The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

Publications

Fully Embodied

by Reverend Rick Davis

Undated Sermon

I can still faintly recollect an old memory from my earliest childhood when I must have been four or five years old. I am picking up some play tool when I notice my Uncle – a powerful father figure in my life – looking on with great sadness and shaking his head in disapproval. I have picked up the tool with my left hand - my natural inclination, and Uncle Herman is letting me know that I have made a grave mistake. I switch to my right hand and Uncle Herman signals his approval. He’s got my best interests at heart. He’s left handed himself and knows what a bother it is to be left handed in a world of right handers – especially working with hand tools, as he often did in his construction business.

My first grade school teacher, Ms. Liarly – a force to be reckoned with – reinforced the message and admonished me every time I picked up a pencil with my left hand. Eventually I was completely shamed out of being left handed and joined the ninety per cent of the human race who have it right: i.e., who are right handed.

I never thought much about this socially coerced change until my young adult years when someone noticed that my left shoulder was noticeably higher than my right shoulder and wondered if I might have some type of curvature of the spine. Not long after this, when I began meditating at Zen Buddhist centers they also noticed this, and sometimes one of the priests wandering through the meditation hall would stop and gently push my left shoulder down to correct my posture. But it would just spring back up again.

During the meditation, which calls for an erect, balanced posture, I began to realize how unbalanced I felt and it finally dawned upon me – it was as though I had made some kind of psycho-physical withdrawal from the left side of my body. The musculature on the whole left side of my body was noticeably less developed than on my right. Before trying to meditate, I hadn’t even noticed this glaring reality. I had shoved the whole business down into my unconscious.

Thus began a decades long effort to become both more physically and mentally balanced through meditation and other effective means. But it’s not easy to reclaim lost ground long abandoned. I had become a right handed person – learned to write, use tools, throw, do pretty much everything with my right hand, although for some reason I always did continue to use my left hand for wielding a fork and spoon. (Perhaps there’s some obscure symbolism at work there – the left hand being the one that nurtures me.)

I have always regretted that I was not allowed to be who I was meant to be – a left handed person. What would my handwriting be like? Would I have become a better artist? More skillful with the use of my hands? Would my brain or personality have developed differently? Hard to say.

For a number of years I have worked to strengthen and reinvigorate my left side, primarily so that I can feel more centered when I sit to meditate. I am acutely aware of an unbalanced feeling when I do sit, but yoga and exercise have helped correct this.

This summer I did something foolish that has turned out to help me in this physical balancing act. I was bicycle riding with my son Zachary in a nearby park. We were hurtling along at a very rapid clip, I put on the hand brake and suddenly found myself flying over the handle bars and I landed on my right shoulder. I knew instantly that serious damage had been done. Next day the X-Rays confirmed my personal prognosis – my clavicle was fractured. This put my whole right arm out of commission for awhile.

So my left arm was called into service. Looking for the silver lining in the cloud of this injury, I saw an opportunity to really do some major left side rehabilitation. Ever since the injury, I try to do as much as possible with my left hand, including writing (with my left hand I’m at about the fourth or fifth grade level) and I do some asymmetrical exercises specifically to strengthen the left side of my body. It has made a positive difference, enhancing my physical sense of being balanced.

Now I’ve never met anyone else who has experienced what I have and faced my particular challenge, although I am sure there are many other, older lost lefties around (today left handed people are not forced to switch). But I’ll bet there are any number of people here who have experienced something similar. Society has so many pre-constructed molds that we are expected to fit into – we are supposed to be right handed (although more than ten per cent of people are born left handed); we are supposed to be hetero-sexual (although a significant percentage of people are not); we are supposed to believe in God (although there are always people pretty much everywhere who cannot honestly embrace traditional theological understandings of God); if we’re men we’re supposed to be one way, if we’re women we’re supposed to be another. Those are just some of the big molds most folks are expected to fit into. There are many other molds constructed by local communities and religious groups and family systems that seek to enhance conformity and deny individual uniqueness.

So often I have talked to folks here who have gone through the emotionally wrenching process of springing free from all sorts of pre-constructed, constricting molds – the kinds of molds that cramp, distort, misshape and diminish people, molds that preclude spiritual and intellectual growth, that prevent people from discovering and developing their own unique gifts, that estrange people from their own true nature.

Many years ago I saw a documentary movie that showed how cruel and exploitative people in Africa captured children and locked their legs and arms into molds so that they could not grow properly. Over time the children grew to be crippled and were sent out onto the street to beg, and the money they collected was taken from them by their oppressors. What a dreadful, searing image.

The pre-constructed social molds we are expected to fit into do not have such cruel intent, yet so many good people are not allowed to grow to their full potential because of the molds they were put into earlier in life.

Think about your own life. Was there some time when you were told that who you were was unacceptable, ugly, evil, disagreeable? Did someone tell you that you were not up to snuff, that you were a disappointment, that you were strange or different, that you were too this or too that? And did you hear this often enough that you internalized it and came to believe the lie that you had some fatal flaw?

By and large the world honors conformity, not uniqueness and diversity. Conformity is easier to handle, more predictable, it feels safer and more secure for the majority. Yet the hidden cost is great – diminished lives, undeveloped talents, and unrealized potential. And there is great danger in this, too. The more a society insists upon conformity, the less freedom there is and the greater is the potential for abuses of power.

Today you can’t help but be aware that there are social and political forces at work that want to place people in ever stronger, ever more constrictive social, theological, psychological, political molds. It’s a flight from freedom into the arms of the dubious comforts of theological and political authoritarianism that often occurs during times of historical stress and strain.

So thank goodness for communities such as ours. Our religious heritage is quite unique in American history – although the characters and historical settings change through time, there is a strong, shining thread that runs throughout our narrative: It is a story of breaking free of some mold that someone else insists everyone fit into – molds that constrict, diminish, oppress the human spirit and betray the truth. Sometimes the mold is theological, sometimes it has been political or cultural or social. Our goal is to be authentic, as much as we dare to be, even if others say we are heretics or worse. It does take courage to walk this path. Yet it has been displays of such courageous authenticity that light up the corridors of history, without which we would all dwell in the land of fear, superstition and oppression. (And the grim possibility always persists that fear and oppression could hold sway.)

Truth be told, we could use more such courageous authenticity in our world, for there is too much darkness (fear, anger, hatred, greed, mistrust, despair, cynicism, pessimism, injustice) and not enough light (courage, compassion, tolerance, understanding, peace, justice). Willful ignorance and divisive demagoguery hold too much sway. There need to be religious communities that are not afraid to say that the Emperor has no clothes, that old ways of thinking and acting will not take us where we need to go, that the “good old days” were not so good after all and we need to have fresh visions of inclusiveness and interdependence. Which is to say, it is important that our movement exists in our nation and in this community. We have vital roles to play – amongst ourselves in supporting one another with our mutual compassion and respect and in our community, being a light of truth. As my friend and colleague in Portland, the Rev. Marilyn Sewell, puts it: “We find ourselves at a crisis point in our civic life at the present time. We cannot afford to be passive, divided or unfocused. The world needs us too much.”

Yet in order to be who we are called to be, we need to fully inhabit this congregational body of ours. We need to be able to use our left hand and our right hand, our heart, our brain, our feet – the whole congregational community must be involved, otherwise, we will only be able to limp along. Life calls for us to be fully embodied and the needs of our times clamor for us to use our full strength and potential.

As individuals we are meant to be fully embodied and empowered, not to retreat from the full use of our bodies, minds and spirits because of fear of censure or ridicule. My hope is that this can be a place where we all learn to hear and heed that call – that call to be your authentic and full self – spiritually, psychologically, politically, socially, sexually, artistically. May this be a place where neglected and weakened aspects of our character and personality have new chances to grow.

Yet I also have a collective wish for us. So often Unitarian Universalist congregations - and ours is no exception - fall prey to some paralyzing mindsets, some disempowering myths that convince us that we are not fully capable. Since we don’t have an enforced creed, neither do most Unitarian Universalist congregations have any high behavioral norms for membership. So many members naturally think: “I’ll drop in when it suits my convenience or when the program that day looks interesting.” So with this “consumer church” mentality we rarely have a full sense of ourselves on any given Sunday, we do not get an awareness of the total strength of our community. (I don’t say this to make anyone feel guilty – this is just the way things have evolved in our movement, but unless we begin to evolve in more engaged and creative ways we will become increasingly irrelevant.)

With partial participation we end up using only part of our body, a small portion of our strength. We might yearn to do more, but not enough folks are present and currently engaged to make so many things happen, and so we come to believe that we are not capable of doing any more than we do. To be sure, we do a good bit and many work very hard. But many have never been properly invited to participate or given a sense that they were needed or could make a difference, and we have not organized well enough to integrate new ideas and talents. Today we want to remedy that.

A number of years ago I remember hearing that we could not build a new home for ourselves because people had given all they possibly could and it wasn’t nearly enough. Turns out that wasn’t true at all, and we went out and discovered new levels of generosity and commitment among our members. We are now in the concrete and wood evidence of that commitment.

Today, with your support, once again we are going to demonstrate that we have deeper reserves of widespread commitment and involvement than we have yet seen. Today, with your participation, we are going to strive to become a fully embodied congregation so that we might be true to our avowed mission: “to build a joyful home for free religious exploration where we nurture the hopes and serve the needs of the world.” More than ever the world needs us, and needs for us to be strong, fully embodied. Today, we are asking you – yes, you – if you will make a special commitment to this congregation and make the fulfilling of this commitment a priority in your life.