QUIETING THE SOUL
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
May 25, 2008
Today’s scripture lessons[i] speak to our life experience of anxiety. “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,” says the psalmist. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own,” counsels Jesus. “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” Tomorrow we celebrate Memorial Day. It commemorates those who have died in military service to this country for over 200 years.[ii] Today, we are involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of the anxiety provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Many have died and more will die in these wars to be memorialized in turn later. As Osama Bin Laden said a month after 9/11: "There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that."[iii] What’s the antidote to anxiety, in our personal lives, if not in the political realm where many of us feel increasingly desperate?
The psalmist speaks of calming and quieting the soul, like a child would by being with his or her mother. Jesus asks us to look to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, which are fed and clothed without sowing and reaping, without toiling and spinning. Easily said, you might retort, but a lot harder to do. Nice sentiment. But how does one practically live with this attitude? How can we actually make it work for us? I have three answers for you: a contemplative prayer discipline, being able to accept help ourselves, and service to others.
There’s a woman I used to know[iv] when I lived in Boston who used the prayer exercises of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, to deal with her anxiety. Ignatian prayer has you read a bible passage looking for any imagery that resonates for you. Instead of trying to think about the passage intellectually or figure it out, Ignatius asked that it just “pray you” -- flow over you and through you. My friend wasn’t a Catholic herself, but a priest she consulted with had her read Psalm 25, and she was struck by words like these: "I am lonely and afflicted… Consider how many are my foes, and with what violent hatred they hate me." She found solace in the psalm’s imagery of her feet being plucked out of a net. She felt both longing and hope that she would "abide in prosperity" and that her child would "possess the land," as the psalm put it. But this was the line she found herself repeating the most: "All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love."
She was actually uncomfortable with personal God language, especially that using the patriarchal term “Lord.” But the priest gently asked her to let everything go which repulsed her: "Just stay with the words that touch you and comfort you. Enter into them. Contemplate them. Don't worry. Just listen quietly. Just be." Over time, she began to see God as the life force itself or the creative spirit behind all that is. She came to understand that God can be imaged in many different ways and that a very powerful one for her was of love as a force or natural law, not just love for a particular person. She also found that, through imaginative entering into scripture, she could feel an anxiety-soothing sense of God’s presence with her – bringing her back to life when she thought about suicide, grieved her mother's death, and was afraid of guns and knives in her inner-city neighborhood. In the words of this morning’s reading from the psalms, she just needed to calm and quiet her soul by feeling like a child with her or his mother. She just needed to let go in the words of this morning’s gospel lesson: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you wear…Can you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.”[v]
Another Boston friend of mine was utterly devastated when his infant daughter died. He was forced to confront ultimate questions such as: How can I survive the pain of losing a child? Is life worth living now? Does it have any meaning? As the weeks passed after his daughter’s death, my friend began to discover new dimensions of Christianity, which then became deeply sustaining for him. Those discoveries originated from feeling totally vulnerable and out of control – from completely letting go of any sense of control. Then he realized that friends and family members were available and supporting him in ways he could never have imagined. He was struck by something as simple as a co-worker saying over lunch, and really meaning it: "Please consider us as members of your community. We're here for talking, visiting, telephone calls, anything you need." He realized that nobody had ever said anything like that to him before, or (more likely) he had never allowed himself to acknowledge the need for such support from others before. He’d never actually been able to accept help.
Through the attention and help of others, he began seeing how small and fearful his personal ego had been. He realized that healing love was not his to possess or channel. It comes freely from others and ultimately from God by what Christians call grace. Yet, one has to be open enough to be willing to receive it, and then to let it pass into and through onself. "Right in the heart of grief shimmered a field of grace," he came to say. "I could stand in this field and look all around to see grace bringing new life everywhere. Or I could walk in the field and meet others, some of whom were also aware of the incredible miracle of life."
Over time my friend realized that his daughter’s death had thrown open a doorway in his soul, had calmed and quieted his soul: "My little ego had thought that its self-centered view of things was the way things really are. But suddenly I was standing in the midst of a great unknown Source from which proceeded all meaning, life and death.”
Let me give you a third example of a Boston friend who was overwhelmed by anxiety, but then found a way to calm and quiet her soul. Armed with a M.Ed. in research and statistics and an M.B.A., and after stints at two smaller firms, she got on the fast-track to partnership in a major Wall Street investment-banking firm. She explains that "I became driven 150% by ambition. Nothing would stop me. No matter what I was asked to do, I did it. I worked around the clock, ignored all my friends who kept telling me to get a life, and … [five years later] I had made it. Partner! Master of the Universe!"
To her utter shock, though, by that winter her success was also making her so anxious that she had fallen into a deep depression. In fact, she was suicidal. Objectively, everything that anyone would ever want, it seemed, was hers. She was making half a million dollars before bonuses, dressing beautifully, living in a luxurious home, and traveling around the world. As she put it, "Not only did I have the golden egg; I had the goose too!" Yet, she felt empty at her very core. So she checked into a mental hospital during a two- week vacation. She wanted to die. She felt utterly helpless and lost.
Those two weeks in the hospital made a difference, though. After her stay, she was able to get back to work. Externally she thought she had developed a good cover for her anxiety. Yet, she soon learned differently, when she was working for a California software company on a public offering of stock. After a presentation to senior executives, one of them pulled her over: "Do you realize that your hands were shaking throughout that whole presentation? I've known you for a couple of years now, and you've never been nervous or had any kind of tremors. Are you all right?" Anxiety cover blown.
Then she was saved by China. She’d been reading one of the dozen or so business journals she carried in her briefcase every week. A story about economic development in China caught her eye. She began to read that despite any economic gains the country was enjoying near the coast, the prior status quo reigned supreme in the vast heartland. There was a vignette of one small family, headed by a man named Mr. Wong who was raising his two daughters alone. They lived in a simple hut with no electricity and no water. Mr. Wong worked the unforgiving land by hand. A picture of him and his two daughters in the article broke my friend’s heart as she saw their plaintive faces staring out at her. She started weeping gently, then crying. "My heart was touched in a way that it's never been -- by any person or any thing," she explained. (Even now, she can't describe the article and her reaction without tears coming to her eyes.)
The next day, she faxed the reporter in Shanghai who had written the article. She pleaded, "Do you know these people? Can I get in touch with them? How can I help?" The village had also affected this seasoned reporter, and he offered to serve as translator and intermediary between the Chinese peasants and the New York investment banker. She learned that in this desperately poor mountainous village in central China there were many children, like Mr. Wong's daughters, who couldn't even go to school because they were unable to pay for the basics -- pencils and paper -- not to mention books, book bags, and warm sweaters for the unheated classrooms.
Soon my friend was helping fifty children to attend school, including Mr. Wong's two daughters. Six months later, supplied with fifty tissue-paper letters and a photo of the children in front of the school, she had left her hard-earned partnership and investment banking for good. "It was a terribly hard decision," she says quietly. But once I'd seen the eyes of those children, I knew that I was not going to spend my life blood sixty stories above Wall Street."
Now, while still sending money to China, this woman runs her own non-profit operation that aims to help people in the corporate world find their hearts. It supports individuals in defining their own spiritual path and then in keeping them on that path amidst the ringing phones, budget deadlines, and constant business meetings that shape so many people's working lives. Her enterprise also deals with organizational culture and values, examining how particular business contexts either impede or stimulate spirituality. Finally, this non-profit helps with organizational learning: promoting corporate change to reduce employee alienation and enhance morale.
So her way of overcoming her anxiety was actually to become part of the process of helping others who were worried about their lives, what they would eat or what they would drink or about their body, what they would wear. Her own soul was calmed and quieted as she got outside of herself in service to others. As Jesus says in today’s gospel lesson, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”[vi]
Before I conclude, let me ask if these three antidotes to anxiety – contemplative attitude, willingness to accept help, and service to others -- say anything to the political and social anxieties that lead us into wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and result in the deaths of our soldiers whom we will commemorate tomorrow on Memorial Day? The Sunday after 9/11 I preached from this pulpit about how we couldn’t at that time control our feelings of grief, anger, fear and depression. We certainly didn’t feel safe. But I cautioned against letting feelings of revenge and hatred take over. I implored us not try to justify retaliatory violence, or any other kind of violence, on religious grounds. Instead, I suggested, first, that we unite in community, rather than feeling isolated or alone, and second that we take determined action in service to others suffering in this country – no matter how badly we were feeling ourselves. And third I suggested that we each take fifteen minutes each morning and fifteen minutes each evening to sit quietly in meditation or prayer; that we empty ourselves of all the noises and images that had cluttered our consciousness since the planes slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and be still with God. Accept help, serve others, and develop a contemplative practice.
We Americans are often too quick to go to war, not only causing ruin and desolation for others but having to commemorate more and more of our own brave, dead armed forces men and women at each year’s Memorial Day. In another sermon at the end of September, 2001, I asked: "How do we fight an … enemy like Osama bin Laden without creating a much larger enemy than we started with?" How do we avoid potentially playing into terrorist hands by bringing on the "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West that historian Samuel Huntington has been speaking of since the end of the Cold War?[vii] I suggested that we see the terrorist acts that had occurred within an international criminal framework: that we find the perpetrators and bring them to justice through careful international police work and trials in national and international courts. I asked that we tirelessly explore peaceful alternatives to violence, including not only legal processes but also creative diplomacy.
Finally, I counseled that we must, especially at a great educational institution like Stanford, educate ourselves about the why of what happened on September 11. Why would carefully calculating people be willing to commit suicide for their cause? Why would they apparently hate America so much that they would want to do us such grievous harm? Gandhi used to say that if only we could learn to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents (he never used the word 'enemy' for opponents) seventy-five percent of the world's problems would disappear.[viii] We need to understand the roots of the grievances against America, I said, and then to see if it's possible to remove those causes at their source without violating our basic values as a nation.
We’re a long way down the road since those sermons in September of 2001 and others that I preached later about how any future invasion of Iraq would violate Christian just war principles. There are many more dead to memorialize tomorrow, and hopefully we can do that in the quietness of our souls, not in the kind of national anxiety that can lead to very bad decisions. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in a memorial poem during World War II: “The young dead soldiers do not speak. Nevertheless … They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts. They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us … They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this. They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.”[ix]
“I have calmed and quieted my soul,” says the Psalmist. May we do the same.
NOTES
1
[i] Psalm 131; Matthew 6: 24-34.
[ii] “Memorial Day,” Wikipedia,
[iii] Osama bin Laden, translation of taped remarks aired on the Al-Jazeera television network on October 7, 2001 (San Jose Mercury, October 8, 2001, p. 16A).
[iv] This story and the two that follow are taken from Scotty McLennan, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
[v] Matthew 6: 25, 27-28.
[vi] Matthew 6: 33.
[vii] See Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer, 1993).
[viii] Pascal Alan Nazareth, "Understanding Islamic Fundamentalism," San Jose Mercury News, September 16, 2001, p. 5P.
[ix] Archibald MacLeish, “The Young Dead Soldiers,” as reprinted in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), #583