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Hymns:
Opening, Nearer my God to Thee, #87, verses 1,2,5.
Closing, Amazing Grace, #205
Reading:
Gloria, #534
 am
grateful to Carmen Corica for asking me to do this sermon. As I told
him, it is a painful process to look deeply and carefully at my belief,
my particular faith about God, but it is timely. It is painful because
in order to find the kernels of truth in me about my faith, I must go
back in time and resurrect my life. And that life has not always been
easy.
It is timely because of all the changes and losses in my life in the
last few years. It is a good time to catch up with myself. And in order
to talk about God, I have to talk about Barry. We are
linked…….inseparable.
The experience and concept of God that we all integrate comes primarily,
of course, from our formative years. We make lots of adjustments over
time after we are grown, but the fundamental idea of who/what God is,
our image of him/her that we either embrace or push off against, has
been living inside us since smallness. My early experience of God was
boredom.
The 1st Christian Church in Fulton, MO seemed devoid of all emotion when
I was growing up in it. It certainly was devoid of passion. Like
automaton stick figures my parents, relatives, and their friends seemed
to sleep walk through the same old same old services that rarely
surprised. My father was a deacon and elder in the church and he would
help serving communion during the service. Then, when the sermon
started, I remember watching him sleep in his chair in the back of the
sanctuary as the sermon predictably droned on. Where was God? He was not
there to me. If he was there, he was asleep.
I left Fulton to attend college in a town very similar to Fulton. I
rarely, if ever, attended church while I was there, and grew
increasingly cynical about organized religion in particular and God in
general. There seemed simply no relevance for me in faith in a boring,
proper, polite, passionless, sound asleep God. By the time I graduated
from college 6 years after my arrival, I was an angry, cynical, anxious,
alcohol addicted young man.
I prepared to enter the Air Force as the draft was about ready to grab
me and make me a grunt in Viet Nam. I figured I had a better chance of
survival in planes. Fate intervened, however, and because I was not
taken in to the Air Force when I went to be processed in … they had
their quota, I was #1 on the list for the next month. I came home and my
brand new girl friend, Caroline, who had two sons, ages 4 and 5, agreed
that we would marry to keep me from going to either Nam or the Air
Force. Married dads were exempt from the draft. It seemed a right and
clever thing to do at the time. But, as always up to that time in my
life, I made no deeper investigation into my own soul about it, or into
the will of God for me. There was no deeper place in me, or no deeper
source of wisdom in the universe that I had yet found. I was getting out
of hell, and I didn’t care how.
What I didn’t know was that I was actually moving in to hell through the
portal of this ill advised marriage.
As the addiction to alcohol took me over, I became less and less able to
function as a husband or father. At my best, I was 23 going on 12 or so.
At my drunken worst, I was an abusive, frightening specter. God was not
in the equation. I arrogantly ridiculed anyone who seemed to believe in
something outside themselves. To me, they were fools.
I gained and lost several jobs over our first 4 years together as a
family. I dropped out of graduate school in theatre despite a caring
plea by my major professor to stay. I was unemployed for months, then
got a job at the unemployment office. Within 6 months, I was fired from
there. My boss and all those who called me to be responsible were worthy
of my contempt. Just like God.
That firing was the last straw for Caroline. I came home and she and the
boys were gone. After pleas, I went to a friends to stay. It was there
she found me 2 days later, to inform me of my father’s sudden death. As
I drove my red VW Beetle the hour and a half down Interstate 70 from St.
Louis to Fulton to be with my mother, I discovered God.
Through tears and screams. Through enormous self pity and rage, I found
God. I can’t tell you how. What I know is that I felt a powerful
presence with me. I felt my mask, my false self, my cool, cynical self,
being sheared away. By the time I arrived at my parent’s house in
Fulton, I had been given a strength and grace that were not my own. It
carried me through the funeral. And, filled with total humiliation, it
compelled me to enter the alcohol/drug treatment center that saved my
life. I was 28 years old.
One more humiliation followed, and that was beginning to go to AA
meetings after completion of the alcohol/drug program. My stereotype of
who went to those meetings did not include someone like me. I was a
college graduate for God’s sake. My arrogance did not go away over
night. It was there, however, that I found some of the wisest, most
grounded people I had known in life. Their support and my work of the 12
Steps of recovery were what brought me to open my head and my heart and
truly let love, and God, in.
The experience transformed me and brought me, spiritually to, pretty
much, what I am today, 35 years later.
As Caroline and I worked our way back together in to our marriage, which
lasted for another 15 years, I had many opportunities for
spiritual/emotional growth. I plowed back into life with a great new
energy, committed to make up for lost time with my new sober life. I
taught high school, I created a counseling center for families with
alcoholism, I directed plays, I started a state wide addictions
counselors association with a few of my colleagues, I worked feverishly
on a Masters in counseling, etc. And occasionally I saw my family. This
new phase of life gave me a deeper connection with God. There was less
and less a wall of shame that separated us. Two of the first three steps
of AA carried me for years…..Came to believe that a power greater than
myself could restore me to sanity, and made a decision to turn my life
and will over to the care of God, as I understand him. Those steps took
me out of the old paradigm of boring Christianity and into the new
paradigm of “God as I understand him.” What an open door. I was
electrified by the possibility that I could actually construct my own
understanding of God, not the boring, dogmatic church fathers!! It was
my introduction to mysticism, a fire that still burns in me today.
Evidently I had not gained sufficient humility, however, because 15
years sober, our marriage truly ended. As both Caroline and I were
counselor/social workers, the end had an additional taste of failure to
it. We couldn’t walk the walk we were telling others to walk, or so it
seemed.
The time that followed our divorce, which included my move to Colorado,
was very difficult. I was so depressed, I considered suicide. What
called me back when I was in such despair was the briefest prayer….”God,
help.” That prayer cut through the darkness with astonishing clarity.
My life was not only saved, but re-directed again. My faith was revived.
Then I settled in my new Colorado home, began to practice Native
American spiritual practices which gave me yet another non-Christian
door through which to walk in to the lap of God. It was also the time
that I met Amanda. To illustrate the shift in my life by then, I met
Caroline at a drunken party, Amanda and I met at a Lakota ceremony. She
was alive with spirit and energy which she freely shared with me. It was
a part of what enabled me to begin to visualize a God of joy. And when
Hannah Joy was born, joy seemed ordinary.
So, where does that leave me today? Well, you got part of the answer in
the chalice lighting I shared. The God in which I believe, and the God
in which I do not believe.
It has been hard for me to maintain my faith in the loving God in which
I believe since I have been your minister. I experience God as a loving
creative force that is both outside and deep inside me. God, to me, is
also the warp and woof of the universe, the stuff of which it is made,
thus the power of mitakuye oyasin for me.
Because many of you do not believe in God I have worked hard at
providing a balance of services and sermons that are not deeply
spiritual, are not all about God, or the possibility of God. Because
many of you were wounded by traditional language, I have completely
changed the language with which I pray publicly so I will not harm you
further. In doing so however, in keeping the peace here with you, in
taking care of some of your needs, I have not maintained my own
conscious contact with God in the way I have in the past. It has caused
an emptiness in me. I have been so busy pleasing you that I have
temporarily lost a fundamental part of me. It is because that I am the
way I am that this has happened. My fundamental imperative from
childhood remains, “take care of everyone’s needs, don’t upset anyone,
you gotta be good and look good, otherwise what will the
neighbors/congregants think?” It is a recipe with which to lose my own
spiritual way if I’m not careful.
The recent news from one of the small groups about their experience of
church here has been very encouraging to me. For the first time I am
hearing that there is a group that is not getting enough spirituality,
that feels the services are too intellectual, too much in the head and
not enough in the heart. HALLELUJAH and AMEN. Up until now, I had only
heard from those of you who were offended or disinterested by or in a
spiritual way of life that includes recognition of the possibility of a
loving unseen dimension. I want and need ritual and prayer and dialogue
in the spiritual and emotional realities of life as much as I need air
and water in order to flourish.
I also need to worship with my body through movement and dance. I need
to sing, and sing my praises to God, sing to a loving universe that has
so lovingly provided for us. I need to move out of the boring church of
my childhood into a fully alive, kick ass church that generously praises
God.
That is what I want! I may not get it, I know. But I want it.
So, to end this for now.
Carmen, I do, indeed believe in a loving God outside and inside me who
is present in this room in every beating heart. I do believe in a God
who makes up the stuff of the universe in a mysterious way that I will
never know, but have great faith that it is so. I do believe that we,
all of us in this room, and every living thing in the universe, are all
related, all relatives from the original matter which was animated into
life by Creator/God/Great Mystery to form the universe. I pray every
day, every day for over 30 years, to that God for healing of everyone in
need. I believe it makes a difference.
And I am here with you, a happy, healthy man, because of that God. I
have done my part, but I was guided and nudged and, literally, saved by
God as I understand him/her.
I am so grateful.
Please understand … I do not expect anyone in this room to believe
as I do. How could you? You have lived an entirely different life than
I. I honor the full spectrum of belief and experience gathered in this
sanctuary from dedicated atheist to passionate theist. Each of you has
your own life journey. You feel and live and believe as you must. The
only part I would challenge is if you do not believe because of anger at
God and have made no real and lasting attempt to get at the source of
that anger. That you have rejected God because you are angry at the
church and caretakers of your youth who were doctrinaire and abusive
makes sense. To live well into adulthood and not have made an authentic
attempt to understand and bring healing to that part of you does not. I
am grateful to have been pushed, pulled, and prayed through that
process, and I feel profoundly blessed as a result.
May you all be as fortunate and blessed as I feel.
Namaste. I see the light of God in me, and in you.
Mitakuye oyasin.
Amen.
Meditation.
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