I Asked for Wonder
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 13 December 2009 00:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2009-12-13-9am-sermon.mp3}
When I was a child one of the favorite books in our house was Robert McCloskey’s book about Maine called A Time for Wonder.
For one thing, the landscape was one that we knew—
The summer after World War II ended, my birth mother had found her way to a small island there in the Penobscot Bay.
It became a special place for her and my dad.
And so years later, when I was very young, we would pile into the station wagon for the long drive north
Bucksport, Blue Hill, and then on down the peninsula to the water.
When we looked at the pictures in Robert McCloskey’s book we remembered:
The rounded green shape of the Camden Hills, the blue water of the bay dotted with islands,
Hundreds of thousands of stars in a midnight, inky blue black sky over Penobscot Bay.
We liked the part about the family getting ready for the hurricane:
Getting the groceries in, putting gas in the boat
The lobstermen “checking moorings, checking chains, checking pennants, getting ready. . . . .
All of the talk is of hundred-pound anchors, two-inch rope, one-inch chain and will it hold? “
We used to chant the word together
“We’re gong to have some weather.
It’s a comin’
She’s gonna blow
With the next shift of the tide”
And then that wonderful pause before the hurricane
A mouse nibbles off a stalk, a spider scurries into a knothole,
“All living things wait”
And then, the first surge of the changing tide ripples past Eagle Island, Two Bush Island, Spectacle Island,
And the storm roars in.
* * * * *
A Time of Wonder. It’s a magical book and I thought of it this week as I mused on the story of Hanukkah. Judas Maccabee and his small band wresting back the Temple from Antiochus, cleaning it out, finding the one little jar of oil,
The oil that was supposed to last one night and instead lasted for eight.
It was called a miracle.
Miracle from the Latin word “mirari” to be amazed, to admire, to wonder.
They were filled with wonder when they saw this.
I knew Gaby was going to light the menorah today and sing the blessing. I remembered from other years, the hush that comes over the room when the ancient blessing is chanted. I remembered the sense of wonder I always have in that moment.
I was thinking about wonder this week.
I was listening to news from Copenhagen about climate change
I was meeting with a small group of you to talk about First Parish and the environment and how we can take more leadership.
I was thinking about wonder
* * * * *
Last week in our call to worship we read these words
“When I was very young I had no trouble believing wondrous things.”
Those words stayed with me this week.
Children are our teachers when it comes to wonder, aren’t they?
Spend time in a pre-school classroom, listen to the oohs and aahs when an animal is brought in,
Spend time with a toddler in a tide pool on a beach in the summer
I know someone who, every September, religiously, without fail searches for milkweed
She looks and looks, sometimes even drives to Maine to get it
She is a preschool teacher
She brings the milkweed with its caterpillar into her classroom
She watches the faces of these three year old children as they look at the caterpillar, and then the cocoon
Waiting, waiting
And can you imagine the look of wonder on their faces the day the butterfly emerges and they watch it fly away into the sky?
“We sisters chased fireflies,” the poet writes
Reaching for them in the dark . . . . .
In all the days and years that have followed
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced
That same utter certainty of the goodness of life
That was as palpable
As the sound of the cicadas on those night
My sisters running around with me the dark . . . .
The way reverence mixes with amazement
Children are our teachers in wonder.
And sometimes, despite our own serious grownup selves,
All the important things we know we have to do, the tasks that call to us,
Sometimes, we slip into wonder too.
I think of the times you have spoken to me about your walking in the woods, your climbing a mountain, your quiet days in the summer living close to the lake, your looking up into the blackness of a night sky with hundreds of thousands of stars.
Those are the times that your voice softens or changes in tone and quality. There is something magical about those moments. Something mysterious. We try to tell each other tales of these moments and we stutter and stumble and sometimes we simply grow silent. Because there simply no words. No words we can find to describe what we saw or how it made us feel.
Instinctively, children know how to wonder.
As Unitarian Universalists, we center our religious education on our belief in that inborn spiritual capacity.
We want to nurture it, in our children and in ourselves.
Because we believe it lies close to the heart of things, close to the heart of what it means to be alive, to be a spiritual person.
In a world with a lot of noise and a lot of stuff, we search for ways to get back to wonder.
* * * * *
Abraham Joshua Heschel was a 20th century Jewish theologian, mystic, social reformer who believed in wonder too.
I stumbled upon him again this week, this man who escaped from the Holocaust by a hair, endured so much sadness in his life and yet was still capable of and ultimately grounded in radical amazement, in wonder.
He once wrote, addressing his words to God,
“I did not ask for success (in this life).
I asked for wonder.
And You gave it to me.”
I asked for wonder. I love that.
Heschel was a rare person because he went deeply into two worlds that are often held rigidly distinct. He was at one time a contemplative, a mystic, in love with creation and the holy with a mystic’s love.
And at the same time, he was completely and utterly passionate about the world he lived in. About the reality of evil. About the need for justice, about the need for change.
Heschel was born in Warsaw, born into a family that was recognized as “spiritual nobility” in the Jewish world. He came from a long line of Hasidic rabbis and from a young age, was looked to as a gifted spiritual teacher.
He moved to Berlin to study and teach, but when Hitler rose to power, he was arrested and deported to Poland. Just six weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland, Heschel got an invitation. The president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio asked him to teach in America, that precious invitation that would get him an exit visa. It was his ticket out of hell and he took it.
Heschel taught for a few years in Ohio where he was poor, lonely, didn’t speak English, and was desperately trying to get visas to get his family out.
Then he came to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and stayed there for the rest of his life.
His family was not so lucky. One sister died in a German bombing, two sisters in concentration camps. And when the Nazis came to the door of the family home, as Heschel’s wife Sylvie tells the story, his mother went to open the door and she saw them and she just fell down, heart attack. She died right there in front of them.”
So Heschel comes out of this crucible of anguish in Europe, he comes to America and instead of turning away from God and humanity and the world—
Instead of getting cynical or bitter or disillusioned,
He gets more passionate about creation, humanity, the Holy.
Instead of giving up on God, as so many did at that time, he grew to love God more.
Over and over, when people would ask him
“Where was God in the Holocaust,”
Heschel would always answer:
“Where was man?”
His friends used to talk about his sense of “radical amazement” and how he’d try to get you to share it too. “Did you notice the trees?” he’d ask them. Well, Heschel was in love with trees. You’re walking in Riverside Park: “Don’t forget the trees,” he’d say, “don’t forget the river.” You have to react. He wanted you to react. 1
‘I say that this world in itself is so fascinatingly mysterious, so challengingly marvelous, that not to realize that there is more than I see, that there is endlessly more than I can express or even conceive, is just being underdeveloped intellectually.” 2
So he comes out of this suffering in Europe and he comes to America and he starts to teach about religion and for him, religion began in wonder.
For him, religion began with what he liked to call “the ineffable.”
Heschel’s daughter, Susannah, teaches Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. “Oh, ineffable. He loved that word—that which is inexplainable, but you know is there. It points to something beyond—that which we pray to, meaning God.” 3
Ineffable. It points to something beyond.
Invisible to the eye but real. So very real. Like the wind. Like courage. Like love.
This wasn’t just an idea to Heschel. It was his own personal experience.
“A moment comes” he wrote, “like a thunderbolt in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake.”
The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. What an image. Sometimes that is what it takes.
We are so closed to wonder.
So closed off by the busyness of our lives, by the details of our days.
Religion begins in wonder but for Heschel, it didn’t end there. It always led to obligation, our human obligation to respond to the Holy, to God, by acting in the world to care for one another.
“In a free society,” he said, “some are guilty but all are responsible.”
If you look at a photograph of the famous civil rights march in Selma, you can see Martin Luther King there at the center and then to the right of him, two people over, the white man with the long white beard. That is Heschel.
He said later that when he was marching with King it felt like he was praying with his legs.
* * * * * * *
So for me, this week:
The Hanukkah story, mirari, to wonder, the blessing chanted over the menorah, the talks in Copenhagen, the book from my childhood.
Memories of that sand beach and those deep dark forests in Maine
Sisters running in the dark after fireflies.
It all weaves together in my mind and I know that for us in our time, if we are to honor these moments of wonder that we have had in the natural world,
These moments by the water or under the stars where we feel our sense of self drop away
Moments when that flash of the undisclosed come upon us
If we are to honor the Holy that undergirds those moments, that has given us those oh-so-precious moments
If we are to do this,
For us it will mean praying with our legs as well.
I’m not sure yet what form it will take, marching or letter writing or coming together in small groups to think and talk and study and figure out how to act. Figure out how the strength of this gathered community can be harnessed to guard and protect the natural world
I don’ know yet. We are feeling our way together here. We are dreaming together. We are trying to vision how the strength of this gathered community can be harnessed to guard and protect the natural world.
I don’t know yet but I have faith in this congregation. I have faith in you.
I listen to you speak about these things.
I know how deeply you care about the natural world and about these moments in your lives. These holy moments.
There are many things still to imagine but somehow we know that this is what we are called to do.
Wonder. Radical Amazement. Action. It’s all twined together, for Heschel and for us as well.
Sometimes, honoring that source of wonder in our lives means fighting for it.
It means praying with our legs.
We are ready to go.
Jenny Rankin
December 13, 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Jenny M. Rankin
Reading: Reverence
The air vibrated
with the sound of cicadas
on those hot Missouri nights after sundown
when the grown-ups gathered on the wide back lawn,
sank into their slung-back canvas chairs
tall glasses of iced tea beading in the heat
and we sisters chased fireflies
reaching for them in the dark
admiring their compact black bodies
their orange stripes and seeking antennas
as they crawled to our fingertips
and clicked open into the night air.
In all the days and years that have followed,
I don't know that I've ever experienced
that same utter certainty of the goodness of life
that was as palpable
as the sound of the cicadas on those nights:
my sisters running around with me in the dark,
the murmur of the grown-ups' voices,
the way reverence mixes with amazement
to see such a small body
emit so much light.
Reverence by Julie Cadwallader-Staub, from Friends Journal. ©Religious Society of Friends. Reprinted with permission.
Footnotes
Morton Leifman, Vice President Emerius, Jewish Theological Seminary, Quoted in Bob Abernethy’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, original broadcast January 18, 2008.