"To Each Their Own"
A Sermon for February Focus Month by Rev. Charles Blustein
Ortman
February 7, 2010
READINGS: ANCIENT & MODERN
The first reading is from the Hebrew Scripture, the Song of
Solomon:
He Speaks:
You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride;
you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.
Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates
with choice fruits,
with henna and nard,
nard and saffron,
calamus and cinnamon,
with every kind of incense tree,
with myrrh and aloes
and all the finest spices.
You are a garden fountain,
a well of flowing water
streaming down from Lebanon.
She Speaks:
Awake, north wind,
and come, south wind!
Blow on my garden,
that its fragrance may spread abroad.
Let my lover come into his garden
and taste its choice fruits.
The second reading is from the book, Soulful Living; the Process
of Personal Transformation, by Dr. Larry Dossey, physician and author
of many books on the power of prayer:
If scientists suddenly discovered a drug that was as powerful as
love in creating health-it would be heralded as a medical breakthrough
and marketed overnight-especially if it had as few side effects
and was as inexpensive as love. Love is intimately related to health…
The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore,
common sense, and every day experience. Throughout history "tender,
loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element
in healing.
SERMON:
February Focus Month has now been a part of this congregation's
annual program for 14 years. We have used this opportunity to provide
for in depth exploration into the important issues of the day, concentrating
on eleven different topics. Three of those topics have been pursued
for multiple years, two of them back to back. Those were Racism
and Peace and Justice. The other multiple year inquiry had nearly
ten years between the first and second times we considered it. That
theme was Sustaining the Spirit; Sustaining the Web.
For those of you who may not have been here during Focus Month before,
here is the general outline. The worship services throughout the
month are designed to deal with various aspects of the focus theme.
The hope is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, to raise the issues
of our day so that they might be viewed through the lens of our
religious sensibilities and values, so that we can be better prepared
relate to these issues in intentional and religious ways. The purpose
in maintaining a month-long focus is to promote a particularly keen
view of the issue through our religious lens.
Beyond worship, the Religious Education program has developed a
curriculum based on the theme, which they will be following throughout
the month. There have also been two or three special Adult Ed classes
that are specific to our theme and next week we'll enjoy a special
potluck lunch following the second service. The final service on
February 28th will be an intergenerational service, where the entire
community of the congregation will engage together in a kind of
"hands on" worship experience.
Beyond worship and RE, each committee, organization or council
of the congregation is asked to devote at least a portion of its
time this month exploring its relationship to the focus theme. We
also hope that a similar exploration will take place in the households
of our members. Our mission here at this congregation is to seek
transformation in our hearts, our hours, our community and our world.
This is an excellent opportunity to promote that mission.
Our theme for this year, "Ethical Eating; Weighing Options,"
was brought forward here by the folks in the RE Program, especially
under the leadership of our Pillar, Judith Rew. A much larger Unitarian
Universalist constituency is also looking at this year's focus theme.
At our UU General Assembly two summers ago in Ft. Lauderdale, delegates
from across the country voted to make Ethical Eating the first topic
of exploration for our newly minted Study/Action program within
the UUA.
Over the course of four years, congregations are asked to study
this issue and then we will be asked to vote on making Ethical Eating
a statement of conscience and action at the General Assembly in
Phoenix in 2012. Through due diligence, we will hope to be able
to do our part in that process. My own hope is that we will not
only do our part in this UUA process, but that we will have learned
something about our relationships with food that might allow us
to find and make greater meaning in our lives. My hope is that what
we do here will also help us to promote healing in our world, a
world which has been blighted by the industries, institutions and
cultural ignorance that have paved over the intimate relationships
we need to experience and feel with our Earth in order to sustain
her.
So here is the plan for this year's focus month. Today we will
take a look at our personal relationships with food. What is a personal
ethic of eating? How do we want to relate to the very physical reality
of our lives and by extension - that which becomes our life, that
which we consume? Next week we will explore further reaching relationships
with food as it to links us in spirit to the environment and to
our ideals of justice.
The following week's worship will be led by our Senior Youth Group
and they will look at, "Mardi Gras: Revelry and Restraint."
They'll be talking about their own upcoming trip to New Orleans
as well as exploring the relationship between food and the Festival
of Mardi Gras. The final week we will attempt to pull things together
so that we might have a way of living into the aspirations that
we may have developed along the way. We have a full agenda of exploration
this month.
And so we begin today with the ethics of eating as that ethic relates
to our own relationship with food and by extension our relationship
with our bodies. It's somewhat amazing to me how much we don't talk
about our bodies. Oh sure, we mention them, and sometimes we may
even mention them a lot. But if we do, we often talk about our bodies
in terms of the challenges they present us, often as though they
are something else, not part of ourselves, not part of who we are.
Left over from Greek Gnosticism, I think, we have an aversion to
things that are physical. Things of the mind seem to demand greater
value, greater tribute from us then things of the body. We don't
talk about our sexuality, for example. We're surrounded by sexuality
in this culture; it's part of the air that we breathe. But, many
of us would just as soon disdain ownership of anything personally
sexual.
I think the same thing is often true in our relationships to food.
Things to eat surround us and we often ingest them as though we
were breathing them in. There is a commonality between pornography
and junk food. Neither of them is as much about the object of attention
as it is about immediate gratification.
In this fast paced culture of ours, eating is an act that too often
comes down to something that has to be dealt with. How often do
we consider that what we are eating is what we are becoming? How
often do we consider that to what we eat provides the raw material
that goes into the creation of our bodies?
A car needs gas, not to make the car, but to make it go. A body
needs food though, to make the body as well as to fuel it. As a
culture, we often act in ways that seem to be unaware of that fuller
equation. It's also interesting that we are now trying to figure
out the technology of creating gasoline out of garbage, when we
succeeded at creating food for humans out of garbage over a half-century
ago.
The reason I chose the reading from the Song of Solomon for this
morning, and I would encourage you all to read the whole thing -
it is a very hot piece of literature - is because in a very religious
sense, it encourages us to be in touch with the sensual, the physical
aspect of who we are. It does so in a way that embraces the physical
self. And yet transcends the physical, incorporating and embracing
the loving, the spiritual self.
I'm alarmed at how out of touch much of our culture seems to be
with the sensual, physical side of natures. Each year, for three
days preceding the start of the UUA General Assembly, there is a
three-day gathering of UU ministers from across the country. Much
of those three days, we are gathered in a large meeting hall, maybe
as many as 800 to 1,200 of us. That's a lot of clergy.
A couple of years ago when we met in Ft. Lauderdale, I looked around
the meeting hall at my colleagues there. The thing that was most
amazing in my glance around the room was the incredible amount of
obesity among those ministers. How can we talk with our congregants,
I wondered, about their relationships with food, when we as the
religious leadership in our movement have such a poor relationship
with food and with our own bodies? I knew then that I had to preach
on this topic, but I surely did not know how.
I want to talk about obesity this morning, not as an isolated affliction,
but as a part of this larger picture of imbalance in our physical
world that I believe is a manifestation of an imbalance within our
spiritual worlds. I suspect that obesity touches everyone's life
in one way or another. I'd like to ask you not to get overly hung
up on that if you don't feel that obesity is an issue for you. Let
it be a metaphor for an issue that you do have. I have to guess
that we all have our issues. Maybe an issue more closely related
for you is the opposite, anorexia or bulimia. You choose. At any
rate, I'm not attacking anyone here who might qualify as obese.
Quite to the contrary, I'm attempting to reach out, to say - you
are not in this alone. Maybe there is something we can do together
here that can be helpful to all of us.
Obesity is not just a disorder among clergy. It is endemic throughout
our culture. Whether or not you suffer directly from the disorder
known as obesity, it is something that affects your life by affecting
those who know and love.
Obesity is very often related to genetics and family history. Believe
me, I know this is true. I come from a long line of very stout Germans,
and my body simply wants to be fat. Those of you who've been around
for a while will remember that six years ago I got to the point
where I had to lose some serious weight. I finally found a diet
that worked for me, The South Beach Diet, and I took off 55 pounds.
But some of you have also noticed that I have been inching my way
back up in that rounder sphere. I need to lose between 20 and 25
pounds now, and I am hoping to get a good start on that this month.
I will hope to have your support and if you want it, I promise mine
in return.
I know how this works for me, this putting on weight. It happens
because I fail to pay attention. I fail to notice what I'm putting
into my body. I fail to appreciate the materials that I'm using
to create and recreate my body. I just eat. My personal struggle
is much the same as our collective cultural relationship of imbalance
with food. We don't pay enough attention. We just eat.
As I was writing this sermon at my kitchen table on Thursday, when
I reached the juxtapositional point between the context of this
Focus Month and this morning's narrower theme of our personal relationship
with food, I stopped because it was time to have some lunch. I got
out some pickled herring, which I love, some crackers and some low
fat Swiss cheese. I made a little plateful of open-faced sandwiches
with them and then started stuffing them down, while thinking, "I've
got to hurry up and eat so I can get back to my writing." And
then all of a sudden it struck me - "This is the problem. This
is exactly what I don't want to do."
I know that if I stand any chance of having an ethical relationship
with what I eat, I have to be conscious of what I'm eating. So I
thought about how other people might go about being more conscious
of what they're eating. One thing some folks do is to say a blessing
before they eat anything. Not necessarily that they are blessing
the food, but that they are acknowledging that the food is a blessing
to them. So I've decided that I'm going to try that. I'm going to
try to remember to think or say some kind of blessing each time
I eat. I'll hope that it will help me be more conscious and more
grateful from the experience of eating, rather than simply more
relieved.
I know that obesity can be the result of many factors. Sometimes
it is the result of addictive behavior, or loneliness or trying
to stuff down anger. Often it is complicated by genetic dispositions.
Those causes not withstanding, I believe in the power of the human
spirit to rise above challenges to the well-being of the body and
the spirit. I believe in the power of community to serve as an excellent
support in that process. Let me know what you think.
I suspect that, if eating becomes more of a religious experience,
more of a conscious process, the quality of our food we eat will
become a more integral part of the way we select what we eat. We
all know that mass produced, drug induced and chemical laden foods
aren't the best things for us to eat. We know that. But so often
many of us ignore it. Why? I have to think it's because we choose
to be, or allow ourselves to be, unconscious of our relationships
with our bodies and with our food. We tend to be more interested
in a fuel fix that will get us through the next few hours, instead
of the bodybuilding/world building investment it could be for the
long haul.
Albert Schweitzer, guru to a generation of Unitarian Universalists
in the last century, had much to say that pertains to our exploration,
"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key
to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
If we are going to create a successful ethic of eating, an ethic
of being in right relationship with our bodies and our food, love
will need to be at the base of those relationships that are a part
of who we are and what we consume. We will need to love ourselves,
love one another and love our planet.
If we are going to create a successful ethic of eating, it will
need to be personal first, and then interpersonal and finally planetary.
Love cannot happen in isolation but only within the context of relationships.
And for there to be a successful ethic of love, the extent of the
relationships involved will need to be limitless. We will need to
learn to love all that we see.
How can that be possible? I don't think it can; not all at once.
But I do think it begins by paying attention. And the more we pay
attention to, the more we can learn to love.
In his philosophy of "Reverence for Life," Albert Schweitzer
goes on: Thought cannot avoid the ethical reverence and love for
all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and
be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the
other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize
clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless
ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts,
which this ethic will involve [us in], but allow [us] really to
experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of
love for all creation - this is the difficult task which confronts
our age."
It has not been so very long that our human race has forsaken our
food and the food chain that is its source - maybe 50 to 60 years.
Still, in that short amount of time, we have fallen far from grace.
We need to learn to love once again, ourselves and the interdependent
web of this world, of which we are a part. We need to relearn the
arts of paying attention, of being grateful for gifts unearned,
and of offering service to that which we love. We can do these things
though, and we can learn how to do them with and from one another.
Whether or not some of us choose to be vegetarians out of this
experience of exploration is immaterial. Whether or not we continue
or stop drinking coffee is immaterial. Whether we all choose to
do the same things, which is highly unlikely, or whether we proceed
in many different ways as a result of considering our relationship
to food, none of these is significant in terms of the transformation
we might be seeking. We're not striving for perfection; we're aspiring
to excellence.
What is important is that we grow in our capacity to love - ourselves,
one another, our food and our planet. What is important is that
we pay greater attention to ourselves, to one another, to our food
and to our planet. What matters is that out of love and attention
we learn to experience a profound sense of gratitude that leads
us with reverence to the greater service of - ourselves, one another,
our food and our planet.
Albert Schweitzer concluded: "Reverence for Life affords me
my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists
in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy,
harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world - that
is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal
forms all around me - is only possible for me in that I give myself
out for other life." Affirmation of the world is affirmation
of the will to live. It means that we are in respectful, ethical
relationships with that which we take in and that which we give
out - for ourselves and for all other life.
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