5 Ways to Save Your Spiritual Life | Rev. Dr. Daniel Kanter | 01.21.24

Diving into the five disciplines we talk about as spiritual guides, we will reflect on what works and why.

Sermon Transcript

So the question for today is: “Have you had that moment?” That one that reminds you of your impermanence. Standing in front of dinosaur bones maybe, or in front of a cathedral carved one inch at a time by four generations of Italian stone carvers, or that one where you’re sitting here in this sanctuary built by people, only a few who are left to remember its ribbon cutting. That feeling of impermanence, your mortality? I don’t know if it’s an occupational hazard or just me, but I think about these things all the time and not just while reading the news of an airline engine tearing off midair as I sit at a small gate in a small airport in Northeast India, but also looking at a basket woven by hands gone hundreds of years passed in a museum in the Northeast of India, or watching the children grow up here and become parents, adults, or thinking back on all the people who I have seen come and go in these pews.

And it’s not just your fragile lives that I witnessed, it is also mine. And so I just returned, as we’ve said from our annual pilgrimage to India, a journey to visit the Unitarians of that area and to visit our partner project, the orphanage that sits in the Khasi Hills, hours from the city of Shillong in the state of Meghalaya, very close to the border of Burma or Myanmar. We go for two reasons really: One is to encounter a type of Unitarianism that grew up from an indigenous culture infused with spiritual meaning from songs and prayers written by people who left Christianity, looking for a way to serve life without the fear of hell.

One whose statement of belief says this from 1888. They say, “We believe in the unity of God, in the fatherhood and motherhood of God, in the brotherhood of man, in love, union, worship, faith, and in immortality. We go to encounter this kind of Unitarianism to lift up hours, to measure our faith or lack of it to be enveloped in the religion of love that we practice and they practice passed down through place and time.” And it takes almost 40 hours of travel just to go there, to be there immersed with them.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal one morning after spending an evening with some elders at the church in that city talking about spiritual experiences, some of them talking about experiencing the dead who had stayed in the home after they had died for three days. It’s their practice to sit in vigil for three days.

And I wrote this. I wrote, “The mystical is alive in Unitarianism here. Life is enriched by prayer and song. Even if they just call us to a deeper attention of the world, it is manifested in gratitude rather than problem-solving. Commitment, a commitment to a faith embedded in practice.” This to me points in one direction that the most sincere people of faith are humble, perplexed, feel the presence of God in their lives and the impossibility of capturing that presence in words. And in this way, God is not a symbol or a cudgel, but a lived reality.

We go to be immersed in this type of Unitarian religion and we go to support our adopted project, The Children’s Village, an orphanage of sorts that nurtures children’s with that Unitarianism, that kind of love that extends from their faith, that value of education like ours, the nourishment of children and guidance of children, mostly whose mothers have died. We don’t go to fix them, we go to love them. Talking with the staff on Monday. I said to them while we sat around before I left, that love is present in that place and the love they give to those children is why it thrives. And they said, “Yeah. But they’re still children and it can get tense.” But they said that when it gets tense, they remember this is church. The love is the guiding force of that place.

Not anger, not fighting, not struggle. And that is how it feels all throughout Unitarianism in Northeast, India to me, love infused, not anxious, not the feeling that church isn’t enough, but that it infuses their lives. The feeling that faith is a measure of one’s comfort in promoting a religion of love, and that every Sunday is one in a generation’s effort to promote reason and tolerance. And every time I go there, it never fails. I have that feeling that time is so vast, that life is so short that I can do my part and enjoy as much as I can and help the world along a little bit, but that I am also a grain of sand on the vast beach of the universe. And every time I go, I ask myself the same question, that is, what am I doing with my life? Not what am I doing with my work? I am secure in that. But what am I doing with the hours that pass? Partly because in India there are twice as many hours as there are here.

5 Essential Spiritual Disciplines

But whenever I go, it reminds me of the five spiritual disciplines that we hope for you here. Five things that can save your spiritual life as the title of this sermon says, they are five things that you may have heard before, but bear repeating. They are daily practice and weekly worship and monthly service and annual retreat, and at least once in a life pilgrimage. So let me run through those for you.

#1 Daily Practice

Daily practice. Now, true confession, I don’t have a lot of discipline for this. I have done Tai chi and meditation and book studies and prayer and walking and wordle, and I know the point of daily practice is to set some time aside in the day to stop, to discern, to reflect, to ground, to make it possible for you to see something you may have missed, to ponder the grasshopper, the sunrise, the breath that moves in and out of you without you doing anything.

To ponder the vast possibility that today or tomorrow is your last day alive. To ponder the miracle that you are here at all or to not get so carried away, maybe just how something tastes or what is speaking to you about your life or who is speaking to you who needs more attention. Daily practice helps all this. It can be taking three deliberate breaths in the morning or it can be walking for hours or sitting in meditation or it can be what we do in India with the Unitarians there saying grace before each meal to just give thanks for the things we have been given. Spiritual practice in a daily way is to pause, give thanks to breathe.

#2 Weekly Worship

Weekly worship, that’s what we’re doing here. Congratulations. You actually accomplished that. But what is this we’re doing? It’s this deliberate setting aside of the things we do in our busy lives to accomplish nothing.

To see the people we care about, to sing, to pray, to give, to receive, to listen, to think, maybe to daydream, I know you’re out there. Weekly worship for us isn’t the worship of one thing or one God. It’s time set aside for all these things. Trust me, I know it is good for you and I know it’s hard to commit to, but I know it is good for you.

#3 Monthly Service

Monthly service, giving time to others so others’ lives are better. So many here do this. So many here tutor with reading partners and work shifts at the food bank and serve as church ushers or greeters or coffee team members, whatever it is. Monthly service lifts us from our self-orientation, helps us to be humble in the face of a needy world. I had this experience in early December when I went to a school in South Dallas with Reading Partners as a board member.

We had a tutor day and I sat reading a story to a young boy and he asked me questions about it and I learned a lot about he and I live in two different worlds in the same city. He would ask me things like, “Why would anyone go for a walk?” A common thing for me and a dangerous thing for him. And he said, “Why would people want to get lost on a hike? Why does this girl in this story have two dads? And when you go up on a mountain, can you see this school?” When I went to J.R. Irvin’s school, it helped me that I had a daily practice. I could see a little more clearly the person in front of me. And it helped that I had weekly worship and all of you so that I could take my despair after that experience somewhere and ponder it and be reminded of my morality and the ethics that drive my life and that all I could do was maybe give that boy some love.

And that’s important. When I serve, my heart is strengthened.

#4 Annual Retreat

Annual retreat to sit a day or days aside to stop or join with others in a pursuit that isn’t recreation. Every year I go on a retreat with the senior ministers of large UU churches. We problem solve and share and worship and play and complain mostly about our churches, but I don’t complain that much though. And we eat together and we spend time in silence and we worship more and we feed each other, our support. Retreats can come in all shapes and sizes. They are time to set aside to renew, not vacation, but a deliberate pause. Are you detecting a theme in all these things? Retreat can be a day, a weekend, a year, a week.

#5 Pilgrimage

And then there’s pilgrimage. In pilgrimage, all of these things happen, whether it’s going to India or going on the Boston Heritage trip with Reverend T. J. this fall, or going to someplace that was spiritually important to you in your life, your childhood home, a mountaintop, a holy place. It should take effort to arrive there.

Because the effort gives you time to ponder what is important in your life. The pilgrim, we say, enters a luminous space, leaving the safety and comfort of home and is returned changed. A pilgrim, we say is a wanderer with purpose. So when we go to India, we aren’t just travelers, we are witnesses to our faith, grown in a different soil and it changes us. It changes us. When you go to Boston, it changes you because you don’t have to explain to anybody what a Unitarian is and you can rest in this mature spirituality that you witness there. All these disciplines ask Mary Oliver questions and guilty as charged, she is way over quoted in you UU churches. But she’s quoted because she’s so damn good at bringing the poetic spiritual response to the world into words. In this poem today, she asks discipline questions. These are Mary Oliver questions. “Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? Does everything die at last and too soon? Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Or I would say the wild and precious moments you have in life, like this moment and the moment you step outside the sanctuary and the moment you walk to your car. And tomorrow when you don’t want to go to work, what are you doing with your wild and precious life?

And Billy Collins asks similar questions. He says, “What pulls you up by the rains and settles you down by a roadside? Grateful for the sweet weeds and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.” Isn’t that a beautiful statement? What pulls you up by the rains and settles you down into gratitude? What reminds you of your mortality?

Living with Intention

Well, we’ve given you the five disciplines. They’re easy, right? You just go and do them. The theme here is living with intention. I don’t really care if you do one or the other, but that you do something

That synthesizes the moments in your life that ask these questions. What makes your living purposeful? How do you see the people and the things in your life more clearly? How do you find gratitude for this moment and in turn, joy? Hard in a busy world, but not if we use some of these five disciplines. And you might just choose one. What would your life look like if you had a daily practice or more than one daily practice? What would your life be if you came here every Sunday for the next three months, no matter what was on TV on Sunday morning, or what sports your child has to play at 10:00 AM on Sunday? Or how warm those blankets feel? What would happen if you came here every day for three months every Sunday? And what would service every month do to you or double your service until Easter?

And what would happen if you took a retreat a day or a weekend or a week of quiet, deliberate prayerful time? What would that do to your life? And what if you planned a pilgrimage to go somewhere with intention or committed to go with T. J. to Boston or with me to India next year? What would happen? Believe me, friends, if I can do any of these things, then you can do them. I am the worst at the discipline. You pay me to come to church on Sunday. But I am a better person because I engage in these disciplines and there’s still so much work to do. My guess is that if you took up this spiritual model for your life, you would both feel your part in life more meaningfully, and the result would be more gratitude for the sweet weeds or the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers or the people you live with or the days you have left. And who doesn’t want more of that?