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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Feast on Your Life
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
November 25, 2007
I am the happy inheritor of my grandmother’s cedar lined hope chest. It came to me when she was downsizing her home, because she knew I had loved it when I was a child. It is made of a rich, dark wood, has a simple shape and her initials on the front: ES. My grandfather had given it to her before they were married in the mid-1930’s. When I was small and my grandmother opened it, the smell of cedar was overwhelming and exotic. She always pulled beautiful linens out of the chest, and as a small child I assumed it held vast stores of riches, and also possibly magic, which made my grandmother laugh every time she opened it for me. I was so hopeful and sure about what was in the chest, even though what I hoped for wasn’t there to be seen with anyone’s eyes.
Now the chest stands at the foot of my bed. The cedar inside is still fragrant, but over time the outside wood has become scratched and dull; a ball foot has detached and one of the hinges has pulled loose. For a long time I have thought that I’d call the furniture refinisher who has a shop on Washington St. right at the bottom of our street to come take a look and give me an estimate for repairs. He has a great reputation and I know if he were to take the job, my valued possession would be well taken care of.
Except that one day late last week I noticed that his shop has been completely cleared out and there’s a “for rent” sign in his old windows. Without warning, just within the past week, the shop suddenly closed and the refinisher has departed for parts unknown. I was surprised, and a little bit annoyed, and quite a bit concerned. What am I going to do now about my hope chest? Who is going to help me with this important project? Where am I going to find someone I can trust with something this significant?
Sound familiar? I don’t presume, but I can imagine that this might be somewhat similar to what it was like for you when you learned that I plan to leave the congregation at the end of June. Out of the blue, the very person you may have been planning to talk to and get advice or support about some important issue that’s been bugging you for awhile, the very person whom you’d imagined could help you with that special project has just said that she’s going to be leaving. So who, you may be wondering, just who exactly is going to help you now?
The good news is that I’m here for the next several months and I intend to spend that time working. And during the transition there are people outside the congregation who are ready to help if you ask them. Even more, we just had a lovely experience these past several days around the memorial service, where members of this congregation took really good care of one another. I suspect that if you keep doing that, this transition will go well.
I know you can do this because I have been comforted and bolstered by your caring and support for me, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your only questions about my departure have been, “is everything all right?” and “what are you going to do next?” The answers are “yes” and “I have no idea.” I’m not ill or in crisis or in any trouble; things are actually pretty darn good in the congregation and my personal life. There’s all the normal, regular issues and growing pains around here that let us know we’re alive and kicking. It’s always true that some things could be better. But it’s basically a good time around here with general good feelings and no major problems.
I have not made this decision lightly. And yet while I’m quite sad to be leaving when things are so good and moving forward in such good and exciting ways, I’m also very much at peace and feel that I’m doing the right thing. You are a wonderful congregation and you have a very exciting future. A minister and congregation are in partnership, and I sometimes imagine it as a dancing partnership. We dance pretty well together, you and I. But there are other possible dances that you might do. I think you’ve got tremendous potential to partner with some fabulous dancing partners in the future. When you do, I will be your biggest fan and cheerleader from afar as you go “dancing with the stars.”
But still, there is the question…why am I doing this? I think the best answer is “for spiritual reasons”. In the second reading this morning the poet describes a meeting between different parts of himself…perhaps the part of himself who has to make a stable living and take care of his family is greeting the part of himself who had been a banished artist. Maybe the part of himself who is Latino is meeting and welcoming the part of himself who is Anglo. Whatever the truth of his life, the poet greets a part of himself that had been banished or put on hold, and now he welcomes that part of himself home. “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored…” At the end of the poem this reunion is cause for a great celebration… “Sit. Feast on your life.”
A few weeks ago I mentioned James Hillman and his idea that many characters live inside what he calls our inner boardinghouse. He says we should let these characters talk to one another, and that we ignore them at our peril. Life has its own rhythm and pattern. At critical times when we listen deeply, when we really pay attention to our inner knowing, we find that we already know what we need to do next, because the residents of our inner boardinghouse have suggestions. These characters make themselves known to us through our dreams, through images that come up in conversation, in our writing, or sometimes while we’re daydreaming. We ignore these characters at our peril. But if we keep faith with them, acknowledge and welcome them, often a new hope and new possibility opens in front of us.
The poet Roger Housden tells the story of knowing that the life he had for fifty years in England was coming to an end. With this new knowledge came an urgent sense that he should go to America. Among other things, he had had a powerful dream of Botticelli’s Venus rising through the waves, offering him her shell. But in his dream Venus had a different face than the one Botticelli had painted. With sadness Housden knew that he had to end some of his relationships; this he did and then packed up and moved to the Pacific Northwest. Once he was in this country, he met a woman at a spiritual retreat and they quickly recognized one another as soul mates. As they were leaving the retreat, she gave him a scallop shell, and at that moment he realized that she was the woman whose face he had seen in his dream of Venus rising. They have been together ever since.
There is a Buddhist teaching that the instructions that an acorn receives that tell it to begin to grow actually are evoked by the future tree. Somehow, perhaps because time is irrelevant on certain levels and everything really is happening at once, it is the future that calls the seed into growth, into the shape and form it will become. If you try to follow this with linear, logical thinking it doesn’t work. If you follow it with intuitive reasoning you might have better luck.
I realized recently that I had always somewhat assumed that my middle age was going to be kind of bland and boring, that the most exciting part of my life was behind me. I’m discovering that nothing could be farther from the truth. We continue to develop and grow all our lives. But, we either allow growth and new life to happen, or we shut it down. If we shut it down, there’s cramping, confinement and the death of parts of ourselves. Then, instead of celebrating our wholeness at a feast, we end up burying parts of ourselves, perhaps with tedious, deadening routines, perhaps under unhealthy, unproductive behaviors.
In this morning’s first reading Rebecca Parker wrote about the disappointment and disillusionment that is rampant in our time. People arrive at our congregations she says, the modern equivalent of medieval “seekers and ranters.” They arrive with a longing to be listened to, heard and understood. These people, she says, have a tremendous religious longing for justice, and for love. They might arrive having just walked out of the ashes or fallen timbers of the broken promises and broken covenants in their lives. They might arrive disillusioned, full of grief, looking for a way out of the mean place where they’re stuck.
And yet, she says, if we can meet them at the door and welcome them in, what arrives for them and with them is new truth, a whole new revelation of truth, freedom and love. The very place of brokenness becomes the place where new life comes pouring in. What is required for this to happen is that someone has to be there to listen with out judgment, which is a form of love.
Part of the power of a congregation is its capacity to listen and respond to the world’s great need with skillful discipline and care. It takes practice…spiritual practice. When we do this we are offering service with love, which is the very definition of ministry. But when we follow our impulse to respond to needs in others with openness, compassion, respect and kindness, lives change—the other person’s life and our own.
There are processes through which a group of people can listen together for what wants to emerge into their shared life. In traditional religious language, listening to what wants to happen next is “listening for a call”. It’s the act of sitting like an acorn and listening for directions from the future that’s calling the oak tree into being. If this sounds like a fluffy thing to do, I’ll tell you that it’s fluffy like a gorilla. Listening for the call of what wants to happen next is sometimes baffling, sometimes frightening, sometimes annoying, sometimes overwhelming. And it is always incredibly powerful. When a sense of what wants to emerge resonates with enough people it becomes a powerful shared vision and mission.
This powerful potential is always present, whether it be in us as individuals or in groups such as a congregation. But potential is very difficult to comprehend. Moments of change are really important because they’re moments when the normal order is broken open and we can catch a good glimpse of the particulars. We’re then able to name and claim the vision and mission that resonate in a unique way for us. When the vision becomes uniquely our own, it satisfies in a way nothing else can. And this potential, this opportunity becomes like food at a feast for us. This possibility becomes the fuel we need, the power that causes the future to unfold around us, within us, through us, into new patterns.
The congregation is a hopeful place for spiritual seekers because it offers an antidote to the world’s abuse and dismissal. We’re living in a time when power is shifting in our culture; there is more power for elites than ever before. What do we want to say to this? The world is asking something of us in this moment. How do we want to respond? What do we want to offer to the seekers coming through the doors every week? Sometimes those seekers are not even strangers, they are us. Are we willing to see their sorrow, their grief, their anger and pain? Are we willing to see their hope and love and joy? Are we willing to see them truly, and recognize not only their terrible sorrows, disappointments and needs, but also their visions and dreams?
It’s risky. Doing so often touches and stirs up our own sorrow, or our own longing for a new way through life. Getting involved also can be messy; it might not go according to a time line. It might not go as planned. It might ask us to change, or grow or give in new ways.
I was driving home from church one day a couple months ago. It had been a good day, a pleasant day, a satisfying day and I was thinking about how, despite the terrible uncertainty and mess in the world, my life is pretty darn good. I was singing a song of thanks inside my heart as I drove along, “thank you for the ones I love, thank you for so much beauty; thank you for the abundance of color and music and texture and spice and flavor and love in my life.” And in the midst of this happy humming all of a sudden I heard a voice inside my mind. It was no voice I recognized, and it said in the neutral tone of a Zen master, “Did you imagine that I gave you all this for yourself alone?”
It was a very startling question…I had to concentrate on my driving because it was so unexpected I almost drove off the road. The voice didn’t sound like anyone or anything I’d ever known or imagined. It wasn’t an actual sound that I heard with my ears, so I haven’t worried that I’m losing it. If the voice was a taste it would be like water; colorless, odorless, tasteless. The voice I heard in my mind had so much of “no-voice” quality that I suspect it was actually my own voice asking my conscious self a question from another, less conscious part of myself. It didn’t so much trouble me as fascinate me, and I have continued to ponder this question…“Did you imagine that I gave you all this for yourself alone?”
Yet, as I have turned the question over from time to time, it seems to have done something to the acorn in my heart; it seems to have jump started a kind of growth that previously I had been able to ignore, or had told myself I could postpone until a more rational, more convenient time.
I am not happy about this. “Oh goody, I get to tell highly rational people that I hear big questions prompting my decision that could well have simmered along nicely until a more logical, convenient time…and now I get to cause those same people hardship and disappointment. Yippee!” I find consolation however, in knowing that in my life, disappointment has often been the broken place where what’s most real and essential, what’s new and unexpected, what’s deeply wonderful and liberating has emerged.
When I consider my grandmother’s hope chest, I believe I might find help for restoration among the people I know: perhaps a friend or family member will teach me how to refinish and restore it. Perhaps a fellow congregation member could show me what to do. If not, someone in the world surely has the skills, and I can find that person and pay them if I have to. I have lots of options. The chest will continue to evoke my memories of my grandmother, it will continue to provoke the possibility of magic and the mystery of what’s unknown. It might even evoke something wonderful in my granddaughters’ imaginations someday.
I have a similar confidence in the life of this congregation…that the support and help you need will be there as you go through this transition. And more, that at times while you and the seed of your future might be sorely provoked, you will also be invoked with the promise of a whole new life, of which currently you might only have caught the merest glimmer.
I know that there is a collective courage and kindness, strength and hope in this congregation, because I have experienced this with you. I also believe that there is solace, goodness and joy in your future. And that there is room in your future for people who are not yet here, who will arrive with longing and needs, with visions and new dreams.
My hope is that you will greet these people with elation, with a joyous welcome, and that you will invite them to sit and feast with you on the new life, new hope, new freedom and love that you discern and discover together. And that then, in turn, together, you take the power of your love out into the world.
Derek Walcott’s poem is “Love After Love.” Among other places, you can find it in Roger Housden’s, ten poems to change your life, Harmony Books, 2001.
Roger Housden tells his story in that same volume.
Rebecca Parker’s is quoted from her essay “What They Dreamed Be Ours To Do” found in Blessing the World, Skinner House, 2006.
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