What is so utterly invisible as tomorrow: A Sermon for the High Holy Days

Details

Created on Sunday, 27 September 2009 01:00

Written by Jenny M. Rankin

We come into these days of late September 
The rain pulls down leaves and they lie crimson and gold and gleaming on the wet granite rock of the path to church.
Late September and all is changing
The skies around us
The trees around us
The air around us
These are the days of awe in the tradition of our Jewish brothers and sisters
When God, it is said, opens up two books
The book of life and the book of death
Each person has ten days 
To look at their life
Examine their conscience
Admit where they’ve done wrong
Make amends
Start again.
As we read together in the Responsive Reading, this is the time for “teshuva” or turning
Turning back towards God, back towards your truest self, back towards the person you want to be, the relationships you want to have, the world you want to help build.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” wrote a great Hebrew teacher, and at Yom Kippur we examine our lives 
As individuals, AND, as a community.
how are we doing?

On Wednesday night I met with some of you to talk about
How First Parish can take more of a leadership role on the environment
On Saturday I sat with the governing board as they thought about what you told them in the Congregational Conversation last spring, how can we welcome newcomers better, how can we strengthen our connections with one another, how can this big place feel more personal?

We are a vital community, and after a year and more of construction, displacement and exile we are ready to pitch in and work on building up this community that we love
Because  belonging here helps us to feel rooted, less alone in this world.
It helps our children feel rooted.
These are the high holy days and as a community we examine how we can do better, be more to one another.

* * * * * 

But this morning, truth be told, I’m thinking in a more personal vein, I’m thinking about you.
I’m envisioning your faces and the faces of your children
Streaming into the pews
What has transpired in your lives in these last weeks and months I wonder?
Adventures you have had,
Beauty you have witnessed,
Joy, small and ordinary, that has come to bless your life.
And what challenges are facing you?

In these months, we have received news from the doctor
‘Yes, the scan is clear’ or
“No, there’s something more there we need to check out.”
We have received news from friends, partners, spouses, parents
Welcome news and unwelcome news
Our children have delighted us; our children have tormented us
You come in on Sunday, your face is familiar to me or it is brand new
I try to put a face with a name (I thank you for wearing your name tag!)
I remember a story you’ve told me,
I remember the privilege it is to be a minister here amongst you
That you would share a little bit of yourself, of your inner life, with us.
And  I remember how daunting it can be
How helpless I can feel in the face of illness, sadness, loss, estrangement.

I think of what one of you told me this week:
 ‘You know, it’s been two years since my diagnosis and when I think about it, I realize my world has grown smaller in some ways.
I don’t see as many people, I don’t do as much.
I can’t. 
I don’t have the energy. 
But you know, in some ways, I realize, it’s not all bad. I have to focus on what really matters.  The people I love best in all the world. My own (true) self. 
My life is smaller but it is not necessarily less.”

None of us would wish for an illness to develop this angle of vision, this spiritual lens on life.
But sometimes, we learn, it IS in the unexpected challenges
The obstacles or the sudden sadnesses
That the depth and beauty of life is revealed to us.

That’s how it has been for me in these past months.
For me, the summer was one bracketed by loss:
The death of my mother in June and a beloved uncle at the end of August
Bracketed by loss and blessed, in the middle, 
with a stretch of time where I could truly rest
And rest I did, there by the edge of the ocean, where land meets sea
I’ve spoken of this place to you before, this place I return to each year.
You’ve told me about the places you go.
I was able to rest,
With my brother and sister and their children
With my own family
With dear old friends.
Soothed by the turn of the tide, the smell of the salt, the wind on my face
Immersed in the natural world, 
The pleasures are small and simple
There are no lists
I have told you before of this place and how I return to it 
And that somehow, 
 it restores my faith

My faith in life
My faith in mystery, wonder
My faith in something of the transcendent.
As I get older, I try not to agonize over the words anymore.
I know when I lose touch with what theologian Paul Tillich used to call the ground of being,
When I lose touch, 
I suffer.
My soul suffers.
It gets more shallow.
It gets more anxious.

“When despair for the world grows in me ,” writes Wendell Berry
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests…
I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”

* * * * * 

So in the middle of this summer was this wonderful rest, but I started to speak to you of the surprises, the curveballs that life can throw us and
What may be revealed to us in them
and so I want to tell you about my uncle. 

My uncle Arnold Westwood was a Unitarian minister
as were his father and his brother.
If you go to our headquarters, the Unitarian Universalist Association at 25 Beacon Street and go up to the second floor,
Just outside the office of the President, 
you will see his photograph on the wall
there with his brother and father, all 3 in their clerical robes
and you can read about the scholarship fund they endowed.
Arnold served churches in Westport, Connecticut, Cleveland, Ohio, Amherst, Massachusetts among others.
He chaired the committee that brokered the Unitarians and Universalists coming together in 1961.
I was honored to be his colleague in the ministry and he cheered me on in my career, but first and foremost, he was my uncle.
I loved him and he loved me and my family.

And so, in July, his son drove him 4 hours from the tiny town in the Berkshires where they live to the seaside
to conduct the graveside service for my mother

He stood there on a cloudy summer day:
88 years old, tall, with white hair and clear blue eyes
Stooped over now with age.
We stood together in the quiet,
On the green grass of that little country cemetery
and we said the prayers together.
Arnold was emotional that day, my mother’s death cut too close to the death of his own wife a few years before.
Tears were close to the surface for us all..
He was old and frail AND he was fervent and strong.
A minister with every inch of his being, AND an uncle who loved us so much.
A person who believed in the power of love to heal and bless,
A person who radiated that love.

At the end of the service, Arnold asked us to join hands and 
to say the benediction with him.
“I’ll line it out,” he said, and so he did, him saying one line and us repeating it
It was his own personal benediction, the one he had fashioned over 50 years in the Unitarian Universalist ministry.

His voice was deep and though it faltered now and then, it had power.
You could imagine it booming out in a worship service
A little bit the way I’ve been told Dana Greeley’s voice used to boom out here

So he lined it out and we said it with him:

“May faith in the spirit of life,
And hope for the community of earth,
And trust in the power of love,
Be ours, this day and always. Amen.”

It was the last benediction he ever said.
Three weeks later, after a fall in his home, he died.
He had told me earlier in the summer that he was ready to go at any time. 
“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said.
In the hospital, he told the intensive care docs,
“I want no extraordinary measures, “ 
“I want to die with dignity”
His family gathered round,
“I love you all” he said
Shouting it out from his hospital bed in that big booming voice.
His children said goodnight and headed out into the darkness
To drive the curving Berkshire hill roads to home.
He died thirty minutes later.

* * * * * * 

“What is so utterly invisible,”
The poet writes,
“as tomorrow?

Not love
Not the wind
Not the inside of stone.
Not anything
Yet how often I am fooled--
I'm wading along
in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky . . . .”

“What is so utterly invisible as tomorrow?”What indeed?
If any of you have known loss in your life, or the threat of loss, 
the threat to someone or something you love with all your heart,  
you will understand the poet as she speaks these words.
You will know with all you have in you what she means.
You will know what it is that brings us up against the fragility of life

AND

  the tremendous tensile strength of Life itself.
Suddenly it’s as if everything comes into focus.
You said to me this week, “I can’t do all those other things anymore” 
“I only have this much energy. I have to decide what really matters.”
We know that sharpened angle of vision will blur and fade again,
We will lose ourselves in the minutae, 
Become absorbed in the lists, the trivia, the schedules.
But once in a while, when we wake up,
We are grateful.  
When we are able to see with that quiet eye,
To see with what Wordsworth called that inward spiritual eye.
When something in life wakes us up, whether it is the High Holy Days or something else, when something in life wakes us up,
Helps us to see an ordinary day for what it is
Ordinary, yes,
Mundane, maybe
Sacred? Oh, yes!

* * * * *

 “I don’t know where such certainty comes from—“ writes the poet,
the certainty that there will be a tomorrow and we will be in it.

I don’t know but if I had to guess I would say that only the soul could send us forth with such cheer

Only the soul that can confront the hard possibility of stoppage
the phone call in the night, the diagnosis, the curve ball.

“What is so utterly invisible as tomorrow”
I don’t know,
But today is visible and real and precious and with us in this room, right here, right now.

And so with the spirit of the ancestors whispering in our ears
Inspired by those we love, whether here or in some other place,
We sally forth.
With my mother’s face in my mind,
With my uncle’s faith in me held close so close to my heart.
I sally forth…. We sally forth!
And if there are days when our hearts are faint within us,
Perhaps our souls are sturdier than we know.

Look, we can see the light spilling into next week’s trees 
We are headed for those beautiful ponds:
Look, just there, around the corner.
We can feel our legs splashing over the edge of darkness,
And our hearts?
Our hearts are on fire!

Reading for Sept 27, 2009

by Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

"Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks" by Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know. © Perseus Books Group, 2001. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

• < Prev
• Next >