Presented by: Rev. Kendyl Gibbons at DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church

This little fable represents a kind of popular piety that always sets my teeth on edge. On the one hand I find it sentimental and wishful; an attempt on the part of what Marty would call summery spirituality to retroactively deny the reality of human aloneness and suffering. On the other hand, if I am honest, I also feel envious and deprived. Why is it so easy for some people to experience a supportive divine presence? I wonder. How come no one carries me? It is a recurring dilemma for religious liberals; if we generally do not find meaning in glib assurances of an anthropomorphic Lord, how do we face the lost and despairing moments of our lives? In the words of Amy Levy’s sermon assignment, where do we find the inner strength to live courageously? What is it that sustains us, and what comfort do we have to offer one another? What gets us through the toughest times? What can we count on, and how can we have access to it when we need it most?

These are not academic questions for any of us, least of all for a minister.

For even when we are not living out our own winter seasons, there will always be those we know and care about who cling to the very edge of the abyss, who look to us as friends, or leaders, or lovers, or guides, in the poignant hope that we will have some answer to tell them that will help. I know a woman whose beloved husband is refusing any more treatment after years of chronic illness, and she struggles to accept his willingness to let go of life. I know a marriage that trembles on the brink of disaster in the face of one partner’s agonized inability to change, and the other’s painfully eroding patience. I know someone who waits in desperate suspense for medical diagnoses that only increase uncertainty, except for the assurance of more pain to come. I know a woman who clings to her duty to family as her only rock in the endless seesaw of hope and hopelessness that is her struggle with depression. I know a child caught in the riptide of early adolescence who can find no voice powerful enough for her distress but defiance. I know a man who wakes every day, wondering if he will ever know peace again, after the death of his child. The desperate pain of the human condition surrounds us on every side. It is not only in Bosnia, in the drought plains of Somalia, in the slums of Calcutta. It is as close as our neighbors, our co-workers, our fellow church members; as close as our families; as close as our own labored breathing, and agonized memories, and dreadful fears. We have all been through hell in some form; we have all uttered the cry of absence, absence in the heart. We have all seen the single, staggering set of footprints on the beach alone, and wondered what had become of the promises we thought were made to us, once upon a time, when we gave our hearts to life, and entered into the project of the world.

There are two kinds of questions that we might ask about these experiences.

One is what is often called the theodicy question; the riddle of the existence of suffering and evil. Why does life contain this kind of pain? Why is the world such a place that irredeemable tragedy can take place in it? If there is a good god, why does that god permit unjustified events that bring personal agony? This is a very good question, with enduring fascination, which can be intelligently asked even by those whose understanding of the world does not include a personal, intentional god. But it is, in the end, an abstract and theoretical question. True, even when we are suffering most acutely, some part of us wants to know why, and takes comfort in the thought of some cause that we can recognize, or some purpose that might be served by our pain. Why can be answered with “because of” or “in order to,” but those answers do not address our urgent need to know how to get through this. It is this second question which Amy proposes; how does our inner strength help us, in those moments of desolation and despair? Confronted with tragedy, mortality, and pain we cannot run from, what are we to do? If we do not expect to turn to a Lord who will carry us when the beach is stony and the breakers are crashing around us, what can we expect; where do we turn?

I think that Marty and Kushner are correct in suggesting that what we turn to is a way of looking at and being in the world that is commonly called faith. There is a place, I think, where something inside us-what Amy refers to as inner strength-connects to some reality outside us that is value or ultimacy or meaning or divinity or God, however you want to name it, and that place of connection is where faith lies. I want to talk as explicitly as I can about that process of connection, but I do so in the clear understanding that I can only tell you what it is like for me. Faith manifests itself differently for every person, and in the end we do not manipulate it. We cannot command it to appear, or to provide us the particular solace that we think we want; we can only follow its connections where they lead for us, when we are not in a position to control the outcome anyway, and our only hope may be to endure from one day to the next.

The inner strength that is the basis of faith takes form necessarily in action. Faith in this sense is not something that we have; it is something that we do. It is, if only internally, a set of deeds. For me there are three basic parts; I will call them acts of truth, acts of trust, and acts of hope. They occur as a sequence, not once and for all, but over and over in a constant cycling back as we move through our hardest times toward whatever resolutions it may lie within us to achieve. Each of these acts-truth, trust and hope-contains its own internal movements. What I can offer is a description of how they work for me, and let you compare that with your own past or present experience. Perhaps this may suggest some guidance for the ways in which we can approach those moments of our lives that call for inner strength and for living courage.

The three acts of truth, which are always the starting point, are to name the pain authentically, to challenge whatever shame accompanies it, and to connect and share it with other people. To name the pain authentically means to let go of the comforts of denial and to acknowledge the loss, the struggle and the fear that confront us. It means to be willing to tell the truth, at least to ourselves, about our deepest feelings; not to run away, not to pretend that things are okay when they aren’t, not to retreat permanently into all the various painkillers that our culture offers. It means naming the feelings even when they are not the same as our thoughts; if we feel abandoned, we may consciously know that we are not abandoned by everyone, but it is still important to acknowledge that that is how it feels. It also means that we look at the deepest pain; not the trivial distractions, but the pain and the unmet longing that really move us to the soul. This is not easy to do; it requires an unsparing honesty that is willing to name even what does not seem to be fixable; the mortality and brokenness at the very heart of things.

After naming the pain authentically, the next act of truth is to challenge the shame that often accompanies our pain. Much of our deepest suffering comes with a message about our own inadequacy as human beings, with the belief that something about our very existence is a mistake, that we are inherently flawed, and that since this is why we suffer, we cannot expect our suffering ever really to change. The shame lie tells us that we deserve whatever has brought us to this desperate moment, and that suggestion is always a lie. The challenge to it lies in the paradoxical truth that on the one hand, this is not the way life is supposed to be, and on the other hand, this is just the way life is supposed to be. On the one hand, although suffering is a part of life, we know that life is much more and much else than just suffering. The norm of our existence contains good; we do not walk forever in the valley of the shadow. All that happens to create loss, grief and pain is in some sense an outrage; we do not deserve it; it is not what we were made for. Says Millay, “I do not approve of the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been for time out of mind. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Our shame is challenged when we affirm that our lives are meant for goodness and joy, and our deepest suffering is usually basically unjust. On the other hand, it also helps to challenge the lying voice of shame when we remember that this is exactly how life is supposed to be; a mixture of joy and sorrow, of success and failure, of pleasure and pain; when we remember that loss and mistakes and despair come to everyone, without exception. We are part of a universal community of the broken; no one is perfect, no one gets out of here alive. “Mama said there’d be days like this,” says the song, and in that reminder is comfort. We didn’t get here by messing up tremendously worse than anyone else; it’s just the nature of the enterprise of life. When we are able to grasp the two ends of this paradox, we become able to cleanse our suffering of the toxic shame that makes it difficult to perform the other acts of truth, naming the pain authentically, and sharing it with others.

This is the third of the acts of truth, to connect with the people around us, and risk letting them know how it really is for us. To know that we are loved, that we are upheld in the thoughts and prayers of family, community, and friends will not cure our cancer, or mend our broken relationships, or bring back our loved ones from the grave. Yet that support can be an indispensable part of what gets us through our own personal winter of the soul. At some moments we may resent the thought that anyone else could ever have been where we are, and yet to see that someone else has survived the same kind of experience and gone on to know joy, healing, hope and new possibility may be a lifeline in our darkest moments. To know that we matter, that others see our pain, and care about it, somehow makes it possible to go forward even in the face of that pain. When we share, we connect, and when we connect, we become able to draw upon a reservoir of strength that is far greater than what we have alone. “Give sorrow words,” advises Shakespeare; “the grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.” When we do that, when we give our sorrow words, we begin to put it into a larger perspective, and to make it an object of reflection, rather than a compulsive force within us. The acts of truth include the act of truth telling.

The next set are the acts of trust; to hang on to what we thought was true, to keep going, a little at a time, and to acknowledge that we do not run the universe. The first act of trust is to decide that the middle of a crisis is not a good time to reconsider all our deepest values and what is most important. It is a conscious recommitment to those things which we said we wanted and believed in at a time when we were more nearly at peace. They may seem impossibly distant or difficult from the perspective of one crossing the beach alone; all the dreams and the goals and the limits that we had previously set will look profoundly unrealistic to the deeply aching heart, but we can choose to stand by them, knowing that the deeply aching heart is not capable of positive choice. If we said that life was precious, if we said that reason was dependable, if we said that kindness was important, if we made a promise, now is not the time to abandon those decisions. Robert Frost says that if he ever really made his escape from civilization, those who came to seek him “would not find me changed from him they knew, only more sure of what I thought was true.” To choose the act of trust is to be consciously more sure of what we thought was true, knowing that in intense pain we are unlikely to make the best long-term decisions, or take the healthiest perspective.

The second act of trust is the simple but difficult determination to keep going, one day at a time, one moment at a time, if necessary, one breath at a time. This may feel like the only choice we actually have, the only thing we really control in the chaos around us, but that decision to persevere always lies within our own hands. Obviously, it means different things in different situations; not to cling to life at all costs, for instance, but to hang on to our own values and our own decisions as long as we possibly can. Author Madeline L’Engle illustrates this sheer hanging on in a story she tells about the spiritual power of meekness:

I knew meekness when John, friend and doctor, dropped my new born son between my breasts and said, “Madeline, here is your son,” and this after nearly forty-eight hours of work. I knew meekness half an hour later when the placenta wouldn’t come and I began to hemorrhage and spent the next hours fighting for my life. I remember thinking “Hugh will have to marry Gloria to take care of the children,” and immediately I thought meekly, “No! I am going to take care of my own children! I am going to be Hugh’s wife! I have more books to write!” And then all thoughts had to stop and all concentration had to go into breathing, simply breathing, because I knew that as long as I could breath I was still alive. The foot of the bed was raised into shock position yet I knew exactly what was going on. I tried to concentrate on nothing but keeping one breath following the one before as the doctors struggled to get a needle for a transfusion into veins which kept collapsing on them. And I kept on meekly breathing. A fresh doctor was called in, one who wasn’t exhausted with the struggle of holding, by hand, the uterus closed in order to stanch the flow of blood. The needle found a vein which would hold it, and life-giving blood began to move in my veins, and I meekly kept on breathing, for my babies, for my husband, for my work, and the breathing itself was prayer, please God, please God, please God… And the pain was bad, bad, and I kept on breathing and saying please God… And after several hours I was all right, and my son was brought to me and put in my arms, and my soul magnified the Lord.

The choice, to keep on breathing, to keep on functioning, to keep going through the routines of life, is an act of trust. And however little meaning or possibility it may seem to have at the time, it is part of the work of faith.

The third act of trust is the acknowledgment that we do not run the universe; that we cannot prevent tragedy in its many forms, nor undo the past, nor determine the future. Recognizing this reality actually removes from us a tremendous burden, and frees our spiritual energy from useless regret for what has been or fear of what is to come. Whatever forces created the world did it without our conscious assistance, and there is much good that occurs all around us without our having lifted our hands. The serenity prayer invites us to accept those things which we cannot change, and this includes, I would add, accepting the gifts of life which we also did not earn. We can place the determination of the future into the hands of whatever ultimacy there may be, in prayer or in thought. “Let tomorrow come tomorrow,” says the poet Wendell Berry. “Not by your will is the house carried through the night.” This is the final act of trust, which completes the process of keeping faith with what we said we thought was true, and the process of simply hanging on, with whatever determination is needed to get us through.

And this brings us, in the end, to the three fold act of hope, which calls us to maintain gratitude, to make our suffering into beauty, and to prepare ourselves and our lives for new possibilities to come. We maintain gratitude by seeing our own pain, unique and absolute as it always is, in the light of the ultimate. We try to separate the feelings of utter devastation, which are not wrong feelings, from our rational perceptions, and remember that most likely we have not lost absolutely everything. Which is the fluke in human life, the good we receive or the bad that befalls us? It is the old saw that I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet. It is easy, when we are in very specific, intense pain, to be unable to look beyond that particular moment of experience toward anything larger. And yet, says Camus, what does it matter what we have lost, when what we have left is not used up? To maintain gratitude is to focus on all that is left, and not used up in our lives. That is the first act of hope.

The second is to take our pain, and to transform it into beauty; beauty of thought, or of self-expression, or of feeling, or beauty of life. We redeem our suffering when we can feel that good has come of it somehow; that we have grown, or become more compassionate, or more concerned to treasure the life we have. Perhaps it is actual physical beauty, in art or in song; any number of people have transcended their darkest hours using paint or poetry, or pouring their anguish through the piano or into the stitches of their quilting. Or it may be the interpersonal beauty of acts of reconciliation and forgiveness that grow out of our recognition of our mutual brokenness, or creative acts of anger that turn our energy into change in the world, so that others need not suffer as we have, or acts of deepening love and commitment, that bring us closer to others and use our shared suffering to bind us together in a way that no future challenge can ever undo. Or it may simply be the inner beauty of serenity, of the knowledge of our own ability to endure, of wisdom and c ompassion. Any of these is an act of hope, producing out of our suffering something beautiful.

And finally, the last part of the act of hope is to prepare our minds and hearts and lives for the possibility of something new. This means knowing that, as one author says, all fires burn out at last. Since change is inevitable, all hard times are temporary. Even in the face of permanent loss, we can not live at the high pitch of grief forever; even in the face of our own mortality, death at last is an end, and a change. And knowing this, we can, through simple repetitive affirmations, no matter how false and artificial they may at first feel, begin to lay the ground work for a new chapter in our lives that holds the potential for abundance and joy once more. Even when we are most sure that the pain will never cease, and that life can hold nothing for us but endless ashes, we can challenge ourselves to imagine what we would hope for, if we could hope. This kind of exercise points the mind in the direction of something beyond present anguish. That imagining is the final act of hope, and although we may move through the cycle of truth, trust and hope any number of times, it signals that the dawn is near.

These, for me, are the acts of faith; to name the pain authentically and challenge the shame, to connect and share with others; to hang on to what we thought was true, to keep going, in whatever tiny increments it takes, and to acknowledge that we don’t control what happens; to know that nothing lasts forever, to make beauty out of our suffering and to prepare for the possibilities of something new; acts of truth, of trust, and of hope. I don’t think they are God’s footprints, there on the beach in our times of deepest suffering and struggle. It is our feet that plod through the sand at the moments when God is no longer visible to us, but that does not mean we are not alone. We carry within us the divinity that reaches out to what is holy in the world, and I think that is better comfort anyway. However hard the journey, there are always moments when the deep within connects to the deep beyond, in truth, in trust, and in hope, and by those acts of faith we grow, find courage, and ultimately, are sustained.