New Perspectives

Every week a little group of us meet in the hall here at the church for a Pilates class. Jordane our teacher is so committed to our physical well-being that we are now convinced she spends all the hours she is away from us thinking up ever more subtle exercises in order to reach muscle groups we never knew we had. After each class I find new parts of my body aching. We start gently enough, rolling our spines forwards and downwards till we find ourselves with our heads hanging upside down between our knees. And it was in this position hanging upside down last week that I spotted the chewing gum. Stuck under a number of our chairs. Before you leap up in horror out of your chairs now – fear not – I have removed hopefully all of it. I suspect it’s been there for a while and we’d probably never have known it was there had I not been hanging upside down like a bat.

And that is really the message of this morning’s address – if you hang upside down from time to time you’ll notice things you might otherwise have missed. You’ll get to see life from another angle, another point of view. And for anyone who isn’t so keen on trying out awkward bodily postures there are many other ways we humans can gain new perspectives in life.

Get a new job, fall in love, lose a job, fall out of love, move house, have a special birthday, get ill, get well, retire, join a church, start shopping at a different supermarket, go on holiday, come back from holiday, take on a new hobby, volunteer, go on a journey big or small – the list is endless.

What these life changes have in common perhaps is their ability to shake us up in some way. Our routines are changed, we get to think new thoughts, life doesn’t look quite the way it usually does. And in those moments we may find ourselves feeling more alive. Like the meditation we followed earlier on about a fresh breeze touching our cheek, there are times and experiences when we feel awakened, more aware and alert than we usually do. In these times our regular ways of thinking and feelings – our assumptions and prejudices, the ruts most of us fall into in our thinking get a shake-up. Our habitual ways of being benefit from a breath of fresh air from time to time. American Unitarian Universalist James Ishmael Ford is a Zen Buddhist practitioner as well as a UU minister and he writes of the insights he gains from meditation, a sense of

“oneness. It really is just being present to our friends and to ourselves. It means just paying attention when sitting at the computer, or changing a (nappy) diaper, or whatever the myriad activities of life may be. Nothing special. And yet, it is all there is within the universe. And so I sit (in) Zen (meditation) to help me notice those nothing special moments as they arrive, and just how precious they really are. I have a friend who has taken up Tai-chi for much the same reasons. And I have friends who find Sufi dancing does the trick. And I have other friends who pray, good old fashioned Jewish and Christian prayer right to God. Each of us must find our own best way”.

For Ford having a regular spiritual practice prepares the ground for new perspectives. And he notes that a sense of awakening doesn’t usually arrive in a nice neat package when he is quietly sitting in meditation – it arrives at inconvenient moments, in unexpected encounters or unpleasant experiences. He tells the story of being on a meditation retreat, having already broken his toe. Then early in the morning climbing some stairs a lightbulb blows and he is in darkness. He misjudges the next step and bangs his already broken toe on the top stair. He experiences the new perspective of extreme pain. It wasn’t pleasant but it did wake him up. He wasn’t the calm detached meditator examining his experience. He and the pain were one in that moment. Only later could he reflect on the experience of such pain and understand its ability to soften him to the pain of others, soften his responses to the world all around.

One of the conversations I seem to have been having most often with people recently is how to cope with the news. How can a spiritually awakened person best deal with the painful news we hear from around our world every day. One way is to withdraw, to maintain a distance from the news and I have every respect for people who feel they need to back away from the diet of negativity that is our media’s main output these days. Another approach is to stay with the news and with our distress and then do all we can to change our perspective. Instead of demonising the ‘other’, the ones who are committing dreadful acts, we can attempt to view the world from their point of view. This does not mean we in any way approve of their actions but it is a tool for understanding. It draws us closer to the perpetrators of violence rather than pushing them away. When we imagine the world from another standpoint we are starting to put into action our Unitarian emphasis on the oneness of all that is – one world, one humanity, one spirit. Though let’s not imagine that this is an easy stance to take.

Forgive me if you find these examples painful, if any of them touch on your own life experiences in any way. Do not think that I am asking you to forgive those who have committed acts of violence, but rather to start an inquiry – into what might lead to certain behaviours, certain belief systems. That seems to me an important spiritual task. How can we begin to comprehend, for example, what leads a person to steal a purse from a dying woman, to plan and carry out a gruesome execution, to abuse children? What might lead people to cheat and lie, to threaten and frighten? I think we need to try to comprehend other perspectives on life when our natural reaction is to be appalled, outraged. Outrage makes us back away from something that frightens us or we disapprove of. Seeking another perspective makes us curious, inquiring, asks ‘tell me more’. We humans have a tendency to think of ‘us and them’ – to divide the world up into groups – some of which we belong to, some of which we don’t. I truly believe that one of our important spiritual tasks in the 21st century is to work on our divisive thinking and instead develop our ability to see human beings as individuals, who together make one species, with all our glories and all our pain.

Developing our ability to change our perspective is a very useful skill – moving in and out of focus, stepping to one side to take a better look, developing our curiosity about this complex existence we share. On the front of today’s order of service is a quote from writer Ursula le Guin:

“If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…. But close up a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need a distance.”

And the opposite is also true – yes, we can gain new perspectives by stepping back, by viewing the whole from a distance, and also by moving in very close, learning to pay attention to smallest details. It reminds me of William Blake’s visionary words: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour”. When Mary Oliver describes hearing her lover of 30 years whistling for the first time she speaks for all of us. We all have mysteries to reveal and to discover in this beautiful, complex thing called life. Let’s help one another to find these new perspectives.

Rev. Sarah Tinker

Sermon – 8th February 2015