Sermons

READING ~ On Feeling Melancholy, The School of Life
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZ1EmPOE_k&t=165s

Our first reading is from The School of Life, an online compendium of tips and tools for mental wellbeing. This is called On Feeling Melancholy. You can find a charming video on Youtube link above.
Melancholy isn’t exactly a word on everybody’s lips. But we should pay more attention to it, even seek it out from time to time. Melancholy is a species of sadness that arises when we’re open to the fact that life is inherently difficult, and that suffering and disappointment are core parts of universal experience.

It’s not a disorder that needs to be cured. Modern society tends to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness but we have to admit that reality is, for the most part, about grief and loss. The good life is not one immune to sadness but one in which suffering contributes to our development.

Melancholy is an underused word. It doesn’t mean grim and miserable. It means grasping without rage the fact that the world is full of folly and greed, that it is rare to find inner peace, that it is hard to live comfortably with those we love, that it’s very unusual to have a career that’s both financially rewarding and morally uplifting, that many decent people have a very hard time. Often sadness simply makes a lot of sense.

We learn so late about stuff. You’ve wasted years; everyone has. You can only avoid regret by switching off your imagination. The wisdom of the melancholy attitude, as opposed to the bitter, angry one, lies in the understanding that the sorrow isn’t just about you, that you have not been singled out, that your suffering belongs to humanity in general.

To take that fully to heart is to become more compassionate and less vengeful. The melancholy facts shouldn’t make us desperate, rather, more forgiving, kinder, and better able to focus on what really matters while there is still time.

 
READING ~ “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye   
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

SERMON ~ “The Deepest Thing”

Naomi Shihab Nye wrote that poem in a plaza in Colombia, South America, following a traumatic bus ride in which she and her husband were robbed at knifepoint and witnessed the murder of a fellow traveler, the Indian in the white poncho in the poem.

They stumbled into the plaza with literally nothing: no passports, no money, no possessions…just the small notebook and pencil Naomi kept in her back pocket. A stranger read the distress in their faces and asked what had happened. They told him. He listened carefully, his eyes sad.

“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he said.

That’s it. Naomi and her husband, newlyweds on their honeymoon, still had to figure out what to do next, but that simple act of kindness helped restore them to humanity. Naomi’s husband hitchhiked off to a bigger city to try to replace their traveler’s checks. Naomi sat in the plaza, not knowing where she was going to spend the night, and wrote this poem.

It’s one of the few poems in her long career that she didn’t consciously compose, she said. It just came to her, wisdom born of suffering and compassion.

Nye’s poem reminds us how deeply entwined our human experience of kindness is with sorrow. It’s only when we’re willing to let ourselves be touched by the suffering of another that we really know what it means to be kind.
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing… You must lose things, feel the future dissolve like broth in a cup of soup…You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

“Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.”
The words we heard earlier about melancholy from The School of Life make the same point. We are made human by our shared suffering. It is our ability to feel the loss and sorrow inherent in life that allows us to feel compassion, forgiveness, love.

Compassion literally means “to suffer together” or “to suffer with.” It is the capacity for sorrow that allows us to feel compassion. Our heart opens as we empathize with another’s pain.

This appears to be hard-wired into our physiology. Researcher Dacher Keltner has identified “the compassionate instinct,” a need to respond to each other’s suffering with care. My nervous system responds to your pain the way it does to my own, and vice versa.

This instinct originates in the mother-child bond and the need to keep that infant alive. But it radiates out to encompass all kinds of suffering. The vagus nerve, which regulates the life-or-death instincts of breathing, digestion, and sex, also spurs us to be kind.

This is an ancient instinct, and very likely one that helped us survive as hominids. I heard recently on NPR about research into a Neanderthal community in Europe. I don’t remember the details, but they found a skeleton with multiple injuries: two broken legs and lots more. This person would not have survived without being taken care of, and somehow the researchers knew that he had. Lived beyond whatever caused the injuries, tended to by his tribe.

Yet we can override this primal impulse. Multiple studies have shown that people who feel superior to others can tune out their suffering, block the instinct that would have them respond.

I think this is really important as we consider the state of the world today. We are so polarized, people put into camps of “us” and “them.” The moment we feel better than “them,” we lose our ability to respond with compassion.

The root of the word “kindness” is kin. With whom do we feel a kinship bond? Our UU principles remind us that we are all kin to one another, that each person matters as much as the next.

Your suffering, your sorrow, is as important as mine. How I treat you makes a difference, to you, to me, to all humanity. When I let your suffering touch my heart, we are all enlarged. We all grow bigger in the process.

Susan Cain explores some of the same territory in her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

Cain is the author of the 2012 bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Some of you may have read that. It was a provocative read. I was curious to see what she’s been up to since.

Susan begins Bittersweet by reflecting on the ancient belief that the body contains four humors, or liquid substances, corresponding to four basic temperaments: melancholic, or sad, sanguine, or happy, choleric, or aggressive, and phlegmatic, or calm.

Ideally, people would embody all four in some kind of balance. In actuality they tend toward one or two. Societies also tend in one direction or another, Cain says. Our society prizes the sanguine and choleric, or the happy and aggressive, what she calls “enforced smiles and righteous anger.”
“This sanguine-choleric outlook is forward leaning and combat ready,” she says. “It prizes cheerful goal orientation in our personal lives, and righteous outrage online [in the political /social arena/sphere]. We should be tough, optimistic, and assertive; we should possess the confidence to speak our minds, [and] the interpersonal skills to win friends and influence people.” (Cain, xxv).
Can you relate? We’re supposed to be happy and we’re supposed to be go-getters. In a study of 70,000 people by Harvard psychologist Susan David, one-third judged themselves for having “negative” emotions such as sadness and grief.

But what is lost by avoiding these other aspects of human nature, the melancholic, or sad, and the phlegmatic, or calm? Cain focuses her book on the hidden gifts found in melancholy, or what she calls the bittersweet, that quality of emotion that mingles sorrow and longing.

Bittersweet, the way Cain describes it, is that feeling you get when you cry at sad movies or songs…painful and enjoyable at the same time. People actually like listening to sad music, a favorite bittersweet song, over and over again, more than they like listening to a happy tune.

Just ask me about that “broken hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. I have listened to that song more times than I can count.

What’s your favorite?

Bittersweet is the longing for a more “perfect and beautiful world” and the grief we feel for never being able to attain that ideal. It’s the response we sometimes have in nature, or in relationship, or with art, when we are simultaneously aware of the beauty and the impermanence of it all.
“The bittersweet experience stems from human homelessness in an imperfect world, human consciousness of, and at the same time, a desire for perfection. This inner spiritual void becomes painfully real when faced with beauty. There, between the lost and the desired, the holy tears are formed.”
That’s a quote from Owe Wikstrom, a Swedish professor in the psychology of religion, reflecting on the writings of Gregory the Great in the sixth century.

Just like sorrow, shared suffering, is the foundation for compassion, longing is the gateway to belonging, Cain says. Longing calls us out of ourselves in search of connection — to God, to others, to the community of which we are part.

“Longing is the transfiguration of aloneness,” says the poet David Whyte. “…the defenseless interior secret core of a person receiving its overdue invitation from the moon, the stars, the night horizon, and the great tidal flows of life and love.”

We often think of longing in terms of romantic love, but it is also the force that inspires religious commitment, that draws us into community, that expresses itself in creativity, that fuels our work for justice.

It is the energy that calls us forward, toward some kind of more we might not even know we are seeking. Longing reminds us that we belong to more than ourselves, that we are part of this whole beautiful, difficult, complicated thing called life.

You may be longing for a deeper spiritual connection, for enriched relationships, for creative expression, for a better world.

“What is the ache you can’t get rid of?” Cain asks. It is that ache that leads you home.

The invitation this morning is to consider the full range of our emotional palette, to let all the colors touch our brush. To recognize the gift in experiences that sometimes register as painful.

To surrender to this life, “not because it does not constantly break your heart, but because it also beckons with beauty, startles with delight,” as we heard in our opening words.

It is when we don’t acknowledge our own heartbreak that we take it out on others, Cain says. Our “culture of positivity” rewards repression, but at a cost. …

We build a healthier world as we develop the ability to hold the full range of emotion, to embrace sorrow and longing along with action and joy.

Why do we feel this juxtaposition of emotion? Because we are human. Because we’re supposed to. Because we have the ability to be moved by other people’s suffering and because we long to be part of something greater than ourselves.

Can we hold these polarities — the painful and the beautiful, the suffering and the kindness, the longing for more and the sense of being found? Can we journey from the warmth of summer to the chill of autumn with grace and equanimity, accepting the way things really are?

Sorrow and kindness. Suffering and compassion. Longing and belonging. In some curious way this is what it means to be human. Embracing both sides, all sides, of the paradigm. Living fully into the experience of life.

May you embrace the fullness of life this day, this week, and all the days to come. Amen.