I begin with a reading by Nancy Shaffer, from her book of meditations, Instructions in Joy.
Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,
and also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
how much is gone and we hadn't intended it
because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
but also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides because we are so many
and we want to live right where black oaks lived,
once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in before,
remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy
and how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly found and held
and also forget the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. It’s one of the days from the Jewish calendar that presses itself into me, not so much on the day itself, but in the time of year. In those days after Rosh Hashanah when the air turns crisp, when the pumpkins in my garden turn orange. It’s a time of turning, not just for the weather, the pumpkins, the season itself, but for us, for the human part of creation. How wise the ancient Jews who thought to observe this time, to reflect on what has bent askew, what has fallen or been pushed out of right relation.
What milk have we spilled, or poured unnecessarily? What lives have we overturned? In what relationships have we made holes? Where and when and for what do we need to atone?
Atonement parses into at-one-ment, which appears the simplest way to get at the heart of this day. Observant Jews set aside the ten days between the New Year and Yom Kippur to take inventory, to tally the tears and fissures, to note the unkempt words, the careless actions, the slivers of meanness that may have chipped away from our own pain or frustration. And then, the tally taken, observers of Yom Kippur consider as their Buddhist brethren and sisters do, what right action to take to restore balance and harmony. What amends must be made? What change need occur to re-establish trust and cooperation? What must one do to feel at home in oneself and thus able to welcome another?
Yom Kippur extends beyond contemplation into action. Regret is not sufficient. Though we find the virtue of humility embedded in remorse, Yom Kippur summons us to the virtue of courage as well. It summons us to wake early, to pad into the kitchen in our jammies and robe and sit at the table where the milk has spilled—to reckon with how much is gone that we never intended to lose.
Yom Kippur calls to us in the middle of the night when the branches outside our windows stir. We hear it in the tapping wind and creaking panes of glass urging us back in the rooms we wandered out of forgetting why we were there.
What did we promise ourselves that we have not kept? Where have we trailed off from our essence, the nature of our being that requires adherence lest we lose integrity? It has become easier to let slip the who of what we are.
In the last several months I have noticed during the excavation of self-reflection, that for the first time in my life I am completely at home. Home in my body and in my being—the ways I am, the essential nature that makes me Leaf. I am at home with you in this joyous ministry. I am at home where I live, in the house I inhabit, in the woods that surround me, in the region that holds me. I am at home in the friendships and kinships that sustain me as lovingly as the trees.
I share this because the recognition of being home now allows me to understand how all the years of not being home in one way or another—in body or spirit or place—caused a great deal of spillage. Nancy Shaffer in her lovely meditation speaks of “forget[ting] entire lexicons of joy and [losing] ourselves for hours yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.” How wise and true of her to note. To know in our experience of utter lost-ness, when we feel most untethered from what grounds us, that we are held, reminds me of a poem by David Wagoner called "Lost":
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
Herein lies the distinctive offer of Yom Kippur. We approach the day willing to atone, yearning to restore and be restored. We name the moments, the methods, the meanderings where we have lost ourselves, our bearings, our attention to right and wrong. We yield for a day or a week or the ten days and nights of awe, arms upraised, calling into the indigo scrim of sky, here, here is where I faltered. And from the depths overhead, the winds sings to us through the branches tapping on the window, get up, get up, and I will show you in the darkness how you have been held.
Yom Kippur is the day Jews make the way back home to God. The days preceding it are meant to find our way back into right relation with self, followed by a restoration of relation with other human beings and as I see it, all the beings beyond human that sustain us: the earth and its creatures, its flora and fauna and waters and stone. Perhaps for some it is the collectivity of the cosmos and all its being that comprises the God or Godness that await us on Yom Kippur. When we reach the day, having done our best to align ourselves, to resume or at least attempt living right-sized, we are ready to place ourselves in the presence of the tree of life, the burning bush. If the value of doing so eludes us, if we are lost to the purpose of God, that thrum of being that holds us in our waking and our sleep, our living and our death, the gift is that the forest knows where [we] are.
To put it more biblically, it is Cain who having murdered his brother, calls out to God, “I shall be hidden from your face.”
Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
This is the gift—that we get to return. That we may feel lost, we may be lost. We may stray so far from the true edge of ourselves that we become something contrary to what we are meant to be. We may become foolhardy or unkind, greed-filled or wanton in our desires, careless with lexicons of expression and joy. We may roam so far from what we intended that we do not recognize the visage in the mirror staring back.
Or we may feel lost not by virtue of our own wandering, but by the mighty tosses of fate, the gales and riptides of life that unseat us. Uprooted we raise our tiny fists to God, we bellow or shriek our curses into the brooding sky, forgetting it reaches down to meet us. Anything above ground is sky. We hold onto that image of sky as the blue overhead because it looks clear in front of us, but the sky’s embrace is everywhere—or as Julian of Norwich, the 14th century Christian mystic put it: “ in falling and rising again we are kept in the same precious love.”
We get to return because we are never forsaken. Sure, God as rendered in the fourth chapter of Genesis. booms to Cain. “You will be a fugitive and a wanderer. When you till the ground it will no longer yield to you its strength,” but the same human imagination that penned those lines, that conceived God thoroughly brokenhearted by the blood Cain spilled, went on to write, “And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Nod meaning wandering. The land of wandering. A prescient forbear recounts the consequence of fracture: the brokenness of Cain, the brokenness of Abel, the brokenness of God. In our wandering we feel lost but we remain found. Attached to the cosmos that spawns us and never lets us go, not in our dying, not even in the spilling of another’s blood. We are held, but it is our journey to return to the awareness of embrace.
That is the summons of Yom Kippur, to return to that awareness.
In the words of Nancy Shaffer, “Yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.”
And—
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yom Kippur, in its own ironic or non-ironic way is about salvation: the kind that comes from turning and returning. Not from a man nailed to a cross. Not from an angel on high who assures disruption, but from the human capacity to stand still: before a tree, a burning bush, even a mirror, before the creatures with whom we share creation and re-create our lives each day—to still ourselves so that we may be found—by the wind that upturns the silver back of leaves, by the indigo sky that can always place us in the darkest night, by the churning waters that recognize us whirling in the undertow.
Whoever you are, wherever you may be, stand still and let the forest find you. Yom Kippur invites us to be found, to rediscover not just the true edges of self but the real not imagined permeations of being: the embrace of God, of a cosmos that holds us, that waits patiently for us to turn back, to lift our face to the sky and head home again. Amen.
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish Fitchburg UU 19 Sept. 2010
