1 Rev. Kim K. Crawford Harvie Arlington Street Church 9 December, 2007 Soul of Light Every Jewish holiday is opening day for a new season of spirituality. Author Shimon Apisdorf is speaking. Every holiday is a fresh encounter with a familiar experience, and an opportunity for insight [and] spiritual growth. [Every holiday] calls out to our souls and asks us to lift our eyes, discover the presence of [the holy] in our lives, and strive to become more of who we want to be, and who we can be. The lighting of the first Chanukah candle is opening day for the season of [light]. Chanukah is about two ever-present forces: darkness, and the presence of light, emptiness, and the promise of being filled. It s about the mysterious inspiration that enables us to reach and surpass our imagined limitations. It s about how little things can make a profound difference. It s about the power in a diminutive flame to banish an enormous darkness. 1 And it s about discovering the soul [of light]. Opening day for the season of light: to begin again means letting the past be past. To let go is to say goodbye, and come fully into the present. This sounds quite lovely, or terrifying, and it can be both. It can also mean severing our last connection especially a bad connection with what was; bankrupting the economy of grudge-bearing in our lives. This can happen with a death or, in a different way, with a relationship gone bad, or one that needs to end. To let go means stopping the madness of refusing to accept what is, surrendering hope that circumstances are anything but exactly what they are. The new hope is to make peace with exactly what is: to mourn, to accept, and to move on. 1 Shimon Apisdorf, Chanukah: Eight Nights of Light, Eight Gifts for the Soul, p.15
2 I always remember this wonderful intervention Ram Dass made with a woman who came to see him about her teenage daughter, who had run away to live with her other daughter down south, and forged a check with her sister s name on it, and gotten pregnant she was a mess. Ram Dass said later that it took about fifteen minutes for the woman to tell him the whole story. He listened with a quiet heart of compassion. When she finished, he could see that she was deeply identifying as a martyr, and that he was just another person in a long line who had heard the story. He responded, Right. She must have sensed that he hadn t gotten hooked by the drama; she said, No, you don t understand. And then she started all over again, another fifteen minutes, and he just listened. And when she finished the second go-around, he said again, Right. That time, she heard him. She just stopped, and everything shifted. You know, she said, I was kind of a hellion when I was a kid, too. And then she let it go. 2 Suddenly uncluttered by anger and grief, she revealed a soul of light. In the case of a relationship that needs to end: well, years ago, I read a list of Twenty Risks to Take for Total Happiness. I ve never forgotten it; the very first risk to take for total happiness was a one-word directive: Leave. Whether we are leaver or leave-ee, whether the leaving is literal or metaphorical, the outcome can be the same: peace. In the face of unmitigated failure and irreconcilable differences, the decision to let go can be tremendously empowering. And while it s risky to change horses mid-stream, it s ultimately riskier, still, to continue to drown in the past. 3 To return to our opening day metaphor, you can t steal home with a foot on third. Leaving is a close friend of cleaning out. It can take everything we have to override the powerful instinct to cling. We cling to the stuff that defines us or, more accurately, that defined us when we acquired or created it. We can let go of old ideas, old possessions, old ways of making sense. Making a place in us for the soul of light means something s gotta go. 2 Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, How Can I Help?, p. 115 3 How s this for a filing system?! Pamela Redmond Satran, Twenty Risks to take for Total Happiness, Self magazine, March, 2001, p.198
3 I m thinking of an old Zen story: A visitor comes to the master, seeking enlightenment. The two sit down to tea, and the visitor proceeds to talk. He talks and talks and talks, claiming to seek but making not one moment s space for the master to speak. The master picks up the teapot and begins to pour, only he doesn t stop when the cups are full; he just pours and pours and pours. The tea overflows and runs across the table and onto the floor. Stop! What are you doing?! cries the visitor. The Zen master smiles. A cup must be emptied to be filled. Emptiness is not an attractive image; we don t like its starkness. But there s no room for something new if we haven t cleared out the old. Emptiness can be all about possibilities. To deeply cultivate a soul of light, we will befriend emptiness. And only when we have cleared out the broken can we make room for wholeness. Cleaning out is a close friend of giving it away. Give it away is a tall directive. We want, and what is enough? But only when we clear away the clutter and quiet down the noise in our heads can our hearts speak and the soul of light shine through. That clutter includes busyness. A week ago Saturday, members of our governing board, the Prudential Committee; some of our family members; and I had the very rare opportunity to spend a few hours together doing nothing. For a group that is marked by its sacrificial leadership and indefatigable devotion to the good work of Arlington Street Church, this was an unprecedented event. We sat down and ate breakfast, and we sat down again and ate lunch: real breakfast, not a drive-through breakfast in the car; and not a power lunch or a power bar lunch at our desks, but a delicious lunch, prepared with patience and love. In between, we walked in the icy, sandblasting wind; chatted in front of the fireplace; and played board games. Board games! Many of us had to remember how to play. Did you know that when Monopoly was invented in 1904, there was no space marked GO? The first square of what was then known as The Landlord s Game was called, simply, Mother Earth, indicating, at least symbolically, a point of origin or a place of [sanctuary] and rest. [Thirty years later,] when the game was patented as Monopoly, that space was gone, replaced by a large red arrow and the words GO! Collect $200.00 salary as
4 you pass. That was the same year that the young writer, James Agee, defined the objective of the New American society as motion with the least possible interruption. 4 How can we cultivate a soul of light if we hurtle through life like a moving target? How can we be bearers of light, bringers of light, unless we choose to live from a strong, clear center? I m thinking about the story of the creation of Jack Kerouac s epic On the Road, published fifty years ago. Six years earlier, in 1951, Kerouac pounded out the first draft of On the Road in three weeks on a single, huge roll of paper. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical,. but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter [has in it a kind of] strength. [We might say that] Kerouac wrestled with the tree itself. Jack Kerouac is known for his excesses with pills and sweet wine ultimately, he lost the battle with those demons at 47 years old but On the Road was fueled by nothing stronger than coffee. You may recognize this brief, transcendent passage, one of my favorites from Kerouac s writing; here it is, hot off the scroll, before the raw passion got sucked out of it in one of three revisions: The only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. 5 That kind of energy, insight, joy are gifts of the soul of light. When I first read today s opening passage from Shimon Apisdorf, I began reflecting on how I would welcome Chanukah this year. How might we experience the kindling of the menorah as an opportunity to remember the presence of the holy in our lives, and to be, ourselves, bearers of light? A single image came to me. It was from late this past summer, about a month 4 Clark Strang, Living Simply, Simply Living, New Age Journal, November/December 1999, p. 88 5 This sentence is exactly as Jack Kerouac wrote it: spelling and punctuation, though not spacing. The quotations are from Luc Sante, On the Road Again, New York Times, 8/19/07
5 after our own Carmen Griggs almost died from treatment meant to cure breast cancer, and two months before she faced her final surgery, which, thanks be to g*d, is all behind her now. At that time of her early recovery, though, she was still in the belly of the beast: bald as a baby, and still measuring her steps and her breathing, but radiant with the will to live, and live well. And from that fragile, precarious place, she said, No complaints. You know, I really have a wonderful life. That, my spiritual companions, is the soul of light. That is a profound engagement with this present moment, mad courage, and great love. As we kindle the lights of Chanukah, I commend us to the power in a diminutive flame to banish an enormous darkness, 6 to an emptiness that promises to fill, and to the spiritual practice of making of ourselves bearers of light. In this season of making light in the darkness, may each of us shine, shine, shine from a soul of light. 6 Apisdorf, op cit, p. 15