Every once in a while when Duane and I are talking about Washington state, the name Walla Walla comes up. Have you ever heard of Walla Walla, Washington? It’s "the town so nice they named it twice." Now I’ve told you everything I know about Walla Walla, "the town so nice they named it twice."

Some things are worth doing twice. Among the first five books of the Bible, for example (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), the Book of Deuteronomy is nearly a word-for-word repetition of the most important writings excerpted out of the previous four books. The name "Deuteronomy" means "second law." It was written much later than the other books, when the people of Israel were going through troubled times and needed to be reminded of their earlier, glorious history and the covenant that God had made with their ancestors, Abraham and Moses. It was a sort of refresher course, pep talk and stern lecture all rolled into one.

Now I hardly think that my past sermons qualify for inclusion in a new canon. Nor do I believe that this community is going through troubled times. But a refresher course or a pep talk… Well, that might be… refreshing. And so, by request, I am going to recapitulate today in one sermon a four-part sermon series that I originally offered in late 1998 and early 1999. For some of you, this will be new information, while for others it will sound familiar.

I called the series "The Four Rules of Life," though in fact I tend to think of them less as rules than as guidelines, ways of being in the world which, I believe, can help us to keep our priorities straight, help us to know what to do, and help us to make a positive difference to the world. Following these guidelines can provide you with a framework within which to lead an ethical and courageous life, to draw on inner resources that you might not know you have, and to be someone whom others trust and respect. You can become even more the kind of person the world needs now.

The guidelines are these: Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and detach from the outcome. They aren’t very complicated, they’re pretty easy to remember, and they go together nicely as a package. In fact, although I’ll be talking about them one at a time, they are actually pretty much integrated into a whole behavioral set, and they are somewhat interdependent. To some degree, you can’t do one without the others.

Showing up can simply mean showing up, physically being there, keeping your commitments: to drive the carpool, to attend the Board meeting, to go to your in-laws for the holidays, to be at your children’s or grandchildren’s sports events no matter what. In this fast-paced world of conflicting and seductive demands on our time and energies, simply showing up over and over again can be a kind of heroism.

You may recall that Cal Ripken broke a world record for consecutive baseball games played when he showed up for his 2,607^th game in a row in the summer of 1995. An editorial in The Washington Post commented

There is another kind of showing up as well, which is the way I like to think of discipline. I had a long history of resistance to the idea of discipline until I learned in one of my seminary classes that the word "discipline" comes from the Latin root "discipere," which means "to grasp or comprehend, to seize." Now I could imagine that a discipline was like a rope hung between posts along the edge of a dark path. You seize the rope and make your way along the path, and the rope (the discipline) helps you to reach your destination.

Discipline is about movement; it’s an active process, a movement toward something deeper. Discipline is not the same as a habit, which is simply a repetition that keeps you in the same place like a hamster running around on a wheel. Discipline is about being on a specific path moving in a specific direction, with a desired outcome in mind.

And of course, a lot of discipline is simply about showing up, over and over again. Just showing up. Some professional athletes say that 60% of working out is getting to the gym. The showing up isn’t just about physically going somewhere or doing something, though that’s clearly a part of it. But showing up is also something that happens inside. It’s about being fully present in this moment, and it’s also about the discipline of staying with something, even when that may not be particularly pleasant, or something whose rewards are not immediately visible.

Discipline can be the daily exercise workout, or the daily or regular attention to developing a skill or talent — practicing a musical instrument, learning a new language. Coming here regularly on Sunday mornings can be a discipline. There are people who read the newsletter and then decide whether they’ll go to church or not based on what’s scheduled for that morning. That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean coming to church every week, week in and week out, because you know that showing up here feeds you in some way even when you can’t tell ahead of time what that way might be. And you know that your regular presence strengthens the entire community. It’s good for you to be here, and it’s good for the whole congregation to have you here.

You could follow a spiritual discipline as simple as pausing to give thanks before each meal, or a more demanding one such as a daily practice of meditation, prayer, reflection, or writing. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the discipline is. The point is that it be something that is going to help you grow and deepen, and that it be regular, steady, that you do it no matter what. Just do it. Show up at the gym, sit down on the piano bench, on the pew in church, on the meditation cushion. Be there.

Following a discipline can help you to develop a strong inner sense of authority, a personal authority that is an important element in developing true strength of character. Psychologist Alice Miller tells us that one of the tragedies of childhood is when a child is disciplined so harshly from outside that it never has the chance to develop any inner authority. A discipline imposed strictly from the outside can rob us of our own authority, while one that comes from within, a discipline that we choose freely and follow gladly, can help us to learn that we can count on ourselves, that we have an inner authority which can be trusted.

This is such an important expression of our Unitarian Universalist values, our belief that the ultimate authority lies not with someone outside — some Pope or bishop — and not with a creed handed to us from generations past — but that the ultimate authority must be the individual human conscience as it is most highly and fully developed. To develop and deepen and intensify our own conscience, our own inner authority, is one of the most compelling tasks for us as religious liberals.

This task of being disciplined in order to develop a reliable inner authority is a spiritual task. And although they might not immediately appear that way, that’s what all four of these guidelines are; they are spiritual tasks which will help you in your soul development.

There is a quality of being completely in the present that accompanies showing up and paying attention. There is nothing but this moment; the present is all there is. When we aren’t paying attention, when our minds are idling and we’re going through the motions of our thousand-fold daily tasks, we are unlikely to be in the present at all. How much of our lives we spend rehashing the past — going over the memories of happy experiences or (more likely) revisiting old unpleasant ones, occupying our attention with regret and resentment. For many of us, nearly as much time goes into anticipating the future, fantasizing about the next project we’ll undertake when this one is done, imagining our children when they are older, looking forward to the next vacation or the next pay raise or the next lover. Yet the present is all we have —this moment, and this moment, and this moment. That’s all we can live, all we can bring our vitality and energy to: this moment.

I’m also talking about the kind of paying attention that fully involves the senses: paying attention to how our senses describe the world. "Here," they say to us, "feast on this! Isn’t it delicious? Look at that. How splendid! Notice this! How marvelous!" I’m reminded of the lines from a hymn we sing here frequently. "Wake now my senses and hear the earth call/Feel the deep power of being in all." This is what happens in soul-work, in spiritual development — we feel in a most intimate way, directly through our senses, the deep power of being that moves through all things, that animates our life and the lives of all beings in the cosmos. And because of that sensual awareness of the deep power of being which moves through all of us and everything else, how can we help but feel connected to it all? Paying attention is an act of connection, and connection is what religion is all about.

Now when I talk about telling the truth, I don’t intend to invite a lot of speculation along the lines of "what is truth?" This isn’t about abstract philosophy; it’s about your every day life and mine. When I say "truth," I mean the kind where you know darn well what the truth is — you’re just not sure you can bring yourself to say it. I’m talking about the kind of situation when you have done something stupid, selfish, mean, irresponsible, dishonest or embarrassing, and you don’t want to admit it. It’s old news, but it’s such a powerful example of what I’m talking about: Who among us doesn’t know exactly how Bill Clinton must have felt when confronted by questions about his relationship with a White House intern, and who among us doesn’t understand the temptation to lie in order to get out of the mess we’ve made?

In fact, who among us has never told a lie? Of course we’ve all lied at times, and not just as children. So let’s just get that one out of the way right from the start: I don’t always tell the truth, and you don’t either.

So here I stand with my two conflicting beliefs (that’s one definition of a liberal, you know — someone who can hold two conflicting truths at the same time): one is my life rule that we should tell the truth, and the other is my awareness that, as flawed human beings who may strive for perfection but will never be perfect, and who live in complicated circumstances with conflicting demands, we won’t — we can’t — always tell the truth.

But we can do our best to move in the direction of truth-telling. Remember the discipline, like the rope along the dark path that helps you find the way? Perhaps we can learn to develop the discipline of telling the truth as gently and as lovingly as possible.

When I met yesterday with the Worship Associates, they were saying how wonderful it is to get feedback from you after a worship service they have prepared, and how good it feels to hear "That was great! I really liked that!" But they have made the commitment to be Worship Associates because they want to learn something, and some of that learning could come from caring, truthful feedback about aspects of their services that could have been better. There’s an art to telling the truth, which involves, first, checking to see if a truth would be welcomed (sometimes it’s better just to say nothing). Timing matters, too; a helpful criticism can probably be heard better after a day or two has passed than just as they are stepping out of the chancel. Third, check your motive; if you intend to help someone learn how to do better, then be helpful — explain why something didn’t work for you, and make a suggestion about what would have worked better.

My hope for this community is that we can learn to be a place where it is safe to tell the truth, where it is helpful to hear the truth, and where truth is welcome as the basis for trust and safety.

Why? Because it’s good for the world, and it’s good for your soul.

As religious people, ask yourselves these questions: What kind of world do you want to live in? One that is authentically based in trust? Or one where you can’t know whether to trust or not? What responsibility do you have to create and maintain that world? How will your embrace or avoidance of the truth further the healing of the broken world we live in?

As for your soul… The soul is that part of us which is the most authentic and unencumbered; it’s the gate through which we experience our connection to the sacred. A bright soul lives with the truth as its sun. So when we tell lies, even little, supposedly harmless ones, it’s like acid dripping on our integrity and eating away at it. We damage our souls when we stain them with the poison of deception and untruth; and when we damage our souls, we diminish or lose entirely our capacity to be in relationship with the most meaningful part of existence — we lose our connection to the sacred.

Ultimately, we have to answer to ourselves, to that deepest white-hot place inside us where we are incapable of false denials. Perhaps there are people who can avoid doing this, but I doubt it. I doubt that in the final analysis they can turn away from the knowledge of the damage that is done by lying. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that ultimately we owe truthful speech only to God. I feel that way as well — I try to live my life with the awareness that ultimately I can not lie to God, because to me, God is the great truth that lies at the heart of the universe. And that means that I can’t lie to myself, not really. Whether or not you believe in God, I hope that you, too, are able to find that place deep inside yourself where you are incapable of lying. The more you are able to stay in touch with that white-hot place of truth, the more you will be able to live your life with honesty and integrity and self-respect.

…and detachment. Here comes the hard part, the guideline that people have found the most challenging: detach from the outcome. When I offered this sermon series three years ago, this was the one that people had the most trouble with (although it’s also the one most mentioned as helpful). One person told me that he has applied this "rule" to his golf game, and seen surprising results; another told me she reminds herself to detach from the outcome every time she goes into court to present a case.

It is a basic Buddhist teaching that human suffering comes from attachment, and the way to alleviate suffering in the world is to become non-attached to things and to people. Non-attachment to outcomes falls into the same realm.

This idea of detaching from the outcome is a very difficult one for Americans to grasp. Ours is a society that is built on a dream of the future. The concept of the frontier which called us westward for three centuries, Horatio Alger’s vision of rags to riches, the myth of cities whose streets were paved with gold, where immigrants could become part of the mainstream and create new lives for themselves — all these aspects of the "American Dream" are about deliberately and intentionally attaching to the outcome, attaching to the desired future and not letting go. Ours is a culture of aspiration, of ambition, and of appetite. Hitching our wagon to the star of a desired outcome is part of who we are.

So it’s important to clarify that "detach from the outcome" is not the same as not caring what happens. Not only is it fine to care what happens; it’s also very important that we care what happens. Changes get made because people care about what is going to happen and they work hard to make certain desirable results come about.

But being detached from the outcome means approaching the matter with a certain degree of openness and flexibility. It means not being so focused on one specific outcome that you invariably will be disappointed or upset — because it’s unlikely that anything will turn out exactly as you wish. Detaching from the outcome can free you from the potential pain of disappointment, bitterness, and polarization.

Detaching from the outcome might mean being willing to question your agenda, your desired outcome, and being open to the possibility that some other result could actually be preferable. If you work with groups of people as I do, you have surely had the experience of coming into a situation with a pre-set idea of what is supposed to happen, and the group then coming up with a different idea which turns out to be better. This will happen more easily if everyone is committed to finding a good outcome, without being attached to a particular outcome.

If you’re invested in a particular outcome, it’s hard to let go of the investment and admit that you might have been wrong even when the outcome has turned out the way you wanted it to be and it’s clearly not all that great. So another part of detaching from the outcome is about being willing and able to acknowledge it when you were wrong.

Still another part is not being so focused on your own agenda that your attention goes exclusively toward the final result and you lose sight of the process. "Trust the process" is one of those mottoes that I heard over and over again while I was in seminary.. Trusting the process means learning to stand back and allow things to unfold naturally. Sometimes it may not be at all clear what should happen, no less what is likely to happen. One has to simply trust the process, allow people to muddle around a bit and try stuff until it becomes more clear what the desired outcome is. It’s in the muddling around that the best learning often comes.

It’s been helpful for me to remember this lesson as this congregation embarks on a multi-layered process including a new long-range plan, a second capital campaign, improvements to the building, and the transition into becoming a mid-size church. Over the last month or so, I’ve attended several intense meetings where, when they were over, I think everyone left scratching their heads and asking "What just happened? Did we do anything at that meeting?" But I have the image of all of us good-hearted and skillful people circling around and around, beginning to close in on what some desirable outcomes might be while not attaching to them. Gradually we’re getting more clarity about how to proceed, what steps need to be taken next, while the goals are still somewhat unrefined. The congregation as a whole —those of you who wish to be involved — will have plenty of opportunity to join the circle and have some input into the decisions about our future which will need to be made in the upcoming months. We all will get plenty of practice in showing up, paying attention, lovingly and helpfully telling the truth, and detaching from the outcome!

Church can be — and should be — the place where we are invited and encouraged to become our best selves. It should be a place where we are invited to develop authentic relationships of integrity, where we are encouraged to behave ethically, to shoulder responsibilities and keep our promises. I want this for you in your personal development, and I want it for the world, because the world needs reliable, ethical, loving truth-tellers who are flexible and creative.

The world needs us, and we need to be prepared to respond by bringing our best selves to this broken world. "Then shall bloom in song and fragrance/harmony of thought and deed,/fruits of peace and love and justice/where today we plant the seed."

Closing Words "My High Resolve," by Howard Thurman

In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading presence of theHoly, my heart wiispers: Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in good times or in tempests, I may not forget that to which my life is committed. Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.
 

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