Movements of the Spirit, a Sermon

Cleveland Park Church

3400  Lowell

Washington, DC

May 19, 2013

The story we have today in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles is, of course, a fascinating story and worthy of our full and undivided attention.  But we decided to focus today more on the subject of this story, namely the work of the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit works with us today.  To assist us in that focus I am going to lead you in some brief and easy movements of body and breath.  And I am going read you a children’s’ story and tell a rather long personal story.  I  don’t believe I have ever done that in my sermons here or anywhere else.  I learned the art of preaching from people who warned against personal stories from the pulpit.  The personality of the preacher is of no interest in the Calvinist tradition.  The preacher’s job is just to illuminate the scriptures. 

So in a nod to our Calvinist tradition, let me say just a few words about the Book of Acts.  Biblical scholars have ripped into the book and concluded that much of it could not have happened the way St. Luke says it did.  But we cannot help concluding that something extraordinary obviously happened.  Something very important happened to these people whom the Gospels all portray as none too competent and in Paul’s case none too nice.  Something happened to these mostly illiterate people to make them fearless public speakers who changed the world some 2,000 years ago and whose preaching and example is still sending out shock waves.

Luke tells us that a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting, and tongues as of fire appeared and rested upon each of the disciples.  Did it happen exactly like this?  Does this sort of thing still happen?  Does God still intervene in our lives like this?  Is there anything we can do to make God intervene?

These are difficult questions to answer, and as we attempt to answer them we are at ground zero of some of the most disputed territory in the history of Christianity. 

As a congregational church, we are the direct descendants of some people, Augustine, Luther, Calvin who taught that there is not much we can do about the workings of God and the Holy Spirit.  God is sovereign and we people are such flawed creatures that there is really nothing we can do to merit God’s love.  The Sovereign deity simply chooses whom to save.  All we can do is celebrate the fact of salvation with the singing of hymns and attending to the Word of God. 

 On the other hand, an equally distinguished group of theologians including Thomas Aquinas, John Wesley, St. Ignatius and a contemporary of Augustine named Pelagius asserted to the contrary that people are not completely depraved and are capable of doing at least a few things to make it easier for God to work through us.  This has become the more popular tradition in recent years. 

Whatever your view of the matter, please know that you are welcome in church this morning.  If you’re a Wesleyan, we thank you for choosing to come; if you’re a strict Calvinist, thank God for bringing you here.

And now we’re going to engage in a little Wesleyan experiment.  We’re going to do just a little something that may help the Spirit work through us this morning & who knows, perhaps for the rest of the week. 

But first, I’m going to read you a story from The House at Pooh Corner.  I’m sure you have read it but perhaps you have forgotten that one day Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit went out for a walk on a misty overcast day, got lost and ended up in a sand-pit at the top of the forest.  Every time they left the sand-pit in an effort to get home, they somehow ended up back at the sand-pit.  While Pooh and Piglet confessed to being hopelessly lost, Rabbit stoutly maintained that he knew where they were and could easily find the way home if only they would try again.  So Pooh devised a little test:  Rabbit, if you’re so smart, can you leave us and hop away a hundred yards or so into the mist and find your way back?

  “If I walked away from this Pit, and then walked back to it, of course I should find it,” said Rabbit.

  “Well, I just thought perhaps you wouldn’t,” said Pooh.  “I just thought.”

  “Try,” said Piglet suddenly.  “We’ll wait here for you.”

Rabbit gave a laugh to show how silly Piglet was, and walked into the mist.  After he had gone a hundred yards, he turned and walked back again . . . and after Pooh and Piglet had waited twenty minutes for him, Pooh got up.

  “I just thought,” said Pooh.  “Now then , Piglet, let’s go home.”

But, Pooh,” cried Piglet, all excited, “do you know the way?”

  “No,” said Pooh.  “But there are twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they’ve been calling to me for hours.  I couldn’t hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they’re calling from.  Come on.”

  They walked off together; and for a long time Piglet said nothing, so as not to interrupt the pots; and then suddenly he made a squeaky noise . . . and an oo-noise . . . because he now began to know where he was; but he still didn’t dare say so out loud, in case he wasn’t.  And just when he was getting so sure of himself that it didn’t matter whether the pots went on calling or not, there was a shout from in front of them, and out of the mist came Christopher Robin. 

So you see, the calm, centered self, aka Pooh Bear, can indeed save itself provided, of course, that it banishes the ever-chattering, distracting, multi-tasking, self-deceived self.

Now we’re going to investigate this truth through movement.

I then led the congregation through four movements: Seaweed, Upper Body Twist, Half-Moon and Chair. 

Added information:

People have been moving in imitation of nature for some 100,00 years

Directions:  Breathe evenly and deeply.  Accept that you are who you are, where you are and how you are & see then if you can bend or twist a little more.  Then just maybe the Holy Spirit may come along and give you a little nudge.

And that little nudge might be a lot.

Thank you for your cooperation, for bending, stretching and breathing.

Now remember I promised you another story, a story that partly explains how I got interested in movement, breath and so on and might give us something to think about. 

The story begins at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in September of 1974, almost forty years ago.  One of the first people I met there was Eugenia Lee Hancock of Bluefield, West Virginia.  We met one evening in the makeshift student pub in the basement of the vast complex of gothic towers on 120th and Broadway in New York City.  Somehow I found myself in a small group of people, no more than three or four, and Lee was telling us what she had done that summer. 

Because of her lifelong activity in youth groups or whatever, she had been part of a rather lengthy series of conversations with various leaders of the Presbyterian Church, elders, presbyters, executive presbyters, ministers, lay people, and a youth delegate on the topic of church renewal; or in terms of our purpose today, how to fill churches with the Holy Spirit.  Somehow discussion of the human potential movement came up and these Presbyterians decided that it was worth looking into for its relevance to church renewal, which surely made Luther, Calvin and Augustine, looking down from heaven extremely nervous.  The Presbyterians decided that they should look into the matter at the source, namely the Esalen Institute and that they should send someone there to investigate and report back and decided further that the youth delegate should be the one to go, to the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, on the central coast of California, where mountains rise immediately out of the ocean , where hot water gushes out of the ground and is channeled into enormous stone bathtubs that can comfortably fit about a dozen people at a time.  There went Eugenia Lee Hancock of Bluefield, West Virginia, 23 years of age, for one month, all expenses paid, take as many workshops as you want and report back.

That evening she was still aglow from the experience.  It was obvious that something very important had happened during this month and that this Esalen Institute was someplace I had to go.  So as soon as I had a steady job some ten years later as a chaplain at Dartmouth College, I made my first trip to Esalen.  I have been back for at least a week or so almost every year since.

So let me give you just a brief account of one of my most moving experiences there, which I interpret very much as an experience of the Holy Spirit.  I have no better terms for it.

It was January of 1991 and I was at Esalen for a five-day workshop.  We met three times a day for two hours.  There were two workshop leaders, Jessica and Scott and fifteen participants.  On a winter afternoon it was starting to get dark, about 4 o’clock.  This workshop had a format similar to many at Esalen and now elsewhere:  over the course of a week everyone had the opportunity to share his or her life story with the group.  People shared dreams, talked about their marriages, their jobs, their families.  We had been together for a few days, had heard a lot of stories, so we felt comfortable with each other.  It was my turn.  After I had spoken for a very minutes, Jessica, the leader that afternoon, suggested that I stop talking and just sit quietly, eyes closed, meditate for a moment or two and simply report what I was experiencing. 

Understand?  Get Rabbit, the conscious mind out of there?

I was not terribly happy with that assignment for I was not then, am not now nor have I ever been very fond of sitting meditation.  I squirm a lot.  My mind wanders.  I fidget.  My knees hurt.  I want to scratch something.  Anyway, I followed directions.  

After not very long, I reported the obvious thing to report in such a circumstance: that I felt very nervous and self-conscious and on the spot, etc.

“Mmmm-hmm,” said Jessica and repeated the instructions.  “Just keep your eyes closed, breathe and report what is happening.” 

That calmed me down and I began to just pay attention.

Of course, for a few moments, nothing was happening.  There was nothing to report.  I breathed in, and breathed out.  It was quiet.

Then I reported that I felt a distinct surge of energy.  If that had been all I experienced that afternoon, it would have been remarkable enough.  My breathing deepened and I felt like I had never felt before, like something much more powerful than I had just taken over.  I was not breathing – I was being breathed.

Then I reported an even more powerful infusion of energy and I felt the center of my forehead pulsing powerfully, unmistakably, in and out.  I felt warm, alive, energized.

Nobody said anything.  Nobody had said anything about third eyes or somatic responses to meditation.  This was certainly remarkable enough.

Then I had to report that I sensed very distinctly in my mind’s eye – or wherever- the presence of beings who were with me in the room, but who did not have a physical presence in the room.  However they were – unmistakably – present.

And they were beaming at me, most lovingly beaming at me.  Beaming?  You mean with faces, smiling?  Well, they didn’t exactly have faces.

After just a few moments, I found this love impossible to bear and I burst into tears.

What exactly happened after that I have trouble remembering.  It was fully dark by then.  I’m sure I got a lot of hugs from group members and we all left for dinner.

Now, what does this experience prove?  I’m not sure it proves anything, but it suggests a lot.  First of all, experienced meditators don’t find this story very surprising.  They have heard about and in some cases experienced levitation and travel to distant galaxies, so this is not all that unusual. 

What I notice some twenty years later in the context of church and the Bible is that in Genesis I, the Spirit of God moves upon the waters.  In Genesis 2 God breathes the breath of life into the human.  The word for breath and spirit is the same.  Thus the Holy Spirit has been with us from the beginning and is with us with every breath we take.  I really believe that.  God is loving us all the time, with every breath, every step of the way.

All I did to get this remarkable experience was pay attention to my breath in the context of community.  Although the fifteen or so people with me that afternoon did not say or do anything, they paid attention and that made a huge difference.  Thus I suggest the royal road to living a spirit-filled life is to pay attention to your breath and spend time with people who pay attention.  Do that and the Spirit will rock your world. 

Christmas 2009/Epiphany 2010

In Search of a Sense of Place
California Journal



At Christmas time in the year of Our Lord 2009, I was still in the Napa Valley, in the city of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, having lingered there longer than ever before the flight east. The only return flight I could get with my frequent flyer ticket was on New Year’s Eve; San Francisco non-stop to Dulles. My airplane caught a 125 mph tailwind on the way in, making for a four-hour flight from the West Coast. Upon arrival, I took a short cab ride on a rainy, cold night to one of those great Washington young people’s group homes that always throws a party on New Year’s Eve, to celebrate the evening with numerous people from one of two churches I attend here. Thus my transition from West to East was swift and merry.

Way back in April when I first arrived, people told me that if I wanted to really understand the soul of St. Helena, I should go over to Crane Park any week night and blend into the crowd at the eight bocce ball courts. I indeed found quite a crowd, not to mention picnic tables covered with cheeses, olives, spreads, crackers, cold cuts, pasta, flatbreads, salads, dips, elaborate desserts and, of course, bottles of wine; mostly from Napa, bottles from tasting rooms, bottles from private cellars, bottles with unusual labels, bottles with no labels at all. The Grgich Hills Winery team showed up once a week with an entire washing machine flat of stemware and a dozen bottles from the tasting room. Oh my. Strike up a conversation and soon a glass is placed in your hand, wine poured, delicacies offered. Mmmm. Such generosity with food and wine I have never before enjoyed.

Eventually I joined a team (sponsored by the Episcopal Church, which I often attend): The Holy Rollers. We weren’t particularly good, but we ate well, and improved as the season wore on, finishing sixth out of ten. The last evening for bocce occurred about a month ago. We lost the first two games to a much better team, but came back to win the last one, which was a kick.

St. Helena really is a friendly little town. One can walk into Cook, the small restaurant on Main Street beloved of locals, have a seat at the bar, and find oneself engrossed in conversation. One’s glass is not infrequently filled with whatever someone brought. The menu is rather limited, a simple, type-written sheet of paper, but I have grown to love the place. The chef comes to me for treatments at the spa and I know all the staff by name. Market, another good small restaurant with a longer menu, is up the street. Eddie, the greeter and seater, a peach of a fellow, will remember your name after a couple of visits. I have never lived in a place where it is so easy to meet strangers.

I have been blessed with wonderful clients at Health Spa Napa Valley, even though the economic situation has reduced the number quite precipitously. Most clients come in, say relatively little and get on the table. I breathe deeply and begin. I move my hands, forearms and elbows from head and shoulders down to the feet and back up. Slowly. Repeat. Breathe. I’ve decided that a good massage really is a work of art, something more like a musical composition than a medical treatment, a concerto for the human body in three parts, face down, face up and sideways. The tune we play together depends on the instrument: some people are flutes, some violins, horns, cellos, occasionally a bass violin or grand piano. Most depart with a thank you and a smile on their faces and I move on to the next, or go for a swim before heading off to the bocce ball courts, or Cook, for an evening of conviviality.

Sometimes something magical happens; a deep exhalation, a sigh, a release, a shudder. Clients occasionally teach me something, or reward me with something intangible beyond the cash payment. One client this summer was a defensive safety on a top ten college team in the 1960s. He liked to talk, so we talked football; and beyond football to sportsmanship, honesty, the life lessons taught by competition. I have done advanced academic work in the general field of moral philosophy, but he was the teacher in this conversation, as much by his attitude as anything else.

This season’s liturgical highlight was a Chanticleer concert at a big old Catholic church in Petaluma. They entered the darkened church in tuxedos, carrying lighted tapers and singing a Gregorian Chant, followed immediately by Josquin Desprez’s Ave Maria:

Ave Maria, Gratia, plena,
Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.

The darkened church, the illuminated altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the height and depth of the voices, blending, soaring, welling, gently but surely shaking the rafters and the foundation; thoughts of my mother, all mothers, all parents, the Holy Family, all families, all children, all caring, all loving, all yearning, all suffering, all striving . . . Somewhere deep inside the voices released the wellspring of tears yet made life a glorious blessing.

O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.

A few days later I drove down the coast to Esalen for Christmas week. A week at Esalen is always good, but this was even better than usual, a workshop called SoulMotion, led by Scott and Zuza Engler. For most of our six hours of “class” each day we simply moved to music, slowly working out all the kinks and tightness of our workaday lives. We ate good food, amid much exuberant conversation. We soaked in the famous hot springs perched fifty feet above the ocean. Periodically in class, we would pause to share in small groups or in the larger group. After a few days the sharings emerged from deeper and deeper places.

In an abnormally cold Washington this January, I am warmed by good memories.

In Search of a Sense of Place. January 2, 2006.

California and Washington, DC.


Today’s missive begins during the first week of December in a little coffee outpost, under the same roof with a bank and a real estate office, in the Sonoma Valley that serves Flying Goat Coffee, roasted up the road in Healdsburg. The thick and chocolaty espresso leaves several rings in the cup as I take the final sip. If you want good coffee, wine, beer, and food, Northern California is the place to come. Prince Charles, on his recent visit to the United States, attended some official functions in New York and Washington, then made a bee-line for western Marin County to enjoy the fruits of organic agriculture, including, I am sure, some great cheeses like Cowgirl and Humbolt Fog, washed down with a few bottles of the local claret. Reports suggest that he happily would have skipped his time in New York and Washington and come straight here.

California, like most places, is in reality a multitude of places and certainly contains more multitudes than any other place that is not self-governing. (Whether California is governed at all remains an interesting question.) There is, as already noted, culinary California, as well as surfer’s California, urban California, skier’s California, rural California, northern and southern California and so on, on and on. And, of course, there is a dark side, even to sunny California.

A recent San Francisco Chronicle features an article about an undertaker in Oakland who is sick and tired of doing funerals for teenagers. At some 250 homicides in 2006, Oakland has already superseded last year’s total by over 100. Many of these are teenage gang members, or teens who have somehow run afoul of gang members. I have trouble believing what my eyes are telling me as I read this gruesome story, although I have read stories like it before and know that it is true.

How can there be a gang problem out here where the weather is so nice and the land is so beautiful? Sure New York or Chicago has gangs. Winter in those cities is positively awful. Everyone in town needs prozac, or something like it, by March. I remember the album cover of Chicago: The Blues: Today, the great Vanguard three-record set that came out in 1965. The cover was a photograph shot from an elevated platform, the overhanging sky a dull gray. The elevated platform was gray. The smoke curling up from a chimney was gray. The snow between the el tracks was gray. The only color (a sort of dirty orange) in the photograph came from a warning sign next to the tracks. There was perhaps the faintest trace of tan in the walls of the housing projects some hundred yards distant. No other photograph reminds me so powerfully of winter in Chicago.

I drove a taxi in Chicago in the summer of 1971. I drove all over the city, from good neighborhoods to bad. It was not difficult to tell the difference. Turn the corner into a bad neighborhood in Chicago in those days and instinct immediately took over. My fellow cabbies all agreed that one got out immediately, in defiance of any and all traffic regulations. I have not driven all over Oakland or Los Angeles, but I cannot imagine that any neighborhoods there today look so bad. According to everything I have read, they don’t. Yet the crime rate is horrendous. I suppose it is not so surprising that sprawling, big city Los Angeles would have a gang problem, but I have heard of gangs operating up north here in Santa Rosa and in the eastern suburbs of the Bay Area like Pleasanton and Walnut Creek, places that look far too nice and wealthy to have any problems at all. Why?

At this point I remember that one of the important events in my intellectual life took place on another day when the New York Times was sold out and I bought the Los Angeles Times instead, back in 1990. The headline in the People section read, "The People Prof: What Do Yuppies, Gangs Share? Walter Goldschmidt Knows." What they have in common, according to the article, is the need for recognition by their peers; the need to belong to some society, however small. When the Los Angeles Police Department announced a war on gangs, Goldschmidt, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UCLA, predicted its failure. Crime rose in the year of the Department's war. Goldschmidt explained that police action only led to greater cohesion on the part of gang members. Gangs form because teenagers perceive the dominant culture as being against them, or as simply not caring about them enough to provide adequate opportunity. So they drop out of school and join gangs, where they at least feel that they belong. When attacked, gang members pull together like the members of any club worth belonging to.

The obvious question then is: Are the schools in these places that bad? Are they offering so little? If so, why? And is it just the schools? How about the parents, the wider community, society?

Whatever the cause of gangs (and they have been with us a long time, in the old world and the new), there are certainly some trends in contemporary life that many people find disturbing and these trends are writ particularly large in California.

This autumn’s reading has included a particularly good book about California from the Sonoma County Library entitled Fault Line: Searching for the Spirit of a State along the San Andreas, by Thurston Clarke. The author took six months or so to travel the San Andreas Fault from Shelter Cove and Point Arena in the north to the Salton Sea in the south, where the fault fractures into Mexico. He has a wonderful eye for people and places, for the human community and the natural. Here he is on three human communities:

“The same issue of the Hollister Free Lance inviting the public to an open house at the new $7.8 million county jail also announced that San Benito County’s supervisors had decided to save $100,000 a year by closing the library. (Hollister sits astride the San Andreas some fifty miles south of San Jose.) While jails were essential and mandated by the state, parks and the library were ‘at the end of the county food chain,’ one functionary explained. No explanation was given why this rather paltry sum, the cost of one low-end tract house, had not been offered by the developers surrounding Hollister with ‘exclusive residential communities’ and promising ‘all the comforts of a “modern California community.’

. . . I walked through some model homes (in Palmdale, north and east of Los Angeles) in developments near the fault, three-to-four bedroom houses between $115,000 and $128,500 (in 1996). Every model I saw, regardless of size or price, had elaborate bathrooms called “spas,” and at least two places for watching television. Even the largest models lacked a living room large enough to accommodate six people in any degree of comfort. Instead, there were many small places where family members could escape one another. These were called the “bonus room,” “family room,” “media niche,” “entertainment niche,” “nook,” den,” or more honestly, the “retreat.” They ensured that when parents returned exhausted from their two-hour commute, they did not have to share a room, television, or computer with their kids. They indicated that life in Palmdale was a dark, indoor one for adults who left home five days a week before sunrise, returned after dark, and slept late on weekends to recover. . . .

. . . Cathedral City is a working-class town sandwiched between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage (on the eastern edge of greater Los Angeles). It is where people who guard agates and groom greens live in modest tracts and trailer parks alongside Social Security retirees. The middle school resembled a self-storage warehouse and the modular classrooms in back could have fallen off any container ship. Teachers at the meeting told me it was new but already overcrowded, having increased from 900 to 1,200 students in three years. Students had to pay for their own sports and the district could not afford after-school activities. Many kids went home to empty houses and played video games or joined gangs.”

There is a lot more to this book, but Clarke is at his best in presenting this nightmarish image of a society where the forces of coherence are failing. Yet how could any civil society possibly keep pace with the growth of California?

Population has outraced civil society here from the beginning of European settlement. California contained 25,000 Europeans (both Yankees and Californios) in 1848, along with a native population estimated to be anywhere from 15,000 to ten times that. Thanks to the gold rush, the European population hit 250,000 a scant three years later. By that time, California had entered the Union without ever being a territory. It went from being part of Mexico to being a state in about two years. The flood has not subsided or even leveled off since. The population hit 1,500,000 in 1900 and more than doubled every twenty years thereafter until 1960, when it had more than 15,000,000. It then took forty years to double again and is around thirty-six million.

Crime is up in other American cities as well. Other parts of America breed alienation in heartless housing tracts both urban and suburban. Are these problems really different or worse in California? Sometimes I think so, but I have no proof. Garrison Keillor writes of his native state (and mine), Minnesota:

“The state was settled by no-nonsense socialists from Germany and Sweden and Norway who unpacked their trunks and planted corn and set about organizing schools; churches; libraries; lodges; societies and benevolent associations; brotherhoods and sisterhoods, and raised their children to Mind Your Manners, Be Useful, Pay Attention, Make Something of Yourself . . . “

Did folks like this not come to California? In fact, they did, in greater ethnic diversity, but they did. They wrote a progressive constitution. They built a great public school system, libraries, civic institutions, the works. I think the short story of California is that these institutions simply have been overwhelmed by the tidal waves of growth. Yet the California dream continues to draw people and there are certainly places where the dream is doing spectacularly well.

One of these for me has always been the Esalen Institute perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean some thirty miles south of Monterey. I have spent a lot of time there, with no time ever being more wonderful than around the winter solstice. Watching the sun sink into the ocean while soaking in the famous mineral baths of a winter evening is particularly special. Following it with dinner and a couple glasses of wine is to feel like one has been transported to the abode of the gods. After a few days there with a good group of people, everyone has been soaked and massaged, stimulated yet relaxed, noticed and appreciated. Joy, the most important fruit of the Holy Spirit, is everywhere in evidence.

I was there a couple weeks ago for a Yoga seminar, taught by a spiritual anarchist from New Zealand (more on that some other time). One member of my group happened to be a winemaker from Napa.

Did this nice man bring a few bottles of the good stuff to share?

He did. Oooooh yes he did, this Saint Gregory of Napa. Yes. Yes.

Two luscious, fruity, smooth, drinkable red wines, both of which fairly leaped out of the bottle into the glass and hurled themselves gleefully down the throat, dancing and singing all the way. Big, dopey smiles formed on our faces as we looked at one another. We felt unbelievably clever, warm, blessed. Someone said something; or maybe no one said anything. I forget. We started laughing. We couldn’t stop.

Now I am back in Washington; in winter, a very mild winter without a trace of snow, but winter it is, with darkness and dampness and the funeral for President Ford taking place across the street from my apartment. I was on the Mall a few nights ago when the motorcade stopped at the World War II Memorial: a long line of police motorcycles lit up with red, white and blue lights, followed by a dozen or so dark sedans, a limousine with two American flags and a hearse bearing the presidential seal. This is what brings me back to Washington time and again. History seems far away in California, but here in Washington, it is close enough to touch.

Joan Didion has written about this: “One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

In Washington, in 2007, we know that history has bloodied our land, and we have bloodied other lands as well, as we celebrate this president who brought the Vietnam War to an end. We cannot help wondering who will bring the Iraq War to an end, and how, and when. We await, as ever, the prince of peace.