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A Stone a Day "There's gonna be two dates on your tombstone,all your friends will read 'em. But all that's gonna matter is that little dash between 'em."-- Kevin Welch
Call to Gather (Patrick Murfin) This
happenstance assemblage of atoms, It is an honor to be alive. It is good to be together.
Meditation Henry David Thoreau (from “Journal 1841”)
The whole of the day should not be daytime, nor of the night nighttime, but some portion be rescued from time to oversee time in. All our hours must not be current; all our time must not lapse. There must be one hour at least which the day did not bring forth,--of ancient parentage and long-established nobility,--which will be a serene and lofty platform overlooking the rest. We should make our notch every day on our characters, as Robinson Crusoe on his stick. We must be at the helm at least once a day; we must feel the tiller-rope in our hands, and know that if we sail, we steer.
Readings
“On the Road” by Ted Kooser By the toe of my boot, I held it to the light
“Set in Stone” by Victoria Safford
In a cemetery once, an old one in New England, I found a strangely soothing epitaph. The name of the deceased and her dates had been scoured away by wind and rain, but there was a carving of a tree with roots and branches (a classic nineteenth-century motif) and among them the words, “She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.” At first this seemed to me a little meager, a little stingy on the part of her survivors, but I wrote it down and have thought about it since, and now I can’t imagine a more proud or satisfying legacy.
“She attended well and faithfully to a few worthy things.”
Every day I stand in danger of being struck by lightning and having the obituary in the local paper say, for all the world to see, “She attended frantically and ineffectually to a great many unimportant, meaningless details.”
How do you want your obituary to read?
“He got all the dishes washed and dried before playing with his children in the evening.”
“She balanced her checkbook with meticulous precision and never missed a day of work—missed a lot of sunsets, missed a lot of love, missed a lot of risk, missed a lot—but her money was in order.”
“She answered all her calls, all her e-mail, all her voice-mail, but along the way she forgot to answer the call to service and compassion, and forgiveness, first and foremost of herself.”
“He gave and forgave sparingly, without radical intention, without passion or conviction.”
“She could not, or would not, hear the calling of her heart.”
How will it read, how does it read, and if you had to name a few worthy things to which you attend well and faithfully, what, I wonder, would they be?
Special Music “Patterns” by Maltby and Shires
Sermon Music coordinator, Barb Martin and I always touch base before we settle on special music for a given service. I give her a rough idea of what I think the sermon topic will be and she tries to find an appropriate fit. A few weeks back, when Barb suggested the song that Kellie just sang for this service, she acknowledged that it was on the dark side. I gave it a listen and agreed…especially the last line about the patterns of life leading the woman “nowhere at all.” What a downer, right? Of course, from a Buddhist perspective, acknowledging that we are being led nowhere at all is the means to our liberation from suffering. But it seems to me, that in this song, the woman is not singing as a Buddhist: She is not seeking liberation from suffering, but rather wallowing in it. Could it be, as the song suggests, that the patterns of our lives, the routines of living, the things we do each day, often out of responsibility to our families…the jobs we tolerate…the obligations we fulfill…the things we don’t always want to do but endure because we have to…could it be that these patterns are in fact leading us nowhere at all? Somehow I doubt it. I guess our answers depend on what we think our destinations would be, if not for all these “burdens” of our lives.
Now I won’t be suggesting today that life is always exciting and it certainly isn’t always pleasant. The fact is that life offers endless challenges and we can easily get ourselves in ruts. Even in the bounty of our relative economic privilege, we can find ourselves feeling trapped by the realities of our day-to-day existence. I come from a family that has done its share of struggling with depression, so I know that the dark clouds of despair that can gather over us from now and then are not easily pushed aside. And I figure most, if not all, of us can relate on some level with the struggle the woman in the song is having, because I believe to be overwhelmed from time to time by an obsession with all that we are not able to enjoy, or to accomplish, or to become is an inevitable part of the human experience. That’s why I thought the song does fit today’s service. It offers a good example of the way we can beat ourselves up…or feel sorry for ourselves…as we come to terms with what it means to be living through what I have heard described as “the big boring middle of our long book of life.”
However, I do want to offer us something to ponder in response to this song. A simple suggestive quote from a guy named Rob Brezsny. This is the guy who wrote the book I quoted at the Thanksgiving service…the book called Pronoia, which, you may recall, is his philosophical antidote to paranoia…Pronoia—a way viewing life not as something that is out to get us, but rather as a glorious adventure that is showering us with blessings. The quote I offer is one that I find myself repeating a lot these days:
“Despair is lazy.”
When I was younger, I probably would have scoffed at this quote. “Despair is not lazy,” I would have said. “Despair is hard work, man….Despair is life.” My teen years and early adulthood gave me plenty of opportunity to proclaim that life is an endless string of disappointments: a girlfriend leaving me in the dust for a guy with a nice car…a best friend abandoning me for his evangelical church in which my agnosticism was considered not only a bad influence but intrinsically evil…a mother in and out of hospitals, struggling with depression…not to mention the typical angst faced by most adolescents that comes from growing bodies, pimples, and all-around general awkwardness. The music I listened to then was dripping in self-pity. Maybe some of you remember one of my favorite songs at the time…a song with the words “I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor and when I did I expect to find him laughing.” Yeah, man…I felt that song!
As I grew older, I learned that life can be about far more than despair. Giving myself to the challenges and rewards of a committed love relationship helped. Finding a UU church and discovering the gifts and possibilities of religious community contributed a lot to my understanding of despair as something to be worked through, rather than wallowed in. Attending theological school exposed me to the ways philosophers, psychologists, and theologians throughout time have worked to understand the human predicament, and I grew a great deal from reading their wisdom.
Still, I had not fully shaken my own patterns of self-pity.
In the springtime of my first year of ministry, for example, I was at a retreat with my fellow religious professionals. We were in small groups, taking turns pondering simple questions small-group-ministry style. The question was “Where do you find freedom?”
As the small group participants mentioned things like bike-riding, reading, going to movies, and playing guitar, my turn to speak neared. I trembled as I acknowledged the answer I had to give. Wanting to take the small-group experience seriously and to honor my fellow participants with my truth, I shared that the only place I found freedom was on Sunday afternoon for an hour or two after I had led the service…and then I was right back to the grind of wondering and worrying about what I would do the following week, or the ever-growing list of things to accomplish around the house, or whatever else my mind could become pre-occupied with. Perhaps those of you who are task-driven or who have a tendency to be hard on yourselves can relate.
After I had spoken, my fellow ministers sat in silence for a moment or two. To speak my truth had been difficult, but, at least now, I thought, we would get down to it. I didn’t want to be directly helped or healed by my colleagues; I just wanted to hear that others struggled with the responsibilities of the job…with the responsibilities of life, too.
You can imagine my surprise when none of them took up the topic. Instead, we moved on to another question. I sat there embarrassed and confused. Had I spoken a truth that no one wanted to admit to sharing? Was I just being a downer? Or was I out of my mind? I tried to convince myself that these more experienced colleagues knew that the end of the first year of ministry is tough and there is nothing to be said. Whatever their silence meant, it gave me a lot to ponder. Silence often does that.
Now these many years later I am more accustomed to the challenges of my work, but I still, at times, fight the demons of feeling overwhelmed by life. Sometimes I am cornered by my fear of not having anything worth saying from this pulpit. Sometimes I am troubled by my inability to turn off my occasionally obsessive mind, to stop wondering and worrying so much…to not have such high expectations of myself as a minister, or a husband, or a father. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the challenge of living up to the principles and theology I claim to follow…to practice what I preach, we might say.
So what is it that helps me rise above these times…to carry on despite the burdens that I seem to insist upon shouldering? The answer has become something I think I may have always intuitively known, but that I still strive to intentionally embrace: The answer is, amidst all the necessary routines of my life, to find opportunities to engage in ritual…ritual that helps to remind me that life is only a temporary journey, ritual that calls me to acknowledge the blessings of my life and that leads me to share my blessings with others…ritual that lifts me off the chaos of life’s dance floor for a moment or two and onto the balcony, where I can look down and see more clearly the gift it is to be alive and to have a precious opportunity to dance at all.
In our best attempts, our weekly service is aimed at helping each of us do this. It’s why we take the time to repeat familiar words, to practice the group meditation that is hymn singing, to sit in silence, feeling our backs against the chairs as we breathe our common breath. It’s why we pass the offering baskets, reminding ourselves that our abundance is something to be shared. It’s why we find ourselves leaning forward as we listen to a story from our lives that helps us laugh or forgive or believe in life despite all the reasons not to…or when we hear a prophetic voice calling for justice, for our need to look beyond our own lives and toward the lives of our sisters and brothers who share our world.
Small group ministry is another important ritual in the life of our community. I know that getting together monthly with other folks for a structured format of sharing and receiving what it means to be human adds a great deal to my life. Indeed, Small Group Ministry is perhaps the most religious of all our programs at the church because it is designed to bind us together, to connect us to each other’s lives in ways that inevitably expand our own. In a few weeks we will begin enrollment for the next six-month session and I hope you’ll consider participating and join with those taking the risk to make meaningful connections.
There are many other ritual gatherings at the church…opportunities to participate in intentional exchanges of food, or thought, or discussion or action that build community and enrich our lives.
But today, I want us also to consider the rituals we might create for ourselves that do not depend upon this church. Even the rituals that we simply stumble upon when we least expect them.
Here’s one my daughter taught me.
Over the summer and into the fall, we had gone to a park almost every day…a little park-going pattern for Daddy and daughter that had been interrupted by winter. On an unseasonably warm afternoon a few weeks ago, we were able to revisit our routine, if only for a day. As we made our way across the grassy hill, brown and straw-like in the January sun, and toward the gravel covered playground, both of us clearly grateful for the chance to pretend it was spring, I realized how much I had missed our regular visits to this park…and how much taller Leah seemed since the last time we had been here.
Before she bounded up the stairs of the multi-colored, plastic-coated tower, however, she abruptly stopped in her tracks and bent down. Almost immediately she popped back up proclaiming her familiar shout of gleeful discovery: “oooooohhhhhhh….wook!”
My heart tugged a little when I realized that Leah had stopped with a distinct purpose in mind…a purpose that I had come to expect a few months earlier, even if it caught me off guard this time. Just as she had done many times before, Leah had stopped to pick up a stone. As was her custom, she didn’t linger over her discovery; rather, she simply handed it over to me so that I could also delight in her find. Once it was in my hand, she didn’t wait to see my reaction, or ask for the stone back. Neither did she keep looking for other rocks to hand over to me. Instead, her task done, she ran up the steps of the play set, across the rickety blue bridge and towards the yellow slide. As she went on her way, I twirled the little pebble around in my fingers and held it up to the sun.
When she first started this practice many months before, I would take a look at her stone of the day and then after she had moved on, I would let it fall out of my hand, back to its natural habitat. But once I realized that she would choose only one rock each time we visited the park, and that she did seem to give some thought about which rock she chose, my appreciation for her little ritual deepened and I decided to save her discoveries. I imagined putting them into a jar that one day, many years later, I might give to her, as a keepsake of the time we had spent together wandering around the parks of Des Moines. This day, when I reached down to tuck the new addition into the pocket of my windbreaker, I found that I had not yet removed the dozen or so rocks that had started our collection last fall. I pulled a few out, and smiled, grateful to have rediscovered these tokens of our time together, grateful for the ritual symbols these stones had become for me.
I suppose my idea to keep Leah’s stones was inspired by the story of another ritual…a story I read on the internet many years ago. The story is not about keeping stones, however. It is about what the stones might represent, even as they are taken away…especially as they are taken away.
It’s a story told by a ham radio operator who one Saturday morning happens upon a discussion between a guy his age and an older sounding fellow who keeps bringing up something about “a thousand marbles.” Intrigued, the radio operator decides to listen in.
"Well,
Tom,” the older guy says, “it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm
sure they pay you
As the tale is told on the internet, the man eavesdropping on this conversation is transformed by the encounter he has heard: He decides he needs to spend more time with his family and that he, too, needs to buy a bunch of marbles.
Now I know these kind of internet stories, these modern day folk tales, tend to be contrived and schmaltzy. And when I am being cynical, I have lots of questions. I wonder, for example, whether or not this story has been posted by a marble company. And I wonder what happens to all the marbles the guy throws out. And I wonder if it is really a good idea to pay such close attention as we lose our marbles.
But even if the story is contrived, I appreciate the point it tries to convey and the ritual it suggests…a ritual designed to remind us that our lives are finite and even the most simple acts of recognition of that fact can inspire us to appreciate what we have, to embrace the miracle that we are, in fact, alive….alive for another day of living and loving.
I need to draw a distinction here between routine and ritual. A routine is something that is done without thought…a pattern of behavior in which it is easy to turn off our senses. Some activities meant to be religious rituals could be merely routines if we don’t fully engage with them. And a regular trip to the park could be simply a routine if we turn ourselves to auto-pilot and refuse to pay attention. A ritual as I describe it today, however, is a chance for us to heighten our awareness…to put our task-driven expectations aside and to open ourselves to whatever comes our way. A ritual, then, is a means by which we intentionally engage in life without trying to control it. It is an act that we, by necessity, must approach with open minds and hearts. And, when we do, we are rewarded with understandings and discoveries that may have been unlikely otherwise. Rituals like these can be incorporated into almost any area of our lives…in our interactions with our family and friends, in our workplace, even in the way we drive a car or clean house. Whatever we do, if we do it with intention and with respect for the possibilities and blessings of our lives, can be considered a ritual.
In our first reading, poet Ted Kooser picks up a stone, recognizes its significance and tells himself to put it down and keep walking. I questioned whether this reading fit my theme today because it seems like Kooser is suggesting that intentionally paying attention to what we find along our path is more trouble than its worth. “After all,” the poem seems to say, “who really wants the grand explanation?” But I think the poem is more complicated than that. It could be interpreted to mean that we can’t assume that any single thing we come across or any single ritual we practice will hold all the answers…that we are better served by appreciating what we find, but moving on the best we can…moving on toward new discoveries and new understandings, not getting trapped in any one way of seeing the world. Indeed, there can be ritual power in knowing when to let things go and to do so with intention and respect.
Our second reading, the meditation by Victoria Safford is much more directly in line with my purpose today. I read her walk through the cemetery as the means to a powerful ritual for her, mostly because she was willing to intentionally soak up the wisdom of the place…to learn from the silence and the stones she finds there and to let what she learns teach her something about life itself.
You see, my idea of ritual is that it does not necessarily have to be repeated over and over to have significance in our lives. Ritual, as I describe it today, is more about intention and affording our lives the respect they deserve. It’s why I so appreciate the Unitarian Universalist approach to memorial services, in which we don’t do a lot of rote recitation of scripture, but rather we do all that we can to thoughtfully honor and celebrate who the person really was and what her life meant to those left behind. Most of the words spoken are unrehearsed but hold just as much ritual power as any others because they are expressions of engagement with life as it has truly been lived and as it continues on after the loss.
Here’s one more story of ritual emerging from life. This past summer, during a trip through Ohio, I took Susan and Leah to visit the memorial park where my mother’s cremains were buried almost twenty years ago. It had been a about a decade since I had visited the place and we spent a long time just trying to locate the plaque with her name on it. Just when I was about to give up, we found it, almost covered over with grass that hadn’t been trimmed in a long time. I watched as Susan, who had never met my mother, set to work pulling the grass away from the stone. Then she recruited Leah to help us find stones and place them around the perimeter to keep the grass from growing back. It became a ritual that we may never have the chance to perform again, certainly not in the same way, but that I will keep in my memory always. Our act that day leant an earthy sensibility to what could have been a hollow visit. It was a ritual that gave me the balcony view I deserved…and that my mother’s memory deserved as well.
What are the rituals of your life that you carry with you, whether one-time events or activities you repeat on a regular basis? How do these rituals help you or bring meaning to your life? Where might you be missing the opportunity to create and learn from ritual? I’m thinking the stories of our rituals might be good things to share with one another. If you have a ritual that has helped you appreciate your life, I want to hear about it. Maybe we can share them with each other in a regular column in the church newsletter or in People to People. Let me know what you think.
In closing, I share with you a poem by Sheri Hostetler that I think has a lot to do with the kind of ritual I have tried to describe today. It is entitled “Instructions”. She writes:
Closing Words (attributed to Kalidasa) Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence. The bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty; For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision; But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness And every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore to this day.
[1]Sheri Hostetler, from the anthology A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry |