A Return to Reverence

Anne Boyer

Sunday, January 25, 2004

 

 

Opening Words

from “Holy Now” by Peter Mayer

 

Wine from water is not so small

But an even better magic trick

Is that anything is here at all

So the challenging thing becomes

Not to look for miracles

But finding where there isn’t one.

It used to be a world half-there

Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down

But I walk it with a reverent air

’Cause everything is holy now.

 

Meditation

by Anne Boyer

 

Even as we sit together on a cold January morning,

spring is happening.

 

The bulbs rouse from a rich dirty sleep,

fed by the snow, the rotting of leaves.

 

The light stretches itself wider with each cycle

of day, then night, then day again.

 

The stars have moved in the darkness. 

They hang new on the scaffold of the heavens.

 

New lives kick in the bellies of animals.

Children outgrow their snow boots and coats.

 

Spring is not only the hyacinth we force in a south window,

or the primal green memory of leaves on trees

It is the newness of every moment, of our original breath,

 

the new cells of our bodies perpetually exchanging themselves

with the cells of the earth,

the old skin we shed invisibly and all around us.

 

Spring is with us, under all this white depth,

           under the blanket of winter’s impossible nights.

So as we sit and breathe together,

we marvel not simply about spring,

but about the power of the departing winter.

 

Oh winter, that it was ever here,

      that it is here now,

                  that we may just survive it again.

 

Reading

the words of Walt Whitman

 

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.

 

Whether I walk the streets of the city,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,

Or sit at dinner with the rest,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

 

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with miracle,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

 

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fish that swim –

the rocks –

the motion of the waves—

these ships with people in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

 

A Return to Reverence

 

I was raised a Methodist in the middle of Kansas, which meant I was raised in a cultural tradition of Spartan sanctuaries, harvest-time choruses of Bringing in the Sheaves, and the best deviled eggs and angel food cake ever to grace a church basement.

As a child, I loved church, particularly the rocking toy designed to look like Noah’s ark and the hippy minister who wore a turtle neck and smelled vaguely of pipe tobacco.  One Sunday, when I must have been seven or eight, this minister, Reverend Daley called the young ones up for children’s church.   He handed out fresh packs of Crayolas and asked us to go to the back of the sanctuary to draw a picture of God.

God?  I was in trouble.  As much as I loved church, I knew this God thing was going to be a problem. My older brother had told me about Santa and the Easter Bunny, and in my young mind God seemed something quite similar – a spirit or intent, made manifest only by human action: parents as Easter Bunny bought chocolate rabbits, parents as God kissed us good night and kept as safe while we slept.  I was under the impression that everyone at church had entered a silent conspiracy to pretend that this God guy was real, maybe just to give us a reason to hang out on Sunday mornings.

My peers, perhaps because they didn’t know “the truth” about God yet, drew someone who resembled Charlton Hesston, our tall, bearded minister, or even Papa Smurf. 

I considered my options.  I could draw the cartoon God, but I was quite sure this was not the point my beloved minister was trying to make.  Daly was much too sophisticated to view God as Papa Smurf.  Always eager to please, I realized this was my opportunity to impress Reverend Daly.  I lined up a handful of crayons and went to work. 

I swirled each color in loose lines across the white copy paper.  God did not have a face.  God was energy, line, color, movement, even the blank space between these things.  God wasn’t God, wasn’t a man, and wasn’t even Papa Smurf.

As the service ended, someone collected our drawings and stapled them to the bulletin boards.  The adults filed out of the sanctuary, chatting as they studied these portraits of God.  A cluster of church matriarchs gathered around my picture.  My grandmother led the pack, and they appeared to be discussing my work.  I bounced over, certain that I had earned my first theological A+. Instead my grandmother, an often imposing woman, leaned down to me and stage whispered: “Why did you do this?  I know you can draw better than that!” 

I wanted to rip down the picture and throw it away.  I had been sure that I had the right answer, that I would be rewarded, that if God existed, this was it.  To others my vision of God was a childlike scribble.  I realized then that God, this idea which seemed so clear to me in its abstraction, was for each person their own masterpiece and their own mystery.  I like to think this moment of revelation set me on my path towards becoming a Unitarian Universalist.

I never found out if Reverend Daly looked at my drawing.  Certainly, what I like to think was a sophisticated theological intent was there, but I’ll admit my execution might have been faulty.  Even the generous Reverend Daly could have looked at any picture and seen a scribble, too.  It was because of Reverend Daly, though, that I associated the word Reverend with gentleness and kind attention.  Reverend: one who reveres, who dwells in reverence for the world.

According to my dictionary, though, this is not what Reverend means at all: Reverend derives from one who should be revered.  To revere means to “regard with a respect or affection mingled with fear.”  Fear?  Of a minister?  That’s not very Unitarian! 

With the exception of the rare scary movie or roller coaster, I don’t like to be afraid.  Perhaps the element of fear is the reason that the word irreverent is equally attractive to me.   I belong to the generation that marketers have branded with a large, noncommittal X.  This X is meant to signify many things, but perhaps it is mostly an “x marks the spot” for “advertisers these folks will buy anything!”  However, one of the characteristics this generation has been told we possess in quantity is “irreverence.”  Irreverence has become a societal virtue and a marketing tool, more valued then reverence, and on the surface more interesting.

One could even argue that our church, a place seemingly without fear and with a great deal of laughter is an “irreverent” place full of “irreverent” people.  After all, we have a not-so-scary Reverend who regularly quotes jokes from irreverent Cable Comedy shows.  What we think of as our irreverence is refreshing and restorative, but what if it isn’t irreverence at all?  What if our laughter, our dissent, our skepticism, and even Jon Stewart’s borrowed one-liners about the Bush administration, are the deepest form of reverence, an honest, affectionate way of recognizing the wonder and mystery of this universe and our lives within it?

I believe that reverence does not only include laughter, dissent, and skepticism but requires them.  Reverence for social justice, for the value of each life, inspires us to acts of dissent against those who abuse power.  It is reverence for truth, rationality, and lived experience that inspires us to be skeptical when some person or group proclaims to know all of the answers to the mystery of life.  And it is reverence for the core of our humanity, that part of us that dwells in joy, surprise, and community that lets us laugh, sometimes at the pomposity of our own behavior, sometimes at the arrogance of the powerful. 

I don’t think true reverence has much to do with religion.  It is not piety, obedience, or faith.  It does not require God or science to thrive.  Reverence is not an institutional position, it is a lived experience.  Reverence is not a set of words, and no talk of god or spirit or prayer can create reverence where there is none.  Reverence is somewhere written on the whirling helixes of our DNA, a poem in our evolutionary anthology.  All reverence requires from us, is an appreciation of our existence and its fragility.

I’m learning this because I’m fortunate enough to live with a philosopher. 

She is four.  For those of you who haven’t lived with a preschooler, I suggest you borrow one, even mine, maybe just for a weekend, especially if you are interested in spontaneous dialogues about the meaning of life and death. 

A few weeks ago we were driving home from her preschool class, and she asked me.  “Mama, who will live after we die?” 

 I’ve read the parenting books.   I knew enough to turn the question around.  “What do you think, dear?”

            “I don’t know the answer!  That’s why I am asking you!”

            I explained to her that after we die some people and plants and animals do go on living after us, but that everything alive will die in its time.

            “Will the cashier at the video store die?  And the butterflies?  And the people renting videos?  And my teacher?  And my mommy?”

            “Yes dear, we will all die, but then we will go back to the earth.”

            “But what’s the earth?”

            “The earth is everything around us, and even ourselves, so after we die we become a part of everything else.  I believe that just like the compost become a part of the plants, the dead become a part of us.”

            She thought about my answer for a while.   We rode in the silence of whirring tires and radio voices.

“I’m afraid to die.” She finally told me.

            “So am I.  But because I am afraid to die I try to live a good life.”

            “Okay, Mama, I’ll try to live a good life, too.”

            I think she gets it.  I think together we are on our way to the kind of reverence I’m after, the reverence of respect and love, even a little bit of fear.

Some of you may also have been thinking about reverence, too, particularly since UUA President Reverend William Sinkford made a call a year ago for Unitarian Universalists to return to a “vocabulary of reverence”  As much as I am growing in my understanding of reverence, after reading his speeches about the subject, I am still not certain of the vocabulary he has in mind.  Some argue that what he wants is a return to a traditional religious language, but this isn’t what I think about when I think about a vocabulary of reverence. Walt Whitman had this vocabulary, and the poet who wrote Ecclesiastes, and the pagan Starhawk, and the atheist Emma Goldman.  Reverent language is not religious language: reverent language is human language, and human language is, as Emerson would say, an extension of the vocabulary of the universe itself.   There is no word that cannot be reverent, and no silence that cannot be more so.

Reverence is found in our shared silent awe, that pause in the car when a four year old is considering mortality, or that moment in the garden we see the first crocus or the last green leaf.  The contemporary philosopher Paul Woodruff studied the concept of reverence in Humanist Greek philosophy in his book appropriately titled “Reverence”.  He writes:

Awe is inarticulate.  A sense of awe comes over us without our being able to say exactly what it is about.  Reverence at such a moment forbids any attempt to put words around it.  That is why awe is the most reverent of feelings.  You feel, when you are in awe, that you are human, that your mind is dwarfed by what it confronts, that you cannot capture it in a set of beliefs, and that you had best keep your mouth closed and your mind open while awaiting further disclosure.

What I have been thinking about, what I want then, is not simply a return to the vocabulary of reverence.  I want a return to reverence itself.  I want to stand in the yellow blaze of the forsythia, in the wild groove of the universe.  I want to regard the mystery of the slow heat of the compost pile, of the miracle of people I encounter each day.  I don’t think I need special words for this.  I don’t need anything other than the looping in out of breath.  We only need what we already have, what we had even before we were old enough to tie our own shoes.  We only need our capacity for awe, for breath, for a beating heart.

Some of you may remember the first Sunday of this church year. We filed outside, dedicated our Memorial Garden, and joined in the Hymn of Valor.  On that late summer day, where the cool air met the warming sun and the leaves rustled with the possibility of season’s change, in a place filled with the memory of the departed members of our congregation, I’ll confess to you that I felt it then, even at church.  I felt reverence. 

We sang old fashioned words like “high endeavor” and “inward light.”  I thought of the members of our congregation who had persisted in their commitment to liberal religion and social justice despite troubling times, and of those who live thoughtful, honest, compassionate lives despite grief and depression, illness and chronic pain.  I listened to the noises of the baby next to me.  I saw the shining hair of our elders.  I stood myself, inspired and strengthened by this community.

I felt the affection of reverence. I felt the respect of reverence.  I even felt the fear in reverence. The approaching autumn, the realization that this moment, this life, was absolute in its impermanence, for this, I felt reverence.   Each of us, the baby in her mother’s arms, the elders, everyone I have ever loved or will love, the earth itself, these will all pass back into the mystery of the universe. This is essential to reverence.

If Reverend Stringer were to hand me a pack of Crayolas and tell me to draw a portrait of the God, or even of the appropriately Unitarian “spirit of life, that which is greater than all and present in each,” the first thing I would probably do is laugh – and don’t worry, I didn’t bring any crayons for you today, either.  I no longer imagine myself a bell-bottomed pig-tailed Luther jump starting my own Methodist reformation.   I might still swirl the burnt sienna around the page in a gesture towards the abstract.  I might, though, decide to draw something else entirely, maybe that moment in the memorial garden, that moment of community, nature, art, tradition, struggle and death,  a moment of being human: mortal and divine.

This drawing would be crude.  I might draw the picture with words instead.  I would not open a holy book or ancient liturgy to find the words; I would use the everyday words that rise and fall around me, the stuff of this ordinary miracle called the moment.   I would hope that if you came across this picture, you would know that this, this clumsy, imperfect, human thing I’ve tried to share with you, this is my vocabulary of reverence.  This picture is, despite my skepticism and silliness, despite these competing moments of the ridiculous and the sublime, this is, despite everything human, because of everything human, the only picture I can draw for you today. Once in a rare while, maybe in a moment of wild reverence, maybe in an escaped whisper, maybe in the outflow of breath, I might even call it God.

 

 

Closing Words . . . David Bumbaugh

“The heat of our bodies is the heat of stars, tempered to the uses of life. The salt in our blood and in our tears is the salt of ancient oceans, encapsulated and carried with us, generation upon generation, into strange and distant places and circumstances. . . .

 

The history of the universe is our history; we are all of us recycled stardust. Out of the stars we have come.  How can we not stand in awe? . . .”