Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

On Being Human

Reverend Darcey Laine
October 15, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

As my sister’s due date got closer and closer, I packed a “Sister in labor” bag and put it in the car. I checked with Rev. Amy every day to tell her what I would miss if that day turned out to be the big day. When the call finally came at 2:00 on a Friday night, It was like a slapstick comedy. I thought the phone ringing was my alarm clock, so I’m swatting the snooze button on my alarm clock instead of answering the phone. I knew what the sound meant — my sister needs me — but I could just not figure out that I needed to pick up my phone and talk into it. The mistakes continued from there. When my sister first told me her time was close on Thursday, I was in a meeting here at the church. I packed my bag as if I would be called to the hospital from work, including a change of clothes so I could get out of my work clothes into some up-all-night and don’t mind hugging a sticky newborn or toddler clothes. Now it was 2:00 Friday night, the moment had finally arrived, I was in my pjs and my clothes and shoes were out in the car.

Once that was sorted out, and I was ready for the late-night drive to Oakland. My husband pressed a coffee drink on me so I could cut down the life-threatening mistakes I might make driving on just a few hours sleep. As I headed first to the church and drop off some materials Amy would need for the big youth art event, I was now just laughing at all the mistakes I made — bad road choices, locking doors of rooms I still needed. (I remember being in the Piazza’s parking lot at one point — I can’t even imagine what that was about). I was feeling tolerant of my mistakes because it was so late at night and I was thrilled to be on-call to such a noble purpose. I started counting the mistakes, which somehow made me feel better. I was up to 11 or 12 mistakes before I got to my sisters house, and that was before the crucial moment after my nephew was born that I realized my camera wasn’t in my sister-in-labor bag and I couldn’t snap those newborn pix at the hospital. Instead I’m trying to help brand-new-dad find his camera, and am struggling to take pictures on a piece of equipment with way more buttons and dials than mine. “But you always have your camera” the proud parents said quizzically. Mistake number 14 I think that was. Just fell out of my sister-in-labor bag when I was pulling on my “up all night” shoes in the driveway.

One might say the whole night — from my silly mistakes to the awe of being with my sister as she gave birth, watching my nephew enter the world — that whole night was an experience of our existential limits as human beings. And that is what I’d like to explore with you today — As human beings we encounter our limits a hundred times each day. From the day we enter this world until the day we leave it, we reside in a reality with incredible gifts and power, and real limits. One of our greatest powers is how we construct meaning around our gifts and our limits.

This is why I like to speak of Humans living between earth and sky. To me this picture is so powerful, that when I was finishing my internship, one of the members of that church painted this stole for me to show us humans dancing on the face of the earth under that starry sky. To me the sky represents the spaciousness of our ideas, of our universe. The human mind is an amazing tool that opens up whole new aspects of being and possibilities. Our capacity to imagine and then plan for our future, for technological progress is part of living under the sky. Our capacity to imagine the perfect football game, or the perfect plan for how I could be completely prepared to help welcome my nephew into the world. The catch is that we live on earth. Beneath our feet we find the bumpy gritty earth. We experience gravity. (Gravity is such a downer). You can see a path from an airplane or mountain top, but when you get down into the forest, you may find that you just can’t get there from here.

The first of our limits is that we are living creatures made of matter. We are part of an infinite variety of expressions of our genetic code. We may find we got the “good at math” genes, and the “never going to run a 6 minute mile” genes. The cycle of growth also provides significant limits. I’ve seen babies working so hard to learn to turn over that the cry from rage and frustration. Toddlers fall down dozens of times each day learning to walk. Each time we approach our personal limits, the capacity of our physical body, our knowledge, our experience, by pushing those limits, by seeking to expand them we experience the discomfort of not knowing, of not being strong enough or fast enough. Our only alternative is to dwell in the land of the familiar so that we don’t come up against our limits as often.

But no matter how skillfully we play our limits, entropy is a fact of life. The aging process intervenes, and at the very time that our knowledge and skill is soaring and opening doors, our bodies slow down. My football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, has the most reliable kicker in the NFL — 3 time pro-bowler David Akers. But after his hamstring injury last year, he has changed his training routine, “Instead of 80 balls a day, I'm hitting 45 a day,” Akers said knowing that as he ages he must change his practice if he wants to retain his mobility in the leg.

Also time is finite. We are born and we die. Even if we got both the math genes and the fast runner genes, and we lucked into a great marriage and great children, we are constantly making choices about how we will spend our time. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge these limits. It’s hard to believe that we have to make choices, that we can’t do it all. But one has only to look at all the cool events on our church calendar this month to realize that time is a real limit, that even the best planning and efficiency cannot inoculate us against. But in our freedom to choose lays our power — our power to shape our lives and our world.

Resources are finite too. Sometimes I’m watching those NFL games and thinking — how great would it be if every time I finished a play someone ran over to me with a bottle of water? If every time I said “ouch” a team of trainers and therapists ran over to assess me, massage me and get me ready to go back in the game? How effective we could be if our churches were staffed like the NFL! Or what if our Sunday service was like a TV show. Up there in the back would be a whole team of producers, sound, and light professionals. I’d sit here in the front before the service began, and someone would hand me my text, while separate professionals did my hair and makeup. (Wardrobe having been approved earlier in the day.) Wow we would be slick. But today it’s just me and Bill preaching, and Richard running Sound, our ushers in the back there, Veronika and Henry and the choir making music, and you. Pretty cool, actually.

This brings us to another limit we encounter; we are not alone. My son cries out from the back seat “go faster mama” and I have to explain “I can’t go faster because there’s a car in front of us. And a car in front of him. I can’t drive over other cars, or through them.”

Have you ever had a really terrific vision or plan, and then when you tell someone about it they point out all the problems with it? “There’s a great band in town, let’s all go see them Saturday night!” well, I need childcare, and Bob has to work late, and there’s no public transit nearby, so that lets out our friends without cars. Darn.

But here’s the other way it can go.

“Let’s go see our favorite band on Saturday night”

“Cool, why not park at my place and we can have some dinner first, and then all carpool to the show”

Wow. Now that’s an even better plan.

This limit — our deep interdependence with other beings — is also one of the greatest gifts.

On a daily basis we are impeded by and cooperate with:

• Our fellow humans
• Bacteria and Fungi
• Wind and Rain
• The sun
• any of the other beings with whom we share this world>
• And any of the forces with whom we share this world.

But we forget. Sometimes we feel so in control of our lives, we forget that without that bacteria in our guts we couldn’t digest our food.

We forget what it’s like to live without the power grid, our e-mail server, traffic lights, the snowpack that makes up most of our drinking water, the people who bring our food to market, the animals and plants who are our food. We begin to think we really are independent, we really are in control. I tell you there is nothing like the coming of a baby in the night to bust up that illusion.

One night as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about the one-ness of everything — the universe being one cooperating, self-limiting, interdependent system. And I thought about that one-ness breaking into little tiny irregular fractions, and these fractions were all the particular things that are, like you and me and that squirrel. Each of us is a tiny part of a massive amazing whole too large for us to comprehend. The limits come in where I am only part. The gift is that where I am not, someone else is. Nature abhors a vacuum, and each niche and nook is filled with life, pushing its limits, expanding and growing.

So what do we make of it all? How do we make meaning of our lives knowing that life and death are co-arising, knowing that limits and freedom are co-arising? Well if we continued our football analogy, the answer would be clear — it’s all about winning the Super Bowl. Except I don’t believe that at all. That would mean only 1 out of every 32 people would live a life worth living — because for 32 teams only 1 can win it big. Okay scratch that. What else is there besides winning the trophy? Is it even possible to imagine that because someone won the Super Bowl, that the totality of being also won? Each of us can only experience a tiny fraction of what it means to be alive on this planet, but each life can have its own integrity.

We take our very real limits and very real gifts, and create a particular life for ourselves. I know that being with my family the night my nephew was born meant something to me even though I had to change my shoes in the driveway and left my camera in the car. And at the end of any Sunday worship I hope that I will have given you all something to think about even though my robe was wrinkled.

Each of us lives at a unique intersection of biology, choices we make, and our place in community and ecosystem. But within those limits and freedoms, we have choices in how we make meaning out of our lives.

Being Human is about living the story that only I can live. Are we the 2005 Eagles who didn’t even make the post-season? Am I a woman who will never get down to a 6 minute mile? No, I am so much more than my limits. Think about those colorful life-sized self-portraits hanging around the campus our teens made that very day I was at the hospital with my sister and her husband. Consider the act of making an outline of our bodies — imagine it is an outline of the limits of our capacities and experience. But within that outline is where the self resides. The intense hues, the simple or the complex, all that we are at this moment resides within the boundaries of our limits. We can choose to define ourselves by our limits, or we can choose to define ourselves by what we are at our core, or from our heart as Bill described earlier.

At a more fundamental level, the essential meaning is simply that of being alive in this unique particularity, and as part of great totality of all that is. We must let go even of our narrative, the story we tell ourselves about our lives, to get at the core of who we are. We are living beings, a conscious, feeling, growing spark of life. We have the capacity to respond anew in each moment to our own power and limits, and to the beings we meet as our journey comes in contact with theirs. At this moment in my life, when so much is in transition, I recommit myself to this life because it is, as Ram Dass says, “the only dance there is.” Dreams of wining the Super Bowl, plans for Friday night, stories I tell about my self are only real in how they are manifest in my corporeal, particular, limited and powerful life moment by moment. The important life is not the one I might have lived, the one that perfect people could manifest, because like a geometrically perfect circle, they do not exist in nature. And so we dance between limits and freedom, between earth and sky. And in this dance we are holding hands with every other being. We dance this life, the life unfolding in us right in this very moment, because it is the only life there is.