Working Together -- David Whyte

We shape our self/ to fit this world
and by the world/ are shaped again.
The visible/ and the invisible
working together/ in common cause,
to produce/ the miraculous.
I am thinking of the way/ the intangible air
passed at speed/ round a shaped wing
easily/ holds our weight.
So may we, in this life/ trust
to those elements/ we have yet to see
or imagine,/ and look for the true
shape of our own self, by forming it well
to the great/ intangibles about us.

I remember a Sunday, at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It may have been Memorial Day weekend. Rev. John Wolf was speaking about mortality, about the human condition of being fully alive and fully conscious of one’s impermanence. I thought he was making an awfully big deal about something that was obvious: we don’t last forever. That was half a lifetime ago. Somewhere along the way I came to recognize the truth of impermanence: yours, mine, the pine trees in my yard, the impatiens I just planted. And in seeing how temporary everything is, what gets my attention is the preciousness of life.

Mary Oliver writes (excerpt from “When Death Comes”):

When it’s over; I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

She says it so well: A bride married to amazement. A bridegroom taking the world into my arms. Loving life, loving the world, living in amazement.

In the 80s, when I was living in Oklahoma, I went each year to the Southwest UU Summer Institute (known as SWUUSI). It was held at Lake Texoma, a retreat center on the Texas/Oklahoma border. Each evening a group of women met at sunset by the lake. It was partially a consciousness-raising group, telling as much truth as we knew know about our own particular situation and committed to hearing one another. It was a ritual of appreciation for each other and for the earth. We celebrated ourselves as women in a world that was changing. And we also celebrated beauty, in each other and in the world around us. We’d look at the sun setting over the water and say, “How beautiful you are,” to the sunset. We’d look at each other and say, “How beautiful you are.” All these years later, when I see acts of beauty -- a bright blue swallow soaring at high speed above the yard and landing lightly in the mulberry tree, gray and black rainclouds with patches of butter-blue sky shining through -- I pause, and whisper, “How beautiful you are.” Each time I see an act of love, or hear a story of life spoken truly, or look out at this congregation following meditation, the sentence comes quietly to me in some form, sometimes as a question, “Do you know how beautiful you are?” The ritual of noticing beauty, of lighting up from the inside for beauty has continued with a life of its own in my life. William Blake, the English romantic, writes (in “Auguries of Innocence”): “To see the World in A Grain of Sand,/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour.” That’s how those summers felt. Their legacy is that my eyes see differently.

“How beautiful you are” is a statement that makes me take the beauty around me seriously. Spending a week saying that heartfelt sentence every day with others who meant it with all their hearts has, quite simply, changed the way I see. That sentence is charged with memory, with heart, with the meanings of all of us who meant it together. Hafiz, the 13th century mystic, says, “The impermanence of the body should give us great clarity.” In other words, our temporariness can wake us up, can help us sort things out, set things right, see what’s beautiful in this world and speak up for it.

Anne Lamott, in Travelling Mercies, describes complaining about her hair in a conversation with a friend who has just received a difficult diagnosis. Anne says her friend looked at her and said, “Annie, you really don’t have time for this.” Most of us don’t live with the immediacy of life and death. Otherwise we wouldn’t –perhaps-- be so consumed with our “bad hair days.”

A passage from the Bhagavad-Gita teaches that the greatest wonder of all is that while we know that everyone and everything else will die, we do not believe that we will. That was me on that Memorial Day weekend Sunday some 30 years ago; I sat there thinking, “What does this have to do with me?”

So, this is a sermon about life, about waking up, about beauty, about respect for the blink-of-an-eye that is a lifetime, and a deep love for the precious time we have. Not necessarily because of impermanence, though that may be what gets our attention, but because here we are, and this is it. Whatever else there may be -- and we can’t know, though we may individually have a faith and a belief that informs us -- this is what we know for sure: Here we are.

This is an optimistic sermon. And it’s also serious: it’s about life and death, after all. It’s Memorial Day weekend. A time set aside for remembering people who are no longer with us. It started in the Civil War as Decoration Day for union soldiers. After the First World War, it became a day to commemorate all those who have lost their lives in defense of this country. Now, we set the day aside for everyone, to bring flowers to gravesites, to note the passing of lives, to take a long weekend to celebrate life, as the first weekend of the summer season, with Labor Day weekend being the last, a kind of parentheses around the summer.

Today marks two months since my father’s death. One way I have commemorated his life is by thinking of what I have inherited from him: introspection, thoughtfulness, resistance, willingness to begin again. I am a continuation of his life, his and my mother’s. I look at pictures of the two of them when they were young. They had a whole world I wasn’t part of. They too had a time when everything was possible, when everything was in front of them.

My stepdaughter Jackie’s boyfriend Paul is interested in history. He gives me books to read because he knows I read a lot and because he likes to talk about books that mean a lot to him. I’ve read books he’s passed on to me, books that I never otherwise would have read, some of them about war. So, I’ve read D-Day; I’ve read Citizen Soldiers. And Paul and I talk. I skip the battle strategies and notice the relationships. The love the soldiers felt for one another, the afterword at the end of the books where the men and women now in their 80s are interviewed. They say they may never have felt so close to anyone as they did to each other in war, on that edge between life and death. Many of them dedicated the rest of their lives to constructing good things as an antidote to all the destruction they saw in war.

One aspect of beauty is what the Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls “a terrible beauty.” A struggle that makes meaning, a loss that breaks our heart, cracks us open and lets us see more than we ever could have: the earthquake, the tsunami, the hurricane, the death. These terrible beauties too are an inevitable part of life.

I think of others who have gone to that edge of terrible beauty. Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The marches, the beloved community, people’s willingness to go to that edge together, where something new could come. Civil Rights workers interviewed decades later say they weren’t afraid during the marches. They weren’t afraid because they were together, because they believed in what they were doing. There were times that stones were flying. A friend I met at Divinity School, from Louisville, marched as a child with her father, shoulder to shoulder with King. She reports that someone in the crowd threw a rock. Almost accidentally, King caught it in his hand. And those nearby caught their breath with relief. The Civil Rights movement counts as a time of terrible beauty, a time full of hope on a risky and dangerous edge.

Most of our lives are not lived on that edge, which is a good thing, because the human body pays a price for all those adrenalin surges. Brad Warner, punk rocker and Zen Buddhist priest, writes in Hardcore Zen that most of our lives are filled with the mundane, and says further that maybe more than 90% of our lives are ordinary times -- though I have no idea how that number could ever be measured and arrived at! Warner says that though we may seek peak moments, we can’t make them happen, or even expect to have very many of them in a whole lifetime. Our task is to live in the mundane, with alertness and good will and compassion. What we really have to work with, what we have plenty of time to practice with, is the everyday business of living. Taking care of what’s in front of us. Most of us won’t change the world, but we can change our worlds by paying attention to the everyday. As Warner puts it, to make the world a better place, we can begin by cleaning our rooms and telling funnier jokes.

We begin where we are. Gandhi and King began where they were, saw what they saw, did what they did. By taking care of the everyday we are better prepared for the edgier moments.

In our everyday lives, we are called to have the conversation with the world that only we can have; the one that’s true to us, true to this particular and unique spot in the universe that we occupy. And how do we find that conversation? We practice in our everyday lives. As Miles Davis, our great jazz musician, says, “Sometimes you have to play for a long time before you learn to play like yourself.”

Mary Oliver writes (excerpt from “Wild Geese”):

You do not have to be good.
You don’t have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

That’s the question: To know what we love. To let the soft animal of our body love what it loves. And if we don’t speak for what we love and see and know and believe, who will? Herman Hesse wrote, “I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.” As Hesse and many others remind us, it is we who are the ultimate determiners of what is true for us.

Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood, talks about learning to throw a baseball. She says she learned to do it “smack on target” when she “got” that she had to aim her whole self along with the ball. I ask myself: What have I aimed my whole self at, without holding back, without reservation? Where have you aimed your whole self without reservation? What is it that the soft animal of my body loves? What is the conversation that only I can have? It’s those places that call for our attention, that can surprise us, that give us clarity.

Earlier I mentioned consciousness raising groups, the group of women at SWUUSI from the 80s, who together saw beauty. Each transition of my life has had an accompanying bewilderment, a need to find out how others have navigated whatever new waters I find myself in. As a new mother, I sought other new parents; when I was newly divorced, I looked for others who had some wisdom about how to learn what I needed to know for my next steps. The same with returning to graduate school as a second-career adult – where were the others? What could we know together about the special circumstances of this transition? Again, with remarriage, with step-parenting, with adult children, with grandchildren. And now, with yet another career, with being a 60-year-old intern. Where are the others and what have they learned? And, of course, there are others. What about the unexpected changes as one ages? There’s so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that one day I would no longer be able to read a map without a magnifying glass. Such a simple thing. But I didn’t know it would happen to me. Others on the way can help me see, help me laugh. This is what it is. Here we are. We need each other.

One great learning of returning to graduate school in 1990, in my early forties was the recognition that if I needed to solve the world’s problems alone, I might as well give up now. If, instead we, in groups, share knowledge, ideas, inspirations, crazy dreams -- hope is there too. In the meantime, there’s always something useful to do: clean my room, tell funnier jokes.

I went home to western Pennsylvania for Mother’s Day. All of us came home. It was just six weeks after my father’s funeral. We wanted to be with my mother, whose health is fragile, and we wanted to be together. On Saturday, the women in the family went out for lunch. All of us mothers. I’m one of four sisters. As I looked around the table I realized how important it is to me that they all take good care of themselves, live lives that make sense to them, lives they are connected to, involved with, passionate about. And it’s important that I do that too. Somehow, the more each of us lives truly, the more all of us can be inspired. The whole boat stays afloat with all of us doing our job of living, of keeping it interesting. There we were, laughing, encouraging each other, attending to each other’s stories, saying in dozens of ways, I know you, I see you, I like you. Somehow, the more each of us can be, the more all of us are.

Last week Rev. Linda talked about the UU movement as one of optimism and inclusiveness, a movement that trusts that individuals can think for themselves and determine their own beliefs, a movement that is willing to come together in community and work with differences. Here at UUCC, we have some “rules” we’ve agreed to: For example, no one leaves alone at night. No one cleans up alone. No one welcomes newcomers alone. We strive to be mindful and helpful, with good will. You would not be here if that were not so. Somehow, the more each of us can be, the more all of us are. In a family, in a congregation, in a community. In June of 1967, the BBC commissioned the Beatles to write a song as a contribution from the UK for the first global telecast. The song, “All You Need is Love,” is credited to Lennon-McCartney, though Paul says most of the writing of that particular song was John’s work. In a book I read some years ago, the synergy between Lennon and McCartney was credited with making something new, that, perhaps, neither of them could have done alone. Each of them with talent and passion, both of them, along with the whole group, doing more than any single one of them could have done alone. “All You Need is Love” was written to include all people everywhere. It was heard globally by 350 million people on that telecast.

9 a.m. Constance Rudd will lead us in “All You Need is Love”
11 a.m. Choir sings “All You Need is Love.”