Unsheathing the Heart ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 9, 2025
There is an ancient teaching that has long been attributed to the Buddha himself. It says,
“Be ye lamps unto yourselves;
be your own confidence;
hold to the truth within yourselves
as to the only lamp.” (5th century B.C.E.)
For those who want to read the words again, it’s #184 in our gray hymnal.
“Be your own confidence.”
Our spiritual theme for this month is Trust. This is such a big, and rich, topic; it is wide and it is deep, and I have struggled greatly to find small enough lenses to talk about it in bite-sized pieces. We’ll be exploring aspects of trust such as the ability to trust ourselves, to be our own confidence, and trusting each other. We’ll consider religious trust, or faith. We’ll take a look, of course, at the deep distrust that has beset the United States in the past decade or so; the complete lack of confidence we have in what each other is saying.
As a minister I think a great deal about trust. It’s something of an occupational hazard. To me, trust is elusive, despite the weightiness of the word. Picture the word chiseled in granite above the door to a bank and trust company.
To me though, trust doesn’t feel like granite. I ask often, where does it come from? I think back 10 years ago to when you called me to be your minister. In that act, you offered me your trust. But as hard as we tried to get to know each other over the course of one short week, I knew that you were only extending your sacred trust to me provisionally. From that day forward, I was going to have to earn it, and earn it over and over again. I learned trust is gained, and kept, through the smallest of actions, bit by bit, over years. And if I were to ever fail you, to have a terrible lapse of judgment, I knew that the hard-won trust would be gone, and would have to be rebuilt, if ever possible. Trust – hard to hold in your hand; wispy, ephemeral.
Today, though, we’ll be thinking about trusting ourselves, and what can hold us if we lose our self-confidence.
It’s hard to absorb and to focus all of the teachings about Trust; this condition of the heart that can be shy, can evaporate. So of course, to focus, I went back roughly 25 centuries to the Buddha.
“Hold to the truth within yourselves
as to the only lamp.”
Can that advice possibly be true? It seems to be advising us to trust our instincts in every single circumstance, to exclusively follow the still, small voice within, to rely exclusively on our own hearts and spirits. But we are, after all, fallible humans. We make mistakes all the time. Our lives are made up of a series of decisions, over and over, choices to be made. To have another child. Or not. Where to go on vacation. Which car to buy. To marry or not. Which job offer to accept. How can we ever trust that our instincts will unerringly guide us through a lifetime of choices?
Well, it turns out that our instincts are certainly less than perfect. I think we all know this – I imagine that each one of us here can call to mind a wrong choice here and there throughout our lives. And experts caution us to not rely totally on our instincts – sorry, Buddha. Let’s remember that Buddha never had to choose between two used cars.
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow, suggests that we not start out by focusing on our intuition. “My advice would be to try to postpone intuition as much as possible,” he said in an interview. “Take the example of an acquisition. You do as much homework as possible beforehand so that the intuition is as informed as it can be.” (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/strategic-decisions-when-can-you-trust-your-gut)
In other words, if you’re ready to buy a house, don’t focus right away on the way the sunlight streams in to what will be your office. Research the market, and then think about which house makes you feel the most at home. It’s then that you go inward, and take your time, and ‘be your own confidence.’
It might be a relief to accept that we cannot trust our own instincts in every situation. If we make some big mistakes, are we able to keep trusting ourselves? Or do we lose our self-confidence, become fearful and tentative? Our poet talks about slipping back into her armor. We can start to guard ourselves, to become wary, hesitant, to harden our hearts, both toward ourselves and those around us.
What can help us to unsheath our hearts? What else can we trust?
I see two other forms of trust that emerge in these times. Our trust in ourselves becomes less focused on our instincts, and more about our confidence that we can weather a storm, that we are resilient. We accept that we simply cannot do everything perfectly, that we will fail. And here is where we need to return to our inner lamp, to tell ourselves, I will find a way through this mess. I have done it before. There will be life beyond the end of the marriage, beyond the financial decision that went wrong.
The ancient anchoress Julian of Norwich famously told us: “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Maybe not right away, but we try to trust that we will have what we need to help us find a new path. We learn to trust that life itself is Love, and wants us to flourish.
And so, in the end, we can have faith – trust – in life itself. Our poet wrote these words that Holly read for us:
“Why would I ever try to know
what to say, how to act,
how to plan, when,
with zero effort of my own,
life itself will move through me,
will rise up in me to meet itself?”
She concludes:
“Why would I not trust life?
It would be like a seed
evading the rain,
like a sunflower
just unfurling
trying to avoid the sun.”
I am always astonished by the force of life, by the insistence of it. This force that calls forth plants to sprout in stone walls, or cracks in the sidewalk; this is what grounds and informs my faith.
Years ago, I bought a nice hibiscus plant to put in a sunny window. As so often happens, at least to me, it struggled to thrive. Over time its leaves turned yellow and dropped. I went away for a few days, and when I returned, it was clear that the hibiscus was dying. There were only a few leaves left. And yet, the plant had produced two flowers, bright red, cheerful, on a plant reduced to almost nothing. The sight brought tears to my eyes. Even dying, the plant was doing all that it could to live, to share its life force with every last ounce of its energy. And it spoke to my heart, softened and opened my heart, and offered me a glimpse of life that we do not understand with our minds, but can only feel. I felt in the presence of love, of life’s longing for itself, and defiance.
My friends, my hope for us is that we can sense the life force sustaining us all, and trust in its benevolence, its desire for the flourishing of all of creation, and that whenever we need to, we can lean into this love.
May it be so,
Amen.
