An Irish Blessing
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- Created on Sunday, 19 April 2009 01:00
- Written by Angela Herrera
{player 2009-04-19-11am-sermon.mp3}
Reading: Blessing, by John O’Donohue
blessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.
may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
may the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.
may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.
may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.
may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
An Irish Blessing
You made it through tax season. I made it through holy week: Maundy Thursday, Passover, Easter. Spring has emerged, shy but clear. Tomorrow is Patriot’s day and many of us will be greeting each other in the streets. Wednesday is Earth Day. And in eight weeks time, my internship here in Concord will end. Although I’ll be here until June, this is the last sermon I will give as your ministerial intern. And what I want to leave with you is a good old-fashioned Irish blessing, the one I read to you a few minutes ago. Don’t worry if you forgot some of it already. I want to walk through it together anyway, lingering on a few lines. And if you are visiting or are new to the church, this blessing is for you too.
They are the words of John O’Donohue, a Catholic Irishman who was ordained into the priesthood in the 1990’s only to leave it within the same decade, saying that he felt “the oxygen was too scarce.”
Blessed be the longing that brought you here and quickens your soul with wonder, he begins. Perhaps this clicks with you right away. Your life has been a journey, a spiritual journey, and you can see some of the milestones behind you now. You have come to trust that wherever you are, it is part of a larger narrative, a larger journey, and that the present moment’s place in the overall scheme will come into view soon if it isn’t clear now. It isn’t so much that the universe has a plan for you, and that this plan makes itself obvious. It’s that you are getting good at tracing the thread of your own longing in life, and how it has led you to some experiences, and through others.
On the other hand, my Buddhist colleague, Karuna, was fond of saying that enlightenment can happen at any time, but holding onto it is really hard. If you’re like me, you come into wisdom only to forget it again for a while, and then relearn it, and then maybe forget it some more.
If tax season was especially hard on you this year, or if you were rooting for the Celtics during overtime yesterday, or—especially—if you are aching with the unfolding of something painful in your life this morning, maybe you are wondering where exactly John O’Donohue thinks you are that it is so blessed. You wouldn’t have longed to be here, and neither would he, thank you very much.
But then if we’re lucky we remember that this is the longing to change things that are beyond our control. It’s understandable, universal, and can lead to the kind of longing O’Donohue is really referring to, which is the longing to find meaning in living lives in which we don’t have control over everything. The longing for spiritual depth.
It is this longing that gives birth to:
the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
You know that voice. The one that you always find it hard to hear, because you’re paying attention to other things? Or at least, you’re trying to pay attention to other things. But on some level perhaps you do still hear this voice, because somehow it makes you are cranky when you think you should be happy, and it’s why you feel restless, and why, when you’ve tried to solve the things you thought were the problems, everything still seems unresolved. You’ve been feeling safe. And now here is this voice: the vexing inability to stagnate. There may be perfectly good rational arguments for staying exactly the same, but you feel incomplete. Your soul is on the move. It wants to grow. It doesn’t care if you keep your line of work, or change your look, or move away, or find a new love. It wants you to do the thing that makes you uncomfortable: it wants you to look deeply within.
… may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
I sent my dad in Oregon a birthday card this week that said, “Do one thing that scares you every day.” I included a bottle of my favorite lavender scented scouring powder, and on the inside of the card I wrote, “You can start by cleaning your shower.” I was teasing. He’s getting his house ready for his new wife to move in next month.
I do like the card though. I don’t think it’s about crossing over your personal boundaries willy-nilly. It isn’t about being addicted to adrenaline, or crisis, or change. We have to watch out for those things because they distract us from the voice. This blessing is about looking directly at the life things that make us uneasy: commitment, closeness, aging. Honesty, conflict, losing everything. Or how about having everything and then saying, “is this all there is?” Scary.
Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. You have a Unitarian Universalist community at First Parish. A place with a vision in which even if your unease includes religion itself, perhaps you will feel safe enough to enter into that unease, knowing you are not required to accept any creed, and your doubts are acceptable. You are invited in, with your mind and your heart. So may you enter generously into unease, and
may the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul…
…may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world
May your mind in habit your life with the sureness with which your body inhabits the world. I think of the title of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Wherever You Go There You Are. It’s about being present, as much in mind as you are in body. How many times has your mind wandered during this service? Don’t feel bad, it happens to everyone. It’s why ministers repeat themselves so much. We know half of you won’t even notice. Surely it isn’t because our own minds were wandering the first time we said it…
It’s hard to sustain focus. In Buddhism they call this the monkey mind. It jumps around all over the place. And yet, it is possible to get a little better at presence. Just by learning to notice when we have monkey mind. And eventually, this practice of noticing what your mind is doing will bring your mind more fully to all areas of your life, which means it will bring you more fully to all areas of your life. You’ll notice what you have been doing without thinking, and it will surprise you.
May your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
Divine urgency. This is something I understand with my heart before I understand it with my head. But if I were going to talk about it from the head, I’d want to begin by saying that I think the question of whether or not God exists is a misleading one. It can only lead to another question, which is “What do you mean by God?” If you ask this of enough people, you’ll find that there is a spectrum of belief. On one end is the God most of us do not mean. You know him, though. He seems to be the best thing people can come up with when they try to take the Bible very literally. He’s wrathful and loving, deliberate and mysterious, all-powerful and sits on a throne above this wounded world. He has prompted many apologias, and especially many refutations, some of which are as wrathful as their object. Urgency on this end of the spectrum is the result of a divine commandment: “Do it or else.”
On the other end of the spectrum is a very dry kind of secular humanism. It maintains that humankind, not some higher power, is the pinnacle of evolution. According to this other far end of the spectrum, there is nothing at all beyond what we can discover by science or reason. It has been criticized for seeming too sterile, and not accounting for emotional or relational ways of knowing. This philosophy has also prompted a many apologias of its own, and many refutations, some of which were as lacking in inspiration as their object. Urgency on this end of the spectrum is human-made, or perhaps a by-product of existential dread: “You only live once.”
Most folks fall somewhere in between. On the more theistic side of center is a belief that there is some kind of greater spirit in the universe. A force that might also be called Love. People who have had direct experiences of this God often find it hard to put into words. If they speak up, they find themselves speaking in metaphors. Often the metaphorical images of Christianity or another world religion suffice, and the person’s relationship with the holy is deepened within the existing framework of their lifelong tradition. They perceive literal interpretations of such images as misunderstandings. Divine urgency comes from the longing to live in a way that puts one in right relationship with that greater Spirit or Love, because it makes one feel whole, and authentic, and more fully alive to life.
On the more humanist side of center is something like what religious humanist William R. Murray describes in Reason and Reverence, a perspective that finds meaning in the natural world. He speaks of nature’s unconceivable vastness as the ground of our being. We are born out of it, into an ever more reciprocal relationship. He quotes David Bumbaugh who marvels, “The universe itself is continually incarnating itself in microbes and maples, in hummingbirds and human beings, constantly inviting us to tease out the revelation contained in stars and atoms and every living thing.”
Murray also draws on the work of Karen Armstrong, who defines “the religious quest” not as the process of “discovering ‘the truth’ or ‘the meaning of life,’ but [of discovering] how to be fully human.” The sense of urgency, then, comes from a religious longing to be more fully human or whole.
If we answer the question of whether God exists by placing ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, I think there is actually quite a bit of overlap in the middle, of people who don’t use the word God to describe the ground of our being, and those who do, but whose theologies are actually quite similar. The question ceases to be as important as the shared urgency to be more fully alive, more fully human, closer to God, or closer to wholeness.
And because our relationship is reciprocal, this is what this vast interconnected universe needs from us. The voice of desire, the unease, the longing for wholeness are what make humans unique. It’s what sets off these debates, and what prompts us to bless each other as John O’Donohue has done. Wholeness and the sense of belonging and interconnectedness with each other and with nature is needed in order to restore balance to this world, to creation, to this thing that—like each of you—is somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.
In a moment we’ll rise up and sing together, and then we’ll be on our way again. But first, here is the whole blessing once more. If there is one line that you like, I hope you’ll take it with you through your week.
Blessing, by John O’Donoghueblessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.
may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.
may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.
may the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.
may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.
may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.
may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.
may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.
may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
Bumbaugh and Armstrong both qtd. in the Murray book, Reason and Reverence: Religion for the 21st Century. Skinner House: Boston, 2007.