The Awakened Life

A Worship Service by Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone

First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday January 23, 2005

Reading

To Be of Use

Marge Piercy (in “Good Poems” pgs. 157-158)

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.  They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls.  I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and much to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.  I want to be with people who submerge in the task,  who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pas the bags along.  Who stand in the line and haul in their places, who are not parlor Generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire must be put out.  The work of the world is common as mud.  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.  But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.  Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were meant to be used.  The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Prayer and Meditation

Remembering Our Virtues

Calvin Dame (adapted)

Spirit of Life and Love, which moves through us and through all the world…

May we this day be grateful for the gift of life which is ours, remembering today and always that the life we have and hold is to us a mystery and precious.

May we this day be reminded of the responsibilities we carry, not so that we are intimidated or overwhelmed, but so that we may be true to them,

            so that we may be faithful in carrying them forward.

May we this day maintain a sense of perspective,

remembering who we are, engaging the tasks at hand,

but understanding our limitations, understanding our own shortcomings,

            forgiving ourselves and others if we fall short of perfection.

May we this day be inspired, be filled with new breath,

            be filled with new enthusiasm,

            be ready to see fresh opportunity, new perspectives,

            unnoticed avenues for action and resolution.

And may we this day remember those virtues that bless our lives,

and bless the lives of others,

the virtues of caring and concern, the virtues of honesty and respect,

the virtues of charity, industry and patience.

And may [we] …maintain a …sense of [our] calling,

remember that…[we] are called to a wider vision of the world,

            a world made more fair, more just, more equitable by [our] efforts.

Amen.

The Awakened Life

A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian

Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City

Sunday January 23, 2005

I have come to believe that there are two kinds of people in the world.  There are morning people –those who love the churning, changing, light of the eastern sky at dawn—and there are people who can’t imagine why anyone would ever want to get up early enough to see a sunrise.  There are those who rush out to greet the dawn and there are those who, sharing Woody Allen’s approach to death, have no problem with mornings but just don’t want to be there when they happen.

I am of the former group.  If left to my own devices, I would prefer to get up an hour or so before morning light and go to bed an hour or so after the setting sun.  I used to wear this as a badge of honor.  Morning people (I knew deep down) are industrious, motivated and effective.  Night people weren’t exactly sluggards—not exactly.  I have nothing against night people—I am married to one.  Of course I know the level of esteem you denizens of the night hold for day-dwellers.  Morning people are unsophisticated rubes, easily duped simpletons.  Who would really want to eat dinner at 5pm and be in bed by eight?  Right?

I go off on this tangent about when we wake up, in part, because “Awakenings” is our January topic for QUUEST.  Each month we have a topic, which we explore in our Religious Education program.  Each QUUEST theme is kicked off by a “Story From the Ages” that we tell in the Sunday Service on or about the first of the month.  This month you might recall me telling our youth the story of the Buddha’s awakening and enlightenment.  In the seminar, which I provide for QUUEST Workshop Leaders, I managed to mention most areas of awakenings without ever touching on the physical reality of being awake.  Celeste Roth brought this to my attention.  Well, one of my mantras is to try and make different mistakes each time, so today I begin with physically waking up.

This morning’s sermon is about the awakened life—and it is important to be awake.  As they say, you must be present to win.  Still, as much as it pains me to admit it, the spiritually awakened life is not determined by whether or not you hit the snooze bar on the alarm clock—or if you even need an alarm clock at all.  I believe that vast percentages of the population go through their lives awake, but not awakened—alive but not stirred.

Henry David Thoreau observed that most men (and women) live lives of quiet desperation.  I have, myself, wandered in those mires and doldrums.  The three or four years after Linda and my son, Scott, was born was that time of quiet desperation for me.  I was in my early 30s and had been working in radio off and on since I was 18.  Radio was enjoyable work and there was significant ego reward if not financial wealth.  My life, though, felt disconnected.  I worked, came home, drank a bit too much beer, went to bed and got up to do it all again and again and again. 

In no way do I pretend that my experience was unique or even of a different caliber than the rote that so many people face.  Life just was.  I had interests—but no real passions.  I had coworkers—but almost no one who I knew with any depth.  Life was mostly shades of gray—with a few patches of hazy blue in an otherwise drab sky.

A couple of things happened to me—whether I sought them out (or just didn’t get out of the way of them) I don’t know, but two things happened that started to awaken me.  One was a bird—the other was the church.  First the bird then the church.

I grew up in the Village—on Oxford Way right behind  the middle section of Casady Square.  The native wildlife of the village consisted of an occaisional skunk or possum that might wander over from Casady Lake, a group of indescript bugs and birds.  I joke that until you start getting into birds there are only two kinds of birds—big birds and little birds.  That is pretty much true.  Actually growing up in suburbia, I knew there were cardinals, blue jays, little brown birds and big black birds.  That was about it.

In 1983, I met Linda—here at church.  She was living in Shawnee.  Things happened as they sometimes will—and by 1984 we were living in a mobile home in rural Pottawatomie County.  It is there that I first saw “The Bird.”  It was a bit bigger than a Cardinal—kind of speckled (brown speckled) with some yellow and red accents.  The underside of its wings were a yellow-orange.  What really caught my eye though was the bird’s back.  When it flew—right in the middle of its back you could see a white rectangle.  It was that rectangle that caught my eye.  It was perfectly squared off as though someone had painted it on the middle of the bird’s back.

After seeing the bird a few times feeding on the ground outside our mobile home, I became interested in it.  Soon I became obsessed with it.  I called up an old college friend who had been a Wildlife major.  He couldn’t identify the bird for me despite my colorful description—but ended up giving me his old Field Guide to Birds of North America.  I even made an appointment to with a Biology professor at OBU who I had interviewed at the radio station one day.  No luck.  My quest went on, and on, and on.

I went through that field guide so many times that my world was beginning to fill with birds.  Not big and little birds, but wrens and chickadees and juncos and bluebirds and woodpeckers.  And woodpeckers!  The Yellow Shafted Flicker is a woodpecker who prefers to eat ants.  Unlike most woodpeckers, the Flicker prefers to pop down and munch on ants right off the ground if that’s where they are available.  The Flicker was my bird.  Eureka!  I had gone through that field guide a hundred times—giving only slight consideration to the Woodpeckers—since I had seen “The Bird” only on the ground in open terrain.  How was I to know woodpeckers aren’t always found in the woods?

I found my bird and the process had opened up a whole world of avi-fauna in the process.  Birding became a passion for me.  I became awakened to a whole new world.  I tried my hand a bird photography—quite unsuccessfully—but became quite adept at recognizing and observing birds.  This led me to do lead workshops on Birding at our Unitarian Summer Institute at Lake Texoma.  This awakening also led me to do a series of Public Service Announcements on the Radio for the State Non-Game Wildlife Program.  A few years later I was given an award by that department.  It hangs next to my desk and is one of my fondest accomplishments.

The other thing that stirred me from my “thirty-something” doldrums about then was the church.  I had grown up in the church and like so many of our youth and drifted away when I went to college.  I still considered myself a Unitarian—a member of this church—but other than the self-declaration and a copy of “The Challenge of a Liberal Faith,” I might have been hard pressed to prove it. 

In the early 1980’s several members of this church, my mother among them, formed Channing UU Church—now in Edmond.  From the onset, I believe their desire was geographical and the real intent was to spread our Unitarian faith, more than anything else.  At any rate, I have always been a bit of a ham—I bet you never could have guessed that!  Add that to being a musician—and Linda and I were asked a couple of times to do the entertainment for Channing’s canvass dinner.  On one of these evenings, Jo and Gene Bragdon, then members of Channing, asked why we didn’t just join the church since I was coming to the Canvass Dinner anyway.  Linda and I could find no objection in that—so join we did.

Deep in the recesses of my being, for a long time, I had been trying to put a stirring to sleep.  Back before I had gone to college I had begun to consider if ministry was in my heart.  A bit over a year ago, Bruce Clary told a story about my asking him about ministry—it was early enough in my life that Bruce jokingly called me “Little Marky.”  I can assure you that no one has called me “Little” in over three decades. 

In ways that I don’t really know—and still don’t totally understand—the flame of my call to ministry had remained a flicker.  Perhaps a remnant of a flicker.  It was after becoming involved in Channing that my passion for our faith began to awaken—to arise.  It had hidden there—behind the busy-ness and business of my life, dormant, sleeping.  And I as I began to exercise myself in some the activities of the church—that calling was awakened.  The passion I had sensed in myself in my mid-teens began to reassert itself.  Through my active participation and leadership in that small church, my call to ministry began to take fuller form.  I won’t say the rest is history—except that it is.  It took a good deal of wrangling, angling, study, travel, luck and, even, prayer—but the calling in me woke up, I found my life lived with passion as never before. 

For me the awakening was to ministry.  But please don’t take this to mean that your passion should lead you to ministry.  If it does it does—but you need to be awakened to that which stirs in you.  My message for today is a hope and a prayer that you find your passion—seek it out—study it—awaken it and awaken to it.  It will likely prove elusive at times.  How was I to know that you didn’t always see woodpeckers in the woods?  How was I to know that writing a skit was part of a call to ministry?  Sometimes awakenings seem sudden and sometimes they seem gradual.  In truth, I suspect that there is always a element of the gradual in the sudden and the sudden in the gradual.  As they say, “When the student is prepared, the teacher arises.”

There are a series of famous Ox Herding paintings from the Buddhist tradition.  They begin in bliss when suddenly the traces of the ox catch ones eye.  Then one seeks and pursues and locates and tames and rides the ox.  Later the ox and rider become one until both the ox and the rider in turn transcend themselves leaving nothing but a state of bliss.  Awakening is, I believe, much like that. 

We sleep and our spirits are at rest—but we can’t spend our lives asleep.  That would be a waste of the gift of life.  So we go about the tasks of living and one day we catch a glimpse of something.  Something that catches our heart and mind and imagination.  We only notice it at first, later we may be lucky enough to really see it—it becomes our quest.  We become alive in it.  We search for “it” even though we probably aren’t sure what “it” really is.  We see it again and again and again until we eventually can touch it and know it.  It lives in us and it let’s us live in it.  Soon we have such appreciation for the gift that the only thing we can do is to share it.

Life is a gift—if we learn to see it that way.  Life is a gift and we are in the image of that gift.  This resemblance causes us to seek and crave and awaken to life in the same way that water seeks its own level and one bird’s call brings another and another in the distance.

“Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?”  Asks the same man who observed we live lives of quiet desperation. 

We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.  I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.  I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.  I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear, nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.  I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.  If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.

Live deep.  Suck out the marrow.  Know life by experience. 

First, though, you have to wake up.  On this day, I pray that each of us touch the things that in the deep secret part of our lives make us feel most alive, most real, most human, most loved.  This is the part of us that is one with God.  Make no mistake, the thing we awaken to is Love.  The gift of life is a love that transcends all time a place—it touches all souls and spirits prepared to receive it.  First, though, you have to be awake.  Whether your taste is midnight or mornings first light—I pray you be awakened by life.  This day, choose to live The Awakened Life.  AMEN