Constraint-based Living

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By Ana Levy-Lyons
During a concert that has gone down in history, the great violinist Itzhak Perlman broke a string. Instead of stopping to replace it, he kept playing, finding the melodies on the three remaining strings. When the piece was finished, the astounded audience gave him a standing ovation and clamored for him to speak. He approached the microphone and said, “It is our task to make music with what remains.” On the most literal level, he meant what remained of his violin. He may also have been referring to what remained of his health since he contracted polio at age 4 and walks with crutches and leg braces. He plays violin sitting down. Metaphorically he may have meant, make a life of beauty with what remains to each of us after our storms leave us drenched, battered, and diminished.

His performance might have seemed freakishly brilliant, and it was, but actually constraints can be so helpful to the creative process that some artists go out of their way to create artificial constraints within which to do their work. The French author George Perec wrote a 300-page novel, La Disparition, without the use of the letter “e.” And there’s an English translation that also doesn’t use the letter “e.” Just for reference, I’ve already used 209 e’s in this sermon. And frankly, I plan to continue using them liberally. Former NYU professor Louis Bury wrote a constraint-based dissertation about constraint-based writing. He also writes poetry while riding the New York subway system. The rules are: Each stop you have to write one line, each transfer is a new stanza. No rewrites. Here’s one of his poems: What genre / of pulchritude/ what fable/ of conviction/ fires your/ puttering engine? (Don’t worry, I didn’t know what pulchritude meant either – I had to look it up. It means beauty.)

This is not to say that all constraints are productive like this. Poverty, hunger, lack of health care are not productive constraints. Billions of people in this world suffer crushing constraints that make survival the only possible goal. Self-actualization, creativity – these don’t even enter the picture. But spiritual teachers, like artists, have found that voluntary constraints can create great inner freedom. Fasting, the discipline of daily prayer or meditation, going on a silent retreat, keeping dietary laws, giving something up for Lent. In the story about the Buddha that Meagan told, Siddhartha gave up all his wealth and his material possessions, gave up his fine clothes in exchange for a monk’s robe, and ate only one meal a day. The teaching was clear – he could never have had the spiritual breakthroughs he had if he’d stayed living in luxury at the royal palace.

Sabbath is another constraint-based spiritual practice. It has rules. Depending on your religion, you might not work or buy things or turn on a light or drive a car during the Sabbath. The work and errands that you would otherwise do in seven days has to get squeezed into six. After the service today, as part of our Sabbath Sunday, we’re going to have a panel discussion with three Sabbath-keeping people from three different religious traditions: one Jewish, one 7th Day Church of God, and one former Mormon UU. Each of them will talk about how the voluntary practice of limiting their freedom in certain ways actually leads to an abundance of spiritual goodness in their lives. The Sabbath constraints are productive constraints. They can allow you to bask in the pulchritude of the present.

This is a hard sell for Unitarian Universalists. Not the basking in the pulchritude of the present part, but the rules part. Most of us in this room do not voluntarily constrain ourselves at all. In fact we try to eliminate constraints from our lives as much as possible. For some, our attraction to Unitarian Universalism is part of that quest. Collectively, we’ve some bad experiences with the constraints imposed by religion. Especially when it comes to sexuality, family, and gender. As recently as a few weeks ago, we’ve seen a case in North Carolina of the power of religious authority to constrain others and violate their rights in the most intimate ways and places. So it’s for good reason that we are wary of religious rules and constraints. As John described so nicely in his homily, we legitimately reject the lines that others have drawn and we proudly color outside those lines.

And that’s all good. It’s right to color outside lines that are oppressive or arbitrary. And to help others color outside those lines. But where I see us run into trouble as religious liberals is when we stop there. When we go no further in our spiritual growth than drawing outside the imposed lines. When we try to live within no lines at all. Then we run the risk of a kind of moral chaos. We run the risk of a kind of spiritual aimlessness. We don’t challenge ourselves to go beyond our comfort zones. In a world in which everything goes, it’s hard to actually go deep. Because we reject Sabbath rules, for example, we effectively never stop working and consuming. Because we reject kosher dietary laws, we eat anything we want. Because we reject constraints around our sexuality, we sometimes end up being careless with our sexual energy. There’s a kind of giddy freedom in the place we’ve arrived now as religious liberals. It was well earned and it was a vital step to get here. And now I believe it’s time for us to take the next step. As John so aptly put it, it’s time to redraw our lines.

To use the three examples I just mentioned, we could reject dusty old Sabbath rules like not dancing or drinking but embrace a practice of enjoying a day together without work and shopping. We could reject kosher dietary laws but embrace a practice of eating food that’s healthy for the planet and humane for farmworkers and animals. We could reject the idea that others can tell us when and with whom we can have sex and embrace a practice of deep respect and responsibility in our sexuality. These are all just examples, but the point is that as religious liberals we must still take our spiritual journeys seriously. We still believe in right and wrong. We can acknowledge that we are sometimes tempted to do things that are harmful. We can believe that what we do matters and hold each other accountable for living up to our values. And when we do this, when we redraw our lines and then live within the lines we’ve drawn, we begin to live with a deep spiritual dignity.

At the end of the day, as much as we try to escape our constraints, constrained we remain. Like it or not, life is full of constraints that we don’t choose – financial constraints, health constraints, constraints based on our abilities and aptitudes, our gender or sex, the technology available in the time and place we were born, constraints based on our responsibilities to children, to parents, to people we love. We work within these constraints, we seek to overcome them, we gripe about them. But they are often immovable. They form the absolute boundaries of the possible in our lives.

The ultimate constraint on all our lives, of course, is that they end. We will all die, and this fact gives a meaning and urgency to our living that would be impossible otherwise. Death is the most productive constraint of all. It forces us to ask ourselves, “What genre of pulchritude, what fable of conviction fires your puttering engine?” Life is precious because it ends and the stakes are high because we cannot do everything we want to do. There is not enough time, not enough resources; we don’t have enough strength, enough knowledge. We are too drenched, battered and diminished by the storms of life. It is our task to continue nonetheless. If we find that we can’t walk well, like Itzhak Perlman, it is our task to find something we can do exceedingly well sitting down. And when we feel that life has taken too much from us, it is our task to make music with what remains.
Now please rise in body or spirit and join in singing Hymn 1017 – Building a New Way