Spirit and Temper

(c) Jill Ann Terwilliger 2005

This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek the truth in love,
And to help one another.
James Vila Blake


READING “Invitation” by Patrick Murfin

Here, let me put my thumb in your eye
that you may see.
Let me thrust my foot to trip you as you rush by
that you may examine the soil
Let me drive you until sweat soaks your shirt
that you may shuck lazy complacency.

Oh, we will have our moments
lying in the fresh grass together
watching the face of god
scud by in fleecy clouds.
Together we will know illumination.

But there is more to life
than transcendental moments
(however wonderful),
times when the spirit is best served
by thrusting arms past elbows
into the grease pit to seize the clog.

I’m sorry – I didn’t become a poet
to decorate quality-paper greeting cards
with noble sentiments
in graceful calligraphy.
You have me confused with someone else.

So come if you will,
let me kick you in the shin.
I love you.


SERMON “Spirit and Temper”
Rev. Jill Ann Terwilliger

When I work with a couple to plan their wedding or union ceremony, I give them homework. In our second meeting together I say to them: list 20 things that cause conflict in relationships or that keep people from having the relationship they want to have. Not necessarily your relationship, but relationships in general. The lists are varied, but some things come up over and over, and if they don’t, I suggest them. Every list of potential conflicts includes: parenting (both whether and how), work, friendships beyond the partnership, sex, religion, and money.

For each item, each person has to answer two questions. This is the homework: They have to answer, “What do I need to hear from my partner to make me feel secure that we will have the kind of relationship we want to have?” and, “What am I prepared to promise my partner to make him or her feel secure that we will have the kind of relationship we want to have?” The couple is to go home and each answer these questions separately. Then they set aside some time to share what they have written and talk about their answers. All of this is in preparation for writing or choosing the vows.

Couples rarely enjoy this exercise. Charles and I did it, and we didn’t enjoy it much either. But … The purpose is not to have an easy, lovey-dovey-smoochy conversation. The purpose is to try to tackle some of the common rough spots in a relationship and ask what will be needed to bring the couple through together. One thing that happens as people work on this exercise is that the answers get repetitive. We realize – and I say we because this happened to Charles and me, too – we realize that the specifics of how we handle money or how we’ll resolve parenting disputes is not really the issue. Eventually, by asking the questions 20 times – What do I need to feel secure? What am I willing to promise? – some over-arching values present themselves. These are the things that can be turned into vows of commitment. These are the things that two individuals can turn into a binding covenant.

Our vows began, “I take you to be no other than yourself,” and continued with words about love and trust and respect and integrity and faith. And then we said two very specific things. We said, “I will share my life openly with you,” and we said, “I will make our relationship a priority each day.”

You might guess that we have not lived these vows perfectly. And I would guess that, if you have made vows with someone, you have not lived them perfectly either. No one ever does. And most importantly, that is not what a covenant is about. Laws and contracts are about adherence and enforceability. If you breach the promise in a contract, a court determines what damage was done and restitution is made, at least in theory. One of my colleagues, a lawyer turned minister, says that lawyers began writing covenants into contracts when they wanted the agreement to survive a breach of promise. The role of the courts was not to assign damages, but to compel adherence to the covenant. “Thus [my colleague asserts], covenants are agreements (i.e. relationships) that can survive their breach … and are ‘enforced,’ not through seeking monetary compensation, but instead through appeals to the conscience.”

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Now, imagine a congregation. It might have about 95 members. It might live in the suburb of a small Midwestern city. It might be about 10 years old. It might be a spirited and friendly and embracing kind of place. Sound familiar? Imagine this congregation is welcoming new members or welcoming a new minister and that in preparation for the ceremony you are asked, “What 20 things most commonly cause conflict in a congregation? What keeps a congregation from having the kind of relationship among its participants it wants to have?”

We have, in fact, just welcomed new members, and you are, in fact, about to install a new minister next week, so let’s also ask the question in fact, not just imagination. Picture in your mind the congregational culture, relationships, feel, you seek and hope for here in this church. [pause] Now, call out your answers as they come: What keeps a congregation from having the kind of relationship among its participants it wants to have? [pause]
Unspoken assumptions
Poor communication or miscommunication
Lone-ranger-ism
Power and control
Secrets
Sexual misconduct
Money, politics, and (even here) religion

With these kinds of issues in mind, our new member ceremony includes a covenant, words of commitment from the congregation to the new members. The congregation says “we pledge faithfulness to you in the tradition of freedom, openness, and mutual trust. We expect to be enriched by your perspectives as we work and live together. And we offer to you our experience, aspirations, and opportunities for building our future together.”

Next week, at the center of the installation service, will be a covenant between you and me. In it, I will promise to speak the truth in freedom, minister to you alike in your joys and in your sorrows, and to set forth, by my example and by my word, the religious way of life. On your part, you will pledge to remember that the work of the church belongs to all of us; to be charitable toward my failures and I toward yours; to remember that you bear a responsibility in my material welfare and spiritual development; to maintain freedom of both pulpit and pew; and to cooperate together with me in our common growth in a religious life.

These are lofty promises we make about being together as a congregation, and, have no doubt, we do not now and will not in our lifetimes live them perfectly. Which is as it should be. These are high aspirations and ideals we reach for. And when we fall short, here in religious community, we do not seek recompense for the wrong. Rather, we call one another back to the covenant; we call one another to grow into our best selves, closer to our high aspirations.

It all sounds good, doesn’t it? We reach, we miss, we help one another to reach again. But in the reaching and the missing and the helping, inevitably, thumbs are stuck in other’s visions, shins are kicked with passion, hearts and egos are bruised with truth in-eloquently told. It’s a wonder that we stay here in this struggle. But stay we do. Something greater holds us here.

Mystic poet Jalaladin Rumi hints at the bond here in this short poem:

Don’t turn from the delight
that is so close at hand!
Don’t find some lame excuse
to leave our gathering.
You were a lonely grape
and now you are sweet wine.
There is no use in trying to become a grape again.
- Rumi

Delight. Delight close at hand. In Rumi’s writing the word ‘delight’ conjures a sense not just of earthly pleasure, but of spiritual joy, humor, even ecstasy that can come in surprising ways. Perhaps it’s because I have an 8-month old daughter, but this is how I understand delight these days. I picture Rumi playing peek-a-boo with God in a gathering of people. God pops out from behind one person and Rumi smiles. God peeks over the head of another and Rumi giggles. God sneaks around behind Rumi and pops up over his shoulder and Rumi is lost in the delight of knowing that God is everywhere, even when he’s not looking.

“Don’t turn from the delight/that is so close at hand!” Rumi says. Delight, or our seeking after it, holds us here.

But just how does it happen? “You were a lonely grape/and now you are sweet wine.” You were an isolated being and now you are a part of something larger: sweet, flowing, giddy-making.

You might recall that a grape becomes wine after it is thrown into a giant vat with thousands of other grapes and stomped to a pulp by the community. Then the juice is set aside to ferment. [That was the old way of doing it. Today it’s all done by machine, but either way it’s not a gentle process.] By the end, the grape has become something utterly different than it once was.

I’m not suggesting we should intentionally “pulp” one another just so we can experience the sweet wine of community. I wish for nothing of the sort. I simply know, as Patrick Murfin suggests, that on the path to illumination, one person’s clear vision is another person’s finger in the eye. So we might ask, how does that help us, either as individuals or as a community?

Parker Palmer, in his book The Company of Strangers writes, “Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives! And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place!” (p. 124). Palmer then reminds us that the person who most troubles us is likely to be the person who draws out what we least like about ourselves, an experience we can grow from if we have the courage to face it (paraphrase of Linda Hansen in “Community: The Most Genuine of Victories”).

To open ourselves to community, to join a community, in the deepest sense of that word, is to open ourselves to risk and vulnerability. In turn, risk and vulnerability open the way to growth and transformation of the individual, and also of the community.

“The truth,” M. Scott Peck writes, “is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” That is how conflict helps. It helps us, if we have the courage of openness, to deal with the parts of ourselves we least like and parts of the community we least like. And to begin the process of finding truer ways and different answers.

Jolinda shared with our kids some very practical ways for stepping out of our ruts, our automatic responses, when we find ourselves in a conflict. Stop and think. Ask questions. Share and listen. And practice!

A story from the Desert Monks hints at a similar process: Abba Joseph said to Abba Pastor, “Tell me how I can become a [true] monk.” The elder replied, “If you want to have rest in this life and also in the next in every conflict with another one say, ‘who am I?’ and judge no one.”

The beginning is to look within. How am I responding and why? Why does this issue or this person get my dander up? How much of the tension in the situation is from my own response and how much from their intention? Such self reflection doesn’t absolve the other from responsibility. It opens the way for truer, more honest, answers to emerge. It opens the way for transformation of self, and of community. I make no claims that this is easy. I make no claims to do it well myself. But I know, it is a better way.

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We are freely joined together as a religious community not by a promise to be perfect, but by a promise, a covenant, always to try to be our best, and always to come back together when we have fallen short and try again. We are here to learn what it means to be a covenanted community of love and hope and grace; and to take what we learn here into the wider circles of our lives.

If we can do this, if we can become like sweet wine, delight happens among us. We realize we are playing peek-a-boo with God. We catch glimpses of the holiness of humanity emerging from conflict and anger; the holiness of our individual humanity blossoming; the holiness of all humanity growing. Delight is so close at hand.

May it be so. May we make it so through our living.