Guiding Goals
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church
1-6-08
I am amazed by the power that has been released in my life by setting goals for myself. It shocks me to see how these goals guide my actions and attitudes in positive ways. Since I came to this church I’ve adopted this congregation’s long practice of making goal posters that, in collage form, depict our intentions for the coming year. So far, so good on all my posters. I put my poster in front of me in my church office, to remind me daily of what I intend. The last two years have been related goals which are about work I needed to do in my most intimate relationships. You’ll have to talk to the people with whom I am most intimate to get a more objective assessment of how I’ve done, but suffice it to say that I notice a real improvement in these relationships.
The year before that, I made a poster about finishing a novel that I’d been dithering at for many years. Just about exactly a year later, after making the poster, I completed the book. Mind you, it’s yet to be published – I’ve got a book about to be published this year, happily, but that’s not the novel. Anybody out there who can hook me up with a good literary agent?? In any case, it felt really, really good to finish that project – I learned so much from the process.
So I’m a believer in the goals posters we make here at our church. It is indeed a spiritual discipline. No matter whether the goals are sublime or mundane, it’s very powerful practice for our souls when we make goals for ourselves and hold them up in front of ourselves to guide us.
It’s a spiritual practice to go a bit further, too, and peel back the layers of our goals. What are the goals behind our goals – what is it we’re really intending to do or be or accomplish? What do these goals say about the states of our souls? The ultimate purposes of our lives?
Ponder this: let’s say your goal this year is to take a trip to Europe. A wonderful goal, worthy of your time and of the effort and money you’ll have to save to get there. But what is the goal behind this goal? What motivates you to go to Europe? It might be good to explore that before you go – so that you can reach not only the surface goal of being there, but also to reach the deeper goal that motivates the trip in the first place. Is your deeper goal to get a fresh perspective about your life and your way of looking at things, which travel can help you achieve? If this is the deeper goal, it might be good to get clear about it – to reflect carefully on what exactly needs to change in your way of looking at yourself and the world around you. Do you want to go to Europe in order to get a break from a job you don’t like? If that’s the goal behind the goal, it’s important to look at this intention – and perhaps ask yourself what you can do about your employment situation. How much nicer it would be to come back from Europe to a job you actually like?
Or maybe your surface goal is to significantly reduce your golf handicap. A cool thing, a fun thing to intend for the year. But what’s the goal within that goal? Perhaps improving your golf game is a surface sign of a deeper intention you have to stave off the symptoms of your aging process. Maybe if you are aware of this hidden goal, you will take better care of your body in a number of ways that don’t relate directly to your golf game, or you will come to terms and accept your aging process – or both!
Today is Epiphany Sunday, the day on the traditional Christian calendar when we celebrate the arrival of the three wise men who came to honor Jesus’ birth. They made a trip from the East to visit Israel. Their goal was to honor the newborn king of Israel who they believed had been predicted to be born at that time. But what was the goal behind their goal? To prove themselves right? To demonstrate that their astrological and historical and spiritual knowledge was accurate? To earn wise men brownie points for being hotshots? Were they testing their theory about the birth of the king? That is one goal they might have had beneath the goal of taking a vacation to Israel. Or they might have had another deeper goal, a completely different agenda behind their decision to take the trip. Perhaps they were following a hunch that if they followed the star, something would happen, something would appear, about which they knew nothing, but would be wonderful to discover. Perhaps they were taking this trip in order to open themselves to some kind of inner transformation. Perhaps they weren’t out to prove themselves right, but to discover something they didn’t already understand. Perhaps they were motivated by divine curiosity – by an openness to wonder and magic and surprise.
In any case, their journey from East to West did not follow their initial plan. There were detours that they did not anticipate. There were surprises, all right – the object of their quest was completely, utterly different than what they could have expected, whether or not they had any specific expectations.
So one thing we celebrate at Epiphany is that it is a wonderful thing to have goals that take us places we cannot anticipate or imagine. Perhaps that is your goal for the 2008: to arrange things so that, somehow, you will be profoundly amazed...
Some of the goals I have set for myself have been manifestations of hidden goals that I didn’t examine. I have reached a number of goals in my life that were in large measure motivated by the hidden goal of becoming a somebody, making a name for myself, puffing up my ego. The surface goals were very powerful - it amazes me how I was able to reach them, because of the energy that setting these goals released for me. But the hidden goal of ego-gratification was at work, too – and taking me down a path that I didn’t really want to go, getting me in trouble in my most intimate relationships. In the last few years I have been working at bringing this hidden goal of ego-maintenance into my consciousness, trying to be aware of it so that I can examine it and ask if it is really the goal I want to pursue. Indeed, one of my goals has been to more closely examine my inner, hidden goals and intentions.
Knowing what you want is very, very powerful consciousness that gathers and focuses your energy and intelligence to get you what you want, or at least to go a long way in that direction. Knowing why you want what you want is even more powerful consciousness, as it opens you to a greater awareness of your true self, which is your soul, your spirit, which transcends your individual ego.
The book we’re reading now for One Book, One Church – our church’s practice of reading books together – is called Lying Awake and it is by Mark Salzman. A group of us discussed it this past Thursday – we’ll be talking more this coming Thursday evening at 7:30 in my office. It’s a book about a nun in a convent that is dedicated to praying for others. The nun, Sister John of the Cross, is respected and envied by her fellow sisters because she periodically has ecstatic spiritual raptures with God. But these raptures are associated with increasingly bad physical symptoms. She learns that she has a brain tumor that is causing non-muscular seizures which are the cause of her spiritual raptures. Then she has to decide what to do – if she has the surgery, she may lose this special sense of closeness with God. But if she doesn’t, then she will become more and more dependent on the nursing care of the dwindling number of her fellow nuns. She prays all night for guidance about what to do. What is her goal? Is it to have rapturous union with the Divine? Or is it to honor the needs of her community? Is her highest goal to keep being special, to keep being the envy of her fellow sisters who don’t have such an ecstatic connection with God? Or is her highest goal to contribute as much as she can to the well-being of her sisters? As she struggles in prayer in the convent chapel in the middle of the night, one by one her fellow nuns come in to pray with her, not saying anything aloud, not saying anything to her to influence her – just being present to show their love and commitment to her. The chapel fills with the whole community of nuns. By morning Sister John feels her prayers are answered. She decides to have the brain tumor removed.
What are our spiritual goals? Really?
There’s a wonderful Canadian pastor by the name of Freda Moosehunter. She once came up with this description of a lot of people’s spiritual goals. Maybe all of us at some point or another are motivated by this intention. Here are the words she put into our mouths: “I would like to buy three dollars' worth of God, please. Not enough to explore my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don't want enough God to make me love an Indian or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation. I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy three dollars' worth of God, please.”
Sister John of the Cross got her three bucks worth of spiritual ecstasy, and then decided there was more – she decided that her real goal was transformation. She realized that there was a higher goal than what might seem to some to be the pinnacle of spiritual experience. What mattered even more was belonging to and serving a community of spiritual seekers, even if that meant focusing on matters more prosaic and less rapturous.
So may we do the same as a church – and be for each other what Sister John of the Cross’s fellow nuns were for her – staying close to each other and being physically present and spiritually awake for each other’s sake. This displays a spiritual unity with God that transcends even the most thrilling private spiritual ecstasies.
May we each and all set our goals higher than three bucks worth of God. May we aim for the whole enchilada, even if it means picking beets with migrants, even if it means letting go of the desires of the small-s self for the sake of the needs of the capital S- Self which we share with all beings.
I’ve told this story before here, but I think it’s such a good one that I feel compelled to repeat it – so I beg your indulgence. Years ago a friend of mine named Rock Pfotenhauer was regularly making trips from his home in Santa Cruz up to San Francisco. This was back in the day when young folks of my generation did a lot of hitchhiking. One evening, Rock was standing at the bottom of Highway 17 in Santa Cruz, holding up a cardboard sign on which he had magic-markered the letters “SF”. He waited a long time – nobody picked him up. It was getting dark and he was getting frustrated. So he had a bright idea. He flipped the cardboard sign around and wrote “ALASKA” on it. In minutes somebody stopped in front of him and said, “Hey, man, I’m only going as far as San Francisco. Would that help?” Rock said, “Sure!” and hopped in.
I believe that the soul, and the whole universe to which it is connected, conspires to give us rides toward our highest goals. If we set low goals – just surface goals, without our awareness of our deeper motivations – there’s a lot of power in those goals. But if we set higher goals, goals that reflect our true selves and our highest inner aspirations – the power that is set loose by our consciousness of these goals is truly astounding. It will help us reach our lower, surface goals, and sweep us right past them toward our higher, spiritual goals. If we take our cardboard sign and write “3 Bucks Worth of God” on it, it will take us longer to reach that goal than if we write “All of God” on it. With that sign we’ll get the three bucks, and change to spare to share with others!
So may we go the distance with our goals. May our efforts to reach our mundane goals help us to discover and pursue our sublime goals – so that we can get to San Francisco before dark, and, what the heck, see Alaska to boot! So may it be --- amen!