What is Saving Your Life Now?
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 07 February 2010 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2010-02-07-11am-sermon.mp3}
My ministerial colleagues in the Boston area meet several times a year, moving from one place to another. They’ll be here at the First Parish in early March for the day, but last month we were in Lexington, and our opening worship that day was led by Kathleen Hepler, the minister in Framingham. I’ll confess my attendance record is poor, and if I am drawn to go by anything, it is worship, the sermon, the singing. We ministers may not all be good singers, but we are loud.
Kathleen preached one terrific sermon, and she used the two readings you have heard today: the Barbara Brown Taylor reading and the story by Seamus Heaney. I asked her for the readings, and I promised to write a sermon of my own. I realize from reading the sermon Jenny preached here two weeks ago that I am also on the territory Jenny staked out that day, the struggle to understand the word spirituality and how we as Unitarian Universalists, we who are atheists, Christians, humanists, Buddhists, Jews and those who reject or defy labels, how we can find common ground.
Barbara Brown Taylor’s question comes as close as any to the question any red-blooded preacher ought to be asking and answering each and every Sunday: “What is saving your life now?” What is saving your life today? Is there more to life than this? Where do I find it? What gets me through the day? In the face of our worries about jobs, health, family, money, what keeps me going?
If you have ever sat with me in my office and told me of some big change in your life, some big worry, some big poor choice you’ve made, some consequences you’re facing, some uncertainty with a capital U that you’re enduring, I have no doubt talked about William Bridges and his books on transition: endings, turning points, beginnings, over and over, and how Bridges says we are never inclined to linger much there in the turning points, too painful, too uncomfortable; we want a quick fix.
But Bridges says, and I say this as I thrust his book into your hands, take note of the turning point, the place between the endings and the beginnings, the end of the job and the job not yet, the end of good health and the unknown prognosis, the end of a relationship and new relationships just around the corner, the end of children living at home and all the possibilities of an empty nest.
Take note, I say. Take note right there as you turn from one life to another. Take note, I say, and I mean this literally. Start a journal. What does it look like, there at the turn? Keep track. Look around. What are you made of? What is saving your life now? The mystics called this place between endings and beginnings “the dark night of the soul.” For some, it IS in the dark of the night that we confront this turning point.
Or maybe your life today is not at any dramatic point, no endings in sight. The question may still be useful. Barbara Brown Taylor (my preaching students this fall started calling her BBT), BBT frames this question for all and any of us who simply find ourselves asking the question, “is there more to life than what meets the eye?” One of you sent me a card years ago that said, “Most people don’t know there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss your life.” That card hangs over my desk where I write, over the desk where I write words like these to make sure none of us “get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss (our) lives.” Forget the angel part.
So, what is saving your life now? I’m asking you. Let’s begin with Seamus Heaney in the other reading: the kaleidoscope and the battleship and the water and the lesson he says he learned from it, the lesson he saved to tell people on their graduation day. “Don’t surrender the bright prisms of your own individual gift to the terms of the world around you… Don’t let the power world of water tubs and battleships negate the reality of… that imagined prospect, that excitement of the spirit… Trust in the kaleidoscope of your own possibilities.”
BBT, meet Seamus, meet this congregation here in Concord, Massachusetts, on this Sunday morning in early February. What is the kaleidoscope we clutch? What is saving our life today? And remember that BBT says the answer will likely be something else tomorrow or next week or next year. I’ve had the luxury and the time to consider this question over the past week, and I’ll answer for myself. You’ll have your own list.
What is saving my life now? I’ll only mention two things, though there are more, and the two really blend into each other. My first answer is you. You save my life and you’ve done it over and over. You’ve extended a kindness when I have certainly not deserved it. You’ve spoken a word that has ignited me. You have gently criticized and made me better. You have confirmed for me that my salvation exists on the horizontal, between and among us, far more than it does on the vertical to a God I have the luxury to doubt, but I pray does not doubt me.
What is saving my life now? You are saving my life, and I have learned to trust my tears in this regard. What is the expression, “tears well up,” which is to say something is full, something is spilling over, pay attention. One such moment happened to me over the past two weeks. I received an e-mail from a young woman in Hong Kong. She said she had grown up here in Massachusetts, had found a Unitarian Universalist congregation in high school, then in college, then in graduate school, in different places in the country. Then in 2002 she moved to Hong Kong to work in the financial markets and did not find there huge numbers of Unitarian Universalists.
So, she said, she went to the iTunes music store and found podcasts from the First Parish in Concord, Massachusetts, and she told me that she has been listening since. She mentioned specific sermons that had come at important times in her life. I am beginning to gulp, tears are coming. Now, she said, I am returning to Boston in the fall for my wedding, and you are my minister. Will you officiate at my wedding?
She and her mother came to meet me this week, home to make wedding preparations. I know your voice, she said, and I am wondering if she is as surprised as I was when I saw Nina Totenberg for the first time. I know your congregation, she tells me, and the ones who laugh. Oh, I said, that would be Rick in the choir. He laughs at my jokes. What is saving my life now? Rebecca, now back in Hong Kong, listening to this podcast, Rebecca, you are saving my life now, telling me the work I do matters, and here on the edge of retirement, that is sweet news indeed.
What is saving my life now? I will say that my second answer is a subset of the first. Children save my life. I mean my own children and who they have become. If you remember a sermon from a few years back, my spiritual path to work, you will remember the first stop on my path is just down the street from our home, there at Willard School, where my son teaches, and I told you then, when I drive by that school I give thanks for both my children.
And when I say children I mean my grandchildren: Devin, Tyson, Anita, and an unnamed boy coming into our lives in early May, they are saving my life now, such miracles. BBT says that people travel all over the world looking for meaning. “They will spend hours launching prayers into the heavens,” she says. “They will travel halfway around the world to visit a monastery in India or take part in a mission trip to Belize. The last place people look is right under their feet…” When I watch my children raise their children, when I see my grandchildren’s faces in the light just so and I know what they will look like as adults, there is meaning enough, right in front of me.
What is saving my life now? Children, and not just my own. I mean the children who come forward here each week for Pam’s stories, and it is the look on Pam’s face and the look on the children’s faces that save my life. I mean the children who come forward to sing here, and though the official word is go light on the cameras and go light on the applause, there is a big part of me that wants to stand and cheer because they have lifted me up and out of myself, they have given me hope, they have given me my life back.
What is saving my life now? Children, and not just our children, but the children in Transylvania and the children in Haiti and the children in Hong Kong and Iraq and the Gaza strip, children I have seen and children whose stories I have heard, how indomitable they are, how much closer to believing and accepting and loving they are, than I am. Children save my life.
I could go on and on, and some of you are thinking I already have. Humor saves my life, but you know that. Music saves my life, not because I am a musician, but because it is a mystery to me how people can make music happen. The choir here knows that I sit out there as they rehearse each week; they save me as I prepare to be ready for all of you. Their faces and their stories and their music wash over me. They move me in a very real sense, move me to a place where I can look life right in the eye and feel at peace.
“What is saving your life now?” the wise old priest asked Barbara, and I ask you. This is not a request for a complicated theology. What does your life depend on? I know for me that that question is both simple and it is complicated. It is a matter of finding the right words and finding someone to listen to us. The answers lie right within us: there is no text book, no pop quizzes, nothing to memorize. The answer lies right at our feet, Barbara Brown Taylor says, and if you’d like to keep the conversation going with her, read her new book AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD: A GEOGRAPHY OF FAITH, and if you’d like to keep the conversation going with me, drop me a note or an e-note and tell me your answer. I’ll listen.