whole idea of a separate, isolated, individual, is false. The self, is an illusion, as the Buddhists teach us. There is no self.
You, in the sense that there is meaning to that word, are as completely connected to the rest of creation as is every other existing thing. There are no differentiated forms of existence. It’s all one thing. Which, is also a definition of Universalism.
So don’t worry about being alone, because the truth is, a “you” that doesn’t exist as a separate thing, can’t be cut off from the rest of existence. You couldn’t if you tried. And no one else can do it to you either, including God, which is the original meaning of Universalism. We’re in this together. Forever. This is us.
And those thoughts playing in your head, are like a book you could read, or a movie you could watch. Somebody, or something, else is writing the script. You’re just following along. Enjoy the show.
The folks who could train their minds to be successful in that study room at the University of Virginia, could sit in that empty room, and watch their thoughts go by, amused by the silly or unexpected or curious ideas and connections that pop up seemingly from nowhere.
Just as a person, sitting in a rocking chair, on a shady porch, on a hot summer afternoon, could watch a fly, circling in the warm air, buzzing this way, and then that way, and then that way, and then back again.
If all the problems of humanity stem from the inability of people to sit quietly in a room, alone, then developing that ability could solve a lot of our problems, or at least prevent us from creating new ones.
It’s worth a try.
Or rather, it’s worth not trying. Let’s, for July, not try. That’s too active.
You know the 4th Commandment is “Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.” But honoring and keeping just sound like more work to do. One more task. We work for six days and then, instead of a real Sabbath, we spend another day busily, “honoring” and “keeping”. Or as Robert Weston says, we set down one kind of church work only to pick up another: “soul-searching” and examining our lives, probing our tendencies of thought, sifting the true from false in the things of doubt.
Criminy! Enough, already.
Take a breath. Watch your thoughts without examining them. As, my friend’s daughter urges us, “BE QUIET PEOPLE”. Be quiet people.
We can’t live our lives apart from action, or make sentences apart from verbs. There’s always some sort of doing going on.
But having finished one busy church year, before we take up the busy work of the coming church year, let our verb for the summer be the simplest possible:
To be.