A colleague of mine at Keene State College is teaching a section of the same course I teach, Integrative Thinking and Writing. There are some forty sections of this course, each with a specific theme or topic, chosen by the instructor. Students choose the section that interests them or fits in their sched-ule. Like me, Alice has two sections each with its own theme. One is "Death and Dying," the other, "The Pursuit of Happi-ness." Guess that about covers it. I was sufficiently intrigued by Alice's topics that we got together over coffee to talk about them. There is no shortage of students interested in a writing course on death and dying, and according to Alice, the students in that section seem more engaged than the ones pursuing happi-ness.
As you all know, much has been researched and written about happiness. To name just a few recent books:
Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: The 9 Habits of Maximum Happiness
The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living (by the Dalai Lama, no less)
The Pursuit of Happiness: Discovering the Pathway to Fulfill-ment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
And lastly, by one of the foremost psychologists studying happi-ness, who I like
to think is a distant cousin, Martin Seligman, Authentic Happi-ness: Using the New
Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lad ting Ful-fillment.
Interestingly enough, my colleague uses none of these as her course text. Instead she chose Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.
Apparently, happiness has its limits and even its encroach-ments.
What compelled me most about my conversation with Alice were her own questions: Is there something of more value to us as humans than happiness? Is contentment the same as happiness or is it deeper? Why is happiness so darn important? Is it what we should be pursuing?
Obviously, it is not necessary for the propagation of the species, nor does our happiness insure planetary well-being. If anything, what we conflate with happiness: the allure of more, immediate gratification and unbridled appetites—does more harm to the earth than good.
So what then is the value of happiness? Is it reducible to a simple-minded positivism available to any who harness the power of positive thinking? Is it an attitude, brought on per-haps by gratitude? Or is deeper than that? More than a state of prolonged pleasure? Is happiness a state of contentment brought about by attitude and achievement? Does it involve a level of accomplishment that requires a modicum of opportunity that must be guaranteed by the state? Is that why its pursuit is essen-tial to the American Declaration of Independence? Is it what compelled the Dalai Lama to collaborate with leading neuroscien-tist Richard Davidson?
Using brain imagery to track what happens to a mind happily engrossed in meditation, scientists can now "promote resilience and happiness and other positive qualities of the mind through enhanced training and mental exercises."
Some psychologists posit happiness as a state of well-being. Davidson defines it as " a combination of positive emo-tional states, including contentment, satisfaction, pleasure and joy... associated with actively embracing the world and being fully engaged."
What happens to happiness if it resides in the state of embrace: our capacity, willingness, desire to embrace the world, and in turn, be engaged?
Perhaps this is what shifts happiness from a psychological to a spiritual experience. Or perhaps this is what directs us to our deepest values.
In her "Morning Poem," Mary Oliver writes,
"there is still somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted"
...whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, suggesting happiness is nothing less than an act of daring: ad-venturous courage.If she is right that "somewhere deep with [us] a beast [shouts] that the earth is exactly what it wanted," this may be the poet's nod to the scientist's revelation that happiness cor-relates with our embrace of the world, and our willing ness to engage.
But precisely because happiness gets co-opted by movements of prosperity and positivism, it may be worthwhile to take up Alice's question, to determine whether the pursuit of attentive-ness and engagement rank up there with life and liberty.
In his book, Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: The 9 Habits of Maximum Happiness, David Leonhardt identifies elements of atten-tiveness and engagement such as include seizing the day, count-ing blessings, and spreading joy though he also devotes a fair amount of word-space to good old fashioned self-focused positive thinking.
But in a world so clearly filled with suffering: the atrocities that repeat themselves in each generation, the ram-pant inequity in the distribution and allocation of resources, and a mindset that encourages us to perceive everything from trees to talent to terrapins as resources to maximize — do at-tentiveness and engagement require more than positive thoughts and stress reduction?
What does attentiveness ask?
One day, in the midst of my own happiness: let's call it a state of well-being, I asked a wise and Buddhist-flavored coun-selor why u it I get to be so happy and experience joy and com-fort while so many beings suffer?
Karma, she answered. We don't know what their karma re-quires of them but yours requires that you bear witness to their suffering, that your notice and acknowledge it.
In short my karma demands my attentiveness and engagement. Apparently how I engage is an open and endless question. Must I, must we, follow the trail of tears to hotspots and war zones, disasters and landscapes of desolation? Some of us do feel called to foreign soil. And some us, self included, adhere to Wendell Berry's maxim that we must respond where history has placed us. Here, now, where my paws are. This is the realm of my influence, the specificity of my embrace.
As I immersed myself in the engagement with you that entails writing sermons, I paused long enough to take my dog Zuki for a walk in the woods. We are lucky to live next to many acres of young forest where Zuki prowls, happily unleashed. (If I know nothing about human happiness, I imagine canine bliss as the moment the leash snaps off the collar and Zuki darts unimpeded into the woods.) As I ambled along the trail I heard the rustle of dogs: not one, more. As Zuki can-tered toward me I saw what looked like a tawny shepherd followed by a brindled reddish, gray-ish, yellowish one in pursuit. They were of course coyotes and as I watched to see what they would do: hoping there would not be aggression in the mix, the coyotes noticed me and slunk away. God, they were beautiful, and without thinking, I muttered a prayer aloud that they be kept well, that they survive the winter, unharmed by hunters. And then I thought of the deer that roam the forest, the ones who will be inevitably eaten so that the coyotes stay alive. Zuki and I have come upon the barest remains of a downed deer, the ground cover of fur, the elegant, fleshless spine, the partial skull. No beauty there, other than perhaps the cycle of woodland life unintruded upon by humans. The moment with the beautiful coyotes and my beautiful dog, similar in build and size but for her sleek and complete blackness, summoned me to embrace the awe of wildness with its inherent pain.
It invites, lo, insists that I engage wholeheartedly with the encounter: that is to say the heart that beats desire for coyote well-being, and the heart that beats breathless coming upon a carpet of fur emptied of its being.
Thus, to engage fully doesn't always feel like happiness. To engage with life when grief burgles the house and redeco-rates, hanging drapes so opaque it seems impossible for any light to get through. Surely that is not happiness, but the re-sulting impulse to get out of the house or hunker further down signals a pulse. Embrace is not always an expression of joy, a sign of affection. Sometimes it denotes relief—in dogspeak, em-brace often involves teeth, sometimes playfully, sometimes not.
If embrace is the act or state of beholding the world as we are held by it; a combination of attentiveness and engagement neuroscientists and Buddhist monks recognize as a kind of one-ness with being, then perhaps my colleague Alice is right to question the pursuit of happiness. Perchance it is not the brass ring to reach for, to groom our children to grab. Admittedly, detouring from the
pursuit of happiness, which gets peddled as the insatiable quest for satisfaction, might damage the consumer economy, but it could restore well-being. Or perhaps the challenge is to expand our notion of embrace, to notice what we notice, to attend the fullness of it all.
David Stendl-Rast posits the antidote to exhaustion isn't rest; it is wholeheartedness. The antidote to discontent might be wholeheartedness as well.
The fine Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye write this:
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
A wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world tails in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
Something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
And disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
And now live over a quarry of noise and dust
Cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
It too could wake up filled with possibilities
Of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
And love even the floor which needs to be swept,
The soiled linens and scratched records
Since there is no place large enough
To contain so much happiness,
You shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
Into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
For the moon, but continues to hold it, and to share it,
And in that way, be known.
As the night sky holds the moon, we too are held in the sky's embrace. Whether or not we dare to be happy, let us dare to of-fer the world our attentiveness, let us dare to wholeheartedly engage. Amen.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Gift of Yom Kippur
I begin with a reading by Nancy Shaffer, from her book of meditations, Instructions in Joy.
Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,
and also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
how much is gone and we hadn't intended it
because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
but also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides because we are so many
and we want to live right where black oaks lived,
once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in before,
remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy
and how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly found and held
and also forget the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. It’s one of the days from the Jewish calendar that presses itself into me, not so much on the day itself, but in the time of year. In those days after Rosh Hashanah when the air turns crisp, when the pumpkins in my garden turn orange. It’s a time of turning, not just for the weather, the pumpkins, the season itself, but for us, for the human part of creation. How wise the ancient Jews who thought to observe this time, to reflect on what has bent askew, what has fallen or been pushed out of right relation.
What milk have we spilled, or poured unnecessarily? What lives have we overturned? In what relationships have we made holes? Where and when and for what do we need to atone?
Atonement parses into at-one-ment, which appears the simplest way to get at the heart of this day. Observant Jews set aside the ten days between the New Year and Yom Kippur to take inventory, to tally the tears and fissures, to note the unkempt words, the careless actions, the slivers of meanness that may have chipped away from our own pain or frustration. And then, the tally taken, observers of Yom Kippur consider as their Buddhist brethren and sisters do, what right action to take to restore balance and harmony. What amends must be made? What change need occur to re-establish trust and cooperation? What must one do to feel at home in oneself and thus able to welcome another?
Yom Kippur extends beyond contemplation into action. Regret is not sufficient. Though we find the virtue of humility embedded in remorse, Yom Kippur summons us to the virtue of courage as well. It summons us to wake early, to pad into the kitchen in our jammies and robe and sit at the table where the milk has spilled—to reckon with how much is gone that we never intended to lose.
Yom Kippur calls to us in the middle of the night when the branches outside our windows stir. We hear it in the tapping wind and creaking panes of glass urging us back in the rooms we wandered out of forgetting why we were there.
What did we promise ourselves that we have not kept? Where have we trailed off from our essence, the nature of our being that requires adherence lest we lose integrity? It has become easier to let slip the who of what we are.
In the last several months I have noticed during the excavation of self-reflection, that for the first time in my life I am completely at home. Home in my body and in my being—the ways I am, the essential nature that makes me Leaf. I am at home with you in this joyous ministry. I am at home where I live, in the house I inhabit, in the woods that surround me, in the region that holds me. I am at home in the friendships and kinships that sustain me as lovingly as the trees.
I share this because the recognition of being home now allows me to understand how all the years of not being home in one way or another—in body or spirit or place—caused a great deal of spillage. Nancy Shaffer in her lovely meditation speaks of “forget[ting] entire lexicons of joy and [losing] ourselves for hours yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.” How wise and true of her to note. To know in our experience of utter lost-ness, when we feel most untethered from what grounds us, that we are held, reminds me of a poem by David Wagoner called "Lost":
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
Herein lies the distinctive offer of Yom Kippur. We approach the day willing to atone, yearning to restore and be restored. We name the moments, the methods, the meanderings where we have lost ourselves, our bearings, our attention to right and wrong. We yield for a day or a week or the ten days and nights of awe, arms upraised, calling into the indigo scrim of sky, here, here is where I faltered. And from the depths overhead, the winds sings to us through the branches tapping on the window, get up, get up, and I will show you in the darkness how you have been held.
Yom Kippur is the day Jews make the way back home to God. The days preceding it are meant to find our way back into right relation with self, followed by a restoration of relation with other human beings and as I see it, all the beings beyond human that sustain us: the earth and its creatures, its flora and fauna and waters and stone. Perhaps for some it is the collectivity of the cosmos and all its being that comprises the God or Godness that await us on Yom Kippur. When we reach the day, having done our best to align ourselves, to resume or at least attempt living right-sized, we are ready to place ourselves in the presence of the tree of life, the burning bush. If the value of doing so eludes us, if we are lost to the purpose of God, that thrum of being that holds us in our waking and our sleep, our living and our death, the gift is that the forest knows where [we] are.
To put it more biblically, it is Cain who having murdered his brother, calls out to God, “I shall be hidden from your face.”
Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
This is the gift—that we get to return. That we may feel lost, we may be lost. We may stray so far from the true edge of ourselves that we become something contrary to what we are meant to be. We may become foolhardy or unkind, greed-filled or wanton in our desires, careless with lexicons of expression and joy. We may roam so far from what we intended that we do not recognize the visage in the mirror staring back.
Or we may feel lost not by virtue of our own wandering, but by the mighty tosses of fate, the gales and riptides of life that unseat us. Uprooted we raise our tiny fists to God, we bellow or shriek our curses into the brooding sky, forgetting it reaches down to meet us. Anything above ground is sky. We hold onto that image of sky as the blue overhead because it looks clear in front of us, but the sky’s embrace is everywhere—or as Julian of Norwich, the 14th century Christian mystic put it: “ in falling and rising again we are kept in the same precious love.”
We get to return because we are never forsaken. Sure, God as rendered in the fourth chapter of Genesis. booms to Cain. “You will be a fugitive and a wanderer. When you till the ground it will no longer yield to you its strength,” but the same human imagination that penned those lines, that conceived God thoroughly brokenhearted by the blood Cain spilled, went on to write, “And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Nod meaning wandering. The land of wandering. A prescient forbear recounts the consequence of fracture: the brokenness of Cain, the brokenness of Abel, the brokenness of God. In our wandering we feel lost but we remain found. Attached to the cosmos that spawns us and never lets us go, not in our dying, not even in the spilling of another’s blood. We are held, but it is our journey to return to the awareness of embrace.
That is the summons of Yom Kippur, to return to that awareness.
In the words of Nancy Shaffer, “Yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.”
And—
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yom Kippur, in its own ironic or non-ironic way is about salvation: the kind that comes from turning and returning. Not from a man nailed to a cross. Not from an angel on high who assures disruption, but from the human capacity to stand still: before a tree, a burning bush, even a mirror, before the creatures with whom we share creation and re-create our lives each day—to still ourselves so that we may be found—by the wind that upturns the silver back of leaves, by the indigo sky that can always place us in the darkest night, by the churning waters that recognize us whirling in the undertow.
Whoever you are, wherever you may be, stand still and let the forest find you. Yom Kippur invites us to be found, to rediscover not just the true edges of self but the real not imagined permeations of being: the embrace of God, of a cosmos that holds us, that waits patiently for us to turn back, to lift our face to the sky and head home again. Amen.
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish Fitchburg UU 19 Sept. 2010
Because we spill not only milk
knocking it over with an elbow
when we reach to wipe a small face
but also spill seed on soil we thought was fertile but isn't,
and also spill whole lives, and only later see in fading light
how much is gone and we hadn't intended it
because we tear not only cloth
thinking to find a true edge and instead making only a hole
but also tear friendships when we grow
and whole mountainsides because we are so many
and we want to live right where black oaks lived,
once very quietly and still
Because we forget not only what we are doing in the kitchen
and have to go back to the room we were in before,
remember why it was we left
but also forget entire lexicons of joy
and how we lost ourselves for hours
yet all that time were clearly found and held
and also forget the hungry not at our table
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
Because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. It’s one of the days from the Jewish calendar that presses itself into me, not so much on the day itself, but in the time of year. In those days after Rosh Hashanah when the air turns crisp, when the pumpkins in my garden turn orange. It’s a time of turning, not just for the weather, the pumpkins, the season itself, but for us, for the human part of creation. How wise the ancient Jews who thought to observe this time, to reflect on what has bent askew, what has fallen or been pushed out of right relation.
What milk have we spilled, or poured unnecessarily? What lives have we overturned? In what relationships have we made holes? Where and when and for what do we need to atone?
Atonement parses into at-one-ment, which appears the simplest way to get at the heart of this day. Observant Jews set aside the ten days between the New Year and Yom Kippur to take inventory, to tally the tears and fissures, to note the unkempt words, the careless actions, the slivers of meanness that may have chipped away from our own pain or frustration. And then, the tally taken, observers of Yom Kippur consider as their Buddhist brethren and sisters do, what right action to take to restore balance and harmony. What amends must be made? What change need occur to re-establish trust and cooperation? What must one do to feel at home in oneself and thus able to welcome another?
Yom Kippur extends beyond contemplation into action. Regret is not sufficient. Though we find the virtue of humility embedded in remorse, Yom Kippur summons us to the virtue of courage as well. It summons us to wake early, to pad into the kitchen in our jammies and robe and sit at the table where the milk has spilled—to reckon with how much is gone that we never intended to lose.
Yom Kippur calls to us in the middle of the night when the branches outside our windows stir. We hear it in the tapping wind and creaking panes of glass urging us back in the rooms we wandered out of forgetting why we were there.
What did we promise ourselves that we have not kept? Where have we trailed off from our essence, the nature of our being that requires adherence lest we lose integrity? It has become easier to let slip the who of what we are.
In the last several months I have noticed during the excavation of self-reflection, that for the first time in my life I am completely at home. Home in my body and in my being—the ways I am, the essential nature that makes me Leaf. I am at home with you in this joyous ministry. I am at home where I live, in the house I inhabit, in the woods that surround me, in the region that holds me. I am at home in the friendships and kinships that sustain me as lovingly as the trees.
I share this because the recognition of being home now allows me to understand how all the years of not being home in one way or another—in body or spirit or place—caused a great deal of spillage. Nancy Shaffer in her lovely meditation speaks of “forget[ting] entire lexicons of joy and [losing] ourselves for hours yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.” How wise and true of her to note. To know in our experience of utter lost-ness, when we feel most untethered from what grounds us, that we are held, reminds me of a poem by David Wagoner called "Lost":
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
Herein lies the distinctive offer of Yom Kippur. We approach the day willing to atone, yearning to restore and be restored. We name the moments, the methods, the meanderings where we have lost ourselves, our bearings, our attention to right and wrong. We yield for a day or a week or the ten days and nights of awe, arms upraised, calling into the indigo scrim of sky, here, here is where I faltered. And from the depths overhead, the winds sings to us through the branches tapping on the window, get up, get up, and I will show you in the darkness how you have been held.
Yom Kippur is the day Jews make the way back home to God. The days preceding it are meant to find our way back into right relation with self, followed by a restoration of relation with other human beings and as I see it, all the beings beyond human that sustain us: the earth and its creatures, its flora and fauna and waters and stone. Perhaps for some it is the collectivity of the cosmos and all its being that comprises the God or Godness that await us on Yom Kippur. When we reach the day, having done our best to align ourselves, to resume or at least attempt living right-sized, we are ready to place ourselves in the presence of the tree of life, the burning bush. If the value of doing so eludes us, if we are lost to the purpose of God, that thrum of being that holds us in our waking and our sleep, our living and our death, the gift is that the forest knows where [we] are.
To put it more biblically, it is Cain who having murdered his brother, calls out to God, “I shall be hidden from your face.”
Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
This is the gift—that we get to return. That we may feel lost, we may be lost. We may stray so far from the true edge of ourselves that we become something contrary to what we are meant to be. We may become foolhardy or unkind, greed-filled or wanton in our desires, careless with lexicons of expression and joy. We may roam so far from what we intended that we do not recognize the visage in the mirror staring back.
Or we may feel lost not by virtue of our own wandering, but by the mighty tosses of fate, the gales and riptides of life that unseat us. Uprooted we raise our tiny fists to God, we bellow or shriek our curses into the brooding sky, forgetting it reaches down to meet us. Anything above ground is sky. We hold onto that image of sky as the blue overhead because it looks clear in front of us, but the sky’s embrace is everywhere—or as Julian of Norwich, the 14th century Christian mystic put it: “ in falling and rising again we are kept in the same precious love.”
We get to return because we are never forsaken. Sure, God as rendered in the fourth chapter of Genesis. booms to Cain. “You will be a fugitive and a wanderer. When you till the ground it will no longer yield to you its strength,” but the same human imagination that penned those lines, that conceived God thoroughly brokenhearted by the blood Cain spilled, went on to write, “And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” Nod meaning wandering. The land of wandering. A prescient forbear recounts the consequence of fracture: the brokenness of Cain, the brokenness of Abel, the brokenness of God. In our wandering we feel lost but we remain found. Attached to the cosmos that spawns us and never lets us go, not in our dying, not even in the spilling of another’s blood. We are held, but it is our journey to return to the awareness of embrace.
That is the summons of Yom Kippur, to return to that awareness.
In the words of Nancy Shaffer, “Yet all that time [we] were clearly found and held.”
And—
Because we weep not only at jade plants caught in freeze
and precious papers left in rain
but also at legs that no longer walk
or never did, although from the outside they look like most others
and also weep at words said once as though
they might be rearranged but which
once loose, refuse to return and we are helpless
because we are imperfect and love so
deeply we will never have enough days,
we need the gift of starting over, beginning
again: just this constant good, this
saving hope.
Yom Kippur, in its own ironic or non-ironic way is about salvation: the kind that comes from turning and returning. Not from a man nailed to a cross. Not from an angel on high who assures disruption, but from the human capacity to stand still: before a tree, a burning bush, even a mirror, before the creatures with whom we share creation and re-create our lives each day—to still ourselves so that we may be found—by the wind that upturns the silver back of leaves, by the indigo sky that can always place us in the darkest night, by the churning waters that recognize us whirling in the undertow.
Whoever you are, wherever you may be, stand still and let the forest find you. Yom Kippur invites us to be found, to rediscover not just the true edges of self but the real not imagined permeations of being: the embrace of God, of a cosmos that holds us, that waits patiently for us to turn back, to lift our face to the sky and head home again. Amen.
Copyright Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish Fitchburg UU 19 Sept. 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Of Ducks & Caravans
Come, come whoever you are—wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, ours is no caravan of despair. Come yet again, come.
The words of Rumi, 13th century Sufi, everlasting. Each year we turn and return—we gather again, the caravan circling round to pick up each one as we are—wherever we are in our journey.
We are not all in the same place for over the summer some of us have taken journeys and some of us have been taken by them. For many, it has been a summer marked by transitions—changes of heart, of home, of spiritual, emotional, physical condition.
As the caravan stops, waits for each of us to board, we take note of our fellow travelers—the ease or difficulty with which we climb on—some hopping, some creeping—color radiating from our faces or color drained. Some with our last two chickens, some with jewels.
We each join the caravan because it transports us here—together in our separateness.
Arlene Gay Levine writes:
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
Not so unlike William Blake who bid us to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, each moment in time is time. Each step is the journey. The journey of a thousand miles begins again with each step. That’s why we never step in the same river twice. The river flows, ever-changing—and we who bob and float and flow, sometimes snag, drift or swirl about in the eddies. We travel the river of life never coming up for air in the same place twice for just as the river changes, we change—we age, we ripen like cheese or wine or pears. And as we know, some of our ripenings toughen our skin and others tenderize us to bruising.
Thus we gather this ingathering Sunday once again, each in our own state of being—our ripeness fragrant or aromatic; some of us thick-rind as the rhino, some of us thin-skinned as the grape under a heel. We gather not just to be renewed but to be noticed in our renewing.
This week I received a few photos taken on Star Island where I spent a week in mid-August—photos of my mother and me laughing, no, cawing wild and exhilarated as crows; photos pixilated with innumerable points of joy—my mother’s sun-drenched face upturned, me banjo in hand. The photos tell of our renewal—not just mine and Taya’s, but an island of people, travelers all. Who gathered as we each “moved through a world of stone and stars” whirling together—alone but collected, separate but connected.
Each experiencing the moment co-created by each other. No moment belonged to any being alone. Every moment held the sound of the surf, the scent of salt air, the heat of the sun. Each mote of stone dust rising from the dirt embedded with particles of light—solar yes, but sacred, too—“nor do I mean anything miraculous,” to quote Mary Oliver,”only the light that can shine out of a life.”
I had never been to Star Island before but once there I understood its allure—the way our separate togetherness formed an invitation to dance at daybreak, to say yes because each note is the song.
And just like here, the song changes—it shimmies and coils, undulates like great undersea grasses swaying from the ocean floor.
At church, people make decisions about all kinds of things—steeples and buildings, budgets and mission, but that is not why we come; that is not what compels us to climb on the caravan—deciding things. No, we gather for something else—we gather to be the note in the song, the duck in the sea.
Donald Babcock writes:
Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,
And he cuddles in the swells.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic.
And he is part of it.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you.
He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.
I like the little duck.
He doesn’t know much.
But he has religion.
We come like ducks to the ocean to be religion, not to study or parse it, analyze or justify it. To experience it, full-bodied; to make ourselves “part of the boundless, by easing [ourselves] into it—we come just to be where it touches us”—where the fragile and tenacious humanity of another brushes our skin, thick or tender, calloused or bruised, and like the duck, we probably don’t know how large the ocean is. We may ponder, dare to imagine its vastness though we cannot know with our finite bodies its infinite waves—we can rest while it heaves; we can bob and float—and because we lack the poise of ducks, we may overturn. We may churn in the undertow gasping for air, popping back up, scanning the water for a glimpse of the others, “finding repose in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.”
We come together this ingathering Sunday “to repose in the immediate, to make ourselves part of the boundless, to ease into it where it touches us”—here and here and here.
We return to one another, to the river never the same twice, to notice the changes, to feel them in our bodies and in our souls. We gather to witness and be witnessed, to hear and be heard, to behold and be held—whirling with and yet alone.
Come—come whoever you are—wanderer—worshipper—lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. Yet again. Come.
Closing words
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
The words of Rumi, 13th century Sufi, everlasting. Each year we turn and return—we gather again, the caravan circling round to pick up each one as we are—wherever we are in our journey.
We are not all in the same place for over the summer some of us have taken journeys and some of us have been taken by them. For many, it has been a summer marked by transitions—changes of heart, of home, of spiritual, emotional, physical condition.
As the caravan stops, waits for each of us to board, we take note of our fellow travelers—the ease or difficulty with which we climb on—some hopping, some creeping—color radiating from our faces or color drained. Some with our last two chickens, some with jewels.
We each join the caravan because it transports us here—together in our separateness.
Arlene Gay Levine writes:
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
Not so unlike William Blake who bid us to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, each moment in time is time. Each step is the journey. The journey of a thousand miles begins again with each step. That’s why we never step in the same river twice. The river flows, ever-changing—and we who bob and float and flow, sometimes snag, drift or swirl about in the eddies. We travel the river of life never coming up for air in the same place twice for just as the river changes, we change—we age, we ripen like cheese or wine or pears. And as we know, some of our ripenings toughen our skin and others tenderize us to bruising.
Thus we gather this ingathering Sunday once again, each in our own state of being—our ripeness fragrant or aromatic; some of us thick-rind as the rhino, some of us thin-skinned as the grape under a heel. We gather not just to be renewed but to be noticed in our renewing.
This week I received a few photos taken on Star Island where I spent a week in mid-August—photos of my mother and me laughing, no, cawing wild and exhilarated as crows; photos pixilated with innumerable points of joy—my mother’s sun-drenched face upturned, me banjo in hand. The photos tell of our renewal—not just mine and Taya’s, but an island of people, travelers all. Who gathered as we each “moved through a world of stone and stars” whirling together—alone but collected, separate but connected.
Each experiencing the moment co-created by each other. No moment belonged to any being alone. Every moment held the sound of the surf, the scent of salt air, the heat of the sun. Each mote of stone dust rising from the dirt embedded with particles of light—solar yes, but sacred, too—“nor do I mean anything miraculous,” to quote Mary Oliver,”only the light that can shine out of a life.”
I had never been to Star Island before but once there I understood its allure—the way our separate togetherness formed an invitation to dance at daybreak, to say yes because each note is the song.
And just like here, the song changes—it shimmies and coils, undulates like great undersea grasses swaying from the ocean floor.
At church, people make decisions about all kinds of things—steeples and buildings, budgets and mission, but that is not why we come; that is not what compels us to climb on the caravan—deciding things. No, we gather for something else—we gather to be the note in the song, the duck in the sea.
Donald Babcock writes:
Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,
And he cuddles in the swells.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic.
And he is part of it.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you.
He sits down in it.
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.
That is religion, and the duck has it.
I like the little duck.
He doesn’t know much.
But he has religion.
We come like ducks to the ocean to be religion, not to study or parse it, analyze or justify it. To experience it, full-bodied; to make ourselves “part of the boundless, by easing [ourselves] into it—we come just to be where it touches us”—where the fragile and tenacious humanity of another brushes our skin, thick or tender, calloused or bruised, and like the duck, we probably don’t know how large the ocean is. We may ponder, dare to imagine its vastness though we cannot know with our finite bodies its infinite waves—we can rest while it heaves; we can bob and float—and because we lack the poise of ducks, we may overturn. We may churn in the undertow gasping for air, popping back up, scanning the water for a glimpse of the others, “finding repose in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.”
We come together this ingathering Sunday “to repose in the immediate, to make ourselves part of the boundless, to ease into it where it touches us”—here and here and here.
We return to one another, to the river never the same twice, to notice the changes, to feel them in our bodies and in our souls. We gather to witness and be witnessed, to hear and be heard, to behold and be held—whirling with and yet alone.
Come—come whoever you are—wanderer—worshipper—lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. Yet again. Come.
Closing words
Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.
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