What Are You Invested In? Sermon August 29, 2009

Albert Schweitzer said it well:

Therefore search and see if there is not someplace where you can invest your humanity.
Where have you invested your humanity? In what? And what has been the return on that investment? As individuals, as a congregation?

This week I was in a small group setting up at Mt. St. Francis. I know many of you enjoy the U and I groups here at church, our small group ministries. Well, I was in something similar. And a woman from another state was telling a story about her week. It started off with a bang. In a calm voice, a reasonable voice, she started speaking : I was involved in a five car crash on a major interstate in my hometown. Though we were not supposed to respond, many of us drew in our breath. She went on: My daughter is going off to college. We have had many good times this summer, our family has been together surrounded by laughter and memories. And my daughter andi were driving on the interstate, talking about her imminent departure for school and next thing I knew someone hit us. We scrambled to the side of the interstate, to wait for an officer, to wait for a tow truck. And my 18 year old daughter, this mother told us, said to me: the upside of this is that now I am truly present. The distractions that I felt so overwhelming are now pushed aside. I am aware that I am alive and well, and I can truly focus on this moment of being with you, before I head to college.

This woman told us this story with tears in her eyes. Her investment paid off. Her life’s work of raising this child so that she might have wings to fly made her so proud. She was so grateful for the simple reminder, the simple wisdom, that her little girl gave to her, in a turnabout that comes to parent child relationships, eventually. The student is the teacher. The investment provides a return, beyond any measuring.

Where have you invested your whole life?

This morning I want to focus on that term investment. It is a cringe-worthy word in some ways.

Some among us have felt a sharp decline in our investments in this recession. Some of us are invested in real estate that has lost significant value over the last few years. Some have taken on the stock market and won, others have lost. Some retirements are tied up in yoyo markets that cause consternation. Our investments sometime pay dividends, sometimes crash, sometimes are slow to rebound. There are many kinds of investments. Let us focus on the kinds that involve our whole lives.
***

The other day I was walking along and I saw a bank advertisement that said: it is not what you have, it is what you save. There is some obvious wisdom there. I don’t know about you, but I often buy things with an eye towards self-gratification, towards making myself happy, well beyond the object of the desire’s capacity to give happiness. And so moderating our consumption—if we are consuming for the wrong reasons—is always a good idea.

I think perhaps the bank advertisement doesn’t quite go far enough. Let me try this out on you: It is not what you have, it is not what you save, it is what you build. It is what you are invested in, that will add up to something greater than you.

No matter your station in life you can help build something. No matter what you have or don’t have, if you are rich or poor, you can still contribute to something that might just out last you.

Many of us when considering this question: what are you invested in, would immediately turn our attention to our children or our grandchildren, or if we are childless by choice or circumstance perhaps we would turn our focus to nephews, nieces or the children of friends or a community we love. Those generations that are younger than us.

Many, like the mother I met this week, have invested their humanity in the lives of children.

As a church this morning we made promises to those children going from preschool to kindergarten that we would help to build a place in which they will be raised and come into their own power over time and that we will celebrate their coming into themselves. I can tell you as the parent of one of those children that I come to church in part so that my children will know what it is like to be a part of a multi-generational community. I need you to help raise my children—to offer up your great big hearts as teachers, as wise elders, as ‘walking sticks’ for them when they get stuck or when they have an adventurous spirit. Church is important to children so that they can learn to do community. They need us but we need them too.

At the funeral of Ted Kennedy yesterday, in a poignant moment, the son of Teddy Kennedy, who has struggled with depression, with addiction, but who has perservered in the face of all of that sadness, recalled his father taking him to a hill and the boy, who was very young became scared and unsure. He said: I cannot climb that hill. I cannot do it. And at the funeral as that middle aged man thought about his young self amidst tears he said I will never ever forget my father saying to me: I just know that you can climb that hill. I know you can do it. And I will be with you. And if it takes all day, we’ll get up that hill. And sure enough, he said, they made their way. The impact of example on a four year old boy lived with him forever. Church is a bit like thiat for our children: you can do it. We’ll be here with you. No matter what. This busy man invested his time, and his humanity, and his heart—and it saved that little boy.

For those of us who would invest our humanity in our children it is a fascinating thing to consider evolution and childhood.

You’ve seen baby ducks taggling along behind their mothers, yes? It turns out that baby ducks, goslings in the wild, will follow anything, no matter how implausible a mother. Evolution has provided for these little vulnerable things a rule hardwired in their brains (follow that!) and the rule applies to any object falling within a sketchy guideline for motherhood: and that guideline is something like (seen early in life and moving.) Now normally the first thing a gosling will see is its mother so it is normally fine, but sometimes the bird’s neural system can be fooled. Scientists call this imprinting, this tendency to lock onto an early object and fall for it, or follow it. This ability to be fooled is not just for goslings. In fact, lambs have been tricked into forming a bond to television sets, guinea pigs to wooden blocks, and monkeys to cylinders of wire bent into a rough form of a mother. What we imprint on the life of our child is crucial—a sense of our humanity.

Frederick II, a thirteenth century holy roman emperor, unwittingly conducted the first study of human bonding. So Frederick loved language, and he wanted to learn what inborn language children might speak if they were to develop without any clues from their caregivers. Would they speak Greek, Latin, Hebrew, the language of their parents? So the emperor told the fostermothers and the wet nurses to bathe the children, to suckle them, but in no way to engage them with play or to speak with them. The priest who documented the experiment notes that no linguistic knowledge was gained because all of the children died. The emperor discovered something remarkable: that children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures and gladnes of countenance, and blandishments.

But, it turns out, that if a caregiver, a mother, a father, makes funny faces at a child—its brain grows and grows and grows.


Walker Percy wrote that modern man is estranged from being, from his own being, from the being of other creatures in the world, from transcendent being. He has lost something—what he does not know; he only knows that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.

The mysterious, absent element is a deep and abiding immersion in communal ties.
Someone asked me, when I first considered becoming a minister, as I was doing my internship in Annapolis, “why become a uu minister—there is no fear of a mean god, there is no promise of a great salvation, there are no insiders who are special and outsiders who are deprived.” Why go through all the heartache and the headache and the trouble, if everyone wins in the end?
Why make the investment, they seemed to be saying. And all I could do to respond is say that this liberal way in religion saved me. When I was floundering, cut off and alone, isolated and awry, I found a Unitarian Universalist church in Greensboro NC, in Washington, DC in Bethesda MD that gave me something like hope when I needed it most.

Perhaps you have heard the story of the two sisters who were leaving River Road Unitarian a few years ago, and a car crashed into one of the siblings causing her great injury. And the minister, Scott Alexander, came over and found the safe sibling softly singing to her sister: Spirit of Life, a song they sang as children all the time. It is all I could think to do, said the little girl. It was something I knew and it means so much to both of us, and I thought it might provide some comfort.

That is what it means to be church to give our children this kind of grounding in the life of the free and liberating spirit of life, the free and liberating spirit of humanity. So that when they encounter the rough patches of life, which they will, we can say: we gave them a song to sing, we gave them a loving sense of the divine, whose love embraces the whole human race and all the plants and animals too. We gave them a neural wiring in the brain that said: here I am safe to be me, to be loved and to love in return.


I venture to say that our children will be a bit like those goslings—they will go off with anyone anywhere antime regardless of the theology, if they ask for bread and we give them stones, if they ask for depth and we give them shallow, pat answers or no answer at all.

*****
So this leads to our second point: most of us are invested in becoming ourselves. A few weeks ago, I chuckled as Martha stood in joys and concerns after her trip to Boston. She had her Boston University sweat shirt on: BU. It said. What a wonderfully Unitarian Universalist message: Be you.

Most of us are on a journey towards integrating all of the paradoxes, all of the ups and the downs, the triumphs and the missteps into a life of wholeness. Most of us have invested at least somewhat in that kind of self-discovery.

Do you know this poem: Now I become myself by May Sarton?
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places,
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces.
Run madly, as if Time where there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gahtered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is yhoung.
O, in this single hour I love
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still and stop the sun.

Once you stand still, someone told me the other day, a wise old man, once you stand still you cast your own shadow. You say: here I am. Here I stand. Your shadow is one of your unique features, and you do best to cast your own, instead of standing in someone’s elses or trying to create one that isn’t really yours.

I become myself.

Some of you may be clinging to something that is not life-giving: revenge, regrets.

Two monks, Tanzan and Ekido, were walking down a muddy street in the city. They came on a lovely young girl dressed in fine silks, who was afraid to cross because of all the mud.
“Come on, girl,” said Tanzan. And he picked her up in his arms, and carried her across.
The two monks did not speak again till nightfall. Then, when they had returned to the monastery, Ekido couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
“Monks shouldn’t go near girls,’ he said “certainly not beautiful ones like that one! Why did you do it?”
“My dear fellow,” said Tanzan. “I put that girl down, way back in the city. It’s you who are still carrying her!”
Sometimes our investments are wrapped up in the should haves, the could haves, the might haves, that would haves. All of those things we are invested in, committed to, clinging to that might easily be put away, if we just knew how. If we could just begin.
Are you clinging to a resentment? Are you clinging to a grudge? Are you invested in some kind of dis-abling sense of self? Some kind of rule like that monk had for his brohter monk? Today, I want to challenge you to put it aside. To take on some practice that will help you shed that resentment. It may be yoga, meditation. It may be centering prayer. It may be just listening for the small still voice inside. Why do you think we sit in silence after the pastoral prayer, after the joys and concerns?
Sometimes we all have to make the tough decision to move our investments around, to transfer from one account to another. It may be time for you to find something new to invest your humanity.
Therefore search and see if there is not someplace where you can invest your humanity.