I can't believe it!  I learned how to cut and paste!  Really, I learned that in kindergarden, but anyway, ta da, here's the sermon!

"Harmony and Discord" by Carol Morton Davis

Cosmologists used to believe that the universe was slowing down.  They theorized that there was only so much energy in this conglomeration of planets, stars, and dark matter and once it was used up the whole thing would grind to a halt and collapse in upon itself, ready for another Big Bang.

That was until the recent discovery that the stars are actually accelerating away from each other.  Now the universe appears to be speeding away towards---what?  At least the old view had the virtue of tidiness, order, certainty and a sense of harmony.

I want to believe as my mother taught me and as I learned In Catechism that the natural order of things is order.  But the natural order of my yard is crabgrass and weeds.  Unless tended, my morning glories fight a death struggle with my purple cone flowers.  Unless I diligently pursue the natural accretion of shoes, clothing, newspapers, and dishes in my house—the stuff of life—my living space is anything but orderly.

I crave harmony and order. So I plant flowers, trim the lawn, and rake my Zen garden.  I paint, maintain, and clean my house.  I have a home cooked meal with my family nearly every evening.  I enjoy my work in a profession whose entire purpose is the peaceful resolution of disputes. 

But I am not Miss Manners.  I confess that I have a love-hate relation with harmony.  I love modern atonal music by Carter and Boulez.  My MMPI says that I detest authority.  I am a borderline dilettante, uncomfortable with perfectionism and able to procrastinate with the best of them.

Maybe my body chemistry is in tune with the cosmos and its naturally unruly state.  Too much peace and quiet, too much harmony, leaves me restless and I look for adventure.  When discord prevails I crave calm.  Harmony alone is not the solution, but instead a balance of harmony and discord.  

I began studying the piano some eight years ago.  In fact my first lessons were on this magnificent Mason and Hamlin grand that my family was storing for the church in our living room.  I hoped that someday harmonious music would flow from my fingers.  That day has yet to come.  Instead I remain thoroughly mediocre at the keyboard.  To my surprise, while I have not achieved harmonious results from my piano education I have gained an invaluable insight from my recitals.

My daughter’s violin teacher says that preparation of a recital begins the first time you sight read a piece and continues every time you practices.  Perhaps that explains the anxiety with which I approach piano practice.  I am the most timid piano player imaginable, afraid to strike a wrong note. 

As the recital day approaches my sense of trepidation grows into outright fear.  By the hour before I play I have achieved absolute terror.  But do I let this stop me?  No!  I sit at the bench, forget all the notes, forget where to begin, and watch my hands shake.  I tentatively start the piece, freeze, fumble with the notes, freeze again, fumble some more and somehow finally reach the end of the piece.

The fear I feel is palpable, delicious, and entirely safe.  That’s why I keep doing recitals.  After all this isn’t skydiving, where my chute could collapse, or drag racing, or lion taming.  It’s a recital and the worst that will happen is that I will be mildly embarrassed and the audience will be made to feel uncomfortable.  That’s a small price for the chance to learn from a large fear. 

The creative spark I feel from studying music and the benign stress of the recital pull me out of my day to day routine.  I do this because it is difficult and stressful.  The only way I know to grow as a person is to do things that are outside of my comfort zone.  The recital is so outside of my comfort zone, so discordant and stressful in an almost visceral way, that other challenges seem more attainable.  I may be afraid to give that speech, take on that case, or make that new friend, but not THAT afraid…I can’t wait for the next recital.

And so it is for anyone.  The path to a harmonic utopia will pass through a forest of brambles.  Those who choose that path can expect can expect at the very least to be scratched and bruised as they hack their way through the thicket.

Susan B. Anthony and the early suffragettes were agitators.  They had to be.  As revolutionaries they were challenging deep-seated beliefs of our society.  This nation and most of the world had long lived harmoniously with laws that restricted women from voting or owning property.  The cost of that so-called harmony was the subjugation of half of the population.  That is why the suffragettes had to demonstrate, organize, march, and suffer arrest.  Susan B. Anthony herself was arrested, indicted, tried, and found guilty for voting in a Federal election.  The suffragettes needed to agitate in order to force people to wake up and rethink their preconceived notions.

Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Edward Munch, and Jackson Pollack produced art that challenged the status quo and expended the boundaries of art itself.  Many art revolutionaries were reviled in their lifetimes.  The influential art critic Louis Leroy in a satiric essay published in 1874 coined the term “Impressionism”.  Commenting on Claude Monet’s painting, “Impression:  soleil levant,” Leroy wrote, “Impression I was certain of it.  I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it—and what freedom, what ease of workmanship!  A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”

And of the First Impressionist Show, Leroy wrote, “The rash man had come there without suspecting anything.  He thought that he would see the kind of painting one sees everywhere, good and bad, rather bad than good, but not hostile to good artistic manners, to devotion to form, and respect for the masters.  Oh, form! Oh, the masters!  We don’t want them any more, my poor fellow!  We’ve changed all that.”

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built modern houses in the era of Victorian mansions.  Le Corbusier experimented with odd configurations and modern materials.  Mies van der Rohe designed minimalist structures for an unprepared public.  Now these revolutionary designs are commonplace in our cities and neighborhoods.

Literature is about nothing if not about conflict and discord.  I know that I couldn’t be a writer because I couldn’t bear to make my characters suffer.  My novels would be happy tomes where nothing bad ever happens to joyful people.  They wouldn’t sell a copy.

It is the memorable suffering of Steinbeck’s Tom Joad that drove home the injustices of the Great Depression.  Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman suffer the shallowness and materialism of modern culture.  Othello, Mr. Rochester, Kurtz, Anna Karenina, and Randall Patrick McMurphy—the roll call of suffering protagonists goes on and on.  They are literary warriors in the cause.  Their suffering holds a mirror to the world, a world that will listen, learn, and grow.  Their suffering, and ours as we endure with them, may expose some new truth, a truth that leads to new understanding and a more honest and balanced world view.

As it is with fiction, so it is with the real world.  Michael Servetus, an early founder of Unitarianism, published a tract decrying the Trinity.  He was convicted of heresy and antitrinitarianism and burned at the stake in 1553.  Galileo was punished by the Church for advocating the Copernican theory that the Earth rotated around the sun. 

Dr. King and Gandhi were revolutionary martyrs whose ideas survived their deaths.

Tolstoy said, “I know that most men, even those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” 

There are times when I become so content in my routine and in my job that it takes an outside event or an act of will to change.  Likewise an entire group can become fixed in its way of living, and can confuse stasis with harmony.  Its creed is, “It’s always been done this way,” or, “Don’t make waves,” or “If it aint broke don’t fix it.”  Such an attitude really isn’t an option in this world where change is constant and the very stars are spinning out of control.  Stress and discord are unavoidable.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin cautions us about being too narrow minded in our ideas and values.  Unlike Plato, he argues that there can be no single set of ultimate values that are universally true.  Instead he points out that certain “ultimate values” are not even compatible with each other.  Perfect liberty is not compatible with perfect equality.  Unrestrained liberty would permit the strong to dominate the weak.  And a society that enforces perfect equality would have the weak dominating the strong.  Mr. Berlin sees similar conflicts between the ideals of justice and mercy, knowledge and happiness, and spontaneity and security.

His solution:  an open minded pluralism that accepts the truth of the values, acknowledges that values may be in conflict with each other, and recognizes the necessity to bend if we are to attempt to live in harmony. 

For us to exist in our rapidly changing world of conflicting values we must first realize that the essential nature of our world is conflict and discord.  Left alone, harmony will not grow.  It must be cultivated and nurtured.  We must accept that our friends, our institutions, our universe of human interactions are always changing and we must give them room to change.  At the same time we ourselves are changing.  Our ideas, values, and our very self-conception will change with our circumstances. 

The natural order of human relations may not be orderly and there may not be a divine set of laws that governs our interactions with each other.  But to be human is to perpetually try to order our lives in such a way as to bring happiness. 

Sometimes we have to bring more order to a chaotic situation.  Sometimes we have to mediate between different conceptions of order.  Sometimes we are too accommodating to harmony and imprison ourselves in stifling safety.  Whatever the situation, we are called to face our fear, deal with the stress, and make the changes.  For some of us it is easier to increase order.  Others are more comfortable with less structure.

 When we are in the chaos and stress of discord it is easy to realize what we must do to restore our balance.  The greater challenge is to recognize the tomb of lies that is false harmony, and to gather the courage to make changes.

May we all have the intelligence to be aware of the sacrifices that we make for harmony, the wisdom to judge the cost of peace, and the strength to change our world and ourselves.    

Last night was another dream-filled sleepfest.  It felt like I would finish one dream and start with another.  Here they are:

 

I was at a Rolling Stones concert at the Metro in Chicago.  This is a tiny venue that holds only a thousand people or so.  I was standing anly six rows back and the stones were young!  Maybe in their 20's.  Mick looked great and Keith didn't look wasted.  What a treat this was especially since I've never seen the Stones in concert before.  I jumped and danced and felt thrilled.

 

Then yet another school dream.  My books, which I hadn't looked at all semester, were locked in my locker.  I knew the combination of the locker, but I didn't know which one was mine.  I ran frantically from locker to locker trying to see where were my books.  I was feeling even more panicky because I hadn't attended a class all semester.  In another room was a kid handing out study packets.  When I found mine filed under Davis (my maiden name was Morton in school)  I saw a study guide for Grey's Anatomy.  Why on earth would I be studying anatomy?

 

In the last and most grizly dream I was in a large jetliner with my father.  I was sitting in the front of the jet and my father was way in the back.  As the jet taxied for takeoff it veered off the runway and started driving down a highway.  We drove for some minutes down the road when we encountered stopped traffic.  The jet was going way too fast and it ran into the rear of a car, crushing it.  I gathered my shoes which I had taken off and my Grey's Anatomy folder and I jumped onto the slide and out of the plane.  My father was sitting on a curb by the car, facing away from the crushed car, shaking his head and looking pathetic.  I sat next to him and listened to the sounds of a body being extracted from the car.  My father told me to not look at the car.  He couldn't look at the car either.

 

OK, I know that I'm crazy busy at work, the kids are back in school, Mara's looking for colleges, Ashley's looking for a new cello teacher, Mike thinks that I'm unhappy, and I need a vacation from my summer vacation.  But an airplane hitting a car?  Gimme a break!

I'm happy to report that I survived yesterday's sermon.  It was a lot of fun.  My church (Unitarian-Universalist) has lay preachers in the pulpet once a month.  We get some training and some help editing and then we're on our own.  We get to choose the topic; in the past I've done Epiphanies, Rites of Passage, Spring Cleaning, and yesterday's sermon, Harmony and Discord.  I'll publish the sermon here if I can ever figure out how to transfer it from the Word file.  I've been fooling with that for an hour now with no luck.

 

The sermon the chance to go into depth into a subject that interests me.  I'll ususlly buy two or three books on the subject to supplement my burgening library.  My husband jokes that he would be happier if I only collected shoes and jewelry like normal women.  But in addition to footwear and earrings I'm always bring home books. 

 

I also like sermonizing because I can bring a woman's perspective to the pulpet.  We have a male minister and most of the lay leaders are men.  So we hear a lot about social justice and green politics and being active in the community.  I try to focus on more personal family-type issues.  The need for coming of age rituals, the meaning of beauty, how to gather the courage to change ourselves and our situations.  I don't do feminist rants, but my talks are definitely about my issues.  I have trouble with the notion of God, or the Goddess, or any greater powers so my sermons focus on humanistic themes.  I try to focus on how we find spirituality in ourselves and amongst others.

 

Maybe my perspective is too feminine.  Maybe the guys don't want to hear about relationships and the spiritual rewards of nurturing.  Maybe they want more action.  I notice that some of the men who usually attend manage to miss my sermons.  Too bad.  They could learn something.  As it is, most of my positive feedback comes from other women.  As long as they're happy, I'm happy.  The men will come around eventually.  

The weekend is here.  Horray!  My boss is in the midst of settling a large case and is more worked up than usual.  He's also working his paralegal harder than usual.  Check on this lien, call this doctor, make an appointment with the client, give him a lap dance, it just goes on and on.  (Just kidding about that lap dance.)  He's so driven when he's working up a case for trial or settlement and all the girls in the office know to avoid him.  Unfortunately I can't.

 

So I go to the office a little earlier, stay a little later, and work an extra day or two.  My tan is waning as my paycheck grows.  When we have time we don't have money, when we have money we don't have time.

 

I'm also putting the final touches on a sermon that I'll be giving at my church this Sunday.  It's about harmony and discord and the danger of having too much of either.  It 's obvious what comes from an overload of discord, but too much harmony and no play makes Carol a dull girl.  We all need some risk, excitement, and adventure and sometimes when our surroundings become too staid we need to make waves.  My sermon advocates agitation.  This is what I've been thinking and reading about for the last two weeks and it probaly explains my strange dreams.

 

Speaking of risk and excitement, I'm always nervous when I give a sermon.  It's not as bad as a piano recital, but I certainly have some big butterflies.  But I love the chance to really ponder an idea or concept, to synthesize those ideas, and to try to share them with others.  Once I figure out how to get the sermon from Word into my blog I'll publish it here.  A few of the ideas have been teased out over the past few month in this space. 

 

Anyway, the sermon is written.  All I need to do is choose my readings (probably an excerpt from "Catch 22") and figure out what to wear (probably a black sheath dress with my salmon jacket and black slingback pumps).  I'll let you know how it goes.

I know something's going on when ever I start dreaming.  I'm a Freudian.  I think that dreams can be very revealing about the inner workings of our psyches.  I can understand the back to school dreams, but last night's crop has my head spinning.

 

It was one of those nights that whenever I woke up I was having a dream.  My husband says that on these nights I get agitated and it's like I'm running.  In one dream I was living in an apartment that I inhabited some 20 years ago.  Living with me were two "people" who can best be described as being like Thing One and Thing Two from the "Cat in the Hat."  I just wanted to find the bedroom to go to sleep but Things One and Two kept running up and down the stairs, outside the house, and around the yard.  They wanted to bring me outside and once there Thing One berated me several times for not properly locking the gate.  Whew, no wonder I was running.  I remember waking up with my nightie twisted around me.

 

In the only other dream I remember (I know that I had lots more) I was a man working in a department store.  I remember thingking that this wasn't right, that I'm a woman, but there I was with undeniable evidence to the contrary.  I had short hair, I was big, I had these giant hands, and I was being treated like one of the guys by the other salesmen.  How wierd!  Later, I came back to the store as myself wearing a dress and heels and one of my fellow salesmen was coming on to me.  I was apalled!  He didn't even recognize me as one of his co-workers and he was standing close and touching me.  It shouldn't have, but his advances felt strange.  Then thankfully I woke up.

 

It feels better writing these dreams down.  They've been stcking with me all morning.  I hope I can straighten out whatever's causing this so that I won't have to wear a running suit to bed tonight.     

There is something about "back to school" that stirs my memories and emotions.  My daughters had their first day of school yesterday and last night I had THAT DREAM.  The one where I'm in school and I have no idea where is my math class because I haven't bothered to attend the class all semester.  I'm terribly upset in the dream, just like in the dream where I haven't bought my books or in the one where I never bothered to pick up my schedule.

 

I would chalk this up to Catholic guilt, but in these dreams I'm not in grade school wearing my blue plaid skirt and white blouse.  Instead I'm in college, an apparently derelict, borderline alcoholic young woman who has no sense of personal responsibility.  Which couldn't be farther from the truth.  I was a good girl in college; a studious, mostly sober sorority sister.  It would have killed me to neglect my classes like my evil dream twin.

 

But there she is, regularly in my dreams, reminding me that there is a price to be paid for everything.  Maybe these dreams are a product of guilt.  I'm not doing enough for my girls, my husband, or myself.  Or maybe college is a time of such emotional turmoil that it stays with us forever in many different ways.  All I know is that I haven't seen the last of my dream college.    

I'm back.  Back from vacations, back from the pool, back from a carefree summertime world where the last thing I thought about was writing.  

Now that the girls are back in school and now that I'm recovering some semblence of a routine I find that I want to write again...and to reconnect with my MSN friends. 

 

I'm afraid that I'm rusty.  Writing is a habit after all.  While I've been working on my tan my metaphors have gotten flabby.

 

Oh well, gotta make school lunches.  Thanks for hanging in there!