Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“What We Can’t Talk About And How It Can Hurt You”
Rev. Rod Debs
March 13, 2005
This morning I want to talk about Our Whole Lives, and about the taboo that forbids us to talk about it. But first: Why are we living? What are we here for?
Two Christian Scriptures stuck in my mind as a kid, telling me what I’m here for. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount I read: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48, KJV) This perfectionism is deeply rooted in our Western culture, Christian or not. There has always been a little voice in my head—the voice of my mother or father, school teachers, my conscience saying: You can do better. This is not good enough. This is not perfect.
Biblical scholars claim that we misread this passage if we think it calls for the modern notion of perfection. First century Judaism was a purity tradition that might better translate this passage as calling for “wholeness”: Be ye therefore whole and holy before the unnamable almighty. Beyond the prescribed purity codes of behavior, mistakes were OK. Mistakes were the nature of living, of exploring, experimenting, expanding competency. But wholeness meant a rejection of bodily incompleteness or impure behavior, not perfection’s absence of mistakes.
So in recent years when someone asks what is “salvation” for Unitarian Universalism since we seem to be uncomfortable with a God who requires blood sacrifice, human blood in payment for sins of the world, I have been saying that salvation is being whole, not perfection.
What does it mean to be whole rather than partial, incomplete? Last month, Rev. Bob Boerger described Jesus’ way as healthy living. The salvation Jesus taught and lived began with community wholeness, the generous sharing of the common table. Furthermore, Jesus sent his followers out to heal as well as to eat with the people. Not magical faith healing, but the reorientation of our relations to mutual relationships, peaceful integration of our bodies, minds, emotions, with others and with the natural world: healthy living. Not error-free perfection. Not cocoon isolation. Not absolute discipline and control. Rather healthy living in community, wholeness.
A second verse disclosing to the Christian world Jesus’ purpose for humanity: “I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10, KJV) Jesus’ reason for coming was reputed to be his desire that we have “abundant life.”
What is life abundant? There may be different answers for different people. Those desperate destitute who have no hope for abundance in this earthly life have raised their sights to abundance in a glorious afterlife. You and I see the global news of war-torn nations, not only incapable of producing food and obtaining water, but murdered and mutilated by renegade bands of armed youth conscripted to carry out ethnic cleansing, driving tens of thousands of refugees into exile on uninhabitable deserts. I cannot bring myself to criticize the faith that gives people hope for “pie in the sky by and by.” But such otherworldly “abundant life” is not really the message of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus’ message was a call to create the Kingdom of God here among us, blessed life on earth here and now.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but “abundant life” has nothing to do with the gospel of greed from television preachers who promise wealth, jobs, and magical healing if only you mail your check to God, in care of the television ministry. “Abundant life” is not “the one who dies with the most toys wins!” Abundant life is not the American dream of wealth and possessions and privileged life style.
Nor is “abundant life” the path of self-denial, a sacrificial anti-body spirituality of religious piety. You’ve heard the text, “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourself treasures in heaven….” (Matthew 6:19-20, KJV) That’s what I grew up with. Spiritual piety and sacrificial self-denial created both a heavenly reward and a non-material, even anti-body spirituality among the pious. My experience of such spiritual piety is that it bred self-righteousness and mild asceticism, anti-body denial, not “life abundant.” Piety was a constant struggle against the body, fraught with guilt and shame whenever the body reared it’s hungry head.
The abundant life Jesus charged his disciples to create among them was not otherworldly but here and now. Nor was it materialistic greed. Nor was it anti-body sacrifice and spiritual piety. Bob Boerger is right. The abundant life expounded by Jesus is healthy living, physical and relational health that yields joy and peace, endurance and generosity, mutual regard and loving-kindness. Neither otherworldliness nor crass materialism nor disembodied spiritual piety can yield the peace and joy of “abundant life.”
I believe that “abundant life” involves our bodies’ relationships, sensual and intimate relationships of the flesh. How we relate to our own bodies. How we experience the natural world. How we relate bodily to other beings. How could we know the wholeness of “abundant life” without healthy embodiment?!
In America it seems we have internalized a kind of perfectionist discipline demanded by parents, teachers, cops and kings, by bosses, customers, and stockholders. We think that success depends on getting it right, sacrificial discipline, obedience to authority, serving the Master, deferred gratification. Servanthood. Our god is perfection.
In this country we don’t have long lunches that take all afternoon. We don’t have months of vacation as in Europe. We don’t take mid-day siestas as in hotter climates. We don’t begin meetings whenever people arrive. We are driven by the clock, by the narrow profit margin, by providing a more perfectly appealing product to the customer. There is no wiggle room between being perfect and being a loser.
This morning I want to talk about Our Whole Lives. I want to talk about the abundant life that is taboo, yet drives us without conscious thought and without the benefit of public discussion. I want to talk about our fleshly life of sensual and intimate relations, what we can’t talk about in polite company or anywhere else for that matter.
I’ve asked Patti and David Abraham and Melanie Harper to share three things with us: something about how social shame controls us; second, tell us about the Our Whole Lives curriculum jointly created by the UUA (Unitarian Universalist Association) and the UCC (United Church of Christ); third, give us a taste of the material or process of the OWL (Our Whole Lives) curriculum.
. . . .
I enjoy freedom of the pulpit, but the most precious part of life is taboo even to me. Sensual and intimate relations are taboo topics. When I am speaking with you one on one, I don’t ask, how are your intimate, sensual relationships? If I were to raise issues of sensuality or intimacy, you might wonder if I have a hidden, private agenda—lascivious intent. In the pulpit, to speak about sensual and intimate relations is simply in bad taste.
Perhaps it’s just not important to most people! I don’t believe that for a second. Movies don’t sell without bodies-beautiful or sensual intimacy or violence. In fact nothing sells without sensual appeals, bathing beauties on bikes, models selling cars and cleaning products and insurance. The best movies address intimate relationships. There is a thriving global audience for intimate sensual relations or the internet would not offer thousands of web sites that shamelessly display almost every taboo to the privacy of our personal computers.
Relations of sensual intimacy are basic to our whole lives, as basic as food and sleep. Imagine that eating was taboo. Imagine that no one dare talk about what they ate, that sometimes they ate alone or in their car or on a secluded picnic rather than in that one private room at home. What if you had to have a government-issued license to eat with one person. What if you liked to explore forbidden foods, even mild poisons, but there was no one you could talk to about it? What if you binged and felt so guilty and ashamed that you were bulimic, or that you became so guilty for eating that you became anorexic? What if international cuisine or even healthy diet was taboo to talk about, to celebrate or even to mention in public? How would we raise our children to healthy eating if there were no public discourse of eating, free from shame?
Seicus, the Sexuality Education Information Council of the United States, has described our AYS (About Your Sexuality) curriculum for teens to be the best in the nation, the best for thirty years. Now the UUs and Congregationalists have spent a decade of research and over a hundred thousand dollars to create the best course on sensual and intimate relations, Our Whole Lives, with five age-specific curricula including one for adults. This is the best thing that we do as UUs.
If I could talk about it in pastoral conversations or from the pulpit without you wondering what is my personal agenda, I would. But I can’t. I know that you are discovering your own wisdom about the fullness of life. But there are many of us who are also walking wounded. We are bumbling along without the benefit of public discourse or even private wisdom sources. It’s not just politicians or rock stars who are caught acting out destructive intimate relationships. Fifty percent of marriages, our marriages end in divorce. Many more are walking wounded. None of us intended when we said “I do” to have a painful relationship that would end in divorce or go on interminably unhappily. I don’t have to read about a judge using a hydraulic masturbation machine under his courtroom desk to know that dysfunction of intimate, sensual relations strike the best and the brightest.
What I do know is that we need a safe place, a safe process for public discourse on sensual and intimate relations. I believe that we have it in the Our Whole Lives curriculum. I can’t talk about it tastefully from the pulpit, and I don’t think you want me to bring it up to you privately (heaven forbid). What we can’t talk about is hurting us, and it will hurt our children as they grow up and explore sensual and intimate relations.
Frankly, I’m no longer willing to waste my time talking about anything that doesn’t make the blood flow. Life is too short. And precious. I challenge you to dare to enter safe conversation about what matters most in our lives and what is the source of our greatest joy and delight, our greatest pain and sadness. Let’s dare to carefully explore the real core of our relationships. Patti, David and Melanie have been trained as facilitors of Our Whole Lives adult curriculum and are exploring times when you who are willing could hold introductory sessions. Give them your name and contact information.
We Unitarian Universalists owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our community and to our children to become more competent and conversant on healthy, abundant living. I dare you! Thus ends the reading of the infomercial.