The Second Question: What Do I Love?

"The Second Question: What Do I Love?"

Matthew 6:19-21
October 11, 2009

"Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust
or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it's safe from moth
and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place where your treasure is, is the
place you will most want to be, and end up being.

Last week we began this series with a stark beginning question, one of the biggest
questions one can ask oneself, and that is, “who am I?” That is a core question, one
that needs to be answered, and yet it’s also probably one that is never, really, finally
answered. None of these questions are ever final, of course, because we are never
finalized, we are never a finished work, not until the end, of course, not until the end of
our lives, but these are the kinds of questions that must be attended to, that must be
asked and then re-asked over and over again, if we are going to continue to live
meaningful lives. The reality is that we all lose our way, we all sin, as the classical
Christian formulation goes, and fundamentally, sin is about losing our way, not finding
our purpose, forgetting who we are and whose we are—it’s about knowing the truth
about oneself, about one’s purpose in this life, and then forgetting it—maybe willfully
forgetting it—and losing one’s way in this world. I’ve shared with you that about seven
years ago I think I lost my way—I had forgotten about my core values, about who I was
and what I was called to do in this life, and I got lost, and when you lose your way, you
do stupid things. If you forget about who you are, you forget about how to live your life,
and live your life well, and to do things out of that core set of values that make you,
you.

But, there is another question, another inquiry that I know I forgot to ask myself during
that time in the wilderness, and that is the second question of the four that Wayne
Muller proposes that we ask ourselves if we want to know the beauty and the meaning
of our lives: “what do I love?” A simple question, really, seemingly easy to answer—I
mean, don’t most of us have a list ready and handy, naming those things we love, or
maybe whom we love. I love God and books and the church and my partner, though
not necessarily in that order, of course, and maybe that is the point, isn’t it, to answer
the question by sorting out the list, figuring out what really does matter to us, and why it
matters so much. What I love about Muller’s question and his explanation of that
question in his book, is that he’s not trying to get us not to love what we love—if you
love books, you love books; if you love good beer, you love good beer; if you love your
spouse and kids, you love your spouse and kids; if you love roller coasters, you love
roller coasters; if you love the movies, you love the movies. There’s not judgment
there, but beneath the question, beneath the naming of what we love and who we love
is the question of why—why do I love books? Sure, I love the feel of them, the smell of
them, but, really, the reason why I love books is ultimately because I think I love
knowledge, I love learning new things, whether through fiction or non-fiction—I am
enriched by what books give, which is a new world or a deeper understanding of an
older world. If you love movies, or gardening, or working in your shop, or your spouse,
why is that you love each of those things? What is that moves you about what you
love, that brings you joy, sometimes unexpected joy, when you plunge your hands into
the rich earth, or when the lights go dim, and you find yourself in womb of a movie
theater? And why do you love this man, this woman, these children—sure, they are
gifts from God, but why do you love this particular gift so much—is it because she
brings the best out of you, even as she challenges you and your assumptions? Is it
because he believes in you, even when you don’t believe in yourself? Why do we love
what we love and why do we love the ones we love?

Asking that question does matter—not because it’s an interesting intellectual exercise,
but because it gets at the root of who we are—and that is the point of what Jesus says
on the sermon on the mount, so well captured in Eugene’s Peterson’s interpretation of
it in his version of the Bible: "Don't hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by
moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in
heaven, where it's safe from moth and rust and burglars. It's obvious, isn't it? The place
where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being. Look
to what I love, look to what you love, and there will our hearts be, there will be what
really concerns our soul. For Jesus here, in this passage, the concern is with the
treasure we try to hoard in our bank accounts, in our CD’s, in our investment
properties—and he is concerned about it not because they are in themselves bad—
stuff, things, are meaningless, in and of themselves—but if we love them, we must ask
ourselves why we love them, and what they mean to us. If having enough money
means security, if it somehow represents safety in this world, we’ve got to come to
terms with the idea that what we really love is the safety, the security, that money
represents for us.

And if it is true that what we love forms us, molds us, makes us, then we have to own
the fact that much of who we are is rooted in our desire to be safe in this world, to
secure the boundaries of self, to make sure the drawbridges of self have been duly
lifted. If it is safety that we love, then we must own that it has formed us, for both good
and ill, and we need to work on that reality. Or if money means more, more stuff, more
time, more vacations, more of everything, we must own the fact that the “more” of what
we want has become where our heart is, for both good and ill, and it is our work in this
world to separate out for ourselves what is eternal about what we love, and what is
doomed to be sold at the estate sale at the time of our deaths. Again, things, stuff,
they mean nothing, until they are imbued with meaning, until we laden them with
meaning—and that meaning, the meaning we impart to them, is everything, and if we
confuse the stuff we love with the joy it gives us, the security it gives us, the pleasure it
gives us, then we will make the mistake of laying up our treasure here on earth,
thinking it can go with us, like some ancient Egyptian burial tomb, full of stuff that we
unconsciously think we will need with us in the world to come.   Now, no one believes
that is the case, that we will need the stuff of this world for the world to come—we are
not ancient Egyptians, at least not consciously—but we live our lives like that is case,
laying on meaning and purpose onto things that cannot go with us anywhere, after we
draw our last breath.

Meister Eckhart, the great Christian mystic, once wrote that “The spiritual life is not a
process of addition, but rather of subtraction.” Indeed, that is the case—our work is to
subtract, to get at the marrow of what we love, and who we love, and why we love those
things, and those persons. Why do we love books, roller coasters, our gardens, our
home at the lake, the children in our lives, the spouse beside us? To get at the marrow
of it all, to subtract the thing or even the person from the equation, and see what we
really and ultimately love and why we love this thing, this person, this grace, this
gentleness, this joy, this thrill, this heart, this hope.

In ancient India lived a sculptor renowned for his life-sized statues of elephants. With
trunks curled high, tusks thrust forward, thick legs trampling the earth, these carved
beasts seemed to trumpet to the sky. One day, a king came to see these magnificent
works and to commission statuary for his palace. Struck with wonder, he asked the
sculptor, “What is the secret of your artistry?”

The sculptor quietly took measure of the monarch and replied, “Great King, when with
the aid of many men I quarry a gigantic piece of granite from the banks of the river, I
have it set here in my courtyard. For a long time, I do nothing but observe this block of
stone and study it from every angle. I focus all my concentration on this task and won’t
allow anyone or anything to disturb me. At first, I see nothing but a huge and
shapeless rock sitting there, meaningless, indifferent to my purposes, utterly out of
place. It seems faintly resentful at having been dragged from its cool place by the
rushing waters.

Then slowly, very slowly, I begin to notice something in the substance of the rock. I feel
a presentiment…an outline, scarcely discernible, shows itself to me, though others, I
suspect, would perceive nothing. I watch with an open eye and a joyous, eager heart.
The outline grows stronger. Oh, yes, I can see it? An elephant is stirring in there?

Only then do I start to work. For days flowing into weeks I use my chisel and mallet,
always clinging to my sense of that outline, which grows ever stronger. How the big
fellow strains! How he yearns to be out!   How he wants to live! It seems so clear now,
for I know the one thing I must do: with an utter singleness of purpose, I must chip
away every last bit of stone that is not elephant. What then remains will be, must be,
elephant. (Muller, How Then Shall I Live, 100)

And, as Muller reminds us, the love our hearts is the elephant in the stone. Sadly, we
populate our lives with too many things that are “not elephant.” (Ibid 101). What we
love galvanizes us, it gets our attention, it is what Marge Piercy talks about in the poem
at the back of today’s bulletin, it is what garners our attention, and ultimately, our
attention is love made flesh and bone, made real. What we attend to, what consumes
us, maybe even what worries us, is what we love, and our work is to keep chipping
away at that stone in our hearts until it reveals the elephant, the elephant in the room,
so to speak, the truth of it, underneath the thing we think we love so much, the thing,
the treasure we keep trying from rusting and being ruined by the moths of this world.
You know, the stone around what we love, the stone that is hiding the elephant, is what
obsesses so many of us, and we think that if we can rip out more and more stone out of
the quarry, we will be safe, or we will be loved, or we will be home, or we will have joy—
but it can never be that way because the stone is just stone, the thing is just a thing,
the bank account is just a bank account, the house is just a house, even the person is
just a person, until we take the time to chip away at the soul of it, so that we can see
underneath that very thing we think we love so much. What we find is not that we
ultimately love the books, the garden, the roller coasters, the money, the house—what
we find is that we love what the books mean to us, and what the garden means to us,
and the roller coasters meant to us, and money and the house means to us.

And then, and then, we can let the soft animals of our bodies love what it loves, and we
can be honest about it, and we peel away the layers that have hidden the pearl of great
price within us, the hidden wholeness within us. What it means is that we can become
honest with ourselves, and we can now honestly name for ourselves that we love what
we love. But, of course, with that honesty, comes the truth of it, comes the reality that
when we embrace what we truly love, we will also have to face the sadness of it, the
other side of that truth, the part of the elephant that is not so beautiful. I think the
reason we come to love the stone more than the elephants in our lives, the material
things rather than what those material things really represent for us personally, is
because we cannot face the fact that love is always intermixed with pain, that love is
always mixed up with loss. Jesus kept reminding us that the truth will set us free, that
he was the ultimate truth teller, and we are to be a people of truth, but most of us, most
of us actually would rather be lied to, would rather be in love with love, rather than a
person, would rather be in love with a thing, rather than what thing represents to us,
the meaning behind our love for it. It is so painful, the truth, even the beautiful truth,
because so often the truth itself is a painful thing, even as it sets us free. Seeing the
world the way it is, that is a difficult thing, but if Christ wants us to see the truth and to
tell the truth and be the truth, well, it must be better than staring at a block of stone,
thinking that the stone itself is beautiful, and never, never being able to see the beauty
that lay within it.

Wayne Muller shares this story in his book:

Jack’s wife, Elaine, had gone through a year of very difficult treatments for a brain
tumor—radiation, chemotherapy, many alternative medications. Jack had passionately
supported her throughout the course of her illness. They had worked together to find
the right doctors, and Jack had fought on her behalf with the medical establishment to
ensure that she received the best and most accurate treatments. They had laughed
and cried and fought and surrendered their way through many battles together. And
now, at the end of this exhausting, painful year, she lay dying.

One evening Elaine was upstairs; a nurse was with her. As often happens with
protracted illness, it is not always clear when death will come. Often people linger for a
long time, and the people who care for the dying must occasionally take space to
breath. This was one of those moments. Jack had gone downstairs to check on his
daughter, Lucy, who was resting on the couch. Lucy was feeling scared and alone.
She was three years old.

As his wife lay dying, Jack held his daughter. Lucy had known her mother only a short
time, and much of that time Elaine had been very sick. As Jack held Lucy, his
intuition—born of intimate communion with his wife—told him that the moment had come
when Elaine would be leaving her body. He made a move to go upstairs to be with her,
but Lucy insisted he stay downstairs and remain with her. She cried and screamed,
“Don’t leave me, Daddy, don’t leave me.” Jack didn’t know what to do. He felt a
powerful need to be with his wife as she died, and yet his daughter, his own
responsibility now, wanted him to remain with her downstairs. Jack took a long breath.
He settled into the pillow and held Lucy close to him. A few minutes later the nurse
came down and told Jack that Elaine had died.

At times this is how it comes to us. Love and sadness are blended together in the
waters of our life, and we must drink them together, just as they are. Neither cancels
out the other. Love, added to the sadness, make our grief bittersweet. Sadness,
injected into our love, creates a love that burns the heart.   (Ibid 128-129)

Of course, that is the truth of it, and if we want to see what we really love, we will see
what Jack saw in that moment, that to love deeply, to love these ones, this wife, this
child, will also mean some pain, some loss. I don’t know if he knew that truth before
that moment, but if we do not choose to chip away at the stone that we mistake for the
things that matter most to us, life will do it for us, and to be honest, I think most of us
would rather do it on our terms, rather than on life’s terms.   If we embrace what we
love, if we can peel away the layers and see what the soft animal of our body really
loves, then we can see the truth we have been running from, and we can make our
peace with it, and be prepared for the shadow that lays within it, within all things that
are not ultimately God, shadows that just come because of the simple fact that we are
in living in the presence of light—light and shadow are always connected to each
other. What we may find is that what we were looking for in that treasure we have laid
up on this side of eternity, is possible, is doable, is real, and can be found in the heart
of universe, in this God, in this Christ, who has first given us the good capacity to love
and to love deeply. So, I ask you: what do you love? Whom do you love? Why do you
love what you love and why do you love whom you love?   Amen and amen,