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Playing Above What We Know A Worship Service by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday July 17, 2005
Reading from “The Secret of Caring for Life” by Chuang Tzu…If you do good, stay away from fame. If you do evil, stay away from punishments. Follow the middle; go by what is constant, and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, look after your parents, and live out your years. Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee – zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music. “Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!” Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. “A good cook changes his knife once a year – because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month – because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room – more than enough for the blade to play about in. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone. “However whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until – flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.” “Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”
Prayer and Meditation
Words by Jean M. Olson The center of the universe is in this small room where our souls touch the infinite, and grace surpasses all our understanding.
And the center of the universe is in the nest outside the window where the tiny speckled eggs are about to hatch under the watch of attentive parents.
And the center of the universe is held by the young mother in the bus going past as she cradles her newborn in her arms and wonders where her future lies.
But the center of the universe is also in the heart of the bomb crater where bits of bone, and chair, and cup are all that remain.
and the center of the universe is also in the jug of water carried by the small boy walking past the garbage heap where his brothers search for their day’s sustenance.
And the center of the universe is also in the quivering salmon just caught and eaten by the grizzly bear in the cold Alaskan stream.
And the true center of the universe is millions of light years distant from an insignificant solar system in an average galaxy that some call the Milky Way.
May the consciousness of the universe that connects all souls comfort and strengthen each one and bring peace and wisdom to every life.
Playing Above What We Know A Worship Service by the Reverend Jonalu Johnstone First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday July 17, 2005 When I was in divinity school, I had the task of working with a group of people to plan a worship service. We sat around a table, talking and talking and talking and getting nowhere. Some wild ideas were thrown out that belonged as near as I could tell in Berkeley, not at Harvard. Some members of the group didn’t seem to grasp the idea of a worship service at all. I wondered if they’d ever been to one. I couldn’t understand what the problem was – the task was clear enough to me. List the elements, divide them up among the group, just do it. What was all the clamor and angst about? Then, someone invited a wise professor to sit with us and help us sort it out. He asked us some simple – but challenging -- clarifying questions, “What are you trying to accomplish?What do want people to go away with? What is the movement of the service? You’re taking people on a one hour journey. Where do you want them to begin and end?” Then, to my consternation, we talked some more. Amazingly, it started to come together. It wasn’t just a matter of listing elements and dividing them up, like I’d thought. No, we were plotting a course. We did use a couple of those Berkeley ideas, and some more conventional. And the day of the worship service, an astounding thing happened. It was awesome. The music, the movement, the readings, the balloons – yes, balloons were a part of it. I knew something had happened that was more than what I could have done – more than what any of us could have done alone. We all learned something about liturgy that day. We were playing above what we knew. Maybe you’ve experienced it some other way. You’ve been on a basketball team, when everything seemed to click – the ball seemed to make its own way down the court, passes were smooth, and whoosh, a shot you didn’t even know you could make – and maybe it went on and on. Playing above what you knew. Or you’ve sung in a choir or played in an orchestra where the music surrounded you and sang through you and you weren’t even aware how you were doing it, you were so taken up in it. You were playing above you what you knew. The title of this morning’s sermon comes from a quotation from Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpeter. Davis found that the moment of greatest achievement came not in playing what you know well – but in pushing it to its limits and playing above what you know. Each night, each performance, Davis tried to learn something new, to play something new. In a few months of playing the same songs with a band, they would morph into entirely new works, with one original thing added to the next and the next. Let me share this paragraph from one of his biographers, Paul Tingen: Without
impermanence there is no life, no growth, just static sterility. Miles summarized the urgency of his need for change in the aphorism, “If I ever look back, I’ll die.” [pp. 24-25, Miles Beyond: The Electric Exploration of Miles Davis 1967-1991.] Few of us can stand to do what Miles Davis did, to push ourselves to risk novel enterprises every day. It’s comfortable to operate in the scheme of what we know, to drive the familiar route, to listen to music we already love, to socialize with people from whom we know what to expect, to eat our favorite foods, and do work we’re confident we have mastered. We’ll even stay in unsatisfying relationships, or awkward family systems to avoid making change. To stay in the realm of what we know. Yet, when we stay too long in what we know, inevitably we find that something’s missing. Growth. There is a human striving that wants more than simple pleasure and comfort. Not that I’m putting down simple pleasure and comfort. If you don’t have enough to eat, or a job, or friends, or a car, or health to appreciate it all, that picture of living in the scheme of we know looks pretty appealing. The problem is when we do have all those things and begin to seek something else. Often in our culture the first seeking is the materialistic – a bigger house with more and larger TV’s, a sportier car, the music and food that critics say we should like. These elements of comfort and pleasure don’t ultimately satisfy. A book popular ten or fifteen years ago, called Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience, distinguished pleasure – filling the senses in a pleasing way – from enjoyment, which the author said required more from us. Enjoyment requires goals, commitment and striving and then, results in harmony. At its peak, enjoyment becomes flow – that state of being so intensely in an experience that boundaries and time disappear. The experience that Cook Ting had in butchering the oxen – being completely in sync with the spaces, never cutting, much less hacking, only separating the bones and flesh in their natural way. Such experience requires self-awareness, yet one loses oneself. It requires awareness of the other, yet the other is merged with the self. The perfect action, it requires a minimum of effort – the least effort necessary to accomplish the task, yet it requires a lifetime of preparation and readiness. I love these seeming contradictions because I know that in the midst of paradox lies religious truth and meaning. Here’s what a rock climber said about his absorption with his sport: “You are so involved in what you are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity…. You don’t see yourself as separate from what you are doing.” [Cskikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper and Row (1990), p. 53.] This merger of self with the activity creates a sense of focus that is exhilarating. Yet, somehow as we engage in such an activity, while loosing ourselves, we also feel most fully ourselves, more self-confident, and more skilled. We may touch the experience of flow in sport or music, even in absorption in a book or conversation. But, how do we play above what we know in life? First of all, what do we really know? Yes, we become familiar with certain elements, habits, and routines. But what do we know? Unlike those pursuits where we can take lessons or study a guidebook, life doesn’t come with instructions. Or in the case of many of us in this church, we’ve rejected some instruction manual others told you existed. We UU’s have a skeptical nature. We don’t easily adopt the rules and assumptions that are spelled out to us. We hold them up to the light of our own experience and reason. When they’re found wanting, we set them aside. So what do we know? For the most part, we’re uncertain that there is a God or a benevolent force in the universe that will make sure it all comes out right. We don’t know what will happen when we die, so don’t have heaven or nirvana to prepare for. We accept the scientific strivings to learn the nature of the universe and of humankind, yet often that leaves us with hypotheses, unproven and perhaps, unprovable. Yes, most of us have our own opinions on these matters – but we could hardly say we know. As one UU tends to close his statements of opinion – “and that’s how I see it today.” Yet, we have to function in a world where we don’t really know. We have to get up each morning, face the day, kiss our spouses, teach our children right from wrong, make a living, and live with ourselves. With uncertainty the only certainty, we must seek answers that work for a time, test them, try them, and find out. What is the purpose or meaning? Without a book or oracle to spell it out, we have to find our own. And that’s no easy task what with the myriad choices before us. In a way, the same thing happens, though, in those smaller, simpler situations. Miles Davis, trumpet in hand, had choices with each note he played – choices about melody, ornamentation, rhythm, volume, tempo, tone. If he stuck to the score – the directions given for life – he went one way, but he was likely to go his own way, maybe not for every single note, but for enough that the result was playing above what he knew. Especially when others joined him, listening to his direction, responding to it in their own ways, creating their own new directions. New music. Playing above what they knew. Teaching one another and learning from one another. So, Miles Davis and his band made choices, note to note, phrase to phrase, song to song, style to style. Ever creating, ever evolving, ever pushing into the unknown. But always having some sense of what they were about, feeling their way into creation. That may be what it means to play above what we know in life. Each note, each moment, choices are before us. Do we play what’s expected, what we’ve played a thousand times? That may be just what we need at a given time and place, or, knowing the big picture, we may be inspired to something more. It’s a risk to wander off the path that’s clear and set. A serious risk. We step out of our comfort zone. Others may criticize, even mock, our actions. People criticized Miles Davis, saying, “Stick to the music I love!” Since we’re stepping into a realm of not-quite-knowing, what happens may surprise us. Good surprise or bad surprise. We may find ourselves ill-equipped to handle what we thought we could. We may make a terrible mistake. We can even make fools of ourselves. When we push a bit above what we know, we may fumble the ball or hit a wrong note. If we risk taking a conversation deeper with our children, they may ask questions we don’t want to answer. If we risk taking a conversation deeper with our spouse, we may touch emotions we’d left firmly under wraps. It might push us – and our relationships -- to grow more deeply, but it may hurt, too. As Austin songwriter Karen Mal puts it, “My scars are tattoos of the lessons I’ve learned.” What we forget sometimes, though, is the risk we take in sticking to the “safe” comfort zone. If we only play what we know, boredom may set in, even a sense of meaninglessness. We may become enamored of pleasure alone, caught up in the senses. Which sounds pretty good until the questions start to come as they have through all the generations. The writer of Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible, found himself in this place – “I have seen all the works done under the sun and all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.” Or from the Miles Davis’ biography: “Without impermanence there is no life, no growth, just static sterility.”
What we do with our lives does depend on what meaning we take from it. If we grow up in an alcoholic household, we can learn the alcoholic behavior and become addicted ourselves or enablers, or we can find a novel solution – a different path – seeking healing and wholeness for ourselves, and then for others. If we lose a loved one through a tragic disease, we can immerse ourselves in permanent grief, depression, and despair, or we can choose to reach above, to contribute to cures for the illness, or to share the love our precious one taught us. The popular press inundates us with inspiring stories about overcoming adversity and making tough choices to give something constructive back to the world. It’s easy to dismiss these as simplistic or trivial, but the truth is – if we make meaning out of the stuff of life, whatever stuff we are thrown, we are choosing to play above what we know. But how do we do it? How do we play above what we know? When I was helping to put that worship service together, I thought I already knew the way to devise a worship service. You have Opening Words, a Hymn, a Reading, a Prayer, maybe throw in a Responsive Reading, another Hymn, a Sermon, a Closing Hymn, and a Benediction. Carve them up, put them together in a way consistent with the theme, and voila, you’ve got it. No, said my peers and teacher. Step back, away from what you “know.” Look at the bigger picture. Don’t rush to action. Recognize the choices you’re making and why. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to create? Or as Miles Davis said in the first word of his autobiography, “Listen.” Know what is going on, where you are, what others are playing. Consider how you can combine and create. Adding this reflection element to our action is crucial in playing above what we know. The danger in acting without reflection is that we hack away, like the mediocre cook cutting up the ox. The task may be completed, but only with unnecessary struggle and with less than optimum results. How often do we rush to action when a better answer might be to think it through first? Especially today in our cultural context, where every second counts. But what does that second really count for? A telemarketer presses for a commitment now because she knows if you get off the phone, you’re likely not to take her offer. The salesman on the car lot doesn’t want you to go home and think about it. Even the pop psychology tests tell you to say the first thing that comes into your mind. Reflection is counter-cultural. Yet, when we make our choices in life in the context of those bigger questions – What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to create? – some decisions become immediately clear. While some of our questions simply slip off into insignificance. Other choices, though, become like the complicated place Cook Ting encountered in butchering the ox. Following his lead, we can size up the difficulties, watch out and be careful, work very slowly, and move with the greatest subtlety. Always keeping in mind the larger goal. Not that we’re all Cook Ting. He’d been working at it awhile, nineteen years with the same knife. When we go off the charted path – and if you’re in this church, I daresay you’re off the charted path – risks are inherent in the choices we make. I think we do play above what we know in this church. Take this summer for example; lay speakers take to the pulpit. I heard that amazing amalgamation of creative interplay in Steve Davenport’s sermon last week, where he cited what he had learned from other summer speakers. And from the Young Adults whose words and music from different voices converged into a powerful message, reminding us what we gain from their presence with us. Playing above what we know. I see it, too, in Covenant Groups where one person says, “I thought about what you said last time.” I’ve witnessed it when one person contributes something that the next one builds on and so evolves the music program, the Social Justice agenda, Forum presentations, QUUEST, and so many other aspects of the church. And at the base of all of those contributions are transformations in people’s lives. I hope for the good. I love seeing that. I hope to see more. I’m not asking you to risk everything to try something new for its own sake. Novelty is not it – meaning is. If we push deeper or reach higher in the light of what we are trying to accomplish in life and who we are trying to become, then we are on a spiritual quest. Our reach, as Robert Browning suggested, should exceed our grasp. Said he, “or what’s a heaven for?” I would say, “Or what’s a life for?” At eight, eighteen, or eighty years, we’re made for change. Our choices are not whether we change, but how. Keep reaching, keep exploring, keep deepening, keep learning – always in the context of balanced reflection and action; or we can stand still, unreflectively, in concert with our habits, allowing afflictions and death to overtake us. Let me leave you with this blessing, written by Nita Penfold for a child’s first day of school: No matter what they tell you, let it be about joy let it be about the sacred self surviving – no, thriving – shining its way to the knowledge within. Let it be about blooming, the unfolding of the universe through you, because the story of you begins fifteen billion years ago with that first flash of being.
At four, you reached out your hand into the dark night and pulled back in wonder, a firefly blinking from your finger. Keep that magic, that both you and the firefly are one, everything connected, everything possible, made of stardust and moonshine as we all are. Let it always be about your shining. So may it be for us all. AMEN.
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