Original Blessing:

Reflections on the Body and the Senses

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

October 21, 2001

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

 Readings

Reay Tannahill, Sex in History p.14

“In the year 4004 Before the Common Era, at precisely nine o’clock on the morning of October 23…  “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.  And he found it very good.”  The year, the day, and the hour of the Creation were calculated by two seventeenth century scholars after painstaking chronological study of the Hebrew Text and most of their contemporaries welcomed the information.  To be able to out a date to the Creation gave it a comforting actuality.  Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.  Its logic was inescapable.  There had been no single act of Creation.”

Reading: The Nature of Love Diane Ackerman p. 151

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last months of her life in Somalia, saving children. It's not surprising that we have created a host of machines that translate sensations into electricity. Walt Whitman was accurate when he wrote "I sing the body electric." Everyone of our cells is sheathed in electricity, even our brain cells, crackling with energy, surging like a network of tiny lightning storms. The world confronts us with its awkward languages of shape, color, movement, sound wave and smell, and we translate all of them into the electric lingo our bodies speak, sending messages by code … to the brain. Love develops in the neurons of the brain, and the way it grows depends on how those neurons were trained. Evolution hands out a blueprint for the building of the house of one's life, but, as with a house, much depends on the skill and experience of the builders; the laws and codes of society; the features or quality of the materials; not to mention the random effect of tornadoes, landslides, or floods; plumbing catastrophes; and the caprices of inspectors, supervisors, hooligans, or neighbors. How we love is a matter of biology. How we love is a matter of experience.

Sermon

“And from the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman.” 

Since then we have cleared up more than a few misunderstandings as regards creation and procreation – but the relationship between religion and human sexuality has been an uneasy one at best.  I keep hovering around our origins because I seek answers about why we are as we are – how things became as things have become.  Because – like a movie you watch time and time again looking for clues -- I hope to find some illuminating, liberating clue to the human situation.

We have some new clues now – scientific answers -- but the ancient ones – the stories live, somehow, in our culture and our hearts, and still shape our relationships – with our bodies, with one another, and with the world. 

Every major western religion – and that is all that we can touch upon today – has a place where it has recognized the beauty and awe of our living in bodies.  Or what I will call being embodied.  Even Paul, who felt mighty conflicted about bodies saved his best metaphors about religion for the body.  And in the Song of Solomon there is little doubt that the writer believed in the delights of the body. 

As an apple-tree among the trees of the wood,

So is my beloved among the sons.

Under its shadow I delighted to sit,

 And its fruit was sweet to my taste.

refresh me with apples;

 For I am love-sick.

There is a place in every major religion that speaks of the beauty of being in bodies – of miracle of birth – of the wonder of the senses – the delights of love – of the deep touch of nature.  However, those are not the predominant voices of religion regarding our bodies and about our sexuality that have most come down to us today.  It is as though ancient humans knew – as we know now – about the power in the human body.  We are a crossroads where mind, body, spirit, emotions meet – and the ancients also recognized, as we do – the possible dangers.  To protect themselves they surrounded their awareness of their bodies with controls – of shame – that have been passed down to us and that sever the connection between our senses and our whole lives.  Last week I spoke of the dust being ablaze with miracles.  During the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon the dust was mud – up to the ankles in some places.  When my husband Mark took his three year nephew and niece to the Feast they were ecstatic with the mud. – They played until they were covered --- not unlike Maeve and Lea and James this summer on the muddy banks of the Wisconsin River – covered in mud from head to toe.  The sensation is delightful, caressing, intense, refreshing – after the mud is rinsed off.  The dust is ablaze.  A few days ago my daughter Maeve asked me why the dirt was brown and not purple or something else – and I thought about the multicolored sand we scattered at Union Street – there is beauty in the soil and all around us – we are given to this world with senses and expressions that have great power.  The dust is ablaze.  Again and again when I return to the Genesis story – which permeates our world -- again and again, I see that the message is that the key to being human and free – is knowledge – understanding – it is the balance that we need against the power of our human lives in the world.  We are the crossroads.  That is why on this Sunday – two days before the anniversary of Creation – during National Family Sexuality Education Month – and a week before El Dia De Los Muertes – the Mexican Day of the Dead Festival -- it still seems a good time to honor our embodied lives.  To honor the dust of which we are – and its many delights and many challenges.  In the Genesis Story when God first sees the creation – it is good.  It is the task of religion to restore that goodness.  

To date the fear and shame that religion has tried in order to control our embodied lives has not worked – it has not controlled or enhanced the physical lives of humans.  As Lina Breen said in the quotation that Chris read earlier “human sexuality is simply too important, too beautiful, and too potentially dangerous to be ignored in a religious community.”

We call ourselves a liberal faith – a liberal religion.  We have had comprehensive – that is non-fear based sexuality education for more than thirty years.  Arthur Vaeni, defines liberal as “of or befitting a free person”.  That expresses the sense of liberal I think that we could use here – it has less to do with one politics, one party, one theology than with a way of approaching the world.  Unitarian Universalists seek to foster intelligent and interdependent freedom – that is to say that our religion seeks not simple answers to moral questions but to search for the answers that allow us as free people to gather – creatively and in mutual respect.  The pop wit, Ashley Brilliant, once said – I want all of the power and none of the responsibility – when we face our sexuality in a healthy way we acknowledge – yes there is power here – and we will take deep responsibility.  There is the fear – that a celebration of the body and of the body’s relation to the world will lead to the sort of chaos we see all around us – sexual disrespect, sexual exploitation, fragile families, promiscuity, unfaithfulness – but the reverse is true – Vaeni says “hiding from our sexuality only makes us vulnerable to its misuse.”  Responsibility is the ability to see ourselves truly in relationship – that your feelings matter, that your feelings matter, that every action that we take has real and felt consequences.  We need to know and respect the extent of our own bodies, our own feelings, to be able to respect the feelings of others.  Sexuality is complex because it is not really about acts – it is about being in the world and all the ways we connect deeply with that world.  All the way from the soft, squishy mud and the strong arms of a good care taker to the warmth and vulnerable confidences of our friends to the most intimate of relationships – to conscious and chosen love and lifelong commitment.  For a small child the lines are all blurred – it is up to the adult to help teach the child about boundaries.  For adults who grow up without that help the boundaries are often -- too often blurred.  We have to be taught to know: To know that we need to be safe, to honor the safety of others, when we need to be held, to be alone, to feel the wind in our hair – to know when we are in love.  To be able to say no – to understand when to say yes – to understand our Bodies and our Selves.  Silence does not teach any of that – only intelligent and sensitive dialogue does.  Silence does not teach clarity but there are generations of honest wisdom that do.  Fear does not shift behavior – but understanding can – that is the core of our heritage of belief.

Anyway – this is not the crowd that needs convincing of this – I am proud of Unitarian Universalism -- of our Our Whole Lives Curriculum is a highly successful multi-age curriculum that teaches people of all ages how to think critically about our bodies and our lives as deeply sensing, connecting, and creating creatures.  I have watched the difference that our religious education courses have made in both junior high and high school classes as young people learn to take themselves seriously – in a different way – learn to seek deeply in their relationships, learn to respect their bodies, to fight coercion, to see the media with a critical eye, to say no and to wait -- and to know when it is right. 

Today I am talking with you about our whole lives – not the curriculum really****** – I am talking with you about our real whole lives because it is when our lives feel and are whole that we have energy, feel connected, think creatively, and have hope.  One of my favorites stories is the one that Aristophanes’s tells in Plato’s symposium – about the ancient, ancient time when human beings were one creature – male and female, male and male, and female and female and then, by calamity the Gods split us apart and we come back life after life seeking our other halves – seeking wholeness.  It’s a great story – but not exactly the wholeness that I mean. Certainly, an aspect of our wholeness is about our life partnerships and marriages.  But they do not make us whole because they are our lost halves – it is not as thought one finds the right person and then life is simple bliss – most of the time they are tougher than that.  Our life partnerships invite us to our own wholeness – challenge us to speak our needs, accommodate someone else, and mature.  However, in reality we often spend much of our lives outside of those relationships.  Our wholeness is made of our many relationships -- our friendships and respecting the boundaries of those, our parenting relationships, our work partnerships, our relationships with our beloved pets – who bring to us not only their own precious company but a share of the non-human world for which we often hunger.

To recognize wholeness is to recognize that we are not flat creatures -- we are beings of sense and sensuousness.  Do you remember Flat Stanley? – he was a Elementary school project – a small paper boy who was sent to various locations around the world – your grandmother’s in San Diego or your friend in Osaka or your cousin in Chicago and there his picture was taken, developed, and sent back along with Flat Stanley.  When we encounter new places and people we do so embodied – in all dimensions. 

To recognize wholeness is to see that we are different from one another – of many cultures and histories and that those shape us -- that we are women and men, children and grownups, old and young, heterosexual and gay – spry and creaky, sorrowful and joyful.   Therefore, wholeness is about justice. 

In truth to recognize wholeness is a reminder that our bodies are not really easy places -- they are not simply places of joy unbounded.  I’ve had a migraine for the last three days -- we carry pain, we age, we suffer, we are mortal.  We bring our aging bodies with us through our lives and into our aging relationships.  However, these are our bodies – our meeting point with the world – we are not simply spirits with legs – our bodies are in and of the world.  Our wholeness is made of the ways our bodies change over a lifetime – the way our minds and hearts change over a lifetime and how we can learn to respond to those changes to find delight amid those changes – to find support within those changes.  To find a church that recognizes this and does not dismiss it as something to be overcome in another world is a blessing indeed.  To find a church that recognizes and celebrates it as something to respond to in this life is also a blessing. 

John Buehrens the just past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association said:  We have found that a responsible sexual ethic is possible. What is required, is a life-long commitment to dealing with our sexuality, not only under the heading of morality, but as an issue of spiritual wholeness.  He spoke those words to celebrate the signing of the religious declaration on Sexuality, Morality, Justice, and Healing – signed by over 850 religious leaders January 18, 2000.

What does Buehrens mean by spiritual wholeness?  Spiritual wholeness is the fullness of life – the connection with larger meaning, the sense of the spirit of life breathing into even the most ordinary of acts.  Earlier I said that I believed that it was the task of religion to restore the goodness of Creation – the wholeness and integrity of the Interdependent web of all being of which we are a part.  This should be the task of religion – not the shaming and tearing of the web – but the repair of the world.

I have thought about the wholeness and integrity of our lives often in the last month or so.  Religion should repair that – how numb we can become or lost in feeling – either way.  The safest and commonest touch may release a person from a sense of isolation, pain, or even madness.  That is our healing touch – our creative action, our responsible interaction with the world.  Our hands bearing care – or the positive electricity Diane Ackerman wrote about ..surging in the living body.  I sing the body electric – sang Whitman.  When our hands are wise and caring and our minds are clear and respons- ible to the world the clicking, sparking, turning engine of creation hums.  That is our ongoing participation in creation.  Bryan Sykes wrote: It is as if our present world of governments, corporations and committees has blinded us to the possibilities and importance of individual small-scale actions…In this view of human evolution, chance events, individual choice, and contingency are the variables.  This puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on individuals and their actions.”  Creativity occurs when our choices create the conditions for more goodness, wholeness, and life to come into being.  Sometimes it is as simple as friend holding a baby for a while – giving a parent a break.  Sometimes it is as simple as offering a nourishing meal to a busy neighbor.  Last week I listened to the laughter from the Writer’s Workshop going on Tuesday night in our church Women Studies program.  That was the sound of creativity.  Or when Kim Harden asks tough questions about Hatred so that we can each explore our own roots and leaves in the world. 

Too often, when sexuality is spoken of the reference is to acts of procreation or even sex – which are the least of it.  When our bodies and our sexuality are placed into the context of our whole lives every minute becomes the precise anniversary of creation – every moment is the moment of creation. That is our original challenge and our Original Blessing.  Unitarian Universalism affirms this blessing and invites us each to put our minds, hearts, spirits, and bodies to affirm this as well.  It is that I offer to you to celebrate and to remember on this day – that you are each precious and sensing – open and vital creatures – to know that that challenges us but also links us deeply to this world and on our path as free persons together in a covenant of community.