Here’s the second sermon in my fall sermon series: "What Matters Most Now: Life, Love, and Liberty in these Uncertain Times."
We’re facing a number of crises crashing in upon us. They threaten our wellbeing, personally and communally. We feel these threats in our bodies, minds, and souls. At the same time, we’re being summoned by God to engage this urgent moral reckoning as a nation.
The series aims to draw on ancient wisdom, freshly imagined, to help people recover habits and patterns for living in these times.
The series focuses on the universal feelings and experiences that unite all human beings. Charlie MacKesy’s book, "The Boy, The Mole, the Fox, and the Horse," does this beautifully, especially the way he brings together the four characters (boy=curiosity, mole=enthusiasm, fox=suffering, horse=wisdom). We will pair five of Charlie’s best sayings and joins them to biblical wisdom says to help ground us in these uncertain times.
This sermon was based on Proverbs 17.3 and a saying from Charlie MacKesy’s book, in which the boy says to the mole: “Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”
1.
What are we going to do now?
Each week another worry. Each week another brick in the wall between Americans. Each week another weight drops on our shoulders.
We don’t all experience these crises the same way. There are those for whom the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. There are those for whom the failure of the grand jury to indict Louisville cops in the death of Breonna Taylor isn’t a travesty of justice. There are those for whom the US Postal Service slowdowns, the voter suppression, and fact that America leads the world in COVID tragedies isn’t alarming. But for a majority of Americans today, all this is deeply troubling. It feels like our world is unraveling, our democracy is crumbling.
One of you told me this week that you consumed so much news on Wednesday that you barely slept Wednesday night. I was with a group of our young adults on Monday and they expressed serious concerns about the difficulty they’re having processing all that’s happening. In my prayer meetings, the pervading sense among participants is that people are trying to hold off despair. Several times a day, I feel a pit in my stomach and the faint tremor of anxiety in my limbs. With each new crisis there’s a new sense of increased depletion, an increased sense that we’re not sure where we’ll find the resources to manage the crises that are bearing down on us.
We’re not well right now. None of us, whether we take our stand Left, Right, or Center. Our society isn’t well. The world is not well. All this feels, frankly, lousy.
Reflecting on the fires now afflicting the Western United States, conservationist and activist, Terry Tempest Williams, wrote last week, “It’s a wonder we’re not all in bed. You know, our bodies aren’t neutral to all that’s happening. I mean, we’re all feeling these crises at an unconscious level. Anyone who says they’re fine is dead to this world; for the world is not well. I feel grief like it’s a raven on my shoulder.”
I feel like that. Do you? Grief, a raven on your shoulder.
What are we going to do. . . now?
There are people who will want to avoid all talk of grief. “Grief is for the weak,” they’ll say. “Grief makes us vulnerable, and vulnerability is a luxury we can’t afford now. We need action, resistance, revolution. We need strength now.”
Of course, we need strength now. But where are we going to get it when there’s so little of it left inside us?
2.
When I was a young man, I was, among other things, a swimmer and a runner. What I learned from athletic competition I apply to life today, and especially to the ways we face the compounding crises of our days.
When I competed, there was nothing I could do to press more energy into my arms and legs and make them swim two hundred meters or run eight hundred meters if I’d been out too late the night before, if I’d eaten poorly, or if I’d otherwise failed to provide my body with the resources it needed for the strenuous work I would push my body to perform.
Endurance is a matter of sustenance, I learned. If there’s no sustenance, there’s no endurance.
There was no force of thought, no amount of self-talk, no coach who could yell loud enough to coax from my body what I needed in order to compete and win if I hadn’t taken care to nourish my body, to resource my body. If I was depleted before the race, I’d have lost before I even started.
Same is true now.
When people are in grief (to any degree), when you’re living with ongoing effects of trauma, when you’re feeling pretty depleted, then you’re going to lack the resources you need to do what you otherwise could do. That depletion is a natural response to trauma. When you’ve been wounded—and grief is a wound—the body says to the brain, “Hey, this is a lot, it’s a helluva burden. So we’re gonna slow things down a bit; we gotta heal.” Sometimes the brain doesn’t want to hear that. It just wants to keep pushing. And that’s a problem. Under-resourced and overtaxed and we’re headed for a breakdown. We’ll fall out of the race.
If you break a leg, you and everyone around you knows you’re hurt. But when you’re living with trauma, when you feel grief, when you’re depleted, there’s no cast, no crutch, no bandage to prove you need space and time to heal, to renew your strength. And if you don’t take care of what’s inside you, no amount of pushing is going to get you going on the outside, at least it won’t keep you going long enough.
What we’re facing now requires endurance, and endurance requires sustenance, an inner resourcing.
3.
Our readings in ancient and modern wisdom today, invite us to pay attention to what’s inside us so we have the resources to negotiate skillfully what’s outside us. The great error of our age is to think we can keep going on the outside, when we’ve got little left on the inside.
Our first saying comes from Charlie MacKesy’s wildly popular new children’s book for adults, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, published by Harper late last fall. It’s sold zillions of copies. People love the book and the art because it speaks so simply and elegantly and with such emotional intelligence to the needs of our times. Take this saying, for example:
“Everyone’s a bit scared,” said the horse, “but we’re less scared together.”
Or this one:
“Sometimes,” said the horse. “Sometimes what?” said the boy. “Sometimes just getting up and carrying on is magnificent.”
Or this:
“Is your glass half empty or half full?” asked the mole. “I think I’m grateful to have a glass,” said the boy.
Remarkable sayings aren’t they? Little wonder booksellers can’t keep the book in stock. We need this kind of wisdom now. People know it; they’re searching for it.
In our reading today, the boy and the mole are both staring into a gentle brook. The boy says to the mole:
“Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”
Of course, there’s plenty that happens on the outside, but what happens inside us affects the way we experience everything outside us.
The boy echoes the teaching of Jesus as well as the spiritual tradition Jesus came from. Proverbs 17.3 teaches: “The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, but the heart is what matters to God.”
Heart matters. Soul matters. Inner life matters. Does it matter to you? Does it matter enough to tend it, really tend it?
4.
Look, I know that a bunch of you are phone banking to get out the vote. And that’s vitally important. I know that a lot of you are using social media to fight injustice. And that’s vitally important. I know many of you are giving to political campaigns and fire relief agencies and running errands for those who can’t and cooking meals for young families who are stretched terribly thin trying to manage kids and school and home life and work. And all this is vitally important. Thank you.
There’s always more to be done on the outer world. And there’s so much at stake. For some of you it’s hard to imagine backing off. Focusing on your inner life feels indulgent.
I’m not necessarily asking you to back off. And I’m not asking those of you who are less active, or who feel paralyzed or depleted, to do more.
What I’m saying is this: your inner life matters. It matters enough to intentionally tend it.
5.
Every week I meet with several pastoral leaders for an hour of honest conversation about our lives, our practices, our responsibilities, and how we’re handling all of this. This little group started as a way for us to stay productive in these tumultuous times. Over the months, we’ve come to realize that what we gain most is not a check-in about our outer lists, but a check-in about our inner lives—the depletion we feel, the sense of loss and grief that sits like a raven on our shoulders, the anger, the worry, the fear, the over-functioning we’re tempted to practice, our longing for God.
Last week as we ended, we found ourselves talking about tasks and to-do lists. One of us said, “I know these things are important, but I don’t want us to trade the vulnerability of our lives for the tyranny of our to-do lists. To get the right things done in the right way, I need each of you to help me stay connected to what matters most. When I ignore this inner work, the outer work gets wonky, and when it does, I don’t feel well and I don’t do things well either.”
She got it right.
Our inner life matters so much more than most of us think. We ignore it at great peril. Especially now. What we’re facing now requires endurance, and endurance requires the inner resources to sustain the journey.
6.
So, what can you do?
Meditation practices resource the inner life. So does prayer, especially contemplative prayer. So does yoga, Reiki, Xi Gong, and other forms of body/soul work. Spiritual direction, Stephen Ministry, and psychotherapy can help. So can walking, running, and cycling—they’re physical exercise forms but when they’re done with real attention to the rhythmic nature of the exercise, without the addition of distracting music, podcasts, or news programs, spirituality and physicality merge.
There’s also reflective reading, art, photography, gardening, fishing, surfing, cooking, and vulnerable conversation with a safe and true friend; these can create a spaciousness within you, nourish your soul, and cultivate your inner resources. And if you’re looking for opportunities, DCC’s Integrated Spirituality programs are all designed to support a vibrant inner life so that you can sustain the rigors of life in these challenging times.
This focus on the inner life isn’t some privileged, myopic, individualist, escapist navel-gazing. And it’s not about avoiding the call to right all wrongs and work for a better world. No, it’s a recognition that unless we transform the trouble within us, we’ll make trouble outside us. But if we, in the words of Jesus, “bring forth what is within us”—if the light and the dark within us is bravely explored and transformed, we will find the gold within us that works for the good of everything outside us.