by Rev. Dr. Daniel Ó Connell

A sermon at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in St. Louis, MO

In our chancel drama this morning, we heard of problems great and petty. We get stories of personal problems, and we get hints of world problems.

We heard the voice of Ecclesiastes, known as "the teacher" and probably one of the bible's more pessimistic thinkers. To quote the song– is that all there is? And how to deal with the world's problems, when sometimes it seems we are powerless to deal with our own?

One piece of advice that seems sage, is to first deal with our inner critic. You know, the one that mocks your ambition, the one that seems to sap your resolve, the constant critic of inner doubt.

It's like the two boys at the library – one is looking for "how to" books, the other wants to find the "why bother" book.

Author Paula Prober wants to help. According to USA Today– (Fix your inner world before tackling the universe, Anita Manning, USA TODAY, 01/14/01)– Prober is a former teacher, now a therapist in Eugene, OR, specializing in gifted children and adults.

She has a book called, Ten Tips for Women Who Want to Change the World Without Losing their Friends, Shirts, or Minds.

The book is for women, but using humor, insights from Carl Jung, and others, she seeks to challenge us all about dealing with our inner critic in order to become more useful to ourselves and the world we want to affect.

You can see her ten tips in your order of service:

Tip No. 1. Confront your inner critic. In Prober's case, that creature is named Godzilla. "I can't get on with changing the world when Godzilla is telling me I'm incompetent and intellectually malfunctioning," she writes.

To disarm the beast, she recommends initiating a dialogue with it, in writing. "The dialogue technique can be used to speak with other aspects of yourself such as your fear, depression, shame, headache, back pain, inner child, wisdom or creativity," she writes. "The process is a powerful way to tap into your unconscious."

Tip No. 2. Assemble a committee of role models and mentors who can provide support "when we feel lonely, run out of ideas, or realize we've consumed the entire bag of Oreos in two hours." [These can be real or fictional characters. Alive or dead].

Tip No. 3. Seek out your self-doubt, name it (Prober calls hers Sadie), give it a monologue and let it go on a tirade. Let it exaggerate and grow large. Then you can see how small it really is.

Tip No. 4. Learn to say no, to set limits. [You're more likely to succeed if you keep your efforts manageable].

Tip No. 5. Make more noise. By making sounds for 10 to 20 minutes a day, which Prober calls "toning," you "are gaining courage and giving yourself permission to be heard, while also getting the added benefit of releasing tension and emotion."

Tip No. 6. "Enlighten up." This is a process that "allows me to be both intense and funny at the same time," she writes. "It involves prayer, candles, goddesses and my greatest fear."

(Prober does live on the West Coast, after all.) [We all have our own rituals, think about investing yours with a little thought & effort].

Tip No. 7. Do lunch with your evil twin. That's the part of everyone's inner self that Jung called the shadow, the part "we reject, deny, hide and hate. If we don't deal with these parts, we risk projecting them onto others."

Tip No. 8. Make more love. Love can come from many sources, including friends, family, books, nature and yourself. "The task here is to find ways to bring love into your life and then to find ways to give it away," she says.

Tip No. 9. Appreciate your "nerdliness." Hypersensitivity, intuition, intensity and perfectionism may not be neuroses. They may be signs of giftedness. [Isn't that nice? Things the larger culture may make fun of can actually be gifts, just by re-framing the way we think about them].

Tip No. 10. Go beyond the conventional to the imaginative, the mysterious, the unusual and the unexpected. Visualize your fears or sense of hopelessness, then visualize the ideal world, your goal.

Draw or paint the goal and describe it. [The idea is that as long as you're going to think about something new, you might as well think BIG].

To deal with your own problems or the problems of the world, you have to be ready to deal with your inner critic.

After that, it might be good to begin with things you can do that have an immediate impact.

The beauty of that is that if you get pretty quick feedback on something little you can do to make a difference, you may be more motivated to do something bigger, something that takes longer, something that takes a long term investment.

So starting with something little to fix the world, something that has an immediate payoff can be fun, but it can also be motivational to do something with a longer term pay off.

This is kind of how the idea of Random Acts of Kindness came about. You may remember this from about 8 years ago. It first became known in Glamour magazine, and then was widely reported.

Imagine with me now, a woman in a red Honda, drives up to a tollbooth. 'I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars behind me,' she says with a smile, handing over seven commuter tickets.

One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the tollbooth, dollars in hand, only to be told, 'Some lady up ahead already paid your fare. Have a nice day.'

The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on an index card taped to a friend's refrigerator.

Anne Herbert, a writer, came up with it in a café, and shared it with a stranger. Within a few weeks– with no marketing campaign, and just by word of mouth– the phrase became something repeated in households all over the country.

'Here's the idea,' Herbert says. 'Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly.'

Her own fantasies include: breaking into depressing-looking schools to paint the classrooms; leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the poor parts of town; slipping money into a proud old woman's purse.

Says Herbert, 'kindness can build on itself as much violence can.' Another great phrase. As these ideas spread, so does a vision of guerrilla goodness, so does a vision of how to fix the world– one act of kindness at a time.

Consider these rash acts observed as a result of such dangerous language–
In Portland, Oregon, a man plunked a coin into a stranger's parking meter just in time.

In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people with pails and mops and tulip bulbs descended on a rundown house and cleaned it from top to bottom while the frail elderly owners looked on.

In Chicago, a teenage boy shovels a driveway: what the heck, nobody's looking, he thinks, and he shovels the neighbor's driveway too.

Not just random acts of kindness, but senseless acts of beauty: a man plants daffodils along the roadway, another scrubs graffiti from a park bench.

They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up a little - likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindness without feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened if only because the world has become a slightly better place.

See, this is another way to confront the inner critic, another way to make a difference, if only for one day, for one person– you. You can take some delight in anticipation.

If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your bridge fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else later? Wave someone on in the intersection? Smile at a tired clerk? Or something even bigger?

There are some ideas in your Spiritual Homework, with a link to even more ideas. And if all that's too complicated, there is a simple way to start a sort of chain of good deeds.

This idea was given to the Global Ideas Bank, and it's called the Generosity Game. You may have received a little slip of paper in your order of service. There are more out at Visitors Corner.

Here's the idea:

You do something good for someone, and you do it anonymously. [Pay someone's toll; buy an ice cream for the person next in line; pay someone's parking meter; give up a great place in line].

And you pass on one of these cards to the person you do it for. On one side, they say

'It's Your Turn.' On the other, they give these instructions: 'This is for you! Now it's your turn: go do something good for someone else. Do it anonymously. Pass on this card.'

So, you see, the card passes itself on! Someone is the recipient of your good deed (and the card), goes and does something for someone else, passes on the card. Then that person has some good thing done for them (and gets a card), and they do something for someone else ... isn't it great?

So, to fix the world we start with addressing our inner critic; then we try out some creative acts of kindness or deeds of spontaneous generosity. Those are little fixes to heal the world's hurts, to make someone's day.

But what about the world's larger problems? Unitarian Universalists have always been champions of fixing BIG social problems. But in a post-moderni world, is this really do-able?

Consider that for many years, our answer to large problems has been new technology. Bigger and better, onward and upward, forever. Edward Rothstein writes in a book review of America as Second Creation in the New York Times ("The Double-Edged Ax of American Technology," May 31, 2003):

every narrative of how a great invention helped create an American Eden inspired a counter-narrative of how that same invention helped construct an American hell.

The same ax championed as the creator of the log cabin was soon enough condemned as despoiler of the natural world, leaving behind stumps and wrecking the habitats of American Indians. The "heroic story of self-sufficiency," [the story goes], eventually became a "tale of thoughtless land exploitation."

And as with ax, so too with the mill, the canal, the railroad and the dam. On one hand, these technologies were championed for transforming the wilderness into "a prosperous and egalitarian society."

On the other, they have been condemned for having increased economic inequality and for running roughshod over those less powerful. On one hand, they have been invocations of optimism and progress; on the other, they have been reminders of disruption and marginality.

We might imagine technology as digging a useful hole. But what then, of the big mound of dirt it leaves behind?

Really great ideas for fixing the world have to take this into account. Our answer can't cause more problems than it creates.

The Global Ideas Bank, I mentioned before, is a place where people bring new ideas to help fix the world. Hopefully, these new ideas don't create more problems as a result of their "solution." Sometimes, the solutions can help not only deal with a current problem but past problems as well.

Consider the depopulation– years ago– of predatory birds. As more land was taken up with human housing, predatory birds found their hunting grounds razed, and fewer places for them to thrive. But a new urban problem suddenly became an opportunity to help out those predatory birds.

In England, there was a problem with city pigeons and the mess they created. In London alone, costs were getting out of control dealing with cleaning up all the pigeon offal. Now,

George, a Harris hawk, and his mate Harriet are used by Woking Borough Council to frighten away pigeons. And since they started their duties, council officials believe the number of pigeons and the amount of pigeon mess has declined.

The idea seems to be taking off. After calculating that they were spending more man hours clearing up after pigeons than they were on train maintenance, London Transport's Northfields Depot organized a weekly visit from a squadron of Harris Hawks.

It's estimated to have saved them, on one site alone, hundreds of thousands of [dollars]. Actually, the hawks rarely catch their prey, but their presence alone has the desired effect.

"Like having a tiger in your front room," says Terry Singleton of Raptor Pest Control, who looks after the birds, "You're not going to hang around to see if it can catch you. And you're not going to go back in to see if it's still there." http://globalideasbank.org/BI/BI-167.HTML

Global Ideas Bank has other great ideas– from the midlife sabbatical to bringing in jesters to corporations; from teacher resource packs on non-violent conflict resolution to citywide attempts to set a record on learning languages, to swapping community service for community college tuition, to Boomerang Day for returning borrowed items.

This idea– that we can make a difference in the world– that we can fix the world, has been with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists for a long time. Just look in our hymnal, and you'll see plenty of readings that support this:

461 - Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
462 - I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear;
463 - My heart is moved by all I cannot save;
464 - And then all that has divided us will merge;
465 - If we will have the wisdom to survive.

So, let's build a land, you and I, let us build the land we seek, We'll Build A Land, #121.

Benediction #457 Edward Everett Hale (UU)

Please repeat after me...

I am only one.

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything,

But still I can do something.

And because I cannot do everything

I will not refuse to do

the something that I can do.

Go now, and fix the world! Amen!

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Page for this sermon preached for the congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in St. Louis, MO By the Rev. Dr. Daniel Ó Connell, On June 8, 2003

Book by Paula Prober, M.S. - Ten Tips for Women Who Want to Change the World Without Losing their Friends, Shirts, or Minds

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