Sunday, April 6, 2025, a reading followed by the sermon by Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading
…if walking down the street I notice some people turning back and looking at me with grins on their faces, the normal thing to do is immediately to start worrying: “Is there something wrong? Do I look funny? Is it the way I walk, or is my face smudged?” Hundreds of times every day we are reminded of the vulnerability of our self. And every time this happens psychic energy is lost trying to restore order to consciousness.
When a climber is making a difficult ascent, he is totally taken up in the mountaineering role. He is 100 percent a climber, or he would not survive. There is no way for anything or anybody to bring into question any other aspect of his self. Whether his face is smudged makes absolutely no difference. The only possible threat is the one that comes from the mountain — but a good climber is well trained to face that threat, and does not need to bring the self into play in the process.
What slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are. And being able to forget temporarily who we are seems to be very enjoyable. When not preoccupied with ourselves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper Perennial, New York, 1990.
Sermon: The Spirituality of Flow
Good morning everyone! Yesterday was a big and bright day! I was pleased to be a part of many events happening all over Attleboro. I was counterprotesting at the For Women’s Clinic at 7, at the legislative breakfast at 9 and joined in the “Hands Off” protest in the afternoon, and working. We went out for some Thai food to sooth this sore throat with som Tom Yum soup. Each moment required attention and care. Before I knew it my bath time was beckoning and after I was relaxed I went to sleep. It was a good day, I was very happy- indeed there were many moments where I felt that my little self had been transcended- and that a deeper force was beaming through me. And I know I wasn’t alone! I want to talk about that today!
Our democracy requires lots of attention, and of course with the course our economy is on, so will our jobs, and I dare say institutions like this one that make capital repairs from endowment funds. And of course we wish that this attention was all good and helpful, but sometimes it is not, sometimes we are full of anxiety and it is as transfixing like a pin fixing the bug to its card. And so I feel it is our duty to lift up the kinds of things that might restore some wellness and wholeness in our lives. Which brings us to the subject of today’s sermon: Flow- the kind of feeling many of us felt yesterday!
Flow is a notion explored mostly by positive psychology researcher and professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Cheek-sent-mi-hah-yee). He once said that “Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.”¹ He felt that people were really happiest when they were in a focussed, engaged, state of mind which he dubbed flow. Its that state of mind where one is so focussed on a given task that nothing else seems to matter.
As a young person, I’m quite positive I experienced flow, playing imaginary games, or drawing castles, but one experience stands out more than others. I was a x-c skier and skating had been introduced to the racing circuits. In that portion of southern NH, our friend who maintained all the ski trails in the area was kind of a curmudgeon, and was resistant to grooming the trails in a way that would allow for skating. Also many of the inns and beds and breakfasts didn’t want to invest the kind of money required to make the trails wider and more capable. But we had our own trails and my father and I worked hard to make them “skateable” For a long time, though my diagonal stride was strong my skate technique was my Achilles heel.
One day the conditions turned slushy but toward the afternoon as the temperature plummeted that wet snow turned to ice. That evening, a brilliant full moon came out. I put on on my lycra body suit and pulled on my skate skis and went out into the night alone.
Was I lonely? Of course! Did I wish I could have been doing something else? Sure! But when I started my first skate- felt the pull of the noon, allowed my eyes to take in the beauty of the shadows of the trees on the blue bright snow I was just in that moment, and that moment alone. I was zooming down hills, and powerfully skating up them, skating around corners. I was having a magnificent time. Suddenly hours had passed. Suddenly I realized I could skate with my skis on the snow. I felt larger, more capable more in tuned with my environment than ever before. I was happy, filled with joy.
Have you ever had an experience like this? What were you doing? Let’s take three volunteers.
We all have big, profound moments of flow, but we also have smaller moments of flow- perhaps small things you do. I know my wife sometimes experiences flow when she is knitting or book binding, or when she is painting. Nearly every time I meditate I experience moments of flow, where the sounds of the outside world and my thoughts become sort of like a unified whole.
Ask: what kinds of things can you do in your life that will enable flow? (Threee volunteers)
Ever heard of the the Japanese Tea ceremony? It’s a form of Zen meditation- It’s not just the preparing and the pouring of the tea but it includes the construction of the rustic house, the raking of the sand garden, the arranging of the flowers, the gathering of the perfectly rustic tea bowl, and tea pot. It is the way the tea is poured the way, it is savored, the silence between the conversation. The ego melts away, to the now, to this person before you this act of hospitality and reverence. It is flow. It is a practice brought to being by Seu-No-Rikyu who wrote this:
When below the eaves
The moon’s flood of silver light
Chequers all the room,
There’s no need to be abashed
If our heart is pure and clear.When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.In my little hut,
Whether people come or not
It is all the same.
In my heart there is no stir
Of attraction or disgust.²
You know if we can just have one moment of this, no matter how stressful our lives might be, we’re good! Figure out how you can find some flow each day- just one thing that connects you back to this deeper place in your soul.
You know where I most recently felt that feeling of Zen tea ceremony equanimity? At yesterday’s protest in down town attleboro. It was cold. My hands were having a hard time holding the sign. It was wet. But as we shouted the call and response: “Tell me what democracy looks like, This is what democracy looks like!” And the traffic flowed by honking horns, some giving us thumbs up with beatific expressions, others with anger waving a curious one fingered hand gesture, I felt as though all of these fellow aligned souls and I and the world were in one unified flow of love and pure joy! And you know, we occupied all the corners of Fisk square, and in every corner I met a brave and smiling throng of Murayites! All there surrounding the very spot where the original Murray Church stood! Here we were a church standing for the most Universal values that all people are worthy, all people are saved, that no one shall be deported without due process! That the beauty of science, the integrity of women’s lives, LGBTQ lives, the freedom of all people deserves our attention, deserves our praise, deserves our loving, passionate, blazing light! And there we were, the flow-the light itself in a pouring down, rainy day!
¹ “Virtue Quotes & Quotations”. focusdep.com. Archived from the original on 11 November 2013. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
² Verses of Seu-No-Rikyu https://www.holymtn.com/homepage/tea-gardens/japan/verses-sen-no-rikyu/
