Somewhere Near Your Heart

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

September 30, 2007 

During the pleasure-reading phase of my summer reading, I read a novel by Charles Baxter called The Feast of Love.  [It’s just been released as a movie.]  The main character is a man who repeatedly makes choices that push people away from him and keep him from getting the love he deeply craves for his life. Bradley seems not to understand that there’s any pattern to his actions, and he is completely oblivious to the ways his own choices contribute to his predicament.  The deepest longings and dreams of his spirit are expressed in art, but he has stopped doing his best work because he is embarrassed by its passion and simple beauty.  Instead he does empty nihilist daubs of mud and black paint and coffee grounds.

A new neighbor who spends an evening with Bradley accidentally sees his more powerful work, and hears him disparage it as naïve and immature.  Later the neighbor muses, “An interesting man. . . he seemed to be living somewhere deep inside himself, perhaps in a secret passageway connected to his heart.”

I thought, when I read that:  I know where that passageway is.  I have lived there.  I still live there all too often.

Do you know where that passageway is?  Have you ever lived there, somewhere near your heart but not quite all the way in?

Last week Leslie spoke to us of denial.  It is, she said, a refusal to acknowledge truths about our world, our situation, our lives, and our own feelings that are troubling in some way—too daunting, too overwhelming, too embarrassing, too painful or even too important for us to willingly admit.  Yet whatever it is we seek to deny or ignore, the first victim is always ourselves.  The first step toward living in denial is to lock ourselves away from the wellsprings of our own life.

To live in denial is to live as if everything that is wrong in the world is all right with us.  It is to ignore the ways in which we contribute to the very things we want to change.  It is to live as if our choices and actions don’t have an impact on our own lives and on the lives of others.

We can only live this way so long as we keep ourselves barricaded somewhere near our heart, dulled and numbed and distanced from what most deeply matters to us. 

Last week Leslie said our habit of denial is fed by fear.  She said:  “We fear death so we deny it.  We fear loss so we deny it.  We fear what might be happening to our children so we deny the problem in our marriage.  We fear we will not find the right words and so we deny a friend support in a time of need. We fear debt, so we ignore the fact we are not paying off the credit card each month.  We fear that the polar ice cap is melting, that our community has problems not easily solved; we fear [being] at war.”  

When we begin to chip away at the wall of denial between our thoughts and our lives, we see so many situations that seem to ask so much of us.  How can we face it all?  The world seems filled with intractable problems and crises.  Our own lives are too full of demand and necessity.  Our families are so precious to us and seem so fragile.  Our desire for love in our lives is so urgent and so raw.  We are afraid of hurt, of pain, of loss; we are afraid we might not have the resources to meet whatever need we are trying not to acknowledge. 

So we slip into the silent secret passageway and close the door on our heart.  We live muffled, disempowered, detached from our own feelings and from the world that is calling for us.  We keep ourselves distracted from our longing hearts and the calling world with busy-ness, with games of Solitaire, with entertainments that don’t feed our spirits.  We distract ourselves from giving the person in front of us the love they need, the love that could awaken us to our own capacity for loving, by focusing our imagination on romantic fantasies or by keeping checklists of qualities for a perfect partner whose real purpose is to keep us alone and safe.  We work desperately at jobs we never planned or really decided to have.  We try not to notice that the meaning of living this way is despair. 

Recently I’ve been reading about another kind of character, a real person this time.  Some of you in the medical world might even know his name.  He’s Dr. Paul Farmer, a physician who since he was twenty years old has divided his time between a tiny town in Haiti, where he has created a comprehensive medical clinic, and the Brigham hospitals in Boston, where he is the head of the Infectious Diseases service.  Farmer has become a controversial but effective leader in the World Health Organization’s efforts to control tuberculosis in populations of prisoners and desperately poor people. 

Tracy Kidder, who profiled Farmer in a book called Mountains Beyond Mountains, says the doctor never seems to rest.  Every moment he’s awake he is working for one of his three main priorities:  Patients, poor people, and prisoners.  He follows the teachings of liberation theology assuming that God calls humankind to have a preferential option for the poor and the oppressed, and he works constantly to address the terrible effects of an economic system that treats human beings as expendable if their medical treatment is too expensive.   He raises funds; he lobbies politicians, he consults with countless medical colleagues; he sees patients in Haiti, in Boston, in Cuba, in Russia, and in Peru.  He celebrates his daughter’s birthday in Paris on his way from a Cuban conference on AIDS to a Russian conference on prisons, finding a moment to get her the perfect present in the airport. 

Farmer has almost too much life.  He isn’t easy to live with or be around—and yet his life is purified by its purposefulness.  He has accomplished amazing things. He’s joyful, at peace with himself, and loving. And the people who choose to accept and share his priorities while remaining in close relationship with him find themselves strengthened, nourished, and energized by his company. 

The difference between the real Paul Farmer and the fictional Bradley isn’t just a matter of hard work by one and laziness in the other; it’s not just that one is more focused than the other; it isn’t intelligence or talent.  If Bradley lives somewhere near his heart, Farmer lives wholeheartedly. The problems he works with are as huge and daunting as any in the world, but he does not live in fear and denial; he engages with them in the full depth and power of his own values, dreams, and desires. 

Living wholeheartedly is our way to break through the wall of denial and reconnect with our own life and our power to engage with the world.

Our first task is to awaken from our muffled state and accept the realities we live in.  We are surrounded every moment, even the most terrible and fearful of moments, by beauty and meaning, by hope and by love.  There are possible connections with other human beings all around us.  At the same time we live in a world that also gives us loss and pain, we feel grief over what has been lost, over what is not yet true, and over what may soon be lost for all time.  This is the overwhelming and often daunting world we live in, and if we are going to face it head on and genuinely embrace it, we need to know where our strength, our courage, our sustenance and support are going to come from. 

 This is what we are doing together, here in this congregation:  We are learning how to embrace life in its richness and its fearsomeness, its beauty and its bounty.  Here we lift up all that is our life; here we invite each other to share the truths of what we live with every day.  Here we consider and invoke and celebrate together that which sustains us, nourishes us, and brings joy and beauty and goodness into our lives.  When you visit the Time and Talent survey and pledge some level of involvement this year, that’s what you are committing yourself to be part of.

 The Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, a theologian and the current president of our Starr King seminary in Berkeley, says that if we are to stay fully engaged in our lives and in the world, what we’re doing together here is essential.  She says we must create spaces and times when we can feel the presence of the beauty and sustaining power that gives us courage and strength to risk being fully awake and alive.  Parker uses the ancient word Sabbath to describe this time—meaning not just the hour and fifteen minutes we spend together here in worship, but a whole day when we “cultivate in ourselves a deep and sustained knowledge of the beauty of life, the realities of sorrow, the goodness of one another, the richness of the world’s religious wisdom, and the providence of life’s bounty.”  Parker invites us to resist our culture of denial and half-heartedness, a culture she says has lost track of the meaning of life. 

So today is our Sabbath, the day we set aside to spend this time together in the presence of ultimate values, ultimate truth, in the presence of what is holy to us.  Can we live in the light of that Truth for one more hour after this hour is over, for just this one day?  Living in that way has immense power to set us free in the rest of our lives from denial, to set us free from fear, to set us free to admit how much we love and long for life.  This one day, can we practice bringing our whole hearts to the moments of our everyday life? 

There is extraordinary energy in living this way.  But we don’t need to suddenly change our entire life; we can take just one step, open one door, make one connection or one different choice.  We can spend one more hour than usual in wholehearted engagement with all that is our life and with the world we live in.

Can you do that?

I’m not suggesting that in awakening to our real life we will all become Paul Farmers.  I’m not a believer in “The Message” or whatever the latest version is of the power of positive thinking; I don’t think that if you just give up negative thoughts the whole universe will instantly transform around you.  But we ourselves might change.  We won’t become Paul Farmer, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Wynton Marsalis.  But we might become more of ourselves.   

Are you living in a secret passageway, somewhere near your heart?  Open the door. . .take a step inside. 

Life calls to us like a lover, like the voice in the Chamber Singers’ anthem from the Song of Solomon: “Set me as a seal upon your heart.”  Wearing our commitment to our own love of life as our seal, we can face all the immensity of the world and the depth of our own longing and hope—and go out to meet them.

Let us awaken to the world we live in. Let us awaken to our own passion, our power and our promise. Let us awaken to the possibilities and the needs calling to us.  Let us awaken to our place in the family of things.