Love Till You ve Loved it Away

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1 White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church Love Till You ve Loved it Away The Reverend Victoria Safford Sunday, May 24, 2015 White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church 328 Maple Street Mahtomedi, Minnesota

2 2 FIRST READING from Annie Dillard Once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from a air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful, airborne bones? We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience even of silence by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn t attack anything; a weasel lives as he s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles. SECOND READING from Isabel Allende I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year and I took care of her at home, until she died in my arms in December of Paralyzed and silent in her bed, my daughter Paula taught me a lesson that is now my mantra: You only have what you give The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. Because of Paula, I don't cling to anything anymore. Now I like to give much more than to receive. I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly I don't know if they even like me. But who cares?

3 Loving them is my joy. Give, give, give what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine. It is in giving that I feel the spirit of my daughter inside me, like a soft presence. 3 Love Till You ve Love It Away There s a poem by Stephen Spender, an English poet, that s sometimes read at Memorial Day although it has nothing specifically to do with fallen soldiers or with war. It is about courage, and valor and honor, and laying down your life, and remembering people who do, but he s talking about people who do that all the time, and quietly, with no trumpets or fanfare or medals or flags - the kind of courage that every day demands of every person, and what a miracle it is that people rise to the occasion of kindness, of decency. He s talking about the nobility of ordinary days - how you show up, how you choose to show up again and again, as a human being worthy of that name, faithful to your core. I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. It s what we say to babies here, in their dedication: go forth singing your heart s own song. What is precious, is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

4 4 Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire s centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour. There are no daring deeds described here, no battles won or lost. The truly great ones in this poem are all the people, any people, who remember the soul s history, and stay true to it - the ones who don t forget that we come from primordial light, from mystery and starlight. For some of us that light is love, the love of God, and we bear sparks of divinity within us. Others name it differently: for some of us, there s miracle enough in knowing that the elements of breath and blood and bone were present when the cosmos first exploded, that our very bodies are part of an ancient astronomy. Either way, however way you speak of that first light, to that light we ll return, each one of us, and pretty soon so why not shine like stars? Why not stay true every day to our fiery origins? The poem is about people who live bright and large, even in small ways. He s talking about passion here and bravery, living life as if it were a great, wild ride, with nothing to lose in the end - which in fact is exactly what it is). In the end, we have nothing to lose. This is about how with glad or shaking hands we hold the cards we re dealt, whatever they are, and how we answer luck (bad luck, good luck) and loss, glory days and all the other days, with deliberate dignity and grace, and how the greatest spiritual work that we will ever do is to turn that grace to gratitude and gratitude to generosity of spirit: how we shine like the sun, choose to shine like the sun in response to the sun, how we choose to answer every blessing which (in Luke s words) none of us has earned and all of us deserve. How you choose to answer disappointment, also. How you show up, how you ve chosen to show up, as a person in this world.

5 5 Pay attention and let go, says the Buddha. Hold on, with heart, mind, soul and strength and let go. Annie Dillard writes of a weasel attacked by an eagle, how it twisted round and sank its teeth into the throat of the bird and held on until nothing remained of it. It would be well and proper, and obedient and pure, she says, to grasp your one necessity [ your calling, your passion, your life -] and not let it go, to dangle from it limp, wherever it takes you till your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over the fields. Hold on with all your heart, tenaciously and fiercely, to love and life and love of life (to these more than specific desire), and let go, with all your heart, with grace: let go resentment, bitterness, control. Isabel Allende, the novelist, lost what was most precious to her, her own daughter, and emerged, in time, from the lifeless desert, from the longest night, the wilderness, despair, saying, I don t cling to anything anymore, but love... She sinks her teeth deep into love. It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world, with the divine and with the memory of her child. Let go, hold on, live high, as our youth group sang to us, and danced for us, in March. We can live, says Annie Dillard, any way we want. I believe that that s true even in those moments when I most feel that it s not moments of discouragement, moments of confusion, anxiety, self-doubt or grief, when nothing seems viable or doable or right: still I do believe we can live any way we want. That s not a material claim, obviously: it s more about the soul. It is possible to be true to your truest self even in unexpected circumstances (which so many circumstances are) and even then become who you are called to be, the person you intend to be. Even if you can t have anything you want, still you can intend to be a certain way, to practice ways of shining. Paul Gruchow was a Minnesota essayist and naturalist who, like Annie Dillard, wrote lyrically about nature and human nature; critics compared him often to Thoreau. He could not, in fact, live any way he wanted. He lived with mental illness, a crushing depression that sank its teeth into every aspect of his being and would not let him go. He took his own life in And yet and still, whether he was writing about the miracle of snow or spring or bison, or about the Boundary Waters, the preservation of vast wilderness, or about the boundless wild chaos inside his own head, Gruchow wrote powerfully and honestly, empirically and generously, about brokenness and beauty, about alienation and belonging, about faith and loss of faith. His gift was the art of noticing and naming things precisely, and he held to that: he grasped his one necessity, his calling, his passion, and spent out his life in devotion, until he just couldn t do it any longer. In a memoir

6 published after his death, three poems are included among pieces of prose, each of them called Prayer. They read almost like psalms, hymns of the spirit: What can one say of depression but that it bears the indelible mark of humanity? Does the mountain brood? Is the river downcast? Does the oak tree weep? Do the ants curse their fate? Do the fishes of the sea shudder and moan? Do the grasses of the plains slouch in their places? No, it is we humans who are cast down and rise again from our travails. You, my Lord, have given to us the sorrows and sighs of the world. Who am I, oh Lord, to deny your gift? I think that even if your theological vocabulary is not the same as his, you can still grasp the sentiment: this is my circumstance, undeniable, and undeniably human. What am I to do? How can I be myself? In the second one he writes: Forgive me, Lord. I thought you owed me a lifetime of laughter I thought you owed me protection from pain. I thought you owed me freedom from sin. I thought you owed me pity. But you gave me the seas and the stars. You gave me thunderstorms and hail. You gave me the cleansing rain of tears. You gave me sleep. You gave me the dawn. You gave me imperfection and absolved me of it. You gave me life. Forgive me Lord for receiving your gifts with closed eyes and a hard heart. Open my eyes and soften my heart, O Lord. Grant me the vulnerability of grace He held fiercely to the evidence, and he held fast, nonetheless, to tenderness, humility and reverence. These are orientations of the spirit, but they are not inherent, not instinctive, in us.. A person chooses to be reverent, to be tender, to be humble. Even in adversity, we can choose what we are called to be. We hold to 6

7 some intention, some promise that we make, perhaps to God but really to ourselves about ourselves. In the final Prayer, Paul Gruchow says You have lent to me, Lord, this desk, these clothes, this cup of coffee, this house, this day, this life, this bountiful world, this vast universe. In exchange, you have asked only that I use them well. This sadness, this screaming, this emptiness, this loss, they are also yours, Lord, and they are also gifts. Let me receive them with a grateful heart. Help me [help me, help me] to use [all of your gifts] well. Let go, said the Buddha, and hold fast. How do you stay true? How do you become the mother who says after unspeakable sorrow: I only have what I give away. Because of Paula, I don t cling to anything anymore. I cling to love, and give it all away. On a Wednesday night two weeks ago, twelve 9 th graders stood in an arc here, and before each child stood his or her parents, their faces just a few inches apart, very intimate, a little awkward. This was a small ritual within the Coming of Age ceremony for these beautiful young people. They stood like that for several minutes an eternity of minutes. Imagine: to be those parents gazing into the faces of these fragile saplings, these wild colts. It s a rare privilege now because they re never still, and they are coming fully into their individuation, into their authority and their privacy, and they re not ours to gaze on anymore as they were when they were babies. For this one moment the parents could feast their eyes and hearts, press the image on their minds like a flower in a book. Imagine these young people, receiving that gaze, all that love and wonder. In the ritual we said, You are beloved of God, but what mattered much, much more were the words each parent whispered aloud to their child, when Jill Schwendeman, our Youth Director, invited them to speak a blessing. It was a lovely thing, a sacred thing. It didn t take long, but it seemed like time out of time. Coming of Age is unlike all other rites of passage. The welcoming of babies in a dedication or a christening, the celebration of a marriage, the marking of a death in a memorial or funeral - all these events take place once and for all, but coming of age, aging up, is continuous. The process of coming into yourself, into your clarity, your character, living into yourself, living out of your integrity, is ever ongoing. 7

8 Our Coming of Age ceremony is in some ways like the rite of confirmation in the Christian church, or a bar or bat mitzvah in Judaism, so many other traditions: it is a chronological threshold from little kid to less-little. But it was so clear the other night that what those parents and the rest of us were speaking with our silence and our words, our shameless tears, was a blessing for the journey, less like crossing a bridge and more like floating down a river. We welcomed new traveling companions old enough now to begin to understand that we re always coming up; we re always discerning our calling and trying to answer; we re always deciding what s wrong and what s right and trying to be good by trying to do good on purpose, instead of doing harm or doing nothing (which sometimes are the same). We re trying all our lives to define what s true and beautiful, and cleave toward that, like the weasel in the reading, who cleaves by will and instinct to the eagle. We learn and grow, stumble and fall, rise and shine like stars, like comets, we fail each other and ourselves with regular precision, and we recover and revive, resurrect the spirit, recuperate and reimagine, reconsider what matters and what doesn t, deciding not once but over and over what it means to be mortal, to be kind and brave, to be our own true selves among other true selves, utterly dependent and hopefully dependable. We decide what it means, what it takes, what it costs, to grow a soul and serve this world, with mind, heart, soul and strength, to live this life till we ve loved it away. All the while, we travel on, beset by storms within and storms without, epiphanies within and glories all around. All the while, our moral compass and our spiritual GPS are recalculating, as we try to make our way. We re trying to be faithful, trying to be truly great. When was your Coming of Age? Were you 13 or 14 or 16 years old, in a stiff suit or a white dress at the Cathedral, or standing on the bima in the synagogue, reciting from the Torah? Was it when you left home, or graduated, or enlisted or got your first job or got fired? Or was it when you got sober which any addict or alcoholic will tell you is not the day you stopped drinking or whatever it was. That was one day, and every day after is coming of age, coming into your beauty and terror and power. Was it after a loss that split open your heart, or the day sometime later when you knew you d go on, transformed forever by sadness, but willing to say yes again to life? When was your most recent coming of age? Was it an act of forgiveness you bestowed or received, the bravest thing so far you ve ever done? Or your service in war, or work with the poor, some huge, transformative risk, or coming out, or having a child, or making something, a decision or a painting, or resting after 8

9 trauma, giving thanks again for life? Was it the moment when you finally acquiesced to your own mortality or finitude, or a moment just this morning, simply noticing the lavish spring the rain, the green, the cold, the sun, and giving thanks because that s what grown-up people do, that s courtesy, when you re given a gift completely deserved and completely unearned? That s what grown-ups do and we re learning all the time. Some years ago, a different group of 9 th graders in a Coming of Age class cornered me. They were chafing at the final assignment of their year, to write a credo, a statement of belief, and then share part of it aloud in a special celebration. Their complaint was justified: they said, No one else in this church ever has to do this, so why us? Why now? I thought about that all summer, and some time later made draft which I ve been revising ever since: I believe that whatever else the human purpose may be, that part of it is to notice and to love this universe, to notice and respond with heart and mind and soul and all our sense to the beauty and order of al these living and inanimate things. I believe that those same traits which enable us to love and to notice, those great gifts which distinguish us from other animals, namely, reason, will and passion, may also lead to our destruction. I believe that compassion, reverence and humility are therefore necessary disciplines, survival strategies we have to learn. I believe that no creator fashioned this cosmos, and that we cannot know most things. Mystery and ignorance are the rule of life. I believe that the only model or clue available to us is the model of creation itself. What we know, empirically, is the gorgeous creativity of the unfolding universe and especially the earth. When we have doubts about our calling, it might be wise simply to imitate the creative impulse of the cosmos, to join with it, to act like stars which live and shine for no other purpose than to explode and die, contributing their energy to some larger, timeless process. I believe that risk unto death matters. That the creative impulse matters, thus art, and childbearing and teaching and mercy and justice these all matter. 9

10 10 I believe that the suffering and death of living things is part of a grand and natural cycle, tragic only because we are so aware of mortality and time. Death is not a part of happiness at all, but it makes clear the urgency of joy. I wrote this sitting on a rock by a lake in the woods up north in the Boundary Waters, where weighty questions about God and truth and death and what our lives are for seem a lot less complicated. We are here to shine like stars, to love our lives away. It s not that we re always changing; it s that we become more and more deeply, more clearly, ourselves. Who we are and who we re called to be are points on a continuum, bends in the same river. Hold onto who you are and who you mean to be. Let fly all else, in gratitude, with grace. When our Coming of Age kids are a little older, seniors in high school on the edge of leaving us, sometimes on their final Sunday we offer them these lines from Emily Dickinson, wisdom suitable for any age: Faithful be to thyself, and mystery- All the rest is perjury.

Everyone Worships Something Rev. Ken Read-Brown First Parish in Hingham (Old Ship Church) May 28, 2017

Everyone Worships Something Rev. Ken Read-Brown First Parish in Hingham (Old Ship Church) May 28, 2017 Reading The Truly Great by Stephen Spender Sermon I think continually of those who were truly great.