LOVING WHAT IS
Sermon by Reverend Vann Knight
September 14, 2003
To the degree that you connect with the concept that I’m about to introduce, your life can be changed in the next few minutes. But like many powerful concepts, this is a simple concept, and often it takes months or years before we can connect what we know in our head to the experience of our lives. The concept is tied up for me in this phrase, “Loving what is,” and in the mantra, “Life is a gift I cannot control.”
We, as a society, spend a lot of time being angry at the way life is. We spend a lot of time arguing with life and wishing life were different. I, as you, don’t want any of my children to be sick. I don’t want to have cancer. I don’t want war. I don’t want starvation.
One of the problems that we may have working with the concept I’m about to introduce is that initially it can feel that to accept life as it comes to us is condoning injustice or violence. This is not what I’m saying. It can also feel that to accept life as it is can cause us to be passive, and that is not what I’m saying.
But life comes to us, and grace comes to us, in ways we cannot control. What I’m going to try to do is give you some big examples and some small examples.
The way our children behave, the way others behave, sometimes we want to change that. The way this worship service is, the way things are at the concert, the way things are at the ball game, we often wish we could change the details of everyday reality. We often wish that we could be different, as the reading said, thinner or prettier or smarter or have more money or not be as sick or this or that. Always something needs to be different.
I think that where this notion comes from is the Judeo-Christian tradition. I grew up in that tradition, but there is something in that tradition, in especially the Christian tradition, about a salvation religion that says that you are lost, that you are in a bad place, and you need to get to a better place, that the way you are is wrong and bad and you need to change.
And there is something both in the Judeo and Christian traditions, especially in the prophetic tradition, that says there is something terribly wrong in the world, that injustice is there and we need to do away with all injustice and one day everything will be just, and we need to do away with all violence, and one day there will be this absolute peace. I think most of us have been exposed to that tradition, and we accepted more of the prophetic-salvation religion than we realized.
Also, those of us who are even close to being middle class or upper class have developed a habit of thinking we can change life, that we can make our life the way we want it to be. If we get sick, we’ll just go to the doctor or get this pill or get this shot and we’re going to be okay. No matter what the difficulty, if we call the right architect, the right contractor, the right professional, we can change the way our life is and make it the way we want it to be. That’s our style.
So we live in a mind-set, especially in this culture, that we can just change whatever it is that we don’t like and that life will be better if everything is lined up just the way we want it. We really like being in control.
And then we take our grandchildren to lunch at Chuckie Cheese, and we don’t know how to manage in Chuckie Cheese. And all of this notion of accepting life as it is – even the notion of controlling life – just goes out the window.
When we find ourselves in those real, frightful parts of life where we can’t stand it, or when we hear those big pieces of bad news, the word “cancer,” what do we do? Do we just sit passively and accept? What do we do when something happens that we wish had not happened?
Let me give you an example. Get your hands ready to clap. On “three” we’re going to clap. One, two, three. (Everyone claps) Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to unclap. Unclap? You can’t unclap. I think the simplest way to explain this is that anything that has already happened, if it happened one second ago, it’s history, and you cannot go back and change what has happened. You blink your eye, and you cannot unblink it.
When it happens, even one second ago, you can forget trying to change it. And to argue with what has already occurred is like trying to teach a cat to bark; it ain’t going to happen.
Life is “as it is,” this moment. Does that meant that we don’t try to do some things to make life different or better? No. Life is a polarity, and one part of that polarity, that yin yang, is the acceptance of life as it is. But that other part is a rejection of life. But in my experience, almost always when I have rejected life as it has come to me, it has caused me stress, great anxiety, many times suffering.
One of the places that we reject first is ourselves. This is a deeply spiritual issue. Paul Tillich said, “Faith is the courage to accept our acceptance.” His notion, and I affirm it, was that God accepts us just as we are. And one of the things that happens to many people, as we get to a certain place and we start wanting to change the way we are, is that there is a kind of self rejection in that wanting to change. And until we come to the place where we can accept ourselves as we are, with our faults, then all of those attempts to change really feel burdensome; they feel like, I’ve got to change for somebody else. Whether I think I’m going to change for God or change for my husband or for my wife or for my parents or for my children or for my boss, all of this is change because somebody else wants me to change. I’m trying to change because I feel self rejection.
This is heavy, difficult work, but if we can come to a place of self acceptance, with our faults, with our brokenness, and then say, “I accept me as I am, and I want to change,” that’s a much lighter, creative way to go.
We also reject one another, our children, our spouses, our partners. And this almost always creates stress, anxiety and suffering. If we could just accept them with their weaknesses and limitations, not condoning destructive behavior, but if we could accept others as we want to be accepted, life would be much less stressful.
Now think about everyday life. If you had to put yourself in one category – and you don’t, because it’s a continuum – are you the person who walks into a room and spots everything that’s wrong, or do you walk into a room and see what’s right? Do you see yourself primarily as one who affirms and appreciates life as it is, or do you see yourself primarily as one who criticizes and corrects life?
Is most of your energy spent fighting against your detailed experience of life? Right here this morning you can either be resisting, rejecting, fighting against, or you can just say, This is the way this service is. What can I learn? What is life teaching me? If we spend our life criticizing life, having a lifestyle of rejection, criticism, correction, that’s going to take us to a place I don’t think we want to be.
But if we can come to a place to say, This is the reality that I have to work with, what can I learn from it, what does this have to teach me, we’re going to end up in a different and much more positive place.
Ray Wollam said that the people in his research don’t have a word for good or bad. Rather, they have the word a-yat-na-ma. A-yat-na-ma. It basically means, this is reality. It is not good reality or bad reality. This is simply the reality we have to work with. And so when the kids are outside playing baseball and the ball comes through the window and breaks the window, you have a choice. You can either get angry that that happened – which is arguing with history – or you can say, “A-yat-na-ma. This is the way it is. How do I deal with it?”
You cannot unbreak the window. It’s history. And when difficult, uncomfortable, unpleasant things come to us, every one of us has the choice of either fighting against it or saying, “A-yat-na-ma. This is the reality that I have to work with.”