"An Unexpected Break"

READING

The reading this morning is from the work of Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron:

Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind - our drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented animals and friends. Their suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape.

In the process of discovering our true nature, the journey goes down, not up. It's as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we will let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of compassion. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

SERMON

The knuckle that joins my pinky to my left hand is gone forever. In the catalog of potential deformities, a missing knuckle is so negligible it might not even make the list. But it was mine and I can't help but acknowledge the wrenching irrevocability of its departure.

Five weeks ago, while attending a meeting in Boston, I fell down half a flight of stairs, broke my hand, and dislocated my shoulder. I'd never broken a bone before. When I returned home I asked my doctor what to expect. He said, "Set your psyche. A broken hand is a small injury, but you'll be surprised how disabling it is."

It is a small injury. I did not need surgery, and only spent a month in a cast. And yet, as any of you who have talked to me have no doubt observed, I haven't handled it well. The adjustments needed to accomplish daily tasks in a cast were daunting. My dependency on others was humbling. The story about my accident was not very colorful and garnered little interest. The first week or two I experienced a daily meltdown induced by frustration, pain and unrealistic expectations.

I took a lot of taxis. Each driver had something to say about broken bones. The most memorable driver was one whose mother had broken her hand at the age of seventy-four. "She fell down the stairs and hurt herself because she was trying to save a plate of cookies she had just baked. She was always active, doing things," he said.

After the fall, she had to let others wait on her, which was difficult. But then, unfortunately, before her one hand was healed, she took another fall and broke her other one. "She never got out of her chair again," the driver told me. Such cheerful encounters started my workday. By the time I arrived at my office, I was already out of sorts.

The taxi driver's story was a good warning for me. Even a small disability puts you at risk for larger ones. It took time to get used to the heavy weight on my left arm, and as I lurched around, off balance, I realized how easily I could fall again.

This is the state of vulnerability into which I was thrust. Many of you know it well. When I asked, one Sunday morning a while back, how many of you had ever broken a bone, nearly all of you raised your hands.

That was a revelation. I had been living in a fool's paradise of invincibility, at least as far as my strong bones could take me. I realized that there was a lot I didn't know - about living with disability, about accepting limitations, about needing help, about growing in compassion.

At some point in this experience, however, I was able to take a step back from feeling sorry for myself. When I did, it began to dawn on me that I had a very small window on the life that many disabled people must lead. Perhaps they too start the day by bracing themselves for the many obstacles they will have to overcome. Perhaps they too dissolve in tears on a regular basis. Perhaps they too wish they didn't have to go through this.

I thought of all the people in this congregation who suffer from disabling conditions, some of them progressive or chronic. I could look forward to a full recovery - minus the knuckle, no big deal. But many of you and people you love have far greater adjustments to make. I grew in respect for how well each and every one of you copes with the challenges you face. I also realized that sooner or later we each have to face our decline. Even a small disability is a reminder of how contingent our well-being truly is. The folk singer Fred Small, who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister, has written a funny and provocative song, the "Talking Wheelchair Blues." In it he chronicles how a spunky woman in a wheelchair faces discrimination of all kinds - social, spatial, political.

But she is philosophical about it. "I look at it this way," she says. "In fifty years you'll be in worse shape than I am now. See, we're all the same, this human race. Some of us are called disabled. And the rest - well, the rest of you are just temporarily able-bodied."

The human condition will make us all vulnerable and needy some time. However invincible we may imagine ourselves to be, the truth will catch up with us. And then we will be grateful for the compassion others have to give. Nothing is more comforting than the kind words of those who have been through the same ordeal. Those of you who also suffered through broken bones and casts, thank you for telling me about it. You reminded me of what it means to be human.

For what draws us together, it turns out, is what makes us fall apart. The funeral ritual of the past week for former president Ronald Reagan has brought to awareness once again how even the most powerful people can be leveled by disability. Illness democratizes us the way no other experience can.

While I was sitting around with the cast on, I decided to read the memoir by Michael J. Fox, titled "Lucky Man." Michael J. Fox lives with Parkinson's disease, an incurable degenerative condition. It's a disease with which I am all too familiar, as my father suffered from it for over fifteen years. Several members of our congregation also live with this disability, which tends to set in late in life.

In the case of Michael J. Fox, however, he began to experience symptoms at the age of thirty. Learning to cope with the personal and public aspects of a neurological condition, its symptoms plainly and dramatically visible, proved to be a huge challenge for this successful young actor. His story is well worth reading.

He relates one of the many funny incidents that led him to acceptance. It occurred in 1994, while making a film with Woody Allen. "On set one afternoon," Michael J. Fox writes, "a few of us in the cast were distracting ourselves between setups by playing a game of hypotheticals. We'd come to the question, ‘If you could live in any era other than the present, what would it be?' Everyone tossed in their ideas and then Woody, who had been hovering distractedly at the fringe of the conversation, decided to weigh in.

"'I wouldn't want to live in any time prior to the invention of penicillin,' he said.

"Everybody fell out laughing - it was such a perfect, in-character response. With everything that Woody Allen was going through that spring, there was still nothing more terrifying to him than the prospect of incurable disease. And then suddenly it hit me," Michael J. Fox admits. "Hey, I have an incurable disease - and I'm laughing anyway. I must be doing okay."

Today Michael J. Fox heads a non-profit foundation to raise funds to find a cure for Parkinson's. He is a prominent advocate for embryonic stem-cell research. He credits the compassion shown to him by others in the patient community for the work he is now inspired to do. "They've helped me see that my story is not only my story," he concludes. "We area we, in the boat together, and awaiting the same rescue. Don't lose hope, because it's coming."

There is much for any of us to learn, understand, and accept about our human condition. But fundamental to learning any of it is the realization that being human is not about getting to the top of the mountain, as Pema Chodron illustrated so clearly in the reading today. We find our true nature by going down, not up. We cannot transcend suffering, only experience it. "We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain," she writes, "and we try not to push it away." We move down into it. "With us move millions of others," our companions in awakening from fear."

What we discover at the bottom is compassion. This is the hard-won gift, the "love that will not die," the bond that makes us one with each other. This is not only what helps us to cope with disability. It is what makes our lives worth living.

Most of the time I had my cast on, I felt self-conscious and slightly embarrassed. This awkward appendage, with its avocado stains and ragged edges, told the world, "I'm not okay." But towards the end, much as I looked forward to its removal, I could see how - if I had to - I could get along. I became a little less clumsy. My dog licked it from time to time, signaling to me that my cast had become part of myself.

"So maybe I'm not okay," I began to think. And that's all right. Frustration behind me, hope ahead, life, once again, is good.

References for this sermon include "Lucky Man," by Michael J. Fox (New York: Hyperion, 2002); the reading from Pema Chodron is in an anthology titled "Prayers for a Thousand Years," edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999). Thank you to Joyce Holmen for the words to Fred Small's song "Talking Wheelchair Blues." Fred's website is http://www.jg.org/folk/artists/fredsmall/fred_small.html