THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation

"I Am Some Body,"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
(Preached December 3, 1995, at
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu)

CALL TO WORSHIP

The universe is one.
One unfolding event
And one only.
From the heart of star heat
Starting the chain of thing making
Out of pure exuberant motion,
Unbroken; to the tight coils of life
That crawled from cooling seas,
Unbroken; to dream making man and woman
Awed by the mystery of knowing.
One event. One being.

Who am I ? Thou art that !
Fooled by point of view
Into lonely isolation.
Filling imagined void
With a heady stew of superstition,
Dream-time truths misperceived
And impossible reports of soul travelers
Scared crazy by the visions of that One.
Building out of fear and guilt
An angry judging moralist
Petty potentate of a god
To condemn the imagined sin
Of selfhood.

Who am I ? Thou are that !
The exhilarating adventure
Of trying every form and formless
Possibility; each of us
A point of view from which
The universe observes itself
From within itself and awakens
To look out of and into its own eyes.
Each incarnated point of view unique
And impossibly important;
For even the gods do not know . . .
And because you are that one !
Such a one !
It is your incarnation
To be this fragile individual
To the hilt.

READING (From "The Human Touch Who Needs it?" by Rev. Michael G. Young, a sermon originally preached in 1965 and reprinted in five books and a Disciples of Christ religious education curriculum. It won a Minnesota state high school speech contest. I still get requests for copies.)

Every human being needs to touch and be touched. Each of us has thoughts and feelings so deep and personal that words will simply not bear their weight. And yet, we long to communicate them, to share them with another. Our most intense joy is amplified and given permanence by being shared. Our deepest fears and anxieties are made endurable and manageable by being shared. But they can only be truly shared in their full depth and significance when they are shared in the totality of who we are. They cry out for touch.

We need to touch. Perhaps in our artificial technologized culture we need the closeness and intimacy of touch more than ever. Our western culture has achieved such a level of cerebration, of the worship of intellect and intellectualizing, that we are terrified of touch.

We have so hidden from ourselves those deep feelings about which we cannot intellectualize that their sheer pressure inside of us terrifies us. We are taught almost from birth that man's glory is his intellect and his emotions are fetters from which he needs to be freed. Emotions are to be risen above, avoided, denied, escaped. One of the greatest unlearned lessons of history is that emotional and intellectual freedom is to be found not in freedom from feelings, but in being freed for them. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that what differentiates man from the beasts is not his mental skill, for all his superiority in that. What sets man apart most profoundly is the depth and complexity of his capacity for emotion.

We need to share ourselves with each other as surely as we need to breathe. But just as surely, that sharing cannot be accomplished on a merely verbal level. What we need to communicate is more primal, more basic, than language.

You have perhaps heard of the nursery babies who die without the human touch, who need only to be played with, handled and cuddled to survive. Recent experiments with baby monkeys, even, indicate that without the physical intimacy or mothering they do not develop properly. Those completely starved of touch, die.

Research in the teaching of reading indicates that not only is verbal facility the ability to use words not our primary mode of communication, but children who do not crawl, and touch, and handle things, almost invariably have difficulty with language. The thought and word are not our primary mode of communication, we are primarily animals who touch! Our deepest thoughts and feelings can only be communicated by touch by physical intimacy.

When your children come to you, frightened and hurt, TELL them you care, TELL them you love them, TELL them you are sorry. Then touch them. Take them in your arms and cuddle them. Then they will believe you. Then they will know you care.

But to whom can you go when you are frightened or hurt? With whom can you share those deepest feelings, which can only be shared by touching?

We adults have limited touch to three areas. We allow the handshake and such similar symbolic but safe, gestures. We may touch in sexual intercourse. And we may touch in hostility, where one feeling-anger-protects us from the others that might burst out. That is just about it! So far as a language of touch is concerned, we have condemned ourselves to a sort of pig-latin where, if we touch at all, our meaning must always be veiled.

Let us examine these three areas of touch open to us.

A handshake is a ritualized caress. It is a symbolic reestablishment of communication. As a gesture of friendship, no symbol could be as powerful as that of touch. For there is power in touch. It demands and communicates a dimension of commitment and trust unlike any other form of communication. I may talk to you and remain hidden from you. But, if we touch, I am vulnerable. I may reveal more of myself to you than I can trust you with. There is a feeling of control in verbal discourse that is absent with physical intimacy. Sham and pretense is much more difficult.

This is precisely why we are wary of touching. It is a terribly risk-filled form of human relatedness. The more so because we need it so much and are starved for it. We are well aware that if the power of touch is loosed, those feelings that we keep carefully bottled up inside may come spilling out. Touch has the power to burst the floodgates of our damned-up emotional lives. And we are right! Touch is dangerous. It is not by accident that we use the same word feeling to refer to emotion and to touching. They are that closely related.

So, when we meet again after a period of separation, we shake hands. We need to reestablish contact, to be together again. But touch is dangerous. So, we keep it off, out there. The handshake becomes at the same time a caress and a fending off, a contact and a buffer. We need to touch, but we are afraid of its power and the trust it demands.

The second area of touch we allow ourselves sexual intimacy is really our only area of open intimacy. In bed, preferably with a member of the opposite sex and properly only one who is a legal mate, we finally allow ourselves to touch. There we may speak, as only touch can, of who we are and how we feel.

That, the courtship-intercourse situation, is virtually our only allowable intimacy. And so we fill that one allowable intimacy with all of our needs to touch. We thrust all sorts of totally inappropriate feelings into that relationship. That one act must bear the weight of all our needs to communicate what cannot be said! Is it any wonder our culture is obsessed with sex, and yet plagued with problems and frustrations about it?

Is it any wonder our teen-agers, like their parents, are hung up on sex? The only vocabulary of feeling we have given them is that of seduction. In any given parked car with young people necking, there is involved FAR LESS sex than the need to be close to another to speak in touch the anxiety, the joy, the affirmation and the uncertainty of being alive; to give and to receive the comfort and security of being together that CANNOT be said.

There is, in back of our so-called sexual revolution, more than simply new attitudes towards sex. There is rather a groping for a new vocabulary of feeling. The major problem in that revolution is not the threat of sexual license. The major problem is our culturally inherited inability to distinguish the need for and expression of sex, from the rest of our deepest feelings the inability to distinguish physical intimacy from seduction.

The final area where we allow ourselves to touch is that of overt hostility. It is seen in contact sports; both those in which we engage and those we watch, touching vicariously. It is seen in the disciplining of children. It is seen in the various outbursts of physical violence, even in much antisocial behavior.

The need to touch can be expressed in hostility while minimizing the risk of the floodgates bursting. The expression of strong hostility keeps the other feelings from being revealed. There is more love present, but hidden, in most of our acts-of anger than we are often aware of. And, tragically, many a child is only able to get physical intimacy from his parents by misbehaving.

The consequent emotional confusion, misunderstanding, and apparent irrationality that clutter our lives are quite understandable in light of our starvation for touch. This unfortunate state of affairs, even infects that one intimacy we allow ourselves. Misplaced and misused hostility is often responsible for your hang-ups in our sexual adjustment.

To whom can you go when you are frightened, or hurt, or just need to be WITH someone? To whom can you go for the human touch?

To a handshake? To a fight? Or, to bed? We are alone with our deepest feelings, and we long to share them. But we have cut ourselves off from this most profound means of communication. We have invested too much stock in talk and we are in danger of bankruptcy. No one is hung up for lack of an argument philosophical, theological, or scientific. NO ONE!

If we would minister as a church to the terrors and hurts of the world; if we would care, the only way caring can be heard; if we would be whole again, and bring wholeness to those we love; we must perhaps, become as little children, and learn again the human touch.


MEDITATION READINGS

I am ! I am !
I am: clumsy
Talking-to-myself language
For this.moment's seeing,
Sensing, wondering;
Hurting alone I-ness,
Joying together am-ness;
Knowing and not knowing
The hide-and-seek of being
An I with an eye,
Seeing things separate
And distinct
That feel flowing and going with
When I am moments move
with that all-over-ness of we;
Never quite so much I,
Nor so little,
As when we.

I am, and you are-
And what is that moment of nakedness
That trust turns into nude,
Appearing and disappearing
Never to be grasped
Nor finally really lost,
And how is it that moment comes
And becomes a place
Somehow common to each;
Not I, and not you;
Yet, we.
That movement of reaching out
And taking off
That neither could manage--
I/you can't do it--
Yet, we did.
Having never been there before,
Or forgotten
And never really left.I am: the feel of thinking,
Having never really thought
Of that it felt like to think,
And the sensual delight of we
Thinking-out-loud-together I's.
Even in our ignorance
The universe talking to itself.

I am, and you are: the thought
Of feeling that all-over-ness
Of the prison box skin bag
Become resonator
Of a million ecstatic events
Like an orgasm gone wild
And gentle at the same time
If we let it.
The water through a sieve
Endlessly feel of it
As if the sieve were making water,

I am! I am !
The laughing, crying joy-pain of it,
We, sowers and reapers
Of endless sensation,
The universe happening to itself.


Something Erupts As Flesh
There is something that erupts in flesh
Like breath rushing in at birth,
A witness looking out through eyes.
Suddenly someone home inside the skin bag
A few dollars worth of chemicals and water
Can't account for. Or is the unaccountability
In our ignorance of the subtle power
Of clay ? It seems so ordinary.
Bricks and vessels, sculpted playthings
For the hand or mind. Its power,
Receptiveness. To passively accept
The artist's vision or the workman's plan;
To receive the stamp of thought
And come alive. Born of mind
And clay; of dust, of dirt.
Breath, life , thought --and dirt.
We are still corn fed, but no longer see
In corn the ear, the stalk,
The rootedness in soil. The earth,
For us, is not alive; not soil, but dirt.
Sweep this dirty floor ! Wash those
Dirty dishes, dirty sox, dirty minds.
Soil inconvenient to our purposes is dirt.
Can spirit really put on dirty flesh ?
They asked.
And, knowing urine, pus, and spittle,
They concluded Thought must only seem
To merge with clay's corruption.
The form, the pattern, image, thought,
Stays pure, shaping passive substance.
Dirt despite itself is lifted up
By uncorrupted thought's creative power.
Spirit calls life forth from clay.
And so, we looked for God beyond the most
Insistent stuffness of this world of dirt.
Life seemed to flesh, a body snatching alien.
Flesh seemed to life, a snare and prison.
Ahura Mazda at war with Ahriman.
God and Satan,
good and evil,
life and death,
flesh and spirit,
sacred and profane.

The universe was sliced in two
Because we did not understand
The subtle chemistry of clay.

Form is what substance does.
The primal chaos is not formless,
But an explosion of infinities of form.
With every increasing power
Of microscope or telescope, the swirls
Of patterns within patterns are found
Waiting for discovery.

The vision of ordered form emerges
From the very stuff on which
Our misconceiving mind would press it.
We are, perhaps, clay's tool to shape itself;
Evoking in the human potter
The vision to be rescued from the mud.
There is something that erupts as flesh
In the unsuspecting chemistry
As unprecedented
as each prior eruption was:
Big bang and star birth,
heavy metal soup from supernova,
Cooling blue water planet,
and replicating molecule.
Its lineage a litany of surprises,
This living thought incarnate,
This awakened fleshly vessel,
This gasp of awe: the realization.
The universe is not sliced in two.
There is something
That erupts in flesh like breath
I Am Some Body !
You have been told that a body is something you have.
That is a lie !
The experience, I know, is as if peeking out
from a space just behind the bridge of your nose;
observing and occupying this sometimes strange,
ungainly piece of protoplasm. But it's a lie.

That body/mind that you are is a most incredible thing.
It is easy, having barked shins, broken fingernails
and otherwise bumped into the world with the skin
that bounds this thing we call body,
to assume that this is where I begin
and I go in from there,
rather than owning the flowing cloud
that is and follows this body around.

There are auras that surround us
And follow like streaming halos.
An aura of pheremones; an aura of electromagnetic radiation
right there at the surface of my skin.

Put your hands almost together.
Move those palms toward each other
until they just almost but not quite touch.
Feel what that feels like just before touch happens.
Feel that almost electric spark jump.

But it doesn't stop here. It stops . . . who knows where ?
As you move through your life you build
a whole other aura that enwraps that one.
An aura of relationships and interconnections
that moves far beyond our imagining.
It is a wondrous experience to realize
just how far beyond this skin
the who and what of you reaches.

Those hands you were just holding next to each other--
what wonderful inventions.
Your single largest batch of brain cells does nothing but operate those fascinating appendages.
How many of you can talk with your hands tied behind you ?
That touch, that ability to bridge the auras between us,
to return sensation that is so full
of the very joy that life is about:
is it not amazing.
I was taught to walk by falling down.
And getting up and falling down.
When I managed to no longer fall down,
whatever relationship that may or may not have had
to the way this incredible body actually can move,
they called it walking.
When I let myself move from that center of me
that my Aikido instructor calls my hara,
instead of that place in my head,
my mismatched parts discover
a grace and power and quickness
I had no idea they possessed.

The senses this body comes with are mind boggling.

There are two ways we humans are in the habit
of organizing our whole universe: by sight or by sound.
Our eyes are capable of distinguishing
a single photon of light !
Just rainbows are enough to make you wonder
what kind of miracle this body is.

Three random notes on a piano,
because of what our ear can do,
becomes something none of those notes were.
A new thing unto themselves: a chord.

What I do with you here: Speech.
The amazing ability that this body has learned;
to take interior experience and turn it into code,
some sounds, able to evoke in another
that same interiority. Unbelievable.

The music that we can make:
sound and silence, like light and shadow,
the textures, the emotions, to shape space
that is possible there.
Even as mundane a thing as taste.
We turn the necessary consumption of fuel
into an occasion for delight.

Smell. Have you ever noticed the power
of odors to evoke memories you thought long gone ?
Wonderful ! The surround of breath and breathing,
the air itself that we swim in,
is an ocean of information.

And touch again.
Not mere tactile contact, but moving and motion,
the sensitivity of skin turned as it were
inside out and outside in.
The feel of the swirl from dancing together
to the wheeling scatter of galaxies.
Every point, a center and a margin in relational motion.

The mind, too, that most erogenous of zones,
a sense organ. Buddhism lists it as one of the senses.
And the extensions of our senses,
imagined and called into being by our technology--
the ability to see and hear and speak,
to BE hundreds of thousands of miles away.

On December 7th, 1995, the extensions of your senses will
have reached to Jupiter as Galileo falls into orbit around Jupiter
and drops your eyes and ears and mind down in to sense what that
immense gas giant is all about.

And yet,

We treat this body as if it were something we had rented
from an absentee landlord. No, even worse, we treat it as if we
lived upstairs over a vacant lot.

 Science at its eruption, seduced us into imagining that
reality was stuff. Therefore, spirit wasn't real. Then physicists
demonstrated that stuff was mostly relationship--an energy
distortion of space/time--seducing the New Agers into imagining
that stuff wasn't real and re-enthroning spirit as reality. Romantic
notions of dis-embodied intelligence have returned with a
vengeance, with all the wonderful metaphors of science to prove
that they are true.

But the worshipers of stuff as real and the worshipers of
spirit as real are BOTH wrong. Both of their metaphors are
incomplete and inadequate.

We are not stuff. We are not spirit. We are something else !

Light, they say, is both wave-like and particle-like; but in
fact it is neither. Those are only the nearest metaphors that we
have to catch what it may be like. The body-slash-mind
(body/mind), is like mass/energy and space/time. Self-organization
and self-transcendence are characteristics of the stuff of our being
at high enough levels of complexity.

We need a whole new set of metaphors,
a whole new poetry of being.
This body is a happening event.
It is always in the midst of change.
It has the wondrous ability to re-present itself to itself
in a constantly up-dating kaleidoscope.
All of my physical states, right down to which
chemicals are flowing
in which amounts in my blood stream,
the positions I happen to be holding my joints at any
given moment,
the memories currently being set off by the experience
that I am having,
the experiences that I am having
being constantly re-structured and re-configured
in the light of previous experience
and of new experience as it is happening,
that constant re-presenting  of all the manifold myriad of pieces
of this on-going, constantly changing and transforming
experience of what it is to be a human being.

The mind able to re-program itself;
constantly reordering and revising its perceptions
of reality on the run.
Re-imagining the very relationship
between mind and body, spirit and matter.
Again and again our petty small metaphors
get pushed beyond their limits.
We discover that the very boundary of the body,
this too real skin, is no boundary at all;
but an opportunity for the most incredible,
joyous melding of bodies. And, if we do it right,
we discover the melding of alonenesses.
Body born minds are able to share so much
that the imagined isolation behind the eyes
can be stretched until we are extensions of each other.
Discover that we are indeed, finally, relationship.
Not merely IN relationship;
but that relationship is what we are, is what is real.
We are inter-connectedness, or--
as Thich Nhat Hahn calls it--interbeing.
Even death is but one more transformation of
relationship,
no stranger and no less unanticipatable and unprecedented
than all the other transformations were
before they occurred.

Every gesture, gestation birthing new possibilities.
A miracle in the midst of miracles. 

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