Sermon: Spiritual Networking

2016 January 31
by Rev Ana Levy-Lyons

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Spiritual Networking

Ana Levy-Lyons

January 31, 2016

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

It’s an old worn-out trope that money can’t buy you happiness. We’ve heard it before in a thousand different ways. That once your basic needs are met – once you feel safe and have a warm place to live and enough food to eat and good health care – once that bar is crossed, having more money won’t make you any happier. Most of us have heard this and maybe even believe it– for other people – but we think to ourselves, “Yeah, but if I personally had more money – or that new generation laptop or those awesome shoes or that haircut I’ve been needing for weeks, I would be… assisted in my happiness.”

But you sitting in this room, and I know this by virtue of the fact that you’re sitting in this room, know that there are other things too that you need for your happiness. When you come here to First U, you’re not pursuing money. In fact, ideally you’re parting with some of your money to be here! You’re here for something else. Twenty-one of you just joined this congregation today looking for that something else – something you’re not completely getting from money or through your work or from your friends or families or even in coming to services here without being members. There are probably twenty-one different reasons why you’re here, but a common thread, I would guess, is community. Spiritual community.

Because most of us know that what will make us happier after our basic physical needs are met (or even without our basic physical needs being met) is relationships. And the trick is, it’s not just any relationships, it’s relationships of a particular quality. A psychiatrist and Zen priest, Robert Waldinger, (I know this sounds like the setup for a joke, but it’s not) he has a lot to say about this topic. He’s the director of a long-term Harvard study of adult development. 75 years ago, they began following hundreds of teenagers, some from wealthy families and some from the poorest families they could find. Every couple years they interviewed them and their families, did health evaluations, looked at their brains, did surveys – the researchers looked at how their lives were going from every possible angle.

Waldinger describes that his team found a clear and consistent pattern: the people in the study, rich and poor, who were more socially connected to family, friends, and community were happier and healthier. They actually lived longer, had better brain function than those who were less connected. Apparently the best predictor of our health at age 80 is the quality of our relationships at age 50. “Relationships are really good for us,” he says. Loneliness, by contrast, is really bad for us. One in five Americans says they’re lonely.

And loneliness, of course is not about whether you’re single or partnered or how much time you spend alone. You can be lonely in a marriage; you can be lonely at work; you can be lonely in a room full of friends; you can definitely be lonely in a crowded city. What makes people happy and healthy and not lonely is not just any marriage, any friendships, any community: it’s a loving marriage or intimate friendships and deep community. Waldinger describes it as relationships you can really count on – where you know they will really be there for you when you need them; and you’ll be there for them. This is the quality of relationships and community that, when we’re at our best, we find here at First U.

This quality of relationships, this level of trust, is not something that just happens by itself. It doesn’t automatically appear when you get 300 of us into a building together. If we want it, we need to intentionally cultivate it. I think what Lynn preached about so beautifully gives us a hint of what that feels like. Lynn spoke about poetry and how foreign it can sometimes seem. She spoke of learning poetry “by heart,” making space for it in our being. We, in our hyper-connected lightening fast stressed out New York world feel like we have no time for things like poetry – things that are obscure and deep and complicated, things that take so much time to understand, and even then you can never be sure you’ve really understood it. Well, people are poetry in all those ways. And just as learning a poem “by heart” can be a key to really getting it, so making space for another person in your own heart can be the only way to really form that quality of relationship that we sometimes call “spiritual.” It’s that quality of relationship that makes us all happier, healthier, and not lonely.

Every time you interact with someone you have a choice: you can either try to learn a verse of theirs by heart and deepen the relationship or you can say you don’t have time and keep it on the surface. If a guy mentions to you after the service, “Agghh, my knee is acting up again,” you could say, “That sucks. I know how you feel. I tweaked my back yesterday and it’s really bad too.” And that will pretty much kill the conversation. Or he could say, “Agghh, my knee is acting up again,” and you can say something like, “Sounds like this is an ongoing frustration for you.” And then he might tell you about how, “Yes, it is and it’s been getting worse.” And if you keep letting him in and engaging him, he might tell you that what he’s really scared about is that if it keeps going like this, he won’t be able to climb the stairs in his home any more. They’ll have to move out. His kids love their home. He loves their home and he is so sad about this. And then you will have formed a little tiny thread of connection with that person – you will then know him a little bit more deeply than you knew him before. And he will have found a little pocket of safety in you – because you made time for him with the gift of your listening and the opening of your heart.

And if we do this in small ways and big ways, many times over, with many different people, make those little threads of connection over and over, what we’re doing is a kind of spiritual networking. We’re making a fabric together. It’s different from business networking, which can also be a beautiful thing. But in business networking, the relationship is a means to an end. Sometimes that end can be noble and important – you find ways to work together to make the world a better place. I hope we do lots of that here. But in spiritual networking, the relationship is not just a means to an end; it’s an end in itself. You read a poem just for its own sake and sometimes, as Lynn suggested, to find a companion.

Am I saying to the twenty-one of you who joined today that every conversation you have here has to be a deep, serious conversation? No. Light, fun banter and play is a great part of community too. But I am asking that we bring to each other a recognition that each of us is a poem, deep and complex and always somewhat mysterious. A lot of work and heart opening and making space is required to really know us. And it’s well worth the effort and time. There isn’t time to say we don’t have time for each other. Mark Twain, in his infinite wisdom, put it, “There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”

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