The Inner Life Sits at Home: A Sermon for All Souls Day
Written by Jenny M. Rankin Sunday, 01 November 2009 00:00
(We give thanks for the candles lit, the names said, the lives remembered.)
The life of faith has many facets.
Last week we celebrated the active dimension,
Jericho Road, social justice
The going out into the world to make a difference.
Today we lift up another dimension
Equally important and perhaps less well understood
It is the contemplative strand of our tradition, the inner life,
The life of the soul if you will.
November 1 is All Saints Day, November 2 is All Souls Day.
All Souls day is a day for the Universalists among us.
The Universalists who came to say in the face of the Calvinist notion of the “elect,” the “spiritually superior”
(that some were saved and not others)
The Universalists who came to say that actually, no, all souls are saved.
There was no picking and choosing, no “some get in this club and some don’t.”
These preachers who were not educated at Harvard like their Unitarian counterparts but who were out there on the farms and in the fields
In the small villages, rural places in Maine and New Hampshire
They spoke from the heart about their religion with a fervor and simplicity
Their idea was not a damning kind of God, but rather a God of Love
A Great Love that would, in the end, gather all souls unto itself for eternity
So this is a day we light candles to remember
And we lift up the life of the soul
And think about where in our lives there might be a place for that.
The great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said that Life is just a chance to grow a soul. But how do we do that?
* * * * *
If you are confused about exactly what the soul is
Join the club
Theologians have been debating it for hundreds of years
If you are a humanist and think a word like “soul” goes with a theistic tradition, remember the ancient Greeks, Aristotle and Plato,
remember the Buddhists
I like what Emerson says.
“We live on different planes or platforms.
There is an external life
Which is educated at school
Taught to read, write, cipher and trade
Taught to grasp all the boy can get
Urging him to put himself forward
To make himself useful and agreeable in the world
To write, run, argue and contend
Unfold his talents,
Shine, conquer and possess.”“But the inner life sits at home
And does not learn to do things
Nor value these feats at all
‘Tis a quiet wise perception . . . . .”“We have grown to manhood and womanhood
We have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions
This (inner life) makes no account of them all“This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul
Is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrateIt lies in the sun and broods on the world.”
What an image Emerson paints.
This is the inner life
It sits at home.
It does nothing.
The tranquil, wide-seeing soul.
It lies in the sun and looks out at the world.
Sometimes I wonder just how our souls are able to live
We seem to give them so little attention
We instruct ourselves about so many things:
health, nutrition, exercise, money, parenting, relationships
We try to pay attention to these facets of our lives
But what about the soul?
Someone asked me this week
“How do you listen to your soul”
I stuttered and stumbled and finally just got quiet.
I think of the days and how they fill up
Meetings, appointments, groceries to get, bills to pay
the round of daily living goes on.
there is so much that tugs on us, pulling us outward, away
there is so much news of the world that floods in on us
How do we make a place for the soul in all of this, I wonder
How do we guard and protect this time
These precious margins on the edges of our lives
What Emerson describes
That quiet, that sitting in the sun, that doing nothing
I was sitting on Friday at a conference on the Holocaust
And on a young Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp
Who made the decision to leave his comfortable life in Wellesley
To go to Europe and help refugees
I listened as a room full of scholars, teachers, archivists, social scientists debated where he got the motivation to go
To make this momentous decision
And then a quiet almost fragile looking woman rose to her feet
A Unitarian universalist I knew from years ago
He was a minister she gently reminded the room
It was “the disposition of his soul” she said
That’s what lay at the heart of his action.
His ability to connect with some mystery beyond himself
And she worried about our children today and do they get the quiet time to develop this connection, this soul strength.
So This is the contemplative tradition
This is spiritual practise
The way of the Buddhists in meditation
The way of the Christians in centering prayer
The way of the Hindus in building a home altar
And the way of simply being human.
“Today,” writes Tom Hennen,
“there is the kind of sunshine old men love,
the kind of day when my grandfather would sit
on the south side of the wooden corncrib
where the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day like a wood stove…
They sat there together, grandson and grandfather
Sheep came to them, the oily wool warm to the touch
The cornstalks glinted
The dry leaves fell
They sat
The grandfather whittled a sweet-smelling apple stick.
“he let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep,
While his own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.”
This grandfather knew something about taking time for the soul, I think.
He knew something of silence
Something of just sitting
Something of listening to the wind and not doing much of anything
Except patting a sheep or carving a stick
By the world’s standards
The grandfather was doing very little
But we know
How he was teaching his grandson with every bone of his body
“His own silence taught me every secret thing he knew”
What would our silence tell us if we would stop and listen
What secret thing could my soul tell me
What secret thing could your soul tell you
* * * * *
It is All Souls Day
We lift up the life of the soul
We light candles
And we remember people we love who have died
* * * *
And now, I am thinking of those candles we lit a few minutes ago
The feeling in the room,
I’m thinking how rare it is in this culture to get an opportunity to grieve
How few rituals we have to help us navigate this territory
Forrest Church, who died last month, Unitarian Universalist minister in New York for many years,
said he liked celebrating All Souls Day in church because of just this.
“Any opportunity that reminds us that we are only alive because one day we will die is one that we should seize,” he wrote.
“I don’t mean to be macabre,” he went on, “but death is the hinge on which life turns. . . . ..
We couldn’t be alive unless we some day die. I know that seems strange.
But those of you who have given me
the privilege of sharing with you your pain
when a loved one died,
(you) know that I believe
that death and grief are sacraments
as much as birth and love are.
We cannot die unless we’ve lived.
And we cannot grieve unless we’ve loved. . . . . .
we purchase grief and death as painful, yet modest payments,
for the gift of life and love.”
I read Forrest’s words and thought of a graveside service I did last week.
It was for a family I didn’t know,
a family who had been connected to this church once upon a time but had moved away and were coming back to Concord to bury their mother
She had died after a year of living with cancer.
She was 75 but in a family where people lived to be well into their 90s,
this was a life cut short, too short.
There were grandchildren still left to raise and she had wanted to be part of their raising.
So there was real sadness at this grave,
Real grief etched there on her brother’s face
Etched there, in her daughters’ eyes.
There was no memorial service. This was it. This little cluster of people next to the grave there in the flat of the land of Sleepy Hollow near Author’s Ridge
This was it
And so I knew, in the face of that sadness and in the face of there being no other service, that it was doubly important, the readings we had, the words I chose, how it all went.
It is always doubly important, of course,
This moment there at the graveside
This moment that happens once in a life time for us as we pause to make that solemn ceremony, that once in a life time transaction, putting into the earth the body or the ashes of someone we loved.
It matters.
I tried to pick my words carefully
that it isn’t the words that matter.
That everything we needed was already present at this grave.
For you see the family had brought their love
their love for their mother, their sister, their grandmother.
They had brought their love
And their love consecrated the ground and made it holy.
And so there it was,
Standing there on a chilly fall day
on the flat of the land at Sleepy Hollow
With great trees around me flaming up, golden and crimson,
Like pillars of fire going up to the sky
There it was, great love and great grief
Right there, side by side
And they blessed that moment for us
They hallowed that ground
“We purchase death and grief as modest payments, Forrest writes, for the gift of life and love.”
Today, when you lit your candles
You brought your love
You blessed this place
You hallowed this ground
Your love made it holy
I am grateful to my Universalist ancestors for lifting up this day
In the church where I was raised, they are lighting candles today
They are saying the names of those in the congregation who died this past year
I am grateful that someone will light a candle and say my mother’s name
It matters
This honoring we do, this remembering we do
This grieving we do
It is all a part of things
It is something that enriches the lives of our souls
Helps us dip down below the surface into something deeper, something richer
On all souls day we sing, we remember, we give thanks
We lift up the life of the soul and pledge ourselves to guard it well
I will end with words by the poet W. B. Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
References
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Success”, 1858.
Forrest Church, “All Souls Day,” a sermon at All Souls Church in New York, New York, November 1, 1992.