2018.12.2 Healthy Humility

2018.12.2 “Healthy Humility for this Being Human”          Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:  “Christmas”

by Lynn Ungar, minister for lifespan learning, Church of the Larger Fellowship

It was all so complicated:
The questionable parentage,
the awkward journey,
the not knowing where you will sleep,
or when the baby will come,
or what his life will look like—
even what the world will be like
when he is grown.
Life is usually that complicated.

It was all so simple:
Keep walking. Stop when you can.
Breathe. Through the pain, breathe.
Hold him. Feed him. Keep him warm.
Cradle his head in the palm of your hand.
These are things we all know.

It was, it is, so complicated
and so simple:
Love what does not belong to you.
Love what will be broken.
Love what mystifies you.
Love what scares you.
Love the aching flesh
no more and no less than
the brilliant star.
Love what will die
and what will be born again
and die again
and be born again
in love.

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It was, it is, so complicated
and so simple.

The woman who often babysits my kids (for those of you who may not know, my partner and I have a 7 year old and 4 year old twins)  is pregnant for the first time.  With twins.  She is visibly pregnant now, being due in February.  She recently took our girls out to a public event and recounts the interesting reactions she got from people who assumed our kids were her kids and that she had a least one more on the way.  The judgments –both good: “Aren’t you an amazing woman!”  and critical “How can you have so many kids?”—seemed to surprise her.  Welcome to parenthood, I thought. 

She is definitely still in the starry-eyed phase of anticipation.  Not that she’s naïve or not nervous. Who wouldn’t be starry-eyed?  She wants to be a parent, and if all goes well she will be welcoming two new lives into this world!  

It’s just that you really have no idea what it will be like until it happens for you.  I have often thought “I wish someone had straight-up told me: parenting is really, really hard.”  And I have thought about saying to her, “You know there will be times when you will go out in public in the equivalent of your pajama pants, and you won’t care.  There will be times when you will wonder why you are doing this.  There will be times when you will have no idea how to do it, or what to do.  There will be times when you act in ways you aren’t proud of.  You will be changed and you will be humbled in ways that you can’t imagine right now.  Parenthood will put you face to face with all that you don’t know.”

Or is that just me?  J

But I haven’t said any of those things to her, because why not stay in the starry-eyed phase of anticipation as long as possible?

In the Gospel story of Luke we hear the account of the angel Gabriel – an angel!—coming to tell Mary of her pregnancy.  With THE Messiah! Talk about starry-eyed! 

But Mary, in her wisdom, asks Gabriel “How is this possible?  How can this be?”  She doesn’t understand. 

It doesn’t compute, given all she knows at this point in her young life of human beings, and herself, and how things work.

But then she just says, “Here I am. Let it be.”

Well, actually, the New Revised Standard Version of the translation is:  “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” 

Now, for me, especially if we are reading this passage with the virgin birth of Christ in mind, I have a little knee-jerk reaction when I get to this part.  This isn’t humility, it’s God’s humiliation and subordination of a young woman.

But UUs are not believers in the virgin birth generally.  We are much more interested in the human-ness of this story, which has plenty of deep meaning.  Perhaps this is a story of a woman holding the anticipation of the transcendent miracle of life, a new baby to be born, alongside the very realistic questions of how it will all happen. When will the baby come?  Where will we all sleep?  Will we have enough?  Will I be a good enough parent?  Will everything be all right?  How will it all be possible?

And then Mary does this amazing thing, she just says “Here I am.  Let it be.”

The contemplative Catholic monk Thomas Keating wrote, “This is really what humility is, which is a basic disposition in the spiritual journey: the capacity to accept all reality—God, ourselves, other people, all creation—as they are and as they manifest in… the present moment and its content.”

The words human, humane, humble, humility à humus – soil, of the earth, grounded.

Rather than reading this moment as a moment when Mary subordinates herself, even a moment of humiliation, we might read it as a moment when Mary with her own agency simply accepts her condition with a grounded strength, a moment of healthy humility —she is going to have a child, she isn’t married, she is poor, she is a persecuted religious minority.  She doesn’t know how they will survive, but somehow she is willing to be open, to keep going, to hold on to life, to figure it out as they go.  “Here I am. Let it Be.”

It is all so complicated.  And so simple.

Perhaps Mary--and Joseph, too-- being Jewish, had the lesson of Hannukah in them – the lesson that you often have more than you think, that more is possible than you imagined, that it is good to stay a little starry-eyed or you might miss the miracle.

Hannukah means “dedication.” As the people gathered to re-dedicate their temple after it had been destroyed by the Syrian army, they had just one small bottle of oil, enough to burn for only one day.  And they knew it would be 8 days before they could get more.  They did not expect that small bottle of oil to last for 8 days, but they lit the oil anyway.  They did not expect that small little bit of oil, to be enough.  Perhaps they sat in the dark for a while, wondering if they should even bother until they had gotten more oil, and then they went ahead and lit that small little light anyway, and waited. 

For eight days they waited for more oil and as it turns out the light was with them all along.  Turns out they had enough.  A miracle.

Maybe the Hannukah story helps us understand the deeper miracle in the story of the birth of Jesus, or any child, or the unfolding of any long-term human relationship – the miracle of love and light that can arise out of the most humbling circumstances, when we don’t think we have it in us, when we don’t understand, when we don’t seem to have enough, when everything seems to be in chaos, or simply impossible.  And yet we say “Here I am, let it be.”  We stay grounded.  We focus on what we do have, no matter how small. Sometimes all we can do is light our light, with dedication, and see what happens.

Mary, anticipating the birth of this special child, has no idea what is in store for them – the journeys they will have to undertake, the great love that will arise, and the great sorrow.

Any of us in long-term relationships—whether parent-child, partner, friend—can attest that we don’t ever know exactly how it will unfold.  There are the starry-eyed phases: anticipating a new baby, falling in love, finding a kindred-spirit friend when you’ve felt so lonely, even embarking on a project with a new partner in work—all exciting and full of possibility and dreams and imaginings of how it will be.  Sometimes finding a new spiritual home can be like this too!  Some people kind of fall in love with a congregation all at once.

And then there is the inevitable come-down-to-earth reality—misunderstandings, tensions, human mistakes, stress, disappointments, our own imperfect and sometimes selfish selves, loss and sorrow.  The moments when we discover that the way we thought it would be isn’t quite the way it turns out.  The perfect family holiday card doesn’t quite capture the hurt feelings that happened around the Thanksgiving table. Don’t you wish just once you’d get a holiday card with the toddler pitching a fit, or the teenagers looking sullen, or—something imperfect but real?

After a while the starry-eyed expectation wears off. 

It all gets so complicated.

During this holiday season, many of us will be spending time with people we have known for a very long time, with lots of differing expectations.  For some of us that is joyful, for others of us it is a trial.  For most of us I’d venture to say… it’s complicated.

This season I invite us to approach these people and relationships with a humble spirit, which is not to vacate your own needs and perspectives, but to simply see them as they are, and see yourself as you are, and reality as it is.  To say, “Here I am.” And let it be.

At the same time, see if you can re-capture a little bit of the starry-eyed perspective, see if you can approach the possibility of mystery and miracle—the humility that comes from remembering that you don’t know everything there is to know yet about that parent you have known your entire life, or that child you have known their entire life, or that spouse or cousin or neighbor.  Or yourself. 

It is so complicated, and yet so simple, this being a human in relationship with other human beings.

As poet Lynn Ungar says,

“Love what mystifies you.
Love what scares you.
Love the aching flesh
no more and no less than
the brilliant star.”

Which is to say, let us come down to earth, and re-dedicate ourselves to loving what is real—the complicated, humbling, humanness of this life—all of it--

AND let us keep our starry-eyed dedication, too, keeping our own flame lit, looking ever out and up, believing in, open to the miracles in our living and our loving.

Amen.