What's Larger Than Us?

Over twenty years ago, I ventured into the halls of AA. I didn’t have a drinking problem so much as a thinking problem. I thought about driving off the road. I didn’t want to die: I just wanted relief from the profound dis-ease I felt inside myself all the time despite outward accomplishment: grad school, college instructorship, friends, a nice apartment. It was during the era when I taught in prison and the woman who invited me to accompany her to an AA meeting said, “It’s no wonder you work in a prison; you live in one.” Ouch! But she was right and I knew it. I couldn’t have told you exactly what was imprisoning me but I felt the constraint so I went with her to a meeting in an upscale Catholic church thinking I was on an anthropological field trip to observe another species: alcoholics. As I said, I didn’t having drinking problem because I did not drink. I avoided alcohol and didn’t care for the effects, but curiously, I found myself identifying heavily with everyone who spoke. Not the details about DUIs, hangovers or hidden bottles: but the feelings I heard described were my own.
Because the hour spent in a meeting provided the only hour of relief from that feeling of dis-ease, I kept going, still thinking myself a visitor but a grateful one nonetheless. For those of you unfamiliar with AA or the other Twelve Step programs, spirituality is a big piece. That first meeting, a big blue felt banner hung on the podium that read “But for the Grace of God.” I recall thinking, well that’s just fine for these people but what are the rest of us to do?

People in meetings kept mentioning a higher power. Everyone needed one, no matter what it was: Nature, God, the Goddess or G.O.D —good orderly direction or group of drunks. Something beyond the self to turn to, or turn it over to and let go. For me, the phrase conjured some sort of elevated sovereign being which just wasn’t a resonant metaphor so I would sit in meetings held in church basements and peer out a window usually at the street level, thinking there’s a world going on out there that gives no thought to those of us inside this room at ten on a Monday morning or eight on a Wednesday night; but here we are, all searching for something larger. And that’s when it hit me: the idea of a larger power, not a higher one. I realized each morning we wake unto a world already in action. We re-enter consciousness from the sleepy world of our dreams and there it is in all its glory: the universe humming along. As odd as it sounds, it might have been the first time I recognized, or more accurately, felt, for it was more sensation than cognition—that I belong, that we all belong to something larger than ourselves.

When I was a kid I used to terrify myself worrying that I had dreamed up the entire world: that it was just a figment of my imagination and when I woke up I would be all alone in the blackness of space. Finally, I told my best friend who said she had thought the same thing—which somehow instantly reassured me I was not in fact alone, unless of course I had dreamed her up, too. I suspect whether or not we have a childish moment of solipicism where we fear we might have thought up everything from string theory to the entire canon of Mozart, deep down many of us have experienced at least a flash of feeling terribly alone: not solitary in a contented way: but truly unstrung like the moment the obstetrician severs the umbilical cord. Suddenly the world is awash in unfamiliar sounds and smells, lights, temperatures, textures. Gone is the familiar slosh of amniotic fluid, the safe confines of a womb inside a larger being that notices and hopefully cares.

My students often presume humans created religion solely as a way to explain otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena. The new field of neurotheology examines where in our brains the religious impulse comes from and how the brain apprehends religious experience. But it occurs to me on some pre-conscious level, or perhaps simply a pre-natal one, we literally enter the world as we come to know it, with the initial experience of being part of something larger; and once we slip through the birth canal into the delivery room: be it home or hospital or the back of a cab, we sense the sudden shift and seek to recreate the experience of belonging we’ve already had.

When we study religion: eastern, western, animist, monotheist, polytheist, earth-based or otherwise, we encounter story. Great and often overlapping narratives that at the core offer us belonging. Creation stories may attempt to explain how we got here or how life first formed; but more essentially, they contextualize our individual beginning within a meta-origin that continues to hold us. We think of story as a human invention or impulse indicative of how our brain works: how memory, imagination and consciousness coalesce: all of which may be true.  But a bit like my child-self thinking I had dreamed up the world, we believe we have conjured story when in actuality we don’t create story so much as inhabit it.

As one of my students wrote in his research essay on what comprises reality, except for astronauts who have viewed the earth from space, humans don’t typically perceive the ground we live on as spherical. We know cognitively that the planet is round but our senses don’t relay that information; we encounter it as an idea. We experience our lives unfolding on a horizontal plane when in reality gravity affixes us to a point on an arc. In the same way, we appear to fabricate stories from memory and imagination, the gravitational pull of narrative connects us to the greater story of life unfolding.

We speak of our legacy, how we live on in the memory of others through the stories they tell that attest to our influence; but even after the last person who knows us dies, our story still exists. Whether or not it resides in human consciousness, our story remains in the narrative fabric of earth where we have trod and in the molecules of air we exhaled, in the long forgotten cells sloughed off our bodies and the heat that once emanated from us. Our very being belongs to a world that contains us regardless of corporeal form.

Such a perspective is what I call mosaic: enough distance to see the complete picture. Views from the Hubble telescope can depict Earth from multiple angles though not all at once; but even a telescope so powerful cannot capture the entirety of our galaxy, much less all the other solar systems out there. It’s not a readily available perspective so we create stories to stitch us into place, to mark the dot in the swirling galaxy that indicates: we are here. The distinctly tribal narratives of Genesis and Exodus reflect the need to know our place in the scheme of things. To identify with a particular clan or collective recreates a sense of prenatal belonging. Once again we know we are part of something larger.

We rely on stories, biblical or literary, scientific, even musical to instruct and assure us we belong.

That’s the power of AA and other Twelve-Step programs: creating a safe space for individual stories others identify with so that no one feels unique or more importantly isolated, unreachable, alone. As much as an insistence on having a higher or larger power may appear dictatorial, it isn’t. It’s just wise. The isolation of addiction is not unique. It is an intense and potentially deadly form, but as prosaic that the isolation of anyone else. Most if not all of us know the feeling of floating like a dust mote disconnected. The concept of a larger power is but a metaphor for the source of our being; be it a long-dead star, an accumulation of atoms, or the breath of the universe mysteriously and miraculously coalesced into human form.

Dust motes don’t exist in a vacuum. Well, they may end up in one, but dust though it seems disconnected gives evidence of what exists and has existed. Dust may be the original storyteller.

Macro- and microscopic worlds include us even when we don’t consciously perceive our inclusion. Many years ago on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland I noticed

the untamed grasses tickling

the clear belly of sky…

the ground plump with stories,

mist unfurling secrets

to the intricate workings

of villages blossoming

in the scrub brush

a world chattering around our ankles.

On woods walks with my dog, Zuki I often get lost in my thoughts but then she sniffs and upends a tuft of fur and I realize the woods teem with stories of life and death. The voles and mice, fox and deer, coyotes and porcupines, owls and woodpeckers, the hawks and wild turkeys inhabit an intricate expansive world far greater than my ability to imagine—and with each step that jostles a twig or rustles leaves, Zuki and I enter the narrative, leaving our scents and our dust, our spent oxygen, and she, her scat for other creatures to decipher just as intently as she reads theirs.

What’s larger than us? Everything. The trees more plentiful; the underground fungi more prolific; oceans, mountains, sky, galaxies. And stories. Something as vast as the Himalayas or as complex as the mathematical underpinnings of a multiverse lacks the intimacy we long to return to, the containment of belonging we seek, so we go in search of that and find it in AA drunkalogues and tall tales, in ballads and frescoes, poems and plays, quilts and recipes handed down for generations. We find it in archetypes and myths and pictographs etched into cave walls.

We craft stories to express ourselves: to exhale what we ingest; to make tangible what we imagine; to enrich the ongoing conversation; to demonstrate how our particular experience nuances the cosmic narrative. We engage with the stories of others to find the ways we fit and where we don’t because even when we feel we don’t fit in to this particular story or that particular crowd, we define ourselves within the meta-narrative.

When I was so sure I did not belong with the ones who talked about a higher power and kept saying “But for the grace of God,” I unwittingly returned to the story by Dr. Seuss where some of the sneetches had stars on their bellies while others did not. I spent my childhood and adolescence on the margins, and occasionally I wore that feeling of outsiderhood as a badge; but by early adulthood I remember wanting to be just another bozo on the bus. In my late twenties I spent several months sitting in AA meetings thinking I didn’t belong and wishing I did—because I felt better there, recognized and inside, no longer out. I’d been writing stories since childhood to understand the incomprehensible; and then years later, when and where I least expected, rooms full of strangers named and demystified the incomprehensible by telling their stories and nodding when I shared mine.

Thursday it snowed where I live so Zuki and I went trotting into the woods where the lattice of snow-laden branches sculpted a womb of trees and suddenly I knew why I have always sought to live at the forest’s edge.  As much as I love the beach and the expanse of ocean stretching toward the horizon, it is in the woods that I feel held. It is there I experience most vividly the sensation of belonging: where I meet what is larger and climb inside.

All of art, music, invention and discovery are larger than us. Grief and joy are larger. Hope and the indomitability of spirit are larger. The drive to survive, the replication of cells, the path of light traveling from red giants to our retinas here on earth, God, the ground of our being, the breath of the universe, mysteries and the ineffable: all larger than we are —and inseparable.  It is not just with our brains but with our sensory organs we can once again know how it feels to inhabit belonging. The more we notice, the more we listen to the stories that surround us in scrub-brush and anthills, in church basements and sanctuaries, in fallen logs and deer scat, supernovas and bacteria, the easier it is to feel again the pulsing umbilical cord that fastens us to the world wherever and whoever we are.

UUs Respond to Occupy Wall Street

Read "Occupy Your Faith" by Meck Groot in the Clara Barton and Massachusetts Bay Districts Unitarian Universalist Newsletter here.

Opening the Window

If you're a fan of the sermons posted here, you might also like to check out Reverend Seligman's new book:

Opening the Window: Sabbath Meditations
(Bauhan Publishing)

by Leaf Seligman

Why do we do what we do? What happens as a result? How do we make sense of, and find meaning in, our lives and in the world that contains us? How do we render wholeness out of brokenness, creating mosaics of beauty and functionality from the rent pieces of our lives? This collection of Sabbath meditations invites readers to inhabit the questions with intention and joy. With a pastor’s sensibility, a writer’s lyricism, and a generous heart, Leaf Seligman invokes poetry, thinking from diverse spiritual traditions, and stories from her own walk through life to grapple with enduring religious themes and contemporary challenges. It is the preacher’s responsibility to be of use, to choose words with great care, and open the window so spirit can move in and out, she writes in her afterword. Indeed, these meditations the words themselves and their call to a more fully understood, more deeply felt life resonate long after the bookmark is tucked into place and the covers closed. Read them slowly and deliberately. Let them be your company as you journey through the Sabbath and into the week.

The Given Life

Much has been written and reported the last couple of weeks on the legacy of Steve Jobs as an innovator and entrepreneur. He’s been compared to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and no doubt will take his place in history as one of the great creative minds in business. But there is more to Steve Jobs than Apple and Pixar, iPods and iTunes, iPhones and iPads. In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs offered three stories from his life: a distillation of lessons he presented with the simple elegant beauty of a Mac.[1]

Because we are Unitarian Universalists who draw inspiration from many sources, today I turn to the spiritual message embedded in a secular address. “Sometimes,” Jobs said, “Life hits you with a brick. Don’t lose faith.”

Like Job, Steve Jobs experienced the unexpected in acutely painful ways. Being fired at thirty from the company he co-founded at twenty, was in Jobs’ words, “Awful-tasting medicine.” Being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the cusp of fifty was a profoundly sobering fate. Yet Jobs told his audience at Stanford in 2005, “it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

I imagine some us here know the heft of success. I grew up hearing my mother tell me “the higher you climb, the farther you fall.” Though I experienced nothing like Steve Jobs’ incredible journey from a Reed College drop-out who started Apple in his parents’ garage to the head of a two billion dollar company in ten years, I know about being shiny, full of promise and burdened by a responsibility to fulfill it. Unlike Steve Jobs, I did not quit college; in fact I raced through Harvard Divinity School completing my coursework a semester early so that I could serve as the sabbatical member in my home congregation. Toward the end of the five-month stint as student minister covering for two full-time ministers on leave, somewhere deep within me, below the level of consciousness, a voice whispered, “I’m not ready.” Up in the sphere of consciousness, a louder voice rattled off my accomplishments. I had completed my coursework and satisfied the requirements for my thesis in a single draft. I had gotten glowing reviews on my two-year parish internship. I had successfully navigated the search process and been selected as a candidate at a desirable congregation. And I had managed to minister to my home congregation reasonably well in the stead of two seasoned professionals. It felt incumbent on me to proceed as expected: to collect my diploma, accept the call and get ordained.

I ignored the mumbling and pressed ahead. As Mr. Jobs so eloquently noted in his speech, when we ignore the internal rumbles of the psyche: the patterns that won’t go away, that nagging sense of something just beyond view that doesn’t disappear—the rumbles will dislodge a brick and send it hurtling down. Furiously trying to drown out the doubts and deep-seated exhaustion, I acted rashly and didn’t ask for help. Embarrassed by my lapse in judgment I ignored it. By the time the ministers returned and I revealed my mistakes, I had lost the opportunity to fit the brick back into the wall. Like Steve Jobs, I found myself suddenly unemployed, which felt like a colossal failure. I withdrew from my first call to a settled ministry, finally conscious something in me wasn’t ready though I did not yet know what or why. I hunkered down in a house next to a mountain, returned to therapy and volunteered as a chaplain at the county jail.

In the five years after Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, he founded NeXT then Pixar, which made “Toy Story,” the first computer-animated film—not only top grossing at the box-office but the movie that changed film animation forever. Then Apple acquired NeXT and Steve got his job back—and he met and married his wife.

 “You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the Stanford grads; “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Though nothing quite so successful happened for me that next year, I gradually began to discern the mumbling inside. I believed the dots would connect someday because trusting that was the only way to get there. Like Steve Jobs, I swallowed some pretty bitter medicine but I did not lose faith. I felt sad and empty and confused—and in the midst of it realized the universe held me. It sent a herd of deer that winter to feed at woods’ edge. It gave me the chance to sit with people whose medicine was far more acrid than mine. The universe gave me the hush I needed to hear the whisper; and the mountain stood as a testament to the beauty of what rises out of tumultuous change.

I didn’t start any companies that transformed multiple industries but I did get called to another congregation. I held onto the wisdom Jobs offered the graduates: “You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

But as we all know, it is never quite that simple. I departed for Canada to engage in the work I knew I loved and encountered a congregation full of great teachers: many lovely compassionate people and a few sharp-edged folks who taught me a great deal, including how to recognize a shoe that doesn’t fit properly especially when it’s a drag to go barefoot.

Jobs told the audience at Stanford,

I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I recall my mother’s response when I suddenly announced my desire to change plans upon graduating from college. She took me out on the front stoop and instructed me to look at the clouds moving swiftly overhead. “How often does the wind change direction?” She asked. “All the time,” I answered. To which she said, “Does it ever change the beauty of the night sky?”

When I knew it was time to go, I re-entered the search process only to find it did not yield the right match. I followed my heart back to New Hampshire anyway. I wanted to be near my mother and sister and return to a landscape more treed than peopled. I bought a house and trusted the work would follow. And it did. Steve Jobs is right: the dots do connect if we are patient enough to acquire the long view. Or as Emerson said in his famous essay, “Self-Reliance”: The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.”

Had I not faltered in that sabbatical ministry enough to dislodge myself from a pedestal I did not wish to be on, and from my own expectations foolishly wrought; had I not experienced the clarity of too many days that would not have sufficed as my last one, I would not be here. As Jobs says, “As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.”

He reminds us in his premature death as much as his words:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The wise Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister writes,

The sense of competence that comes with being in a position we want and work we can do is the fuel of energy. It gives a person a reason to strive, to achieve, to become co-creators of a better life for everyone. It gives both purpose and meaning to life. Then, no matter who applauds us, we are satisfied with ourselves. We’re giving everything we’ve got and doing everything we can to make this world a better place than it was when we got here. Then we know that we are on the verge of becoming everything we were ever meant to be. Then we know what it is to be happy.[2]

We all know something of life’s ups and downs, its falling bricks and bitter medicine. We know something of our own frailty and hopefully, our own inner-knowing. The pace and pressures of life rarely occasion the quietude we need to hear the psyche’s whisper or the soul’s calling. We hear the allure of success and its accolades. We hear the din of expectation. We taste disappointment and reach for something sweeter to swallow. But inside each of us is a voice making its way to the peak of our consciousness telling us every step that the dots will connect if we keep going, if we remain true to who and what we love, if we honor what we yearn for and keep the faith—especially when we falter.

The year I lived beside the mountain and marked the days by counting deer and sitting with prisoners, I learned about the freedom that comes in constraint. Without the distraction of the employment I had labored so hard to get, without the buzz of activity or even the hum of certainty or its illusion, I had time and stillness. Without that, the only dots I could have connected would have been bricks falling in a row.

The poet David Whyte writes, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.” Wendell Berry puts it this way: “We live the given life, not the planned.”

Accepting that is the only route to serenity I’ve found.

In the thick of my troubles, one of the ministers who returned from sabbatical said, “Five years from now all this might be the best thing that could happen.” I remember thinking that was the single most unpastoral, unhelpful comment I had ever heard. The timing was astoundingly insensitive. Five years later, I wasn’t ready to proclaim as Steve Jobs did, that the best thing that could have happened had; but I recognized the gifts that emerged as a result. Looking back the dots have led me here. And I am  grateful.

The day Steve Jobs delivered his Stanford address, he hoped to live for decades. Sadly, he did not. But he left behind more than several transformed industries. He left us with the sage advice to live each day in such a way—be it somewhere in the middle or the last—that we can say thank you, dayenu, amen.

---

[1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html?view=print

[2] from Happiness by Joan Chittister, published by Eerdmans

Holy Listening

          According to the Bangor Daily News, environmentalist and entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby is working to persuade Congress to authorize “a feasibility study of her plan to turn 70,000 acres adjoining Baxter State Park into a national park called The Great Maine Woods.… The Legislature passed a resolve in June opposing Quimby’s initiative.… Maine’s two Republican senators, the Maine Woods Coalition, [and other local groups] have opposed or expressed skepticism about Quimby’s plan.”[1]

Understandably in a troubled economy and a region beset by massive unemployment, people resist what appears to be in the common vernacular, a job-killer. Though proponents of the Great Main Woods National Park Initiative cite an increase in potential jobs related to tourism, opponents argue such a plan would derail efforts “to revitalize the region’s two paper mills, which if restarted could employ about 600 people at manufacturing wages, which are generally higher than tourism wages.”[2] The forest products industry—loggers, paper manufacturers, lumber companies—have a vested interest in protecting access to large tracts of land now privately owned. Not surprisingly, Maine’s U.S. senators and the state legislators are listening closely to the concerns and even the ire of their constituents and contributors. Loggers and their families vote. Forest product manufacturers contribute to political campaigns and send lobbyists to Congress and the statehouse.

I realized as I listened to a call-in public radio show about this initiative, bears can’t call in. Moose don’t vote. Owls don’t have checkbooks. The creatures: botanical, mammalian, insect, avian, aquatic don’t view their habitat as a commodity: a panoply of resources to be harvested, milled, sold. They don’t recognize borders: national, state, commercial, public or private; but I suspect they recognize at some level the intricate workings of the eco-system they sustain.

Here’s the rub. Of course jobs matter to the people who need them, and to the economy at large. And of course politicians are elected to represent their constituents— though the last couple of years many of us wonder whom our elected officials truly represent. The number one issue of the 2012 campaign according to every pundit out there: jobs. From a human point of view right here in the United States, few would disagree.

The problem is we’ve limited the conversation to ourselves. If wildlife could vote in Congress what would they authorize? I bet the polar bears would vote down arctic drilling and vote in cap and trade. Probably a senior states-bear would filibuster for massive regulation of carbon emissions and the penguins would propose new taxes to pay for new technologies to harness the energy sources they rely on: solar and wind.

The wolves and coyotes would vote to end all the leases of public land to ranchers. The raccoons, opossums, foxes and porcupines would call a halt to highway construction and repair. The deer might submit bills to levy taxes on developers whose subdivisions and strip malls eat up more and more of their land. The migratory birds might vote to shutter airports or restrict flight to engine-less craft. The dolphins, in solidarity with their global brethren, would cease trade and diplomatic relations with Japan until it stops the slaughter of dolphins there. And no doubt a coalition of species would enact legislation against light and noise pollution as quickly as they would dismantle the defense department and reallocate its budget to the EPA.

It’s not that our fellow creatures lack a voice; it’s that we don’t listen.

Diana Reiss, professor of cognitive psychology at Hunter College and her research team were “the first to show that Asian elephants and bottlenose dolphins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror—a complex feat of self-awareness previously thought to exist only in the great apes.”[3] In a recent radio interview Reiss explained,

I was really interested in decoding dolphin communication so I was studying their own forms of communication… recording their own signals with underwater microphones called hydrophones and bringing them into computers and trying to figure out what they were doing. But then I thought, well here's another path to try. What if we give them control over a keyboard? It's about 3 by 3' or a little smaller than that. It has white visual symbols on it. And the dolphin can hit any of those symbols —they all look slightly different. And if it hits for example…a triangle it would hit a computer generated whistle that we created. So the dolphin hits a triangle and it would hear a sound and we would give it a ball. If it hit a different shaped symbol it would hear a different signal and we'd rub it. And in this way we were in the situation where we had to respond to what the dolphin wanted. We… turned the tables completely... I don't like to train dolphins. I like to give them ways of reflecting their intelligence.[4]

          In the course I am teaching this term called “The Downside to Certainty,” we watch TED talks to expand our perspective. A recent one featured the Italian scientist, Stefano Mancuso who founded the field of plant neurobiology. “He and his team explore how plants communicate, or ‘signal’ with each other, using a complex internal analysis system to find nutrients, spread their species and even defend themselves against predators.”[5] He says of plants,

They are more sophisticated in sensing than animals. Every single root apex is able to detect and monitor concurrently and continuously at least fifteen different chemical and physical parameters. Plants are extraordinary communicators. They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. They communicate with plants and other species and communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles.[6]

           As a student of mine so aptly asked, “What would it mean to see plants as purposeful?”

          How would it change us and the world to listen to the whole conversation not just our own lines? How would the epic of creation unfold if we were to acknowledge there are no bit parts?

          My students readily acknowledge, even without the videos of elephants grieving and bonobos driving golf carts and playing Pac-man, animals experience emotion and exhibit impressive intellect; but the students resign themselves to cordoning off that information. They accept ignoring it as the easiest way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of behaving as though non-human beings are less perceptive, and thus less worthy—without actually believing it.

          It is not just plants and animals that communicate; the weather has certainly expressed itself this year with record-breaking heat, scorching wildfires, devastating droughts, torrential rains, record snowfalls, tornadoes and flooding, earthquakes, and a rapacious tsunami. The earth is not silent in its registration of our activity. The question is not whether we have the capacity to hear; the question is whether we have the willingness.

          Humility is not simply a spiritual virtue. It is part of the apparatus necessary for long-term survival. As individuals we might achieve a lengthy lifespan; and as a species we’ve done pretty well. But for all the rhetoric about future generations, about grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we appear not to be listening for the long haul.

          Most of the parents I know would sacrifice their lives for that of their children. Many parents sacrifice their time, their discretionary pleasure and income, even their personal pursuits so that their children will have better lives. Clearly we are capable of viewing, even subordinating our needs in relation to others; yet as humans in conversation with the forests and oceans, subterranean layers and atmosphere, plants and animals, we turn a deaf ear.

          We do it because the conversation is uncomfortable. It threatens the quality of existence as we know it. It undermines the emotional bonds that give our lives meaning. In a human family, the urgency to provide food and shelter makes employment a necessity so the idea of a national park to preserve pristine wilderness instead of unfettered access for forest products and recreational industries sounds as offensive as a string of obscenities. 

           I remember my father, a big-hearted immigration attorney, asking, “What’s up with the environmentalists crabbing about fishing nets trawling in the Gulf, killing other species? These poor Vietnamese fishermen are just trying to make a living.”

           But so are the fish. So are the turtles and the opossums trying to cross the road. The giant sequoias, larger than the blue whale and far older drop their seed cones with as fervent a desire to have their offspring thrive as we do.

          With the division of the first cell eons ago, the intention to replicate emerged. Life forms of all sizes and shapes, longevities and persuasions seek to replicate or reinvent. To disentangle ourselves from the fabric of creation is not an option even if we pretend it is. So why pit ourselves against the neighboring thread?

          All summer I watch the pumpkin vines in my garden. Tiny tendrils wrap themselves on the wire fence, securing a place for the pumpkins to grow. Green globules form, pear-shaped, suspended in air. The intentionality of that pumpkin plant to grow pumpkins is unmistakable. Great stalks spill onto my walkway and across the patio. Tempting as it is to view the encroaching greenery as an intruder into my space, I can’t help but cheer for a plant looking out for its young, seeking sunlight and adequate nutrition. What parent, what child, what human can’t identify with that?

          Yet so quickly we don’t. We see other species as invaders or commodities, resources to manage, pests to control. I realize practicality dictates this. When the telephone repairman pointed out the enormous wasp nest on the electrical box, I let him spray it so that the meter reader would not risk getting stung. I ceded the right of wasps to nest to the possible safety of another human, but believe me I could hear and see the wasps complain. And I don’t blame them. I did not like what I did. As a student wisely observed last week, “The necessary act is not always the moral one.” Perhaps it is a matter of enlarging our understanding of morality to include species beyond our own.

We’ve all heard some variation of this:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.[7]

          In genocides, the perpetrators cast their victims as somehow less than human: as cockroaches or rats. Do rats insult adversaries by insinuating they are human?

          During slavery, one group treated another as chattel, a word possibly derived from medieval Latin and Old French terms for capital and cattle. What if we had no experience of capital, or property, of one being or area of land owned by another? How would that reshape history? Do trees and birds wonder at the strange geometry of parceling a forest or field?

If we confuse the forest with products it can yield,

if we reduce the epic of geology to strata we drill,

if we drown out the sound of life around us with our own noise,

who will listen to our last breath?

          At the installation service last Sunday, Helen Cohen encouraged us to see our shared ministry as conversation not conversion. We are here to listen to one another and compassionately respond—or in Annie Dillard’s words, “to aid and abet creation.” If we fail to perceive life as a conversation, if we confuse it with an occasion for conversion to remake the set in our own image, and cast only humans in speaking roles, it is we who will play to an empty house.

Amen.

How will the ocean sound in fifty years?

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[1] http://bangordailynews.com/2011/08/03/news/penobscot/medway-panel-pushes-for-national-park-feasibility-study/

[2] ibid.

[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=whistles-with-dolphins

[4] http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-09-15/diana-reiss-dolphin-mirror/transcript

[5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/stefano_mancuso.html

[6] http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence.html

[7] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ Martin_Niemöller

9/11

“Love is a place,” e.e. cummings tells us, “and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” It is the first Sunday of our new church year. September eleven, two-thousand-eleven. We are ten years into the post-9/11 world.

          A decade ago in the wake of 9/11, right up to last fall when plans were announced for Park 51, an Islamic Community Center to be developed about a third of a mile from Ground Zero, many Americans voiced anger and fear about a growing Jihadist movement. Ordinary Arab Americans and Muslims of any heritage grew suspect. Understandably, people directly affected by the horrific events of 9/11 were fearful, angry, distraught, but it was from the collective American throat, that the shrill sound of fury overpowered the quieter tones of reason and conscience.

We gather this year as members of a religious community founded in 1768, a congregation assembled in this building since 1837. Our lives would likely be unrecognizable to our forebears who first filed into this grand building at the top of the common—who had no knowledge of internet connection, jumbo jet liners, skyscrapers or even the Pentagon. What our forebears in 1768 and 1837 did know firsthand were the realities of religious intolerance and misunderstanding.

Our Unitarian and Universalist predecessors gathered not in spite of religious intolerance but as a result, Had Unitarians and Universalists not been branded heretics—our theologies of the oneness of God and universal salvation scorned by Calvinists certain of their doctrine of the Trinity and pre-destination—we would likely not be sitting here. Unitarian Universalism emerged from critical thinking in response to deep faith, and flourished in inhospitable soil. If the denomination and this congregation are to thrive we must root ourselves in the place of love.

It is September 11, 2011. Osama Bin Laden is dead. The Arab Spring now dons the autumnal color of crimson as blood runs across the Middle East and drought parches the earth in Somalia. Rebels fight to overthrow tyranny and other rebels confiscate food shipped to the starving. Those who drape themselves in an irate interpretation of Islam will celebrate while Arab-American Muslims living quiet lives will try to avoid accusatory glances.

          The largest population of Arab-Americans in the U.S. lives in and around Dearborn, Michigan, not far from Detroit. On November 11, 2011, a large public rally, part of a ministry of the New Apostolic Movement, is to take place; “the purpose of this [event] is to fight the demonic spirit of Islam.”[1]

          Had I not heard Terri Gross’s interview on Fresh Air (NPR) on Aug. 24 with Rachel Tabachnick who studies this new apocalyptic movement, I would not have known two of its founders, Mike Bickle and Lou Engle, organized Rick Perry’s recent day of prayer. While any of us might be concerned about a new American religious movement calling for martyrs and spiritual warfare, the fact that two of its founders just organized a rally for the leading  presidential contender in the Republican party casts an ominous shadow on the separation of church and state and religious freedom.

      Rachel Tabachnick explains the tenets of the movement:

This group believes … they must re-organize Protestant Christianity …[and] unify the Protestant Church, into one body under the leadership of their apostles…They must take control over society and government and… they will do this in large part through this warfare that they are conducting with demons. … They have what are called prayer warrior networks in all 50 states, and they have very strong opinions about the direction they want the country to take. They teach what is called dominionism. And the idea of dominionism, or dominion theology, is that all areas of society and government should come under the control of God through these apostles and prophets, and that all of these areas of society should represent Christian and biblical values.… They teach that they will go into a geographic region or to a people-group and conduct these spiritual warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population or the demonic control over the entire population. And this is what makes what they're doing quite different than other conservative evangelical or fundamentalist groups of the past.[2]

          Herein lies the challenge on this auspicious day: in our midst, on our soil, embedded in our political process and public discourse, is a religious movement that espouses love while calling for martyrs and claiming all who fall outside their proscribed belief system are possessed by Satan and must be stopped in order for the second coming of Christ to occur.

As we have seen recently in the horrific massacre in Norway by a right-wing extremist, the world is a different place than it was in 1579 when Francis (Ferenc) David, the Calvinist Bishop died in prison for his assertion there was no scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity.

Violence as response to theological challenge or threat isn’t new; beheadings and burning at the stake and other grisly methods of execution punctuated the Reformation era. What has changed with the invention of automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices is the speed and magnitude with which death comes. Instead of burning one heretic at a time in the public square, a lone gunman or suicide bomber can kill scores of people. The flying projectiles of 9/11 claimed three thousand lives within hours.

That increased capacity for long-range, virtually instantaneous damage is what also makes drones and airstrikes possible. The remoteness of our violence intensifies it. Just as it’s easier to verbally accost someone through the relative anonymity of the internet, it’s far easier to depersonalize the ones we don’t actually see half a world away—or down the street. 

At the new Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, a stone of hope rises bearing the figure of the slain civil rights leader, with these words carved in a nearby wall: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“Love is a place and through this place of love move (with brightness of peace) all places.” I find it hard to imagine love is a place that summons us to cast out the demon of Islam. I find it impossible to reconcile the love Dr. King extolled as a love predicated on religious intolerance. The catch-22 of course is that we are faced with the conundrum: are we to tolerate intolerance? Do we accept an apocalyptic movement that requires the demons of every other form of Christianity and all other religions to be destroyed so that the one true Messiah will return? Do we love the intolerant among us but loathe their intolerance as they purport to love the sinner and abhor the sin? And in so doing are we one and the same?

The nineteen men who boarded four planes ten years ago hijacked Islam the way Joseph Kony transmogrified Christianity with his Lord’s Resistance Army, that terrorized and brutalized an entire generation of Ugandans while purporting to follow the Ten Commandments. It is excruciatingly difficult to meet the extremes of religious extremism with a critical mind and compassionate heart, to enlist reason and conscience in an attempt to understand how and why people come to believe their fellow citizens are possessed by Satan—and remain standing like the stone of hope erected in our nation’s capitol to remind us, “Yes is a world and in this world of yes live (skillfully curled) all worlds.”

Yes is not the only world; but all worlds nest within it and they are ours to inhabit and transform. Our ingathering today is no insignificant matter. We are not just forty people ringing in the new church year. We are far greater than that—for this day occasions a hewing of our own stone of hope within this granite foundation and structure of brick. We are the incarnation of Unitarians and Universalists who have gathered in this parish for two-hundred-and forty-three years, and in this edifice for one-hundred-seventy-five, to create and sustain a place of love. Our inheritance is a religious foundation built on reason and conscience, carved by commitment and faith. We cultivate that world of yes by affirming the inherent worth and dignity of all, insisting that no one is possessed by demons, that no one among us is unsalvageable even if we cannot conceive of their salvation any more than they can imagine ours. We inhabit the world of yes when we acknowledge that those who seek to transform us, or even destroy us, are not some distant unrelated species, some wretched mutation that must be eliminated if we are to survive. That is the trope of no.

In his later writings, Martin Luther King identified the connections among militarism, racism and capitalism. He was not naïve nor was his analysis simple. He understood and articulated what few in his day would acknowledge: being a drum major for peace meant dismantling systems of economy and hegemony far great than the Jim Crow south. He knew of his detractors, he felt the target tacked on his back and yet he persisted. He died in service to a conviction of conscience because to die without would have been a fate worse than death.

If we choose to live with conviction informed by conscience, and reason rooted in faith not devoid of it, we can build that place of love, that world of yes—and in so doing determine whether Unitarian Universalism will thrive or perish. “Yes is a world” wherein all worlds curl: the yes of martyrs who hijack planes and rise from stone. The yes of child soldiers conscripted into horror and the yes of those who would welcome them back, the yes of apocalyptic believers exorcising demons and the yes of iron workers erecting beams from the ashes of Ground Zero. Yes is a world that includes both and no.

Martin Luther King wrote: “The chain reaction of evil, hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” More than twice as many service members have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, than the number of people who perished on 9/11. The number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians far surpasses that.

With our bodies may we break the chain and be the link of what binds us together. May nothing evil cross this door coming in or going out. Amen.

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[1] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021,

[2] [2] Rachel Tabachnick, quoted in an interview on “Fresh Air,” NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=139781021

Finishing Creation

June is here with its sweet days, refulgent with the scent of flowers, almost leisurely with its elongated evenings lit by the lasting light. I can think of no better time than to issue the call to finish creation. Put more manageably, I hereby declare June “Do Something Month,” the month in which each of us claims what is ours to do—and keep doing it year-round. As Grace said so eloquently in her testimonial, none of us need to do everything. None of us need offer salvation of biblical proportions to make a difference. Instead we are called upon by the very creation that spawns us to do our part to complete it. From the Jewish mystical tradition comes the concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the torn fabric of creation. Each good deed, each mitzvah renders a stitch.


The writer Howard Mansfield provides an excellent summary in his book, The Same Ax, Twice.

Each moral act works toward Tikkun, or restoration. Gershom Sholem, the pioneering scholar, defines Tikkun as the “restoration of the right order, the true unity of things.”…

“Every human deed or misdeed may change the whole universal balance…”writes Joseph Dan. An individual’s deeds shape “the fate of divinity itself.” The world may be at “any one moment just one step away from the complete redemption, and a minute sin performed at that very moment by some individual would prevent and delay the redemption,” says Dan. “There is no neutral ground, there are no deeds or thoughts that do not contribute to one side or the other.” Each person’s actions carry the weight of the entire community’s redemption. The mending of the world is a communal act. Each day we rise to finish creation.

This is an awesome responsibility. I hear echoes of it in the Passover story where God enlists Moses to free the Israelites from bondage so they can become a covenantal people. God doesn’t liberate them so that they can do nothing. Moses commands Pharaoh to “Let my people go” so that the people can get busy finishing creation by receiving and fulfilling God’s commandments.

The great evolutionary chain of being that gathers periodic elements and fashions them into stars that explode and humans that compose, requires participation. Look at ants and bees: their elaborate social structures that serve creation, not just themselves. The natural world abounds with examples of inter-specie interaction and reliance. The universe is designed to bring us into relationship, engaging us in the acts of co-creation all the time. No one gets a free pass.

In a world grown ever more complicated by human achievement and human failing, there is all the more reason for Tikkun Olam. Howard Mansfield asks,

How do we mend the world? When everything needs doing, when the sky is falling, where do you start? There is a formula in urban forestry: When a mature shade tree falls, you do not replace it with another tree—with one spindly wrist-thin sapling. To restore the shade of that older tree you have to plant dozens of young trees.

Perhaps this is a model. When we lose a good soul, we have to go forth and mend and restore this world in all the ways we know. We have to plant anew—we know this. But with the crisis all around us, we have to plant groves.

Here at First Parish, as the next phase of strategic planning gets underway, what I hear over and over is a fervent desire for this church to remain vital. No one is willing to let this congregation wither on the vine. We all want First Parish to flourish; but are we all willing to do our part to restore and maintain it?

That is the perennial question; and on this sweet June day in this season of refulgence, I ask of everyone sitting here, and the ones gone missing who still get our mail, what can and will you do? Our forebears did not gather so that we would sit comfortably on our tushes making summer plans that don’t include First Parish. No, our forebears, like theirs, had more in mind.

On Tuesday I paid a visit to Bill Ward. Bill lay dying after a long and fruitful life. A life not without its challenges and sorrows, but a life made purposeful and strong by Bill’s willingness to engage. Bill Ward was last of ten children. He joined the Navy at seventeen and served in World War Two. Born in 1925, Bill got his GED in 1967 after learning the construction trades and becoming a construction superintendent. He oversaw the building of Civic Center in Fitchburg, the post office, schools, fire stations and factories. He swept mines in the war and built his family’s home by hand. He has been married almost 67 years and raised four daughters with his wife Eunice. Even though Bill hasn’t come in a long time, he and Eunice still pledge.

It wasn’t Bill who listed his accomplishments the first time we met a few months ago. It was his wife and daughter. Thinking of Bill this week as I am, I reflect on a lifetime of labor given in love. With humility Bill spoke to me of a job well done, of the satisfaction he found in committing himself to a task fully.

Before Bill got pancreatic cancer, I did not know him, nor was I aware of his service to this city. The membership rolls of this congregation brim with people who have participated in Tikkun Olam. A few have plaques when money as well as effort was involved but most of the members through the last two and a half centuries go unrecognized. But it is their shade we rest under, and it is incumbent on us to plant the next groves.

Since I arrived in 2007, I have heard the cry for new members. And since 2007, probably a couple of dozen people have joined. Some have stayed, others drifted away. So here’s a simple act of Tikkun Olam. If you are sitting here today and wonder where someone is you haven’t seen in a while, go home on this sunny day and before you get out in the garden or yard or involve yourself in the afternoon’s activities, take a moment to call or write a note to that person. Invite him or her or them to the church picnic on the 19th and offer a ride.

You want more members? Take it upon yourselves to be the ambassadors of this congregation. If you can ambulate through these doors you can make a call or write a note. Glenda has a wonderful ministry of sending cards and I send some too but it is not our exclusive province. It is everyone’s. We all know that a personal invitation is more compelling than a blanket one. So why not take the time to invite a newcomer here today to join your family at the picnic or for iced coffee some summer afternoon?

This church rocks. I love it fiercely and tenderly and I give my heart to it and I expect you to do the same. Not on your first visit or even your third. But if you believe this congregation matters, if it matters to you there is a religious community in Fitchburg that welcomes you, that welcomes any peace-seeking person who hungers to communally engage in Tikkun Olam it’s time to go out on a limb for that. Everyone won’t fit on the same limb so you get to choose the limb that suits you. Today, Martha shared her practice of meditation with us and she’s graciously offered to share it after service on Sundays and I hope through the summer as well. Fred H. restarted the forum and has kept it going all year. Someone started a book group this week and on Thursday at 2:00 any of you who can come to the first meeting of the “Do Something” group are invited. This church cannot sit idle all summer nor can we just gather for worship on Sundays from September to June, when it’s convenient.

That is not Tikkun Olam. Restoring the world is not about deciding what’s convenient. What fits into the schedule. Tikkun Olam is about waking each day and saying, ah, I am alive today so it is my work to help mend creation. You may do it with a smile, a kind word, attentive listening. You may do it with a microcredit loan or a donation. You might do it attending the forum Fred re-ignited or the book group. You might write a letter to the editor like Betty Gelinas did. You might do it phoning a newcomer or a neighbor. You might do it caring for someone who is ill or bereaved. You might do it by attending Bill Ward’s service when it happens. Or you might withhold the hastily uttered harsh word. Restoration happens when we reframe our comments to lift up the positive, when we nudge ourselves to look at a situation from a perspective beyond our own. It happens when we get up off our rumps and take the blessing of aliveness and energy and revel in the day we’ve been given and this glorious world awaiting repair.

Think of anyone in bondage. Think of the ones constricted by theologies aflame with heaven and hell. Think of the ones being instructed right now in catechisms of hate and doctrines of misunderstanding: secular or religious. Now breathe in the air of Unitarian Universalism which summons us to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We, who have found or been led to this expansive way of being owe it to others, not ourselves, to get on with the mending of creation and the revitalizing of this congregation.

In the back of our hymnal the poet Adrienne Rich writes, “My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”

In Judaism, there is a maxim that whosoever saves a life saves all of creation because a singular act of restoration swings the world toward redemption. Each of us has something to offer. None of us will attend every church event, every service, not even me, but we can commit to each doing something. We can each do our part to revitalize this congregation. We can each do our part to reach out to others, to be the welcome we wish any newcomer to feel. We can each actively support an activity or ministry. There are no neutral acts. To sit back and do nothing is neither neutral nor covenantal. Each week we recite a covenant that expresses our promise to one another that love is our doctrine and service our prayer. Love is not a spectator sport. And in order for a church to thrive, love must be a verb not a noun. We covenant to help one another in fellowship which means we must create and sustain fellowship not simply partake in the fellowship others organize.

Today I call on everyone to make this a Do Something church. A church placed at the top of the common needs to cast its light outward not keep it confined to a couple of hours on Sunday morning nine moths a year. Every day we get twenty-four hours to make a difference. Choose one. Make this a congregation of Tikkun Olam. “The mending of the world is a communal act. Each day we rise to finish creation.” Amen.

Memorial Day 2011

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day we commemorate fallen soldiers, but approaching it more broadly, it’s a day that invites us to remember the people whose imprint lingers. As we recall the people whose lives have touched ours in memorable ways, we conjure moments recent and long past, even fleeting, when a spark of kindness or decency charged us, when the gift of patience or compassion changed us, even now.


Often, we remember the people who had such an effect on our lives without knowing that we have done the same for someone else. At every memorial service I officiate I remind listeners the fullness of a life is not measured by longevity, but by the impressions made.

Last year, as I considered the perennial question of what happens when we die, I settled on the idea that all the light once contained in our animate body disperses back into the world, carried in all the beings and places we touched. In the memory of people and animals we knew, the ground we walked, the oceans we swam, in the air we exhaled—our essential being remains.

If Memorial Day is a time to commemorate the dead it is also a time to consider the ways death doesn’t end us. In her fanciful novel A Gracious Plenty, Sheri Reynolds writes:

The dead coax the natural world along.…[They] control the seasons.…In June, the dead tunnel earthworms, crack the shells of bird eggs, poke the croaks from frogs. The ones who died children make play of their work, blowing bugs from weed to weed, aerating fields with their cartwheels.…The ones who died old cue the roosters to crow and dismiss the dawn each morning…The ones who died strong push the rivers downstream…the ones who died shy string spiderwebs, almost invisible. There’s a job for everybody on any given day. The Dead are generous with their gifts to the living.

Not everyone perceives the dead this way, but as the protagonist of the novel notes, she can only see those who have died by remembering the shape they held in the past, “but that’s about my eyes—not [their] presence.”

Memorial Day creates an opening through which to return our attention to the presence of those we carry with us, whether they are dead or not. And it invites us to consider the ways we inhabit not just the memory, but the sensibility of others.

If you were to ask me to name all the folks who have made a positive impression on me it would take hours. Chances are good that I did not end up in all of their memory banks, but I have learned I am stored in some.

A couple of months ago, Tricia forwarded an email that came to the church office from a woman now forty, I knew for about six weeks when she was twelve. I stayed briefly at her house having befriended her mother, roosting the way young adults do when they have not quite landed. To be honest, I had not thought of Joni since I left Houston in 1982. I heard from her mother once by email about eight years ago, out of the blue. It was a short email updating me on the family. I responded in kind and that was the end of it. When I read the email Tricia forwarded it took a moment to figure out just who Joni was. She mentioned she had come across a letter in her mother’s attic I had sent to her and her younger siblings and that triggered her getting in touch. She didn’t tell me what was in the letter and I had no recollection of writing it, but she asked if she could visit so I invited her up to my house for lunch and she came. We had a delightful time and though I still don’t know what possessed her to reconnect, I agreed to visit her this summer in Greenfield where she and her children and partner live.

Though I still wonder why Joni remembered and reached out almost 30 years later, I certainly understand the impulse because of the people I carry inside. Some I haven’t seen for thirty years and if my Internet searches had proved fruitful I would have contacted folks out of the blue, too. People who might have thought, gee, what is she getting in touch for?

So often we don’t realize the effect we have on others, or they, on us. For eleven years I have carried a little boy named John Gustin with me. I met John on the pediatric floor of Maine Medical Center where I did Clinical Pastoral Education, the hospital chaplaincy program required for ministers in training. John was seven the summer of 2000. From the notes in his chart I knew he was nonverbal without any medical explanation noted; that his alcoholic mother was out of the picture; that his father and two older brothers lived four hours away. Every day I would visit John, grateful for the chance to hang out without having to worry about words. There was no small talk to make. Just quiet playing and the occasional words I offered him. He was quiet even beyond his wordlessness, in his manner. He moved slowly, deliberately, gently. He had been hospitalized because of an infection around the insulin pump in his abdomen, but most days, he appeared not to be in pain. John liked to play at the computer in the patient lounge and I will always remember the day I found him entranced by the figures on the screen. I asked if he would be willing to color with me for a while, being the low-tech person I am. I can still see him registering my request, considering his options to pass the time. In a moment, he lifted his index finger with its dirty little fingernail and pressed the off button. I have never felt so loved in all my life.

And because the universe is benevolent, one of my last days there, I happened on John in his room while a lovely pet therapy volunteer brought out an enormous white bunny. I sat down on John’s bed and stroked the rabbit’s soft fur with him when the volunteer offered to take our picture. I knew there would have been no way to photograph John myself as that would have been a violation of confidentiality and a breach of my role, but when the volunteer handed us each a Polaroid print I smiled and silently thanked the universe.

I treasured that photo because it allowed me to more readily revisit the time I spent with John, the way he instructed me in how to be present and attentive. He provided an easy way for a nervous novice to pass the days without having to knock on doors or enter rooms of other patients less eager to see a chaplain.

Over the years I have wondered what became of him. A few years ago I went onto Facebook thinking I might find him there but I found only other folks with the same name. And for some inexplicable reason about a week and a half ago, I decided to try again. I went onto Facebook, typed in his name, and got a link to his obituary. John died six months after I last saw him. In the hospital at age eight.

I have been carrying his light, thoroughly illumined by the vision of that small finger pressing the computer button. I have held fast to the feeling of John one of the last times I encountered him, curled in my lap, his arms wound tightly around me, his head burrowed in my neck. I heard him crying and followed the sound into his room where a young nurse’s aide brusquely combed his freshly shampooed hair. Suddenly, John began to wretch and the newly made bed was instantly soiled. Exasperated, the young aide yanked the sheets beneath him so I carried John to the couch and cradled him. The trust he bestowed charged and changed me that August day, in a way that enlivens us both still.

When I speak of the universe holding us, this is what I mean. We are held in body, but also in memory. Whether we recognize it or not, we are held by those who carry us, and those we carry. We are held by the places we have trod, the trees trunks we leaned against. We are held in the stories others tell.

In the novel I quoted from earlier, Sheri Reynolds writes of the realm the dead inhabit, “In this place you’ve moved beyond experience. Now it’s your stories that keep you down. You can’t leave until you’ve told them.”

I sense it is our stories that tether us. The ones we have yet to tell, the secrets as yet unreleased carried into death may need telling in order to free the spirit. And perhaps imaginations freed of body trade secrets and swap stories beyond our capacity to hear.

The stories we tell testify to the presence of the beings that remain part of our lives—they may not all be human—by virtue of leaving an impression, imparting a lesson, instilling a value, encouraging a path.

I invite you to take a few moments now to share a story you carry with someone seated nearby so that on this Memorial Day, we not only remember, but we become the a chalice poised to hold another’s light. (Give folks time to share stories)

Sheri Reynolds writes in A Gracious Plenty, “I know the Dead haven’t disappeared because the sun does rise. The roosters do crow. The clouds move across the sky like always.”

After my father died in 1999, a year or two after I read Sheri’s book, which by the way, I bought seventeen copies of and gave out to friends, I began to think of my father pushing the tomato plants up each summer because of the way he devoured the box of Tennessee tomatoes his sister shipped him every year. He would sit down with a box of Saltines, a handful of red tomatoes and a serrated knife and eat slices on crackers as if every one were his last and happiest meal.

Before my father left this life to ripen tomatoes, he married three times, first my mother, then his second and third wives. The last two left their marriage to him and got involved with a woman. During my father’s cancer when there was time to ruminate, we wondered aloud what were the odds. At the time my father met his second and third wives, they had been drifting in rough seas—and in him they found a safe harbor. My father was a gentle, supportive man. In his later marriages he had come to understand more of himself. From the pier where I stand looking back, I see how each woman gathered her strength and re-charted her course. And if someone were to say to me, “Gosh, your dad was married and divorced three times; too bad none of his marriages worked out,” I would tell the story of his memorial service where all three ex-wives gathered to hold him. I would speak also of the Russian émigré who told the people gathered, all strangers to her, how my father had saved her life by helping her come to America. I would express how proud I am to be the daughter of a man who ushered women to safer shores.

Relationships serve a purpose beyond our line of sight. They don’t have to last to work. What we think of as not working may in fact not be a failure of anything other than our ability to see. In 1982 when I left Houston, a twelve-year-old girl named Joni stored me in her memory; and though I left Maine Medical Center eleven summers ago, I never set John B. Gustin II down.

This Memorial Day as we remember the lives that imprint our own, may we feel the embrace of those we hold and those who hold us, in memory, in story, in being. Amen.