Some Brief Reflections and Some Poems
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 09 November 2008 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
(Note that there is no podcast of this sermon)
We’re doing something a little bit different with the sermon slot today, call it an “unannounced special” if you will, or maybe you are thinking a “bait and switch.” I need to say a word here about myself and this past week and what it means to align oneself with the task of writing a sermon in the midst of such a week. It was just ten days ago, on our last day in Israel, that I visited Yad Vashem, the Jewish National Museum to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It will take me time to incorporate that experience, “incorporate,” take the experience into myself, much less find words to describe it. Shall I say that I was shaken to my core at what one human being can do to another? Unitarian Universalism can too often walk on the sunny side of the street and avert our attention to the evil that lurks nearby.
It was just last weekend, until Tuesday, that we hosted the twenty-four ministers we saw before us here last Sunday, standing here to light our chalice, being here to meet with ministers and staff to understand how we do what we do. They were intense and earnest, and I was jet-lagged.
It was just Tuesday, into Wednesday, that we witnessed the results of the election; no matter what candidate we preferred, it was an emotional day and night. Our prayers go out to all our leaders who are always imperfect, who can never live up to our expectations. But it is a new day, and we are hungry for hope.
It was just this past Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, that the driveway and parking have been paved at Lexington Road, granite curbing is going in, the new sound system is being adjusted, the lower hallway is being sheet rocked, workers are scrambling inside and out to make it possible for us to return by the end of the month.
It is raining and the work on the elevator shaft is suspended. We need temporary heat in the sanctuary before the carpet runners can be laid. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. The theological theme for the month is Gratitude, I remind myself; Thanksgiving cannot be far off. The stock market is tumbling, unemployment is climbing, we are here together. And, as I write, here at the homiletical fork in the road with the choice of afflicting the comfortable or comforting the afflicted, I am choosing the latter. In a moment, Angela and I are going to read you four poems.
I am taking you where I go when I am riding an emotional roller coaster and want to get off. I am sharing with you a discipline I have taken upon myself in recent years to bring some center to my busy life. I have turned to poetry, and I thought once this would be a sermon about “why” poetry, but instead today we will read poetry. My friend Laurel Hallman, minister in Dallas, now a candidate for President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, said once that what might “save us from ourselves” is poetry.
And by that she says she means “words and phrases… that point beyond themselves to the depth of human experience. I believe that poetry is scripture,” she said. “I believe that scripture is poetry. I believe that poetry is the way deep truth is transmitted person to person and generation to generation. I believe that when Emily Dickinson said, ‘tell the truth/but tell it slant’ she was speaking of metaphorical truth, the poetic truth that nourishes the heart, and opens the mind, and communicates to the depths. By poetry, I mean the products of the religious imagination.”
In The Meeting House News are two websites from which I receive each day a poem. They are waiting for me each morning when I awake and they are a gift from cyber space to me, and I am grateful (there’s the word). And so listen to these poems about poetry. And then we will sing and go home – to a new week.
How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Wendell Berry
(Given New Poems)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
Out of the silence, like prayers
Prayed back to the one who prays,
Make a poem that does not disturb
The silence from which it came.
How Poems are Made/A Discredited View
Alice Walker
Letting go
In order to hold one
I gradually understand
How poems are made.There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
The leftover love.
The love that spills out
Of the too full cup
And runs and hides
Its too full self
In shame.I gradually comprehend
How poems are made.
To the upbeat flight of memories.
The flagged beats of the running
Heart.I understand how poems are made.
They are the tears
That season the smile.
The stiff-neck laughter
That crowds the throat.
The leftover love.
I know how poems are made.There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.
The Secret
Denise Levertov
(Selected Poems)
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not evenwhat line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so thata thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
linesin other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
forassuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
The Place in the Ways
Muriel Rukeyser
From The Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. 1978
Having come to this place
I set out once again
on the dark and marvelous way
from where I began:
belief in the love of the world,
woman, spirit, and man.
Having failed in all things
I enter a new age
seeing the old ways as toys,
the houses of a stage
painted and long forgot;
and I find love and rage.
Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year
and always less self-pity
since I know in a clearer light
the strength of the mystery.
And at this place in the ways
I wait for song.
My poem-hand still, on the paper,
all night long.
Poems in throat and hand, asleep,
and my storm beating strong!