Becoming Who We Are: A Sermon for Lent
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- Created on Sunday, 27 March 2011 01:00
- Written by Jenny M. Rankin
{player 2011-03-27-9am-sermon.mp3}
Two Readings by William Stafford:
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.You Reading This, Be Ready
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
I’m thinking about journeys today, the Lenten idea of a spiritual journey, one that takes us inside, exploring our “inner latitudes” as Thoreau put it. And I’m thinking of an outward journey I’ll take in a few days with some of you. A group of us from First Parish will get on a plane to Paris this coming Thursday.
We are going to follow in the footsteps of our spiritual ancestors, Transcendentalists, people Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke. We are going to walk where they walked, read what they wrote, and try to look inside their souls a little, and perhaps our own.
Not bad work if you can get it!
Now I realize that to put “Paris” and “Lenten discipline” in the same sentence is, well, stretching things a little….perhaps more than a little!
But hear me out.
The last time I was in Paris I was twenty-something--
I had just graduated from college, history major, unsure of next steps
So when a friend said she was going to Paris for a year, and would I like to go, well
It seemed like as good idea at the time as any other and we were off.
She came home after 2 months, I stayed on, speaking such terrible French, finding a job (in a law office where no one spoke English!, making my way.
I loved Paris, loved the stone, the cathedrals, the back streets, the markets.
It was a year of possibility and discovery, an
I was lonelier than I had ever been before, more than I thought possible.
Paris was a year of power and pain and it touched me and changed me in ways I probably still don’t completely understand.
I am thinking of getting on that plane and wondering what it will mean to return to Paris, this place that holds such a rich and complicated place in my own spiritual journey, my own becoming.
* * *
“You,” the poet says, “You reading this, be ready.”
“Starting here,” the poet writes, “what do you want to remember?
how sunlight creeps along a shining floor
what scent of old wood hovers
what softened sound from outside fills the air?”
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect
that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?”
“Starting here what do you want to remember?” To me, that’s not a bad question to ask here in these last days of March
when the days greet us with almost unfathomable news
of earthquakes and protests and air strikes and revolutions.
In these days when the air is cold and the light is bright,
the light like buttermilk sun washing over the landscape,
These days when the river brims full and fuller, flooding its banks, changing the contours of this land where we live.
“Starting here, what do you want to remember?”
We Unitarian Universalists like to saw we draw inspiration from all the world religions, but I confess that sometimes I think we are more open to the wisdom of say, Buddhism, than to Christianity. There are many reasons for this. Now we get another opportunity. We are into the season of Lent in the Christian calendar.
Lent, the six weeks before Easter, it is time for spiritual preparation.
A kind of spring cleaning for the soul, if you will: clearing things out, straightening up, sprucing up, getting ready, for the new life that is promised to us at Easter.
The liturgical color is purple (like my stole today).
The tone can be penitential.
Lent reminds me of the Jewish High Holy Days in the fall—it is a time of stock taking, looking inward, making amends.
It’s the time we tell the story of Jesus who, right before he started his ministry, went out into the desert for 40 days. He fasted and prayed and the devil came and tempted him—with great wealth, power, knowledge—tempted him away from being the person he was trying to come, this young man just starting out.
And so Lent, 40 days for us that may be a time of sacrifice, prayer, wrestling with our own temptations.
The neighborhood children sit in my kitchen at the counter and talk about what they’re giving up for Lent. “But you’re not Catholic,” I say, “No, but my friend is doing it so I am too.” They talk of giving up sugar, chocolate, gum. Trying not to fight with a sibling.
Lent reminds us of spiritual disciplines that turn us inside out, open us up to new things. Reminds us that deprivation is not necessarily a bad thing.
Philip Larkin the great 20th century English poet, was known to be something of a curmudgeon. He was also always trying to simplify his life, clear things out of the way, get rid of distractions. The thing he like best to do in almost all the world was spend hours in one of those immersion tanks, suspended in water. floating there he said, away from it all, his inner life came alive to him. It was more vibrant there than anywhere else.
“Deprivation,” he said once, “is my daffodil.”
So often, we do mainly think of Lent as “giving up” and I respect that and some years I give up something as my spiritual practise.
But this year, I’m thinking of Lent less as a “giving up” and more as a “going towards.”
Going towards becoming more the people we most want to be, going towards becoming the person that perhaps we were created to be, but that has gotten covered over, covered up,
by the masks that we wear, by the titles we bear, by the expectations of others
covered over by the lists we carry, the distraction, duties, busyness.
Lent not so much as a “giving up” but as a “going towards”
Who can tell precisely what it is that obscures the light of your soul, the light of mine?
“Here’s how I became myself,” writes Anne Lamott,
“mess,
failure,
mistakes,
disappointments,
and extensive reading;
limbo,
indecision,
setbacks,
addiction,
public embarrassment
and endless conversations with my best women friends;
the loss of people without whom I could not live
the loss of pets that left me reeling
dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty
and overall,
choosing as my motto
William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.”
“You have to make mistakes to find out what you aren’t,” writes Anne Lamott. “You take the action and the insight follows: you don’t think your way into becoming yourself.”
Lent is a time of considering these things, considering how far we may have strayed from our true self, our true north, our moral compass, the life we most want to be living.
It is a season of the year, but really, to me, it is a season of the soul.
Because we can do this inner work at any time, any month of the calendar year, but let’s face it, we don’t, do we? It’s hard work, and so we avoid it, we defer it, we put it way over there. And so our religious tradition comes along and puts it right down on the calendar, says “now is the time,” It is Yom Kippur, it is Lent, it is time to look inside, consider your souls, take stock.
Religious traditions have the wisdom to call us to a discipline, a spiritual discipline, we can’t always muster up on our own.
“Some time when the river is ice,” writes the poet, “ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.”
Parker Palmer, the Quaker writer and teacher, says for some people that poem is just words, language that flows together and maybe doesn’t even make a lot of sense.
“But for others,” he writes, “and I am one, the poet’s words will be precise, piercing and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clear—if I have eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? who am I meant to be?”
Parker says there is a life that wants to live inside each one of us and our job is sometimes to just try and get out of the way! “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”
“Ask me mistakes I have made.”
Lent is a season of the soul when we consider mistakes we have made and feel the relief of knowing we all make them,
feel the relief that comes when we name what it is to be human, the flaws and frailties we all carry as well as the strength, the possibilities, the amazing light that can shine out from each one of us.
In Lent, we name again our humanity in all of its glory and all of its brokenness.
Lent to me this year is more about “going towards” than “giving up” something.
It’s not something we do in one big dramatic gesture and then it is over and done with.
It is day by day. Little by little. Bit by bit.
How will I be today? How do I want to be toay? How am I called to be today? Called by God called by the spirit of life, called by the universe, called by the deepest part inside of me, called by all that is good and true.
How am I called to be today? what is my spiritual challenge today? what is my spiritual practise today?
I don’t know what it is for you. I can only know try to know what it is for me, and sometimes it’s hard. Hard to figure out that next step.
For Anne Lamott, the next step was what she calls a “full stop.”
“I had to stop living unconsciously,” she writes,
as if I had all the time in the world.
the love and good an the wild an the peace and creation that are you WILL reveal themselves,
but it is harder when you are in roadrunner mode.
So one day I did stop.
I began consciously to break the rules I learned in childhood:
I wasted more time, as a radical act.
I stared off into space more . . . . .
Every single day I try to figure out something I no longer agree to do.”
Not doing.
She gave up doing. That was her spiritual practise. Imagine!
She did less. She stared into space. Day dreamed, mused.
That is what her soul needed.
her soul as a writer, her soul as an artist. her soul as a person, a woman, a mother, a friend.
I like that idea.
I like the wasting more time idea
I like the staring off into space
a kind of modern spin on the ancient art of contemplation,
the ancient wisdom that to find our own souls sometimes we have to stop
and let silence have its way
let nothingness have its way
let nature have its way
we have to stop and let ourselves be found,
by something larger or more grace-given or more beautiful,
Let ourselves be found by possibilities we could never have imagined in the first place.
* *
This week, I’m thinking about journeys, inward and outward. I’m thinking of where I’ve come from and what has shaped me. I am thinking of Paris.
The truth is we are always on a journey, a spiritual journey, not just during Lent.
The journey to becoming who we are, the journey of “going towards” a more authentic life
is not usually a soft and easy one; it can be treacherous; it can be tricky and dangerous, with plenty of wrong turns, detours and “roads out” along the way.
Still, Lent is an invitation, and invitations always beckon to us.
Come, we say to one another in Lent, as we offer this invitation to one another:
Come, let’s leave the shore behind, put out into deep water, see what will happen, see what we’ll encounter, what will turn up, how we might be changed.
Trust in the lure of the open sea, the wide sky.
It has never let us down before.
Backwards lies the way of comfort, of holing up, of security, the way of no growth.
Forward lies the trackless sea,
stars overhead
wind on the face
Forward lies the way unknown
Come we say to one another as we put out our hand and invite each other into this Lenten spiritual journey of discovery and exploration.
Come, let us travel the pilgrim way, let us travel it together.
Notes
William Blake actually said “we are put here to learn to bear the beams of love.”
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Inner Voice of Vocation, (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1999).