"YIPPEE!!!" Redux
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- Created on Sunday, 21 November 2010 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2010-11-21-9am-sermon.mp3}
With edits, from my sermon of November 20, 2004
“For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro' great griefs surviving to this feast, sober & still,” writes the poet John Berryman, “with the children unborn and born, among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude. We praise our ancestors who delivered us here within warm walls all safe, aware of music, likely toward ample & attractive meat with whatever accompaniment (our cook) in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise, and we hope - across the most strange year to come - continually to do them and You not sufficient honour, but such as we become able to devise out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving. Yippee! Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.”
It is Thanksgiving once again, a secular holiday with spiritual possibilities. We may as well begin with the poem I read you moments ago, the one about eggs, twelve hundred eggs, all cracked open into a bathtub, and then the poet, oh no, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, she DOES, she slides down naked into the gooey egg whites and egg yolks, “smear[ing] the fluid into [her] hair and over [her] skin.”
I found this poem some years ago, and my Yankee sensibilities thought, twelve hundred eggs, that would be food for the hungry, what did she do with the shells, how will she get the eggs out of the bathtub, will she ever eat an egg again, will I ever eat an egg again? And then the word “extravagant” floated into my consciousness, and I thought of Thanksgiving, and I dropped the messy poem into the sermon folder.
“Extravagant,” from two Latin words, “extra,” meaning “outside,” and “vagary,” to wander, “extravagant,” to wander outside the boundaries, to be wild, to be excessive, to be unrestrained. “Extravagant,” as in arranging one hundred dozen egg cartons around the bathroom, and then slowly, deliberately, reverently cracking open each egg, witnessing its contents slide down into the filling tub. “Yippee!” says John Berryman in the poem I read as we began. “Yippee!” says Daniela as she slides down into the eggs up to her chin. “Yippee!” we may say, in so many words, as we look around at whatever table we may find ourselves this coming Thursday.
As we take quiet notice of our lives this week, if only for a moment, as we give thanks, however fleetingly, I am wondering, where is the “Yippee!” for you and me in our lives. Where is the extravagance in our living, and I do not mean the property assessments published in the Concord Journal, nor the fine automobiles we own, nor any listing of material possessions that we or others may judge extravagant. I mean, where is the extravagance in our living, as in what plans do we have to wander outside the boundaries of our life? Where in all our restraint is the unrestrained? What would take the often flat line of our day-to-day heart beat and defibrillate it into life again? What would bring the “yippee” to our lips?
“I came to your door with soup and bread,” writes Kathleen Norris.
“I didn’t know you but you were a neighbor in pain:
and a little soup and bread, I reasoned, never hurt anyone.
“I shouldn’t reason.
I appeared the day your divorce was final:
A woman, flushed with cooking and talk,
And you watched, fascinated, coiled like a spring.
“You seemed so brave and lonely
I wanted to comfort you like a child.
I couldn’t, of course. You wanted to ask me too far in.
“It was then I knew it had to be like a prayer:
We can’t ask for what we know we want:
We have to ask to be led someplace we never dreamed of going,
A place we don’t want to be.
“We’ll find ourselves there one morning, opened like leaves,
And it will be all right.”
“We can’t ask for what we know we want,” Kathleen writes. “We have to ask to be led someplace we never dreamed of going, a place we don’t want to be.” In that definition of “extravagance” I wondered over earlier, here in this poem is the restrained and the unrestrained part, here is the tame and the wild part, here are the boundaries with the line that says “this is the inside” and “this is the outside.” When I said earlier that we are always in danger of flat-line living, I mean it is the safer thing to stay with the restrained, the tame, the inside, no wandering, living with little texture, no risks, staying on the safe side, I mean, filling a bath tub with eggs, it’s not reasonable. When Kathleen Norris says to us “we can’t ask for what we know we want…we have to ask to be led… a place we don’t want to be,” she is inviting us to wander outside the boundaries, outside the possible, outside whatever we had thought all along ties us down. One hundred dozen eggs, what could she have been thinking?
This is the invitation for which we may have been waiting, an invitation to extravagance, to finding the “yippee” in our lives, and the place of discovery apparently will not be in the predictable, the tame, the restrained. What if we wandered outside the boundaries? Kathleen’s answer: “We’ll find ourselves there one morning, opened like leaves, and it will be all right.” Considering that she says the neighbor woman, on the day her divorce was final, was “coiled like a spring,” then we have to say that “opened like leaves” sounds a whole lot better. And maybe that’s the spiritual challenge that the season holds for us. Would we rather be “coiled like a spring” or “opened like leaves”?
It is Thanksgiving, and we are staring right down the barrel toward the holidays of December. Check out our white knuckles. Listen to our rapid breathing. Look in the mirror. It is Thanksgiving, and we had thought all along that we could ask for what we know we want, and then the poet comes along and tells us we have it all wrong. “We have to ask to be led,” she says, “someplace we never dreamed of going [which sounds exciting, like a dream vacation, until she says] “a place we don’t want to be.” We have to ask to be led someplace we don’t want to be, the poet says. I would say, what if we said “wander” instead of “led”?
What would it mean to deepen into a place that it would be possible to wander someplace we have never dreamed of going, to wander someplace we don’t want to be. What would it mean to let go to this extent, you and I, we who are people who are used to being in control, knowing exactly what we want and how to get it. What would it mean to wander some place else entirely? One of the big themes in conversations with you in my office is often about the transitions in our lives: illnesses, jobs, relationships. And as you speak of the sometimes-unbearable experience of being in-between, I try to remember to invite you to tell me what that space looks like. I think when I have invited you to do that, I have invited you to wander out past the boundaries.
Here’s one of my favorite Anne Lamott stories, from her book TRAVELING MERCIES. Anne is a single mother, and in other books she has written about her son Sam. Here is Anne, moving out beyond what is safe: “Sam was welcomed and prayed for at St. Andrews seven months before he was born. When I announced during worship that I was pregnant, people cheered. All these old people, raised in Bible-thumping homes in the Deep South, clapped. Even the women whose grown-up boys had been or were doing time in jails or prisons rejoiced for me. And then almost immediately they set about providing for us. They brought clothes, they brought me casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance that this baby was going to be a part of the family. And they began slipping me money.
“Now a number of the older women live pretty close to the bone financially on small Social Security checks. But routinely they sidled up to me and stuffed bills in my pocket – tens and twenties. It was always done so stealthily that you might have thought they were slipping me bundles of cocaine. One of the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams, who is in her mid-eighties now, so beautiful with her crushed hats and hallelujahs; she always brought me plastic Baggies of dimes, noosed with little wire twists.
“I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blake’s – that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love – and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: ‘Thank you.’”
Maybe you’ve had a Mary Williams push a plastic Baggie full of dimes into your pocket sometime in your life, which would have been an extravagance in itself. Notice the “thank you” part at the end, my own way of coming back to Thanksgiving. When the plastic Baggie full of dimes is pushed down into our pockets, can we choke out a “Thank you.” This is more than metaphor. When Daniela cracked open each egg, it is quite clear from her writing that she gave thanks for each one. Her poem is one of gratitude, of aligning herself to be able to give thanks for something so unimaginable and yet maybe so wonderful.
So, where is the extravagance in our living, as in what plans do we have to wander outside the boundaries of our life? Where in all our restraint is the unrestrained? What would take the often flat line of our day-to-day heart beat and defibrillate it into life again? What would bring the “yippee” to our lips? Where is your life taking you? What is it we want? When we think we’ve answered those questions, we may need to stop. We may need to avoid stumbling into the easy answers. Listen. Listen to yourself. Listen to the universe. Stay in the place that is “in-between” and look around.
Put your own language on it. Ask to be led, the poet says. Wander outside the boundaries, I would say. What are the places you’ve never dreamed of going? What are the places you do not want to be?
And here’s the big elephant in the room this Thanksgiving season, in this room, in the rooms of First Parish: what shall we do as we transition from Gary Smith to not-Gary Smith? What shall we make of divided votes and uncertainty and being stuck? What shall we make of good people coming down on all sides? What shall we make of living in the in-between, the not yet, we who are people who are used to being in control, knowing exactly what we want and how to get it. Remember to look around, I say to you. Tell me about what the turning point looks like. What are your strengths in this place? They will help you move on.
We are in the midst of extravagance these days, both personally and institutionally. We are wandering outside the boundaries and sometimes the process has been clumsy, but we are strong, three hundred seventy-five years of wandering here, remember, and we know what it is to be civil toward one another, and we will know the right thing when we see it. It is Thanksgiving, and there are lessons to be found.
Let us pray. “For that free Grace bringing us past great risks & thro' great griefs surviving to this feast, sober & still, with the children unborn and born, among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude. We praise our ancestors who delivered us here within warm walls all safe, aware of music, likely toward ample & attractive meat with whatever accompaniment (our cook) in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise, and we hope - across the most strange year to come - continually to do them and You not sufficient honour, but such as we become able to devise out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving. Yippee! Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.”