HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish Church in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 19th, 20008


OPENING WORDS:
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” --G K Chesterton


All my life, ever since I was a little boy and for as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by maps. I’m not sure how or why I became so fascinated, but I suspect it had something to do with the large, free-standing globe next to my grandfather’s chair in the front room of their modest Seattle bungalow, and the hundreds of National Geographic magazines that were carefully shelved in chronological order behind it. A good map is an amazing thing (and even bad ones have their uses). They can take us anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye. They can take us back in history to show us how other people lived their lives in times before us; or into the future, say, to predict the outcome of an upcoming election. Electronic maps like Mapquest or Google Earth can give us turn-by-turn driving directions to any location in the database, or show us satellite photographs of virtually any location in the world, in what seems like real-time. Maps can even take us to other worlds: to places like Middle Earth, or Treasure Island, or “over the rainbow” to Oz. It’s no wonder that I should have become so fascinated with them when I was younger, and that this fascination has continued now well into middle age.

Yet those of us who love maps most also quickly discover that “the map is not the territory.” And this is particularly true as we begin to map out the course of our own lives. It’s nice to know the geography of where we’ve been, and the road to where we want to go: which turns to take and how long it’s going to take us to get there traveling at a certain speed over a certain distance. But nothing in real life is ever quite that certain. Perhaps you’re familiar with the old saying: if you want to hear God laugh, tell her your plans. If you actually want to get from where you are now to whatever destination you’ve chosen for yourself, you have to fold up the map, put it in your pocket, get up out of your chair and go. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Our maps can guide us; they can even inspire us, and give us hope and confidence. But the map can’t make the journey for us. We can trace the route with our finger, but we have to walk it with our feet.

Of course, my favorite maps of all are still generally of places where “you can’t get there from here.” These maps are often beautifully illuminated, and contain interesting illustrations and legends around the margins: annotations like Terra Incognita and “Here There Be Dragons” -- the unknown territory where mythical, magical creatures dwell, magnificent creatures who challenge us to explore beyond the same limits of the familiar landscape.

I’ve never seen a real dragon, but I’ve certainly read a lot about them, and seen plenty of pictures of dragons from every corner of the globe. There are some who say that dragons are simply a superstition left over from times when human beings weren’t as knowledgeable as we are today. Others say that they are mythological creatures, who represent metaphorically our collective fear of the unknown, that uncharted territory where no one has ever gone before, and unknown dangers may well await us around every turn.

But I sometimes wonder whether Dragons might just be more real than we think -- and that just because they are figments of our imagination doesn’t necessarily make them any less interesting...or less dangerous.

There are legends about dragons in just about every human culture and society we know of. Perhaps the earliest is the dragon Tiamat from the Babylonian Creation Epic the Eunuma Elish, who was slain by the culture hero Marduk and then reshaped to form the world we know today. Or from the other side of the world, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and turquoise “fire serpent” Xiuhcoatl of the Aztecs.

A little closer to home (at least culturally), we have the Draca Wyrm (who both slew and was slain by Beowulf), and Fafnir the evil and avaricious dwarf turned dragon through his own acquisitive greed, slain first by Sigurd in the Volsung Saga, and then twice later on by Siegfried in “Das Nibelungenlied” and “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” Not to mention the unnamed dragon slain by Saint George on his way home from the Crusades, and of course many, many others of both legend and literature.

Even Satan makes a cameo appearance as a Great Red Dragon in the book of Revelation, (although there are some who would say that he was also a Dragon in the Garden of Eden, before God took away his legs and made him crawl upon his belly in the dust). And the Chinese have more dragons than they know what to do with: creatures virtually identical in physical appearance to the dragons we know here in the West, but with VERY different personalities.

But if dragons really are just “Make Believe,” how do we explain the cultural ubiquity of dragons in societies which until relatively recent times have had very little knowledge of one another? Why would the Babylonians, the Aztecs, the Chinese and those old Norse Vikings all imagine the same flying, fire-breathing, rapacious snake-like predator, whose razor-sharp claws are capable of slicing through human flesh as if it were so much lunch meat, and whose armor-like scales make them all but impervious to most pre-industrial human weaponry?

There have been lots of theories put forward, including challenges to the premise that dragons are really all that cross-culturally ubiquitous in the first place. But one of the most interesting is a hypothesis suggested by anthropologist David E. Jones in his book An Instinct for Dragons, in which he claims that dragons represent a residual, instinctive fear, hardwired into our limbic system, of the principal predators (namely snakes, hawks, and big cats) who fed upon our distant biological ancestors as we were evolving as a species: a fear which goes back not only to before the start of human history, but before the beginning of “humanity” itself.

Combining the wings and talons of an eagle with the claws and teeth of a leopard and the tail of a python, dragons represent and symbolize our subconscious, non-rational, instinctive fear of becoming someone’s lunch -- as well as the essential feelings of helplessness and powerlessness which accompany that precognitive sense of vulnerability and victimization. Dragons represent and symbolize our visceral fear of a malevolent power which is both beyond our control and can strike us down at any time without warning. And thus (at least here in the West) they have come to represent not only great power and great danger, but also great appetite: greed, avarice, the insatiable desire to acquire and hoard more and more, without any real sense of need or limitation.

Here’s a little more dragon lore. It is natural, at least in our culture, for us to associate dragons with fire; they do, after all, breath the stuff, and thus fire can be seen as a perfect metaphorical manifestation of a dragon’s reckless and indiscriminate power to destroy. But in many other cultures, dragons have generally been more closely associated with water, and with the destructive power of the ocean, and of storms. And when we toss in their ability to fly, and their penchant for gold, and gems, and other precious stones and metals, it becomes clear that dragons actually embody all four of the ancient elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. What makes Dragons dangerous is not so much the source of their power as its completely random unpredictability. Dragons are chaos incarnate. They represent not only our fear of the unknown, but of the unknowable -- those elements of our human experience which can neither be predicted nor controlled.

A little earlier this morning I mentioned that Chinese dragons look an awful lot like their European cousins, but they actually have very different personalities. Chinese dragons still symbolize great wealth and great power. But they embody as well a sense of prosperity, abundance, and good fortune. Chinese Dragons can be vain, but they are also wise -- as well as bold, heroic, noble, energetic, decisive, optimistic and intelligent creatures, whose ambitions and appetites are far more sophisticated than those of their European counterparts. In Chinese folklore Dragons are closely associated with the Imperial House, and those born in the Year of the Dragon are thought to enjoy superior health, wealth, and long life. Chinese dragons are still capable of great destruction. But they prefer to use their powers to protect and bless those who honor and respect them....

Here There Be Dragons....

“He was a dragonlord, they say. And you say you’re one. Tell me, what is a dragonlord?...”

“One whom the dragons will speak with,” he said, “that is a dragonlord, or at least that is the center of the matter. It’s not a trick of mastering the dragons, as most people think. Dragons have no masters. The question is always the same, with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? If you can count upon his doing the former, and not doing the latter, why then you’re a dragonlord....”

There will always be unexplored territory around the margins of our lives, where dragons and other imaginary creatures make their homes and frighten us with the threat of the unknown, and ultimately unknowable. The question is not so much whether we will ever master those dangers: Dragons have no masters. The question is whether we can master our own fear of being eaten alive long enough to learn from the wisdom of Dragons, whose avarice and cruelty have made them hunted monsters in the folklore of the West, but whose kindness and generosity have inspired human beings to worship them as deities in the Far East....

Here There Be Dragons....

It helps to have a good map before setting out on any journey. It helps to know your destination, and to be aware of what lies upon your way, and to have a good inventory of the equipment you bring with you. But ultimately, the most important discoveries that await us in our traveling never show up on any map, and it is impossible to prepare for every contingency. So we need to learn how to trust our own inner resources, and to rely upon the help of both neighbors and strangers alike; to find our bearings again when we stray off course, and to read that “inner compass” which keeps us true to our own best selves....

Here There Be Dragons....

Ultimately, the most important place we discover on our journey through life is not a place “out there.” It is rather a place “in here” -- that special place “where our own deep yearning meets the world’s great need,” and our desire for personal achievement, and our ability to be of use, come together in often unexpected and even magical sorts of ways. And then we know, in our heart of hearts, that we have become the kind of people our creator intends for us to be, and that our journey, and our destination, are the same....

READING:

[In her novel The Tombs of Atuan, the second in her award-winning “Earthsea” series, fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin tells the story of the Wizard “Sparrowhawk,” the Archmage of Roke, who travels to the island of Atuan in order to steal the lost half of the broken amulet of Erreth-Akbe from the underground labyrinth there. But his powers fail him, and he becomes a prisoner of the Priestess of the Labyrinth, a teenaged girl known only as Arha or “the Eaten One,” who secretly keeps him alive in defiance of her superiors in order to learn more about the world beyond the walls of the temple, which in fact now imprison them both.]

“Who was Erreth-Akbe?” she said, sly.

He looked up at her. He said nothing, but he grinned a little. Then as if on second thoughts he said, “it’s true you would know little of him here. Nothing beyond his coming to the Kargish lands, perhaps. And how much of that tale do you know?”

“That he lost his sorcerer’s staff and his amulet and his power -- like you,” she answered. He escaped from the High Priest and fled into the west, and dragons killed him. But if he’d come here to the Tombs, there had been no need of dragons.”

“True enough,” said her prisoner.

She wanted no more talk of Erreth-Akbe, sensing a danger in the subject. “He was a dragonlord, they say. And you say you’re one. Tell me, what is a dragonlord?”

Her tone was always jeering, his answers direct and plain, as if he took her questions in good faith.

“One whom the dragons will speak with,” he said, “that is a dragonlord, or at least that is the center of the matter. It’s not a trick of mastering the dragons, as most people think. Dragons have no masters. The question is always the same, with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you? If you can count upon his doing the former, and not doing the latter, why then you’re a dragonlord.”

“Dragons can speak?”

“Surely! In the Eldest Tongue, the language we men learn so hard and use so brokenly, to make our spells of magic and of patterning. No man knows all that language, or a tenth of it. He has not time to learn it. But dragons live a thousand years.... They are worth talking to, as you might guess....”

“TO CROSS THE WIDE, WILD OCEAN”

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Parish in Portland, Maine
Sunday October 12, 2008

****
OPENING WORDS:

I am standing on the sea shore,

A ship sails in the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.

She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her Till at last she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says: “She is gone.”


Gone! Where?

Gone from my sight - that is all.

She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her.

And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.

The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her.


And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone,” there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout: “There she comes”

-- and that is dying. 

An horizon and just the limit of our sight.

Lift us up, Oh Lord, that we may see further. --Bishop Charles Henry Brent 1862 - 1926

************

I know this may come as a surprise to many of you given everything I’ve just read, but I never really cared that much for dogs when I was younger. I always saw myself as more of a cat person. In fact, when I was a teenager, I figured that you could pretty much divide up the entire world according to these two categories. Cat people were graceful and free and independent, while dog people were sort of dull and stupid and noisy. Cat people went on to become artists and poets and musicians and (of course) sailors, while dog people owned “stinkpots,” and became cops and used car salesmen and Junior High School Vice Principals. Cat people liked to do their own thing, and go their own way, and mind their own business; while dog people were always sniffing around (and sticking their noses in where they really didn’t belong), digging things up, barking for attention, slobbering EVERYWHERE, and generally hounding us cat people up a tree.

My father was a dog person. As those of you who have met him may already know, when I was growing up my father worked as a regional sales manager for a large pharmaceutical company; and then later in his career became a sales trainer and process improvement consultant for several different large, multinational corporations. He knew how to sit up and fetch and roll over and shake hands, and qualities like loyalty, discipline, tenacity and obedience were very important to him. I didn't really appreciate that when I was a teenager. I just thought it was rather ridiculous of him to try to get a cat like me to wear a leash like his.

Of course, now that I am older (and have been the parent of two teenaged children of my own), I understand these things a lot better. And my estimation of cats has fallen considerably in that time. They say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but in my experience you can't teach a cat of any age much of anything at all, except maybe when to eat and where to excrete, two things that most dogs learn far more quickly than do human children. The reason that curiosity killed the cat was that the cat was too stupid to get out of harm's way. No dog that I've ever known has managed to get itself stuck up a tree and out on a limb, unable to get down of its own volition!

Dogs are courageous where cats are cowardly; dogs are affectionate where cats are aloof; dogs come when they're called and stay where they're told and only very rarely bite the hand that feeds them. There are some archeologists who estimate that dogs have been part of human society for as long as 25,000 years, and all 400-plus breeds you see today are still members of a single species. A cat may occasionally catch a bothersome rodent and deposit it in your bed where you'll be sure to find it and appreciate it most first thing in the morning; but dogs can be trained to bring you your slippers and your newspaper, to protect your home from intruders, to guide the blind, herd sheep, hunt ducks, and do hundreds of other useful jobs in exchange for their bed and board.

Of course, I'm speaking of dogs in general now; not all dogs live up to the promise of their species. And unlike my good friend and Harvard classmate Gary Kowalski, I'm not quite ready yet to ordain dogs to the ministry, whatever their virtues as spiritual advisors. "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine" saith the Scripture. I don’t know about you, but I just wouldn’t feel comfortable about going for counseling to a therapist who growled, barked, whimpered and whined for a fifty-minute hour, and then licked my face when the session was over. A dog may well be "a man's best friend," but somebody has got to draw the line somewhere!

Actually, my dog, The Adorable Parker, although named for a famous 19th-century Unitarian theologian, possessed very few of the spiritual qualities enumerated by Gary. But compared to her predecessors, Calvin and Luther, she was a saint! Those two “Big Dawgs” certainly had healthy enough appetites, liked to exercise, and got at least eight hours of sleep a day (usually on the couch); but they lived for junk food (pizza was their favorite), and one Christmas they stole a 20 pound turkey out of our kitchen where it was thawing overnight. Of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, dejection, avarice, gluttony, and lust — I knew them to be relatively free only of the last, and that due to a surgical procedure performed by the veterinarian when they were still puppies, and not because of any special piety on their part.

Over the years, my dogs have proven amiable enough companions: loyal, friendly, and reasonably obedient if I'm there to keep an eye on them; but they were hardly saints, and even Parker loved nothing better than to tear through the garbage in search of a tasty tidbit the moment I let her out of my sight.

Martin Luther once wished that he "could only pray the way this dog looks at meat;" while the 17th century English metaphysical poet George Herbert insightfully noted that "He who lies with the dogs, riseth with fleas." Samuel Butler observed that "The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."

Yet perhaps no one learned more about life from dogs than the "dog philosopher" himself, Diogenes of Sinope, the original Cynic, whose philosophy of cynicism takes its name from the Greek word for dog. Diogenes believed that one could obtain spiritual liberation by minimizing one's physical needs and freeing oneself from the foolish pleasures and conventions of society. In this respect, he was very much like Henry David Thoreau, who in his day was sometimes called the “Diogenes of Concord,” and who learned to measure his own wealth by the things he could afford to do without.

But Diogenes went far beyond Thoreau in his effort to achieve self-realization through the rejection of the "artificial" values of human society. He literally lived like a dog in a tub on the outskirts of Corinth, where his acerbic criticism of pretense and vanity soon gained him quite a reputation throughout Greece. It is said that Diogenes was once visited by the Epicurean philosopher Aristippus, who through his skill at flattery had earned himself a comfortable place at the court of Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. Seeing Diogenes preparing a meager meal of lentils, Aristippus told him "if you would only learn to [pay a] compliment, you wouldn't have to live on lentils." "And if you would only learn to live on lentils, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysius," retorted the Cynic.

Alexander the Great likewise sought out Diogenes, and found him sunning himself, just as a dog might, there near his tub on the outskirts of town. When Alexander asked whether there was any way which he, the conqueror of the known world, might serve the philosopher, Diogenes asked him to "Stand out of my sun." But when Alexander's entourage began to ridicule the Cynic, Alexander reportedly silenced them with the comment "If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes."

In yet another story, Alexander comes upon Diogenes examining a heap of human bones. "What are you looking for?" the king inquires. "I am looking for the bones of your father," replies the Cynic, "but I cannot distinguish them from those of his slaves."

Nowadays we think of Cynicism as that attitude which sees the worst in every situation, which questions the sincerity of people's motives, sneers at the hint of goodness or compassion, and assumes that most folks act out of their own narrow self-interest, with little concern for the happiness or well-being of those around them. To the cynic all politicians are liars, all businessmen are crooks, (I hesitate to repeat the things they say about the clergy); and anyone who believes otherwise is a fool, deserving of whatever injustice they may suffer.

Yet dogs, as a rule, are loyal, honest, trusting creatures, eager to please and devoted to a fault, whatever cynical motives we may attribute to them. I can't really blame them for preferring Pizza to Purina or the the living room couch to a crate in the garage; I suspect I'd feel exactly the same way if the choice were left to me. What is truly amazing about dogs is their capacity for near-unconditional love, an instinctive affection for human kind engraved upon their souls by ten thousand years of breeding and training. A dog WANTS to love its owner, more than anything else in the world, and will often do so in defiance of its own best interests.

Calvin came into our household as a death camp survivor, literally rescued from the Midland County Pound seconds before he was scheduled to be euthanized. An AKC registered Weimaraner who had been badly abused by its previous owners, and then abandoned when they moved away, he was a good twenty to thirty pounds underweight when he came to live with us -- his ribs were clearly visible beneath his flesh, and a mere movement of the hand was enough to send him cowering in a corner. He barked all night, he peed in the house, he chewed up everything he could get his teeth on; but his one great fear was the fear of being abandoned again, and once that fear was set at ease, as we fattened him up with scraps from our table and allowed him to sleep on the floor at the foot of our bed, he became as devoted a house pet as anyone could ask for.

Luther had a slightly different story. Luther was what you might call a "puppy of a lesser dog" — a congenitally deaf Dalmatian who somehow managed to turn his head at precisely the moment the veterinarian snapped his fingers, and thus escaped the fate which ordinarily awaits "defective" purebred dogs. It's tempting, I suppose, to feel pity for Luther, living as he did in a silent world all his own. But being deaf wasn’t something that Luther generally lost any sleep over; as far as he was concerned, he was just another dog, who didn’t know or care much about what he might have been missing. And he didn’t miss much, at least not in the way of trouble: he could bark and chew and dig and strew garbage with the best of them. Moreover, sirens, thunderstorms, and Fourth of July firecrackers were no big deal for that hearing-impaired canine; and I swear he could smell the Pizza truck coming up the street long before Calvin heard it pull into our driveway.

Parker was, is, and in many ways shall always be my “forever dog." A “pet-quality” Boston Terrier (although we sometimes refered to her as a Boston Terroist), whose non-standard markings imperfect gait had likewise caused her to be rejected by her original owners, in many ways she represented to us the best of all possible worlds: a cat-sized critter with the heart and personality of a full-sized Canis Lupus Familiaris. For over thirteen years she was my near-constant companion: we slept in the same bed, often ate from the same plate (only after I was FINISHED, of course), and for many years pretty much spent every waking moment together (which sounds a lot more impressive than it was, considering the amount of time she slept). I loved her as a puppy; learned to appreciate her more fully as a fully-grown dog; and in her final days she taught me once again the essential truth of Forrest Church’s definition of religion as ‘our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”

She reminded me as well of Forrest’s more trenchant theological observation (which I have quoted now at practically every Memorial Service I have conducted since I first read it more than a decade ago), that “knowing that we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit on our lives, it also lends a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love. The fact that death is inevitable gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk losing. Love’s power comes in part from the courage required to give ourselves to that which is not ours to keep: spouses, children, parents, dear and cherished friends, [of course, dogs...] even life itself. It also comes from the faith required to sustain that courage, the faith that life, howsoever limited and mysterious, contains at its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is redemptive.”

Proverbs 26:11 reads "Like a dog that returns to his own vomit is the fool that repeats his folly." Yet as unappetizing as it may sound, this is precisely the genius of dogs: their eagerness to please, the tenacity of their love, their willingness to try again and again to do what is asked them in exchange for the smallest token of our affection. The cynics may find this a foolish virtue, but within it, perhaps, lies a lesson for the spirit: a lesson in loyalty, discipline, tenacity and obedience which leads to a larger liberty of the soul, a tolerance for difference and diversity, the courage to devote ourselves to that which is not ours to keep, and a reward of unconditional acceptance that transcends the limits of our understanding, yet still awakens deep within us our own capacity for love.

READING(S)

[I’ve known Gary Kowalski for about 30 years now; he was a classmate of mine at the Harvard Divinity School, and currently serves as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Burlington Vermont. He is without a doubt one of the smartest people I’ve ever known; in fact, I sometimes like to joke that I have only had three good ideas in my lifetime, and that two of them started out as Gary’s. In addition to his work as a Unitarian Universalist minister, Gary has also developed a whole second career as an author and an animal rights activist. Two of his books in particular touch on my topic for today: Goodbye, Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost a Pet is the 7th-best selling book in its catagory at Amazon this week, while his earlier book The Souls of Animals is now in a second edition, and contains a widely-quoted passage about the virtues of dogs as spiritual advisors which has always been a particular favorite of mine. But even before Gary published that book, I’d seen (and saved) an earlier draft of that particular passage from one of his church newsletter columns, and since we have a little extra time today, I thought I’d read them both....]

CLICK HERE TO LINK TO GARY'S BLOG, "REVOLUTIONARY SPIRITS"


from The Souls of Animals by Gary Kowalski

My dog has deep knowledge to impart. He makes friends easily and doesn’t hold a grudge. He enjoys simple pleasures and takes each day as it comes. Like a true Zen master, he eats when he’s hungry and sleeps when he’s tired. He’s not hung up about sex. Best of all, he befriends me with an unconditional love that human beings would do well to emulate.

Chinook does have his failings, of course. He’s afraid of firecrackers and hides in the clothes closet whenever we run the vacuum cleaner, but unlike me he’s not afraid of what other people think of him or anxious about his public image. He barks at the mail carrier and the newsboy, but in contrast with some people I know he never growls at the children or barks at his wife.

So my dog is a sort of guru. When I become too serious and preoccupied, he reminds me of the importance of frolicking and play. When I get too wrapped up in abstractions and ideas, he reminds me of the importance of exercising and caring for my body. On his own canine level, he shows me that it might be possible to live without inner conflicts or neuroses: uncomplicated, genuine, and glad to be alive.

“FROM THE STUDY” by Gary Kowalski

My dog is my therapist and my spiritual advisor. He models healthy values for me. He has a sound appetite, gets plenty of exercise, and sleeps at least eight hours a day. He doesn't drink or smoke. He makes friends easily, doesn't carry a grudge, and has a healthy and uninhibited expression of sexual needs. He doesn't eat junk food. He doesn't worry excessively or hang on to regrets, but pretty much takes each day as it comes. He doesn't know the meaning of life, but he enjoys almost every minute of it.

I believe the essentials required for happiness are not too complicated: nutritious food, fresh air, going for walks, and someone to pat us on the tail when we go to sleep at night. These basics are within the reach of most people. If you're seeking a fulfillment that eludes you consider: contentment may be a bone buried in your own back yard.