Spiritual Rebooting
Written by Jenny M. Rankin Sunday, 24 January 2010 00:00
(Reading: “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver)
I was listening to Garrison Keillor last week as I sometimes do on Saturday night,
Cooking dinner, and heard his classic line, “it’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone.” Well, not around this place, I thought to myself!
In Massachusetts this week, we reckoned with a sea change in senatorial leadership. In Haiti, aftershocks, people working so hard to find and feed, to comfort and help.
Here at First Parish, we are beginning to walk the journey of transition together, following Gary’s announcement of his retirement in 2011. Last weekend we had Susan Beaumont with us, she and the Transitions Committee describing a process of self-study you will undertake this spring to consider where you are now as a community, what you want to become in the future. It is a time of discovery. Susan brings to us the experienced voice of someone who has walked with other faith communities through transition. We have wise and seasoned lay leaders here who have been thinking about and preparing for this time. They will help guide the process, keep it open, invite you in for what is essentially a “listening to the congregation.”
For some of us, this week has been pretty much business as usual and for others of us, it has been anything but. As a community, we mourn the death of George King, a long-time pillar of First Parish.
For me, at the end of next week I begin a three month sabbatical. It will be a time to dig deeper in spiritual reflection and intellectual study than day to day life allows. I know how rare such a time is and I am so grateful to you for this gift.
Sabbatical comes from the word “Sabbath.”
“Thou shalt honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy,” the Torah says.
In Orthodox Judaism, it is one day that is set apart each week.
No work of any kind.
No laundry, cooking, cleaning. No emails, bills. Imagine!
Just resting in the creation we have been given. Savoring it.
In my own life, I confess that finding and sticking to some kind of Sabbath practice isn’t one of my strengths.
One whole day is pretty much impossible so I look for smaller ways.
I do better some weeks than others.
When I leave it out altogether, I pay the price.
Sabbath, resting.
Not trying to change anything, make anything happen.
Just an awareness--we have been given this life, this beauty, this universe, these stars, this sky, this ocean, this heaven-on-earth around us.
In her poem “Joy,” Julia Cadwallader Staub writes:
“Who could need more proof from honey,” writes the poet,
How the bees with such skill and purpose
Enter flower after flower
Sing their way home
To create and cap the new honey
Just to get through the flowerless winter. . . . .
And how we humans can’t resist its viscosity
Its taste of clover and wind
Its metaphorical power….
All because bees just do, over and over again, what they were made to do
Oh, who could need more proof than honey
To know that our world was meant to be
And
Was meant to be sweet?”
Resting, savoring, joy. That’s what Sabbath, spiritual practice, points us toward and
We need that, don’t we, here in the depths of winter.
We need that we who are descendants of the New England Puritan tradition,
We who are sometimes more attuned to duty than to joy.
Rev. Forrest Church, minister at All Souls Church in Manhattan for many years,
He calls it “spiritual rebooting.” If your spiritual life has become automatic or stale, he says, there are some simple things you can do to “reboot.”
And if words like “soul” and “spirit” and “spiritual” are too churchy for some of us,
I think what we are talking about is what gets us out of bed in the morning.
What keeps us striding through these days that are set before us?
Striding, walking, sometimes stumbling, what keeps us going.
And when there are obstacles in the path
When those things come along that stump us in small ways,
Or stun us in big ones, how do we do it?
What do we do next?
How do we thread our way around and through
Whatever life hands us with courage and some kind of grace?
What’s the difference between living a life where we’re going through the motions
Hanging on
Feeling bored at one turn and cynical by another
Or just kind of dead inside. Disconnected.
When we talk about rebooting the spiritual life
We’re asking questions about how awake we are
How much gratitude there is in a day?
What forgiveness might look like in our lives?
How much courage we’re able to summon
Each one of us has a different spiritual struggle, a different wrestling match
For any one of us, depending on the day you ask us,
Or maybe even the hour of the day, we’ll give a different answer
There are seasons in our lives, things go up and down, we turn a corner, we struggle to hang on, we get to a smoother place
There are rhythms and seasons
What matters is that we’re engaged, we’re awake, we are trying to be and become our best selves. And make the world around us better, too.
In our religious tradition, we say that life is a gift. Tremendously precious gift.
And when we hear those names on the pastoral list each week, we know, we get it. And, of course, we also know we forget all the time. We’re rushing, our heads are down, I have my list in my hand.
And maybe that’s one reason we come here, to try to wake up again, to invite one another out of the routine, out of the stupor.
To me, being a person of faith doesn’t mean believing this or that
It means trying to live a little more fully, dig a little deeper, make more of this life I’ve been given, not settle for less.
Being a person of faith, for me, means being faithful to the life we’ve been given.
Honoring it enough to try and make something of it.
Sometimes that might be big things, but I’m thinking about small things, too.
Really small.
Like saying thank you at the end of the day.
Like looking up to watch the color change in a winter sky.
Like going for that extra ounce of patience when a child is tired and you are oh-so-tired.
I have come to wonder whether it is this quality of engagement, of aliveness, of not taking things for granted that attracts me to the Transcendentalists.
This was not a group of people that was lolling around, bored, blasé, whining.
What was it inside Margaret Fuller that had her at age 20 pushing herself to learn German so she could translate Goethe, or in her 30s moving to New York City where she knew no one to write for a newspaper? A woman in 1845, mind you, writing for a newspaper.
What was it that pushed her to visit prisons and mines in England, factories in France, slums in Rome?
Or Theodore Parker (Like Fuller, he was born 200 years ago this year)
What was it inside this boy from a hardscrabble farm in Lexington that had him learning languages by the dozens, reading books with voraciousness, standing up to the Unitarian establishment of Boston?
What fired him up and kept him going?
His mind developing, his soul seeking and striving, the moral fibre of his being deepening and strengthening?
So that, at the end of his life, he was fighting abolition with all he had in him
These were not women and men who sat around.
These were not women and men who were shallow.
These were not women and men who were dozing.
They were looking at the world with new eyes.
Asking questions. Pushing on.
Why did religion have to be something that was shut up inside a church? They asked.
Why couldn’t it encompass the stars in the sky pouring down their rays every night?
Why couldn’t the holy be found in swamp, river, pond, forest, field?
Who said we had to believe in that Jesus walked on the water?
And what is a miracle anyway?
Why were schools like that and what about mental asylums?
Why were blind children taught in that way and what about prisoners?
How come boys got one kind of an education and not girls?
Why were men allowed to walk up the steps of the library at Harvard and not women?
How could it possibly be right for one person to own another human being?
The questions rolled on. Never settled. Always another one behind the next.
There was a power to the questioning.
There was an energy and a restlessness to the seeking.
There was a spiritual life force at the heart of it all that just wouldn’t quit.
These men and these women were like us.
They some lost people they loved.
They loved people that some thought they shouldn’t.
They lived with illness.
They got depressed.
They got angry. They wrestled and they hurt just as we do.
And there was a kind of persistent life energy, ambition, seeking, that kept them going.
They didn’t give up.
They didn’t give in.
They didn’t stop learning. They didn’t stop loving.
They had a tremendous love for this world, for its people, its seas and skies.
I believe there is a spiritual legacy here for all of us.
I believe there is a spiritual energy here for all of us.
Something that we can touch and tap into
Something that will help fuel us in our own spiritual seeking and our own social justice doing.
Because the ideas and loves and faith and doubts of these women and men
Didn’t disappear
It didn’t all go away
Their spiritual energy did not die
It became part of what we now call our living tradition,
part of what we call our Unitarian Universalist faith that we come here on Sunday to touch and celebrate and sing and be fed by for the rest of the week to come
Their energy meets our energy and we are all strengthened by it
We are part of this too. You bring your soul here.l I bring mine.
When we show up, when we bring our particular light, when we bring what Emerson called “that power new to nature” that only exists in you or in me
We add something to the tradition. We change something.
It’s like lava that flows beneath the earth, it’s a kind of spiritual fire
Malleable, fluid, ever changing
It is the power of belonging to something bigger than ourselves
It can give us a strength we never knew we had
And so armed with this strength beyond strength
that comes from within us and also from somehow beyond,
Armed with this we can become, in the poet’s words
“Each body a lion of courage and something precious to the earth.”
Armed with this strength, we can say with the poet,
“When it’s over I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms
When it’s over I don’t want to wonder
if have made of my life something particular and real….
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”