What do we know "by heart"?
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 13 February 2011 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2011-02-13-9am-sermon.mp3}
If you’re new here today or new even in the past few weeks or months, you may wonder about the benediction we say here together, at the end, words on the back cover of the order of service, we say, but watch and listen to all those here who know those words by heart. They are the words Pam said with the children earlier, words so many of us know “by heart,” we say, an interesting expression, by the way, to know something by heart, as if our head, our brain, our memory, play only a minor role, and our hearts claim the words.
On this Sunday nearest Valentine’s Day, a day of the heart, if ever there was one, I believe our hearts SHOULD claim these words; they are, as Pam said, words of connection, the horizontal theology of this place, in which love can flow in and among us. One of my preaching students asked the question last week, “What if we discover that we already love one another, that we’re meant to love one another, and that life gets in the way?” The benediction we say is a road map to get back on track; it’s our GPS telling us it’s recalculating the route; it’s the compass heading us in the right direction.
This benediction came to First Parish by way of a reading I had remembered from my first settled ministry in Middletown, Connecticut; it followed me to Bangor, Maine, where I used it occasionally as a benediction; and then, finally, here to Concord, where I began to say it every week, and then I noticed you moving your lips; you were learning it; and I invited you into it, and ever since, we have said it together.
I mention the benediction today, in the midst of a last sermon lap, because it is something I have been so honored, so proud, so humbled, so moved to share with you, to watch you take it as your own, help me with rewording (“persons” to “beings”), watch the children learn it, hear from you as you use it in your own lives. You have it on your refrigerator, you say; you have it laminated in your wallet, you say; you choose one part of it and talk about it around the dinner table as a family, you say; you used to write it in chalk on the driveway on the first day of school as a reminder to your child of what is right and what is wrong, you say; the young people did a musical on the benediction, and the stage prop is behind me.
Will you understand if I say this means the world and the stars to me to give you this gift and then have you give it back to me? And that is the beginning of the sermon for today, this sermon on love and the benediction and knowing by heart. The sermon is found somewhere in the Meister Eckhart reading you heard earlier, it is found in the exchange between the kind monk and the little burro.
Within the benediction is the phrase, “Hold on to what is good.” This admonition is a variation of advice we gave our own children, particularly in their teenage years. One variation came from one of the earliest shows in reality television, a show about an American family, with a camera crew parked in their lives over a period of months, and we are the witnesses.
In one episode (and those of you who have been here for years will remember this), their young daughter is boarding a bus in the early morning for a class trip to a destination I cannot recall, but it is clear in the mother’s face that there will be plenty of danger and her daughter is so young. The girl is ready to board the bus, there is one last embrace, and the mother conjures up all the wisdom and parenting skills she has and whispers in her daughter’s ear, “Remember who you are.” Eliz and I stole that line almost immediately. “Remember who you are,” I would say to my young son, to my young daughter, as they ventured out on an evening, on a weekend, off to college. “Oh God, Dad, don’t say THAT!”
“Hold on to what is good.” “Remember who you are.” And the other phrase that belongs in here also comes out of the desperation of parenthood. It is only used judiciously. It comes when a moral choice is before your child, and they are appealing to you to see an ambiguity, any ambiguity. “Do what you think is best,” I would say, eliciting the same reaction as I got to “remember who you are,” that is to say, they knew what was best already and hoped for a reprieve. When we say, “hold on to what is good” each week, I am thinking of these moments in my life and more. Hold on to your core, we are saying to each other, hold fast, don’t let us down. Remember who you are. Do what you think is best.
Another of my students this week told us the story of a young man, mugged, wallet stolen, the thief is running. “Wait,” yells the aggrieved, the mugged one, “take my coat, you must need it.” This stops the robber in his tracks, he comes back for the coat, and the robbed one says to the robber, “Let’s go get a cup of coffee, but you’ll have to pay, you have my wallet.” And they do, and the wallet is returned, and the thief is made a gift of the coat and a twenty-dollar bill. Hold on to what is good. Remember who you are. Do what you think is best. Sign-posts, the road to love and more love.
Yes, here is the usual disclaimer. Don’t try this “yelling at the back of a thief thing” yourself. The incident may have happened on a closed course with a professional driver, but it makes a good story, and it did happen, and it does happen. “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
The transaction took seconds. That’s how it works, I think, this business of “hold on to what is good,” “remember who you are,” “do what you think is best.” Our impulse, in this case, an impulse of generosity [it could be courage; it could be love], goes directly from our hearts to our hands. In these moments, our actions are not processed in our heads. Our brains are by-passed. It is not a matter of coming up with all the reasons why we can’t give up the coat or our safety: there are other coats; there was something about the thief.
“Once in a while, a kind monk comes to [the burro’s] stable and brings a pear, but more than that, he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears, and for a few seconds, the burro is free and even seems to laugh, because love does that. Love frees.” And I am thinking now of the amazing impulses to generosity so evident in this congregation, the hard work to understand the complexities of immigration; the restocking of the Open Table food pantry; the home goods and furniture donated to those who have little; the blood drive coming; the trip to El Salvador by our young people; the benefit concert for the Urban Ministry; the list goes on and on.
“Hold on to what is good,” we say to each other, something that turns out to be a spiritual practice, this business of moving from our hearts to our hands, with a judicious but not belaboring use of our head. There is plenty of room for cynicism in this whole business of determining the best response to suffering. But somewhere beyond the comical cast of politicians and agencies that get in the way are kids who don’t have schools, people who don’t have homes or jobs, people who have precious little hope. “Do what you think is best,” we softly whisper to one another, until that is what we are doing: our best. “Love does that,” the poet says. “Love frees.”
The sermon is in sight. We must be more than half way there. Scott Peck, in THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED, says that “love is a strangely circular process,” which is to say, we hope we are made better by scratching the burro’s ears, it’s a win-win outcome, the burro is happy, we’re happy the burro is happy. We’ve done our one good deed for the day. Check it off, we say. But I’ve always resisted the circular metaphor and reasoning in favor of something that looks more like a spiral.
One of my teachers in theological school asked us to consider the transaction that happens when we bend over a baby’s crib. The baby sees us and we make a face or a sound or break into a smile. This causes the baby to smile, to wiggle, to cry out. That would be the circle. We smile. The baby smiles. But, of course, it does not, it cannot, end there. What happens next? We pick up the baby, we smell the baby, we cuddle the baby. If someone were watching, who would they say is the giver, and who is the receiver? There really is no distinction. The whole exchange has become a spiral of love and gratitude, never complete.
This spiral, I have said earlier, is found in a benediction I brought here twenty-three years ago, and it has become a part of us, and we have re-gifted its parts until who knows who is the giver and who is the receiver? And what about the spiral of gratitude that came right up against us eighteen months ago in our relationship with the good people of our partner Unitarian Church in Szekeleykerezstur in the Province of Transylvania in the country of Romania. The casual observer, evident by all our tentative first steps, would have seen a people there so in need, suffering under Ceaucescu and his brutal oppression of ethnic minorities, so little infrastructure in these small villages, little farming equipment, roads in poor condition, few cars then out in the country, a barter economy, our partner minister there making the equivalent of $50/month.
And we Americans, we Concordians, awash in cash and things, we can heat their sanctuary, buy the minister a car, renovate their parish hall, supplement the minister’s salary, send them a portion of our Christmas Eve offering, retile the roof, dig a trench, rebind the books. It’s so obvious. We are the givers. They are the receivers. That was true until that moment came along in September of 2009 and we were brought to our knees by their pledge of $10,600 to OUR Capital Campaign!! What if they’re the givers and we’re the receivers? What if the quality of their character and the hospitality of their being somehow stopped us in our tracks, and we are no longer the rich American riding in the big car, smoking a fat cigar, throwing dollar bills out the window?
“It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods,” writes David Whyte in our other reading for today. “I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love…”
We began with the line from our benediction, “hold on to what is good,” then words from parenting, with application to life itself, me and you, “remember who you are,” “do what you think is best,” the gift of a coat and coffee and love, immigration, Transylvania, the spiral of gratitude, a monk, a burro, a pear, a touch, love frees. And then the poet here at the last: “I want to know if … you can look with firm eyes saying this is where I stand,” this is where I stand, this is my spiritual core, this is where the impulses for all that is good in me are found.
The rhythm of the benediction in its first lines flows one into the other: “Go out into the world… have courage… hold on to what is good.” Hold on to the core of what makes you the best you can be, we are saying. The world will sometimes try to pull you apart, the world will sometimes try to make you forget who you are, the world will sometimes draw out the worst in you and not the best, but, and this what we say to each other as a prayer, as a plea, as a reminder, please, please, hold on to what is good.
“Once in a while, a kind monk comes to [the burro’s] stable and brings a pear, but more than that, he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears, and for a few seconds, the burro is free and even seems to laugh, because love does that. Love frees.”