Mindful Nation, Mindful Congregation

SERMON at UUFG -- 2012 November 11

You may have heard, there was an election. Up in Ohio, it seems.

Yes, throughout our beautiful Sunshine state, Floridians were breathing a sigh of relief: that this time it didn’t come down to us.

Four days after all 49 other states had reported in, our Florida finally completed counting all the ballots just yesterday. In case you didn’t hear, the winner was Al Gore.

The US elected a president, vice-president, 435 house representatives, 33 senators, and 11 governors, not to mention state and local legislators. We elected politicians, and we generally don’t have a very high opinion of politicians. We tell jokes like: throw a party for honest congressmen, it’ll cost you nothing – just like the party for hardworking congressmen. I saw a bumper sticker -- I wouldn’t put it on my car, but the sentiment is neither unusual nor surprising:

“Politicians, like diapers, should be changed often, and for the same reason.”

Politicians are generally not well liked.

There’s one congressman, though, that I want to talk about: Congressman Ryan from the Midwest. I don’t mean Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district. I mean Congressman Tim Ryan from Ohio’s 13th congressional district. First elected in 2002 at age 29, he was re-elected on Tuesday to his 6th term.

Last March, Tim Ryan came out with a book: A Mindful Nation. Hmm. "A Mindful Nation." Not what I would expect from a sitting congressman. Full title: A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit.

Mindfulness is now a key concept in psychology, referring to a psychological quality that involves:

• “bringing complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis;”
• “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally;”
• “a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is.”

Mindfulness is paying attention to present moment experiences with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is. So it has two aspects:

1. bringing attention to immediate experience – particularly, noting mental events as they happen.
2. being open, curious, and accepting of whatever it is that you’re noticing.

From a calm awareness of bodily functions, of sensations, of emotions, of thoughts as these things arise, wisdom emerges.

That's easy to say. It takes a lot of practice to develop the habit of doing it.

Tim Ryan’s journey to mindfulness began with Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon Kabat-Zinn is himself an interesting guy. Born Jon Kabat in 1944, he hyphenated his last name to Kabat-Zinn when he married Myla Zinn, the daughter of social activist and historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010). Jon, as his father-in-law was, is a man committed to social transformation.

A professor of medicine and a long-time student of the Korean Zen master, Seung Sahn, in 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn integrated medicine and Zen and created MBSR – Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction – and began teaching it at his Stress Reduction Clinic. Today, over 200 medical centers and clinics in the US and elsewhere use the MBSR model.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is the author of, Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness using Mindfulness Meditation; and Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Then, in 2005, Jon Kabat-Zinn came out with another book: Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. There was a 100-page section on mindfulness and politics, so Kabat-Zinn’s publisher mailed a copy to each of the 535 members of Congress. Casting bread upon the waters. You never know. Maybe one of them will read more than a page.

Congressman Tim Ryan in Mindfulness Meditation
at a Public School

And one of them did. Congressman Tim Ryan read it. A couple years later, Ryan went on a 5-day mindfulness meditation retreat led by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Five days of mostly silence, with instructional talks and guidance sprinkled in. Five days of practicing bringing attention to immediate experience -- the mind wandering off, and being brought back. Since then, Congressman Ryan has had a daily mindfulness practice. He says:

“It quiets the mind. It helps you harness more of your energy. It increases your focus and allows you to relax and pay better attention to what you’re doing and to those around you. My football coaches would have loved it. It’s the kind of performance enhancer any athlete would be eager to have. . . . I wrote A Mindful Nation to promote the values of slowing down, taking care of ourselves, being kind, and helping each other.”

With that as prelude, dear friends, I want to talk to you today about my hopes for our congregation, for my ministry with you, what that would look like. We all had a big vote last Tuesday, and you all have another big vote next Sunday. In our Unitarian Universalist congregational polity, I work for no one but you. There is no bishop or denominational hierarchy that I report to. It’s entirely up to the membership to find a minister that suits you, and once you have one, only the minister or the membership can end that sacred relationship. No one else – no outside authority – has any say in that. Next Sunday, this congregation will have a vote on whether this Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville would like to continue with me as your minister.

I appreciate the opportunity this represents. In 2006, you all voted to call me and LoraKim as half-time-each co-ministers. Then, about three years ago, you voted again – to call me as your sole, full-time minister. Now we have a chance to reflect on what our shared ministry together would look like going forward, and ask: is this really what we want to commit to?

It’s a good question. It’s valuable to take the time every so often to revisit that question. That discernment should be hard work. Ideally, it would not be painful work. This time, the question comes up for us in a context of division and hurt feelings. And the fact that that is our context is, itself, the main issue before us. We have avoided the hard work for so long that it is now the painful work.

I want you to know that if we decide to continue endeavoring to walk together in the path of love, then my ministry with you will be committed to the hard work that leads us individually and communally to a better place. This work leads each of us individually to a greater peace and understanding.

The work of this fellowship, at its best, changes its members, transforms them, so that all through their lives, not just at Fellowship, every waking hour of every day, our members display a growing and deepening spiritual maturity. In addition to the transformations of each individual member, this work leads us also to a community that we can know as truly being beloved community.

Beloved community doesn’t just happen because we say we would like it. Right? It takes work. It will take work. I would be derelict in my duty as your minister if I didn’t try to encourage you to the ongoing, never-ending work it takes to grow in wisdom, in emotional intelligence, in the three R’s of resilience, reflection, and relationship.

We’ve got a responsibility – I as minister and you as member or prospective potential member – to try and help ourselves grow so that our congregation can grow – not numerically (that’s secondary) but grow in presence, in understanding, in ability to name and manage our emotions, in nonreactive and nonjudgmental engagement. Our congregation’s going through too much right now. Our members are suffering too much, all down the line, and now’s the time to implement a commitment to the work.

It turns out that "Mindfulness" is a handy way to sum up what is really at the core of the work that is before us. So let me mention what congressman Ryan goes over in his book, and then apply that to our congregation and the discernment that is before us.

Ryan surveys the scientific studies about how mindfulness practice strengthens our capacity for attention, for nonjudgmental sympathetic understanding. He goes on to devote chapters to mindfulness in our schools: how it can increase our children’s attention and kindness. Mindfulness in our hospitals and doctors offices: how it can improve our health and our healthcare system. Mindfulness in our military, police, and firefighters: how it can improve performance and build resiliency for the military and first responders – and how, later on, mindfulness is the path for coming to terms with PTSD. Mindfulness in the workplace: how it can help us rediscover our values and reshape our economy.

Ryan highlights the work of Alan Marlatt in using mindfulness to address our national substance abuse problems. Marlatt is the founder of Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention. Thousands of mental health counselors and therapists are teaching clients mindfulness to help with depression, with social anxiety, with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mental health issues. Midwife Nancy Bardacke, the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting Program has found that expectant parents who learn mindfulness “develop skills for working with the stresses of pregnancy and everyday life.” (163). Others have adapted MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) specifically for teens to equip teens during that very stressful time of life with “the skills they need to keep themselves balanced in a world that can be difficult and complicated for young people.” It trains the brain for resilience and cheerfulness. Oakland’s “Mind Body Awareness Project” is bringing mindfulness training to gang members. Mindfulness enables 12- and 13-year-old boys “see for the first time that it’s OK to be who they are and that they don’t have to belong to a gang to attain self-fulfillment.” (164).

What we see in our nation and, in microcosm, in our congregation, is polarization that comes from reactivity. Something occurs, we don’t like it, the limbic system is triggered, and we just react. Stress levels go up; the capacity to empathize goes down.

Reactivity in our schools produces increased stress from the negative judgmentalism of peers, which, at the extreme, includes bullying -- and a corresponding inability of bully victims to get unstuck from the role of victim.

Reactivity in our military and police leads to a mentality that, in the extreme, is expressed as “shoot ‘em all and let God sort it out.” Traumatic stress levels can lead to PTSD for the rest of their lives. Some frustration and anger is inherent in the work they do. Absence of skills to manage those feelings is not.

Reactivity shows up in disease rates, and pain, and pain medication, and self-medication with alcohol or drugs, licit or illicit.

Reactivity shows up in gang loyalty to one’s insiders and gang violence toward those seen as rivals.

Reactivity shows up in, “I just don’t understand those people.”

Well, there you go. There’s our work: to understand them. Which includes also understanding ourselves.

There is a way to learn how to manage our reactivity. We don’t suppress it. We don’t judge ourselves, or others, wrong for having a reaction. We don’t indulge the reaction either. We notice it, and are able to make a conscious decision about what to do with that reactive energy.

There is no easy way to health, no magic bullet. It’s not easy to get out and exercise everyday. That’s a hard discipline. But the heart attack you could have prevented hurts a lot more. We can do the hard work, learn how to manage conflict without getting hurt and wounded, or we can continue in the cycles of painful conflict every so many years.

It is almost useless to say, "Don’t be so reactive." If we haven’t been training ourselves in nonjudgmental awareness, in identifying our feelings, in empathizing with ourselves and with others, then when the reactivity comes – and it does come from time to time for everyone – we have no resources for managing it.

Mindfulness is a crucial resource, if we commit to learn to use it. If a politician can learn it, then we can, too, can't we? Nonviolent communication is another potent resource. By "nonviolent communication," I mean both speaking and listening in ways that at no level treat any being like an object and that at every level affirm every being’s sense of value and security. Our congregation doesn't have these skills. To get them will require work. It will require our members coming to classes and practice groups.

Even if we were all really well-trained and practiced at both mindfulness and nonviolent communication, we'd still have problems. Problems, there will always be. As Congressman Tim Ryan says:

“We will still misplace our keys. We will still forget people’s names. We will still say and do things that may hurt others, including those we love. We will say the exact wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. But in each of these instances, with mindfulness we may do it just a bit less. We may see the humor in our mistakes and be able to laugh at ourselves more. We may be just a little less critical of others, and of ourselves. Or we may deal with our mistakes more quickly and with a more sincere and kind heart. We may more easily forgive the people who have hurt us. We may sit down and have civil political conversations with those who strongly disagree with us.”

And so I have a dream. I have a dream of a congregation that draws on the first source of the living tradition we share:

“direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder affirmed in all cultures that moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” 

I want us to be attuned to “transcending mystery and wonder,” yet, even more, I want us to see “direct experience” as fundamental. I want us to recognize that direct experience requires paying attention to.

I have a dream of this congregation as a place that first, foremost, and always, is accepting, welcoming, and radically hospitable. If certain of your fellow members aren’t ready to do the work, then they aren’t ready to do the work, and that’s OK. It’s really, really OK for you, or anyone else, to be exactly where you are in your spirit journey, and to remain as what might seem to me as “stuck” there for as long as it takes for you. I have no way of knowing what seeds may be germinating below the surface, but my faith is that by offering the water of unconditional acceptance, I do all that can be done to support the eventual sprouting of those seeds. I have a dream of a congregation where everyone who just needs a comforting presence for an hour, . . . or a month, . . . or 10 years, can find it here: a congregation where no one is castigated for not working hard enough.

At the same time, I have a dream of a congregation where the majority is prepared to explicitly embrace the intentional work of emotional and spiritual growth and deepening: a congregation where most of the members most of the time are able to carry through on a resolve to set aside time each day to journal, to study the texts that feel to them to be wise and instructive, to sit in quiet, still mindfulness 20 minutes – and are able to cultivate the habit of returning throughout their day to attention to immediate experience.

I have a dream of a congregation that mostly comes to Fellowship on Sunday, because that’s part of the work, and that also comes to a smaller spiritual practice group once or twice a month because that’s also part of this joy-making work.

I have a dream of myself also developing the habits that go with being the person I want to be. I’ve got the habit of meditating for an hour a day. I need other habits – exercising the body more each day, which, we know, also improves cognitive, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being. I need habits of calling you and visiting you more often, of bringing out my care for you in ways that you can more readily recognize it.

I’ve been calm in the midst of this storm. You might not know the reason I'm not bothered – much – by a need to be protective. It’s because I love you no matter what. I know I need to be more consistent about showing that love in other ways, too – ways that can be recognized even in the midst of reactivity – mine, yours. That is the explicit growth edge toward which my energy and my learning will be going.

I have a dream of a minister and congregation that will arrive at an expectational mission: a statement that very briefly indicates the work that is expected of each member to engage insofar as they are able. Something like what a Seattle congregation has:

"We covenant to awaken spirit, nurture hope, and inspire action."

Or what a New York congregation has:

“Healing spiritual disconnection by helping each other listen to our deepest selves, open to life’s gifts, and serve needs greater than our own.”

Something like that – something that indicates the work we are here to do. By itself, such a statement isn't terribly impressive; it's so brief and general. Yet these examples are specific enough to guide us in developing programs. The brevity and generality of the mission statement need to be complemented with an array of carefully designed programs to flesh out the meaning of that work: programs focused on learning how to listen to our deepest selves, how to awaken spirit, how to open to life’s gifts, how to nurture hope, how to inspire action or serve needs greater than our own, or whatever it is that we decide is our mission.

I have a dream of a congregation that has an expectational mission, that designs programs that specify how we embody that mission, and that shows up in significant numbers at those programs.

This I believe is my work. This, I believe, is our work.

If you are ready to commit to that vision (while understanding that the vision also provides for taking breaks from the work to just bask in a community of acceptance and affirmation for as long as you need to) then you may say so with your vote next Sunday.

If that’s not the vision that most of you want, then, you all, God bless you, do need a different minister. And I need a different congregation.

There you have it. If you have any questions for me, or anything you want me to hear today, I’ll be up here, starting about 5 minutes after the service today, for anything you’d like ask or share.

May our best wisdom guide us, and I look forward to your collective decision.

Amen.