Care and Feeding of the Soul

Sermon

Why talk about care and feeding of the soul? Sure, we're in a church, so we have expectations that we discuss things like the soul and the spirit, but other than that expectation, is there a substantive reason for talking about this? There is, because we starve our souls so often, because ours is not a spiritual society and so we have to attend to such matters here. Because when our souls are starving, we suffer and are diminished in almost every way. And our society and the very nature of our souls makes it easy for this to happen, for our souls to starve and for us to suffer, and sometimes not even know why. Because the soul isn't like the stomach. When my soul is hungry, it doesn't protest and clamor for food. It doesn't make embarrassing noises or even really make me uncomfortable. It just wanes. It's really very quiet and decorous, the soul is. It acts just like I wish my body would on a diet. Fairly quickly it starts shrinking, and it can get really quite small before I really notice it has shrunk at all.

Usually I only finally notice when there's a big space that used to feel occupied by soul. When my soul doesn't get fed, what it leaves behind is empty space, and not in the peaceful, zen sense of empty space, more like the empty space of a house with no furniture – you feel the lack and how much the space was made and meant for stuff that's missing. The interior of my soul, like the interior of a house, doesn't really make sense as empty space. Noises are too loud, our feet sound strange on the uncovered flooring and there's nowhere comfortable to stay and rest. Without the furniture, things are lonely and unbalanced and incomplete – and that’s how I feel when my soul has shrunk and left all that emptiness unfilled. That is when I find myself aimlessly surfing the web, not with enjoyment but rather with a fear of sitting still with nothing to anaesthetize my mind, or similarly playing computer solitaire late, late at night.

Computer solitaire is not spiritual downtime. Let's just establish that right off the bat. Flipping channels on the television, surfing the net, catching up on personal hygiene, those are not spiritual downtime either. They may afford us a break or bring us comfort or anaesthetize the soul’s yearning and in that way meet some other need as yet unidentified on the human genome. They may even be all we feel capable of occasionally but they don't nurture or nourish our souls.

What does nourish our souls? If we did treat them like stomachs, then we would all have special rooms devoted entirely to the function of nourishing our souls – and even commercial establishments serving a variety of what I guess we would call 'soul food' that would give us a huge range of nourishment to choose from. And this would all be a big part of everyone’s daily life. But that's not the world we live in, so in this world, what do we mean when we talk about nourishing our souls and our sense of the spiritual?

The myriad practical, logistical acts we perform as part of living and getting through our day are not spiritual – or are they? Embellishing on the 'soul food' idea, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and religious leader Thich Nhat Hanh says, memorably: 'When you eat an orange, eat an orange.' We get what he's talking about, don’t we? There's the common method – quickly grabbing an orange, eating it perhaps while doing something else: driving or talking or flipping through mail, bemoaning our sticky fingers, washing up, getting on to the next task. Then there's the way he meant. Sit down. Have napkins ready, because you're thinking about what you're doing. Look at the orange: the deep, bright color, feel the cool weight and the bumpy, waxy surface. Dig your finger in where you wish to begin peeling, or start there with a small sharp knife. Maybe try to peel it all in one long curling piece. Feel the thick vegetal skin open under your hands. Smell the tang of the rind and the sweetness of the fruit. Dodge the spray of juice when our seeking fingers go too deep.. Pull off the bits of white that cling so determinedly to the juicy sections. Pull the sections apart. Are there seeds? Is the skin thick or thin; is it bursting and full or a little dry and spongy. Let's say it's full and bursting, no seeds. Pick up a section and put it in your mouth and bite down and taste and feel the orange burst in your mouth. Do that with every piece. It's sensuous, it's attentive, it's mindful. Is it spiritual? Thich Nhat Hanh would say yes. Wipe your sticky hands, rinse them with water, dry them carefully. You have eaten an orange. You have nourished your body and perhaps also your soul with your awareness and gratitude for the fruit and the time of eating it. What would our living be like if we did everything so?

One of the pieces of wisdom implicit in Thich Nhat Hanh's advice is that living properly is attending to the soul. Another is that living properly can't happen in a rush. I walked out of my house a couple of weeks ago to let the dog take a quick 'comfort' break outside. I had a fresh cup of coffee in my hand, and somewhere to go. I sat on the wall waiting for him, and looked at the changing leaves, and suddenly was overcome by a longing to just sit on that wall and look for a long time. I thought with regret of my appointment, and wished that Maccabee would take as long as ever he had to do what he had to do so I could legitimately steal a few more moments on that beautiful morning. But he's an easy keeper, he came trotting back just then, and I got up and went about my day. And I'm still hungry. I want that moment back – and I can't have it back. It's gone and another like it hasn't come. And I can't let go of it because I needed it. It's an empty space clamoring to be filled.

When my soul is full up, moments like this come and go and they're not a big deal. I'm already full, so it doesn't take much to satisfy. Or, I'm already full, and so one less opportunity to savor is hardly noticed even in the moment let alone days or weeks later. The fact that I still miss what I didn't reminds me my stores are low and I ignore the signs of need at my peril.

Our society isn't set up to honor spiritual neediness. Really we don't honor almost any kind of neediness much, do we? America is the land of the self-sufficient and we aren't really set up for interdependence and connection – you see this in everything from our architecture and town planning to our social infrastructure and payscales.

But churches, among other communities, honor our interdependence, our neediness, spiritual and otherwise. We honor that we don't just need each other for fun or practical support through a crisis or safety in numbers, we need each other for the spiritual growth and transformation connections offer us. We hear each others' journeys, each others' truths, and our eyes are opened and our minds are broadened and our souls are lifted, all by what we learn has been for another, what could be for us, in terms that are not merely social or psychological but spiritual, soulful

Another portion of Eat, Pray, Love details a conversation Elizabeth Gilbert had with a Balinese medicine man:
"'I want to have a lasting experience of God,' I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights but also devote myself to God.'"

That sounds pretty good. But it also sounds self-indulgent, doesn't it? Wanting to be with God all the time, but not give up worldly pleasures – to enjoy the delights of the world and devote yourself to God – most traditions of the world hold that committing to one so deeply, completely, requires the renouncing of the other. And that is fairly consonant with our modern understandings of what living requires of us. Don't all things worth having require sacrifice? Isn't it impossible to have it all? Don't we hate those who seem to have it all for that very reason – it's impossible, at least for us, and should be, therefore, for everyone?

Elizabeth Gilbert wants to have her spiritual cake and eat it too. But wait, that's a practical reality that you can't have your cake and eat it too – right? That’s a physical reality: you can either have the cake and all its enticing prospect before you on a plate, or you can have the cake and all its delicious memory inside you in your belly. Perhaps considering the old axiom spiritually make it somehow to have it all. Surely transcendence, or metaphysics, a metaphysical cake, could help out here.

This kind of confusion and obsession with cake, though very much in the style of Elizabeth Gilbert, is why we turn to outside sources.

Here is what the Balinese man, Ketut, answered her:
"'To find the balance you want,' Ketut spoke through his translator, 'this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way you will know God.'" (E,P,L p. 27)

He doesn't just tell her this, he draws her a literal picture of what he means to aid her understanding of what he has told her. In his picture her body has four legs standing on the ground. And in his picture Ketut omits her head.

The truth is, a lot of us Unitarian Universalists would wish for what Elizabeth Gilbert has the audacity to ask for. Ours is a worldly faith. And worldly faith sounds pretty much like what Gilbert is seeking.

What if we follow Ketut's prescription? What if we each grounded ourselves firmly on the earth, staying in the world, but looked at it through our hearts, rather than our heads.

If I have at least 4 things to ground me in this world and this life, what are they? Personally:
Politics – the most worldly enterprise of all (I can't imagine why that springs to mind so readily right now!)
Love – the people I love and their lives and feelings, the people who love me and my life and feelings
Nature – interacting with the world around me, with plants and beasts, taking care of what I can, seeking to preserve and protect the environment, to mourn what dies
Expression – giving form to what I feel and think and doubt and believe and fear and hope

Alright, if those ground me: politics, love, nature and expression, then how does that 'looking through the heart' come into it? Surely there are more ways, but there are at least two I am exploring this morning. One is to stay soft, to keep our hearts open to feeling, to emotion, to what communicates itself to us through what it makes us feel. The process of growing, and growing up, is commonly lamented as also a process of hardening, of losing imagination and creativity and playfulness and fascination and even compassion. So staying open-hearted is not easy, but it is essential. The people we admire most often possess open-heartedness in their repertoire of gifts – and indeed to find open-heartedness in someone who is also a brilliant and famous expositor or leader or thinker always deepens our admiration.

The other is to attend to what makes our hearts beat faster. Over time, we find, if we do this, that we are renewed by making room for what makes our hearts beat faster. The nature of what has this effect on us varies enormously from one to another. It may be sports or travel or reading or building or time spent with loved ones or time spent at work we believe in or art or learning…. You don't need me to reel off a list of past-times and motivations – you know what makes your heart beat faster, and you know whether you are honoring it in your life or not. If you are, don't stop. If you are not, don't wait any longer. Begin now, and give your soul what it is starving for.

What are your four spiritual legs? What do you see when you look through your heart? Eat an orange. Observe the Sabbath. Reflection reveals that we all know what matters and we know what is missing. Walk no more in the empty house of your soul. Fill it and stand firm on your four legs and honor your perceptive heart.

Amen.