Open to the Grandeur and Glory of Life
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
May 15, 2022
Our scripture for this morning comes from 2 Corinthians 9:8-11 and I will be reading it from the Message version.
8-11 God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist puts it,
He throws caution to the winds,
giving to the needy in reckless abandon.
His right-living, right-giving ways
never run out, never wear out.
This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.
At this time of year, I find myself reflecting and reminiscing about my own graduation ceremonies over the years. My high school graduation was held outside at Zolliner Stadium in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The graduates sat in full sun in the same place where the Zolliner Pistons (who became the Detroit Pistons) played professional basketball outdoors back in the day. We moved back to this location at the last minute after a brief storm came up which made it miserably hot in the sun. Most of what I remember is sweating a lot. I also had to leave immediately after my graduation party that day to get to the camp where I was to become a camp counselor – the same camp where one year later I would meet Sue.
My undergraduate college commencement at Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois was interesting as well. Our commencement speaker was the Mayor of Gary, Indiana. They went all out. He had graduated from my college and was doing some great work in cleaning up the city of Gary. Earlier when I started college, I remember watching on the news military tanks being moved into downtown Gary as the violence in the town had escalated. Things have changed immensely in Gary since that day, greatly due to my commencement speaker.
When I received my Master’s Degree, we were all lined up in the basement of the Library at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois awaiting our processional. Our commencement speaker had been kept a secret until he arrived to greet us all in the basement. Later, we found out this was mostly due to his controversial status with people at the time. But it came as a surprise as the political advisor to Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson, made his way through the graduates, shaking our hands, and looking for a table to sit at to cut down his message. See, he was told he had 15 minutes, but his speech was almost 40 minutes. I was standing nearby as he argued why he deserved more time. It was awkward.
My doctoral hooding ceremony with George Fox Evangelical Seminary in Oregon was probably the most beautiful of my graduation experiences. Our speaker was one of my professors, Len Sweet, who not only challenged us but spoke a charge to us to step up to the challenges of our world with being like Christ. My family, along with many from my Quaker Meeting came to celebrate the occasion in Beaverton, Oregon. It was a beautiful and memorable event.
Over the years, I have often thought what I would say if I was asked to give a commencement speech. And immediately my mind goes to the many commencement speeches that have lived on after they have been given, such as
Chadwick Boseman’s speech at Howard University in 2018 when he said, “Purpose is an essential element of you. It is the reason you are on the planet at this particular time in history.”
Or there was Steve Jobs’ speech at Stanford University in 2005, where he said almost prophetically, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet – keep looking.”
Or how about the speech Oprah Winfrey gave at Harvard in 2013 where she said, "Learn from every mistake because every experience, encounter, and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are. And then figure out what is the next right move. And the key to life is to develop an internal moral, emotional G.P.S. that can tell you which way to go."
Or one last one from David Foster Wallace speaking at Kenyon College in 2005 where he said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated.”
These were all in the top 15 of all-time commencement speeches in history, but the one that I believe speaks to our condition whether graduating or not and continues to make the list of top commencement speeches is from Naropa University in 2015. Where Quaker Parker Palmer gave the commencement address. Many consider it the best commencement message every given.
This morning, I want to share some of Parker’s words. These are not words just for those graduating – these are pieces of immense wisdom that we can all take with us and work to develop in our daily lives. Palmer labeled them “The 6 advices for living with wholeheartedness.” He starts by saying,
Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart.
What I really mean…is be passionate, fall madly in love with life.
Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you.
No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”
He goes on to say,
Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.
To grow in love and service, you, I, all of us, must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success…Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn - that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.
Palmer’s second point of advice speaks to the difficult art of living with opposite truths and speaks of inner wholeness. Palmer says,
As you integrate ignorance and failure into your knowledge and success, do the same with all the alien parts of yourself. Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egotism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief. Everyone has a shadow…
But when you are able to say, “I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,” the shadow’s power is put in service of the good. Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection, it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of your life.
As a person who…has made three deep dives into depression along the way, I do not speak lightly of this. I simply know that it is true.
As you acknowledge and embrace all that you are, you give yourself a gift that will benefit the rest of us as well. Our world is in desperate need of leaders who live what Socrates called “an examined life.”
In critical areas like politics, religion, business, and the mass media, too many leaders refuse to name and claim their shadows because they don’t want to look weak. With shadows that go unexamined and unchecked, they use power heedlessly in ways that harm countless people and undermine public trust in our major institutions.
In Parker’s third piece of advice, he calls for extending this courtesy to others and treating them with the same kindness that we do our own:
As you welcome whatever you find alien within yourself, extend that same welcome to whatever you find alien in the outer world. I don’t know any virtue more important these days than hospitality to the stranger, to those we perceive as “other” than us.
The old majority in this society, people who look like me, is on its way out. By 2045 the majority of Americans will be people of color… Many in the old majority fear that fact, and their fear, shamelessly manipulated by too many politicians, is bringing us down. The renewal this nation needs will not come from people who are afraid of otherness in race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.
Palmers fourth piece of advice addresses the small-minded lists and unimaginative standards that measure all the wrong metrics of “productivity” and “progress.” Palmer urges:
Take on big jobs worth doing — jobs like the spread of love, peace, and justice. That means refusing to be seduced by our cultural obsession with being effective as measured by short-term results. We all want our work to make a difference — but if we take on the big jobs and our only measure of success is next quarter’s bottom line, we’ll end up disappointed, dropping out, and in despair.
Our heroes take on impossible jobs and stay with them for the long haul because they live by a standard that trumps effectiveness. The name of that standard, I think, is faithfulness — faithfulness to your gifts, faithfulness to your perception of the needs of the world, and faithfulness to offering your gifts to whatever needs are within your reach.
The tighter we cling to the norm of effectiveness the smaller the tasks we’ll take on, because they are the only ones that get short-term results… Care about being effective, of course, but care even more about being faithful…to your calling, and to the true needs of those entrusted to your care.
You won’t get the big jobs done in your lifetime, but if at the end of the day you can say, “I was faithful,” I think you’ll be okay.
In his fifth point of advice, Palmer echoes Tolstoy’s letters to Gandhi on why we hurt each other and offers:
Since suffering as well as joy comes with being human, I urge you to remember this:
Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.
Sometimes we aim that violence at ourselves, as in overwork that leads to burnout or worse, or in the many forms of substance abuse; sometimes we aim that violence at other people — racism, sexism, and homophobia often come from people trying to relieve their suffering by claiming superiority over others.
The good news is that suffering can be transformed into something that brings life, not death. It happens every day.
Parker says, I’m 76 years old, I now know many people who’ve suffered the loss of the dearest person in their lives. At first they go into deep grief, certain that their lives will never again be worth living. But then they slowly awaken to the fact that not in spite of their loss, but because of it, they’ve become bigger, more compassionate people, with more capacity of heart to take in other people’s sorrows and joys. These are broken-hearted people, but their hearts have been broken open, rather than broken apart.
So, every day, exercise your heart by taking in life’s little pains and joys — that kind of exercise will make your heart supple, the way a runner makes a muscle supple, so that when it breaks, (and it surely will,) it will break not into a fragment grenade, but into a greater capacity for love.
In his sixth and final piece of wisdom, Palmer quotes the immortal words of Saint Benedict — “daily, keep your death before your eyes”— and, echoes Rilke’s view of mortality, by counseling,
If you hold a healthy awareness of your own mortality, your eyes will be opened to the grandeur and glory of life, and that will evoke all of the virtues I’ve named, as well as those I haven’t, such as hope, generosity, and gratitude. If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.
Folks, what Parker Palmer was addressing was not just a set of graduates from Naropa University, but he is sharing wisdom with us all for life in this present moment. This is timeless wisdom that I hope we take in and make part of our lives. I believe we all need this message, today, and as Parker said, may our eyes be opened to the grandeur and glory of life!
Now, as we center down and enter waiting worship, let us take a moment to ponder the following queries:
· Am I passionate and falling madly in love with this life?
· How might I introduce myself to my “shadow side” this week?
· In what ways do I need to work on embracing “otherness”?
· How am I transforming my suffering into something that brings life?