From Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words my groaning: O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer: and by night, but find no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.

When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer, for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.

*Hymn Spirit of Life SLT No. 123

Dear Friends,

I assume some of you have had a stressful week. I know I have. The particulars are not important. "You want me to name the specific sorrows?" the poet Maggie Anderson asks. "They do not matter. You have your own." All of us struggle at times swimming a narrow, swift river in a moonlit darkness. All of us, I would guess, lie there awake worrying, trying to figure things out. We may complain aloud to God or whatever name we may use for the Creator, "Why have you forsaken me?" And we ask ourselves where can we find the strength to continue swimming in the narrow, swift river? And how do we find our way to a safe landing? Sometimes we may even ask if what we're suffering is some kind of divine punishment. Or if there's a God who will help us out of our misery.

The Hebrew Scriptures are full of such expressions of lament - in the books of Psalms, Lamentations, Jeremiah and Isaiah. The Book of Job is about a man who is given an unimaginable burden of loss and grief as a test of his faith. In a speech of many pages, he complains bitterly to his friends about God's injustice.

We give our suffering many names: anxiety, stress, bewilderment, sadness, depression and grief... because there are many different forms and many different degrees. But at the heart of it, finding one's way out of the dark is a most difficult task. We seek a comforting hand and a guiding light. We seek a connection to something greater than ourselves to help us. By thinking or speaking out loud to someone or something else, we may discover an answer within ourselves. As William Shakespeare wrote, "Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break."

The answer may be in the very darkness where we sit or lie. Dark is not just an age-old symbol of fear or sadness, but darkness also, a symbol of places of nurture and renewal, like the womb or the earth. By turning inward and by being attuned to our thoughts and feelings in the darkness, we may find a source of strength and a sense of direction. How often do our problems seem to be resolved in dreams?

Do you know the TV ad about that sleep aid? You know, the one where the man is sitting at the kitchen table talking to his dream characters -an astronaut apparently cooking breakfast at the stove, a large, talking beaver eating a plate of fish with a fork and Abraham Lincoln sitting at a chess board. The man says, "I haven't slept a wink!" and Honest Abe says, "We know. Your dreams have been waiting for you."

This ad always makes me smile. To me, it's about more than a sleep aid. It's about the importance of getting in touch with the unconscious parts of ourselves, the very core of our being. This may be the creative, playful part which likes a good chess game. It may be even be that part which leads us to inspiration and a new direction.

The mystics and spiritual guides tell us this part of our inner being is not only accessible through dreams, but through spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer. It's when we pause and withdraw into the dark places that we find our greatest strength, our inner power, and miraculously, a connection to the power of the Universe.

Meditation and prayer are more focused and intentional than mere relaxation or amusing distractions. And I know that giving ourselves time to relax, to just breathe is necessary, too. We all need to pause, to get away from stress and put things in perspective. I don't discount that at all. It's essential for everyone's well-being.

But what I'm talking about is getting in touch with a deeper life force. Some call this life force within us the God or Goddess incarnate. Some call it part of the creative and creating energy of the universe. Whatever name you may give it, it can give you the strength, as your heart labors, to swim the narrow, swift river. It can give you the power to unlock the voice chained in your throat ... to give sorrow words.

Some of you may know the name Starhawk. She's the Unitarian Universalist social activist, pagan priestess and author who greatly influenced the beginnings of feminist spirituality. Her influential book, Dreaming the Dark, was first published in 1982. In it, Starhawk writes about finding the power-from-within. This is akin to the life force in a seed or a growing child. It's life seeking to fulfill itself. She contrasts this power-from-within to power-over or the power to dominate others. The latter can lead, and often does lead, to physical violence and the annihilation of life. "For power over is, ultimately the power of the gun and the bomb, the power of annihilation that backs up all the institutions of domination." (p. 3)

The power of annihilation is the logical outcome of a patriarchal society carried to its extreme ... where God is the King, the male ruler in Heaven and men alone, not women, are made in God's image and meant to rule on Earth. It is based on the artificial separation of body, mind and spirit. It means the denigration of the more traditional feminine roles of nurturing and healing, possessed by both men and women alike. This, in short, is a definition of power-over.

Now the power-from-within is a very different kind of power. Starhawk says it's "the power we sense in a seed, in the growth of a child, the power we feel writing, weaving, working, creating, making choices, [which] has nothing to do with threats of annihilation."

How common, how ordinary that sounds! And how available to anyone who can lift a pencil or a paintbrush, to anyone who can speak or sing, or nurture and teach a child. How available is this power to anyone who is free to make choices at all! Although we may not feel it, all of us here this morning have a power-from-within. It's just a matter of discovering and tapping into that source, that wonderful life-giving source which elevates our self-esteem and our sense of empowerment. It is the source which spurs us to joyous creativity and to love. It is the Spirit of Life which sings in our hearts "all the stirrings of compassion."

Religions around the world have given many names to the concept of the power-from-within. Some people, like the Quakers, call that it the Inner Light or the Divine Spark. Starhawk thinks that none of these names are entirely satisfying. She writes, "It can be called spirit - but that name implies that it is separate from matter, and that false split... is the foundation of the institutions of domination. It could be called God - but the God of patriarchal religions has been the ultimate source and repository of power-over. I have called it immanence, a term that is truthful but somewhat cold and intellectual. And I have called it Goddess, because the ancient images, symbols, and myths of the Goddess as birth-giver, weaver, earth and growing plant, wind and ocean, flame, web, moon and milk, all speak to me of the powers of connectedness, sustenance, healing, creating."

Starhawk admits the name Goddess makes some people uncomfortable. Either they are against the worship of any external being or they are uncomfortable because Goddess "smacks of Paganism, of blood, darkness, and sexuality, of lower powers...Yet power-from-within is the power of the low, the dark, the earth; the power that arises from our blood, and our lives, and our passionate desire for each other's living flesh."

I say that this dark, earthy power is something to embrace. It is not evil or sinful, it is merely human. It is within each of us. It can empower us to stand up for what we believe in. To stand up for ourselves, our family and friends, for a more equal and just society or for saving the environment from human greed and exploitation.

What if searching for the power-from-within alone in the dark... or the sunlight...isn't enough? What if somebody has a real problem that meditation or prayers to God, the goddess or the Spirit of Life can't fix? What if they are really depressed or seem to be suffering for more than a few days or a couple of weeks? You may think, "Rev. Rachel sounds a bit like some of those fundamentalist, bible thumping preachers who say that mental illness is the work of the devil, insist prayer is the only answer, and reject modern science".

To the contrary, I think that psychology has made many important discoveries over the decades about how our brains work. I would recommend psychotherapy for anyone who is suffering from depression, anxiety or other disabling conditions. I've been there myself. No one should suffer unnecessarily. No one should live without a sense of self-worth, without joy, without a sense of purpose.

You may want to start by reading a good self-help book like Depression for Dummies or Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies written by clinical psychologists Laura Smith and Charles Elliot. I'm really not kidding! I just read the first book and think it's a great resource for laypeople or... as they say "for the rest of us!"

Maybe reading a self-help book is not your thing. I recommend joining a support group or self-help group to talk aloud about ones sorrows... as Shakespeare said, "to give sorrow words" to a sympathetic listening ear. It's amazing what can happen when you find out your problems are not so unique! I remember when, right after I graduated from college, I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group in Cambridge called Bread and Roses. Our small group of women would met monthly. We sat in a circle in someone's apartment and talked about our common experience as women facing sexism in our personal and professional lives. We named our problems and I knew that I wasn't suffering alone. It made a huge impact on my life!

The fields of psychotherapy and clinical psychology, the self-help movement and spiritual practices are all complementary. They can work together, enriching each other. I think having a spiritual practice or being part of a religious community can help us answer the Big Questions... life's purpose and meaning... in a way that these other approaches may not. Yet undoubtedly the affects of spiritual practice and mind/body medicine overlap. The human brain is a mysterious thing. I find it fascinating that a heart doctor at Beth Israel Hospital and Harvard University, Dr. Herbert Benson, has studied the beneficial affects of deep meditation in Buddhist monks. He found how meditation reduces stress by affecting brain waves. The benefits are just amazing and now the practice of meditation is widely recommended by health care professionals.

Just an observation about this season: We know when days are shorter and we live in increasing darkness, many people suffer feelings of depression or Seasonal Affective Disorder. To fight this depression, we may do many things to increase our exposure to sunlight. But what would you call walking at noontime in a sparkling snowy wood? Is that a kind of psychotherapy or a spiritual practice? It's hard to say, really, but I would say that it's both! Or better yet, it's good for all-round physical, emotional and spiritual conditioning.

How about the effects of bringing light into the darkness? Of hanging strings of light on a tree or lighting candles, lots of candles, in the darkness of a cold winter evening? Is that a spiritual practice? Yes, but perhaps a kind of emotional therapy as well. What about staring at a burning log in a fireplace? It has a calming effect, and may even make us more cheerful. It may evoke a sense of mystery as we are lost in the colors and dance of the flames and the power of the fire as it consumes the logs. Is that "therapy" or a spiritual practice. It's sometimes hard, I think, to separate the two.

I'd like to offer you , to anyone who lies awake at night dwelling on the stresses of life, a closing poem called A Theology for the Night by Nancy Shaffer.

Not God as unmoved mover:
One who set the earth in motion
and withdrew. Not the One to thank
when those cherished do not die -
For providence includes equally
power to harm. Not a God of exactings,
as if love could be earned or subtracted.

But - this may work in the night:
Something that breathes with us, as others
sleep: something that breathes also
those sleeping, so no one is alone.
Something that is the beginning of love,
and also each part of how love is completed.
Something so large, wherever we are,
we are not separate, which teaches again
the way to start over.

Night is the test, when grief lies uncovered,
And longing shows clear, when nothing we do
Can hasten earth's turning or delay it.

This may be adequate for the night
this holding: something that steadfastly breathes us,
which we also are learning to breathe.

Remember my friends, that we are not separate, but related to each other from our beginnings here on earth.
Remember, too, that each of us is a part of this great, indescribable Something
which steadfastly breathes with us,
which supports us and teaches us again the way to start over.

Amen. And blessed be.

Laura L. Smith, PhD & Charles H. Elliott, PhD. Depression for Dummies. (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Co., 2003)

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark; Magic, Sex and Politics, New Edition. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988)