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.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
The Call to Joy
I begin most days with a walk, often in the woods. While Zuki(my dog) follows her nose dashing about I list my blessings in a litany of gratitude. On the days when brilliant blue sky frames the unfurling leaves it’s impossible not to revel in the grace of the world. The woods are such a lovely antidote to human news. The way life teems among branches, fallen or standing, the scrub brush chattering around my ankles.
On Monday’s walk, overcome with delight at the shape of my life now, I recalled how I used to feel immobilized by the vast suffering in the world. How, I wondered, could I go about my plentiful life in the presence of so much need. In the midst of my fretting about what I could not do, could not solve and could not save, a friend asked, “What would it mean to answer the call to joy?”
I wasn’t sure I understood the question so I wrote it on a memo board. Daily, I pondered how my friend had phrased her question. She didn’t say, “What would mean to be happy?” She didn’t ask what it would mean to be content or satisfied. She asked what it would mean to answer the call to joy.
The language of call is religious: the sound of the cosmos itself summoning us to something important, taking up a particular vocation or form of service. And since answering a call suggests a religious experience, I began to wonder how that relates to joy. What makes it a calling? Is joy a religious experience? And how do we recognize joy in the midst of a world blighted by suffering, in a culture preoccupied with happiness?
The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi writes: “Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” This suggests joy dwells deep within. It doesn’t float on the surface, like oil atop a rain-slickened road. It doesn’t come free in the cereal box or with a scratch card for the lottery. It takes its own time, and sometimes the path it travels tastes of sorrow, or regret.
For many of us, true joy arises in the shadow of difficulty or at least challenge. While pleasure may derive from momentary sensation, and happiness may bloom out of satisfaction or mirth, joy travels through fertile darkness to reach the light. It has a depth that resonates. Perhaps that’s one way we can recognize it: by the vibration we feel at the core of our being.
To feel that vibration can be its own joy particularly in the presence of suffering. On my Monday walk as I offered a prayer for all the beings in peril, I contemplated the magnitude of life. Gazillions of beings—how every moment some tender shoot gets stepped on, insects get crushed, (at the second I typed that line I looked down and saw a tick crawling on my keyboard cable and sadly, I squished it. The universe underscores the veracity of its truths.) Every minute somewhere on earth people and animals die horrible deaths; rivers and plants, and marine creatures choke on our toxins. Suffering is indeed the marrow and if the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is right that suffering engenders compassion and thus who would want to live in a world without it, it makes no sense to pray that all suffering cease. Even if we want it to, it won’t. But it occurs to me that we are called to notice the suffering and in so doing, in that sharp intake of breath— the sigh we emit in the face of suffering becomes part of the song.
Joy is not a solution to suffering but it is a response.
To quote Rumi again, “An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.”
Over the last twenty-plus years, I have taught and volunteered in prisons. Buildings with little or no natural light. Drab monochrome, layers of frustration cemented by anger, sometimes encased in despair. I have passed through the electronically operated doors into concrete slab rooms, bearing as much color as I could. Paper, fabric, words. Any medium would do. When I taught at the women’s prison in New Hampshire in the early nineties, I invited women to tell stories or to find themselves in someone else’s. We studied literature and change, and in moments unobserved, we abetted transformation. One afternoon, after I’d read “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, I asked the women in class what it would mean for them to dare to be happy; one responded by saying, “They hate for us to be happy in here.” It’s hard to be happy in prison. Very little merriment. Few sources of pleasure. Restricted access to comfort or solace. But the women in that class taught me about joy.
Another day, a group of women gathered with my friend Jen, who’d brought in plaster masks and lots of art supplies. Markers, paint, beads, sequins, forbidden feathers. The superintendent came in, pulled me aside and threatened: “If I find one feather in anyone’s cell, you’re never coming back.” As soon as she left I said, “ Is she afraid someone might tickle herself? and Gigi quickly answered, “That’s exactly right.”
In an institution intended to dehumanize, fifteen women decorated masks that revealed themselves. In telling each other about the masks they made, they inhabited a space made precious by their being. They weren’t allowed to keep the masks but they made them anyway, because the process of creating them gave those women a way to answer the call to joy.
One need not enter a prison to find joy, but one need not confine prison to the kind with razor wire and correctional officers. Consider the prisons we may inhabit: Shame, guilt, dishonesty, self-doubt, addiction, unresolved anger. Someone else’s shoulds. Achievement defined by another’s values. Believing joy belongs to someone else. Rumi instructs us to “Become the sky/ Take an ax to that prison wall—escape/ Walk out like someone suddenly born into color./ Do it now.”
Keep knocking.
After a long day of university teaching, I would drive to the women’s prison, often weary, sometimes depressed, on a spiritual journey I did not yet recognize. There, women taught me how to find freedom within constraint. Women who laughed with me and shared the intimacy of silence. Women who read aloud and let themselves feel the vibration of collective voices. Women who hung their vibrant masks on the classroom bulletin board as if to say, “Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.” Seeing that wall of masks and knowing what went into making them and leaving them behind, filled my throat with tears. One night, under a waxing moon, I scribbled as I drove home,
The silver throated orchid
grows sideways
reaching toward light,
undaunted by low ceilings,
it sings out the window
to sweet peas climbing by,
trailing arpeggios across the roof
serenading the great orange moon
rising into sky.
Like a cake pulled too early,
the top edge of the moon is gone,
sweetness collecting in the dark.
Dig your hands deep
and plant your own lullaby.
Harvest your dreams
and sleep well
knowing what can flourish
in the slice of invisible moon.
What spilled out as a poem came from the wellspring of joy I had witnessed and experienced, a joy that answered the knocking and opened the barred window to see who was there.
I used to question whether it’s right in a world so ravaged to experience joy. Considering all the travail and heartbreak, contemplating what it means to read Bon Appétit in a world where tens of thousands die each day of hunger and a billion people lack clean water. When I hear of yet another senseless death, it’s easy to cast aside joy. But then I remember what the dead and dying ask of the living is to embrace life, to let the sigh become part of the song.
Inside the fullness of life the comic and tragic, the complex and breathtakingly simple co-exist. Joy is part of the paradox. New lives enter the world as others lay dying. During winter, when trees appear bare, inside they are re-inventing spring. The devastation of earthquakes and tornadoes, the machinations of war, the assault of terror anywhere insist that we listen harder for the vibration of joy. Perhaps that’s why I love the woods, where I feel the hum of existence, the living and the dying commingled, inviting me into the thrum of being.
On my walks I engage of a litany of gratitude because frankly, I am overcome with the breadth of my good fortune. Understanding the way my life—and perhaps yours—reflects the gift of feeling held. Even in the uncertainty that all life involves, some lives, like mine, center on trust.
We don’t enter this building warily, looking over our shoulders thinking someone might gun us down. We don’t suspect newcomers of infiltrating to turn us in to the secret police. We don’t live under tyranny. We don’t dodge landmines or roving gangs of militia as some do. We have the good fortune to be open to the possibility of grace, to lead lives that afford the possibility of trust, even faith.
For years I have spoken of a benevolent universe. The benevolence isn’t tied to a lack of suffering; it arises out of a demanding joy. Joy that bears the cost of mindfulness: the awareness that all life entwines, all sorrow springs from the same cosmic pool; hardship and hazard anywhere affect the thrum of life everywhere.
Our joy affects the whole planet, too.
Recently, I spent the day at in the medium security unit of the men’s prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, co-facilitating a workshop on Alternatives to Violence. In an exercise called Concentric Circles we paired up and had two minutes each to answer the question, “What’s something you’ve let go of in the last year?” Immediately I answered, “Self-imposed constraints.” Leaving our self-made prisons frees us to answer the call to joy.
What makes joy demanding is that leaving prison takes courage. Any incarcerated person will tell you that. After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they reached a point where they wanted to go back. But if we are willing to take an ax to the prison walls we construct, if we are willing in the midst of suffering and grief to respond to our soul’s stirring, if we allow ourselves to feel the thrum of life vibrating within, we can answer the call to joy.
While hope calls us back from the brink of despair by inviting us to imagine a different time, reality or place, joy summons us to inhabit this moment, already ripe. Joy calls to us in our uncertainty and offers itself within the very garden of our limitation. It does not depend on material possessions or success. It does even require happiness. It emerges when we risk revealing ourselves by naming our masks. It relies on our capacity to connect with what matters, to notice the pulse of existence that binds us to all being.
This is why joy is a religious experience. It not about singularity of a religious tradition or institution. Joy cares not if you are Sufi, pagan, humanist, Jew. It cares not if you are Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or animist. It doesn’t even care if you say, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” It cares only that you keep knocking. That you engage with life on life’s terms, that you take an ax to the prison wall that confines your soul. Joy expresses life’s longing for itself.
“Keep knocking,” Rumi writes, “and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” Will it be you?
Amen.
On Monday’s walk, overcome with delight at the shape of my life now, I recalled how I used to feel immobilized by the vast suffering in the world. How, I wondered, could I go about my plentiful life in the presence of so much need. In the midst of my fretting about what I could not do, could not solve and could not save, a friend asked, “What would it mean to answer the call to joy?”
I wasn’t sure I understood the question so I wrote it on a memo board. Daily, I pondered how my friend had phrased her question. She didn’t say, “What would mean to be happy?” She didn’t ask what it would mean to be content or satisfied. She asked what it would mean to answer the call to joy.
The language of call is religious: the sound of the cosmos itself summoning us to something important, taking up a particular vocation or form of service. And since answering a call suggests a religious experience, I began to wonder how that relates to joy. What makes it a calling? Is joy a religious experience? And how do we recognize joy in the midst of a world blighted by suffering, in a culture preoccupied with happiness?
The 13th century Sufi poet Rumi writes: “Keep knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” This suggests joy dwells deep within. It doesn’t float on the surface, like oil atop a rain-slickened road. It doesn’t come free in the cereal box or with a scratch card for the lottery. It takes its own time, and sometimes the path it travels tastes of sorrow, or regret.
For many of us, true joy arises in the shadow of difficulty or at least challenge. While pleasure may derive from momentary sensation, and happiness may bloom out of satisfaction or mirth, joy travels through fertile darkness to reach the light. It has a depth that resonates. Perhaps that’s one way we can recognize it: by the vibration we feel at the core of our being.
To feel that vibration can be its own joy particularly in the presence of suffering. On my Monday walk as I offered a prayer for all the beings in peril, I contemplated the magnitude of life. Gazillions of beings—how every moment some tender shoot gets stepped on, insects get crushed, (at the second I typed that line I looked down and saw a tick crawling on my keyboard cable and sadly, I squished it. The universe underscores the veracity of its truths.) Every minute somewhere on earth people and animals die horrible deaths; rivers and plants, and marine creatures choke on our toxins. Suffering is indeed the marrow and if the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh is right that suffering engenders compassion and thus who would want to live in a world without it, it makes no sense to pray that all suffering cease. Even if we want it to, it won’t. But it occurs to me that we are called to notice the suffering and in so doing, in that sharp intake of breath— the sigh we emit in the face of suffering becomes part of the song.
Joy is not a solution to suffering but it is a response.
To quote Rumi again, “An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy.”
Over the last twenty-plus years, I have taught and volunteered in prisons. Buildings with little or no natural light. Drab monochrome, layers of frustration cemented by anger, sometimes encased in despair. I have passed through the electronically operated doors into concrete slab rooms, bearing as much color as I could. Paper, fabric, words. Any medium would do. When I taught at the women’s prison in New Hampshire in the early nineties, I invited women to tell stories or to find themselves in someone else’s. We studied literature and change, and in moments unobserved, we abetted transformation. One afternoon, after I’d read “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, I asked the women in class what it would mean for them to dare to be happy; one responded by saying, “They hate for us to be happy in here.” It’s hard to be happy in prison. Very little merriment. Few sources of pleasure. Restricted access to comfort or solace. But the women in that class taught me about joy.
Another day, a group of women gathered with my friend Jen, who’d brought in plaster masks and lots of art supplies. Markers, paint, beads, sequins, forbidden feathers. The superintendent came in, pulled me aside and threatened: “If I find one feather in anyone’s cell, you’re never coming back.” As soon as she left I said, “ Is she afraid someone might tickle herself? and Gigi quickly answered, “That’s exactly right.”
In an institution intended to dehumanize, fifteen women decorated masks that revealed themselves. In telling each other about the masks they made, they inhabited a space made precious by their being. They weren’t allowed to keep the masks but they made them anyway, because the process of creating them gave those women a way to answer the call to joy.
One need not enter a prison to find joy, but one need not confine prison to the kind with razor wire and correctional officers. Consider the prisons we may inhabit: Shame, guilt, dishonesty, self-doubt, addiction, unresolved anger. Someone else’s shoulds. Achievement defined by another’s values. Believing joy belongs to someone else. Rumi instructs us to “Become the sky/ Take an ax to that prison wall—escape/ Walk out like someone suddenly born into color./ Do it now.”
Keep knocking.
After a long day of university teaching, I would drive to the women’s prison, often weary, sometimes depressed, on a spiritual journey I did not yet recognize. There, women taught me how to find freedom within constraint. Women who laughed with me and shared the intimacy of silence. Women who read aloud and let themselves feel the vibration of collective voices. Women who hung their vibrant masks on the classroom bulletin board as if to say, “Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.” Seeing that wall of masks and knowing what went into making them and leaving them behind, filled my throat with tears. One night, under a waxing moon, I scribbled as I drove home,
The silver throated orchid
grows sideways
reaching toward light,
undaunted by low ceilings,
it sings out the window
to sweet peas climbing by,
trailing arpeggios across the roof
serenading the great orange moon
rising into sky.
Like a cake pulled too early,
the top edge of the moon is gone,
sweetness collecting in the dark.
Dig your hands deep
and plant your own lullaby.
Harvest your dreams
and sleep well
knowing what can flourish
in the slice of invisible moon.
What spilled out as a poem came from the wellspring of joy I had witnessed and experienced, a joy that answered the knocking and opened the barred window to see who was there.
I used to question whether it’s right in a world so ravaged to experience joy. Considering all the travail and heartbreak, contemplating what it means to read Bon Appétit in a world where tens of thousands die each day of hunger and a billion people lack clean water. When I hear of yet another senseless death, it’s easy to cast aside joy. But then I remember what the dead and dying ask of the living is to embrace life, to let the sigh become part of the song.
Inside the fullness of life the comic and tragic, the complex and breathtakingly simple co-exist. Joy is part of the paradox. New lives enter the world as others lay dying. During winter, when trees appear bare, inside they are re-inventing spring. The devastation of earthquakes and tornadoes, the machinations of war, the assault of terror anywhere insist that we listen harder for the vibration of joy. Perhaps that’s why I love the woods, where I feel the hum of existence, the living and the dying commingled, inviting me into the thrum of being.
On my walks I engage of a litany of gratitude because frankly, I am overcome with the breadth of my good fortune. Understanding the way my life—and perhaps yours—reflects the gift of feeling held. Even in the uncertainty that all life involves, some lives, like mine, center on trust.
We don’t enter this building warily, looking over our shoulders thinking someone might gun us down. We don’t suspect newcomers of infiltrating to turn us in to the secret police. We don’t live under tyranny. We don’t dodge landmines or roving gangs of militia as some do. We have the good fortune to be open to the possibility of grace, to lead lives that afford the possibility of trust, even faith.
For years I have spoken of a benevolent universe. The benevolence isn’t tied to a lack of suffering; it arises out of a demanding joy. Joy that bears the cost of mindfulness: the awareness that all life entwines, all sorrow springs from the same cosmic pool; hardship and hazard anywhere affect the thrum of life everywhere.
Our joy affects the whole planet, too.
Recently, I spent the day at in the medium security unit of the men’s prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, co-facilitating a workshop on Alternatives to Violence. In an exercise called Concentric Circles we paired up and had two minutes each to answer the question, “What’s something you’ve let go of in the last year?” Immediately I answered, “Self-imposed constraints.” Leaving our self-made prisons frees us to answer the call to joy.
What makes joy demanding is that leaving prison takes courage. Any incarcerated person will tell you that. After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they reached a point where they wanted to go back. But if we are willing to take an ax to the prison walls we construct, if we are willing in the midst of suffering and grief to respond to our soul’s stirring, if we allow ourselves to feel the thrum of life vibrating within, we can answer the call to joy.
While hope calls us back from the brink of despair by inviting us to imagine a different time, reality or place, joy summons us to inhabit this moment, already ripe. Joy calls to us in our uncertainty and offers itself within the very garden of our limitation. It does not depend on material possessions or success. It does even require happiness. It emerges when we risk revealing ourselves by naming our masks. It relies on our capacity to connect with what matters, to notice the pulse of existence that binds us to all being.
This is why joy is a religious experience. It not about singularity of a religious tradition or institution. Joy cares not if you are Sufi, pagan, humanist, Jew. It cares not if you are Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or animist. It doesn’t even care if you say, “I’m spiritual, not religious.” It cares only that you keep knocking. That you engage with life on life’s terms, that you take an ax to the prison wall that confines your soul. Joy expresses life’s longing for itself.
“Keep knocking,” Rumi writes, “and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look to see who’s there.” Will it be you?
Amen.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Planting Sequoias
This sermon service includes testimonials by Ann Saalbach, Amanda Chaves, and Tricia Caspers-Ross.
On this Easter morning, as the tight buds on branches reinvent spring, let us consider resurrection as Wendell Berry, the great Kentucky farmer-poet does.
So friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world …
Ask questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest . . .
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years…
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Though you have considered all the facts.…
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade.…
Be like the fox
Who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
What would it mean for us to invest in the millennium? To take as our main crop the forest we did not plant—our forebears did that—nor the one we will harvest—for it belongs to our children.
Resurrection is about life preserved and restored. In sixth chapter of Genesis, long before Jesus appears in the Gospels, we read of a flood that threatens all existence. In that famous narrative, Noah builds an ark and ferries his family and pairs of animals to dry land. As the story goes, were it not for Noah and the ark, all of creation would be submerged. Hence, the ark preserves and restores creation. It is the first biblical example of resurrection.
On January 30th, I spoke of the ark we could build, the ark our congregation could become. In every sermon since then I have made some reference to the land on Fisher Road, to the potential it holds as an integral part of our ministry. Why land? You might ask. Why now?
Last week, while I was in Nashville celebrating Passover with my cousins, a meeting took place after the service where a conversation ensued. I have talked to enough folks about it to gauge that questions linger.
Why “go with [our] love to the fields [and] lie easy in the shade”? Why “be like the fox/who makes more tracks than necessary/some in the wrong direction”?
“To practice resurrection. To invest in the millennium. To plant sequoias.”
Sequoias as you know take a long time to mature. They are immense beings, stately and majestic. They remind mere humans to take the long view. To invest in them is to invest in a future we will not experience firsthand. But that doesn’t mean we will not be part of it.
In 1768 when the First Parish of Fitchburg formed, the folks who gathered did not live to see the building we inhabit. They never heard the melodious sounds of our organ. They could not glimpse even with power of prognostication the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism. But their gathering formed an ark that traveled the seas of time into a future that we know as the present. We are here because they congregated, week after week, year after year. And because the good folks of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries instilled in their children the value of a liberal religious community. Had they failed to do that, this congregation and our beloved denomination would have gone the way of the Shakers. No matter how simple and sensible their aesthetic, the Shakers did not plant sequoias.
If we do not invest in our children we imperil ourselves the way the Shakers did.
One of the great joys, indeed purposes of a congregation is to form a multigenerational community where we can learn from and enjoy each other: where the wisdom and patience of experience commingle with the inquisitiveness and energy of youth. Several years ago, I preached a sermon on aging wherein I quoted a doctor whose research found that folks in their seventies and eighties were better baking companions to children than forty-year-olds. Middle-aged folks are often too focused on results whereas older folks more often enjoy the process without worrying about the final product. This comes in handy baking with young children. And it works in reverse. Young children not yet steady on their own feet and free from fixed ideas offer an appreciativeness and realness often lost from late adolescence to mid-adulthood.
Ann Saalbach has agreed to share her thoughts on commingling the generations.
Ann’s testimonial:
Let’s face it – humans are tribal. We need our own private cave-space to retreat to but in the end, we want to join a group around the fire and we want that group to just move over to make space for us because we belong there and with them.
As I grow old and wise, I have realized that one’s own age cohort is special – we all lived through the same global events at the same age, we are going through similar transitions in our personal lives and we understand each other in special ways. But I’ve also realized that my own cohort is not enough. I want elders, newborns and fledglings, middle-lifers – the whole gamut of life – in my tribe. Our western world can make this hard. We are isolated in our own homes and nuclear families. Where can we taste that sense of community?
My tribe is FPC. I treasure its diversity, not least its diversity in age.
Last spring I regularly attended women’s group. It was a magical time for me and a magical mini tribe. Five of us were regulars and three of those five brought their children. Thus we had members in their first decade of life, their second, their third, fifth, sixth and seventh. (Somehow I think we missed out on the 4th decade – none of us in our thirties.) Those of us who were raising young ones got help and advice from the rest. Those of us who were young ones got spare adults who were not at their wits’ end with us at that particular moment. And those of us like me, whose young one is now grown up and very far away, got to rejoice in being stuck into a chaotic family meal once again.
We need small people. And they need us. Amen.
Some of you asked last week, why does an urban congregation need rural land? John Muir wrote upon reaching Yosemite: “We are now in the mountains, and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell.” Nature is not just for so-called “nature-lovers.” It is the best way we have to remind ourselves we are creatures of this earth. Everything we make, ingest, discard, adore and disregard is of this universe that births and sustains us. Spending time with the fertile earth reminds us how our forebears lived by the rhythms and seasonal cycles of the sun, moon, and earth. It restores us to green pastures and invites members of the wider community to “put faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years.”
In my upstairs window hangs a piece of stained glass edged with the words of E.B. White: “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world.” It is in savoring the world that we find reason to save it; without saving it we lose the capacity to savor it at all.
Many of us seek communal worship to give expression to our savoring of life’s sweetness, just as we seek the comfort and companionship of Sunday services in troubled and troubling times. Since I have been here, this church has closed during the summer months, an oddly counterintuitive gesture since as we all know illness, accidents, grief, loss, and loneliness don’t go on holiday. But truth be known, our sanctuary is just too darn hot and many of us retreat to our gardens and lawns or seek the shade of backyards, parks or woodland trails.
I believe presence matters. I am old-fashioned enough to think consistent weekly connection builds community. Last Friday in Nashville, I reveled in my cousins’ weekly Sabbath dinner, a tradition instigated long before I was born. After my aunt and cousins die, my cousins’ children and their children will carry on the tradition just as they will gather annually for Passover Seder which Jews have been doing for thousands of years. Even though I cannot read or recite Hebrew, the prayers for the bread of the earth and the fruit of vine roll off my tongue. Simply because every Friday night of my childhood, my family gathered to light the candles and bless the bread and grape juice. How grateful I am.
Now I invite Tricia Caspers-Ross and Amanda Chaves to share their thoughts with us.
Tricia’s testimonial:
Like many people, I joined the UU church for my children because I want them to grow up in a thinking, exploring, community, one that teaches them that every person, every being, is valued.
When Rick and I were deciding whether or not to move across the country, we brought the kids to visit Ashburnham. Seamus was three months old, and one summer Sunday I packed him up along with all of his baby paraphernalia, borrowed my mother-in-law’s car, and drove to this church for Sunday service. But, as you have probably guessed, when I arrived there was no one here. Later, I was dismayed to learn that there are no regularly scheduled summer services.
While I was disappointed, this wasn’t a deal-breaker for our family, as it might be for some, but I did wonder how the congregation, especially the children, maintain a sense of community through those long, wet, summer months. How do parents reinforce UU values out in the (sometimes very un-UU) wider world without the weekly support of a UU community?
When I think about the land at Fisher Road, I see an answer to that question. I see a place where those who choose could meet on a sunny Sunday morning and garden, walk a labyrinth, hike, birdwatch, do outdoor yoga or tai chi, play croquet or hide-and-seek. The land is not only a way to maintain the connections that the adults have here, but also to create connections between the older and younger generations in the church, which for the most part, are lacking.
Right now there’s maybe one teenager in the building on any given Sunday, and the youth group is, for all purposes, defunct. I see the land on Fisher Road as a way to re-vive the teen community here, to draw in new families by reaching out to other youth groups in the community. I see the possibility of picnics and barbecues and campouts, Frisbee, and soccer games. I see our youth living UU values and having fun in a way that’s not possible within the confines of this building.
If we buy the land on Fisher Road, we show the children and the teens of our church that we hold true to our UU beliefs by valuing them. And when the children want to be together, having fun, they will continue to come, and the church thrives, and we raise a generation who, like us, want to make the world a little bit better.
Amanda’s testimonial:
I’ve been kicking around this church for I guess about 10 or so years. I started as a teenager watching over the littlest ones who are now as old as Ayla is….she was a just a baby then. I’ve watched a lot of these kids grow… I’ve been pregnant here, and my son Connor has grown up here almost five years now. My family has connected to this family so strongly. When we needed to be held up during uncertain stability, and extreme loss many of you came without call. For this and many other reasons this community is very special.
Today I invite you to take a journey with me…
Imagine the warm sunlight peering into the sanctuary while the astounding sound of the organ and the loving voices of our church family come together and form worship. Where we sit and stand, pray and meditate, share moments of laughter and times of troubles together. Where there is no better place to pass the flame from candle to candle on Christmas Eve, where our dear Leaf can stand before us delivering just what we need to carry through the week and remind us who we are and what is important.
Picture a Labyrinth, a long winding labyrinth with one threshold where the object of walking its path is not to get lost, although it resembles a maze, but rather to clear your mind, breathe deep, and remember yourself…to find peace, and equilibrium inside yourself only by walking, walking down a path to it’s center where all you find is clarity of mind, a wholeness of spirit and an overwhelming sense of love.
Picture a garden, where you or I, or our neighbor can sit and be still, or work the land in community, or smell the flowers. Where we can learn from each other and get back to our UU roots where summers off from congregating in a hot, sticky church are replaced by community and spirit in harvesting a crop that was gingerly cared for and watered and talked to the year through.
Picture an invitation to walk the trails of a more peaceful place in our city. For Fitchburg has many facets. That we may hold our presence for now in the graces of the inner city common…and a more rural place that reminds us of our human roots where people used to experience daily what it means to be surrounded by the natural world.
Picture a place where old and young and somewhere in the middle, find common ground. Where each can do their share, in his or her own way, own ability, and yet common ground invites us to learn from each other and share with each other the things we know, the things we wonder, the things that make us who we are.
Picture our children, for they are all ours, playing games and laughing as they run out of breath and fall cushioned by the greenest of grass and lay watching the birds fly overhead. Learning what it truly means to take care of our earth by doing just that. Learning from Nature what an interdependent web of life is by watching it take place right in our patch of earth. Where children who are able to sit and listen patiently and those who use their bodies to experience life can both participate during a lesson by having lots of room to be free to move and yet be close by without walls or doors so that they too can listen. For those whose voices carry far, that a walled room can make it impossible for those with small ears to hear… that the free air outside will absorb it into the sky.
Picture the sun shining on your faces as we all gather during the summer for a vespers that takes place in the cool evening air. A place that is always open for visitors with no reservations or obligations from each other to celebrate our end of the year picnic.
Someone I know is very interested in Bee Keeping…as I’m sure many people are. They long to learn the ways of having a relationship with the bees. I for one am so far from that desire. Quite frankly bees scare me…I would be utterly terrified and besides I have never been stung so they could be deadly, however his passion for it excites me and I know that something very good comes from this relationship and love for the bees…honey... and I definitely love honey. I can appreciate that keeping the bees is not for me but in seeing the good in it and the good that can come from it…I support it. And so for those who feel that they don’t connect to the vision or the possibilities at Fisher road…know that there is a bigger picture…that our current family and future UU’s, Maybe Connor’s children, just may benefit from our decision to journey together and take a leap of faith. (end of testimonial)
When Wendell Berry says do something everyday that won’t compute: love all that is sacred and love the world, it is a bold reminder that love doesn’t always compute. Perhaps it never does for love is not about bottom lines and accounting columns, nor is it a series of zeroes and ones. Love resides in the joyfulness we find even when we have considered the facts. Love stirs and coheres us even though we have markedly different experiences and desires. Love allows us to hold on and to let go.
Consider this Easter morn, dear Jesus who like the fox, made more tracks than necessary often in the wrong direction, not because he was lost, but because like many a spiritual wanderer, Jesus understood the value of unsettling himself as much as he unsettled others. Jesus did not merely advocate change. He resurrected it. He turned commandments inside out exposing their fleshy truths. He brought a fresh perspective to accepted ways of being and he took risks for the sake of preserving and restoring creation. In short, he did Noah proud.
Resurrection is not for the faint-hearted. Every spring as the trees transform their bareness and the bears lumber out of their dens, life renews itself. Whatever we as a congregation decide to do—to borrow the words of Lincoln—“fondly do I hope and fervently do I pray” that we each embrace the invitation not just to build an ark, but to become one—an ark sturdy enough to carry First Parish into its next incarnation, among sequoias whose mammoth trunks cannot contain our immeasurable laughter. Amen.
On this Easter morning, as the tight buds on branches reinvent spring, let us consider resurrection as Wendell Berry, the great Kentucky farmer-poet does.
So friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world …
Ask questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest . . .
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years…
Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Though you have considered all the facts.…
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade.…
Be like the fox
Who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
What would it mean for us to invest in the millennium? To take as our main crop the forest we did not plant—our forebears did that—nor the one we will harvest—for it belongs to our children.
Resurrection is about life preserved and restored. In sixth chapter of Genesis, long before Jesus appears in the Gospels, we read of a flood that threatens all existence. In that famous narrative, Noah builds an ark and ferries his family and pairs of animals to dry land. As the story goes, were it not for Noah and the ark, all of creation would be submerged. Hence, the ark preserves and restores creation. It is the first biblical example of resurrection.
On January 30th, I spoke of the ark we could build, the ark our congregation could become. In every sermon since then I have made some reference to the land on Fisher Road, to the potential it holds as an integral part of our ministry. Why land? You might ask. Why now?
Last week, while I was in Nashville celebrating Passover with my cousins, a meeting took place after the service where a conversation ensued. I have talked to enough folks about it to gauge that questions linger.
Why “go with [our] love to the fields [and] lie easy in the shade”? Why “be like the fox/who makes more tracks than necessary/some in the wrong direction”?
“To practice resurrection. To invest in the millennium. To plant sequoias.”
Sequoias as you know take a long time to mature. They are immense beings, stately and majestic. They remind mere humans to take the long view. To invest in them is to invest in a future we will not experience firsthand. But that doesn’t mean we will not be part of it.
In 1768 when the First Parish of Fitchburg formed, the folks who gathered did not live to see the building we inhabit. They never heard the melodious sounds of our organ. They could not glimpse even with power of prognostication the merger of Unitarianism and Universalism. But their gathering formed an ark that traveled the seas of time into a future that we know as the present. We are here because they congregated, week after week, year after year. And because the good folks of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries instilled in their children the value of a liberal religious community. Had they failed to do that, this congregation and our beloved denomination would have gone the way of the Shakers. No matter how simple and sensible their aesthetic, the Shakers did not plant sequoias.
If we do not invest in our children we imperil ourselves the way the Shakers did.
One of the great joys, indeed purposes of a congregation is to form a multigenerational community where we can learn from and enjoy each other: where the wisdom and patience of experience commingle with the inquisitiveness and energy of youth. Several years ago, I preached a sermon on aging wherein I quoted a doctor whose research found that folks in their seventies and eighties were better baking companions to children than forty-year-olds. Middle-aged folks are often too focused on results whereas older folks more often enjoy the process without worrying about the final product. This comes in handy baking with young children. And it works in reverse. Young children not yet steady on their own feet and free from fixed ideas offer an appreciativeness and realness often lost from late adolescence to mid-adulthood.
Ann Saalbach has agreed to share her thoughts on commingling the generations.
Ann’s testimonial:
Let’s face it – humans are tribal. We need our own private cave-space to retreat to but in the end, we want to join a group around the fire and we want that group to just move over to make space for us because we belong there and with them.
As I grow old and wise, I have realized that one’s own age cohort is special – we all lived through the same global events at the same age, we are going through similar transitions in our personal lives and we understand each other in special ways. But I’ve also realized that my own cohort is not enough. I want elders, newborns and fledglings, middle-lifers – the whole gamut of life – in my tribe. Our western world can make this hard. We are isolated in our own homes and nuclear families. Where can we taste that sense of community?
My tribe is FPC. I treasure its diversity, not least its diversity in age.
Last spring I regularly attended women’s group. It was a magical time for me and a magical mini tribe. Five of us were regulars and three of those five brought their children. Thus we had members in their first decade of life, their second, their third, fifth, sixth and seventh. (Somehow I think we missed out on the 4th decade – none of us in our thirties.) Those of us who were raising young ones got help and advice from the rest. Those of us who were young ones got spare adults who were not at their wits’ end with us at that particular moment. And those of us like me, whose young one is now grown up and very far away, got to rejoice in being stuck into a chaotic family meal once again.
We need small people. And they need us. Amen.
Some of you asked last week, why does an urban congregation need rural land? John Muir wrote upon reaching Yosemite: “We are now in the mountains, and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell.” Nature is not just for so-called “nature-lovers.” It is the best way we have to remind ourselves we are creatures of this earth. Everything we make, ingest, discard, adore and disregard is of this universe that births and sustains us. Spending time with the fertile earth reminds us how our forebears lived by the rhythms and seasonal cycles of the sun, moon, and earth. It restores us to green pastures and invites members of the wider community to “put faith in the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years.”
In my upstairs window hangs a piece of stained glass edged with the words of E.B. White: “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world.” It is in savoring the world that we find reason to save it; without saving it we lose the capacity to savor it at all.
Many of us seek communal worship to give expression to our savoring of life’s sweetness, just as we seek the comfort and companionship of Sunday services in troubled and troubling times. Since I have been here, this church has closed during the summer months, an oddly counterintuitive gesture since as we all know illness, accidents, grief, loss, and loneliness don’t go on holiday. But truth be known, our sanctuary is just too darn hot and many of us retreat to our gardens and lawns or seek the shade of backyards, parks or woodland trails.
I believe presence matters. I am old-fashioned enough to think consistent weekly connection builds community. Last Friday in Nashville, I reveled in my cousins’ weekly Sabbath dinner, a tradition instigated long before I was born. After my aunt and cousins die, my cousins’ children and their children will carry on the tradition just as they will gather annually for Passover Seder which Jews have been doing for thousands of years. Even though I cannot read or recite Hebrew, the prayers for the bread of the earth and the fruit of vine roll off my tongue. Simply because every Friday night of my childhood, my family gathered to light the candles and bless the bread and grape juice. How grateful I am.
Now I invite Tricia Caspers-Ross and Amanda Chaves to share their thoughts with us.
Tricia’s testimonial:
Like many people, I joined the UU church for my children because I want them to grow up in a thinking, exploring, community, one that teaches them that every person, every being, is valued.
When Rick and I were deciding whether or not to move across the country, we brought the kids to visit Ashburnham. Seamus was three months old, and one summer Sunday I packed him up along with all of his baby paraphernalia, borrowed my mother-in-law’s car, and drove to this church for Sunday service. But, as you have probably guessed, when I arrived there was no one here. Later, I was dismayed to learn that there are no regularly scheduled summer services.
While I was disappointed, this wasn’t a deal-breaker for our family, as it might be for some, but I did wonder how the congregation, especially the children, maintain a sense of community through those long, wet, summer months. How do parents reinforce UU values out in the (sometimes very un-UU) wider world without the weekly support of a UU community?
When I think about the land at Fisher Road, I see an answer to that question. I see a place where those who choose could meet on a sunny Sunday morning and garden, walk a labyrinth, hike, birdwatch, do outdoor yoga or tai chi, play croquet or hide-and-seek. The land is not only a way to maintain the connections that the adults have here, but also to create connections between the older and younger generations in the church, which for the most part, are lacking.
Right now there’s maybe one teenager in the building on any given Sunday, and the youth group is, for all purposes, defunct. I see the land on Fisher Road as a way to re-vive the teen community here, to draw in new families by reaching out to other youth groups in the community. I see the possibility of picnics and barbecues and campouts, Frisbee, and soccer games. I see our youth living UU values and having fun in a way that’s not possible within the confines of this building.
If we buy the land on Fisher Road, we show the children and the teens of our church that we hold true to our UU beliefs by valuing them. And when the children want to be together, having fun, they will continue to come, and the church thrives, and we raise a generation who, like us, want to make the world a little bit better.
Amanda’s testimonial:
I’ve been kicking around this church for I guess about 10 or so years. I started as a teenager watching over the littlest ones who are now as old as Ayla is….she was a just a baby then. I’ve watched a lot of these kids grow… I’ve been pregnant here, and my son Connor has grown up here almost five years now. My family has connected to this family so strongly. When we needed to be held up during uncertain stability, and extreme loss many of you came without call. For this and many other reasons this community is very special.
Today I invite you to take a journey with me…
Imagine the warm sunlight peering into the sanctuary while the astounding sound of the organ and the loving voices of our church family come together and form worship. Where we sit and stand, pray and meditate, share moments of laughter and times of troubles together. Where there is no better place to pass the flame from candle to candle on Christmas Eve, where our dear Leaf can stand before us delivering just what we need to carry through the week and remind us who we are and what is important.
Picture a Labyrinth, a long winding labyrinth with one threshold where the object of walking its path is not to get lost, although it resembles a maze, but rather to clear your mind, breathe deep, and remember yourself…to find peace, and equilibrium inside yourself only by walking, walking down a path to it’s center where all you find is clarity of mind, a wholeness of spirit and an overwhelming sense of love.
Picture a garden, where you or I, or our neighbor can sit and be still, or work the land in community, or smell the flowers. Where we can learn from each other and get back to our UU roots where summers off from congregating in a hot, sticky church are replaced by community and spirit in harvesting a crop that was gingerly cared for and watered and talked to the year through.
Picture an invitation to walk the trails of a more peaceful place in our city. For Fitchburg has many facets. That we may hold our presence for now in the graces of the inner city common…and a more rural place that reminds us of our human roots where people used to experience daily what it means to be surrounded by the natural world.
Picture a place where old and young and somewhere in the middle, find common ground. Where each can do their share, in his or her own way, own ability, and yet common ground invites us to learn from each other and share with each other the things we know, the things we wonder, the things that make us who we are.
Picture our children, for they are all ours, playing games and laughing as they run out of breath and fall cushioned by the greenest of grass and lay watching the birds fly overhead. Learning what it truly means to take care of our earth by doing just that. Learning from Nature what an interdependent web of life is by watching it take place right in our patch of earth. Where children who are able to sit and listen patiently and those who use their bodies to experience life can both participate during a lesson by having lots of room to be free to move and yet be close by without walls or doors so that they too can listen. For those whose voices carry far, that a walled room can make it impossible for those with small ears to hear… that the free air outside will absorb it into the sky.
Picture the sun shining on your faces as we all gather during the summer for a vespers that takes place in the cool evening air. A place that is always open for visitors with no reservations or obligations from each other to celebrate our end of the year picnic.
Someone I know is very interested in Bee Keeping…as I’m sure many people are. They long to learn the ways of having a relationship with the bees. I for one am so far from that desire. Quite frankly bees scare me…I would be utterly terrified and besides I have never been stung so they could be deadly, however his passion for it excites me and I know that something very good comes from this relationship and love for the bees…honey... and I definitely love honey. I can appreciate that keeping the bees is not for me but in seeing the good in it and the good that can come from it…I support it. And so for those who feel that they don’t connect to the vision or the possibilities at Fisher road…know that there is a bigger picture…that our current family and future UU’s, Maybe Connor’s children, just may benefit from our decision to journey together and take a leap of faith. (end of testimonial)
When Wendell Berry says do something everyday that won’t compute: love all that is sacred and love the world, it is a bold reminder that love doesn’t always compute. Perhaps it never does for love is not about bottom lines and accounting columns, nor is it a series of zeroes and ones. Love resides in the joyfulness we find even when we have considered the facts. Love stirs and coheres us even though we have markedly different experiences and desires. Love allows us to hold on and to let go.
Consider this Easter morn, dear Jesus who like the fox, made more tracks than necessary often in the wrong direction, not because he was lost, but because like many a spiritual wanderer, Jesus understood the value of unsettling himself as much as he unsettled others. Jesus did not merely advocate change. He resurrected it. He turned commandments inside out exposing their fleshy truths. He brought a fresh perspective to accepted ways of being and he took risks for the sake of preserving and restoring creation. In short, he did Noah proud.
Resurrection is not for the faint-hearted. Every spring as the trees transform their bareness and the bears lumber out of their dens, life renews itself. Whatever we as a congregation decide to do—to borrow the words of Lincoln—“fondly do I hope and fervently do I pray” that we each embrace the invitation not just to build an ark, but to become one—an ark sturdy enough to carry First Parish into its next incarnation, among sequoias whose mammoth trunks cannot contain our immeasurable laughter. Amen.
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