Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Venice

WHAT? (TEACHING)

I have been interested in crazy wisdom since I saw Godspell back in the early 70s.  At that time I was still trying to make sense of Christianity and couldn't get my head around what the depiction of Jesus as a clown was meant to represent.  Certainly betrayal, suffering, death, and re-birth was serious business!   My UU soul was searching for truth and meaning within some logical context.   Not being acquainted with Holy Foolishnesss, it wasn't a very satisfactory undertaking.

Now that some time has passed I think I'm beginning to get it.    Holy Foolishness is foolishness which transforms - that makes us and our world more whole.   Makes our world more Holy.  Folly of the regressive sort destroys or resists that which moves us toward greater aliveness and wholeness.  The key is contrast.  

Holy Fools are practitioners of a radical style of teaching or demonstrating spiritual values.  In contrast to the folly of pride the holy fool exhibits the qualities of humility and vulnerability.  The Holy Fool is also outrageous, joyful, prodigiously  generous and hopeful.  These attributes contrast with respectability, seriousness, frugality and pragmatic realism.  

They populate the world religions under the many names and guises:  guru, clown, jester, trickster, dervish, sage, shaman, avatar.  Their teachings communicate something about the chaotic, unpredictable, death-dealing aspect of Nature itself - an aspect that the encultured consciousness seeks to deny or avoid.  The fool archtype embodies the struggle between order and chaos, conformity and originality.    

Because they are so often accused of being insane, Holy Fools posit that to seek ‘truth and meaning' - to seek God - is not necessarily the same thing as to seek sanity.  In fact, these teachers ask us to think long and hard about sanity, a word most of us cling to with a steel grip.  Remember our tube exercise.  They ask if fear of being regarded by others as insane - or even unusual - confine us in a cage of ‘responsible' behavior that limits our freedom and cripples our ability to love?  What is sanity, anyway?  Adolph Eichmann, the chief administrator of the Holocaust, was declared "quite sane" by the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial.  And one of the best-known fools, Jesus of Nazareth, was considered to be quite mad by his family.  

Let's look at a some examples of Holy Fools worldwide to see if we can discern a pattern.  What do people who've apparently lost their grip have in common.  We've already mentioned Jesus of Nazareth, but prior to him we have the example of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.  Upon learning that the country was soon to be overwhelmed and overrun by conquering forces, Jeremiah goes out to buy a field - signaling his absolute commitment to God's promise to restore Israel's fortunes.  Russian Orthodoxy is littered with Holy Fools.  The best known and most cherished is St. Basil the Blessed of the 16th century, who roamed the streets of Moscow as a naked vagrant.  He outraged the public by freely mixing with criminals and prostitutes.  Sound familiar?  Basil retaliated by throwing stones at the windows of his righteous attackers, while shedding tears at the dwellings of sinners.  Ten centuries previously the Byzantine saint Simeon did the same thing, only with a dead dog tied around his waist.

Sufism houses Islam's Holy Fools.  Shems-i-Tabriz, the teacher of the mystic and poet, Rumi, was known as a majzub - one lost in God-consciousness.  The story goes that teacher Shems spontaneously snatched a manuscript belonging to Rumi, and threw it down a well.  He then asked Rumi:  "Would you like me to take it out of the well?  It will be dry."  The befuddled Rumi took a deep breath to pull himself together, then replied:  "No!"  This was the "no" that transformed Rumi's life.  By reaching beyond the mind epitomized by the manuscript, his "no" was transformative.  Teacher Shem's eccentric and spontaneous interference in his student's life was typical of the radical teaching of holy foolishness.

India has spawned some of the most eccentric forms of religious practice on earth, together with an exceptional attitude of tolerance toward all of these manifestation of religious aspiration.  The medieval Hindu work, "Footprints of the Adept's Doctrines", describes one type of Holy Fool -- the avadhuta - literally meaning "he who has cast off all concerns."  It refers to an extreme type of renouncer - or seeker -- who has dropped out so completely that no conventional standards apply.  Often he - and it's usually a male --  walks about naked, his nudity being an external sign of his all-encompassing inner purity,  even emptiness.  He is completely unmindful of the ways of the world, even of his own bodily well-being, and in the eyes of the world he is little more than a mindless idiot.  However, the avadhuta describes his own state as being "transmental" and exalted - a description that suggests a sublime awareness rather than idiocy.  

Tibetan lamas are well known for confronting spiritual aspirants with any number of fierce tests, not least of which is personal abuse.  And after his or her initiation, the disciple was subject to still more severe testing.  The teacher's function is leave no sanctuary for the ego-personality.  I sincerely hope this is not on the agenda of the UUA Ministerial Fellowship Committee!  

Taoists are wary of the accumulation of knowledge, since knowledge tends to stifle spontaneity.  They recommend the attitude of becoming progressively ignorant, or unselfconscious.  Thus, by stepping beyond the framework of the mind, the spiritual practitioner - the Holy Fool - achieves enlightenment.

And Zen Buddhists believe that Zen is revealed when we abandon our so-called common-sense or logical attitude and effect a complete about-face."  The most characteristic symbol of "sudden enlightenment" is laughter.

From this very quick overview of crazy foolishness - this holy madness -- we can see that practitioners  walk the fine line between transcendence and immanence, between sacredness and darkest profanity.    They flirt with the boundaries of chaos and defy conventionality.  Holy Fools' apparently crazy behavior reveals some of our fears and make us question our fear-driven choices.  And they all seem to have an aversion to clothes.

The religious establishment recognized the critically important function that the Holy Fools played in maintaining the status quo.  This function becomes especially transparent in the medieval Feast of Fools, celebrated by the Christian church.  This annual festivity is first clearly recorded in the latter part of the twelfth century, but it derived from much earlier customs of societal inversion, such as the Roman saturnalia.  These festivities were an occasion in which the work ethic and the severity of social forms were temporarily suspended.  The timing was important - the first Sunday after the austerity of Lent and Easter.  The masses assumed the contrary behavior of the fool or clown.  No establishment figure or convention, however lofty or sacred, was immune to criticism and ridicule.  Even monks, nuns, and some Church notables participated in the frolicking.  Not infrequently, we are told, "the celebrants' gaiety degenerated into unbridled sensuality and mayhem. "

Understandably, the secular and ecclesial powers looked askance at the Feast of Fools.  It was condemned by the Council of Basel in 1431, but no one paid much attention.  In fact, the church failed to suppress the Feast of Fools for many centuries.  Because, I think, even the church - that institution of so much pain and love and confusion - understands that the fools are necessary.  No, it took more than church edicts to finally end this foolishness.  A different, more puritan mood won through in the sixteenth century, and the Feast of Fools could not withstand the age of reformation.  What survived is a pale, secularized version of mayhem - our Mardi Gras, Halloween, and New Year's Eve parties.  

But the idea of Holy Foolishness is making a comeback.  Protestant churches, fueled by Harvey Cox's book "Feast of Fools", are beginning to mark the Sunday after Easter as "Bright Sunday" or "Humor Sunday".   Today is that day.  Which is why you're being encouraged to loosen your grip and be a little goofy.

SO WHAT? (PROPHESEY)

You see, from my vantage point I'm beginning to see UUs as a branch - albeit a clothed branch -- of Holy Fools.  (bowtie)  Have we not been cast out by our congregational forebearers for rattling creedal, dogmatic, and doctrinal cages?  (mustasche)  Did not holy foolishness inform our Transcendentalists?  (Nose) Do we not provide a place where seekers can gather to learn from and walk with other seekers?  Do we not engage in all sorts of counter-cultural activities?  (Hat)  Aren't we misunderstood by others?  Rev. Susanne tells of a phone call she got the other day from someone who was convinced that UUs engage in wife-swapping.  "No", she said a little wistfully. "The UUs only swap books."

Books are certainly one way to conduct a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  But I would like to suggest that our temptation to take ourselves very seriously does not always serve us well.  Consider the myth of the fall of Adam.   Adam and Eve were embarrassed by their nakedness, and displayed absolutely no appreciation for the comic dimensions of their situation.  In contrast, the Hindu god Krishna was known for stealing the clothes of milkmaids bathing in the river, and hanging them in the trees, so they would have to come out of the water naked to retrieve them.  

That story is considered a parable about the human relationship to the Divine - to the Spirit of Life --  which requires the willingness to appear without covering before one's God - however one chooses to express that god.  And if we are afraid to appear naked before what we understand to be God - how much more unwilling are we to appear before each other without the covering of intellect?  Without the robes of rationality?  Without the shirts of sobriety?  The shoes of seriousness?  The coats of conventionality?  The pants of pragmatic reality?  Holy Foolishness offers another way of relating to our world.  Our world that is so rife with placid injustice that the only truly wise response is to cultivate creative maladjustment.  To be more outrageous fool than conformist.   

NOW WHAT? (CALL TO ACTION)

As we've seen, in many different traditions the spiritual teacher - the Holy Fool -- is not really called to fix the world.  Rather, that person is called to be a holy person - a person who sees the world in a certain way and have shapes their lives and a personalities out of that.  People are drawn to these Holy Fools to seek a depth, a vision and a personality that has been really transformed by preparation.  Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, says that "the point of spirituality is not to keep giving out and doing the impossible, but to constantly "be" somebody.  By just being yourself and pursing those things that are of great interest to you, you are changed.  A ‘way of being' can be one of the most useful things we can do."  

It's also one of the hardest.  Adherence to our fourth principle of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning means constant questioning, re-evaluating, and risking transformation.  We can refuse to answer the call to transformation, to foolishness.  We can tighten our grip, dig in our heels, roll up our tubes and squint through them.  We can create an illusion of safety.  We can be comfortable.  But I'm not sure a free and responsible search for truth and meaning is consistent with being safe and comfortable.  I see creative maladjustment as a much more fruitful mindset.

Let me briefly tell you about what kind of fool I am.   I started losing my grip about thirty years ago I was inventorying paper cups in the kitchen of Trinity Presbyterian Church.  I was standing on a step ladder when a profound stillness came into the room.  I stopped what I was doing and heard - no, really felt - a presence that indicated this was where I was supposed to be.   My world shifted on its axis.  I had clearly been given my marching orders, and they involved being in a kitchen.  Or so I thought.  And because I had no desire to spend my life in a church kitchen I figured I had gotten it wrong.  My UU brain couldn't take it in.   So I spent the next 30 years on the periphery of churches and kitchens wondering why I never felt quite right.  Then, through a series of events that I could've seen as slapstick comedy had I not been so intent on being learned and serious, I found myself on track to get to where I'm standing today.  

Am I comfortable in this free and responsible search for truth and meaning?  Are you kidding?  I'm 63 years old.  The journey I envisioned had more to do with cruises to exotic places, buffets, and cocktails.   What kind of foolish retirement is this?  My sweet husband says he feels like he's one of the people in the circus parade in front of the clowns but behind the elephant.  With the broom and shovel.  Nonetheless, in those 30 years along the parade route I saw such examples of love and foolishness that I had to keep on laughing and dancing.  Of course, the parade also involved a lot of crying and stumbling.  But that's what search is.  Blessed be the search.

Every moment of our lives is held in tension and we get to chose whether we commit ourselves to the inevitable or the unforeseeable.  I am inviting you to choose the unforeseeable.  I am asking you to leave room for the mysterious, the unexplicable, the paradoxical.  I'm asking you to embrace the comic.  Laughter is carbonated holiness and our last defense against hopelessness.  In short, I am asking you to consider inviting the Fool to join you on your search for truth and meaning.  The Holy Fool will help you lose your fear of being mocked or scorned or worst of all, ignored.  When we lose our fear, we are free - free -- to laugh at evil and engage in our own unique foolishness.   May it be so.  Amen.