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Moving Mountains…and
Houses “My best prayer is expressed in my dealings with
other people. If I am able to help one person out of his sorrow or if I
give my time to a small child, I make a better prayer than if I would go
through an entire prayer book on my knees until they ache.”—Rev. Dr. Norbert
Capek (1870-1942), founder of Unitarian Church in the Czech Republic First
Reading “Worry”
by UU minister Tess Baumberger Worry is wearing holes in me, Worry drips and drops wear at me Worry streams erode crevices At night sudden worry geysers Worry drops and streams and spouts Let hope come in and plug ‘em up.[1] Second Reading George prayed every day
for three years to win the lottery, but never heard from God or hit the
jackpot. Finally, God woke him up
in the middle of the night. “George, is that you who’s been praying so hard to
win the lottery?” the Supreme Being boomed. “Yes, Lord,
desperately!” God paused for a moment,
then said thoughtfully, “George, I’ll tell you what. I want you to meet me halfway. Buy a
ticket, OK?”[2] Sermon I
ran into the church member at the grocery story. As I had been on sabbatical at the time,
and we hadn’t seen each other for a few months, we exchanged the typical “How
are you?” greetings. Then, thinking he
would be intrigued, or at least amused, I told him about something I had done
earlier that afternoon. After my brief
story, he let out a kind of laugh—or maybe it was a clearing of the
throat—followed by a “Wow” offered in the spirit of surprise, for sure, but
not in the spirit of pleasure or admiration.
“Wow,” he said, “that’s one of the more cynical things I’ve heard in a
long time.” “Really?”
I chuckled back, wondering just how closely my friend in the Dahls had been
paying attention to our world lately if my simple action had struck him as
“one of the more cynical things he has heard in a long time.” But
knowing my friend Terry the way that I do, I figured he was just giving me a
hard time for the sport of it. Soon we parted company and as I wandered the
aisles with my daughter, I knew I had the beginning of a sermon. But
before I get too far, I need to give you the background. As
many of you know my wife and I bought a new, old house last fall, which
required that we sell our previous, old house. As coincidence would have it, the same
August day I officiated an historic same-sex wedding in our front yard, Susan
and I put our 41st house where we had lived since moving to Des
Moines on the market. We had purchased
this house directly from the owner six years earlier and believed we might be
able to sell it ourselves, too, thereby saving on the commission and giving
us more flexibility in our asking price. So we took the for-sale-by-owner
plunge. The Des Moines housing market
was just starting to take what would become a significant downward turn, but
we held out hope that someone might fall in love with the place the same way
we did. We also knew that choosing
the end of the summer as the time to sell was not optimum, statistically
speaking, but we did want to be in our new place before the end of the year,
and we were lucky enough to have a decent financial cushion upon which to
fall back. I
can almost laugh when I think about how antsy I was back in September as we
prepared for our first open house. I
had spent what felt like my entire summer break prepping the place for sale,
washing windows, cleaning grout, doing repair jobs that had been put on hold
for many months…if not years. After
seeing the results of my labor, which included being able to literally “see”
through my once cloudy windows, I wondered why I had waited so long. Why
didn’t I clear my view when I would still have time to enjoy it? The
morning of the open house, we scurried through a few remaining tasks, wanting
the house to be as clean and inviting as possible. We even baked cookies, to
give the place that homey smell. And
then we waited. And
waited. A
waiting that would transcend this first open house, and even beyond the next
two…a waiting that was far longer than we thought we could have endured when
this saga began. A
waiting that tested our patience, our bank account, and our trust in our
ability to think through our circumstances and make reasoned decisions. A
waiting, you might say, that tested our faith. Of
course, we had people walk through the place, some who took their time and
some who left so quickly that I was left to wonder if they had seen a ghost. Even
in the early days of our house-selling adventure, I heard myself whining to
some of you, offering sad update after sad update. Nearly everyone with whom I spoke,
particularly those beyond a certain age, offered a similar response. “Oh yes,” they would say, “that happened to
me once.” And then they would share
their own tales of hard-to-sell houses.
It didn’t take too long before I realized that my wife and I weren’t
victims in this scenario. We were
participating in a rite of passage for privileged people. Still,
I offered my angst to one of my spiritual advisors and she, too, shared a
story of a hard-to-sell house, telling me that she believed that only once
she had created a letting-go ritual, that involved lots of candles, lots of
prayers, and maybe even some ceremonial food and drink, did her house
finally sell. She instructed Susan and
me to envision the people who would buy the house, who would live in it, and
enjoy it as much as Susan and I did, to, essentially, open ourselves to the
universe and to remove any of our emotional attachments to the place. And, she added, we might want to try
burying a statue of St. Joseph in the yard, or throwing something red in a
moving river. I
listened carefully to her words but didn’t feel compelled by them to actually
take much of her advice. I did try to
envision who would eventually move in, which I had been doing ever since I
wrote the description of the house for the FSBO website, which included lines
like “extra-big bathroom” which meant we had just one…and “chemical free
landscaping” which meant we had more than our share of creeping Charlie. But, I’ll admit, I wasn’t yet to a place of
surrender that would enable me to turn our now vacant house into an altar of
worship. No, that came later. As
fall moved into winter, I started to panic a little bit, wondering aloud to
Susan if we had made a bad decision deciding to sell the place ourselves, and
suggesting that the time to throw in the towel and go with a realtor was at
hand. Susan, who had wisely, it turns
out, kept herself away from our bank account details, reasoned back at me
with well-thought out arguments about why a realtor, at this stage anyway,
probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. It’s
one of the greatest benefits of marriage, having a partner hold your own
freak-outs in check, just as you can hold theirs. And
as the months progressed, Susan certainly did her share of freak-out holding. So
we stayed the course, through the holidays, into the new year. We jumped every time the phone rang as
though we were stranded on an island hoping against hope that a rescue call
would come at last. By
mid January, we had gone over three months without a single visit. Not a single e-mail or inquisitive phone
call, beyond correspondence from realtors who shared with us fancy flyers
detailing horror stories of for-sale-by-owner disasters. One
realty team sent us a different letter about every three weeks, many
including a different magnetic picture of themselves, posing with confident
smiles. Marveling at their tenacity
and prolific PR, we put their magnets, one after the other, on our
refrigerator. In the midst of the
brutal winter that was, we had more contact with them than nearly anyone else
outside our immediate families. They
started to feel like friends. Near
the end of January, a nice couple came through, visiting the place with the
young man’s parents. All the
literature I had read about selling houses suggested that the seller should
not engage the buyer in conversation beyond the barest details, that this was
to be a business transaction, not a friendship. Now, a few weeks into my sabbatical, maybe
I was already starved for human interaction, or maybe my belief in “creative
interchange” trumped what I had been led to believe was taboo, but I did talk
with them…for a long time. I was
curious if they knew that the front yard was an historic site, but I wanted
to tread carefully, too. I’d heard
from equal numbers of people who believed that we should advertise
that our front yard had been the site of Iowa’s first and only legal same-sex
wedding, and those who believed those same facts might be a hindrance to a
possible sale. As the caucuses had
just passed, I asked the group if they had participated. The father of the young man said, “Oh
yes. That was something wasn’t it?” “It
certainly was,” I said. “Who did you caucus for?” I asked. “Huckabee,”
the wife chimed in as the husband nodded.
I
got the feeling that talk of a same-sex marriage might not go over so well. A
couple of visits later, the couple made us an offer that we accepted, and I
spilled the beans about the wedding, about which they, thankfully, were
excited. Things were working out at
last. Except there was a catch. They had to sell their house first. I’ll
spare you the details of the next few months because, well, there weren’t
any. They couldn’t get their house on
the market because the weather was keeping them from making needed repairs,
and the two mortgages Susan and I were paying were rapidly depleting our bank
account. I
freaked out some more, lost a lot of sleep, made myself sick with worry over
how we would sustain this situation and looked forward to the spring when
hopeful home-buyers would reemerge from their winter hibernation. Sure
enough, traffic picked up in March.
More people wanted to see it, and just as many didn’t want to make an
offer. Meanwhile, the realtors in our
neighborhood started descending upon us again, wanting to “help.” We had two in-person visits in two days,
one of whom provided the prompting that ultimately led to this sermon. She
said, “Have you buried St. Joseph yet?” I
confessed that I hadn’t, though I had been encouraged by more than one person
to do so. She insisted that I needed
to do it. I reminded her that I wasn’t
Catholic, and she said that it didn’t matter.
She explained about St. Joseph’s place in Catholicism as the patron
saint of craftsmen, among others, and that a prayer to him would definitely
do the trick. As she walked across the
street, back to her house, she called back, almost as a warning, “It’s all
about the prayer.” I
went home and told Susan that I wanted to follow the advice I had been
offered several times and bury a statue of St. Joseph. Despite her Catholic heritage, she did not
seem convinced, but probably figured if it would keep me from freaking out,
it was worth a try. So, later that
day, Susan and I took a trip to Divine Treasures on Hickman. I walked in as though I knew what I was
looking for, but, amidst all the statues and devotional knick-knacks, I
quickly realized I didn’t have a clue.
I approached the counter and tried, as delicately as I could, to describe
what I wanted. “Pardon my ignorance
here, but I understand that there is a patron saint to whom one might pray
for help in real estate transactions.
St. Joseph, I believe…” He
interrupted me with a laugh. “Yep,” he said.
“Right over here.” As he walked
me over to a table near the front window, he commented, “You were a lot more
sensitive than this Lutheran who was in here the other day. He came in and said, ‘Hey, where’s the
statue of the guy who can sell my house?’” He
grabbed a small green box and handed it to me, before returning to the
counter where the exchange of money would take place. I looked at the box, “The Authentic St.
Joseph Home Sale Practice TM” it read, in the same kind of graphics one might
find on a box for a whoopee cushion or a magic trick. The statue, a three-inch tall white plastic
figurine was prominently displayed in an opening in the cardboard box. I turned the box over and read “Can’t Sell
Home? Ask St. Joseph…He’s Helped 1000’s!”
And then, below a drawing of a guy in shorts burying something in his backyard,
a sentence read “Faith Can Move Mountains…and Homes!!” I’ll
admit to feeling rather ridiculous, especially when I saw the price was
$8.50. A memory of my Christian
history class popped into my mind, the part about the Catholic church selling
indulgences to sinners with the means to pay them, a practice that was abused
enough to lead to the very Protestant Reformation, that in part, led to us
being here in a UU church today. But I was too far gone to turn back
now. As the clerk wrote up the ticket,
he paused, leaning over the glass case where he worked, to explain the real
secret of the St. Joseph statue as though he was revealing the whereabouts of
the Holy Grail. He said, “People will
tell you where and how to bury this as though it matters. But the fact is all that really matters is
the prayer. It’s included with the
statue. You have to say the prayer and
believe it. The statue is just a
prop. The prayer is what makes the
difference.” I
nodded, partly out of sincere respect and gratitude for his interest in
helping me, and partly because I didn’t quite know what to say. After all, prayer, at least in the
traditional petitionary sense, is not a religious practice in which I
regularly engage. Not that there is
anything wrong with it. Far from
it! It’s just that I have not been one
to rely on it. My
general attitude about prayer was probably best articulated by a woman I met
at an Interfaith Alliance of Iowa gathering a year or two ago. We were sitting at a table, waiting for the
event to begin, when she told me the following story. She was a long-time Methodist who, in her
elder years, had been doing a lot of traveling with her sister and some
others in their peer group. One
evening they were walking around a confusing neighborhood of an Italian city
and had become quite lost. Her sister,
who my new friend described as more orthodox in some of her faith beliefs
than she was, declared that they should stop and form a prayer circle, to ask
God for guidance. He would certainly
point them in the right direction. My
friend wondered aloud, “What good is prayer going to do? Wouldn’t it be better to just ask someone
how to get out of here? The God I
believe in gave us minds for a reason.”
A lengthy and emotional debate ensued culminating in a
compromise. First they would say a
prayer; then my friend would try to engage a human in conversation. And, as it turned out, after the prayer, my
friend came upon a nice young man who spoke enough English to help them find
their way home. The next morning, as
the group gathered once again for their next adventure, one of their
traveling companions wryly asked, “So, which God are we going to follow
today?” I
have definitely prayed before, and particularly when done in community with
others, when we have named things that needed to be named, expressed
gratitude, and hoped together for the guidance that comes when we listen
closely to the world around us and for our own hidden reckonings, these
prayers have often been very meaningful.
But this St. Joseph “help me sell my house” prayer felt different to
me, more like how I used to pray as a six-year old, for a new bike; or as a
12-year old, for the Cleveland Browns to kick a winning field goal. What interest did God, or St. Joseph, or
anyone else other than my immediate family, have in me selling my house? Still,
I thanked the purveyor of this “Divine Treasure” and drove immediately to our
old house, where Susan and I buried the little plastic statue, upside down a
few feet from the house, one of the many variations for this ritual we had
heard. Then, with as much sincerity
and integrity as I could muster, I read the prayer that had been included in
the box, a prayer that included gratitude to St. Joseph for his work with
Jesus and Mary and, in advance, for the intercession with God that he would
provide on behalf of my real estate interests, but that concluded with my own
words, in which I shared how much we hoped that someone would love our house
the way we had, and how we wished for the next owners’ health and happiness. The
ritual was not as disingenuous as it may sound. While my theology might be different than
that expressed in the prayer, I could believe that the articulation of
our situation to the universe and whatever divine force might be there was
helpful, if for no other reason than it was an acknowledgement that, in the
end, no matter how good our marketing, staging, or pricing, we were
ultimately helpless. Whether or not we
would find a buyer was in large part out of our hands. I
saw that this petitionary prayer was not all that different than the one I
offered as a 14-year old, asking that my mom might find some relief from her
debilitating depression, or as a 25 year-old
holding onto my future wife as a tornado bore down on us in our tiny Ohio
apartment, or as a 29 year-old,
surprisingly finding myself in an Episcopal church in New York City, asking
through prayer for the calling I eventually found, or as a 32 year old,
offering a prayer on behalf of a patient in the cancer ward of a hospital
where I was the chaplain. Sometimes
we have little that we can do but simply be.
And this prayer had become a way of doing that, just as all the others
I had described. It became the very
act of letting go that my friend had encouraged me to perform several months
earlier and I was starting to finally get it.
I
didn’t even mind the ridicule I endured at the Dahl’s later that
afternoon. My act had felt anything
but cynical. In fact, as absurd as
burying a piece of plastic underneath our “chemical-free” landscaping
probably was, it felt like a good thing to do. That
very night, the couple who had put the offer down on our house e-mailed to
say that they had a buyer. She was
coming for her third visit the next day, and hopefully they would have good
news for us soon. I
almost called my friend Terry. But,
I’m glad I didn’t. The deal fell
through. Still
only a few weeks later, they did have a deal, and therefore so did
we. And sometime in the next few days,
we will finally close, not only on the house, but on this worry-filled
chapter of our lives. Did
St. Joseph and the prayer have anything to do with the sale of our
house? I’m not prepared to say yes or
no. What
do I know about the mysteries of the universe? I
do know that the friendship I had built with the young couple that will
finally buy our house this week probably kept them from lowering their price
once our original deal expired. I also
know that the relationship I built with them that gave me the confidence to
invite them to move in before we had finalized the deal kept me from having
to deal with flooded basements in two houses this month, rather than just
one. And I also know that there are
many people in our neighborhood with houses still for sale. Kind
of makes you wonder if they have buried a statue of St. Joseph in their
yards? What
does this house-selling ritual have to do with Unitarian Universalism? Well, nothing…and everything… just
like every other non-violent, non-coercive religious claim in the world. I’ve
heard some describe our religion as a smorgasbord, where we can partake of
all kinds of religious notions, both hot and cold. I’ve always been a little uncomfortable
with that idea, feeling that we don’t have a right to go mucking around in
other people’s religious practices, particularly when our participation might
be seen as disingenuous. However, I’ve
also been a minister long enough to know that if a religious practice or idea
is helping me or anyone else get through the day and it isn’t hurting anyone,
then it is good enough…and appropriate…especially if it brings us closer to
those who share our planet, whose beliefs we might just as easily disregard
if we weren’t willing to occasionally see the world through their eyes. Perhaps
Mary Oliver sums it up best in her poem “Praying”. She writes: It doesn’t have to be I think our religion is about leaving enough
silence and space for other voices to speak, and for believing that we can
learn something when they do. Or as a graphic on the front of the St. Joseph box
proclaimed: “Ask.
Believe. Trust.” For when we do, we may, to our surprise, find our
own doorway into thanks waiting for us. Closing Words (Kendyl Gibbons) We have such a little moment out of the vastness of
time for all our wondering and loving. Therefore let there be no
half-heartedness; rather, let the soul be ardent in its pain, in its
yearning, in its praise. Then shall peace
enfold our days, and glory shall not fade from our lives. |