The Silent Vow
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 7, 2021
Perhaps the most compelling task we face as humans is that of sorting out what truly belongs to ourselves, and what the world imposes upon us. Over our lifetimes, we are constantly moving: trying to respond to the calling of our inmost nature; trying to respond to what other people need from us; trying to survive and thrive in a basic material sense.
Sometimes this tension is presented to us as something known as ‘work/life balance’; a concept often understood as self-care – how to not allow the demands of one aspect of our lives, such as a career, claim too much of our time and attention so that we don’t have enough left over to offer our relationships or our personal well-being. But that balancing concept is largely based on accounting for our time – if we worked extra one week we feel we need to devote more time to family or partner the next week. But what if we should be looking much deeper to understand how our lives work?
Our spiritual theme this month is Commitment. I’ll be inviting you to spend time this month thinking about your deepest commitments: to others, to vocation or purpose, and to yourselves. How do these commitments fit together? To what have you made promises, or vows in your life? What is your highest resolve?
“I made no vows, but vows were then made for me,” wrote William Wordsworth.
From where do these vows, these commitments, come?
Maria Cook, the subject of our story this morning, had no doubt but that the calling she felt to go out into the world and to preach the message of universal salvation, came to her from God. It was a compelling enough vision for her to vow to carry out the mission of sharing this good news far and wide. This was a time fully 40 years before any woman was ordained to the ministry in the United States. She did not have the support of a partner, or of her extended family, who worried that she was mentally unstable. But this was her calling, her purpose, and she left behind her relationships in order to fulfill it.
David Whyte, the poet and philosopher, calls these three commitments the three marriages: marriages between people, or relationships; marriages with work – our purpose and vocation; and marriage with ourselves – our inner lives. In looking at these commitments from the perspective of work/life balance, one could think of the three as competing: existing in tension, pulling us from one to another. David Whyte presents them as more of an interlocking puzzle. Taken together, they provide wholeness. (based on David Whyte’s book, The Three Marriages).
The first marriage, or commitment, among people, is our response to the human need for relationship; for belonging. The poet John O’Donohue put it this way: “To be human is to belong. Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature.” (Eternal Echoes, p.2) We are raised, most of us, in the circle of a family, in a community. We have a deep need to share our lives with others. To do this, we must reach outside of ourselves; to consider the needs of others, to put energy and time into the fostering of relationships.
The second marriage, again using David Whyte’s term, is with our work. We grow up understanding that we will need to work in order to survive; to be able to earn what we need to have food and shelter. Whether we simply move from job to job throughout our lives or whether we experience a genuine calling, as did Maria Cook, we will spend much of our time and energy throughout adulthood making our way, supporting ourselves.
David Whyte tells of discovering his passion at the age of 13, watching a television program about Jacques Cousteau, the underwater explorer. “My mouth and my mind dropped open at the sight,” he wrote (p. 54) “I walked over the back fields behind our home and saw myself in diving gear, steering zodiacs along coral reefs; more practically, I gave up all my beloved arts subjects and put myself into the salt mines of biology, chemistry and physics…Ten difficult, hard-slogging, exam-clogged, rain-filled years later…I found myself, just as I had imagined, a hundred feet underwater at the base of a volcanic reef in the Galapagos Islands running out of air while being threatened by a tiger shark. I was ecstatic; happy as ever I could imagine.”
And what if we say no to a commitment, to a passion, to a vocation? Whyte asserts that refusing becomes corrosive to our personalities and our characters. (p. 59)
Have we made the vows, or are the vows made for us?
Two of the marriages, the commitments, that Whyte writes about are focused externally; the marriage of relationships and the marriage of work. Those two force us to look beyond ourselves: what does the other person require? What does the career, or vocation need from us? But the third marriage, the marriage to our soul, is of necessity inwardly focused. This third commitment is a silent one, but is the foundation for the other two. Here is where the tension arises; the interlocking nature of the three commitments. They are all linked together.
We commit ourselves to others, offering our hearts and souls, especially to a beloved partner or spouse. This can feel as though it is coming from deep inside ourselves, emanating from the marriage with ourselves. But this can change. Relationships fracture; friendships and marriages come to an end. Even family members can become estranged, finding no pathway forward into continued relationship. David Whyte is married now for the third time.
We commit ourselves to a vocation, to a calling. Maria Cook did not pursue public preaching for the money. This was her work, her calling, but she did not need to do it to survive. It was, rather, her highest resolve. David Whyte could imagine nothing else for 10 years except to become an underwater explorer. Their souls called out for these vocations. And then, the vocations asked too much in return. The hills became too high to climb. Maria Cook returned home, humiliated, and relinquished her preaching. David Whyte left the Galapagos, and is an author, poet, and consultant. Perhaps their need for relationships began to call to them: created tension with their souls, that could not be resolved any other way.
Did they make their vows, or were their vows made for them?
The more I explored this topic of interlocking commitments, of the jigsaw puzzle of vows and intentions, the more I understood that the three types of commitment cannot be separated and considered individually. The three commitments are, in Whyte’s words, an ongoing conversation, and it is vitally important that we make sure we are listening in on that conversation.
The commitment to self is the silent commitment, the internal one. We can so easily stop listening to our still, small voice, drowned out as it can be by the demands of our other commitments. But the soul requires much attention. As we age we discover that our personalities and our desires change; we evolve in new directions, we grow in ways we could never anticipate. The self “moves and changes and surprises us as much as anything in the outer world to which it wants to commit,” wrote Whyte. We are shaped not only by our desires and our dreams, but also by our surroundings and our experiences. As he put it:
“We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.” Picture in your mind the course of a river; starting as a brook up among mountains, tumbling over rocks, and gradually flattening into a broad and placid stream. It’s the same river, but responding to very different circumstances.
Because we grow and change over our lifetimes, we must make sure to listen carefully to our inward selves. The silent vow of fidelity to our souls can be the hardest to maintain, as it can be hidden by the daily commotion of work and the people in our lives. As Howard Thurman told us: “There was no intent to betray what seemed so sure at the time. My response was whole, clean, authentic. But little by little, there crept into my life the dust and grit of the journey.”
In many ways, the commitment to our souls is the most important of all. Without that commitment to our inmost being, we could suddenly find ourselves without a foundation. The essential conversation between the three commitments is suddenly only a conversation between two: relationships and work. We can become lost. And if we allow ourselves to be lost, covered by the dust and grit of the journey, overcome by the demands of the other commitments, those commitments can suddenly be without their foundations. All three are interdependent, woven together by conversation, and to remove one will set the other two adrift.
How do we practice listening to this conversation? Our spiritual practices, whatever they may be, are needed in order to maintain the essential weaving of our three commitments. Whether it is prayer, meditation, reading, walking in nature, when we understand the importance of maintaining the connection to our inmost selves, to our souls, we can elevate spiritual practices to a new level of priority in our daily lives. Become quiet. Listen.
I leave you with the words of Howard Thurman: “In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading Presence of God, my heart whispers: Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in fair weather or in foul, in good times or in tempests, in the days when the darkness and the foe are nameless or familiar, I may not forget that to which my life is committed.
Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.”
May it be so,
Amen.
