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Turning it Over
Delivered by
Shawn Rhodes, March 6, 2005
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
Good morning. Let me begin by saying
it is an honor to speak before you all today. I know there is little I can
say to enlighten an already wise community so instead of attempting to
present some deep philosophical ideas, I’ll just present my own
experiences and perhaps one or two small philosophical ideas along the
way.
People often
ask me what my time in Iraq was like. After speaking with veterans from
several different wars , I find that my experiences there were no
different from theirs. We were all scared shitless at times and there were
times when we couldn’t believe that we’d lived through the night. The
only thing that made us different in that respect was how we choose to
handle our experiences. I came close enough to my own death enough times
to realize that luck didn’t have anything to do with it. The men sitting
next to me on a truck one day in April were just as lucky as I was, and
yet it is they who wear purple hearts from wounds received that day, not
I. Some people are born with the knowledge that there is a god up there,
or in here some of us discover it on our own and some of us forget it for
a while and need to be reminded from time to time. I fall into the latter
category. Allow me to tell you of my personal experiences and perhaps
you’ll discover a new idea or rekindle an old one about what this word
God means in your life.
I was raised in
a religiously liberal environment, by a mother who somehow survived the
bay area in the late sixties. When I deployed to Iraq, I found myself next
to men and women who had similar upbringings, some who were polar
opposites and believed there was just one way into heaven and there were
some who never questioned it at all. Everyone’s opinion of what they
believed changed the first time they heard the deafening crash of a mortar
inside our perimeter, the yell for someone to get a Corpsman to tend to
the wounded. The ones who thought they knew the right way were more
fervent than ever about it, the ones who weren’t sure quickly found a
way, and the ones who had never questioned it at all were the most
terrified. When your own death is held up in front of you it occurs to you
that you better be sure your moments until that point have been lived
well. There’s no telling on the battlefield where your soul will go, but
you try and be as sure as you can that you’re on good terms with
what’s in here, because when that round that cracked by your ear one
second ago becomes more accurate, if you’re not square with yourself,
then it doesn’t make much sense for anyone or anything, else to be. So
the question hit us all at one time or another whether on a battlefield or
in your own bed – where am I going? Who will I meet when I get there?
What will he, she, it think? That there ain’t no telling where you ‘re
going when you die is something we all quickly figure out. The dead of
both friends and enemies look the same when you strip labels away. Labels
only last for those left alive. Hero, coward, enemy, comrade. What will
you meet if and when your time comes? We can’t answer that one either.
The answer can be better expressed in the sunset or the farmer’s
ripening fields than it can in words. Because we can’t comprehend the
fear we feel in the most terrifying moments of our lives or the joy that
comes from living through them, we can’t know what God will think. Not
being able to comprehend something or put it into words twists our western
minds all up, doesn’t it? So the answer comes in resignation. You have
to give up trying to figure it out. You have to give it up entirely. You
can either resign to the fact that we’re all going to die, or you can
resign to the fact that you will die, someday. You see, these are very
different ways of thinking. The people I met who knew we were all going to
die lived with abandon. If death is inevitable, then why worry about what
step to make next? The people I met who believed the other way, though,
and they woke up each day knowing it was a gift from that force behind the
sunset, knowing each meal might be their last, so they savored it, as much
as you can savor a dehydrated pork chop. These were the ones who would
talk to you during a long watch through the night about their homes, their
lives back here in America. It wasn’t so much missing it with them as it
was savoring those memories that they did have. These people seemed at
peace. So I asked myself, what had they discovered? What had they done?
The answer – they had turned themselves over. It didn’t matter so much
what they had turned themselves over to, Jesus, God, Allah in a few cases,
but the fact they had said to their personal vision of the creator – I
may not be the kindest man, I know I haven’t been good all my life, and
I know I smell pretty bad – but I know that when it all comes down to it
you’re the one I’m going back to, so I want you to show me how to do
better with the time I have left. This is what I do attempt every day now
that I’ve been given a reprieve on my life, and every time I came to a
dead end on my journey, a road sign appeared showing me a new road to
travel. It was different things at different times, sometimes it would be
wise advice from a friend, sometimes it would be a song I would hear,
sometimes it would be something in the way the wind blew the reeds next to
the stream that let me know things really were just the way they should be
in the world no matter what was going on in my immediate life.
I re-awakened
the religious search I had been on many years ago, when I was trying out
which faith felt right to me. I had the valuable knowledge that all of
them held a little of the truth, so I set out to discover what each of
them had to say about turning it over. I always knew that Christianity
advocated turning yourself over. Most Christians believe in order to do
that you have to accept that Jesus allowed himself to be crucified. The
often quoted book of John tells us god so loved the world that he gave up
his only begotten son. Whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
everlasting life. The book of Romans states something similar when it says
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is lord and you believe in your
heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. I learned
that Muslims believe something along the same lines, but instead of a
resurrection it is simply that they bear witness there is no deity except
Allah, and that Mohammed is his prophet. The very word Islam means ‘a
submission to God.’ How beautiful is that? A submission to God, a single
work our language could never express so eloquently. In the earth
religions I learned that the presence of higher powers is necessary to
keep the very earth spinning, and that their intervention in daily life
was often called upon. The deities were honored with ceremonial gifts but
more importantly, honored by their believers living a noble life. I really
dug that. I got familiar with what such sages as Buddha and Lao-Tsu had to
say about the topic. These eastern traditions arrive on the same place
that every other religion does – a union with the divine – but instead
of giving yourself over to a higher power, I found it was up to me to
dissolve this notion that there was a self within me I could give up. Alan
Watts said it well in his book ‘the wisdom of insecurity’ which deals
very closely with the topic at hand. He said :The fulfillment of the
divine purpose does not lie in the future. It is found in the present, not
by an act of resignation, but realizing that there is no one to resign to.
This is the meaning, he says, of the universal religious principle that to
know god man must give up himself. He also presents the idea that we are
all free to make this realization and apply it at any moment, there is
nothing physically stopping us. This really blew my mind. It allowed me to
understand that none of us are ever separate from this thing we comprehend
as God at any point in our lives, as much as we deny he exists or exhort
him. It is simply up to us to realize this, to re-unite with our heavenly
father, to go home, in a manner of speaking. So how do we realize this? I
found the first thing I had to understand was that there isn’t single
thing to realize. It is physically, spiritually and philosophically
impossible to separate ourselves from God at any time. Ah but we all
choose to ignore it every day, don’t we? Every time we let hate and
frustration speak our words for us we ignore it, every time we think how
hard and unfair our lives are we ignore it, every time we don’t live in
constant awe and wonder of this world we live in, of the loving people we
have surrounded ourselves with, we ignore it. All of you in this room have
shown me kindness and your own forms of love, and I want to do the same
for you in return. My experiences gave my immaturity a kick in the ass, an
I hope the whoopins never stop. So I challenge you to give yourself over
to God, again an again, every minute of every waking hour, by not ignoring
the fact that you and everything and everyone around you are inseparable
from God, the breath that animates all things. Make that part of your
interactions with your family an friends, with the bagboy at the grocery
store, and with your own heart. Be mindful of your daily life and your
world. There are many who don’t have the opportunity to be mindful of
theirs anymore. They’ve gone home.
Now I’d like to play for you one of
the road signs that helped me early on. It’s about giving up the self
and the world we create with it to God. It’s by a Christian band named
Jars Of Clay, but I think any of these traditions would be proud to claim
it, so I offer it as my gift to you. May it spark something inside of you
that makes your life a richer one.
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