There are times when it’s tough to be a Unitarian! Like lately, for example. When I set out to write a sermon on spiritual resilience and overcoming the hardships of life, I uncovered a huge mine of resources – but all from other religions! They even have better and fancier names for the times I was trying to describe, even though we’ve all experienced them!

It’s times like these I have to say I wish I was Catholic, because there are reams and reams of literature about Spiritual Resilience and the "Dark Night of the Soul" and its opportunities for spiritual growth and learning.

In my house, it was just called "moping." I would have even settled for a dignified diagnosis like depression! No, the clichés abound, and you’ve heard them all! Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again. God helps those who help themselves! Pull yourself together, Old Chap! When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! And my personal pastoral favourite; "Buck up, you sniveling coward!"

We do not get a lot of affirmation in our lives for going into the darkness, being willing to feel the pain of existence, acknowledging that life is not always full of joy and contentment, but is sometimes confusing, painful and disheartening.

But one thing I think I have learned over the years is that there is no way for a spiritually sensitive person to truly avoid the pain of the dark night of the soul. Or, as the expression goes, "The only way out is through." I don’t mean that there aren’t times when a good old-fashioned distraction would help! You know what conventional psychological wisdom says about why people have defenses? Because they need them!

When soul is really suffering, our survival instinct – the one that keeps us going even when we don’t feel like going - comes up with lots of ways for us to handle it; and they are as varied as forgetting it completely, throwing ourselves into work or activity, diving under the covers depressed, or self-medicating. Sometimes they are our body’s way of saying "This is too much to absorb right now" like Scarlett O’Hara’s "I’ll think about that tomorrow!" Or my personal procrastinator’s favourite: "Don’t do today what you can put off indefinitely."

I’m not saying these are healthy things to do, and some of them definitely AREN’T, but some of them do have the effect of buying us the time we need to truly deal with our soul work. Did you know that 50% of people have no memory of their spouse’s funeral 6 months later… couldn’t tell you who was there, what was said, or where they were in their fog? Distractions and defenses serve their purpose, but then there comes a time when they aren’t working any more. Soul pokes his head above the surface and says "Remember me?" And then we must listen.

The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (one of the gospels that sadly didn’t make it into the Bible) says: "If you bring forth what is within you, it will heal you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you."

That’s a little more strongly put than words I would use; but it points the way toward a spiritual truth. And that truth is that "The Only Way Out Is Through."

When we are willing to explore our Dark Night of the Soul instead of avoiding, minimizing or medicating it, what do we discover? We discover many, many things, many gifts, many strengths, many truths.

First of all, we discover that suffering is a door to compassion - that we are connected through our suffering to many others. Helen Keller wrote about belonging to ‘The Great Company of the Bereaved" – and how she drew strength and sustenance in her grief from knowing how many others, too had experienced what she experienced, and had managed to survive, and even transform their grief into compassion. How many of us have been able to turn some difficult life experience into help for others? Most of us know that in spiritual wisdom, suffering is one of the great teachers. Or as the Gospel according to Bob (Dylan) says:

"If you think there’s no price
For this sweet paradise
Just remind me
To show you the scars."
And Tagore "Let me feel the grasp of your hand in my failure."
The spiritually resilient person knows there is something to be gained, some- thing to be learned by dwelling for a time in the Dark Night of the Soul.
D H Lawrence wrote:
This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go."

Spiritual resilience is also the confidence that these "strange gods" of hope and despair will come and go, ebb and flow, and our challenge IS to

… "flow like water, run deep, run clear, fill any space to its own dimensions, hold your temperature longer than the surrounding air, go underground, bend light, be the one thing people need, even when they're fasting, eat boulders, quietly, and be a universal solvent…"

For we can’t live in the land of grief and despair; our soul won’t let us. I know from experience that even dying people have good moments in their day! Haven’t you ever started out crying and ended up laughing? (Or the opposite as happened to me at the Ti-Cats game on Friday night when the squirrel got a touchdown!) – laughed so hard you end up crying?

Life is such that thorns grow on the most beautiful of all flowers – the rose.

That’s the way it is.

Love someone enough to join your life to theirs? "Someone’s going to end up crying!" as my mom used to say. Be idealistic and care about the world; face disappointment and discouragement every day of your life. Have a child, welcome to wearing your heart on the outside of your body (like one of those pictures of the sacred heart of Jesus that used to scare me as a kid – you could almost see it throbbing away!)

For you see, the price of love is heartache,

The price of hope is despair,

The price of life is death

and the price of having a mind is fearing you’re losing it sometimes!

We are made for joy but live with sorrow all the time! No wonder we are meaning-making creatures, sensing that life matters, wanting to be happy, and then struggling to figure it all out when the universe doesn’t deliver up all the answers to our questions and prayers, and unlimited happiness every day of our lives!

Poet Anne Hillman puts it far better than I ever could:

"We look with uncertainty
Beyond the old choices
For clear-cut answers
To a softer, more permeable aliveness
Which is every moment
At the brink of death;
For something new is being born in us
If we but let it.
We stand at a new doorway,
Awaiting that which comes ...
Daring to be human creatures.
Vulnerable to the beauty of existence.
Learning to love."
When we "Dare to be human creatures, vulnerable to the beauty of existence, learning to love…" we discover that we are stronger than we think, and more connected than we will ever know. This is why we come to church; this is why we are part of religious community, or maybe even just part of the human community. We sense that it is here, among our fellow creatures, that meaning is found amid suffering. It is here that help is found. It is here that understanding is possible amid the incomprehensible.

The former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, The Reverend John Buehrens, tells the story of asking his Catholic grandmother why she went so faithfully to Mass. "Because sometimes soul get empty; faith small, like mustard seed." "Because sometimes soul get empty; faith small, like mustard seed."

John writes: "I knew enough about her life to know something of what she meant. She’d been orphaned in Slovakia at the age of ten. She came to America at fifteen, through Ellis Island, all by herself, with only an older married sister to meet her once she reached Chicago. In the Slovak community there she met my grandfather, married, and soon had four children. But by the end of the influenza epidemic of 1919, she had buried all four children. "Soul get empty, faith small, like mustard seed."

"I go to church," she told me, "and I don’t think just about my sorrows; many have them. I pray with others and for others; they do for me. My thoughts then go wider, deeper, higher. Sometimes," she said to me, "doesn’t even matter if priest’s sermon is not so very good!

When I pray for you and your cousins and all young people, hope comes back. I pray for your grandfather, and love comes back too. I pray for strength to go home and show him, not just by words, what faith is, that is no good in life to stay bitter, and that comes back, too. Dat’s vhy I go!"

John also shares this story: According to the Hasidic rabbis, everyone should go through life with two pockets, to be reached into according to spiritual need. In the left pocket, the words, "I am but dust and ashes," as a reminder than none of us is or should be exempt from the human condition. But as a reminder of the beauty and possibilities of life, in the right pocket are the words, "For my sake was the world created."

Sometimes our pain is a needed reminder that we’re human and mortal, that we have a finite amount of time to live and love and get it right! Sometimes it reminds us of our connection to others, and how we can heal and be healed by that connection.

A dear friend of mine who had lost two wives to cancer said to me once something that I always remember and have shared with many of you. He said "Nothing helps, and everything helps."

There is nothing that can protect us from the pain of human existence – not the love of God, or a great family, or money or success, nor even staying in the house with the covers over our head (although that’s good for a day!) There are times that will touch all our lives when "Nothing helps." Yet at the same time, everything helps! Taking care of our bodies as the good gifts they are helps, and listening to the still, small voice within helps, and being loved helps, and giving to others helps; time in nature helps and counseling helps and friends REALLY help.

As Nelson Mandela says: "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." On the way to "Yes," there are Oh so many "Nos." But whatever pit you may have fallen into, start yourself on the road to healing, and then look about you for companions on the road. They are there, trust me, in all sorts of forms, but you need to open your eyes to see them!

Another way that people find their way to spiritual resilience is by making meaning out of their suffering – and giving back from it to redeem what was lost. There are many examples in our world, Priscilla DeVilliers, Terry Fox, Rick Hansen. A man I met last summer who had lost his son in a workplace accident who has devoted the last decade of his life to making teenager’s summer jobs safer; Holocaust Survivors like Vicktor Frankl who lived to tell us stories of great spiritual resilience. He writes:

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer… proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Perhaps we are lucky enough not to find ourselves in some of the Dark Nights visited by those I just mentioned. But they are made of the same stuff as you and I. They were able to see their lives as part of a continuum of meaning – from past, present and future, stretching out and joining all others who live and struggle and try to understand – a community of "memory and hope" and to take incremental steps toward the light. Marian Wright Edelman writes:

"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee."

This I believe is one of the keys to spiritual resilience – seeing yourself not as a point, but as part of a long line of both people and actions. Frankl looked to the past in his darkest moments, feeling connected to the memory of a wife who though he didn’t know it, was already gone. Terry Fox and Rick Hansen dreamed of a future when their illnesses or disabilities would be cured or helped. When the present is dark, remember the times you have persevered and overcome, and know that they will come again. Think of the future and its possibilities opening out to you – possibilities for joy and life and meaning.

And remember the "great company of the bereaved" and the wounded, struggling, and merely confused to which you belong. This sermon is a "hand on your shoulder" telling you, you are not alone, believe me, you are not alone!

Brevity (as you know by now) is not my forte, but I will close this sermon on Spiritual Resilience with the words of Tom and Gracie from the Dead Dog café, which sum it up better than I ever could… when in doubt…

"Stay calm, Be brave, and Watch for the signs! Now why didn’t I say that? Courage to you, wherever you are on this ride of life. So may it be. Amen.

Closing Words by Reinhold Niebuhr

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good

Makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.