Opening Words

Let us worship with our eyes and ears and fingertips;  

Let us love the world through heart and mind and body.  

We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters.  

We seek to know the wistfulness of the very young and the very old, the wistfulness of people in all times of life.  

We seek to understand the shyness behind arrogance, the fear behind pride, the tenderness behind clumsy strength, the anguish behind cruelty.  

All life flows into a great common life, if we will only open our eyes to our companions.  

Let us worship, not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears.  

Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching our spirits.  

Life comes with singing and laughing, with tears and confiding, with a rising wave too great to be held in the mind and heart and body, to those who have fallen in love with life.  

[Come,] let us worship, let us learn [how] to love.            

"Let Us Worship," by Kenneth L. Patton, Reading # 437 
Singing The Living Tradition 

Reading  

Our reading this morning comes from the authors Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey.  You may know Richard Carlson as author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, and it's All Small Stuff.  His co-author, Joseph Bailey is a psychologist on faculty at the University of Minnesota's Medical School.  Our reading comes from their book Slowing Down to the Speed of Life.  Here is what they write:

"There is a direct correlation between the degree to which you are in the present moment and the number of experiences you need to feel satisfied. The less present you are, the more activities you will need to feel a sense of satisfaction. This means that if you are oriented to the present moment, you'll need very few activities to make you feel as though you are getting enough from life and from your experiences. Each experience will tend to be rich and fulfilling. For instance, you won't need to travel the world or go to Disneyland to feel as though your experiences are meeting your needs.

Instead, you'll feel satisfied taking a peaceful walk in the woods close to home. Your present-moment orientation will allow you to fill your spirit with the beauty around you, to notice the sights, sounds, and smells of your surroundings. You may still decide to travel the world and do varied and exciting things, but you won't feel ripped off or disappointed if you can't.

"On the other end of the scale, if you are not oriented to the present moment -- if your thinking usually focuses on past or future experiences -- you'll rarely feel filled up by any single experience. You'll constantly need more and more experiences to feel satisfied. Walking in the park will never be enough; you'll have to be scheduling a skiing trip while you're walking or thinking about something else that would make life more enjoyable than it is right now. Your lack of orientation to the present moment will prevent you from taking in the pleasant sights, sounds, and feelings of your experience. Your mind will be somewhere other than in this moment.

"The point here is not to say that fewer activities are better or that the goal is to eliminate excitement from your life. Rather, it's to point out that the reason most of us feel compelled to fill each moment with varied and continued activities is because we aren't satisfied with what we are experiencing. If you were satisfied, why would you bother rushing around, searching for what would be even better? The root reason we aren't satisfied is because our attention is rarely in the moment. Instead of living at the speed of life, we move too quickly. Consequently, we miss what we already have-- right in front of us-- and look for something else. It's almost as though we'd rather be anywhere other than where we are."

Sermon
Lea Hall, Ph.D., Guest Speaker

Years ago I paid fifty cents for a button that said "Enough," and it was one of the best investments I've ever made. When I wear this button people ask me, "What's enough mean?" And I ask them, "What does enough mean to you? What do you have enough of?" Fascinating conversations with total strangers ensue. Most often people name problems: enough corruption, war, pollution, taxes, stupidity, fanaticism. It's harder to come up with positive things that we have enough of or do enough of. When do we realize we have enough money? Enough time? Enough friends? Volunteer jobs? Travel? I would like to open that conversation here today in a talk back session after this homily, so that we can reflect on these questions and begin to share our thoughts and feelings.

Let me hasten to say that I have no answers for anyone to these questions. They are difficult enough to answer for oneself. I raise these questions because I believe they will become more and more central to our lives. We Unitarian Universalists affirm our belief in peace and justice. How can these things come to pass when so many people on earth do not have enough? Our moral obligation, and what some of us perceive to be our spiritual calling, is to live with these questions. So let's do it together.

The question, how much is enough, is based on need and on desire, yes? We would all agree that human beings have a right to safety, food, water, shelter, and clothing. But beyond that, desire enters in. In your order of service you have a worksheet with three columns. One for what you have too much of. One for what you have too little of. And one for what you have enough of. That's for you to take away, if you like. Who among us has a full column under Enough? Who lists nothing in the Too Little column? No one. And that's because we are human.

The Buddha's realization was that once we are born, we will never have enough. That is, we will always experience desire. Some of you will recall Ram Dass' classic book, Remember Be Here Now. Here's how he described the cycle of desire [pp. 36-37]:

"Example: some body looks at you seductively. . . an ice cream cone goes by. . . . will it ever be the big ice cream cone in the sky? Will it ever be an eternal ice cream cone? Or. . . . is it always going to melt? You gotta keep eating it yet it melts and melts. That's its problem you gotta keep eating it cuz it will melt. . .. & then it's gone & you know that taste in your mouth when you finish & . . . you want a glass of water? Right/ Then you have a glass of water & there's that bloaty feeling? Then, you're ready for the next one. . . to get rid of that one. . . let's take a walk. . . & you take a walk. . . it's cold out. Let's have some hot chocolate. Yes, let's have some, & on and on & on & on & its called LIFE You see: the opposite of craving is saying baby, this is the way it is. Yeah. OK. Here & now. This is it. I accept the here and now fully As it is right at this moment!!!"

The Tao Te Ching reminds us: "If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich." My best days are when I do realize that I have enough of everything. This is the opposite of that famously wicked notion that a woman can never be too rich or too thin. Thin enough- that's a whole other story. Emblematic perhaps of the increasingly dramatic contrast between those who have the luxury of thinking about how to live more simply, and those who struggle each day to simply live. Having enough food to survive, contrasted with dieting and being fit enough—both sides of this struggle are fraught with pain. And we need to realize that the pain of those who have never had to go hungry, is a different kind of pain than that of the poor.

Life is full of these conundrums. We can't rid ourselves of desire, but we can study it, catch it arising in ourselves, and at that moment of awareness of desire arising, we have a choice. At that moment, what once would have been unconscious craving can transform into consciousness of desire, and that consciousness can lead to enlightenment. Thus desire, being inevitable, is both the bad news and the good news. The gospel, if you will. I will come back to this gospel of desire later.

This business of craving, which underlies the question, how much is enough, is central to human experience. I come from Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, which has in recent years reinvented itself as the land of 10,000 recovery centers. Everyone you meet there is either in a 12-step program or knows people who are. That is, addiction is on the table. Craving is recognized for the soul thief that it is. Many believe that we are not only a nation with a strangely high percentage of addicts to substances or behaviors, but that our society itself is an addict. Political columnist Thomas Friedman and even President Bush finally admitted our national addiction to oil. Addiction translates to insatiability. If you can see the logic in this, then you open to a host of questions regarding a cure to our insatiable addictions: how much is enough travel, how much is enough house, how much is enough development, how much is enough regulation of the energy industry, how many wars are enough to fight over foreign oil control?

First, to organize the question of how much is enough, we can divide life into three parts: things, activities, and being. How much, then is enough to have, to do, and to be?

I. Things/ having enough

Perhaps the simplest, although not necessarily easy, area of our lives to assess is the material side: the stuff we own. Some Unitarian Universalists go into co-housing, which is a giant step away from the private, single family, lavish living spaces many of us are used to. My friend Ellie Whitney helped found a solar co-housing village in Tallahassee, and in all the village there is one lawn mower, one wheel barrow, one communal parking lot, one retention pond. That kind of community may be a future trend, for many reasons.

But to take smaller steps, we can consider a simple self-assessment, using the sheet of paper with three columns in your order of service.

For example, I can hardly bear to think about shrinking my personal library. Already, in a move across the country, I gave away many hundreds of books. Only a few do I regret parting with. But they grow back, we buy more, and then we have less space. I probably have too many books.

Clothing is easier. When I see that I have too many clothes, I do something about this. I go through and sort out the things I've not worn in two years and give them away, or throw them away. Then maybe I will have enough closet space. Do you know anyone who has enough closet space? Ha! Whole businesses have sprung up to help us organize our closets, and garages, so that we can cram more stuff that we rarely use into them. Consider the self-storage business. Acres of air conditioned closets, rented at high prices, filled with things that aren't used.

A woman told me about her friends who lost everything but the clothes they were wearing, to wildfires in California. They reported feeling a strange mixture of devastation and relief. Sometimes we actually wait for an "act of God." I knew a man who felt grateful for a flood that inundated his basement, destroying his doctoral dissertation research. He hated his topic. The flood cleansed his life of those papers so he was free to start over on something that mattered to him. And then he became famous for that work. Thanks to a flood.

I do not wish for a flood, rather, I wish for the will and steadfastness to remove clutter from my life. Closets, shelves, under beds, under sinks, in the garage. Even my garden is cluttered with plants like schefflera that somebody couldn't bear to part with: house plants gone mad, transformed into 20-foot weeds.

This is an old struggle. Even the New Testament offers counsel. Phillipians 4:11 "Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." Or even further back, from the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 1:8. "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing."

Material possessions are a starting place where we can simplify and become more joyfully frugal. Of course there's a connection between the things we own and the time we have. Some have suggested that our possessions own us.

II. Time/ doing

Which leads us to the second question, how much time and energy we have and whether our activities are enough.

Does anyone here have enough time to do what you want and need to do? No. Why is that? What is wrong with this picture?

When I was twenty-one, I lived in an urban commune. I had my own room, parked on the street, shared the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the living room with six or seven other people. My first employer out of college asked what I wanted for a salary, and I named some figure. He said that's not enough, you can't live on that. He raised it by about fifty percent. On my still meager salary I saved enough money for a backpacking trip to Greece. Somebody asked me to marry him, and I said okay, but I'm going to Greece in August. He, as a post-doctoral student, had even less money than I, so I paid his way too, and the trip became a honeymoon. Bread, wine, goat cheese, prickly pears, an occasional salad and shish kabob were enough. We had few dollars, but we had enough money and enough time in those days.

What happened? How do we change from people who have enough time and money to people who never have enough of either? And how do we find contentment with less activity?

My friend has had to drastically curtail her activities due to health problems. When I asked her how she's adjusted from a highly active, creative life to a more limited one, she said, "I don't believe I've so much 'done' inner work as been forced, by my illness, to see what is essential for me. . . When I HAD to give in to what was essential, sleeping and eating, the occasional talk with someone, it was like being in a pleasant prison. I watched birds in the back yard. . . . Easy. Not easy. . . . if you listen well, you can hear the gardens just singing with green."

Notice how she moved closer to the obstacle. This is the secret, I believe. To pay careful attention to desire arising, to the moment's fullness, and to claim the freedom inherent there: how do I respond to this moment? Can I feel it without clinging to it? Can I let it flow through me and on? Realizing I don't have to act on every feeling, I don't have to satisfy every desire. Otherwise craving rules me.

If craving rules me, I am a Hungry Ghost. Buddhist philosophy describes these miserable beings that have little bitty mouths and supersensitive throats and enormous bellies that can never be satisfied. Buddhist philosophy says that on the wheel of life we rotate among six realms, and at any moment we can slip into the realm of Hungry Ghosts. It happens that August is the month when many Buddhists celebrate a feast for the hungry ghosts, acknowledging the pervasiveness of this kind of unhappiness. There is a way out of this realm. Rather than identify with the desire, the craving, we can move closer to it and study it. We notice where in the body we feel it. We notice the conditions under which it arises. We notice that we are noticing it, and that we have a choice about whether to act on it. All this noticing leads to pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is insight, and insight again makes evident that we are not only our desires, we are also the witness of the desires. I am not that desire, not that craving, not a slave to that urge. We realize that it's not that I have a craving. Rather, the craving is having me. And once aware, I can interrupt that. This is the gospel of desire. So much for doing enough and having enough.

III. Being

Finally, how much is enough being?

For several years now I have made the same New year's resolution: to use what I have, and this spans having enough, doing enough, and being enough. Sometimes this helps me avoid new purchases, sometimes it sparks ingenious solutions to household problems, sometimes it blazes the way into a new phase of life, sometimes it drops me right down into the present moment, the moment in which I realize that I am already complete.

Being here now, what the psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott called entering into a non-purposive state, is the secret key to the puzzle of enoughness. Another way of saying it is that we are free to renounce craving. There are three steps to this delightful kind of renunciation: to accept what comes, to let go of what leaves, and to move into a simple state of being.

How hard is this? It's really hard. We need to support one another in this new path. I leave you with the questions. How far can we cast our net of awareness of inter-being, as we pose these questions to ourselves? When have you felt pleasure in simplicity? When have you felt joy in frugality? When have you witnessed others?

Accepting what comes right now means, for instance, accepting that climate change is here now. Accepting what leaves means that species are going extinct right now, this morning. Glaciers are melting. Reefs are dying. How do I accept this? Well, how do I not accept it? It's true. It's real. What if I just drop down into this actual moment and say, okay, this is life as I know it. I am alive in a tragic and turbulent time, my species is culpable. I accept this fact, but I don't acquiesce to its continuing and escalating. How do I move into a simpler state of being? I look around, I see what needs doing, I pick up what I can do and do it. Here's the hardest part: the simpler state of being. When we work, just work. When we address problems, just focus on that. When we play, just play. When we rest, just rest. Finding clarity on the way to this simpler state of being, being enough, is our collective challenge.

And we need help. We need mentors who voluntarily simplify their lives, whether in terms of activities, possessions, travel, volunteerism, or relationships. My partner Klaus is my mentor in realizing enough-ness of shoes; he wears his shoes out before he replaces them, and he requires only a fraction of the pairs of shoes that I do. Sue drives a hybrid car. Paul and Jane drive an old, highly efficient car. Kathy cares for her grandson and builds rain barrels. Catherine uses a clothesline. Dee and Dave reused a ceiling fan here and painted with recycled paint. Joy and George use solar hot water. Mary Lou rides the bus. Many of us have downsized our homes. Diane, Dick, and the gardeners compost yard waste here. The examples and mentors are all around us. Call them good citizens or earth evangelists, it doesn't matter. Let's recognize their best practices and follow their example.

This is the gospel of desire, the good news about how to live with contentment in these troubled times: "If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich."