Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
"Picking the Dump" by Mark W. Harris, November 26, 2006
“Picking the Dump” - Mark W. Harris
November 26, 2006 First Parish of Watertown -
Reading: Nehemiah 4:1-6
Sermon
When I was in college I spent most of my summer vacations cleaning oil burners. On a given day my partner and I would collect an assortment of oil filters, air filters, buckets of soot, and other apparatus associated with oil heating systems, which was the family business. Then at the end of the day we would drive to the town dump. Before this time my impression of the dump was that it was a smelly place where you wanted to dump your refuse as quickly as possible and get out. Occasionally, the dump became a subject of conversation beyond the necessary family trips there. Townspeople sometimes became angry when out of towners dumped their trash in our dump. There were also more intriguing things about it. Young men would go there at night, flash their car lights, and shoot the rats that infested the place for live target practice. In the winter I heard it was the best place to go parking with your girlfriend. While this might seem odd, it was in fact the only out-of-the-way place that was plowed, and hopefully you did not get stuck. I never knew dumps could provide so much diversion or pleasure.
What really fascinated me about my summertime trips to the dump though, was watching my partner on the oil burner truck in action. He was an expert dump picker. I would stand before heaps of rubbish and see nothing, but he would poke and prod, and find all kinds of useful things for his home and his children. There would be discarded furniture, bicycle parts, old appliances, and much more. He found a use for what others no longer valued. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. These were the days when you could forage at will in the town dump. For a wide variety of environmental and regulatory reasons, this is no longer true. The amateur dump picker is a vanishing species.
Now you must pick from the street. It seems like every Tuesday, our Marshall Street trash day, I walk down our street, and spot something that makes me think, do we want or need that? Just last week there were the corn stacks that were an important decorative part of our Thanksgiving succah. I had also scavenged some hay bales, but it turned out they were wet and moldy, and made the church smell like a barn. You’ll be happy to know I saved them to make our Christmas pageant more realistic this year. I just haven't told Roberta yet. We often see good looking bikes, desks and other assorted furniture on our walks around the neighborhood. But you have to be quick. If you drive or walk by and contemplate it for too long, someone else will grab up the good merchandise. There are amateur street pickers every where. My passion for this endeavor was ignited over a decade ago when one of our neighbors left three perfectly good wooden chairs in front of their house. They now adorn our home in Maine. And the boys new pool table that we played on over and over again this weekend? You guessed it. Our neighbors trash. So I often scour the streets looking for perfectly useable items. Forget watching the road if I am driving by, my eyed are focused on trash.. Now if you cannot bring yourself to prodding through trash, there is the more dainty alternative of tag sales, of which there is a proliferation. We are always looking for workers for our annual sale in May.
Finding a use for what others discard is a noble recyclable kind of philosophy. But you have to be careful. Many members of my own family have the New England disease of keeping everything and saying with their dying breath that there is a use for it somewhere or sometime. There is a Watertown resident on Catherine Road who has stirred up a controversy with her trash strewn house and yard, and she calls it environmental living. I doubt that is the case, but rather than responding to her pleas for help, our modern culture can only pursue litigation rather than looking at some of the root causes of the problem. There is something deeply profound in reusing that which we consume, in thinking about our purchases with the goal of living lives that are much mindful of the earth and its resources. How does that philosophy measure up to the lines at the stores this weekend, the surge of people to buy and consume, spending and grasping for meaning in having more as they push and trample others to get to the goods first.
Every day I collect a pile in my sink of coffee grounds, and banana peels and lettuce leaves. There is a large plastic bucket that holds this refuse. Every so often Andrea shovels it out into the garden, and mixes it with the earth, making the ground more fertile, replenishing its nutrients with the rotted refuse of our breakfast, lunch and dinners. It is reminiscent of the Native Americans teaching the Pilgrims how to use the remains of the fish they consumed for Thanksgiving as fertilizer for the corn that helped them survive the winter. Turn it over and under said the man at the dump. Turn it over and under and the earth replenishes itself. Most of us grew up in a disposable culture. We learned that things needed to be used for a while and then thrown way. It helped the economy to be wasteful. I learned a relatively smelly introduction to reusing things, first at my childhood dump, and then as a young adult who wanted to use cloth diapers, as opposed to disposable ones. With my first son many years ago, and later with my younger boys I used cloth diapers, provided by a diaper service. But it became clear with our third son, that few people were availing themselves of cloth diapers anymore. Diaper services could not survive. It was rare to find anyone who used cloth diapers. And people would chide us, “are you still using those cloth diapers?” We often forget the consequences of how much of landfills those diapers fill up, and the potential hazardous waste from the bacteria in them. Mostly we are hooked on convenience. What we can discard, and then not think about or see or touch is the easy solution.
It is true that most of want to get rid of waste as quickly as possible. It is unclean and we are embarrassed by our own droppings. As Philip Slater wrote many years ago, “our ideas are based on a pattern of thought that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted anything will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision.” Someone may not connect the trash that is thrown from their window with the trash in the streets. This is the same philosophy behind the city mayors who want to remove the homeless and the hungry from the streets, and truck them off where we don’t have to look at them. If we don’t see them, they don’t exist. It is also harder for us to say no to someone who asks for spare change by looking them in the eyes, and so we tend to look away. But if we see the homeless, if we touch the diaper, then our refuse becomes a little more real. This reminds me of the experience in York , England, where you go underground to tour the ancient Viking settlement that has been excavated by archeologists. They have also recreated all the smells of what it would have been like to live in his village. It is not a pleasant experience for the nose.
As I experienced the Viking village my senses learned that garbage and waste were once an immediate reality for most of humanity, but modern plumbing, disposal, and dumps have removed it from sight. And now we don’t even go to the dump anymore. They are filled and capped, and we truck it away. All of this makes us want to use more renewal resources, and I suspect this feeling among most people in this congregation is going to lead us to pursue becoming part of the Green Sanctuary movement. This has wide ranging implications. It is more than recycling our glass and cans, it means learning to walk more, use different kinds of lighting or fuels in our homes, drive different kinds of cars, replacing our windows, using solar panels, having compost under the sink and in the yard. It is changing our individual lifestyles, but here at church it means educational programs and worship that is more earth centered. It means new windows, and a more efficient heating system, solar panels or water recycling. It means seeing if our investments are green friendly.
It mostly means a different, basic understanding of life. In the reading from The Unexpected Universe, Loren Eiseley has a meaningful encounter when the train he is riding on stalls near a large dump. He reflects on the words of the dump philosopher, “We get it all. Just give it time to travel, we get it all.” The dump philosopher has a kinship with the archeologist. The archeologist is awake to memories of the dead cultures sleeping around us, to our destiny, and to the nature of the universe. Like the dump philosopher the archeologist is the last grubber among things; civilizations are put to bed, judgments are passed. While it could be the marvelous riches of an ancient Egyptian tomb, or a colonial dump site that contains a mangled fish bone, we find shadowy references to the life that was lived, the materials that were precious and perishable, now gone. The refuse tells us how the people lived. We could picture the same from the trash in our own households - the broken doll that gave so much joy, the wilted flowers from a lovely anniversary party, the records we danced the night away to; all carried away, all the stuff that gave meaning to our lives, the memories we have left of the life we lived - the old skis and broken tennis rackets, the crutches from the broken bones, the animal cage now empty. Often the archeologists will say that an ancient dump site will tell you more about a culture than anything else. It gives a complete sense of what they ate, what they used, and how they lived.
Here is the very reality of life itself. We who see beauty in mountains and seas and forests rarely see it in that which is discarded from life. The dump was always depicted as the ugliest, smelliest place in town, and the garbage collector was on the lowest rung of the social ladder. While I don’t pick the dump anymore, and I have my moments of looking for good trash on the sidewalk, I also spend some time, especially in the summer, combing the beach to find refuse. For the past few years we have owned a cottage in the harbor in Rockland, Maine. Being in the harbor means that we seem to get more of the remains of boaters and lobsterman, and this refuse actually makes the beach more interesting for scavengers. We spot useless pieces of Styrofoam from some destroyed cooler, paddles and docks and even whole boars have floated in on the ocean current, and yards and yards of rope. So much rope has washed ashore we have yet to purchase any to tie up boats or provide a railing for our collapsing stairs to the beach. In with the odd assorted items of rusted steel and abandoned Coca-cola bottles, we find endless pieces of seas glass. Often in beautiful or unusual colors it shines up from the rock strewn beach. “Here’s one,” we cry out when we have discovered another piece. It is beach glass from a new beer bottle or an old elixir. It is the left overs and discards. It is the bottle that was thrown overboard, or washed ashore on some wave that licked it from the boats seat. The hard, pointed rocks make it impossible for a bottle to survive this journey in tact. And so we have pieces of culture, of someone's work or pleasure from one day in time. Worn by the surf, we can only speculate who and why and when. It is life that has come from the ocean, just as life itself rose from the ocean. Here on dry land it has no use anymore. It may be pretty, or it may give pleasure for a moment in our sight, or perhaps it will find a use in art. Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. And so we hold and see beauty in the refuse, the discard from the sea.. Now we ask you, if you wish, to take your piece of sea glass, and hold it in your hand. Close your eyes if you wish:
This glass is part of life’s remains and hope. It was useful to someone once. It held a beverage that quenched their thirst. It was a medicine that took away the pain in their head. It was shaped by hand once- blown into being. It was mass produced later on. It floated upon the water -tossed and dashed - it crashed and broke apart sending all its pieces dipping and diving in a thousand different directions. There were the cold green waters of the deep pouring over its surface. The rocks beneath molded and shaped so long ago - some now worn and turned to sand, then sand to glass. There are bits of life all around - sea creatures of many stripes and colors, shells and seaweed coating and colliding with the glass. It was part of life once, up from the sea. It it a memory of another life, another day, and it is a memory now of being found, and then being touched again, with warmth and care. With eyes that hold beauty and shape new life. It can be of use again in yet another form.
I believe we might have a broader definition of beauty than the one that glorifies in unsullied nature, especially when the discards of life have often resurfaced and stained the pristine view. We search the beach for them. They have their own beauty. Their own life’s memory. Why do we often fail to see beauty in the the sweat and blood of the world? Why not in the refuse and remains? We have also often depicted death as an evil and ugly part of life, something we don’t want to look at, and so we hide death away like refuse. What if we saw death as a beautiful culmination of life? The dump philosophers and pickers remind us that all life eventually comes to the point of being discarded. This glass is broken and discarded, but at the same time, what some would not look at or use, has immense meaning and value for others. It has beauty and history and once held some greater meaning. The poet Yeats wrote,
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of the street
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladders gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
Yeats implores us to ask the question, Is anything really worthless? If we want to embrace an interdependent web of life, then we need to be linked to plastic containers. If we believe we must be in relationships with all life forms, then we need to respect the fish bone. If we are going to build our worship around mountains and trees and seas, we also need to remember the factories and pavement and dumps. If we are going to find meaning in cycles and seasons, then we would go to the depth of meaning in decay and death. We cannot selectively find meaning in what is nice and clean, while not seeing what is real and used. We do not make things clean by not talking or looking or using something that is attached to the sweat and blood of the world. The use it up and throw it away philosophy does not do justice to life - what we do not look at or talk about will not disappear, but will resurface to haunt us. Nor does it do justice to ourselves, for our meaning is found in the discarded we use up, as we journey toward the end of our lives.
Picking the dump means we find the beautiful or the useful in the discards of life. In Nehemiah 4, the Jews are ridiculed for trying to restore things out of rubbish. But they keep on laboring, and the wall of Jerusalem was rebuilt. We think it is a new thing, using rubbish to rebuild, when we see things like playground surfaces made out of old tires. What if more things were like that? In Jerusalem there was talk of too much rubbish, but they were counseled not to be afraid. They had learned that they could build on what others considered trash. In fact, Nehemiah gives implicit value to the trash. What others find as useless, he finds as valuable. The remains of ancient dinosaurs have literally fueled our culture for the past century or more. It has been our blessing and our curse. What other kinds of old life will now bring new life? Picking the dump reminds us that we have lived and eaten and worked and loved and died - from the fish bone to the appliance to the wilted flower. When we embrace the beauty in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, then we learn that we are all dump pickers, finding life in the remains of yesterday’s feast. We find value in the refuse of life. We build new walls on the dump when we recognize it as part of us, and part of all; in recognizing our brokenness, we begin to become whole.
Closing Words - from Adrienne Rich
My heart is moved by all that I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
November 26, 2006 First Parish of Watertown -
Reading: Nehemiah 4:1-6
Sermon
When I was in college I spent most of my summer vacations cleaning oil burners. On a given day my partner and I would collect an assortment of oil filters, air filters, buckets of soot, and other apparatus associated with oil heating systems, which was the family business. Then at the end of the day we would drive to the town dump. Before this time my impression of the dump was that it was a smelly place where you wanted to dump your refuse as quickly as possible and get out. Occasionally, the dump became a subject of conversation beyond the necessary family trips there. Townspeople sometimes became angry when out of towners dumped their trash in our dump. There were also more intriguing things about it. Young men would go there at night, flash their car lights, and shoot the rats that infested the place for live target practice. In the winter I heard it was the best place to go parking with your girlfriend. While this might seem odd, it was in fact the only out-of-the-way place that was plowed, and hopefully you did not get stuck. I never knew dumps could provide so much diversion or pleasure.
What really fascinated me about my summertime trips to the dump though, was watching my partner on the oil burner truck in action. He was an expert dump picker. I would stand before heaps of rubbish and see nothing, but he would poke and prod, and find all kinds of useful things for his home and his children. There would be discarded furniture, bicycle parts, old appliances, and much more. He found a use for what others no longer valued. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. These were the days when you could forage at will in the town dump. For a wide variety of environmental and regulatory reasons, this is no longer true. The amateur dump picker is a vanishing species.
Now you must pick from the street. It seems like every Tuesday, our Marshall Street trash day, I walk down our street, and spot something that makes me think, do we want or need that? Just last week there were the corn stacks that were an important decorative part of our Thanksgiving succah. I had also scavenged some hay bales, but it turned out they were wet and moldy, and made the church smell like a barn. You’ll be happy to know I saved them to make our Christmas pageant more realistic this year. I just haven't told Roberta yet. We often see good looking bikes, desks and other assorted furniture on our walks around the neighborhood. But you have to be quick. If you drive or walk by and contemplate it for too long, someone else will grab up the good merchandise. There are amateur street pickers every where. My passion for this endeavor was ignited over a decade ago when one of our neighbors left three perfectly good wooden chairs in front of their house. They now adorn our home in Maine. And the boys new pool table that we played on over and over again this weekend? You guessed it. Our neighbors trash. So I often scour the streets looking for perfectly useable items. Forget watching the road if I am driving by, my eyed are focused on trash.. Now if you cannot bring yourself to prodding through trash, there is the more dainty alternative of tag sales, of which there is a proliferation. We are always looking for workers for our annual sale in May.
Finding a use for what others discard is a noble recyclable kind of philosophy. But you have to be careful. Many members of my own family have the New England disease of keeping everything and saying with their dying breath that there is a use for it somewhere or sometime. There is a Watertown resident on Catherine Road who has stirred up a controversy with her trash strewn house and yard, and she calls it environmental living. I doubt that is the case, but rather than responding to her pleas for help, our modern culture can only pursue litigation rather than looking at some of the root causes of the problem. There is something deeply profound in reusing that which we consume, in thinking about our purchases with the goal of living lives that are much mindful of the earth and its resources. How does that philosophy measure up to the lines at the stores this weekend, the surge of people to buy and consume, spending and grasping for meaning in having more as they push and trample others to get to the goods first.
Every day I collect a pile in my sink of coffee grounds, and banana peels and lettuce leaves. There is a large plastic bucket that holds this refuse. Every so often Andrea shovels it out into the garden, and mixes it with the earth, making the ground more fertile, replenishing its nutrients with the rotted refuse of our breakfast, lunch and dinners. It is reminiscent of the Native Americans teaching the Pilgrims how to use the remains of the fish they consumed for Thanksgiving as fertilizer for the corn that helped them survive the winter. Turn it over and under said the man at the dump. Turn it over and under and the earth replenishes itself. Most of us grew up in a disposable culture. We learned that things needed to be used for a while and then thrown way. It helped the economy to be wasteful. I learned a relatively smelly introduction to reusing things, first at my childhood dump, and then as a young adult who wanted to use cloth diapers, as opposed to disposable ones. With my first son many years ago, and later with my younger boys I used cloth diapers, provided by a diaper service. But it became clear with our third son, that few people were availing themselves of cloth diapers anymore. Diaper services could not survive. It was rare to find anyone who used cloth diapers. And people would chide us, “are you still using those cloth diapers?” We often forget the consequences of how much of landfills those diapers fill up, and the potential hazardous waste from the bacteria in them. Mostly we are hooked on convenience. What we can discard, and then not think about or see or touch is the easy solution.
It is true that most of want to get rid of waste as quickly as possible. It is unclean and we are embarrassed by our own droppings. As Philip Slater wrote many years ago, “our ideas are based on a pattern of thought that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties, unwanted anything will disappear if they are removed from our immediate field of vision.” Someone may not connect the trash that is thrown from their window with the trash in the streets. This is the same philosophy behind the city mayors who want to remove the homeless and the hungry from the streets, and truck them off where we don’t have to look at them. If we don’t see them, they don’t exist. It is also harder for us to say no to someone who asks for spare change by looking them in the eyes, and so we tend to look away. But if we see the homeless, if we touch the diaper, then our refuse becomes a little more real. This reminds me of the experience in York , England, where you go underground to tour the ancient Viking settlement that has been excavated by archeologists. They have also recreated all the smells of what it would have been like to live in his village. It is not a pleasant experience for the nose.
As I experienced the Viking village my senses learned that garbage and waste were once an immediate reality for most of humanity, but modern plumbing, disposal, and dumps have removed it from sight. And now we don’t even go to the dump anymore. They are filled and capped, and we truck it away. All of this makes us want to use more renewal resources, and I suspect this feeling among most people in this congregation is going to lead us to pursue becoming part of the Green Sanctuary movement. This has wide ranging implications. It is more than recycling our glass and cans, it means learning to walk more, use different kinds of lighting or fuels in our homes, drive different kinds of cars, replacing our windows, using solar panels, having compost under the sink and in the yard. It is changing our individual lifestyles, but here at church it means educational programs and worship that is more earth centered. It means new windows, and a more efficient heating system, solar panels or water recycling. It means seeing if our investments are green friendly.
It mostly means a different, basic understanding of life. In the reading from The Unexpected Universe, Loren Eiseley has a meaningful encounter when the train he is riding on stalls near a large dump. He reflects on the words of the dump philosopher, “We get it all. Just give it time to travel, we get it all.” The dump philosopher has a kinship with the archeologist. The archeologist is awake to memories of the dead cultures sleeping around us, to our destiny, and to the nature of the universe. Like the dump philosopher the archeologist is the last grubber among things; civilizations are put to bed, judgments are passed. While it could be the marvelous riches of an ancient Egyptian tomb, or a colonial dump site that contains a mangled fish bone, we find shadowy references to the life that was lived, the materials that were precious and perishable, now gone. The refuse tells us how the people lived. We could picture the same from the trash in our own households - the broken doll that gave so much joy, the wilted flowers from a lovely anniversary party, the records we danced the night away to; all carried away, all the stuff that gave meaning to our lives, the memories we have left of the life we lived - the old skis and broken tennis rackets, the crutches from the broken bones, the animal cage now empty. Often the archeologists will say that an ancient dump site will tell you more about a culture than anything else. It gives a complete sense of what they ate, what they used, and how they lived.
Here is the very reality of life itself. We who see beauty in mountains and seas and forests rarely see it in that which is discarded from life. The dump was always depicted as the ugliest, smelliest place in town, and the garbage collector was on the lowest rung of the social ladder. While I don’t pick the dump anymore, and I have my moments of looking for good trash on the sidewalk, I also spend some time, especially in the summer, combing the beach to find refuse. For the past few years we have owned a cottage in the harbor in Rockland, Maine. Being in the harbor means that we seem to get more of the remains of boaters and lobsterman, and this refuse actually makes the beach more interesting for scavengers. We spot useless pieces of Styrofoam from some destroyed cooler, paddles and docks and even whole boars have floated in on the ocean current, and yards and yards of rope. So much rope has washed ashore we have yet to purchase any to tie up boats or provide a railing for our collapsing stairs to the beach. In with the odd assorted items of rusted steel and abandoned Coca-cola bottles, we find endless pieces of seas glass. Often in beautiful or unusual colors it shines up from the rock strewn beach. “Here’s one,” we cry out when we have discovered another piece. It is beach glass from a new beer bottle or an old elixir. It is the left overs and discards. It is the bottle that was thrown overboard, or washed ashore on some wave that licked it from the boats seat. The hard, pointed rocks make it impossible for a bottle to survive this journey in tact. And so we have pieces of culture, of someone's work or pleasure from one day in time. Worn by the surf, we can only speculate who and why and when. It is life that has come from the ocean, just as life itself rose from the ocean. Here on dry land it has no use anymore. It may be pretty, or it may give pleasure for a moment in our sight, or perhaps it will find a use in art. Beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. And so we hold and see beauty in the refuse, the discard from the sea.. Now we ask you, if you wish, to take your piece of sea glass, and hold it in your hand. Close your eyes if you wish:
This glass is part of life’s remains and hope. It was useful to someone once. It held a beverage that quenched their thirst. It was a medicine that took away the pain in their head. It was shaped by hand once- blown into being. It was mass produced later on. It floated upon the water -tossed and dashed - it crashed and broke apart sending all its pieces dipping and diving in a thousand different directions. There were the cold green waters of the deep pouring over its surface. The rocks beneath molded and shaped so long ago - some now worn and turned to sand, then sand to glass. There are bits of life all around - sea creatures of many stripes and colors, shells and seaweed coating and colliding with the glass. It was part of life once, up from the sea. It it a memory of another life, another day, and it is a memory now of being found, and then being touched again, with warmth and care. With eyes that hold beauty and shape new life. It can be of use again in yet another form.
I believe we might have a broader definition of beauty than the one that glorifies in unsullied nature, especially when the discards of life have often resurfaced and stained the pristine view. We search the beach for them. They have their own beauty. Their own life’s memory. Why do we often fail to see beauty in the the sweat and blood of the world? Why not in the refuse and remains? We have also often depicted death as an evil and ugly part of life, something we don’t want to look at, and so we hide death away like refuse. What if we saw death as a beautiful culmination of life? The dump philosophers and pickers remind us that all life eventually comes to the point of being discarded. This glass is broken and discarded, but at the same time, what some would not look at or use, has immense meaning and value for others. It has beauty and history and once held some greater meaning. The poet Yeats wrote,
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of the street
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladders gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
Yeats implores us to ask the question, Is anything really worthless? If we want to embrace an interdependent web of life, then we need to be linked to plastic containers. If we believe we must be in relationships with all life forms, then we need to respect the fish bone. If we are going to build our worship around mountains and trees and seas, we also need to remember the factories and pavement and dumps. If we are going to find meaning in cycles and seasons, then we would go to the depth of meaning in decay and death. We cannot selectively find meaning in what is nice and clean, while not seeing what is real and used. We do not make things clean by not talking or looking or using something that is attached to the sweat and blood of the world. The use it up and throw it away philosophy does not do justice to life - what we do not look at or talk about will not disappear, but will resurface to haunt us. Nor does it do justice to ourselves, for our meaning is found in the discarded we use up, as we journey toward the end of our lives.
Picking the dump means we find the beautiful or the useful in the discards of life. In Nehemiah 4, the Jews are ridiculed for trying to restore things out of rubbish. But they keep on laboring, and the wall of Jerusalem was rebuilt. We think it is a new thing, using rubbish to rebuild, when we see things like playground surfaces made out of old tires. What if more things were like that? In Jerusalem there was talk of too much rubbish, but they were counseled not to be afraid. They had learned that they could build on what others considered trash. In fact, Nehemiah gives implicit value to the trash. What others find as useless, he finds as valuable. The remains of ancient dinosaurs have literally fueled our culture for the past century or more. It has been our blessing and our curse. What other kinds of old life will now bring new life? Picking the dump reminds us that we have lived and eaten and worked and loved and died - from the fish bone to the appliance to the wilted flower. When we embrace the beauty in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, then we learn that we are all dump pickers, finding life in the remains of yesterday’s feast. We find value in the refuse of life. We build new walls on the dump when we recognize it as part of us, and part of all; in recognizing our brokenness, we begin to become whole.
Closing Words - from Adrienne Rich
My heart is moved by all that I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
"In Dreams" by Mark W. Harris, November 12, 2006
“In Dreams” by Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - November 12, 2006
Opening Words - from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. For we are encouraged that [we] can elevate [our lives] by [our] own conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. . . Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Readings: The BFG by Roald Dahl
Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout
Sermon
I have always been a dreamer. Are you a dreamer, too? As a child my passion was baseball, and in many ways, that still remains true. My dream was to don the uniform of the Red Sox and be their first baseman. I saw myself doing this as I participated in my local practices and games. I devoted hours to making myself a better player. When I visited Fenway Park from our rural environs of western Massachusetts, I imagined what the locker room was like, and was hypnotized by how green the field appeared to me from the grandstand. As children, we all like to imagine what life will be like for us one day. We may dream of college or marriage or children or career. We all create scenarios of what our lives will be. For most of us the words of a parent ring true - these professionals are exceptional, meaning you are not quite good enough. So the boys game does not work out. But other dreams take shape, and they become your vision. Life takes many expected and unexpected turns, and the dreams we create fail to materialize or they evolve in new directions. So many of those childhood hopes “fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.”” as the old hymn says, and we then we must create new ones. For dreams are what gives our lives hope and meaning. They are what we are striving to be and become at this very moment. As Langston Hughes wrote:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
We expect children to be dreamers. My children think about what they will become, and it often reflects what they love; star athletes, or video game designers or magicians, and perhaps they will make that dream come true, or at least some variation of it. I have loved history my entire life, and still feel my greatest passion when I am teaching it to others. Do any of those childhood dreams survive in you? Childhood and dreams play the central role in The BFG, a children's book by Roald Dahl. For school, Dana must read aloud to one of his parents every night for twenty minutes, and not long ago I found myself listening to the BFG, which was a story I was not familiar with. BFG stands, of course, for big, friendly giant. This BFG has befriended the little girl Sophie. We learn in the reading that the BFG can make you dream about anything by simply mixing it up and blowing it in your ear. We also learn that Sophie is on a mission. It seems that eight 50 foot tall disgusting giants are going to eat up boys and girls in England They snatch girls and boys from their beds, and eat them up like popcorn. In order to save the children, the Queen of England, must be informed of the giants existence, and then rid the world of these troggle-humping, bogthumping giants forever. The problem, as the BFG says, is that nobody believes in dreams, except when you are dreaming it.
How to get the Queen to believe? The plan, which eventually works, is for the BFG to mix up the components of the dream so the queen can see and learn the names of all these terrible giants - childchewer and gizzardgulper, and the like. Normally this would seem to be like just another nightmare filled with horrible creatures, and the Queen would never believe in them as real, but there is a twist. To help the Queen see that this is not just a nightmare, Sophie has the BFG mix herself and the BFG into the dream so that the Queen sees them in the dream, and then sees them again when she wakes up - Sophie sitting on her windowsill, and the BFG out in her yard. The implication is that the entire dream is real, since here is reality right before her. Once she believes in the veracity of the dream, she can save all the children the mean giants are planning to eat. And she does, because the BFG knows where they are hiding! We must believe in our dreams as real, in order to make them come true.
Sometimes it does seem that our dreams turn to nightmares, but the point is we must do all we can to turn these nightmares around, and fashion for ourselves new dreams and believe in their abiding truth. There was an interesting essay in a recent New York Times book review called “Misery Loves a Memoir” by Benjamin Kunkel Kunkel feels that our literary culture encourages us to believe that life is what happens to you, and not what you do. Our heroes these days are victims of life’s misfortunes. There is a well known Zen story that is retold by Jon Muth in the children's book, Zen Shorts. It illustrates the turns that life deals us. There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck, “ they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses. “Such good luck!” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Such bad luck,” they said. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. “Such good luck! cried the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
The story illustrates that our dreams or plans often do get waylaid by other events that are beyond our control, which is why we have to be all the more creative in building new dreams to fashion meaning from. In his essay Kunkel notes that autobiographical writing is popular these days, but much of it is about some horrible past that the writer has survived. And that’s it. There is a big sigh of relief that the past is over, and you survived all this trauma, but the memoirs tend to be a kind of wallowing in self-pity, with no sense of dream about the future. And he says, if the memories are not this self-pity, then they are mired in nostalgia. Life was good then, but now? Nostalgia says look at the present and see it as empty except in the context of how much of the past it has lost One of the dangers with these kinds of memoirs or even our own personal reflections is that we feel that life used to be good, but is no longer, or that meaning in life has come from my miserable suffering in the past. No one wants to suffer, and while we may fashion meaning from our suffering, it is important ot remember that meaning in life must come out of what we can build upon with new and revitalized dreams. This approach to life and to the writing of memoirs may be useful because it teaches us how to survive, but as Kunkel points out, they don’t teach us how to live. He says too many of these stories tells us that helpless addiction and passive suffering are the most meaningful experiences we can have. Kunkel contrasts these memoirs with the way Thoreau approached life. He asks, what is the good life? How can I discover my vocation? Thoreau in reflecting upon society and his neighbors wants us to ask what are our aspirations for ourselves and our society. In the end Thoreau quits his cabin. He could regret that he did this. He could say these were the best days of his life. Or one could do exactly what he did. He looked forward. He said,”It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live.” There is a note of futurity of hope and excitement and discovery of something new in the lives ahead of him. “Only that day dawns, he wrote, “to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. “
Thoreau realized that it is dreams that keep us going, that gives us direction in life. On Friday, the Watertown Clergy group was having lunch over at Brigham House, an assisted living facility. There is some concern about the future of the group, because no one has been willing to come forward and be president, after I had done it for many years. Finally, one of the Armenian priests volunteered that he could do it, but he was worried about how busy he is, and how he is forgetful about organizational things. Finally, one of the other members said, “volunteering to do this will keep you on this side of the room,” (which was where our meeting was taking place), “and not the other side of the room” (where the elderly residents were having lunch). The implication was finding meaningful activity, or service to others was going to keep him active. This story also implies a stereotype that being old means you have no dreams, but it is really having no dreams that makes you old. There is a wonderful children’s book called, The Man Who Had No Dreams, which tells the story of a rich, old man who cannot sleep because he has no dreams, and then his life is transformed when he creates a bird sanctuary. Having dreams about what you might like to do with your life, how you could give of yourself to something larger, how you could grow, learn or travel in new ways will keep you going. This is the kind of conversation that occurs in the reading from the novel Abide with Me. Connie says her dream of being thin and her dream of being a parent died, but there may be other ways that a dream like those can come to life. She confesses that she has continued to live in a dream world that was not based in reality, and so perhaps, her failed dreams have prevented her from finding new ones. She has not gone on to discover the new dawn, as Thoreau suggests.
There are many things that can hold us back from fulfilling dreams. In the reading, Connie asks Tyler “What dreams keep you going?” She suggests sometimes the mind changes a story because we cannot face why we did or did not do something we now believe we should have. We may embellish a story to make a problem seem larger than it was, or make ourselves feel better. Was I, for instance, as much of a political activist as I think I was, and how does that dream of mine become altered to keep me going? Tyler talks about wanting to go south to work on civil rights campaigns, but then admits he will not be able to because someone has to watch the children, and he is in debt. His dreams face the reality of family obligations, as is so often the case for many of us. We have made choices, and so our dreams must be built in the context of those choices. Andrea and I know a couple where the husband once had dreams of getting an education and being an accountant, but his wife discouraged him from doing so, perhaps out of fear that the family expenses would not be covered, or out of personal fear that he would then be better than her, and they would be drawn apart. How often do we put a hold on dreams because we fear those we love will grow more than we do, and how can we build dreams together of what will keep both partners engaged and dreaming of all they could be and do?
Langston Hughes, the great African American poet wrote often about the dream deferred that he experienced as a black man, who was told to wait, and that some day the time would come to see his dream fulfilled. It is interesting that Martin Luther King picked up on this idea of having a dream to chart his course for changing America. Hughes wanted to know why it should be his loneliness, or his song, or his dream that should be deferred overlong. In a poem called Deferred he asks when he can have that white enamel stove, when can he study French, buy suits, and see his furniture paid for. This was where the dream of heaven became such a living reality for those whom society shunned. People dreamed of leaving this world behind, and finding glory in another life. Finally Hughes outlined four aspects to a dream deferred that he foresaw the need to overcome in order to live the dream. Those aspects were traveling, nothing, impotence and confusion. Let’s consider these four, and how they play a role in our ability to dream.
Traveling tells me that when a dream is deferred you run around a lot. Now a black man like Hughes might have had to run from one place to the next. He might be told, Here is a chance for you, but that chance never materializes. Sometimes we run away from a past we are trying to elude. We can also defer our own dreams when we refuse to travel. For some, like me, perhaps there was no chance of having a dream fulfilled unless I left the backwater town I grew up in. There was a certain resentment of those who traveled to the city to get an education, or get a job in order to make something of yourself. I had to travel away from home to find my dream fulfilled, but I think even those who stay near home must always travel even within the geographical borders. A longing for new experiences, learning, growing means that dreaming and traveling go together.
Then there is nothing. In the African -American dream deferred there is literally nothing to build upon. You don’t have those family jewels or any prize to . But we also defer our dreams when we list all those things we imagine get in the way of dreams. There is nothing to them except anxiety or fear of failure. This deferment builds upon the belief, I could never do that. And nothing may be those things from the past that Thoreau wants to wean us from - that suffering or painful memory , that nostalgic memory that we know does not help us build a new dream. Even a church may defer its dream of growth by believing, we have always been a small church. We could never do that. That is too much to ask, and so we never do.
The third aspect of a dream deferred is impotence. For African Americans, Hughes was perhaps thinking that any ideas they had would not be considered as worthy. No one would listen, and he felt powerless. We all feel this way when it feels like there is no way out. A parent might have said to us, you have made your bed, now lie in it, and we have felt helpless to dream of anything new, and certainly felt unsupported. Perhaps we feel as though our life has
reached a stage where it is too late to have dreams. Sometimes church life may seem overwhelming if there is only a small group of people doing all the institutional maintenance, we fail to see how others might become part of a new dream. We often feel impotent when it seems
like no one listens to us, but what about finding those who will and the dream can be shared with a larger circle.
Finally, the fourth part of a dream deferred is confusion. Confusion occurs, Hughes says, because dreams get kicked around. Think of the traditional role of women, sacrificing your own dreams or ambition is what it once meant for many women. Many of us still feel confusion in balancing and finding compromises for one partner’s dream. I am reminded of how this church once thought a steel ramp attached to the building would give the congregation the kind of access they wanted, but they probably felt some confusion about what to do, and the idea of an elevator was out of the question, for you felt too impotent. And then out of the impotence and confusion came a vision. Confusion arises when we don’t really know what to do next. Think of the countless number of men, especially who upon reaching retirement age, do not know what to do with themselves. They have lost their day to day purpose of working, and have no dream
of what retirement will be like. Some waste away, but others have countless projects to motivate themselves and give meaning. I think of my friend Carl Seaburg who had about 15 book projects going, and one of them was to help motivate me to finish my book of Easter readings, a dream I had put aside. His brother Alan is still publishing his books eight years after his death. We need to always have something cooking because when they are no dreams, there is no vision, and there is no life. This church, and each and every one one of us needs vision, needs life, needs those dreams to make meaning in the world. Do you want to climb that mountain? Do you want to write that book? Do you want to make that trip or teach that class or learn that language? Langston Hughes’ most famous poem reminds us that every day we need to keep climbing those stairs to new dreams of new dawns before us.
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
and splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark,
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds its kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now --
For I’se still goin’ honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Closing Words - from The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
(speaking of the Sundarbans, little islands off the coast of India)
So why did the people come, then? For the land . . . Everyone who was willing to work was welcome . . . but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no brahmins or untouchables . . . Everyone would have to live and work together . . . But how could this be a country? There’s nothing here . . . It was a dream . . . What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening . And look what he ended up with . . . rat-infested islands. . . Don’t laugh . . . it was just that the tide country wasn’t ready yet. Someday, who knows? It may yet come to be. . . It was a dream. . . It may yet come to be.
First Parish of Watertown - November 12, 2006
Opening Words - from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. For we are encouraged that [we] can elevate [our lives] by [our] own conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. . . Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Readings: The BFG by Roald Dahl
Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout
Sermon
I have always been a dreamer. Are you a dreamer, too? As a child my passion was baseball, and in many ways, that still remains true. My dream was to don the uniform of the Red Sox and be their first baseman. I saw myself doing this as I participated in my local practices and games. I devoted hours to making myself a better player. When I visited Fenway Park from our rural environs of western Massachusetts, I imagined what the locker room was like, and was hypnotized by how green the field appeared to me from the grandstand. As children, we all like to imagine what life will be like for us one day. We may dream of college or marriage or children or career. We all create scenarios of what our lives will be. For most of us the words of a parent ring true - these professionals are exceptional, meaning you are not quite good enough. So the boys game does not work out. But other dreams take shape, and they become your vision. Life takes many expected and unexpected turns, and the dreams we create fail to materialize or they evolve in new directions. So many of those childhood hopes “fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.”” as the old hymn says, and we then we must create new ones. For dreams are what gives our lives hope and meaning. They are what we are striving to be and become at this very moment. As Langston Hughes wrote:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
We expect children to be dreamers. My children think about what they will become, and it often reflects what they love; star athletes, or video game designers or magicians, and perhaps they will make that dream come true, or at least some variation of it. I have loved history my entire life, and still feel my greatest passion when I am teaching it to others. Do any of those childhood dreams survive in you? Childhood and dreams play the central role in The BFG, a children's book by Roald Dahl. For school, Dana must read aloud to one of his parents every night for twenty minutes, and not long ago I found myself listening to the BFG, which was a story I was not familiar with. BFG stands, of course, for big, friendly giant. This BFG has befriended the little girl Sophie. We learn in the reading that the BFG can make you dream about anything by simply mixing it up and blowing it in your ear. We also learn that Sophie is on a mission. It seems that eight 50 foot tall disgusting giants are going to eat up boys and girls in England They snatch girls and boys from their beds, and eat them up like popcorn. In order to save the children, the Queen of England, must be informed of the giants existence, and then rid the world of these troggle-humping, bogthumping giants forever. The problem, as the BFG says, is that nobody believes in dreams, except when you are dreaming it.
How to get the Queen to believe? The plan, which eventually works, is for the BFG to mix up the components of the dream so the queen can see and learn the names of all these terrible giants - childchewer and gizzardgulper, and the like. Normally this would seem to be like just another nightmare filled with horrible creatures, and the Queen would never believe in them as real, but there is a twist. To help the Queen see that this is not just a nightmare, Sophie has the BFG mix herself and the BFG into the dream so that the Queen sees them in the dream, and then sees them again when she wakes up - Sophie sitting on her windowsill, and the BFG out in her yard. The implication is that the entire dream is real, since here is reality right before her. Once she believes in the veracity of the dream, she can save all the children the mean giants are planning to eat. And she does, because the BFG knows where they are hiding! We must believe in our dreams as real, in order to make them come true.
Sometimes it does seem that our dreams turn to nightmares, but the point is we must do all we can to turn these nightmares around, and fashion for ourselves new dreams and believe in their abiding truth. There was an interesting essay in a recent New York Times book review called “Misery Loves a Memoir” by Benjamin Kunkel Kunkel feels that our literary culture encourages us to believe that life is what happens to you, and not what you do. Our heroes these days are victims of life’s misfortunes. There is a well known Zen story that is retold by Jon Muth in the children's book, Zen Shorts. It illustrates the turns that life deals us. There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck, “ they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses. “Such good luck!” the neighbors exclaimed. “Maybe,” replied the farmer. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. Again the neighbors came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Such bad luck,” they said. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. “Such good luck! cried the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
The story illustrates that our dreams or plans often do get waylaid by other events that are beyond our control, which is why we have to be all the more creative in building new dreams to fashion meaning from. In his essay Kunkel notes that autobiographical writing is popular these days, but much of it is about some horrible past that the writer has survived. And that’s it. There is a big sigh of relief that the past is over, and you survived all this trauma, but the memoirs tend to be a kind of wallowing in self-pity, with no sense of dream about the future. And he says, if the memories are not this self-pity, then they are mired in nostalgia. Life was good then, but now? Nostalgia says look at the present and see it as empty except in the context of how much of the past it has lost One of the dangers with these kinds of memoirs or even our own personal reflections is that we feel that life used to be good, but is no longer, or that meaning in life has come from my miserable suffering in the past. No one wants to suffer, and while we may fashion meaning from our suffering, it is important ot remember that meaning in life must come out of what we can build upon with new and revitalized dreams. This approach to life and to the writing of memoirs may be useful because it teaches us how to survive, but as Kunkel points out, they don’t teach us how to live. He says too many of these stories tells us that helpless addiction and passive suffering are the most meaningful experiences we can have. Kunkel contrasts these memoirs with the way Thoreau approached life. He asks, what is the good life? How can I discover my vocation? Thoreau in reflecting upon society and his neighbors wants us to ask what are our aspirations for ourselves and our society. In the end Thoreau quits his cabin. He could regret that he did this. He could say these were the best days of his life. Or one could do exactly what he did. He looked forward. He said,”It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live.” There is a note of futurity of hope and excitement and discovery of something new in the lives ahead of him. “Only that day dawns, he wrote, “to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. “
Thoreau realized that it is dreams that keep us going, that gives us direction in life. On Friday, the Watertown Clergy group was having lunch over at Brigham House, an assisted living facility. There is some concern about the future of the group, because no one has been willing to come forward and be president, after I had done it for many years. Finally, one of the Armenian priests volunteered that he could do it, but he was worried about how busy he is, and how he is forgetful about organizational things. Finally, one of the other members said, “volunteering to do this will keep you on this side of the room,” (which was where our meeting was taking place), “and not the other side of the room” (where the elderly residents were having lunch). The implication was finding meaningful activity, or service to others was going to keep him active. This story also implies a stereotype that being old means you have no dreams, but it is really having no dreams that makes you old. There is a wonderful children’s book called, The Man Who Had No Dreams, which tells the story of a rich, old man who cannot sleep because he has no dreams, and then his life is transformed when he creates a bird sanctuary. Having dreams about what you might like to do with your life, how you could give of yourself to something larger, how you could grow, learn or travel in new ways will keep you going. This is the kind of conversation that occurs in the reading from the novel Abide with Me. Connie says her dream of being thin and her dream of being a parent died, but there may be other ways that a dream like those can come to life. She confesses that she has continued to live in a dream world that was not based in reality, and so perhaps, her failed dreams have prevented her from finding new ones. She has not gone on to discover the new dawn, as Thoreau suggests.
There are many things that can hold us back from fulfilling dreams. In the reading, Connie asks Tyler “What dreams keep you going?” She suggests sometimes the mind changes a story because we cannot face why we did or did not do something we now believe we should have. We may embellish a story to make a problem seem larger than it was, or make ourselves feel better. Was I, for instance, as much of a political activist as I think I was, and how does that dream of mine become altered to keep me going? Tyler talks about wanting to go south to work on civil rights campaigns, but then admits he will not be able to because someone has to watch the children, and he is in debt. His dreams face the reality of family obligations, as is so often the case for many of us. We have made choices, and so our dreams must be built in the context of those choices. Andrea and I know a couple where the husband once had dreams of getting an education and being an accountant, but his wife discouraged him from doing so, perhaps out of fear that the family expenses would not be covered, or out of personal fear that he would then be better than her, and they would be drawn apart. How often do we put a hold on dreams because we fear those we love will grow more than we do, and how can we build dreams together of what will keep both partners engaged and dreaming of all they could be and do?
Langston Hughes, the great African American poet wrote often about the dream deferred that he experienced as a black man, who was told to wait, and that some day the time would come to see his dream fulfilled. It is interesting that Martin Luther King picked up on this idea of having a dream to chart his course for changing America. Hughes wanted to know why it should be his loneliness, or his song, or his dream that should be deferred overlong. In a poem called Deferred he asks when he can have that white enamel stove, when can he study French, buy suits, and see his furniture paid for. This was where the dream of heaven became such a living reality for those whom society shunned. People dreamed of leaving this world behind, and finding glory in another life. Finally Hughes outlined four aspects to a dream deferred that he foresaw the need to overcome in order to live the dream. Those aspects were traveling, nothing, impotence and confusion. Let’s consider these four, and how they play a role in our ability to dream.
Traveling tells me that when a dream is deferred you run around a lot. Now a black man like Hughes might have had to run from one place to the next. He might be told, Here is a chance for you, but that chance never materializes. Sometimes we run away from a past we are trying to elude. We can also defer our own dreams when we refuse to travel. For some, like me, perhaps there was no chance of having a dream fulfilled unless I left the backwater town I grew up in. There was a certain resentment of those who traveled to the city to get an education, or get a job in order to make something of yourself. I had to travel away from home to find my dream fulfilled, but I think even those who stay near home must always travel even within the geographical borders. A longing for new experiences, learning, growing means that dreaming and traveling go together.
Then there is nothing. In the African -American dream deferred there is literally nothing to build upon. You don’t have those family jewels or any prize to . But we also defer our dreams when we list all those things we imagine get in the way of dreams. There is nothing to them except anxiety or fear of failure. This deferment builds upon the belief, I could never do that. And nothing may be those things from the past that Thoreau wants to wean us from - that suffering or painful memory , that nostalgic memory that we know does not help us build a new dream. Even a church may defer its dream of growth by believing, we have always been a small church. We could never do that. That is too much to ask, and so we never do.
The third aspect of a dream deferred is impotence. For African Americans, Hughes was perhaps thinking that any ideas they had would not be considered as worthy. No one would listen, and he felt powerless. We all feel this way when it feels like there is no way out. A parent might have said to us, you have made your bed, now lie in it, and we have felt helpless to dream of anything new, and certainly felt unsupported. Perhaps we feel as though our life has
reached a stage where it is too late to have dreams. Sometimes church life may seem overwhelming if there is only a small group of people doing all the institutional maintenance, we fail to see how others might become part of a new dream. We often feel impotent when it seems
like no one listens to us, but what about finding those who will and the dream can be shared with a larger circle.
Finally, the fourth part of a dream deferred is confusion. Confusion occurs, Hughes says, because dreams get kicked around. Think of the traditional role of women, sacrificing your own dreams or ambition is what it once meant for many women. Many of us still feel confusion in balancing and finding compromises for one partner’s dream. I am reminded of how this church once thought a steel ramp attached to the building would give the congregation the kind of access they wanted, but they probably felt some confusion about what to do, and the idea of an elevator was out of the question, for you felt too impotent. And then out of the impotence and confusion came a vision. Confusion arises when we don’t really know what to do next. Think of the countless number of men, especially who upon reaching retirement age, do not know what to do with themselves. They have lost their day to day purpose of working, and have no dream
of what retirement will be like. Some waste away, but others have countless projects to motivate themselves and give meaning. I think of my friend Carl Seaburg who had about 15 book projects going, and one of them was to help motivate me to finish my book of Easter readings, a dream I had put aside. His brother Alan is still publishing his books eight years after his death. We need to always have something cooking because when they are no dreams, there is no vision, and there is no life. This church, and each and every one one of us needs vision, needs life, needs those dreams to make meaning in the world. Do you want to climb that mountain? Do you want to write that book? Do you want to make that trip or teach that class or learn that language? Langston Hughes’ most famous poem reminds us that every day we need to keep climbing those stairs to new dreams of new dawns before us.
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
and splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark,
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds its kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now --
For I’se still goin’ honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Closing Words - from The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
(speaking of the Sundarbans, little islands off the coast of India)
So why did the people come, then? For the land . . . Everyone who was willing to work was welcome . . . but on one condition. They could not bring all their petty little divisions and differences. Here there would be no brahmins or untouchables . . . Everyone would have to live and work together . . . But how could this be a country? There’s nothing here . . . It was a dream . . . What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening . And look what he ended up with . . . rat-infested islands. . . Don’t laugh . . . it was just that the tide country wasn’t ready yet. Someday, who knows? It may yet come to be. . . It was a dream. . . It may yet come to be.
Love and Death, 11-05-06, Andrea Greenwood
Love and Death
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood
The First Parish of Watertown
November 5, 2006
Reading from Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of ... regulating (myself). Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever... (anger threatens to have) the upper hand and it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
.....Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.... What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
...Strange! ....They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. ... Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
..... Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? ..... Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Sermon Love and Death
This past summer I had a pet butterfly. It came to play every day; flitting around and also resting in my garden, and it made me very happy. I found myself praying a lot for this butterfly. It was a Monarch, and I desperately wanted it to be the right generation -- the one that gets to live a long life because it migrates all the way to Mexico. If the butterfly didn’t show up one morning, I would feel myself getting sad, while simultaneously thinking how stupid I was being, as if it made a difference. It was a butterfly.
Some of you may not know about the odd lifecycle of Monarchs. They are unique among the insect world, in that they migrate extremely long distances -- up to 3,000 miles. This is not uncommon in nature -- birds do this, as do whales. But insects do not. And I am not sure if any animal travels so far. The trip could be shorter for the Monarchs, but they won’t fly across the ocean. The darkness hovering over the face of the deep is too cold; the butterflies can’t float on that air. But the distance or the fact that it is a butterfly doing the traveling is not really the most amazing part. It is the generational aspect of the entire drama. The butterfly that flies to Mexico is not the same one that returns the following spring; but when it goes to Mexico, it does indeed land in the same tree that its great, great grandmother left the spring before. And the butterfly leaving the tree in Mexico comes back to the same garden that was home to its father. So, if I am to be rational about this, of course the butterfly that was here was not the one that flew to Mexico. But I am virtually guaranteed a new butterfly in the spring.
This information moves in me the way some stories do; where you know they mean more than you can say, and it has to do with feelings that are deeper than language. After my father died, I went with my mother to the place everyone in my family refers to as Maine, as if this small plot of land on the shore outside of Rockland is the only place in the entire 33,000 square mile state. There is a little cottage perched there, built by my greatgrandmother in the beginning of the last century. This is the setting all the generations flock to; the place that is in us all somehow; “us” referring to siblings and cousins and anyone related in any way to my great grandmother.
Labor Day morning, early, I was on the beach with my children, the oldest of whom had just turned five. It had been a seriously dislocating week, as we returned from a long trip to England two days before my father’s unexpected death. There we were, on the beach, which is generally stone, but with sandy patches. There were deer tracks, and we were following them, which was fun because the stones made a challenge. We did not expect to find the deer, but were satisified simply with finding another hoof print -- and then we saw the deer, in the clay mud where the woods edge down to the beach. As we were holding our breath watching it watch us, the sky changed color. It had been getting lighter and lighter, but suddenly it was darker, and a fluttery hum was present. Then it was light again; but orange. Thousands upon thousands of Monarch butterflies had descended upon the beach, and landed all around and over us, opening their wings. Stones and waves, unbroken gaze with the deer whose footprints we were standing in, and everything awash in butterfly wings.
There are moments when time collapses and memories merge; when each death is the first death. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was shot. I was in first grade, and the bullet that took him became one with the shot heard round the world; King’s work in Montgomery and Memphis was fused with that of the abolitionists, and the event entered our consciousness like Jesus entering Jerusalem. Palm Sunday was that week. Riots spread in real time as Martin’s funeral was planned. My grandfather died of a heart attack the Monday after Easter, two days after he retired. Then my father had a heart attack, and was gone; and then came back from the dead around the time Bobby Kennedy was shot in June. The choir at my church used to sing “Abraham, Martin, and John” in such a way that any note from it makes me stop, and be still. “Can you tell me where he’s gone?” it asks, plaintively. Where is he? Where are the dead? Don’t we all find ourselves saying, “Oh, I’ve got to share this with Mom” or “Oh, won’t Dad laugh when I tell him this” only to catch the mistake, and remember that the spouse, the child, the parent, the friend is gone. But where? Do space men pass dead souls on their way to the moon? Where do they go; these vehicles for our love? Without them to receive our feelings, can we feel?
Dexter King wrote in his memoir about how he and his dad shared a January birthday, and in 1968 Martin Luther King and Dexter had received matching bikes; one big, one little, otherwise the same. They were purple. Dexter and his dad rode the bikes once, and then his father was gone. I had an amazing conversation in September with a parent of a first grader here, about his daughter riding a bike, and all that meant... the teetering balance and joy of it; the weird way it means both “she’s riding away from me” and “we can travel together”; how independence can feel like separation but also means the possibility of genuine intimacy. But for Dexter King there was none of that; only bikes with no riders; a symbol of what could have been. And the emptiness kept coming. The next year his uncle drowned, and not everyone believes it was an accident. In 1974, somebody came into their church and shot his grandmother. She did not survive.
Many of us are professional thinkers, and can wrestle most anything to the ground. We are less skilled at feelings, and may not even realize to what degree we are held up by our connections to others. Loving people is an act of faith, but not a rational faith; not faith that comes with doctrine or beliefs, and so the death of someone who essentially gave us meaning hits us in ways we are simply unable to think our way through. And we have to confront this theological question: What is the source of our comfort in life? We are a people who need to believe in our beliefs; need to understand what we profess in order to feel that we have integrity. Our minds are a great source of comfort. Familial connections are not always understandable, let alone comfortable. They just are, and because of that we may take them for granted; or may be more in touch with how the relationships challenge us than how they sustain. Even when the bond is good, we are often unprepared for the connection to be severed. Our minds can’t take us to where the dead might gather.
It is one thing to have a religion that provides us with consolation when we need it; when we are drained of emotion, of energy. But we also need our religion to sustain our ability to comfort others -- not professionally, but personally, through a shared faith. Most of us Unitarian Universalists do not believe in an afterlife; do not believe in a literal heaven where souls gather and live in eternity. We do not have taboos on cremation, or organ donation, or anything that would impair the body as it travels to an underworld or a kingdom in the sky. We phrase this positively -- I believe in life before death; organ donation helps sustain life; death is necessary and natural. But theologically, as a denomination, we do very little confronting of that which is inevitable. And perhaps that, too, is part of how we mask things -- acknowledging that everyone dies skips over the fact that the how and the when do matter; do change everything. Memorializing individuals, as we do, and do extremely well, does not give us a theology of death. And without one, what do we we say as we sit with the aged parent or grandparent; with the cancer patient?
So much of our religion is built on hope. It is hope that informs our world view and makes us believe in possibilities; in the viability of democracy; in the goodness of human nature; in the value of education. But what do we do with hope -- with such a future oriented value -- when we do not really believe in a future; at least not for this individual? What does comfort really mean? We sometimes try to offer it simply by avoiding the logical conclusions of our scientific world view. We say religion is not destroyed by applying real analysis to it, but our respect for diversity and individual truth seeking often causes us to avoid deeper conversations about our beliefs and the needs they fill. It is a somewhat anthropological view of religion, in which we observe beliefs, and educate ourselves. As long as we do this, we cannot have a multi-generational faith. We are powerless to effect change, both in the world and in our own lives. The nature of our current theological practice requires discussion among equals, and does not embrace the drama of living and dying; the different roles we play and places we occupy on the stage at various times in our lives. We are the comforter, the victim, the parent, sibling, child. We cause harm, and we heal. But we do not know what to say when our theology really matters; which is to say when we care desperately for one another, are scared and lonely and powerless and not in equal positions; and when it is not just a discussion.
Every belief system has costs and benefits, but its worth to us requires that we be able to look honestly at what those may be. Reconciling what we think with what we feel means talking openly about both all through our lives, and not just when we are at a milestone-- that is the only way of finding truth; which is so much more than fact. That is the only way of living in a shared reality; not just a shared physical world, but a shared emotional landscape as well. One benefit of our faith is that we really believe in knowledge; in our ability to understand, or at least try to. We do not leave secrets alone; we decode and demystify them, and believe that this is the source of our power. Maybe this means that death is more final for us than it is for those who have not chosen to be like gods themselves; those who keep religion in a separate sphere. Perhaps it is the pain of this finality that keeps us from really talking about it; that keeps us speaking about death as natural and shifting the conversation to our right to control the process, or our need to manage it. We care about individuals more than anything, but nature does not care at all, yet we tend to talk only of nature’s perspective, which leaves us empty when our need is greatest. Life may be eternal, but people are mortal, and it is tragic to spend last moments afraid that genuine sharing might actually rob strength and solace from the very person we long to sustain. Genuine religion makes no distinction between giver and receiver, but demands that the same set of beliefs comfort us from the cradle to the grave. This means death is not managed, sanitized, or professionalized as a category separate from life; and the cost of our naturalism is shared; not a hidden burden. A communal understanding -- a shared faith--ties us together; now and over time. It affords us a greater capacity to be in the present as a life ends; to be in that moment, affirming the painful reality of what is happening, but openly recognizing all that has been; all that this person created while on earth; all that the living hope to carry forward. We affirm our love; our forgiveness for any mistakes made; our appreciation; our sadness. We let those we love know that they are in us, as a gift; as a center; as home, somehow.
Instead of a woman and a lidded box, some stories about Pandora have a vase made from mud and clay, filled by Zeus with the voice and strength of humanity, and with something from every single god and goddess. The name Pandora means “All Gifts”. Unfortunately, these were not necessarily gifts, because those who contributed did not know the purpose. Zeus had hidden fire from men, and discovered that Prometheus had taken it and given it to mortals. Pandora was an act of revenge, made of secrets stolen from the gods; then offered to the unsuspecting brother of the man who brought fire to earth. This story, in addition to being an obvious source for the one about Eve, asks many hard questions about knowing and not knowing. Do you release dangerous forces by uncovering things some say are best left in darkness, and silence? Or are secrets only destructive because they are concealed? Does honesty mean peace? Can we acknowledge that sometimes secrets preserve precious things; or that openness can set trouble loose? How much will is involved, anyway -- if Pandora was an open vase, there was no decision to remove the lid. It is important to understand that every single thing in that vase was considered a gift; and in the right context represented power. Hope was equal to the tornadoes and diseases, because misplaced hope is every bit as much a torture. Knowledge -- openness -- does not mean wisdom. Wisdom means seeing the whole story; approaching that container with reverence, because it is the world; it is the mud and water, and filled with life and death; with anger and misery, with beauty and benefit.
Years ago, I was teaching kindergartners and I had a boy in my class who was unbelievably excited about Halloween. After a while, it became clear to me why. He truly believed that he was going to see his grandfather that night; a grandfather who had died in August and whose ashes had been poured out on the water from a boat trip on Labor Day weekend. He had merged stories of souls and ghosts; of figures rising from the grave on Halloween with his aching loss; with his particular story. And this is the time of year when these questions about where the dead can be found persist; when some creatures do fly off to find real haven; when the possibility of an answer seems to hover on the horizon; when we are drawn equally within and without and contact with all that has been washes over us in waves. Is there a bridge over that water? Or must we be on the beach, not knowing what the tide will carry in; or pull back out with it? I think of those butterflies, who follow the coast but will not fly over the water. To do so means death. Melville, too, linked water and death -- he says water gives us the image of the “ungraspable phantom of life”, but he is driven to the sea by coffin warehouses and funeral processions; by a damp, dreary November in his soul. Walt Whitman, in writing about the assassination of Lincoln, manages to bring the ocean in to the prairie, with wind blowing in from the east and in from the west, so that the ocean hovers at the grave of Abraham, scenting the air as if it were lilacs.
Here is where myth and science merge; where our view of the universe can be both timeless and specific. Water recalls the birth of the world; it is the amniotic tide on which the continents rode to shore; it is the only thing never created. The ocean just always was, and maybe we are called to it when the salt tears in us are mingling with their source. Maybe we are one life in a way that is not comforting at all to us as individuals; in a way that involves sacrificing our beliefs in achievement, and links us instead to a mission that began before any of us were conceived and will end despite any of our efforts. There is a poem by Elder Olsson that says:
Nothing is lost; the universe is honest
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end
But only in its own way, on its own conditions;
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains
as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say:
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.
I think of my butterfly, and of the ones that covered the beach one morning as they flew south. Those ones lived for eight or nine months. Their children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and their parents only live for two to five weeks. Not substance, but a form substance assumes. The substance is life. And it hurts to lose the form. This is why we gather here -- to cherish the life; to acknowledge its terms, and to help one another through it all.
So may it be.
The Rev. Andrea Greenwood
The First Parish of Watertown
November 5, 2006
Reading from Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of ... regulating (myself). Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever... (anger threatens to have) the upper hand and it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
.....Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.... What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
...Strange! ....They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. ... Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
..... Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? ..... Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Sermon Love and Death
This past summer I had a pet butterfly. It came to play every day; flitting around and also resting in my garden, and it made me very happy. I found myself praying a lot for this butterfly. It was a Monarch, and I desperately wanted it to be the right generation -- the one that gets to live a long life because it migrates all the way to Mexico. If the butterfly didn’t show up one morning, I would feel myself getting sad, while simultaneously thinking how stupid I was being, as if it made a difference. It was a butterfly.
Some of you may not know about the odd lifecycle of Monarchs. They are unique among the insect world, in that they migrate extremely long distances -- up to 3,000 miles. This is not uncommon in nature -- birds do this, as do whales. But insects do not. And I am not sure if any animal travels so far. The trip could be shorter for the Monarchs, but they won’t fly across the ocean. The darkness hovering over the face of the deep is too cold; the butterflies can’t float on that air. But the distance or the fact that it is a butterfly doing the traveling is not really the most amazing part. It is the generational aspect of the entire drama. The butterfly that flies to Mexico is not the same one that returns the following spring; but when it goes to Mexico, it does indeed land in the same tree that its great, great grandmother left the spring before. And the butterfly leaving the tree in Mexico comes back to the same garden that was home to its father. So, if I am to be rational about this, of course the butterfly that was here was not the one that flew to Mexico. But I am virtually guaranteed a new butterfly in the spring.
This information moves in me the way some stories do; where you know they mean more than you can say, and it has to do with feelings that are deeper than language. After my father died, I went with my mother to the place everyone in my family refers to as Maine, as if this small plot of land on the shore outside of Rockland is the only place in the entire 33,000 square mile state. There is a little cottage perched there, built by my greatgrandmother in the beginning of the last century. This is the setting all the generations flock to; the place that is in us all somehow; “us” referring to siblings and cousins and anyone related in any way to my great grandmother.
Labor Day morning, early, I was on the beach with my children, the oldest of whom had just turned five. It had been a seriously dislocating week, as we returned from a long trip to England two days before my father’s unexpected death. There we were, on the beach, which is generally stone, but with sandy patches. There were deer tracks, and we were following them, which was fun because the stones made a challenge. We did not expect to find the deer, but were satisified simply with finding another hoof print -- and then we saw the deer, in the clay mud where the woods edge down to the beach. As we were holding our breath watching it watch us, the sky changed color. It had been getting lighter and lighter, but suddenly it was darker, and a fluttery hum was present. Then it was light again; but orange. Thousands upon thousands of Monarch butterflies had descended upon the beach, and landed all around and over us, opening their wings. Stones and waves, unbroken gaze with the deer whose footprints we were standing in, and everything awash in butterfly wings.
There are moments when time collapses and memories merge; when each death is the first death. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King was shot. I was in first grade, and the bullet that took him became one with the shot heard round the world; King’s work in Montgomery and Memphis was fused with that of the abolitionists, and the event entered our consciousness like Jesus entering Jerusalem. Palm Sunday was that week. Riots spread in real time as Martin’s funeral was planned. My grandfather died of a heart attack the Monday after Easter, two days after he retired. Then my father had a heart attack, and was gone; and then came back from the dead around the time Bobby Kennedy was shot in June. The choir at my church used to sing “Abraham, Martin, and John” in such a way that any note from it makes me stop, and be still. “Can you tell me where he’s gone?” it asks, plaintively. Where is he? Where are the dead? Don’t we all find ourselves saying, “Oh, I’ve got to share this with Mom” or “Oh, won’t Dad laugh when I tell him this” only to catch the mistake, and remember that the spouse, the child, the parent, the friend is gone. But where? Do space men pass dead souls on their way to the moon? Where do they go; these vehicles for our love? Without them to receive our feelings, can we feel?
Dexter King wrote in his memoir about how he and his dad shared a January birthday, and in 1968 Martin Luther King and Dexter had received matching bikes; one big, one little, otherwise the same. They were purple. Dexter and his dad rode the bikes once, and then his father was gone. I had an amazing conversation in September with a parent of a first grader here, about his daughter riding a bike, and all that meant... the teetering balance and joy of it; the weird way it means both “she’s riding away from me” and “we can travel together”; how independence can feel like separation but also means the possibility of genuine intimacy. But for Dexter King there was none of that; only bikes with no riders; a symbol of what could have been. And the emptiness kept coming. The next year his uncle drowned, and not everyone believes it was an accident. In 1974, somebody came into their church and shot his grandmother. She did not survive.
Many of us are professional thinkers, and can wrestle most anything to the ground. We are less skilled at feelings, and may not even realize to what degree we are held up by our connections to others. Loving people is an act of faith, but not a rational faith; not faith that comes with doctrine or beliefs, and so the death of someone who essentially gave us meaning hits us in ways we are simply unable to think our way through. And we have to confront this theological question: What is the source of our comfort in life? We are a people who need to believe in our beliefs; need to understand what we profess in order to feel that we have integrity. Our minds are a great source of comfort. Familial connections are not always understandable, let alone comfortable. They just are, and because of that we may take them for granted; or may be more in touch with how the relationships challenge us than how they sustain. Even when the bond is good, we are often unprepared for the connection to be severed. Our minds can’t take us to where the dead might gather.
It is one thing to have a religion that provides us with consolation when we need it; when we are drained of emotion, of energy. But we also need our religion to sustain our ability to comfort others -- not professionally, but personally, through a shared faith. Most of us Unitarian Universalists do not believe in an afterlife; do not believe in a literal heaven where souls gather and live in eternity. We do not have taboos on cremation, or organ donation, or anything that would impair the body as it travels to an underworld or a kingdom in the sky. We phrase this positively -- I believe in life before death; organ donation helps sustain life; death is necessary and natural. But theologically, as a denomination, we do very little confronting of that which is inevitable. And perhaps that, too, is part of how we mask things -- acknowledging that everyone dies skips over the fact that the how and the when do matter; do change everything. Memorializing individuals, as we do, and do extremely well, does not give us a theology of death. And without one, what do we we say as we sit with the aged parent or grandparent; with the cancer patient?
So much of our religion is built on hope. It is hope that informs our world view and makes us believe in possibilities; in the viability of democracy; in the goodness of human nature; in the value of education. But what do we do with hope -- with such a future oriented value -- when we do not really believe in a future; at least not for this individual? What does comfort really mean? We sometimes try to offer it simply by avoiding the logical conclusions of our scientific world view. We say religion is not destroyed by applying real analysis to it, but our respect for diversity and individual truth seeking often causes us to avoid deeper conversations about our beliefs and the needs they fill. It is a somewhat anthropological view of religion, in which we observe beliefs, and educate ourselves. As long as we do this, we cannot have a multi-generational faith. We are powerless to effect change, both in the world and in our own lives. The nature of our current theological practice requires discussion among equals, and does not embrace the drama of living and dying; the different roles we play and places we occupy on the stage at various times in our lives. We are the comforter, the victim, the parent, sibling, child. We cause harm, and we heal. But we do not know what to say when our theology really matters; which is to say when we care desperately for one another, are scared and lonely and powerless and not in equal positions; and when it is not just a discussion.
Every belief system has costs and benefits, but its worth to us requires that we be able to look honestly at what those may be. Reconciling what we think with what we feel means talking openly about both all through our lives, and not just when we are at a milestone-- that is the only way of finding truth; which is so much more than fact. That is the only way of living in a shared reality; not just a shared physical world, but a shared emotional landscape as well. One benefit of our faith is that we really believe in knowledge; in our ability to understand, or at least try to. We do not leave secrets alone; we decode and demystify them, and believe that this is the source of our power. Maybe this means that death is more final for us than it is for those who have not chosen to be like gods themselves; those who keep religion in a separate sphere. Perhaps it is the pain of this finality that keeps us from really talking about it; that keeps us speaking about death as natural and shifting the conversation to our right to control the process, or our need to manage it. We care about individuals more than anything, but nature does not care at all, yet we tend to talk only of nature’s perspective, which leaves us empty when our need is greatest. Life may be eternal, but people are mortal, and it is tragic to spend last moments afraid that genuine sharing might actually rob strength and solace from the very person we long to sustain. Genuine religion makes no distinction between giver and receiver, but demands that the same set of beliefs comfort us from the cradle to the grave. This means death is not managed, sanitized, or professionalized as a category separate from life; and the cost of our naturalism is shared; not a hidden burden. A communal understanding -- a shared faith--ties us together; now and over time. It affords us a greater capacity to be in the present as a life ends; to be in that moment, affirming the painful reality of what is happening, but openly recognizing all that has been; all that this person created while on earth; all that the living hope to carry forward. We affirm our love; our forgiveness for any mistakes made; our appreciation; our sadness. We let those we love know that they are in us, as a gift; as a center; as home, somehow.
Instead of a woman and a lidded box, some stories about Pandora have a vase made from mud and clay, filled by Zeus with the voice and strength of humanity, and with something from every single god and goddess. The name Pandora means “All Gifts”. Unfortunately, these were not necessarily gifts, because those who contributed did not know the purpose. Zeus had hidden fire from men, and discovered that Prometheus had taken it and given it to mortals. Pandora was an act of revenge, made of secrets stolen from the gods; then offered to the unsuspecting brother of the man who brought fire to earth. This story, in addition to being an obvious source for the one about Eve, asks many hard questions about knowing and not knowing. Do you release dangerous forces by uncovering things some say are best left in darkness, and silence? Or are secrets only destructive because they are concealed? Does honesty mean peace? Can we acknowledge that sometimes secrets preserve precious things; or that openness can set trouble loose? How much will is involved, anyway -- if Pandora was an open vase, there was no decision to remove the lid. It is important to understand that every single thing in that vase was considered a gift; and in the right context represented power. Hope was equal to the tornadoes and diseases, because misplaced hope is every bit as much a torture. Knowledge -- openness -- does not mean wisdom. Wisdom means seeing the whole story; approaching that container with reverence, because it is the world; it is the mud and water, and filled with life and death; with anger and misery, with beauty and benefit.
Years ago, I was teaching kindergartners and I had a boy in my class who was unbelievably excited about Halloween. After a while, it became clear to me why. He truly believed that he was going to see his grandfather that night; a grandfather who had died in August and whose ashes had been poured out on the water from a boat trip on Labor Day weekend. He had merged stories of souls and ghosts; of figures rising from the grave on Halloween with his aching loss; with his particular story. And this is the time of year when these questions about where the dead can be found persist; when some creatures do fly off to find real haven; when the possibility of an answer seems to hover on the horizon; when we are drawn equally within and without and contact with all that has been washes over us in waves. Is there a bridge over that water? Or must we be on the beach, not knowing what the tide will carry in; or pull back out with it? I think of those butterflies, who follow the coast but will not fly over the water. To do so means death. Melville, too, linked water and death -- he says water gives us the image of the “ungraspable phantom of life”, but he is driven to the sea by coffin warehouses and funeral processions; by a damp, dreary November in his soul. Walt Whitman, in writing about the assassination of Lincoln, manages to bring the ocean in to the prairie, with wind blowing in from the east and in from the west, so that the ocean hovers at the grave of Abraham, scenting the air as if it were lilacs.
Here is where myth and science merge; where our view of the universe can be both timeless and specific. Water recalls the birth of the world; it is the amniotic tide on which the continents rode to shore; it is the only thing never created. The ocean just always was, and maybe we are called to it when the salt tears in us are mingling with their source. Maybe we are one life in a way that is not comforting at all to us as individuals; in a way that involves sacrificing our beliefs in achievement, and links us instead to a mission that began before any of us were conceived and will end despite any of our efforts. There is a poem by Elder Olsson that says:
Nothing is lost; the universe is honest
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end
But only in its own way, on its own conditions;
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains
as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say:
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.
I think of my butterfly, and of the ones that covered the beach one morning as they flew south. Those ones lived for eight or nine months. Their children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and their parents only live for two to five weeks. Not substance, but a form substance assumes. The substance is life. And it hurts to lose the form. This is why we gather here -- to cherish the life; to acknowledge its terms, and to help one another through it all.
So may it be.