First Parish of Watertown

All Our Losses” by Mark W. Harris

March 25, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - Yes, it hurts when buds burst” by Karin Boye

Yes, it hurts when buds burst.
Why otherwise would spring hesitate?
Why otherwise was all warmth and longing
locked under pale and bitter ice?
The blind bud covered and numb all winter
what fever for the new compels it to burst?
Yes, it hurts when buds burst,
there is pain when something grows and when
something must close.
Yes, it hurts when the ice drop melts.
Shivering, anxious, swollen it hangs,
gripping the twig, but beginning to slip --
its weight tugs it downward, though it resists.
It hurts to be uncertain, cowardly, dissolving,
to feel the pull and call of the depth,
yet to hang and only shiver --
to want to remain, keep firm -- yet want to fall.
Then, when it is worst and nothing helps,
they burst, as if in ecstasy, the first buds of the
tree,
When fear itself is compelled to let go,
they fall in a glistening veil, all the drops from
the twigs,
blinking away their fears of the new,
shutting out their doubts about the journey,
feeling for an instant how this is their greatest
safety,
to trust in that daring that shapes the world.

Sermon

It is a maple syrup time of year. The cold nights and warm days make the sap run down the veins of all the maple trees. It is a kind of liquid gold. I always insist on real syrup rather than those sugar syrups, which cost so much less. It takes me back. It was probably late in March, like this, and perhaps there was a brisk cool breeze blowing off the miles of endless trees near my family home. The old sugar maples were lined up along the road that once bordered farmers fields as soldiers of German stock, hired by the British to win their fight, tromped by. They picked apples in the falling leaves, strolled the fields, but they didn’t stay through till spring. In our time, we hammered the bark to make a hole, stuck in the hollow, wooden tube that became an open spigot, and hung the old gray, metal buckets with their creased hats to keep out the rain, ready to catch the pure, special liquid. Every day we watched, as slowly it dripped in. They filled almost by magic, for it seemed that nothing was flowing, and then suddenly they were full. Perhaps it was when I wasn’t looking, asleep or at school. It was a wound, a cut in the tree really that caused its sap to flow. It was late afternoon, as light faded from a dipping sun, when we collected our haul.
It is a maple syrup time of year. I had helped my Dad ready all these trees. I think we used an old hand drill, boring away into the tree’s bark and body. Soon we would reap the rich reward on pancakes or French toast. Bucket after bucket my small arms lifted and carried to add to an ever increasing pot that boiled and boiled away on our stove. My Mom kept those home fires burning, reducing that sap to syrup, down , down , down - passed on to us. It takes forty to make one. I tried some sap once, and it tasted terrible, like eating a tree I suppose. Much cooking time is needed to boil it down, just as we need time. The wounds in us, the losses need time to simmer, and the feelings released, so that eventually we can give thanks for the sweet moments we had, tasted and now gone.
Maple syrup time is a snapshot out of my past that crosses my thoughts this time of year. It is not as vivid as it was 20 years ago, or even ten. It becomes hard to remember specifics. We cannot make the clock runs backwards, but sometimes we try. Soon it may become a series of word associations rather than a clear memory - syrup, taste, try it on snow, a special kind of cone, Mom and Dad, home, spring. It was such a brief moment in time. Things can and do change so quickly. Last Sunday after church, a few of us were in the church office, and Alan our sexton came back to tidy up for the afternoon. He told us how shook up he had been by an incident that had occurred on Friday, the day of the big storm. He was suppose to go out that night, but never did. Instead he told us how he had been out in his driveway at home in Waltham. He, like so many of us, was shoveling away, when for some reason, he looked up. Was it fate or a premonition or just good luck? A car was bearing down on him, having lost control on the icy snow swept hill, it careened down the banking, engulfed his wall, and bore right down on him ready to flatten him all over. He jumped into the street, just as the lumbering dinosaur of a vehicle soon to be extinct ran by, ricocheted off the back of Alan’s car, and then hit the wall on the other side, lurching upward and coming to rest on the embankment. Alan was safe and unharmed in the street. How often do we come within an inch of a disaster? And so we may hug our loved ones that much harder that night, and give thanks that all is well. Just another near miss.
We all witness the losses that which we must accept, cope with, and ultimately find meaning in. Most of us understand as adults that losses will come our way sooner or later. Eventually the car careening out of control will hit us, but we try to jump out of the way as much as we can. We also want to be prepared and have some control over these painful events rather than be shocked or surprised. Still losses come to us in daily doses. A child leaves home, a job does not work out, the love fades from a relationship -- all are experiences we have that mark an end to a time in our lives that may have been meaningful or even trying, but nevertheless it signified the life we knew, the life we lived every day, and now we have to figure out, what’s next. Enduring a loss means the first thing we have to realize is that it really did happen, but now it’s over. Falling hair or failing eyes are signs that age is catching up to us. Age and illness comes to those we love as well, and many of us as adults have experienced the death of someone we are close to. If the loss comes unexpectedly or sooner than seems fair then the pain may seem even more intense.
In her recent bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes the wrenching experience of having her daughter nearly succumb to a fatal illness, and then while she is still hospitalized with her fate unknown, Didion’s husband has a massive heart attack and dies. They were sitting at the dinner table in their New York Apartment, as they had countless times before. It was routine. She begins writing by saying: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” Do we ask what have I lost? This is before we even realize a loss has occurred. Life has changed in the ordinary instant, but it takes time even to accept the change has really happened. Our normal reaction may be this isn’t really happening. It is a dream or something. I will go home, and she will appear through that door because she is always there or I’ll just call her because I always call her, or I will see her waving in the window because that is where I always see her. There is a disorientation to loss because things are not as they should be; all order in your universe is lost and chaos seems to have ensued.
First, we must accept that there is a hole bored in the tree. There is this hole, and all the sap is beginning to run down. Loss changes us, and we don’t even realize it. And perhaps we cannot express it. Years ago I had a parishioner who suffered through the loss of her sister in a tragic car accident, and what struck me at the time was how her voice changed completely. It was suddenly more vulnerable, more open, more exposed. The emotion may be tears of sorrow or anger or regret. No, we don’t want might have beens or memories of what was lost. We want do overs. We want things to be different. The hole isn’t really there. We may be angry that we have lost all that we hoped for or planned for, and now must face the reality that our lives will be so different. Or we may be grief stricken with pain that the person we have lived with for forty years is gone. And the guest book is not enough. We want to cry. Or, as Joan Didion says, I wanted him back.
This is what struck me most about Didion’s book. The loss of the everyday sameness of what we always do was striking. The person who suffers the loss asks, how do I live now? This helped me understand the feelings of grief that those who suffer the loss of a pet must feel. I think I have often silently said, oh it’s only a dog or cat, get over it. But it is the loss of the everyday companionship and friendship we feel. This is who I talk to every day, or who I take a walk with. While we have them yet with us, we think this is what life is. Or we don’t even have to think at all. It is what we do. It is hard to throw out their shoes, or change the phone message. They might come back for those shoes, or whoever calls will want to know it is us, as we always have been. They are links to the person who was once among us. But if we don’t change these things eventually, we think others will say we are denying the truth of this loss. Grief is suppose to be healing, but as Didion points out, the problem is the earliest days that are projected to be the hardest are filled with people and activity, and even an air of unreality that the person will be back. It is the later days, the months and years ahead that are filled with unending absences and the opposite of meaning. They are empty. That life is not coming back. So the memory of the everyday activity with the person begins to fade. We forget times and places, and the phone message may be the one link we have with their voice. In the children’s book Grandpa Abe, a little girl suffers the loss of her step grandfather with whom she had developed a wonderful relationship. After he is gone and her grandmother is packaging up his things, the girl asks to keep a sweater of his that she can wear. He once wore it. It still smells like him. For years I kept a green wool shirt that belonged to my father hanging in my closet. It was something from him, even though as the years went on, I never wore it. Finally, I was able to give it away.
With each loss we realize that our life will not be exempt from pain. What we really want is to find some meaning for this pain. Grieving over the loss of a pet helps address an important question. How much of this feeling of loss is self-pity? Do we feel sorry for the person who died, or for ourselves? Didion says people in grief worry too much about this question. We who conduct memorial services realize that the service is not really for the person who died, but for the people who remain behind. This is especially true for Unitarian Universalists, who like Didion have a religious perspective that acknowledges that for the dead no sovereign eye is on the sparrow, and no benevolent deity is watching me, to paraphrase the old Christian hymn. She says it is not being selfish to think about your pain in the context of the loss. She contrasts creatures in nature who other writers have claimed never feel sorry for themselves with dolphins who refuse to eat after a mate dies, or geese who go in search of the lost mate, and become disoriented and die. There is a need to feel sorry for yourself in your loss, especially when it is a lifelong partner , because virtually every single connection was shared, and then suddenly those were severed. Every thought, feeling, action had the loved one as the object of its intent. Who has not thought of something to share with a loved one, went to pick up the phone, and then suddenly realized they are not there.
What about meaning in the context of loss for Unitarian Universalists? Our memorials do not guarantee heaven for the deceased as a consolation to the living. The feelings that come over us when we suffer a loss are usually not theological. No God made this terrible event occur, and no God is going to make it all better, even if we do believe in an afterlife. Our losses make us aware that life contains both joy and sorrow, but when sorrow comes, when we are feeling the self-pity of our whole world being turned upside down, then we must use these feelings to rebuild our world. The sap runs, and you boil and boil it down, you experience the pain. What is self-evident about our ability to heal from losses is that we can show our emotions to someone else who has also suffered such a loss. We feel part of a greater company of grievers when we are with those who have lost a parent, a partner, a child, because we share a common feeling, a common pain. Loneliness begins to be healed if there is someone to share it with. Churches provide meaning in the context of loss because we are a community of fellow sufferers, who have known loss in our lives, and can teach others to share these feelings with each other.
Joan Didion speaks of feelings of loneliness, because the person she shared her life with was gone. We know that these feelings are assuaged by being with others. She speaks of losing all sense of how to spend her days, and who to speak to because her life was oriented around her partner - their plans, their days, and what they shared. And so healing from loss begins with new activities which have purpose and meaning for us. With loss we may have to adjust or alter our goals in life or discover an entirely new purpose for ourselves. That same woman I knew years ago who suffered the loss of her sister, eventually took her grief and sorrow and transformed it into work for Mothers against drunk drivers. We try to learn everything we can about the affliction that has caused such a sense of loss in our lives. We may ask , what can I do so that others will not have to suffer as I did? How can I help others who have had a similar kind of loss? From a child with a disability to hospice care for the dying, we may want to find ways to support the overwhelming sense of loss a fellow traveler may feel when they confront a difficult trial in life. We may come to see that we each have personal resources to help another find peace and understanding from their loss - we were there , too. It is good to express your loss, and not allow the pressure to be strong to keep you from your grief.
Finally, the spring will soon remind us that it is healing to get outside and feel the renewal of the earth from its season of cold and grief. We notice the flowers bursting into color. There is pain when buds burst - there is pain when something grows and when something must close, our opening words reminded us. Spring is maple syrup season. There is a long time of gathering and boiling it down. So much to sort out. The immediate patterns of life change with our loss. We need to give ourselves time. The sharing with others means we find solace in community, and can begin to build a new life. We all have fears that a loss will strike us in the night like a careening car, or a husband who succumbs to a heart attack. We cannot escape those fears if we are to extend ourselves in loving relationship to others. No one wants losses, but they are an inevitable part of living. We know from our pain and that of others that we can live through our losses, and even though we have a difficult time accepting them, or even admitting they are occurring, they end up teaching us that we can go on, feeling the pain from that loss, but nevertheless knowing that there are others who support us and sustain us, a community that affirms us, and opportunities for new relationships to share , knowledge to gain and wisdom to impart.
This morning I was going to choose hymn #23, “Bring Many Names.” I decided not to because I felt it did not go with our opening words as well as “Morning Has Broken.” Every time I sing “Bring Many Names” I cry during the verse about Father God, hugging us. This is not so much my grief over the loss of the patriarchal God, but rather about a relationship with the patriarch I knew best. It has been some years since my father died. Joan Didion describes her sense of her husband becoming more and more remote as the days pass. We lose the sense of what it was like having them with us, as our lives change, grow and adapt. She writes, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. The little girl in the story tried to keep the smell of Grandpa Abe’s sweater, the one he wore. I kept my father’s shirt. The time comes when we are ready to give up the every day, even as it fades from our immediate memory. After the hole is cut in the tree, and the sap runs and gets boiled, we are ready to taste this wonderful elixir. Despite our loss there comes a time when we are grateful for what we shared. Not long ago my brother gave me a photograph of my Dad, and I had it framed and put on my bureau. Once losses are healed over we are able to remember the presence in our lives that helped make us who we are. As Thorton Wilder says in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the only bridge between them is love. He has faded some from memory, but there is a picture to remember the love he gave. There comes a time when we must make memorials or shrines. It is a way to remember.
The reading today from The Namesake reminds us that so much of life is built upon unintended incidents. Perhaps these are the little cars that careen into our lives. We plan on a life, and it is never the life we get. Perhaps we create a life out of what happens to us, we create a life out of our losses. No one wants to suffer from losses, but they often teach us what we come to know of love, how we come to adapt to change, and how deep we are able to grow in knowledge and spirit. It could be said that our losses shape us. They may make us alone and fearful and angry at times. But out of these feelings there can rise a courageous determination to go on, build a new life, and ultimately be grateful for the chances we are given to grow from our losses. We might say that our larger shared truth is the strength we all have to grow from the losses we suffer in our lives. Sorrow often shows us the way of compassion. Love for others sustains us in our losses. We become not sad or angry for the life we lost, but grateful for the new life we have built from our losses. We can taste the golden syrup. The experience in the end may even feel like a blessing for we the living are the ones who have survived all our losses, and today we are part of the living community that is built on the memory of those who have gone before, as we bear the responsibility to be the carriers of hope for those who will follow.

Closing Words - “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is, salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

“Dear Prudence” Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - March 18, 2007


Opening Words - “Days” by Billy Collins

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday,

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.


Reading - “Madam and the Number Writer” by Langston Hughes

Number runner
Come to my door.
I had swore
I wouldn’t play no more

He said, Madam,
6-0-2
Looks like a likely
hit for you.

I said, Last night
I dreamed 7-0-3.
He said, That might
Be a hit for me.

He played a dime,
I played, too,
Then we boxed ‘em.
Wouldn’t you?

But the number that day
was 3-2-6
And we both was in
The same old fix.

I said, I swear I
Ain’t gonna play no more
Till I get over
To the other shore --

Then I can play
On them golden streets
Where the number not only
Comes out - but repeats!

The runner said, Madam,
That’s all very well --
But suppose
You goes to hell?

Sermon - “Dear Prudence”

This morning marks the second in our sermon series on the seven virtues. Today prudence joins temperance, justice and fortitude as cardinal virtues. How convenient that prudence is especially concerned with care in the use of money. Today happens to be Canvass Sunday! This sermon usually comes at the beginning of March to exhort everyone to pledge to the church, and I suppose mid-month means it is time to give the strong message to those who have yet to pledge. I promise I won’t call anyone a slacker. It seems to me that the idea is to make prudent life decisions. Being prudent means that we will show good judgment and common sense, especially when it comes to making decisions about money.
Prudence is an intellectual habit enabling us to see in any given juncture of human affairs what is virtuous and what is not, and how to arrive at the one and avoid the other. So when it comes to money we ask ourselves questions like : Should I do this or not? Should I spend this or not? Do I need this or not? What is the prudent thing to do? If you don’t have any money, and are broke, or in debt, or unemployed, then perhaps pledging to the church would not be a prudent thing to do. It would be irresponsible because the virtuous thing for you would be to first balance the basic financial numbers that ensure your economic survival. Most of us are not in those circumstances, but we are left with those other questions. How will we pay for college, or how long do I have a financial commitment to my child? What sacrifices do we have to make, or what must I avoid buying so that we can afford something else? We may not always be prudent because if we always avoid buying that book we want or going out to eat then it feels like we are cheating ourselves out of those things we enjoy the most. I had a colleague in Milton who used to say, that even those with very little means deserve to have times when they can taste the strawberries.
We also know that there are consequences to being imprudent. If we just buy the book whenever we want or go out to eat all the time we are living beyond our means, and it will catch up to us. A couple of weeks ago the Dow Jones average took a 400 point tumble. Many people, like me, have pension funds invested in the stock market, and so this particular rout meant that the market value of our funds went down considerably. Selfishly we want our funds to go up and up because we feel it will give us more money when we retire. Some say that there are a lot of economic risks that investors have been oblivious to during recent growth, and then suddenly they panicked and sold out. It is an interesting case because we all tend to think about ourselves and our money, and too easily forget about the well being of the world. One article in the New Yorker suggested that the selloff was reassuring because it shows us that investors are sensitive that things can go wrong. In other words, they were being prudent.
Some might say that if the investors did not sell out, then they would have been reckless, and avoided the legitimate concerns over deficits and a housing slowdown. Companies that invest our pension funds always tell us that having our money in growth funds always means risk, but we certainly don’t want to gamble on losing it all. This is why we would never call gambling a prudent thing to do. Yet we know from casinos to scratch tickets, people seem to love the incentive of possibly winning the big prize. What’s amazing about this is that the odds of winning, the sheer numbers that are stacked against you, seem meaningless to many people. They line up to pay their $10 or $20 bills with the dream of collecting it all. Have you played your numbers today? Langston Hughes reminds us in his poem how the number writer can suck you in with the dream of hitting it big. Finally, she decides she won’t play again until she gets to heaven, for the number there is sure to come up. But then the runner asks, suppose you go to the other place? That’s a gamble, too.
We all live by numbers every day, and how we interpret them in our own lives probably is a reflection of the values we hold. Do your numbers actually describe your state of life? People interpret their numbers as a reflection of health and well being from day one. If a baby has an APGAR test, and the score is 7-10 then she is probably ok, but if the score is less, then it is a problem. If you are a parent, it would be a big gamble if you didn’t pay attention to a low score. Listen to all the numbers that measure good health - heart rate, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and body weight. Is this what the Psalmist prophetically meant when he said, “So teach me to number my days, so that I might learn wisdom?” What can you do to lower or raise the numbers as the case may be? If we diet we can measure how much we eat, or if we exercise we measure how much we do as we walk, run, ride or swim. This is the prudent thing to do.
Numbers effect us at every milestone. Children are expected to walk or talk by a certain age, and if not, then the prudent parent investigates why. The parent who says I am not concerned, may be taking a gamble. As we age we associate 16 with a drivers license, 18 with voting, and perhaps 21 as a real adult. Then as we age more we pass ten year milestones; the time when we need glasses to read by, when men need to get up in the night, and finally pay closer attention to the numbers we receive for our annual physicals as 65 looms nearer and nearer. We look at insurance age milestones; my rates just spiked upward as I passed 55. Finally we look at life expectancy, such as what is the average age of death for an American male or female. We ask how long did my parents live, and then extrapolate and wonder, how long will I live? When will my number be up? We don’t have to be governed by the mere number of our chronological years. We say you are only as old as you feel. But it may be another gamble if we act like we are twenty, and don’t set limits on ourselves for rest. We are not making prudent decisions about what we are capable of doing at a certain age.
Many of us are familiar with the numbers of those things we find most interesting in life. Baseball fans tend to know endless statistics, and I am no exception to that. I also know that numbers on the back of baseball players uniforms were first implemented to indicate where a particular player batted in the order. So in the Yankee Murderers Row - Ruth wore 3 and Gehrig wore 4 because they batted in that ranked order. But there are other numbers seared in our minds, too - ones that reflect not our leisure loves, but our moral compass. There is a miles per gallon and a thermostat temperature if we want to save energy, and even a speed limit of 55 once governed many of us. These describe our state of environmental concern. Our check book may reflect who and what we support, as there are values reflected in what organizations we give our financial resources to. Going deeper, I know the horrifying number of Jews killed in the Holocaust because I don’t want to forget. I believe remembrance is the secret to redemption. Today, I watch the number of deaths in Iraq, not only of Americans, but I seek to know how many Iraqis have died because I believe in the value of all human life, not just those who happen to be wrapped in red, white and blue. My values about the worth of a human life make me cry out in anguish. Numbers make it very real and poignant for me. Numbers are our lives.
Numbers is a Biblical book, too. We sometimes forget that fact. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers - Numbers is partly a census. Early on in Numbers they take the count of who escaped from Egypt and went on the Exodus. This reflects the priestly rankings with Moses at the center, just as the batting order centered on Ruth and Gehrig. After the wandering in the wilderness, they approach the Promised Land, but none of those who were of the generation who left slavery are part of the new census at the end of the book. The new numbers reflect that the new generation must create anew the life that is handed over to them. This reflects several things about the Numbers of the people who come out of Egypt and create the nation of Israel. They create a faith that must be passed on, or else it will die. They will not live to see it come to fruition, even though they have carried it through a difficult time of conflict and turmoil, wrestling with God and each other. Finally, they must be counted anew so that we see who is among the number who will take up the call of the new generation. There is also a good deal of census taking on who can approach the divine presence and when they can do that. While we hardly reflect the strict hierarchal nature of this tradition, there is a strong tradition among us, as with the Hebrews, in the belief in our covenant or agreement with one another, that we live not by dogmas of belief, but by codes of behavior. We will look out for one another.
Ministers are facilitators in this process of looking out for one another. We are servants of the congregation, as it carries out its mission as a liberal religious community. This concept of servant as leader, is also reflected in the congregation as well. In other words, church life is not about individuals, it is about all of you as a larger entity, as the church body. What does this mean in terms of prudent pledging?
We live by numbers. The Unitarian Universalist numbers have not been terribly encouraging since merger in 1961. We have grown in raw numbers by an infinitesimal amount over the last half century, but have not kept pace with actual rates of population growth. That is not good. Some pundits have earmarked us to disappear from the religious scene because we are statistically insignificant. Grow or die; it is that simple. The other sobering thing is that mainline religion is hemorrhaging. Look over at Mt. Auburn St. and see the Baptist condominiums, the Congregationalists merging, and the Methodists part time and living on rentals. Voluntary groups are dying out. It is difficult to pay salaries, maintain buildings, make a difference in people’s lives and the world all on voluntary contributions.
Yet I am happy to report that I think we are able to do all those things. Why? Like the book of Numbers, we have said we are not going to rely on the old generation to bring us to the promised land. For years the endowment income was the largest piece of our income puzzle. We were living off our ancestors. We were letting the dead pay for the present. Not paying our own way, makes it less likely that we will ever get to the promised land. Letting the ancestors pay is a gamble that would not be likely to pay off. The new census would never come, and we would be buried in the wilderness.
There is another gamble that may not seem so dangerous as living off the past, but its effect can be just as costly. This is the person who says, let me pledge, but I’ll only pay for the things I want that serve me and my family. In this era of trying to give everybody what they need, we can easily devolve into a cafeteria kind of religion. For example, churches sometimes try to estimate what it would cost to send one child to a religious education program, and use this as a benchmark for pledging. It is really not helping the community or the church to give only to fill your need, in a kind of pay as you go system. Sure you may come to the church for a particular program or event where you derive the most satisfaction, but if you think the church is about filling your need to support that one program, then you don’t understand what a church is. If you are here only to support the minister or the music program or the building as a historical structure, then you are forgetting that the whole church needs your support, not just the portion of it that makes you feel fulfilled. The church is here to serve the community both in its limited sense of taking care of and witnessing to each other, and in the larger sense of presenting a mission to the world, which in our case historically has been built on the cornerstones of extending freedom, reason and tolerance into the larger world So we educate not to serve your need to give some religious background to your child, but we educate all children who come here to be nurtured in the larger faith of Unitarian Universalism with the intention that they will be the numbers of the next generation.
It is a gamble to live off the past. It is a gamble to only pay for the support of your own needs. We need you, the living, the numbers of the current community, to support the whole church. The book Freakonomics, discusses incentives. Some might say that it is the RE program that is the incentive for going to church. Or it may have been a search for a liberal faith, or the beautiful space, or a community that you can feel a part of. We all have reasons, and perhaps your individuals reasons are an incentive for giving. When your child asks about God, you want to be able to haul them off to church, and say please help me respond to this question. This helps you. You may give for that reason, but if you do, please remember also that the numbers change, the faith must go on, and its values must be imparted to a world where selfishness and greed often predominate. A church that is defined by serving this individual need and that need, runs the risk of losing its identity of leading by being servants of the whole. What about all those other kids out there who ask about God? You want to know that in this world of fundamentalist and orthodox religion where children learn that being gay is a sin that there is our faith. In a country where there are those who say that we live in a Christian nation that is threatened by Muslim hordes, you want to know that there is a faith, your faith, this faith that historically taught that God loves everybody equally, and that we need to let each community follow their own understanding of the divine in freedom, and today teaches that we are tied in one inextricably connected web of community and relationships, and environment that must be cooperatively revered and sustained, or we gamble that the sacred life we share will be lost.
Freakonomics speaks of the economic, social and moral incentives that we respond to. Here is a moral incentive to give to this faith, and its embodiment in Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. The small numbers are scary. The economic and social times we live in strain the possibility of sustaining such institutions. But the moral incentive is great. Five hundred years ago in Poland and Transylvania two communities of faith stood up and said people should be free in community to worship as they wish, and follow their conscience without fear of reprisal. Freedom from fear in matters of religious faith. They were the first in the world to say that, and they are still saying that. But there are only 200,000 of them in America saying that. Only 116 in Watertown. Is that enough to ensure that someone will always say it when the words of hatred and repression in religion are heard in the land? Give more that we might be more. Show good judgment. Be prudent. There is a Sufi story about an old farmer who lay on his deathbed concerned about the fate of his children. As he was about to die, he gathered them around him, and said, My dear ones, I have left a treasure of gold for you. I have hidden it in my field. Dig carefully and well, and I know you shall find it. I only ask that you share this treasure equally. The children asked where exactly the treasure was buried, but the father died before he could tell. After the funeral, they took up their pitchforks and shovels, and dug and dug until they had turned over the field twice. They found nothing, but since they had dug up the field so nicely, they decided to plant some grain, just as their father had done. The crop grew well. After the harvest, they decided to look again for the treasure. Again, they did not find it, but the field was then prepared for next year’s sowing. They planted again, and had even better success. This continued for a number of years until the children had gotten quite used to the seasons of labor and reward. Their farming earned them enough for a good life, and they then realized the treasure the father had left. The future of the faith is in your hands, not the buried treasures of the past. The future of the faith lies in taking equal responsibility for planting the whole field, and then reaping its harvest in the spirit of the common good.

Closing Words - from Emily Dickinson


We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies

“Afraid of the Dark” by Mark W. Harris

March 4, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - Mark W. Harris

We greet the morning, and say farewell to the night.

Night falls as a time of calm and reflection - the hustle of the day of doing is over. The glare of light becomes quiet darkness shadowed by moon and stars.

Night was our friend for all these hours.

Night that bears the gift of silence and reflection - we put our wanting words to bed, and think of all that was good and beautiful about the day.

Night when we hold close those we love - teddy bears, warm hands and such.

Night of dreams when all that we could be unfolds, and all that we are is put to
rest. All the misfortune of the day forgiven and gone.
The sleep of night ready to restore us again.
The friendly dark after the sun has left us tired and worn.

Night is a time of resting and remembering, and a time for longing and visioning who we might yet be.
Here as we greet the dawn together, we remember that we are grateful for the night.

Story - “The Nervous Little Rabbit” (India)

Are any of you afraid of the dark? What makes you afraid of the dark? Do you ever hear noises in the night that make you afraid, and what do you think they are? (Monsters) This is a story about a nervous little rabbit, who was always afraid that something very terrible was going to happen. Suppose one day, the sky would fall down, she said, what would happen to me then? Well, she said this so often that she began to believe it. Sort of like saying noises at night mean some creepy monster is after me. Well, one day she was running near a tree, and she suddenly heard a loud noise. Something fell with a big thump. She was so scared she would believe anything. I think the sky is falling, she said. She ran away as fast as she could. Soon she saw another rabbit. Where are you going so fast little rabbit? the bigger rabbit said. The sky is falling, she said, and I have to run away. I can’t stop to say more. So the sky is falling, the big rabbit thought. Then this bigger rabbit stopped another rabbit to repeat what she had heard, the sky is falling in. Soon the third rabbit told a fourth, and the fourth told a fifth. Finally hundreds of rabbits were all shouting, the sky is falling in. What they heard was true, they believed was true. Then some bigger animals heard all this shouting and wondered what was going on. First a deer, and then some sheep, and then an antelope, a buffalo, a camel, a tiger, and well you get the picture, all the animals told their friends, the sky is falling. But finally, the lion said, wait a minute. He looked up at the sky and said, I see no evidence that the sky is falling. Let’s check this out. He asked the tiger, what did you say? I said the sky is falling. How do you know this? asked the lion. The camel told me. And camel said I heard it from the buffalo. And it took a while, but the lion kept on asking all the way back through the 100 rabbits until he got back to the very first little rabbit. At this point, lion said, little rabbit, what made you say the sky is falling? I saw it, she said. You saw it? he said. Where did you see it? Over by that tree. Come show me, the lion said. No, I am too scared the rabbit replied. What if I carried you.? So they agreed to this, and went over to the tree. At the tree the lion said to the rabbit, look up! What do you see growing on this tree? I see big round coconuts she said. Just as she said this, a big coconut fell to the ground and made a big thump. What was that terrible noise? said rabbit. Oh I see now, she said, the sky was not falling at all. It was only a coconut. Now said the lion, the next time you hear a terrible noise, don’t say the sky is falling, stop and look and see what caused the noise. Sometimes we may say we hear a terrible noise in the night - but it may only be the wind outside or some creaky old stairs, or even the huffing and puffing of our furnace. When we look we see there is nothing there. Stop and look closely, the lion said, never believe when you can find out for yourself what is true. Then rabbit got on the back of the lion and went back into the woods and told all the other animals what happened. They all realized the sky was not falling in, and they kept repeating the words as they ran. Finally, they did not need to say it anymore, just as you don’t need to say there is a monster in my closet, because all you need to do is go look.

Sermon

When my son Dana was little, we used to say, “he runs away from sleep.” Many of us have that experience with our children as we go through the trials of getting them to go to sleep, and then stay asleep. Parents can stay sleep deprived for years. Going to sleep for kids means leaving behind the excitement of being awake, of learning about and seeing new things and being close to those we love, but it also means avoiding that strange and mysterious place we all must go to at night. The world becomes dark, and outside our windows we cannot see, and all of the outdoors becomes a great unknown. Getting children ready to face bedtime is an enormous psychological test sometimes, for the night means facing all these scary things - the dark, the unknown, a strange place, a world of dreams. Many children’s stories are written to prepare for this difficult transition. Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are has Max go to a world of monsters whom he tames, and then returns from in order to sleep. We can wrestle with this strange and forbidden world and survive, he tells us. And so we sleep, perchance to dream. Margaret Wise Brown gave us Goodnight Moon, where the rabbit is familiarized with every item in the bedroom - Goodnight bears and goodnight chairs and red balloons, but also goodnight light and goodnight stars, and finally goodnight noises everywhere. Every little thing becomes part of a known world we can calmly say farewell to; even the noises that we may more often characterize as things that go bump in the night lead to the silence we can embrace.
Children’s stories are meant to make it so we are not afraid of the dark. That’s what many of us remember about the nighttime. It brought us terror when we were children. One of the most memorable events from my childhood was just such an experience. I don’t particularly remember ever having difficulty falling to sleep, but the memory of a time when I once woke up is ever vivid. All my family members were asleep. All was quiet. I grew up in the country, and so when it is dark it is totally dark - no street lamps or passing cars, only the full moon on its appointed monthly pass. This was a full moon time, and what this celestial object illuminated was worse than any dancing witch who might otherwise appear on such a night. I was a child who played with toy soldiers, and because I did not always pick everything up as an obedient child might, one or two would be left behind. And on this appointed night circumstances conspired so that the bright moon reflected the shadow of a plastic cowboy molded in such a way to look fearsome and 10 gallon tall when illuminated in the corner of my room. I awoke to see this awful terror, closed my eyes to make it go away, and looked again in abject fear to realize that this man was present in my very own room, intending only to do me harm. I began to scream and scream. My mother soon appeared to calm my fear, turn on the light, and show me nothing was there. I was assured. The light went out, but there he was again. And again I shrieked and howled. Back again, and with the light it was clear he was not there. Did he slip away and come back only under the cover of darkness? Soon, the culprit toy was found, and in the corner, the evil man was gone, but the terror never left. Ever since I have been one who locked the doors, and wondered about noises in the night.
Do you have memories of childhood terror, or even still fear the night? In the Western world fear of the night has been long standing. Before Thomas Edison the night was always dark, and even torches and candles flickered and went out, and so our ancestors could not find their way. What happens in a world of darkness where one cannot see? Nathaniel Hawthorne brings us back to this world in his short story “Young Goodman Brown.” Goodman’s appropriately named wife Faith warns him not to go out at night, but alas he does, and in the even darker thicket of a nighttime woods, he encounters the initiation of all the supposed good people into the ways of the devil. This experience makes him lose his faith. In olden times night watchmen were employed to protect people from evil folk who went out at night - robbers and worse along the trails, and otherworldly creatures as well. One mid-seventeenth century church record reports four people frightened to death by fairies at night. All manner of terrible things were conjured up for people to associate with the night. It was even thought that the nighttime air could cause illness. They believed the night actually does fall with some malignant gas to sap our health, and so English diarist Samuel Pepys tied his hands inside the curtains of his bed, so they would not have contact with the night air. And never, ever whistle at night, for that attracts the devil himself.
All these fears of the night existed throughout the centuries, and even today we still harbor all the stereotypes of what there is to fear. Our Western religious traditions have never celebrated the night or the darkness. In fact hymn #55 Dark of Winter is an attempt to redress that imbalance so that we might affirm all that is positive about darkness. For if darkness and night are evil in our minds, then this creates obvious parallels to racism. In our hymns more often
than not we repeat the words morning and celebrate the coming of the light. For Christians Jesus is the light of the world dispelling darkness and evil. Think of Christmas Eve where we light candles to overcome the darkness and bring light to it, but it is never the dark we want to celebrate and keep. It is to be avoided for its means ignorant and forbidden - remember Africa being called the dark continent. You don’t need a lesson in white and black hats, good guys and bad. Darth Vader wearing black, and going over to the dark side are all you need to know. And black hat morphs into black marks and blackmail in so many phrases we use, and thus, black people, African Americans become all that is evil and bad.
How can we redress this imbalance of light and dark? In the film “Keeping the Earth” there is a picture of the earth from space at night. While you might expect some serene outline of the continents, what you get instead is the glare of lights, especially in the urban areas like the Northeastern United States. The heavy continuous dots of light reminded me of a comment a family member made many times whenever I was home as a child, and they would return from shopping. They’d say, “you’ve got it all lit up like a Christmas tree.” I still have this very bad habit of turning on every light in the house as I enter a room, and then forgetting to turn them off. It relates back to that childhood sense of security that if the lights are on, it is safe in a room, and we can go there without fear. But every light on in the house, or every light on on the planet reminds us of how much our obsession with having and using light is wasting the earth’s sources of energy. How does it make us feel to see the earth as a mass of light against the night sky? What if we embraced the darkness as part of dream of a greener planet?
Go back now in your mind to that childhood time. Perhaps there were terrors and fear of night, but what more was there? Close your eyes, and see in the darkness the beauty and serenity of the night. As Longfellow called it, “the calm, majestic presence of the Night, as of the one I love.” Close your eyes and go from the glare of day to the cool healing of night. How beautiful is the night. You are in a field, a field that opens to the night sky. There is darkness all around you in the great brown earth below, the blades of grass, and in the forest that gently sways in the breeze at the far edge of the clearing. Above are the eternal dots of light that remind you of your own smallness, and the universe’s greatness. In your small universe, a nearby stream runs over rocks and grass, seemingly mirroring the stars above are hundreds of fireflies that turn off and on at will, as you race through the open field to catch them in your jar. Your ears fall in rhythm to the incessant singing of the cicadas. Darkness is pierced with sound and sight. You hear and see so much more in this time of silence. It is all so clear and fresh at night. Calm. Quiet. A stillness and a darkness that gives you a longing for something deeper. Embrace the night; it is when so much unfolds. The rain beats against your window pane, and the flowers get ready to bloom in the light of day. Night is the time of preparedness and reflection, just as winter begins to turn to spring. (open eyes)
Night is a beautiful time that we can use for quiet and reflection. We often remark when we go to Maine in the summertime how dark it is there at night - different from the city lights that make the sky so hard to see, and make it so we never can embrace the dark. The night keeps children up sometimes, but it also keeps many adults up , too. We think about things at night - every thing. The distractions of the day - work, children, shopping, cooking, TV have all been put to bed, and we are alone with our thoughts. Some are tired but cannot sleep. The night for them may bring more than counting sheep, as Billy Collins writes in “Insomnia”


After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.

By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,
yelling across the rising water
at preoccupied Noah as his wondrous
ark sails by and begins to grow smaller.

Now a silhouette on the horizon,
the only boat on earth is disappearing.

As I rise and fall on the rocking waves,
I concentrate on the giraffe couple,
their necks craning over the roof,
to keep my life from flashing before me.

After all the animals wink out of sight,
I float on my back, eyes closed.
I picture all the fish in creation
leaping a fence in a field of water,
one colorful species after another.

The night gives us time to reflect upon the rising water, and often we do have to crane our necks to keep our lives from flashing before our eyes. The night may bring us too much time to think and reflect. Perhaps that is the true story of what happened to Jacob in the book of Genesis in his famous wrestling match with an angel, or was it with God, or some mere mortal? This match is often used as a metaphor for the dark night of the soul. In the night time we must wrestle with all our demons, all those things that haunt us - will we have enough money, will she be all right, will I get the job? Every little fear that pops into our heads comes out more readily and vividly at night. Jacob sends everyone away in this story, and is alone to meet his demons. This match lasts all night, and because he stayed with it, and persevered, with faith in himself, the forces that are against him do not prevail. He does not let go of this creature he is wrestling with, and finally he is given a new name, for in ancient Israel a person’s name is the essence of the person.
Jacob reminds us that the night is the time to wrestle with all our demons. Here is where we may discover our inner resources, and make our plans for tomorrow. We are kept up sometimes because we are preoccupied with what we are going to do. We go over and over what we will say, or how we will strategize, or even reflect on what we need, and how we are going to tell someone what that is. Let us then close our eyes again, and remember the darkness of night. It is a time away from the noise of the day when there is an abundance of quietness and solitude. Others are nestled in their beds. Quiet seems to pervade the planet. So much fear may make us tremble at night, and we feel alone in our struggles. May the nighttime silence help us face all of our turmoil's honestly in the light of day, and give us the resolve to continue struggling until we believe we have made the best choice for us - that our integrity will not be compromised, that our love will not be forsaken, that our action will be made clear. Help us also to know that others struggle with us in the night. Even though they feel alone in the solitary world of darkness, we join a significant group of saints who have gone before. As Longfellow wrote, “O holy night! From thee I learn to bear What man has borne before!” Each of us takes a number in the roll call of saints who have struggled with truth and right. Each of us sees in the darkness of night, a long darkness that faces each of us at the end of the path, and in our solitary reflection on our lives we hope we have loved others, and been true to ourselves. (open eyes)
In our nightly sleep there is a time to dream. Here as these messengers of our lives truths are revealed, we wrestle with the most significant personal and spiritual issues we face - we want to reclaim our power - we want to overcome our fears - and so perhaps in the dream, we take the risk of opening that door that we have been afraid to open before. We pray that we might gain wisdom by our actions. Each one of us knows the night. In our childhoods, in our cultures there has been much fear of the night - the creatures it invites, the fears of unknown darkness. Yet the night we know usually reveals there is little to fear. Since I was a child I have always been bothered by creaking stairs, and outdoor noises. The night has made me worried about many things. We can hear more in the night. There are sounds of thudding feet from the nearby street. An ambulance and its piercing cry shatter the night’s silence. We wonder if the noise is on our doorstep. Yet, when the light was turned on, I saw that no scary man was there. There was nothing in the dark. Only the dark. What I imagined as my worst fear was not there. So more often than not what we see as disasters, or someone after us, is not so bad, is not there at all. The night is dark and is no more than that. And as the rabbit learned in our children’s story, it was only one rock-like coconut dropping, and not the sky falling. Many rocks will drop in our lives, and it is up to us to take those rocks that we wrestle with in the nights, and throw them back into the sea, and wake from the night ready to embrace a new dawn.
Finally, after the night reminds us that what we fear is usually never there, we look to the darkness of the night sky, and in its vastness know that we live in mystery. There is fear because the darkness reminds us of what we do not know, and perhaps never will. We struggle with the night because it represents the mystery that we are and always will be. There is a light of knowledge we cannot reach. It is the end of the dark path that we cannot see. There is a depth and breadth to darkness. If we get beyond our need to know it all, we will feel the darkness as awe. It is mystery. It is wonder. It is fear because it is so exciting to ponder all that is our night time sky. How far is far away? It is those stars so far away. And so at night we lay silent in the rain. We walk by all the city lights. We remind ourselves that the quiet of night is beautiful. The animals of night are quiet. The animal in us breathes easily for we have companions on this journey. And in this journey there is much to explore, and most of what we come to know is beautiful, and restful and brings us periods of holy reflection on all the world is, and all that we are. And here in this new day, may we recall that we are birthed in mystery, grow by all the struggles of history and life, and are prepared for fulfillment in all the dreaming visions of the night to come.


Closing Words

Hymn to the Night by H. W. Longfellow

I heard the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
Stoop o'er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
As of the one I love.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
The manifold, soft chimes,
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night
Like some old poet's rhymes.

From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,--
From those deep cisterns flows.

O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear
What man has borne before!
Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care,
And they complain no more.

Peace! Peace! Orestes-like I breathe this prayer!
Descend with broad-winged flight,
The welcome, the thrice-prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!