"Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Come, come whoever you are, / Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving, / Ours is no caravan of despair, / Come, yet again, come.

Join with me: "Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Though I've broken my vows a thousand times . . . . Come, come whoever you are, / Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving, / Ours is no caravan of despair, / Come, yet again, come.

This was the recitation/song, written by the Sufi Mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, born in thirteenth century Afghanistan, and put to music by UU minister Lynn Unger, that our bedraggled band from the Faithful Fools Street Ministry, a group of eight adults and one infant, would sing as we gathered together each morning while the blessed sun warmed the San Francisco City Hall Plaza. Our four days and three nights on the streets of the City and its Tenderloin District took place during Christian Holy week, a time, this year, that was the coldest Spring on record for many decades.

I was glad for that, for that piercing and numbness-inducing cold, and for the cold rain, too, that swept over the City as if the Great Earth moving with some palpable ardor intentionally sent its cleansing and baptismal power washing down over us all, over our bedraggled band of seven (for the infant and mother slept each night in the safety of the Fool's court on Hyde street) and over all the city's people, rich and poor, straight and gay, male and female, young and old, black and brown and yellow and white; homed and unhomed---all of us washed by a cold, yet healing rain. I was glad, lying on a collapsed, cardboard television carton, with only one thin blanket one of my fellow pilgrims gave me, I was glad even though on the second night, I was tempted to get up and leave. Tempted over and over, as my body shook from the most prolonged exposure to cold, with out proper equipment, that I've ever experienced; tempted to get up from there---there lying against a concrete wall amidst the meager shrubbery of the First Unitarian Universalist Church and Center of San Francisco. I was glad to be there, in some crazy, foolish way. And yet, glad though I was---I was faced with a relentless question. Just why was I there?

Under the circumstances, being as profoundly uncomfortable as I was, it was a good question. To put it into the words that actually welled up in me, "What in the hell am I doing here?" was certainly the appropriate question to be asking, with the appropriate tone, and in language that seemed appropriate to the foolish situation I found myself in. And yet the only answer I could give, the only answer any of the others were, finally, able to offer during the weeks before the retreat as we met to share support and to explore the purpose of it all, the only answer I knew I could honestly respond with was, "I don't know! I don't know why I am here."

And precisely there is the edge of the Fool's domain. The domain that one writer, Cynthia Heimel, described this way: "When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap." That is precisely where the glad fool lives, at the very edge of what the culture says is acceptable, appropriate, right, good, admirable, trustworthy and worthy of respect. That is how the fool propels herself into life and through life, by leaping---and the leap I am referring to here is the leap internal, the leap we take in our own hearts and guts when we follow what we know is right, but can never, ever explain---neither to anyone else nor to ourselves.

I was lying there in a cold, windswept corner of the City, because of a leap, not just to commit to four days and three nights on the streets of San Francisco, but a commitment to a radical transformation of my life and thence my work. "Understand my life, thereby understand my work," wrote Indian writer V. S. Naipaul.

Whenever we face a major life choice---which always means a great transformation---no matter how long we have been preparing for it, both consciously and unconsciously, we must, in the end, leap. It is the act of the fool, to leap, and I was, lying on that damp cardboard in the dead of night, in an act of leaping with a wild abandon that shook my life into a new sense of awareness: Awareness about what I want my work to be, now that I am about to turn sixty years old. Awareness about what dreams I had deferred, deep in my heart, dreams of living with the kind of creativity, intensity and raw spiritual encounter that I so admired in the great ones of our world and that I yearned to know in real terms as my own. Shaken into awareness, awareness that life is so much more than achieving material comfort, or social prestige, or professional accomplishment, or personal acknowledgement and admiration from others, or power---power to command forces that "make things happen"---or security from illness and injury and economic destitution. Shaken into, yet again, a new level of awareness. If there was any reason for why I was lying on a mattress of cardboard, why I chose to walk the unforgiving concrete sidewalks of the City with no money, no cell phone, no change of clothes, no surety of protecting my ego from humiliation---if there was any reason, other than that great and silent deep of unknowing---it was to bear witness to and from a new awareness. And for that I was glad.

I was glad, too, for the insistent and tenacious determination that seemed to fill my whole body, and to come from some internal source of origin that was far deeper and more powerful than conscious thought, a determination to take this journey, for four days, for next year, for the rest of my life. No boundaries for the fool's field of choice---anything is possible, anything. And it's never, ever, too late. And what I want to live out, no longer as just a possibility, but as a real, fully experienced, consciously engaged way of life, is a life committed to serve those who are most marginalized, a life given to a full-on transformation of both my self, and the broken social systems which have caused homelessness and poverty in the first place. Homelessness is not the problem, it is a symptom. Poverty is not the problem, it is a symptom. The lack of affordable health care and affordable housing for all our children, all our families, is not the problem, it is a symptom. Spending billions on an immoral and ill conceived war---while every state in the union suffers bankrupting budget deficits causing cuts in critical services to the most needy---is not the problem, it is a symptom.

Against the deep unknowing of why I was on the street, of why I am choosing to leave full time parish ministry, to live on the edge of poverty, perhaps in the wash of it, against that there are a number of things I feel are "reasons." One is that awareness I just listed: awareness of my life and bearing witness to Life (with a capitol "L") in as full consciousness as possible---a way that vitally emerges from both mind and heart, both soul and psyche, both body and being. One reason is awareness.

Here are some of the other "reasons" why I am taking to the streets (I suspect that finding and exploring the many "reasons" will be part of my journey until I die):

(1) Understanding and challenging the symptoms of disorder and oppression our society, despite all its genuine greatness, has created, and continues to create---and following them to their sources to dig under symptoms to root causes, where they lie at the center of the human heart and at the core of our social, economic and political institutions,.

(2) Ending the separation in my mind and heart that I have created with the power of my own fear and need for control; the separation between myself and the people on the street and the working poor; the separation of my conscious self from my inner core.

(3) To limit the possibility of going to sleep and of remaining there. Here I must resort to others' words, to others' poetry. Henry David Thoreau wrote: "I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience . . . I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression . . . ." It is our bondedness to what is less than amazing, what is less than the deepest yearning of our hearts, that keeps us pinned within something that is not extravagant enough---and keeps me sleeping.

Here is a poem about men (though I think its universality is clear, especially if you change only one word, "King" to "Queen"). It's by William Stafford, it shifts being asleep into being disowned, unaffirmed, and falsely identified---which is what much of being asleep in life is about. It's called "A Story That Could Be True."

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand in the corner shivering.
The people who go by---
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"---
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."
["Maybe I'm a queen."]

The third companion, what you do, your work,
goes down into death to be there with you,
to help. Take deep refuge
with that companion, beforehand.

A last poem, about this desire of mine NOT to sleep through the rest of my life, is by the great Zen master, Dogen:

This slowly drifting cloud is pitiful:
what dreamwalkers men become.
Awakened, I hear the one true thing---
Black rain on the roof of Fukakusa temple.

The last night on the Street Retreat I escaped the cold. I slept in a bed, in a shelter, an Episcopal shelter. (Unitarian Universalists do not run an on-going shelter anywhere in this country, which is worth noting.) I got into the shelter because I won the lottery. Between 6:30 and 9:00 am you can register your name at the Episcopal Sanctuary for the chance of being one of the few lucky ones getting a bed for the night, or for a week, or for thirty nights (there are only a few hundred beds in the City's shelters, and thousands of homeless). You can't find out whether you got a bed or not until afternoon. Which means that if you had not been at the Sanctuary the night before, you would have to walk down there in the morning (or spend precious coins to call) and then return there again to find out, later, either that you had a bed---or that you would have to sleep on the street again. But then, many people choose not to try: its emotionally draining to wait and walk, and wait and walk, and then to be turned down; and it's sometimes violent in the shelters, and it's often hard to protect your possessions from theft while you sleep or shower or eat.

What was most depressing didn't occur for me during the retreat, for while out there for those four days----it was only four days, and I knew it, after all---during those four days, I got into survival mode. Then, despite my gladness to be making the gesture of finally taking an action that signaled a deeper, more authentic, life's choice had begun---after I returned home, tired, sore, and still determined, I went into a pit of despair: How could we let this happen to anyone? The richest most powerful nation in the world, willing to spend billions on weaponry, and we are forcing people to live and die on our streets. We are creating conditions that force people to die on the streets. How? How? How could we be so cut off from one another.

My despair has lifted. My despair has lifted because I have memories of the triumph of the human spirit out there on the streets; of individuals willing to give their only spare change to someone else; persons, beaten down and up by the physical exhaustion of living with incredible harshness, yet still extending a hand in help, or a smile.

And I have a growing sensibility of our common humanity, of our deep, deep oneness that defies every economic excuse, every jaded gesture of dismissal, every thread of possessiveness and fear that runs through our lives, convincing us that we deserve what we have when others starve. I also have a surety that it is time, time for me, and perhaps for you, to step out into a new terrain of love and courage, of sacrifice and creativity, to risk challenging my/our enormous privilege and disproportionate comfort---to finally bring justice and healing to those no different than ourselves who suffer the weight of a social system from which we profit so enormously.

Let me end, then, with the words of the prophetic Rabbi Hillel that I have shared before in this sanctuary:

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am not for others, what am I?
If not now, when?
If not now, when?
If not now, when?

What is your reaction to this sermon? Please send comments to Reverend Kurt Kuhwald