First Parish of Watertown

“Easter Everywhere” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - March 23, 2008

Call to Worship (Responsive) - from Stephanie Kaza

We live by the sun, We feel by the moon, We move by the stars
We live in all things ; All things live in us

We eat from the earth, We drink from the rain, We breathe of the air
We live in all things ; All things live in us

We call to each other, We listen to each other, Our hearts deepen with love and compassion
We live in all things ; All things live in us

We depend on the trees and animals, We depend on the earth, We celebrate with joy all forms of living, grateful for all beings and companions
We live in all things ; All things live in us

Celebration of the Spring Equinox -

Today marks the first time we begin to celebrate the seasons in our regular worship services as part of our Green Sanctuary program. The vernal equinox is one of the four major turning points in the cycle of seasons for our planet. As our Earth spins on its axis it travels in a path around the sun, the axis on the equinox is neither tilted away from the sun, as it is in winter nor toward the sun, as it is in summer. Equinox means equal night. Many religious festivals celebrate the return of spring. It was said the Greek God Dionysos was in terrible pain during winter. Just like us. In Persephone’s story, she descended into the underworld and returned near the time of the spring equinox. This story has close parallels to various legends, including the stories of the life of Jesus. Today, in celebration of the coming of spring we water the plant, and thus symbolically bring it back to life. And say, welcome spring.

Reading : from Doreen Valiente

I am the beauty of the green earth
And the white moon among the stars
And the mystery of the waters
And the desire of human hearts.

Call unto your soul: Arise and come unto me
For I am the soul of nature who gives
Life to the universe.
From me all things proceed
And unto me all things must return.

Reading - from Easter Everywhere by Darcey Steinke

Inside Grace the altar is covered with potted lilies, pink tulips, and daffodils. The place is humid and sweet as a greenhouse. Ushers wear white skirts with yellow blouses. As the choir processes, the congregation sings, “I know that my redeemer lives.” We hold hands across the rows for the peace song. Reverend Banks begins his sermon by explaining how Easter originated as a pagan holiday named after the goddess Oestar, and that Persians died eggs long before Christ was born. Banks goes on to describe the crucifixion, the thorns puncturing the skin of Jesus’ forehead, blood streaming down his chin, how he passed the dark night in the tomb and then how his resurrected body filled with nothing but light.

I am lucky if I can believe in the resurrection ten minutes a month. I have doubt. But I have faith as well. My doubt fuels my faith. to me doubt connects to the mystery of god much more than certainty. The finite cannot contain the infinite. Once, a New York cab driver told me he was a former Muslim who now subscribes to no organized religion. He said he was reading anne Lamott’s writing guide, Bird by Bird, to help him write a book that lays out his theological ideas. “Religions are ot directly form God,” he said animatedly from the front seat. “Religion is finite. God is not finite, but infinite.”

Banks comes down out of the pulpit. "You need to be sure, dearly beloved, absolutely sure. Christ died for you. Hello? Somebody? Are you positive, absolutely positive?"

I slip from my pew and walk out of the church. On the sidewalk I think: Jesus himself was a doubter. He questioned the validity of the established religious order. He doubted his ability to do what he was asked to do and, on the cross, he doubted the loyalty of God,

Rather than certainty, I try to cultivate a sense of sacredness. Life is brutal, full of horror and violence. Life is beautiful, full of passion and joy. Both things are true at the same time. The paradox extends to my own being. I think of the words of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who calls Christianity the religion of Love and comedy, a la Charlie Chaplin: “The point is not that, due to the limitations of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that due to the divine spark in him, man cannot become fully man.” Abbie, as young as she is, has already felt this dichotomy. On a page of her journal I found this epigram: "I feel like I am someone like God I do not know why."


Sermon “Easter Everywhere” by Mark W. Harris

When Darcey Steinke’s memoir Easter Everywhere was reviewed in the New York Times, the reviewer Stephen Metcalf began, “I love my neighbor as I love myself - which is to say minimally, if at all, and in between fits of out and out loathing.” As I began to write this sermon, all I could think of was Andrea reminding me the other day about Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, and what had happened to her neck as it showed the effects of aging after she had turned sixty. In recent years memoirs have been extremely popular. Each succeeding self-revelation seems to chronicle the most dismal accounting of the human condition or behavior. We seem to identify our misery with meaning, so that every unhappiness seems to be based in some childhood trauma or undiagnosed illness. This is not to demean the seriousness of our afflictions, but it sometimes feels as if all of life’s meaning is derived from dealing with our pain. I laughed out loud this week at a New Yorker article where the outraged author was concerned that the overuse of antidepressants was making everyone too happy. He went to say that most of our creativity stems from our misery, or better yet, our angst over the turmoils and traumas of life. Bring back our depression, he seemed to say, or we will be bored to death with our own tepid, even tempered personalities that lack anger and self-hatred. Think of the great British literary tradition. Where would the British be if they could not wallow in their own misery, complaining about everything? There would be no culture.

Steinke asks herself this question about the source of self-loathing. “What if my abiding sense of misery isn’t due to abuse or balky neurotransmission, but to the absence of God in my life, to an unfulfilled relationship with my own divinity, as vouchsafed to me by the Creator?” You might say, Oh that’s good for her, but what do we Unitarian Universalists do as our Creator is a scientific Big Bang, and our relationship to God is something we define as questionable mythology of our own making, praying not to our Dad or Mom, but to whom it may concern. We sometimes feel as though Easter is the one religious holiday we should boycott. After all, we can celebrate the return of spring only so long, before we have to reflect on Jesus. Now, while he does qualify for having the traumatic life of single parent home, wandering mendicant, and finally put to death on a cross, we also need to ask ourselves what this resurrection really means. We don’t accept a dead person coming back to life, and while we can twist it into meaning a belief in immortality of the soul, we know the body returns to the earth from whence it came, and unlike the tulip, does not pop back up again in twelve months.

Like many of us who eventually find our way to Unitarian Universalism, Darcey Steinke is plagued with the issue of doubt. As the daughter of a Lutheran minister she wants to know how God, if God exists, can allow such suffering in the world. Rather than give her an answer, her father gives the flippant response, “That’s the $64,000 question.” Of course this presumes some kind of all powerful control by a deity over our human freedom to make bad choices, or even the option of altering the natural world so that disease and death do not abide, at least not for me. We Unitarian Universalists know the world to be subject to chance and whim and even tragedy without any kind of supernatural control. It comes down to issues of authority. Steinke’s feelings of spiritual rootlessness, Metcalf tells us, emanate from the dual message she gets from her father. On the one hand, when he wears the robes, he is a commanding presence, but it really turns out that he is kind of a Wizard of Oz figure who has all the appearances but none of the actual power when he takes off the mantle of the office. There is nothing there. The Emperor has no clothes. So we won’t submit to that kind of authority. But that leaves us with the question of what kind of authority does demand our worship

Steinke comes to doubt the existence of the God she had heard about as a young girl under the ministrations of her father. This is the same God most of us associate with Easter, the one who raises a dead man to life, and of course we also say, so untrue. But then where does our doubt take us? If we deny God, then we may make other things into our Gods. Steinke quotes the German mystic, Simone Weil, who wrote, “One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God . . . one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.” Paul Tillich once said something to the effect that our God is whatever we assign ultimate worth to. This is an interesting question, what do you worship in this world? Perhaps in some ways we worship our partners or families as people we love and care about, or perhaps we worship the earth as our home that gives us birth and sustains us in life. Maybe it is self-fulfillment we worship, and those who write memoirs about all the pain of their lives are working out their past. Does this lead beyond a kind of self-indulgence or self-pity and point towards some kind of resurrection of the spirit, or is it simply a litany of all those problems, so that we only worship the problems in our quest for self-fulfillment.

About thirteen years ago I gave up smoking. Now you can say this was merely an addiction, but I certainly felt like I loved smoking. I would do anything to get a cigarette, and I thought about it all the time. If I ran out of cigarettes, even late at night, I would jump in my car in a mad search for a store with late evening hours. I needed that butt. When I smoked I could neither smell it on me or on others. Now I don’t even think about it anymore. I never want a cigarette, and I am glad I was able to kick the habit. In a way it is like something I once worshipped - it relaxed me, helped with anxiety, calmed me down, but I came to doubt its central place in my life, and what it was doing to me. Now that it is no longer a part of my life, I notice the smell in the air and on others. If you have never smoked, perhaps you cannot imagine the powerful hold it had on me, but it was dominating. For some, giving this kind of authority to something can make it difficult to ever rid oneself of it. When I was in seminary I remember talking to a fellow student, who had also smoked for many years. He said that even twenty years after quitting cigarettes, he was still dreaming about smoking. The desire was still there. I think of this as an object of desire that controlled my life. That little filter tipped roll of tobacco was what I would do anything for. It was emblematic of the idolatry Simone Weil spoke of because it provided a focus for my life- what I did first thing in the morning, and last at night.

It may seem silly to characterize cigarettes as a kind of God substitute, but it was the way I ordered my life. As Weil said, it is the things of this world that we worship to which we give attributes of the divine. One could see this in such obvious things such as money giving us the ability to buy all of the things we ever wanted. Yet I don’t think Steinke was interpreting this in the idolatrous sense when she used what became the title of her book to explore the idea that we give attributes of the divine to things of this world, and experience them as such. It was the deeper things of the spirit; compassion and love. This is Easter Everywhere.

We all know this world is full of grief and suffering, and God does not make it go away. This is the reality in Jesus’ life on Good Friday, and it is also the reality in many of our lives that make their way into these successful memoirs. I have suffered abuse or neglect, or I have taken all the gifts and talents I received and frittered them all away on drugs and booze. Part of the Christian myth seems to reflect the reality of our lives, too. They are difficult and fraught with pain. It helps us have some sense of human solidarity to share that pain. Others have similar experiences, and perhaps we feel a degree of affirmation when another says, I have gone through that, too. I am sure this is part of the reason these memoirs are so popular, plus it also helps us feel better when we know someone else has had more severe miseries than our own. We can always say, it could be worse, or there but for the grace of God go I.

We may feel like the resurrection story is not only a false myth about a human coming back to life, but even metaphorically we might scoff at the idea that all of our pain is going to end, and our opportunities for another career or complete health will be resurrected in a second chance, or a final sweet victory. Sure sometimes that happens, and we can feel some sense of gladness in the small victories we find. But we may not recover fully from the injury or illness we suffered, and the idea of even a small moment of resurrection is remote. What then? I think what is meaningful about the resurrection story is that it reinforces the Christmas message that God emerges within the human context, within the everyday matters of our living. It says in an elaborate mythic structure that the divine is present in the human, and that our longings to create God in an all powerful otherworldly scheme are false. Whatever is divine that we may know is here in us, in what we do, in how we embrace life. And what we must do to find this divine in life is to die to the world.

To die to the world, we must get out of our grief mode. By this I don’t mean stop grieving for those loved ones who have died. I mean we must move through those things that make us feel dead to the world. Maybe smoking cigarettes made me feel dead to the world, and certainly doing a task or job over and over again in rote fashion without any kind of affirmation makes me feel dead to the world. Unitarian Universalists are often very smart people who are searching for ways to feel fulfilled. For some of us work makes us feel fulfilled, but sometimes that is all we do. But the work may have none of the divine in it, if it only feels like duty and obligation. Obviously a large part of work is merely what we have to do to make a living and support our families, but if it keeps us in grief mode with its challenges and demands, and offers us nothing new, gives us no joy in living, or no larger purpose, then it is the job that is the meaningless God, and we are failing to see the divine joy in our work. We must find ways to discover the divine in our lives. Where do we find joy, and what is it we feel passionate about? It is possible that we can do that by finding new challenges or switching jobs, but there must be something in that work that helps us care for others, helps a community, makes us feel like we are learning new things, and so we are growing and we are helping the company or institution around us grow to become something that is more compassionate and more affirming of the human condition and the human community.

The message of Easter is really a very simple one. God is in you, and it asks us how we are doing to die to the world we are living in right now, so that we can embrace the divine in us. One of the great things about my Unitarian Universalist faith is that this message of discovering the divine in your life has been central since we first rejected the claims of personal sinfulness for those of potential greatness. Sometimes this has been interpreted to mean self-indulgence and individual fulfillment. But I think it points toward something greater in us, and in the world. In Easter Everywhere, Darcey Steinke says that life is both brutal and beautiful. Sometimes we react to the brutal out of guilt. We become a worker for a green world because we feel some obligation to do the right thing. While it may be the right thing to prevent global warming, it must be approached from a feeling of reverence for the earth, of embracing a sense of sacredness about life. Liberals tend to spend a lot of time in their heads thinking about the right thing to do, but finding Easter Everywhere means we would feel the sacredness with a passion for touching, for looking, for seeing and hearing, for knowing that the divine is in us and all around us. We want to see the world anew, like a cleansing rain, or a budding bank of tulips.

In Easter Everywhere, Steinke’s daughter Abbie writes in her journal, I feel like I am someone like God I do not know why.” I think the quotation from the Slovenian philosopher Zizek fits this sense of divinity. Our proclivity to sin means that we cannot be divine, we are not Gods. But the divine spark in us means man cannot become fully man. We are more, and we can live into that divinity with an embrace of Easter Everywhere. Even though I am a minister I do not tend to use the traditional verbiage about my job, he is doing God’s work. But I think it would be helpful in the context of trying to understand Easter for all of us to think about how we do divine work in the world. I think my father used to do this in the way he ran a retail oil company. That sounds like a kind of business that would not be likely to invoke divinity. Yet, as a child the first thing I realized was that every oil truck had a basket of lollipops to give to children along the route. He also gave out S and H Green Stamps as a reward for cash paying customers. You may remember the stamps were pasted into booklets, and then redeemed for gifts like lamps and stereos. I suppose you could see them as gimmicks to help him succeed in business, but I saw them as ways that he was thinking about his clientele, who had to buy his product anyway since it was a necessary commodity. When I was thirteen, I began to play for a baseball team that had the name of his company on its uniform. These sponsorships are common, but they recognize that there is a community fabric that we need to maintain. That community fabric must also be extended to neighbors in need. He also gave oil to those who were in desperate need, and one winter provided oil to a family whose daughter had died of leukemia. I am sure he would not have thought of his business practices as reflecting divinity, but his care for his customers and the community were ways that reflected that he believed even with a money making venture such as his, that if you are not serving others, giving back to the community and building something better for tomorrow, then you are merely indulging in your own selfishness, and while you think you are getting ahead, you are not dying into the new life of loving your neighbor.

Easter helps us think how we can give our work and our lives a little divine significance. Spring has arrived this week, and we are glad for it. We will see flowers and trees blooming, just as these flowers here today are harbingers of what is to come, bringing joy to our senses. When our spiritual founder William Ellery Channing looked around him he said that the beauty of the world was reflective of the beauty of God, and he also believed that our intelligence was reflective of God’s intelligence. In his sermon, “Likeness to God,” Channing helped inspire subsequent generations of Unitarians to realize, “We see God around us because God dwells within us.” When we seek the truth or live it, whenever we receive or give a blessing, whenever we encounter something with moral courage, whenever we bear a trial patiently, whenever we perform a disinterested deed, whenever we war against a habit which leads us to neglect our higher principles, these are things he said, that help us realize that divinity is growing within us. Only through that energy, only through that knowledge, only through that beauty will we sense that there is a greater cosmic harmony and significance. A couple of months ago, there was an article in the Globe West about Alex Stephenson, the son of our former student minister Fayre Stephenson. It told how each week Alex, an Army major collected between 50 and 100 blankets to distribute to villagers in Iraq. He said, he hoped these gifts would help the Iraqis come to believe that Americans are kind and giving people. We might think of army life as the locus of death, Good Friday all the time. Yet even in a war zone, he responded to the sight of people who had nothing, by giving them warmth at night, and a shield by day to protect them against the sun. Doing good things for others, and defending your life represent extreme paradoxes of living and dying. Each day, he realized was a resurrection - an opportunity to redeem fear and hate and self-interest with compassion and love. You may or may not call that God, but what it means is that a man realizes that it is more than merely making money for his family, it is connecting with others in a way that builds up the fabric of our relationships. It is dying to selfishness, and being reborn to love for neighbor. It is what Easter Everywhere is all about.

Closing Words - from Thich Nhat Hanh (adapted)

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply. I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile.
learning to sing in my new nest,
to br a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing in the
surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the
clear water of a pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

My joy is like spring so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it,
fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs
at once,
so that I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

“Life After Life” by Mark W. Harris

March 16 , 2008 - First Parish of Watertown, MA

Call to Worship - “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Readings - Psalm 90 (translated by Robert Alter)

O Master, You have been our abode
in every generation.
Before mountains were born,
before You spawned earth and world,
from forever to forever You are God.
You bring man back to the dust
and say, “Turn back, humankind.”
For a thousands years in Your eyes
are like yesterday gone,
like a watch in the night.
You engulf them with sleep.
In the morn they are like grass that passes.
In the morning it sprouts and passes,
by evening it withers and dies.
For we are consumed in Your wrath,
and in Your fury we are dismayed.
You have set our transgressions before You,
our hidden faults in the light of your face.
For all our days slip away in Your anger.
We consume our years like a sigh.
The days of our years are but seventy years,
and if in great strength, eighty years.
And their pride is trouble and grief,
for swiftly cut down, we fly off.
Who can know the strength of Your wrath?
As the fear of You is Your anger.
To count our days rightly, instruct,
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Come back, O Lord! How long? --
and have pity on Your servants.
Sate us in the morn with Your kindness,
let us sing and rejoice all our days.
Give us joy as the days You afflicted us,
the years we saw evil.
Let Your acts be seen by Your servants
and Your glory by their children.
And may the sweetness of the Master our God be upon us
and the work of our hands firmly found for us,
and the work of our hands firmly found!

from The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn’t watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth; just as fruitlessly as me, I’m afraid. A one -sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed.

The train would be still or stop-starting from 30th Street to near Overbrook, and I could hear them say names and sentences: “Now be careful with that glass.” “Mind your father,” “Oh, look. How big she looks in that dress,” “I’m with you, Mother,” “Esmeralda, Sally, Lupe, Keesha, Frank . . .” So many names. And then the train would gain speed, and as it did the volume of all these unheard phrases coming from heaven would grow louder and louder; at its height between stations, the noise of our longing became so deafening that I had to open my eyes.

I saw women hanging or collecting wash as I peered From the windows of the suddenly silent trains. They stooped over baskets and then spread white or yellow or pink sheets along the line. I counted men’s underwear and boys’ underwear and the familiar lollipop cotton of little girls’ drawers. And the sound of it that I craved and missed - the sound of life - replaced the endless calling of names.

Wet laundry: the snap, the yank, the wet heaviness of double-and queen-sized sheets. The real sounds bringing back the remembered sounds of the past when I had lain under the dripping clothes to catch water on my tongue or run in between them as if they were traffic cones through which I chased Lindsey or was chased by Lindsey back and forth. And this would be joined by the memory of our mother attempting to lecture us about the peanut butter from our hands getting on the good sheets, or the sticky lemon-candy patches she had found on our father’s shirts. In this way the sight and smell of the real, of the imagined, and of the remembered all came together for me.

After I turned away from earth that day, I rode the trains until I could think of only one thing:

“Hold still,” my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he’d raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

Sermon - “Life After Life” by Mark W. Harris

In the opening words by Wendell Berry we heard “wild things do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” The implication is that there is a presence of peace among wild things that we cannot possess in the human realm because we do tax ourselves with fear, anxiety, and despair over the thoughts of losing those we love, and of losing ourselves, and all that we love about the world that we will one day no longer be able to enjoy or participate in. The adolescent girl, Susie, who is murdered in the The Lovely Bones cannot have what she wants most: “Mr. Harvey dead and me living,” but she resolves that if she watches closely and desires deeply, she might “change the lives of those I loved on Earth.”

There is a popular genre of literature which depicts an afterlife for our fellow creatures who have died. Alice Sebold’s novel was one of those, along with others such as The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. There is an up and down elevator between the two realms, and in both books we see a conceptualized place where the deceased meet other people. Many years ago there was a Unitarian Universalist joke showing people traveling up this celestial elevator, but the road forks at a certain point. One fork goes to heaven, and the other, the one all the UUs choose, is a discussion group about heaven. Appropriately enough, there is a sermon talk back today. Yet today’s sermon topic is not one we have come to expect in Unitarian Universalist congregations. Why not? After all, it is one of the fundamental questions about life, what happens to us when we die?

Almost from its beginning Unitarianism especially has been based in reason and science, and so religious tenets which portray beliefs that transcend our natural sensual existence seem either absurd, even crazy, or belong so much in the realm of the unknown, that most of us adopt a wait and see attitude. We just don’t know if there is some kind of spiritual realm. Historically, there have been some, especially Universalists in the 19th century, who wanted to prove their belief in God’s universal plan to embrace the entire human race. Many Universalists and some Unitarians, although usually not publicly, sought to speak with the dead so that communication could continue between the living and the dead, and they would literally know, with certifiable proof that there was life after death. They tried to validate their beliefs with such public events as seances and table rappings, just as life after life scientists these days analyze the lives of those who have come back from the brink of death, and say they have traveled through a tunnel and seen the white light at the end. I have found this all very interesting, but it does not prove anything.

The fundamental problem, as Berry implies, is that we have to die, and we know it. For some of us part of the concern may be, when is this going to happen? We know this may depend to some extent upon how we manage our lives. Diet, exercise, weight control are all part of the mantra we play in our heads for putting off the date of our eventual demise. But there is also a luck factor. In The Lovely Bones, Susie is very unlucky. She lives near a predator, and time and place coalesced to bring about her murder. Sometimes the victim makes some bad choices, and other times not. Chance is a factor, too, and remains so even as we become older. But more than mere chance, once you have passed the immortality of youth, if you are like me, you become more aware of physical forces in you that tend toward death. The body feels its age or it declines, even as we may attempt to keep it as young as possible. We look in the mirror and see the image of our Mom or Dad as they grew older. Gazing upon pictures or seeing ourselves anew, we notice the features that are now apparent day to day - the extra chin, the expanded girth, the labored breathing, the wrinkled hand, and we say, who is that old guy? We realize soon enough that we have that forethought of grief.

We live with the truth that death is going to happen, and so I think it is the natural human inclination to ask how are we going make it acceptable? How can we give life meaning, knowing that we face death? All the world’s faiths have developed varying ways to understand what lies beyond - Christians resurrect with Jesus to eternal life in heaven, and Buddhists reincarnate again and again on the path to spiritual fulfillment. Unitarians and Universalists in the last century have moved away from the traditional concept of the pearly gates of heaven floating on clouds over our heads with the familial picture of the reuniting of families from all generations. This was the kind of glorious vision of the afterlife that I remember seeing when I visited Salt Lake City, and the Mormons showed an introductory film presenting this very literal view of an after life. In her book, This Republic of Suffering, on the Civil War and death, Drew Faust says that the immense scale of death and the terrible carnage of the Civil War helped bring on this very domestic view of heaven. Because people were separated from their loved ones on battlefields far away, and there was no system to identify who they were, and modern weaponry and primitive medicine often made the carnage even more horrible, people began to conceive of an afterlife where you would be reunited with those you lost in war, and this was especially comforting if they were missing in action or never identified as dead.

Before the Civil War, death in America primarily happened in the safety and comfort of your own home with many family members gathered around. Faust believes the Civil War changed all that. Some believed that religion enabled the slaughter because of the confidence they held in immortality. They knew earth would “recreate earthly ties in a realm of perfection and joy.” (177). Faust says death was redefined as eternal life in 19th century America, and there was great effort to control and repudiate its fear. Among some Unitarians, the war produced the opposite effect. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. never recovered religiously, from the horrors he had seen, and the three wounds he suffered. He could not find meaning in the endless carnage he participated in, and certainly not continue to uphold a belief in a benevolent deity who was manufacturing this historical unfolding for a magnanimous purpose. Louis Menand wrote that it not only made Holmes lose his beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs. Welcome to the 20th century.

We can understand that belief in immortality would be difficult for many modern Unitarian Universalists, but it is one way some of us find meaning in death, although mostly not in the elaborate vision of heaven where we are reunited with families. For most, this seems like a false sense of wish fulfillment. Others of us have some vague sense of spiritual existence, but are unsure what form that takes. My mentor in the ministry believed firmly in the paranormal. He said that we have a spiritual existence beyond the grave, and I recall him once going to rid a house of some spirits who were haunting the premises because they were not at peace. Some grave injustice perhaps, surrounded the circumstances of their death, and their spirits continued to remain close to earth until a ritual was performed that let them be free of their trauma. I reflected upon this kind of experience a couple of weeks ago when I preached on extraordinary knowings. I thought about instances we all have of being in places we feel like we have been before, or meeting people we feel like we already know. I even had an experience of being hypnotized into a past life regression. Was it real, or did my mind make it up? I am uncertain, but it lends some credence to the idea that a soul inhabits many bodies and is reincarnated again and again until it reaches some kind of perfection.

For other Unitarian Universalists, beliefs in seemingly irrational and unprovable doctrines make it seem unproductive to place all our hope in something that is unknown. This is why in most circles UUs will say this is the life we are living now, and we must make the most of it. We believe that the body returns to the earth from whence it came, but some of us are open to the possibility that some kind of spiritual essence lives on after death. Nevertheless, the focus remains on this life, and what kind of relationships we can build with others who share our time and place with us. We can draw some perspective on this from another Wendell Berry poem, called “What We Need Is Here” :

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Our focus on the importance in living this life to its fullest means that many liberals prefer to affirm that this life is all that there is. One of my parishioners in Palmer used to respond to the question, how are you? with the response, “better than nothing.” This was at least a bare affirmation that he was living and breathing. Yet even that minimalist approach to meaning has deeper significance. Andrea sometimes tells the story of riding in the car with her father, and any time they passed a hearse, he would say, “There goes a man with no problems.” I know I sometimes say this in a different way, when a person who has suffered a great deal and/or has lost the quality of life meets their fate, and I think, he or she is now at peace, or they do not have to suffer any more. What love we can give to life must be finished, even as the pain and suffering we endure will end as well. This acknowledges that death is part of living and that there is an inevitable endless state once we die that we sometimes metaphorically called sleep or rest. A larger natural meaning here is that our bodies return to the eternal nature of life itself, back to the earth to bring more life to the earth in an endless cycle of living and dying. If some of us believe in an ongoing spiritual presence, and others find meaning in finding an eternal rest or ending to our individual journeys, there is a third way that brings meaning to a life as it ends or in the wake of its existence.

We have seen that for some Unitarian Universalists this life is all there is, and the meaning comes in the death itself, but for others there is another notion of an afterlife and this comes from the contributions we make to the ongoing life of the family and community. The theologian Charles Hartshorne has called this “Contributionism.” Not long ago a former parishioner of mine from Palmer sent me an obituary about a member of a Catholic Church in the village of Three Rivers. The obituary was for a man named Michaud, whom I barely remembered, and at first I wondered why on earth she was sending this to me. Then as I began to read it all came back to me. Almost thirty years ago I started with the help of many, a food pantry which was located in our UU church. It was called Food Share. Mr. Michaud’s obituary began with the phrase “called safely home.” This is of course a code word for his death, but his family, or perhaps the funeral home marked the event with a theological orientation that death now ended his wanderings in the wilderness of earthly struggles, and he was now safe and at home with God. I suppose one could take this in a literal sense or in the more natural way of being at the end of labors and returned to the bosom of earth. As I read further on, it mentioned that he had been a volunteer with Food Share since its beginning. It was twenty-five years of help to those in need until he could no longer physically lift the crates of oranges, or pack the bags of soups and breads, cereals and pastas. His immortality in a small way was his contribution to a larger effort to make life more abundant especially for those who were poor or in need. Perhaps in that sense he was contributing to the future of life, for who knows what one meal might do for one child who was hungry, who might grow up, and make some larger medical or educational or social contribution to the greater good, as life goes on. He was eternal in the present because he gave that life might continue. He was eternal for the future because he gave that life might have hope for the days ahead.

This was a personally affirming note to receive, even as I realized that someone I once knew ever so slightly had helped in the effort to keep others alive and vital. It is always good to feed the hungry, and some small stroke or action can have larger and larger effects - more people, more food, more relief, more life, and a greater piece of immortality. This reminds me of the reading from The Lovely Bones. Susie tells us that everyone in heaven is watching someone on earth. But I thought of watching even a stranger, who perhaps offered food, or even a smile, and how that event had given life to me or perhaps to you at a moment of despair. There is something life giving, something eternal if you will. This says, Come on, you can do that, you can help, so that we can almost hear all the coaching that must be being said to us - do the right thing, don’t steal that, don’t hurt him, help her out. All those choral voices from heaven, from the blessed memory of the past, from all times and places are encouraging us to hate the evil, and love the good Give more of life to life. Sebold describes almost a universal longing to bring our best selves to life. This force of longing becomes the sound of life that Susie is now missing, but she is still able to shout it to others. And then her final memory of helping with the ship in a bottle reminds her, that her little world that she holds depends solely upon her. She is the one who will make it live or not. Each of us as we approach our inevitable demise, must look back with what contribution we have made to life. This is not just about serving on some town committee, or helping your parent live out their final days in comfort, it is about touching the eternal spirit of life. The food pantry is not immortal, the act of helping is. This is where those faiths that put their emphasis on immortality in heaven miss out on the eternal nature of this life. It is a theology set up to have us believe that the best is yet to come, and yet we see with Susie, that the focus of eternal life, of heaven, is to help us in this life to live out all the greatness we are capable of. You are not a pale reflection of something better yet to come; you are the living embodiment of all that is good and true and beautiful in the world.

This must have been the week to read different phrasings for the coming of death into our lives. When the newsletter from the Greek Orthodox church arrived. I read of the death of a member, and it said, “he fell asleep in the Lord.” When I was in seminary, we were very explicit about what a death denying culture we lived in. It was the days of the ascendancy of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. We learned that phrasing like, he passed away, or she passed on were ways to avoid saying death. Passed to what, or on to what? Now even among UUs this seems common everywhere from affiliate newsletters to seminarians who post a paper for my class. Are we hoping subconsciously that we pass on to something rather than simply being dead to the world. It is certainly not a sleep, because we are not going to wake up in this world anyway. But sleep in the Lord has the connotation of being forever. There is no time frame. We do have that hope that there is something beyond. We do feel the loss of mothers and fathers, children and others so deeply, perhaps we feel better if we know they are shouting for us to love each other with our whole hearts, even as they might show us how, if they were still among us. I am comforted to know that the white tailed deer I saw dart into the forest under the double rainbow on the day of my mother’s funeral was some kind of sign that a spirit was watching over me, urging me on to love life and live it with passion and integrity in the time given to me, even if it is only a memory.

During the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., learned that his son was wounded at Antietam. Any wound then might have meant death, and he rushed to Maryland to see what he would find with fear and trembling. He found his son still alive, almost a resurrection of being lost and found. He wrote, that “the boundary between life and death seemed at once permeable and infinite.” (127). This same kind of event happened to my Harris grandparents when my father’s brother Charlie, who was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, was pronounced dead in the local paper, and they received notification of the same. Months later they discovered he was alive. Dead and born again. Skinny and sick he came home, but they all had touched both the infinite and the permeable. I think that is true for us in a way each day. We move toward the longing of the body to eventually die, but the heart longs to give back something of the eternal spirit of living. We are born and die each day.

Perhaps in some ways we UUs are like our fellow Unitarian Herman Melville, of whom Hawthorne said, he “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.” We will close our service today with a traditional funereal hymn, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, which is based on Psalm 90, which was also one of our readings today. The Psalm reminds us that we live in an eternity, and are but dust in its immensity. Our days bring much misery and pain, and we wonder how can we believe? Yet in that eternity, even as we are afflicted in the few days we have, we may learn that the enduring measure of happiness are the gifts of joy that we can learn to appreciate. What gives our fleeting nature strength and stability and best of all joy is for us to celebrate the work of our hands, of each other and of the community. It is a blessing, for when we give life back to each other, life will continue to sprout. Bring more happiness to this life than misery. Bring more joy than sadness, and in the end and forever, all will be well.


Closing Words - “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

“Gifts Galore” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - March 2, 2008

Call to Worship from Rumi

This being human is a guest
house, Every morning
a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Story for all Ages - “That is Good” - A story from India - Mark Harris

You have seen me in this crown three times recently - once as one of the three kings who came to see baby Jesus, once as the Unitarian king of Transylvania, and today we travel to ancient India, where I am the king, and all of you are my advisors. For you see I always had my trusted advisor at my side to help me make decisions. But she had a strange habit which was kind of annoying, for no matter what happened, she always responded by saying, “That is good, that is good.” Can you say that? Well, one day the king was out hunting, and a snake startled his horse; the king was thrown from the saddle and the horse dragged him for some distance, he cut his foot and he lost a toe. Immediately his advisor was at his side, and what do you suppose she said? (That is Good). The king was furious, how can you say that? Look at what happened. So immediately he said, you are fired, get out of here.. And what do you suppose the advisor said to that? (That is good).


The king went home, and eventually was all healed. He loved hunting, so soon he was out on horseback again. On this day, he was chasing a deer, and he became separated from the rest of his advisors. A local tribe captured him, and brought him back to their village. It was their practice to sacrifice prisoners to their Gods to keep the Gods happy (do you know what sacrifice means?) Well the music was playing, they put the king in a special robe, and the priest danced around him, inspecting every inch. Then he brought out a sharp knife. Well the king was beside himself. He was very upset and frightened. Then the priest inspected the kings some more, and waved for the people to stop playing music and stop dancing. He said, this one is no good. He has been cut. What did he notice? (no toe) We cannot sacrifice him. So they cut the vines and let him go. Once he was back at his palace, the king called for his old advisor. He said, you were right it was good that my toe was lost. It saved my life.. But why did you say it was good when I fired you? She said, there is always some good to come out of things. I said that was good because my dear king, if I had not been fired, and if I were with you on the hunt, I would have been next in line for the sacrifice, and I have all my toes. You are right. That was good. You shall advise me always. You are very wise. and that was good.

Reading - from The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Sermon

Last Friday I met with a couple who are going to be married in June. They are now attending a UU congregation in Princeton, New Jersey, but the bride is from around here, and they plan on getting married at the Commander’s Mansion. Some years ago Andrea and I developed a packet of wedding ceremony materials to be given out to couples. This includes all the major segments of a service such as readings, vows, ring exchanges and pronouncements. It is everything a couple might want to construct their own service, and it gives them numerous choices for each element of the service. One of the most poorly developed sections of the packet happens to also be one of the most awkward portions of a typical wedding. What do you do with the parents? I mean besides ignore them. In the packet we call this the family recognition section. We give the couples four options. If the father walks the daughter down the aisle, then we have a variation on the traditional, straight ceremony, where the father was asked, who gives this woman in marriage? Today we say who brings this woman, so that the connotation of daughter as property of one man to be given to another man is somewhat mollified with the new language, but if it is reenacted, it still has the appearance that may cause some participants in weddings to see red. In Unitarian Universalist services the brides or grooms or whatever combination we have may enter in any fashion they wish, and we also give the couples a number of family affirmations as options including parents who say nothing, both sets of parents being given the option of affirming their child’s choice, and then further options for divorced and remarried parents and children from prior marriages, and even one where it seems everyone in the room is asked to affirm this wedding like one big extended family. Then sometimes if it just does not seem to fit the family situation, I say, oh, well, why don’t I just write something up for you? It is not easy to affirm everybody, and not offend anybody, especially when you have the problem of what to do with remarried spouses. With the couple I met with, we are working on working it out.

All of this awkwardness expresses how many individual choices we offer, and how we may refuse to accept traditional, seemingly misogynist patterns of ownership of daughters. Yet there is another message in this tradition that we may lose sight of, if we merely interpret this action in a narrow, conventional fashion as man giving woman to man as property. This part of a wedding is a reenactment of an ancient tradition where one tribe gave a bride, and the other gave wealth in return, a dowry. It was an exchange, and may even have included giving a different bride in return. It was all part of a network of cooperating families, and represents a kind of gift exchange. Although it generally did not happen that men were given as gifts, the bride is not property in the sense of being a commodity to be bought and sold. While the stories in the Hebrew Bible of women being given as gifts to others tribes may be morally reprehensible to us, there is a sharp distinction between a gift and being sold into service or slavery or the like. This is because all of human life for these ancient cultures was seen as a gift that could not be sold. This is precisely why we see some of the moral controversy around cloning in our own time. The feeling is that you can bestow life, but you cannot buy and sell it. So the ancient father did not own the daughter as property, but rather she was a gift to the other family so that the tribes could work out a mutually satisfying and enduring relationship. The gift may have helped promote peace, or bring reconciliation.

This points to one instance traditionally where sons are given as gifts. It may come out of an ancient tradition of sacrifice, as we saw in the ancient story of Abraham and Issac, which is often interpreted as a major historical milestone in culture when sacrifice was rejected, as Yahweh in the story says, no, don’t do this. But we have interpreted that young man who become soldiers are offering themselves up as gifts to a nation, who might have to sacrifice their lives in the cause of preserving nationhood. One still sees this in how our nation interprets the wars we are engaged in now. These young men, and now women as well, lay their lives on the line to preserve our way of life. Now you may agree or disagree with that interpretation, but the point is we give our children to this larger cause of preserving our life as a tribe, so that most of us might continue to participate in a larger functioning system. That may be a larger sacrifice than being given in marriage, but they both represent the idea that life is a gift that is offered up to preserve a larger way of life. Many of us feel that way when we marry into a new family. As a son-in-law, I may feel like a new son to Andrea’s mother, and she may indeed say and feel the traditional expression of this new relationship, I am not losing a daughter, I am gaining a son. We may represent a gift to that person, as we add a new relationship to their life, increase the joy and strength of the larger family, and bring them happiness that their child has found some degree of fulfillment, and thus the parent feels fulfilled. Now, this is not to deny that we may turn out to be a gift that their child wants to return, but I have also witnessed the pain that is felt when the gift of a daughter or son-in-law is removed from someone’s life.

This sense of the larger meaning of the gift is expressed in Christian theology through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Unitarian Universalists reject the idea that we are a sinful race of creatures, and that God had to give his son to redeem our sins, and that those sins are taken away in a sense because they are borne by Jesus. So I don’t think we need to struggle with the theological meaning of the atonement, or that God needed to sacrifice his own son, but I do think under the theological overlay that turns us off, there is a struggle to see larger meaning, and it echoes the meaning we attach to brides who help bring family togetherness and solace and soldiers who help bring national wholeness and preservation. Just as these other offers of gifts bring the family and nation together and help them persevere and find new life and meaning, so Jesus is offered as a gift to all, that is as representative of the human gifts we all receive, so that we might know that healing from our pain can occur when we appreciate that life is a gift, that we are called to remember every second of every day to help reconcile us to God, or all of life, or nature, or whatever term is most meaningful to you. Life is simply a gift, which when seen as a gift brings its greatest reward This is why Martin Luther was so appalled at the Catholic church 500 years ago. People were buying their way to heaven, bartering for salvation, judging their good fortune on what they did, or who they were, or what they could buy. And he said, No. In starting the Protestant Reformation he expressed the idea that we must see life as a gift, which when seen in that way, will bring us into harmony with all that is divine. This will in turn reduce our sense of bitterness or frustration or anger at how unjust or unfair we may make things feel when we are afflicted with illness or failure.

The story for all ages today addresses this very question. At first it seems outrageous that we would consider some disaster that befalls us as a gift. In fact we would probably react like the king. He lost a toe, and his advisor said, “that is good.” It would almost be like me saying, “that’s great,” after you had a car accident where you totaled your car, and broke your leg. You would think this is the most insensitive lout I have ever met. Yet we learn that what has befallen the king saves him in another circumstance, and even his advisor acknowledges the gift she has received by being fired, for if she had been with the king among the tribal peoples, she would have been sacrificed. Each event in our lives bring a lesson to be learned that we can use for our own larger good. The call to worship from Rumi also puts this in perspective. Each day will bring something unexpected. How do we respond? We must welcome even a crowd of sorrows. He says even the malice must be met with laughter because each event, no matter what comes, is something we can learn to be grateful for.

At the time that these events occur it is certainly hard for us to see what good it is doing us, and yet in the wake of such traumas a larger sense of the gift of life becomes apparent to us. I think of this first in the context of life changing events. There is the sense of deep appreciation for life. When we begin to appreciate that we have survived some trauma, we realize that we are not going to let it defeat us. I think this is reflected in the story from the book, The Namesake. In the reading Gogol learns for the first time that his father survived a terrible train accident where nearly everyone was killed. Gogol has stopped using his name, but has always assumed that his father chose it because the Russian author Gogol was his favorite writer. It turns out that his father was clutching a page from a Gogol short story, and this was the one thing that signaled the rescuers that he was still alive. Gogol asks if his father thinks of this horrible event every time he thinks of him. His father says, “No, you remind me of everything that followed.” In the movie version of the book, the father Ashoke follows this up with the line that he has received every day as a gift since the accident. For the first time perhaps, and then every day since, he sees life as something that he is blessed to have. Each day is a gift. It might be otherwise. In this context especially we come to say, it is good. It is certainly the way I felt about the terrible wave that engulfed Andrea and I at Pemaquid Point in Maine many years ago. Sure we felt the trauma of the accident, and felt its after effects for some time to come, but there was also beyond the terror of nearly dying, a profound sense of gratitude that life had given me another chance. Each day henceforth was a gift. It might have been otherwise.

While a serious trauma or illness may help us see that life is a gift, it certainly is not something that occurs every day to remind us of the value of seeing life like this. The nearness of this appreciation can dissipate, and what then? Is there a way to see everything as a gift, much like the king in our story? Perhaps we can measure this best by the reaction we have to the every day events of our lives. Why does it seem like every time we are rushing to an event in the car that we invariably get behind the slowest person in the world. And so if I get stuck on the way to school or karate or a meeting, my immediate reaction is I am going to be late. This winter especially we have all had numerous moments when we could curse the snow and rain and ice for slowing us down. How do we react? It seems that we invariably feel our schedule has been thrown off, and so we react with anger and frustration, and some of us might even use those feelings to go around people, run red lights, or use nasty hand gestures. On the other hand instead of responding to this event with such emotion, we could respond as though it were a gift to us. We could take a breath and say this slow person is reminding me of the importance of being safe, of taking my time, of noticing my surroundings. This may save me from an accident or a ticket perhaps, but it is a gift that I can curse or use to my benefit. I may have done nothing to cause it. It just happens that a slow person has gotten in front of me. I am only going about my life, and this occurred. How will you respond? Gift or curse? And what will that response do to us as people?

It may seem difficult to try to classify each event at work, or while driving, or even at church as a gift to be understood. The conversation you do not want to have may teach you patience. It may bring you greater understanding, or even laughter. If we understand it as a gift rather than an annoyance, or a hindrance, or an affliction then it may have the greater power to bring joy and understanding to our lives. It may bring us new opportunities for growing and learning, seeing and understanding. It is a gift. Now the idea of receiving so many gifts in one day may seem overwhelming. There are indeed many opportunities for spiritual insight as we slow down, look and receive each encounter, each experience as a gift. And there may be a few gifts that you want to give back.

Life itself is a gift. The moments of our lives are gifts, and ultimately you and I are gifts to each other and to the world. Will we offer life an embrace or a curse? About a year ago my family was at the Peabody Essex Museum, and as part of a festival we learned about traditional Korean wrapping cloths, called Po-Ja-Gi. These wrapping cloths have been used for centuries. They provided protection and cover for objects small and large, ordinary and precious. The size, the color and the materials for these cloths all vary. There is no standard. They are used to wrap belongings and to carry items from the shops. They are used to cover tables and beds. They are used for storage, and to give as a wrapping for gifts. Symbolically they remind us that every moment can be seen as a gift to be wrapped. From the mundane to the ceremonial there is a quality of preciousness that merits calling it a gift, and we can receive those moments, and learn from them as if they are the greatest or the smallest, for indeed they may be either or both. The Po-Ja-Gi tells us that every item and event can be received and seen as a gift.

This year an unusual number of you have given me books either to borrow or read or have. These are true gifts because they are expressions of what interests you, and I presume you give them to me as a way for us to connect, that perhaps we have these common interests or love, or perhaps you have seen something in a book that you think merits my attention. These are gifts of you to me. I love it when you share these gifts of the spirit, and it adds to my library as well!. This reminds me of the importance of gift giving that we can share with one another what matters most - ourselves, a greater love, a deeper meaning between us, all the gifts I have talked about today. I am very lucky in that I get to share with you every Sunday those gifts that I bring to this profession. I can write about what is most important to me. I can share that with you. I can offer up one gift after another. One thing we learn about whatever creative gift we have is that we lose it, if we do not use it. An artist must keep painting, and sharing that with others, or the skill and the passion both dissipate. We need to keep sharing our gifts in order that they continue to grow. It is a daily sharing. It points toward something much larger.

It reminds us that each of our lives is a marvelous gift, not to be bought or sold, or refracted as good or bad, as loser or winner, Many gifts come our way, but the important thing is that we cherish that each of those many things is a gift. This is suppose to be a canvass sermon exhorting you to give money to the church. We each give as we are able to those things we love; those things we come to see as gifts in our lives. Is this church a gift in your life? Is it a gift to the community of Watertown? Is Unitarian Universalism a message that brings love and compassion and justice to your life, and to the greater world? This community will bring you gifts of understanding, acceptance and compassion. What you give makes it possible that your life among us and your values will be understood as a gift to this community and to the world. What you give gives us more presence, makes our voices louder, and takes our loving understanding more and more into the world. This is the faith you have chosen to express your deepest beliefs. Make it an every day gift, and keep on giving. Celebrate the gift that brings meaning and affirmation to your life with gifts galore.


Closing - from May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gift to those one loves most . . . This gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backedup.”

And so we are called to give our gifts to those people, those institutions, those causes, we love the most because we have received the great gift of all.