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Choosing
to Live
“I can scarcely wait until tomorrow, when a new life begins for me…as it does each day…as it does each day.”—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Round”
Meditation Our meditation today begins with a piece written by long-time member Frances Craig, something she wrote for the Des Moines Register many years ago.
Suppose that spring—this great awakening—came only once in your lifetime? Suppose that just this time you’d feel the wind all sweet with pussy willow pollen. That only once you’d find hepaticas and Dutchmen’s breeches answering the sun through the woodland’s leafless trees… That only once you’d see the shedding of tree bark and dry husk sheltering the winter’s buds…and watch the blunt red buds of maples turn to flowerets…then wild plum thickets toss their creamy petals on the air…and quince burst into flame… Suppose this were the only time you’d see the rushing freshets filled with melted snow…or hear the creaking song of blackbirds down at the brimming pond…and then watch the little evolution of wriggling tadpoles turned to hopping things… Suppose that just this once you could stand on the edge of the world to watch and listen as the sun comes up… When the stream dances and the bud stirs and the bird sings… And out of it bursts, like morning, the cry of human life. Suppose that spring and all new birth happen only once— And then be glad that it comes on and on, with timeless joy, as old as the earth and as new as your heart’s awakening.
Readings Our first reading today is responsive reading #628 in your hymnal
“Rolling
Away the Stone” by Sarah York In the tomb of the soul, we carry secret yearnings, pains, frustrations, loneliness, fears, regrets, worries. In the tomb of the soul, we take refuge from the world and its heaviness.
In the tomb of the soul, we wrap ourselves in the security of darkness. Sometimes this is a comfort. Sometimes it is an escape.
Sometimes it prepares us for experience. Sometimes it insulates us from life. Sometimes this tomb-life gives us time to feel the pain of the world and reach out to heal others. Sometimes it numbs us and locks us up with our own concerns.
In this season where light and dark balance the day, we seek balance for ourselves. Grateful for the darkness that has nourished us, we push away the stone and invite the light to awaken us to the possibilities within us and among us—possibilities for new life in ourselves and in our world.
Our second reading is an excerpt from Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg’s book Faith:
No matter what is happening, whenever we see the inevitability of change, the ordinary, or even oppressive, facts of our lives can become alive with prospect. We see that a self-image we’ve been holding doesn’t need to define us forever, the next step is not the last step, what life was is not what it is now, and certainly not what it might yet be.
Some years ago, when I was teaching meditation at a federal women’s prison in California, one of the inmates observed, “When you’re in prison, it’s especially important to try to live in the present moment. It’s easy to get lost in the past, which you can’t change anyway, or to get lost hoping for the future, which is not yet here. If you do that, it’s like you’re not really alive.” Then she paused and looked at me, her eyes shining, and said, “I choose life.”
Recorded Music So Says the Whippoorwill by Richard Shindell from the albumVuelta
The change could happen any day So says the whippoorwill She hangs around for the seeds I leave Out on the windowsill “Be-free-you-fool, be-free-you-fool” She sings all afternoon Then, as if to show me how it’s done, She leaps into the blue The change could happen any day So say my true love’s eyes They see into my shadows With their sweet, forgiving light She smiles and says, Come on - let’s go Let’s stroll the boulevard It’s such a shame to waste the night Just sitting in the dark The change could happen any day So said the mountaineer Before he turned to face his cliff Without a trace of fear Yodel-ay-hee-hoo, yodel-ay-hee-hoo He sang right up until He caught sight of the open blue And became a whippoorwill He caught sight of the open blue And became a whippoorwill
Sermon
Thursday night this week I gathered with a family up in Ames to plan a memorial service for their patriarch. It was a sudden death in the life of this group, this family that has been long time friends of my wife’s family, and I was glad to be called in to help. After they shared stories of his life so that I could prepare Saturday’s service, they thanked me for making the trip during this busy time of year, what with Sunday being Easter and all. Wanting to assure them that it was truly my privilege to be of service to them in their time of need, I said, “Well, I am a Unitarian Universalist minister. We have a little trouble with the whole resurrection thing anyway.” They laughed, we said our goodbyes and I started to make my way home.
As I headed back to Des Moines I was in a reflective mood, as I often am after I gather with families touched by recent death. I find these times when death is most recent to be some of the most holy moments of our living, the times when we may come closest to realizing how tenuous our lives really are and how much we truly need one another. But on this drive, I was thoughtful not only about the stories that I heard or the love I saw expressed. I was thoughtful about my own quick dismissal of the Unitarian Universalist take on Easter.
I winced as I remembered a cartoon in which the wayside pulpits of an Episcopal church and a UU church were both visible on a street corner. It was Easter weekend. The title of the Easter sermon to be preached at the Episcopal church was “The Truth and Power of the Risen Christ” while across the street the Unitarian Universalist minister would be offering a sermon entitled “Upsy-Daisy.”[1]
Certainly it would be easy for us to gloss over the difficult details of the Christian Easter story with easy references to flowers and the rebirth of spring. After all, it is no coincidence that the Christian observance of the resurrection of Christ has been situated around the time of the spring equinox on the first Sunday after the full moon. But I believe Easter offers more to Unitarian Universalists than just a celebration of the cycles of nature.
Of course none of us knows for sure what happened to Jesus after his death. Scholars suggest that he was a rabbi who lived, who taught, who had a following, who angered the powers that be, and who was, in fact, crucified…a common means of execution in his day.
Then the story gets a little murky. Gospel accounts differ on the details, but no matter which we follow, reason must be suspended, we say, to imagine that a man, once dead, could roll away the stone, exit the tomb and reappear to his followers. It just doesn’t add up. At least not when taken literally.
One of the pillars of Unitarian theology throughout time has been the contention that while Jesus was many things to many people, he was ultimately human…and only human. We UUs tend to find hope in this belief that Jesus was inherently no more divine than any of the rest of us…that if Jesus was a human, ultimately not all that different than you and me, then there is abundant possibility to be found in our own lives…possibility that each of us can lead lives of meaning and purpose…that each of us can make a difference, living out our own gospels of love, compassion, and hope.
Again, though, when it comes right down to it, none of us knows for sure what really happened to Jesus, no more than we know what has happened to anyone else who has died. And I think, for us to focus too much on the details of the story of Jesus’ Resurrection (with a capital R) as though it literally happened is to miss the bigger lesson anyway. Because, you see, while we don’t know exactly what happened to Jesus, we do know what happened to his followers, to the people who had opened their hearts to his message only to see their hopes and dreams devastated by his brutal death. We do know what happened to them. They carried on even in their despair. They resurrected the spirit of their teacher by believing that his life was not in vain, that his message needed to be shared, that their own lives had been given a new direction, a new purpose, a new meaning even in the face of their pain and loss. They knew that Jesus would and did live again as they shared stories of his wisdom and expressed the meaning and purpose of his life through the living of theirs.
Even in the midst of death, then, his followers were able to resurrect their teacher by how they chose to live. And therein lies the most hopeful part of the Easter story, at least to me…the story of choosing to live. That choosing to live, that carrying on in the face of what seems like insurmountable loss, is the resurrection story that most speaks to me, because I see it played over and over again in my own life and in the stories of those around me.
Who among us has not, at one time or another, felt abandoned by life, betrayed, left in darkness, uncertain of anything beyond the emptiness and craziness of the world? Who among us has not been given reason to ask how we can go on when so much can change in an instant, when that which we love with all our heart can be stripped from us as if it never really mattered at all? Who among us has not been trapped in our own tomb of the soul, resigned to the darkness when just above, the light beckons, just as it always has, calling us toward new life?
This being trapped by our own despair does not necessarily represent a deficiency of our soul or even a bad choice. In fact, to see it as such really just ensures we may never escape. The means to truly emerge from the darkness may only be a willingness to accept it, to embrace it even, to see it as a necessary component of what it means to be a participant in this wretched and magnificent life. Choosing to live, as I describe it today, does not mean forcing on a happy face or pretending that we don’t ache for clarity or understanding or some assurance that life is not as meaningless as it can sometimes seem.
The choosing to live that I speak of is the willingness to be humbled, if not humiliated, by our expectations of life so that we can finally see more clearly what life really is: a pain-filled adventure with moments of exquisite beauty, a ride to no particular destination beyond the present moment trickling into the next present moment, a precious opportunity to open our hearts to both the reality of the life that has come before us and the possibility of the life that will follow. The choosing to live I speak of is similar to the direction given to us by playwright Florida Scott Maxwell who wrote, “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.”[2] Fierce with reality. Choosing to live is being willing to be fierce with reality. And if we are going to be fierce with reality, we have to be fierce about both the good and the bad…the light and the dark.
When I chose the title and theme of today’s sermon, I was, in part, creating another resurrection for myself. I was welcoming another engagement with the past that I hoped would add another layer to my words today, another layer fierce with reality. In my choice, I was, in a sense, resurrecting the spirit of Mary Ellen Neal, a long-time member of our church who died this fall and whose memorial service will be held in this room on April 21st.
You see, a few years ago I preached a sermon entitled “The Burden of Choice” in which I contended that the gift and burden of Unitarian Universalism was that it enables us to choose how we will view life. The gift is the freedom to make the choice. The burden is the responsibility that accompanies that freedom to choose.
Mary Ellen told me not long after I preached that sermon that she wanted to have some words with me…that she disagreed with my sermon and felt that we needed to talk about it. So I paid her a visit, sharing a pot of tea in her sitting room as we discussed whether or not we humans do, in fact, reliably have choices. Mary Ellen had spent much of her adult life volunteering for Hospice of Central Iowa, and in other social service settings where she could see up close how often people simply do not have the options that many of us take for granted. I also knew that she was no stranger to the dark days of depression, when the only real choice it seems one has is whether or not to live, and often that choice seems predetermined by our own predispositions. As Parker Palmer, a writer and teacher who has had his own battles with depression, has put it, “I understand why some depressed people kill themselves: they need the rest.”[3]
I remember telling Mary Ellen that I understood that choices are easier to discern for some than for others, but that I still believed that, no matter how difficult life gets, we do, in fact, have choices in how we interpret our lives, in how we make sense of the senseless, in how we endure another day, toward the possibility (not the guarantee…but the possibility) of a better tomorrow. She tolerated my opinion but didn’t seem persuaded, which was fine by me. After all, I knew Mary Ellen well enough to know that she had no need to be converted to my way of thinking. Also, I was fully aware of the differences in what our eyes had seen and experienced, so I was under no compulsion to have this wise friend of mine agree with my then thirty-something perspective.
Still, I thought a lot about that conversation with Mary Ellen over the next couple of years, especially when I visited her hospital room last October not long after she had been told that, despite all her valiant efforts to fight it, the cancer had taken over too much of her body and she only had a few weeks to live.
As we talked we shared some tears and even a few laughs. But mostly we just enjoyed each other’s presence, acknowledging the reality that had always been true, but that was now painfully obvious like never before: We would one day, sooner than later, have to say goodbye. And somehow, that would have to be OK. Sure, we could choose to fight it, to wail against the finitude of life, but that wouldn’t change things.
Over the next few weeks, I visited with Mary Ellen often. I brought words of comfort and appreciation from the congregation, I described things happening in the lives of people she knew, and near the end, when she was fading in and out of consciousness, we even sang together…”Hymn of Valor”…”Spirit of Life”….
We didn’t talk about choices any more. It had become clear to me that we were both right. We had no choice but to accept what was happening to her. But I did have a choice in how I would carry with me what I experienced in her presence, what her life taught me, and who I might become as a result of having known her.
I had a choice in how I would resurrect her spirit once she was gone. And that choice, in many ways, had already been made by how I had chosen to be with her, and learn from her, when she was alive.
Being present to Mary Ellen in her final days reminded me of what I have taken from the death of any loved one: What can seem like the most helpless moments of our lives, the moments when we can be trapped in the tomb of our deepest despair, may also be the moments that can lead us to something new…whether it is new life for ourselves or for those we love. It is the darkness that reveals for us the light.
Choosing to live, truly possessing all we have been and done, becoming fierce with reality, carrying on despite all the reasons not to, not turning away from the dark, but not turning away from the light either. These are the themes that are embedded in the Easter story, no matter what we might believe about what happened to Jesus, because these are the themes of what it means to be human. No matter how entombed any of us might be in where we have been or where we hope to be, resurrections of the spirit are within our reach. The change could happen any day. Hallelujah! Springtime, rebirth, resurrection, Easter are here again and we are alive. We are alive. So let’s be ready to roll away the stone, choose life and emerge from our tombs, whatever they may be. Life is waiting for us.
Life is waiting for us.
[1] Shared in The Rev. Wlliam F. Schulz’s 2006 Berry Street Lecture, “What Torture Has Taught Me” : http://www.meadville.edu/Lectures/Torture.pdf [2] Palmer, p. 70 [3] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2000), p. 58.
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