December 30, 2007
“Breather”

Quote:

“To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control her.”
—Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Opening Words

This time of year the direction “East” is big. In many earth-centered religious traditions East is associated with the element Air and with all things new, light, bright, soft, winged, spoken, sung or rung. And so with Christmas and the New Year, with “sons” and “sun,” new beginnings, birth, music, angels, messages and candlelight and stars. On Christmas Day, we said, a child heralded by angels and destined for greatness was born of Mary and drew his first breath of starlit night in a stable. For our opening words I offer this poem by the former poet laureate of Milwaukee, a man who calls himself, in The Sun magazine, at any rate, “Antler”:

First Breath Last Breath           

When a baby boy is born
     and the midwife
              holds him up
     as he takes
              his first breath,
Place him over
     the Mother’s face
              so when the baby exhales
     his first breath on Earth
              the Mother breathes it.

And when the Mother dies,
    her middle-aged son
             the baby grew up to be—
    by her side,
             his head next to her head—
Follows her breathing with his breath
    as it becomes shorter,
            and as the dying Mother
    exhales her last breath
            her son inhales it.

Chalice Lighting

Our Chalice Lighting this morning is an excerpt from Reading # 530 in the back of our hymnal, a piece by Robert Weston called “Out of the Stars”:

Out of the stars in their flight,
out of the dust of eternity, here have we come,
Stardust and sunlight,
mingling through time and through space.

Out of the stars have we come,
up from time;
Out of the stars have we come.

Time out of time before time in the vastness of space,
earth spun to orbit the sun,
earth with the thunder of mountains newborn,
the boiling of seas.

Earth warmed by sun,
lit by sunlight: This is our home;
out of the stars have we come.

With these words we light this morning the chalice of our heritage and hope.

I chose the topic of “breath” and “breathing” for today’s service, the Sunday between the Christmas and New Year holidays, because I know, for many people, time during the winter holidays can be as crowded, chaotic and claustrophobic as it is peaceful, warm and inspiring. Things get kinda tight. We’re all inside little rooms together for the first time in a while, more people than usual trying to squeeze in, everywhere you go. It can be tough to get away from folks who drive you crazy, from the smoke, from the TV or the dishes. The alone time you are accustomed to gets eaten up or invaded. Space and air and time all seem to contract. It’s a holiday, charming, but also packed, taxing. We’re taking a breather this morning: an hour or so in time and a sanctuary of space in which to unwind. To re-“wind” (as in “breeze”). We are every one of us dependent on this breathing thing. We are Breathers and, in many ways, we have made a religion of it. The act of respiration has interesting connections to spirituality and religious traditions throughout the world. That’s what we’re looking at that together today.

The Upanishads and the teachings of yoga that bring Hindu scripture into common application for many people these days tell us that “breathing is the intelligence of the body.” The inhaling of oxygen and the exhaling of carbon dioxide regularly and fully from moment to moment nourishes and protects the tissues of our body, just as the mental processing of experience nourishes and protects the “being” that our physical selves house. Breathing well may be the most fundamental “excellence” physical fitness can offer a human being, or any being for that matter. Plenty of oxygen, up to a certain physiological limit, makes everything go better throughout our bodies. On a good day, on average, you know, we only use about 10-15% of our total lung capacity. On bad days lots of things can interfere with adequate breathing, especially for human beings, and end up stunting and contracting us, body and soul. Our shoulders and spine collapse to cave in the chest, tension in our muscles increases, and our heart and lungs get squeezed, decreasing both the amount of air we take in and the efficiency with which it is distributed throughout the body. 15% becomes 10% just from structural changes. And then there are the effects of the stress and lack of exercise many of us experience. That 10% becomes 3%. We can live on very little oxygen, but we can’t be fully alive. The more deeply we breathe and the more completely we exhale, the more clearly we think, freely we move, and longer we last at any task and in life, because our bodies can work more efficiently to fuel us for our purposes.

Many people who decide to pay attention to their breathing by any means—exercising, meditating, singing or playing a wind instrument, or simply by yawning or sighing more—don’t notice the physical effects as much as they do the spiritual effects. They tend to feel more present, more aware, more alive. They find themselves more relaxed, more emotionally stable, more receptive to experiences and people, and often more in touch with a sense of being a part of something bigger than themselves alone. This has been so for humans, I would guess, since the beginning of time and could very well have been the root cause of much confusion about what breathing is all about, especially back when religion and science were not as well differentiated as they seem to be these days. It wasn’t until the middle of the 18^th century that we started to get it straight about what “air” is and how the body uses it. Before that “breath” was that magic that God blew into the clay to give the first man life. I am not going to go through the quite marvelous history that brought us to our current understanding of the physiology of respiration, but I am going to note that two key figures in Unitarian history made very significant contributions to that understanding along the way.

John Calvin managed to get Michael Servetus burned at the stake for questioning the Biblical veracity and logic of the idea of a God made of three persons. Servetus was a brilliant man, but the publication of On the Errors of the Trinity in 1531 and all the other theological correspondence and treatises he offered to the Reformation were almost a sideline for him. He made his living as a physician. It was in the course of that business that he challenged the ancient expert Galen’s opinion that the blood is aerated in the heart. Servetus theorized that old air was exchanged with new in the lungs and he described the route the blood must take through heart and lungs in order to accomplish that end. He then published his findings in metaphorical form in a theological book, where they were overlooked for centuries.

(Click here for information about Michael Servetus.)

And then there was the British theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley. He was the first to get the connection between the air we breathe in and out and the activity of plants. “In a series of ingenious experiments, Joseph Priestley found that flames and animals' breath "injure" the air in a sealed jar, making it unwholesome to breathe. But a green sprig of mint, he found, could restore its goodness.” (The Case of the Missing Carbon - National Geographic) Priestley was not able to name that element that fire and respiration used up and plants replaced, but he is credited by most with the discovery of oxygen.

So, way back then, we were, as the humanist majority among us Unitarian Universalists continues to be, very interested in replacing theological speculation, in this case about “an animating force,” with tangible, provable scientific truth. Not God, but oxygen and lungs. Some of us hold out and say “It’s God and respiration; or respiration created by God; or respiration in the context of a bigger and yet unnamed mystery, a beautiful, amazing mystery. We are really talking about something that is both rational and irrational. Breathing is a physiological truth that bears spiritual fruit. Breathing deeply and fully enhances our sense of well-being, comfort, integrity, purpose and hope and, when practiced with intention and openness, can create the sense that it is from that “bigger context” that those qualities associated with “wholeness” wash into us. The breath becomes the “door” between our physiology and our spirituality. Shunru Zuzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, calls it “the swinging door.”

"When we practice zazen our mind follows our breathing....The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, 'I breathe', the 'I' is extra. There is no you to say 'I.' What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no 'I,' no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.”

The “swinging door” becomes a channel to union, or in Buddhist terms, “nothingness.” Hazrat Inayat Khan, the Sufi Master, made a similar observation: “With every breath, man touches God. The current of the breath links us.” Krishnamacharya, the “father of modern yoga,” puts it this way: “Inhale, and God approaches you.  Hold the inhalation, and God remains with you.  Exhale, and you approach God.  Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.”

“Inhale, and God approaches you.” “Hold the exhalation, and surrender to God.” I am sure that at some point you have given some thought to the words we use in English for “inhale” and “exhale.” To inspire means literally to breathe spirit in. That’s how we get the other meaning for the word “inspire”: “to affect, guide, or arouse by divine influence; to fill with enlivening or exalting emotion.” And “expire”? To expire means to breathe spirit out, that is, to die. In fact, our languages, in many cases, if not most, preserve our ancient association of breath and spirit. The Latin spiritus, Greek pneuma, Hebrew ruach, Sanskrit prana, and Chinese chi/qi all carry both meanings and form the roots in modern languages for the double entendres that pervade our conversations. You can see this even in some of the expressions we commonly use in English. These expressions fall into certain categories of meaning, it seems to me, and for the most part those categories have spiritual connotations. Creation, sex, life, animation: breathe new life into ♦; heavy breathing ♦. Exhaustion, sickness and death (expire): be out of breath, short of breath ♦ draw one's last breath ♦ save one’s breath ♦. Courage, energy (aspire): to take a deep breath ♦. Secrecy, hinting, hiding, silence (conspire): breathe a word ♦ say something under one's breath ♦ in the same breath ♦.  Surprise, fear, astonishment, expectation, hope (inspire): hold one's breath ♦ take away one's breath ♦ breathtaking ♦ breathless ♦. Peace, space, calm, relief, recovery, repose: catch one's breath ♦ breathe easy ♦ go for a breath of fresh air ♦ take a breather ♦ breathing room ♦ Revelation, information, novelty, freshness: breath of fresh air ♦ Scant evidence, trace, subtlety, lightness: not a breath, as in not a breath of wind, of news, etc.

We say “bless you,” gesundheit, when someone near us sneezes because expiration, especially startlingly loud expiration, is associated with death and the loss of all the pretty good stuff our expressions ascribe to breathing, the alive, happy, relaxing, creative, excited stuff.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes (in Eyes Remade for Wonder) about the Hebrew letters that make up the unutterable name of God. They are Yod, Hay, Vav, and again Hay. As he explains, the name is not unutterable because of its holiness, but because the letters are all vowels. If you try to pronounce them, you can hurt yourself, he says! You get something that sounds like breathing, like a big wind blowing through a small passage. Yod, Hay and Vav are also the root letters of the Hebrew verb “to be.” Our breath, our be-ing, is a small current of air in the big wind of all of life. Scientifically speaking, we could say that that “big wind” began to blow 4.5 billion years ago when the cloud of particles and gases that became our solar system was blown into its swirling by the Big Bang. Every atom that passes through your lungs and mine, that blows through the trees and whistles around the house at night, was born in that one blinding moment. The atmosphere that surrounds the earth is a composite of all the breaths of all time—of the first beings, the bacteria—the bubblers and the bluegreens and the ones with propellers called “breathers”—that ruled the earth for two billion years, and of all the finned then legged creatures and all the plants that emerged in the next two and a half. And in that wind are also all sounds and all signs—the songs, the smoke signals, the drum beats, the radio waves, the voices and the words.

I was listening to WBAI, New York the other day, to the Friday afternoon program called “Nonfiction.” The segment featured a guy named Adam Grossman (aka Isaac Dolom), who blogs in an MP3zine called Dailysonic (click here for the Dailysonic MySpace page). Adam had made a recording of the wind. “The wind contains all sound,” he was saying, “all sounds audible to the human ear. Your own voice is in the wind, the sound of your own name.” To illustrate this truth, he had isolated, from the tape he’d made of the wind blowing, all the notes of the tune “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” It was remarkable to hear. Moving. You can’t listen to something like that and not get it that the boundary between Us and Not Us is only conceptual. Our human lungs represent a biological archetype that speaks to this unity. They look like an upside down tree. These days we know that forests are the lungs of the world.

Al Gore recently reminded us that the entire earth breathes in and out once each year. (click here for An Inconvient Truth Transcript) The vast majority of the landmass of the earth and most of the vegetation is north of the equator, he explained, so that “when the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun…the leaves come out and they breathe in the carbon dioxide and the amount in the atmosphere goes down, and when the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun…the leaves fall down and exhale the carbon dioxide and the amount in the atmosphere goes up again.” Human contributions to the Earth’s CO2 load is negatively affecting her respiratory health! The world we enjoy is the macrocosmic reflection of the human spirit/human breath connection. The same wisdom we apply to ourselves—to breath deep, exercise, meditate, pay attention, honor the mystery on the other side of the “swinging door”—applies to our responsibility to the Earth, to do whatever we can to promote her “fundamental fitness excellence.”

I will close with an excerpt from the late Philip Simmon’s wonderful book Learning To Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, which he wrote not long before he succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease:

“Silence, like love, is not something we reason ourselves into. And once we are in it, we recognize that it has been there all along. It is there like the background noise of the universe, that uniform hiss astronomers find when they point their radio telescopes at the space between stars, the remnant of the big bang, the residual wind of our origin.

But let me speak of another wind, this one nearer home. I want to tell you about the sound of winter wind through a New Hampshire forest. Some of you have heard the sound I mean, though it’s heard only in great stretches of northern woods, far from freeways and flight paths, and if you haven’t been to such a place lately, you will have to work to remember it. It’s the sound a whole forest makes, unlocatable and everywhere, near and far, intimate and impossibly remote. I do not mean a storm wind, full of high drama, but the gentle, subtle voice of a forest as it speaks of winter peace and winter desolation….

Leaves are down, of course, so it’s the pines that matter most. They stand tallest and catch the wind. Theirs is a finely sifted sound, a soft hiss through unnumbered needles. Stand by one as it takes the air, and you’ll know how God breathes. Hear the accumulated sounds of such trees coming at you over the miles, and you hear something like the breath of Being itself, the very sigh of our becoming and passing away…. Most often the sound steals up on me, as I pause between house and barn, or while I’m crunching down the dirt road to meet the children’s school bus or opening the door at night to call the dog. I hear this wind in its purest form only a handful of times each winter, yet when I do I imagine it has been there always, back of everything else I thought I was doing with my life. Whenever I hear it, I think: Surely this is the sound I heard as I was born, the sound I will hear as I die….

In the most common form of Buddhist meditation, one sits silently, often for long periods, continually returning the awareness to the breath, to this wind of our origin and of our passing away. Our word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, or “breath”; in returning to the breath, we return to spirit, we hear the winter wind, we allow ourselves to cool into winter mind, we prepare for the fall into emptiness. And in touching emptiness we touch the source, the spring, the creative power out of which the universe flows at every moment….”

[Philip Simmons, Learning To Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life. New York: Bantam Books (2002), pp106-113]

Breathe deeply, friends.

AMEN.

"Spirit of the wind, carry me. Spirit of the wind, carry me home. Spirit of the wind, carry me home to myself."

I add my breath to your breath
That our days may be long on the earth,
That the days of our people may be long,
That we shall be as one person.
that we shall finish our road together.
—Laguna Pueblo Prayer

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