HUU Sermon Archives

The Greatest Gift

by Merle Wenger
December 15, 2002 

Chalice Lighting Reading: Reading: from "Circles" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is, that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his merit."

Reading: From Ethics For the New Millennium by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"At a basic level compassion is . . . our ability to enter into and, to some extent, share others' suffering. But Buddhists believe . . . that not only does our compassion arise without any effort, but it is unconditional, undifferentiated, and universal in scope. A feeling of intimacy toward all other sentient beings, including of course those who would harm us, is generated, which is likened in the literature to the love a mother has for her only child.

Because our capacity for empathy is innate, and because the ability to reason is also an innate faculty, compassion shares the characteristics of consciousness itself. The potential we have to use it is therefore stable and continuous. It is not a resource which can be used up--as water is used up when we boil it. And though it can be described in terms of activity, it is not like a physical activity which we train for, like jumping, where once we reach a certain height we can go no further. On the contrary, when we enhance our sensitivity toward others' suffering through deliberately opening ourselves to it, it is believed that we can gradually extend out compassion to the point where the individual feels so moved by even the subtlest suffering of others that they come to have an overwhelming sense of responsibility toward those others."

Main service: "The Greatest Gift"

Sing: "If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do, is to save every day 'til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you." (Jim Croce)

Lately I have been thinking a lot about time. How it can not be replaced like gold or cars, or grown like trees. How it can not be bought like flowers, or gifts, or precious stones. That it can not be captured, copied or traded. What makes a dog so anxious about time while a cat seems to ignore it? We measure time with the most sophisticated clocks-right up to the atomic clock which measures time within thousandths of a second, yet the time it takes in measuring consumes more time than the dot in time we need to measure, so that you might wonder, what is the purpose of the calculation?

We have been taught the value of a schedule. A billion-dollar industry exists around the concept of saving time. Whether it be day-timers, calendars, software to schedule projects, refrigerator lists, palm pilots, alarm clocks, timers, metronomes, hourglasses, watches or a simple string around the finger, western civilization is obsessed with tracking the minutes of the day. Life, as opposed to death, (perhaps magnified by fear of death), seems to be characterized by the most efficient use of time. Often the most efficient use of time ties it to some monetary value so that an employee or employer sooner or later gets around to the idea of how much our time is worth. Suddenly life is reduced to a prioritized dollars and cents list of doing first what adds up the most. We seldom have the courage to un-schedule time.

Spiritual leaders have been fascinated by the concept of time. The Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, like others, seeks to replace our dollars and sense schedule of time with an accounting system of love and care for the poor. Meditation based religions seek to fill the gaps between rationally objective points on a time line with a sense of freedom from objectivity. What we often do in measuring time is try to pinpoint time--to define the space that exists between two points; and we call that time--like what is happening in this year of time, or what happened in that hour. But when we realize that time is always moving, never standing still, we get this feeling of trying to capture a snipe, or carefully spooning jello into a fussy baby's mouth. To say that we can hold time or bottle it up is really just a fanciful metaphor.

Throughout my life I have been taught the value of volunteering: to help those in need. Nevertheless I have continued to work in my paid job as if I want to score the most points for doing as many things as possible. Am I trying to please a God who smiles on a workaholic accounting system that rewards the one who ends this race, called life, either dead-tired or physically exhausted? Up until a few years ago, I had spent very little time, outside of my home, doing work for which I was not paid.

Perhaps the onset of middle age has motivated me to give more attention to my spiritual beliefs. I feel compelled to live a little more of what I believe.

A few years ago I began volunteering time-in a way that I had not done before. I organized the chicken BBQ, I started visiting people who were alone or sick, I got involved in the religious education group, and involved myself in a number of committees here at church. Now I attempt to spend about five hundred hours each year in volunteer work activity. I enjoy this time and have always made clear in my mind that my motive is not to please others, but to please myself. I no longer see it as work. In other words, I involve myself in unpaid time that makes me happy.

But I am puzzled by how I feel about this volunteering. As a full-blooded-white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-born workaholic, I expected there to be a clear demarcation between how I feel about my paid work and my unpaid work. Certainly this carefully thought-out scheme I call my vocation, which has been thoughtfully pieced together over the last 30 years, should reward me in some extraordinary way. Shouldn't every dollar bill of profit I make come with its own little slogan like "In God We Trust, But You're the Man?" My sense of satisfaction and pride and self-love, even social value, should definitely tip the scales in favor of paid work.

But this has not been the true. In fact, if anything, the scales of satisfaction drifts toward the unpaid work. I have attempted to recalibrate the scales, to crawl around inside the cobwebbed recesses of my brain to see if some bug lies splayed across the mental circuitry of my satisfaction calculator. Could there be some Freudian or psychological bugaboo that threatens the seaworthiness of this ship called Merle, ready at any stress point to spring a leak and sink, like a slab of granite, into the sea of life?

Since I can not seem to break the cycle, I have instead attempted to develop a theory of time use that will accommodate my new-found conclusions. The theory, simply put, is that the less time I spend focussing on doing things for me, scheduling my time for activities that benefit others, the more I seem to get in return. In other words, the more I give the more I receive. So I went through some old garbage in my brain about trying to be Christ-like, the martyr, acts of self-sacrifice etc. But what didn't add up was that I didn't feel like I was any more the giver than the receiver. So I started to concentrate on what I was getting from others.

How many of you thought today about the gift you were giving your friends here at church, just by showing up? You may have debated long and hard over the years about the value of coming to church on Sunday morning. But your time here to connect with your friends, and their friends, and with society as a whole, is your gift. It is a gift you give every day. In spite of the subtle desires that each of us had for staying at home this morning, to burrow away beneath our insecurities, aloneness and habits, you showed up. I want to be the first to thank you for that act. Your gift to me makes my gift to you possible. In fact when children ask parents "Why do we go to church?" or "Why do we have to go visit Uncle Ray?" I wish the answer went something like this: "The universe, and my larger family, have given me so many gifts: this home we live in, the food to nourish our bodies, these clothes that warm me, the sun to nourish the interdependent web of life: I go out into the world to give some back."

The minute you walk through that door, you connect with this entire congregation. Your gift just happens--the act is automatic. You may not know it or think about it but each person in this room subconsciously makes a connection with you. The connection might be a memory of a recent conversation, it might be a sentence you used in a service two years back, or your respect for a particular aspect of the universe. It could simply be a hug you offered once when the chips were down, or your position on a social justice issue, or your art or craft or your work. Even first time visitors give you a gift. They recognize this meeting and the legacy of the Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists. What is offered here, above and beyond the newspaper, a well-written book, or a Sunday morning TV service, is your presence, your gift, presented to everyone else here in our UU community.

Fear, I am certain, is at the root of all traditional religion. The ordering and classification of the mystical and mythical universe by prophets and sages erased fear and uncertainty from life and replaced it with more tangible fears. The great black hole of afterlife has been replaced by elaborate conceptualizations that are based on nothing other than the methodical, disciplined teachings of frenzied prophets. For many the religious experience is celebrated without an emphasis on presence. The experience furthest from our communal gift-giving is a ritual celebrated by some priest or priestess in front of a gathering without any dialogic participation.

We always think first in terms of self but the communal experience so far exceeds the self-experience. Whether you are thinking in terms of parent/child, teacher/student, friend/friend, minister/congregation, or artist/audience, the spark may be present in each case, but the passionate flames of discourse only occur when both ends are equally present. When you think of the message as going one way, then you are not looking at a communication model. When your very presence is viewed as a gift, then you become an equal partner. But to do communal space well requires that we can do alone space well. We must be comfortable with our alone time, with silence, and the space between two points in time. We must make ourselves a gift to time. (sacrifice ourselves to time-lay ourselves on the altar of time-give it up) People who have not figured out the 20 words for you/20 words for me principal, don't understand that communication fails until both speaker and listener are involved equally. Imagine that communication is like a long suspension bridge like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The speaker and listener stand as suspending towers on either side of the bay. The moment one lets go, the bridge topples into the bay--the communication is broken. The speaker simply cannot reach across the bay and hold up the other end of the conversation.

When I started down the road of balancing my paid time with volunteer time, I was bending or warping my time model. My time warp may not have been as sophisticated as Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the complexity of measuring time, while moving in time, but I think it is related. I started to relinquish my domination of time. As my father lay dying this summer, I did not know what to say. So, I said nothing. I held his hand. He left me know that was all he needed. When I visit Gail in the nursing home I hold her hand and she will suddenly get lost in what she used to call a "senior moment." She appears to be gone from my reality. But then she drifts back and smiles knowingly-as if she knows she has been gone-her words are alien but her smile returns and she shows her recognition. She has lost her sense of agenda so I lose mine. I stop trying to put her in a timeline.

Writers who have attempted to define the ultimate divine struggle with the issue of time. In statements like "I am the beginning and the end," "I am the Alpha and the Omega" or the myths of a two headed God facing forward and backward, or the symbol of the serpent swallowing its tale. All of these methods suggest that the divine, the ultimate mystery of the universe, exists outside of time. God is an energy that transcends our concept of time.

If we ponder the heavens the stars majestically strewn across the morning sky as I witnessed them during our last BBQ at 4:30 in the morning -- the element of time seems to separate us from the billions of galaxies that reduce our planet to the size of one of these flecks of dust you see floating in a shaft of morning sunlight. What if we could overcome time from this equation -- even if only in our mind? Is it possible that in a certain sense of the word, present, to be present at any moment is to transcend the confining definition of time-to give up on Alpha and Omega? Is it possible to be so at one with the universe? If we could reach that state, then have we in fact become God are we too an Alpha and Omega?

I see my message here today, these words that I am placing in the cosmos, as a mere crippled vehicle of communication. This wheelchair bound collection of thoughts will not rehabilitate itself from its quadriplegic confines until there is a recipient to process this message. To stand up and walk we must give ourselves to each other and then meaning will resonate out of the silent gaps between my words and your conscious thoughts. Mere words are but distant unconnected galaxies of the universe until we relinquish the confines of time. The miraculous "walking recovery" of communication takes but a moment of time--one unconfined alpha/omega moment--a brief shaft of brilliant recognition that say, "this is me." Only in that timeless, immeasurable, moment are we truly self-realized. For that moment to be dominated, turned around, or ridiculed, means that we give up our primal moments of self-revelation, the greatest launching pads of self-actualization.

This is why I am a Unitarian Universalist, This is why I am a pacifist, and this is why I am an optimist. This is why I love life. This is why I respect equally the uneducated, homeless, soul on the streets of the inner city (or our hometown), the three-year old child who is trying endlessly to teach me a lesson, or the educated man or woman who wants to give me a piece of their mind. When I attempt to dominate or ignore this moment of recognition and to replace it with some "Merle-colored reality," I have missed an important stepping stone. A friend, a lover, a soul-mate or a comrade can say, "I do not understand," "That makes me uncomfortable," "That makes no sense to me," "That scares me," but these are all positive recognition that this moment out-of-time exists and is real to me.

But the person who would try to steal this moment of personal revelation, to say it is not a valid divine moment, to allege to replace it with their "God," is really not a friend. Only a trans-terrestrial time thief would mistakenly imagine that they could steal something that no longer exists. This laser-like, eye-blinding, shaft of recognition has dissipated, never to be stolen, never to be replaced; a black serpent with its head tied to its tail, hurtling off summersault-like into the welcoming dark of the heavens.

If we truly believe in presenting ourselves as a gift to society and our fellow human beings, then we can begin that process by teaching our children. Our attitude about social interaction is not about personal gain, but social gain. The child who observes their parent giving freely of their time while being unconscious of personal gain, will develop the gift of giving. Emphasis will be placed on presence and being rather than on performance. Instead of "show grandma and grandpa how well you can write your abcs," although perfectly harmless in itself, might be replaced with emphasizing the beauty of the gift of a listening ear. The principled notion of 20 minutes for you, 20 minutes for me, will build bridges of friendship that become the foundation of our lives.

I think we can gauge our acts of giving by how little they cost, how selfless they are, how low-stress they feel, by whether you receive more than you give, by whether they require quality time be set aside, and by the authenticity of the smiles you garner. They can be visits to the nursing home or the hospital. They can be volunteering in soup kitchens and visiting the sick neighbor next door, in spite of how seldom you usually have related. It can be a phone call to a shut-in, a letter to someone in pain. Your time gift might be working in a volunteer organization, playing on the playground, or taking a position in defense of the minority. Often it will only be the time it takes to quit your trance-like, internal reverie and take the time to smile at a stranger. Your time is your greatest gift--not your mind, your money, your creativity, or your body. Although all of these might be involved in the total package, the time you give to another person will far outweigh these other attributes.

The next time you are standing in the shower cleaning your body, or in front of the mirror, combing your hair, or washing and pressing your clothes and getting dressed, in anticipation of attending to a friend or meeting; remember: you are simply preparing your gift to the universe. You can choose whether you think of your participation in that social setting as one selfish gift to yourself, or (as in the case of today) a gift you have so carefully chosen for 50 of your friends. In the present moment, we are your family, we are your companions. Your gift will grow innately and unconditionally, like compassion, as defined by the Dalai Lama. Although consciously you will carefully nurse the ego in regards to the upcoming interaction, the multiplied affect of your presence, in the larger community, is ultimately your greatest gift.

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