Ask Me Whether What I Have Done is My Life
Given by James Covington on February 18th, 2007
Sometimes there comes a moment in our lives when we decide “no more”—we can no longer go on this way, whether it’s a career path we’ve chosen, or a relationship, or a way of living. We just say, “Enough already!” Or “I hate my life, I can’t do this anymore!” Or remembering those haunting words sung by Peggy Lee: “Is this all there is?”
I have had several such moments in my life, most particularly in relation to my vocation. I had one such moment early on in my ministry when I could no longer abide by the theological beliefs of Southern Baptists. I just couldn’t be a Baptist minister anymore, so I resigned my Baptist congregation in Maryland and moved to New Jersey to become a counselor for inner city adolescents at the Jersey City Job Corps and dropped out of church altogether for a while. But the internal strife that led me to leave the ministry, eventually led me back to the church a few years later and back to the ministry as a Unitarian Univesalist and finally to this congregation. The brevity with which I now describe those ventures doesn’t even come close, however, to revealing the inner turmoil, doubts, questions, anguish and soul searching before I could make any decision about how I wanted to live my life.
I have a client in my therapy practice, whom I have been treating intermittently for twenty years. He is in his late forties now and has always struggled with fear and shame. He is gay and was shamed by his father and his peers throughout his childhood for his shy, fragile demeanor. He grew up painfully ashamed of himself, terrified to be himself and only through the reliving of many painful memories of rejection and self-doubt has he been able to heal and restore his self, establish a career and be in a committed relationship. Yet, he almost cried to me this week, “There has got to be more to my life. I know it’s there. What I am doing is not my life!”
These are stories depicting the inner personal life and choosing one’s vocation. Sometimes the inner strife we feel in regard to our integrity is related to social justice and assumptions about the rights of people.
Such was a time on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks decided that she would break the law—she would sit her tired body down at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Now in the South at this time, this was a provocative act, a dangerous act. What could have brought her to behave this way at this time? Legend has it that, when she was asked why she sat down, she said, “I was tired.” But she didn’t mean just weary of body, aching of feet—no, she meant, “I was sick and tired of being treated like a second-class citizen. I was soul-tired.”
Now it should be noted that Rosa Parks was part of a community that had prepared her for this moment. She had been trained in non-violent protest at the Hilander Folk School in Tennessee, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had also gone to learn. And she had long been a member and had served as the secretary of her local chapter of the NAACP. She did not, however, say to herself when she sat down, “I’m going to start the Civil Rights movement today.” No, she simply said, “No more. Enough.” It was an existential moment of truth, and she did what she had to do. This is what we mean by “integrity”—when something has integrity it is undivided, complete, unbroken. She would be a divided person no more—she would claim her self, she would claim her wholeness.
This journey toward wholeness is a journey which invites every one of us, lest we squander our gifts and regret our days upon this earth. What is the nature of this journey?
Well, sometimes it starts when a door closes. Sometimes it’s at our lowest moment, when we have lost what seems most precious, when we feel as if we’re in free fall, that we begin the movement toward our truest selves. After all, we have to make space for the Holy, we have to make room for the new. Certainly, it was that way with me.
A few years after I left the Baptist ministry, I was out of a marriage, divorced, and a single father with custody of two children. I was working as a counselor with adolescents, attending a training institute for psychotherapists and developing a private practice. Yet something was missing. I needed to address the larger questions of life. I needed to nurture my soul and I needed a community within which I could do that. I found a church in the Village, in Manhattan, for a while. Then I found my way to the All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan. I joined almost the moment I walked in. Then, surprisingly, my yearning for ministry came alive again. I talked with John Buehrens, a minister at All Souls. We had many meetings. He asked me if there was any way I could not decide to go into the ministry and be happy. I said I didn’t think so. I just said, “I want to be all used up.” And John Buehrens replied, “Well, parish ministry should do that for you.” And so here I am, 17 years later and still going.
At any rate, now when I’m on an airplane, and somebody asks me what I do, I am reluctant to say that I am either a psychotherapist or a minister because sometimes that revelation is followed by a long and as they say, a “pregnant” silence, as though people think I can see through them right away and know their deepest secrets and darkest sins. And then the person sometimes asks, in hushed and reverent tones, “And how did you decide to be a minister? They are expecting a pious answer. And I just say, “It was the money.”
Parker Palmer, in his book Let Your Life Speak, which was the inspiration for this sermon, refers to what he calls the “true self”. He says that the true self is not the ego self that wants to inflate itself, nor is it the intellectual self that wants to see itself as over and above the messy realities of living, nor even the ethical self that prides itself in living by some abstract moral code. No, the true self is the self planted in us from the beginning, the self that wants “nothing more than to be what we were created to be.”
As many of you know, I grew up in Tennessee and attended the Baptist Church every week with perfect attendance for many years. I received a pin for perfect attendance in Sunday School every year and I wore it on my jacket. By the time I was 15, I had about ten pins on my lapel. I loved to hear my minister preach. Even when I was 4 or 5 I would stand behind a table and pound on it with my tiny fist, pretending to preach. I was mesmerized by my minister’s presence and moved by his words. His words spoke to some part of me that I couldn’t explain. Was it my soul? My inner self? My true self? Later I kept thinking and dreaming about becoming a minister. When I was sixteen I had an incredible “religious” experience where I envisioned, even felt, the presence of the saints in the room, of angels and prophets and ancestors and Jesus himself reaching out his hand to me. That is when I decided to become a minister. Was that the way it was meant to be? I still don’t know how to think about that experience, except poetically, that it was my inner soul, my inner voice, the God within, revealing itself to my conscious mind.
In the poem I read earlier, the poet writes:
“Some time when the river is ice … ask me whether
what I have done is my life. …
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.”
Listen to the current. Just let your life unfold we sometimes say. It sounds so simple, but not so. You see, there are multiple voices, strong voices, telling you otherwise, shouting down that still small voice within. There may be your father’s voice telling you to “succeed,” on his terms, not your own. There may be your mother’s voice, telling you to live her own unlived life. There will be tradition, saying that certain roles are appropriate for you, while others are not, or certain ways of loving, or ways of speaking—that’s the way it must be, the voices say. There may be religious teaching from the past that brings echoes of guilt. There will be a consumer society at you constantly, a barrage of messages telling you that if you don’t have this, or look like that, you will most surely not be loved. Most of us don’t listen to what our lives are saying – we hear only what we are telling our lives to do.
And so we end up so often hiding our truest selves, and moving away from the wholeness we were meant to be. Because the voices that I spoke of are so strong, so adamant, we often choose to medicate ourselves, to numb out, for relief—your drug of choice could be, well, drugs or alcohol, or overwork, or shopping, or frantic movement from one activity to the next.
The path I speak of this morning requires courage. There will be practical hindrances, always, and there will be fears—fear of conflict, fear of rejection, fear of failure.
Parker Palmer’s book, "Let Your Life Speak," is based on an old Quaker saying. Parker talks about his understanding of those words as they affected him at different stages of his life.
When young, he said, "I found those words ["Let your life speak"] encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant…" [To me, at that time, they meant:] "Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do."
"Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me – it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, - a life of high purpose.
"So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find," Palmer continues, "and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self – as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a ‘noble’ way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart.
"Today," he goes on, "some thirty years later, ‘Let your life speak’ means something else to me, a meaning — faithful to both the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience:"… and he concludes with these powerful words: "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."
Parker Palmer found that before he could tell his life what he wanted to do with it, he must listen to his life telling him who he is. We, too, must listen for the truths and values at the heart of our own identity, not the standards by which we MUST live – but the standards by which each one of us cannot help but live if we are living our own lives.
One person I spoke to last week told me of not liking high school very much. She married. Later on, while working for a university, as a perk she was told she could take up to a certain amount of credits in courses of her choosing. She looked through the class catalogue, liked the description of a psychology class, and so, enrolled. Well, the subject turned out to ignite her mind and heart. All of a sudden, she knew what she wanted, and who she was. She went into the study of psychology seriously, was an excellent student and is, today, a competent and caring counselor.
Running beneath the surface of the experience I call my life, there is a deeper and truer life waiting to be acknowledged.
A question worth exploring is just HOW we are going to listen to our lives. If it’s the human soul we would address, we have to be careful about how we gather information. The soul is not awfully responsive to subpoenas or cross-examination
Sometimes, the soul speaks the truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. At these times, we walk softly toward the soul, empty and vulnerable, and sit quietly for as long as it takes. The message will come in the silence.
But, there are other times when the soul is screaming at us. It is wild and demanding, full of the injustice of our neglect. At these times, we must get away - rip ourselves loose of distractions - and wait to receive its icy wash of revelation. The message will come midst the upheaving storm.
There must be a place prepared and a time set apart to pay attention and to wait upon the message. Some people call it pilgrimage. Some call it meditation. Some call it therapy. Some call it retreat and solitude. Some call it journaling. Some call it mindfulness. Sometimes it is all or any combination of the above.
The authentic self is a gift to be received not a goal to be achieved; it is an acceptance of the treasure of true self that each of us already possesses; it comes from a voice within calling us to be the person we were born to be.
There is a Hasidic tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency to want to be someone else, and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self:
Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’"
Every journey, honestly taken, moves us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need; a move toward deeper congruence between our inner and outer life. There is no “self” outside of relationship. We are called to live responsibly within a network, both the human community of which we are a part and the eco-system that supports all of life. Hopefully, this is the calling we are reminded of each time we enter this room. This, after all, is what this Fellowship is about, isn’t it? Showing up, being real, struggling through the hard places, in community, that we might be faithful to our gifts, blessing those we encounter and blessing the larger world, becoming the persons you were meant to be.
As May Sarton reminds us, the pilgrimage toward true self will take "time, many years and places.” The world needs people with the patience and passion to make that pilgrimage, not only for their own sake but also as a social and political act. The world still waits for the truth that will set us free - my truth, your truth, our truth. Cultivating that truth, I believe is the authentic vocation of every human being.
Let your life speak! Then ask yourself whether what you are doing is your life.