Meditation -- based on "Maror", by Marge Piercy, from The Art of Blessing the Day
Maror is the bitter herb included on the Seder plate at Passover. It symbolizes the bitterness of slavery under the Egyptians and the bitterness of the long trek through the wilderness as the Israelites shaped themselves for a new life of freedom. I thought it appropriate for this time when so many of us have tasted gall as a result of the election. But the significance of the symbol is timeless and personal, as this poem by Marge Piercy reminds us.
A bitter cud.
Biting into the bitter, that bites back.
Of all the gross tastes, sweet and salty,
sour, we seek it the least.
We spit it out. But not tonight.
Tonight we must taste our bitterness.
Bite into our failure, suck its essence.
We were slaves in Egypt, the Haggadah
reminds us, and we still are,
but who enslaves us to what?
The bone we chew is our own.
Only I can tell myself where
I am caught, trapped, held
fast, bored but comfortable
in the box I know so well.
This is the moment for naming
that box, for feeling the walls,
for studying the dimensions
of the prison I must choose
to leave in my exodus of one.
I can join not anyone else,
I cannot walk out with you
until I measure my walls
then break them down.
Darkness into light.
Fear and silence into
cursing. The known
abandoned for something
new and frightening. Bitter
is the first taste of freedom.
Spirit of Love and Light,
The poet speaks to us on many levels -- personal, congregational, national.
I have heard so much questioning of our place and our methods recently. From every side comes a call to change in a different direction. Some voices tell us, Widen our values to embrace what others feel, change our language to make it more appealing, more accessible, more palatable. Move toward where others already are in order to draw them in. Risk change.
Alternatively, I hear the call of other voices telling us to sharpen our focus, be more clear about what we value, speak more honestly and prophetically. Stand up, so that those who already share our feelings will be able to find us. Risk rejection.
We struggle to understand our call.
We know we are in a box of some sort, and we are trying to measure it. In time we may break down the walls, and if the poet is correct, we will know some bitterness in that moment. May we also be ready to catch each other should we fall, and may we know the sweetness of having found the way.
Amen
Celebration in Music; Corner of the Sky, from Pippin
[PIPPIN]Everything has its seasonEverything has its timeShow me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhymeCats fit on the windowsillChildren fit in the snowWhy do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?Rivers belong where they can rambleEagles belong where they can flyI've got to be where my spirit can run freeGot to find my corner of the skyEvery man has his daydreamsEvery man has his goalPeople like the way dreams haveOf sticking to the soulThunderclouds have their lightningNightingales have their songAnd don't you see I want my life to be Something more than long....Rivers belong where they can rambleEagles belong where they can flyI've got to be where my spirit can run freeGot to find my corner of the skySo many men seem destined To settle for something smallBut I won't rest until I know I'll have it allSo don't ask where I'm goingJust listen when I'm goneAnd far away you'll hear me singingSoftly to the dawn:Rivers belong where they can rambleEagles belong where they can flyI've got to be where my spirit can run freeGot to find my corner of the sky
Readings:
Mary Oliver: The Summer Day
Who made the world?Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean--the one who has flung herself out of the grass,the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall downinto the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?
Michael Lerner: from The Democrats Need a Spiritual Lift
For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of middle income Americans have voted against their own economic interests to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of needs.
Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that "looking out for number one" has become the
common sense of our society, but they want a life that is about something more --- a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want their lives to have meaning --- and they respond to candidates who seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose.
Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its central theme that life has value because it is connected to some higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace.
Robert Frost: Two Tramps in Mudtime
Out of the mud two strangers cameAnd caught me splitting wood in the yard,And one of them put me off my aimBy hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"I knew pretty well why he dropped behindAnd let the other go on a way.I knew pretty well what he had in mind:He wanted to take my job for pay.
Good blocks of beech it was I split,As large around as the chopping block;And every piece I squarely hitFell splinterless as a cloven rock.The blows that a life of self-controlSpares to strike for the common goodThat day, giving a loose to my soul,I spent on the unimportant wood.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.You know how it is with an April dayWhen the sun is out and the wind is still,You're one month on in the middle of May.But if you so much as dare to speak,A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,A wind comes off a frozen peak,And you're two months back in the middle of March.
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alightAnd fronts the wind to unruffle a plumeHis song so pitched as not to exciteA single flower as yet to bloom.It is snowing a flake: and he half knewWinter was only playing possum.Except in color he isn't blue,But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.
The water for which we may have to lookIn summertime with a witching wand,In every wheel rut's now a brook,In every print of a hoof a pond.Be glad of water, but don't forgetThe lurking frost in the earth beneathThat will steal forth after the sun is setAnd show on the water its crystal teeth.
The time when most I loved my taskThese two must make me love it moreBy coming with what they came to ask.You'd think I never had felt beforeThe weight of an axhead poised aloft,The grip on earth of outspread feet.The life of muscles rocking softAnd smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Out of the woods two hulking tramps(From sleeping God knows where last night,But not long since in the lumber camps.)They thought all chopping was theirs of right.Men of the woods and lumberjacks,They judged me by their appropriate tool.Except as a fellow handled an ax,They had no way of knowing a fool.
Nothing on either side was said.They knew they had but to stay their stayAnd all their logic would fill my head:As that I had no right to playWith what was another man's work for gain.My right might be love but theirs was need.And where the two exist in twainTheirs was the better right - agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,My object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sight.Only where love and need are one,And the work is play for mortal stakes,Is the deed ever really doneFor heaven and the future's sakes.
Sermon: "Two Tramps in Mudtime" Revisited: Vocation and Fulfillment
-- Rev. Dennis Daniel
I apologize to those of you who came this morning expecting to hear me speak on "How? Then Again, Why?" This was a topic I thought up at the end of the summer. When I looked at it a few weeks ago, I decided it was too heady. I didn't want to deal with it right now. So I have consigned that topic to the possible sermons pile, and have decided instead to speak about finding fulfillment, specifically finding fulfillment through the call to a vocation, a topic that seems more appropriate to this time of taking stock and refocusing.
The question of call or vocation is perpetually of interest to professional religious, because we wouldn't have chosen this life if we hadn't experienced some sort of call to it. Vocation is more than a career path, like going into computers twenty years ago because they seemed to be the wave of the future. Instead, vocation involves a sense of inner harmony. Those who experience a call to a particular vocation know that is the work they are meant to be doing.
The question of vocation carries some significance for us in this church right now because we are in the initial stages of developing a program for lay ministry, trying to identify and train people who have experienced a call to service within the congregation, but who are not seeking a professional role. In fact, lay ministry offers not just a way of serving and being recognized, but also a path to growth, being stretched and deepened by serving the needs of the church and its members.
The question of vocation has significance for other reasons as well. I notice the many shifts and passages being experienced by church members: layoffs, squeeze-outs, buy-outs, early retirements, career assessments, well-earned retirements. Each offers an opportunity for discerning a fulfilling direction, finding our own corner of the sky, discovering heart's ease, learning one's bliss, shaping life around meaningful work. I see discerning one's vocation as a way out of the emotional and spiritual stuckness that so many of us feel. And I see it as a way of figuring out how to do good work in a broken world.
Sometimes I will ask a person I have just met, what do you do to keep body and soul separate. The question usually generates a double take. But I ask it knowing that for many people, the work they do does not give them fulfillment. It just pays the bills. Feeding the soul happens somewhere else, if it happens at all. And for many, work subjects them to such aggravation that the soul is depleted beyond the possibility of replenishment.
The question for discernment of a vocation needs to be, what can I do that will keep body and soul together, not in the sense of prolonging life but in the sense of providing a deep satisfaction, so that at the end of life one can say, I have spent myself well.
It's also possible to be doing the right work but feeling constrained by the mores of the organization. In her book, My Grandfather's Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen tells of a group of medical professionals who were meeting with her to enrich their appreciation of the work they did. She had them sit around a large sand tray and choose from hundreds of toys and other objects she has accumulated over the years, shelf on shelf of them. They may take whatever they want, but must use whatever they take. Their task is to arrange the objects they have chosen in front of them on the sand, and then explain to the group what each piece, and the entire array of objects, symbolizes for them.
One young woman, a nursing administrator named Marie, chose a handful of objects but quickly hid one of them beneath her chair. The facilitator noticed the movement but didn't comment on it. She waited to see what would happen. When the young woman's turn came, she explained the value she had placed on the several things in front of her, then told the group there was one more. She asked everyone to close their eyes for a moment while she brought it out.
When they all opened their eyes they saw a thin white candle standing upright in the sand. The facilitator handed her a box of matches. She sat holding the matches for a long time, then lit the candle. Her voice was emotional as she explained, "This is the part of me that no one ever gets to see."
A while later the woman sitting next to her, who had also chosen a candle as one of her objects, reached over and lit her candle from Marie's. As she did so, Marie began to weep. Thinking that she might have invaded Marie's personal space, the woman started to apologize.
Marie told her that she need not worry. Her tears were due to a sudden learning. The group she worked with was so jaded, so cynical, so competitive, that she never felt that she could be completely open with them. She always felt that she had to protect and hide her vulnerability and her passion. Only her patients saw that she really cared. When her neighbor lit a candle from her own, Marie suddenly understood that the time had come for her to stop hiding. Her work was holy to her. It was her calling. The time had come for her to be who she really was. Perhaps others who had also been hiding would learn from her that it was safe to be more transparent.
I think each of us has such a light inside us that we may never feel safe enough to show. That can even happen in church. In some churches it's not okay to express unbelief regarding basic tenets of the faith. In some UU churches it's not okay to express belief in God, or even worse, in Jesus. But I have learned over the years that people who have maintained a protective silence around their relationship with God for years have experienced a feeling of relief when someone else in the congregation has voiced similar ideas. All of this contributes to a sense of vocation, of rightness, of harmony between head and heart and hand.
Parts of ourselves never come into the work we do for pay. Such was my own experience. I worked for seventeen years as a motion picture film lab technician. At one time of another I developed film, printed it, cut negatives, made printing masters, and assigned light values to each scene as it was printed so that the finished product didn't show sudden shifts in color or intensity that were not planned by the director. The work involved long hours working in almost total darkness or staring through a magnifying lense into a light box. I use to get terrible headaches. And almost every job was treated as an expedite. Production companies relied on the lab to cover for their mistakes in shooting and in scheduling. But the pay was good. I lived well and I was able to save substantial amounts of money.
I was known to the other employees as a reader. I always had a book with me, but very seldom did anyone want to talk about what I was reading. One man, however, who was a writer, once asked me if I didn't feel an obligation to give back some of what I had taken in from all my reading. At the time I could only claim that I wasn't ready.
But so much of me was not being used. The church became the place where I came alive. I loved teaching in Sunday school, leading children's worship, planning holiday festivities, eventually serving on the Worship Committee and helping with adult worship once a month. Avocation and vocation were not at all congruent.
In time, I was able to sell a piece of property in Hollywood that I had fixed up for a significant profit. I decided to give myself a sabbatical. In twenty years of working, I had never had more that two weeks of vacation. I needed some time to myself. I bought another distressed property and set to work on it, but I kept enough money aside to live on for six months, while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was thinking that I might make a living by fixing up old houses and reselling them, but I wasn't yet sure.
It didn't take anywhere near that long to get an answer. One day, a few weeks into my new project, I was sitting on the floor, installing wiremold along the baseboards of the living room, listening to the radio. I suspect I was listening to the Pacifica station in Los Angeles, which is not good for mental health. Pacifica reports so much that is going wrong in the world that it's very easy to lapse into despair. My heart was sinking into Pacifica Angst, despairing of even finding a handbasket big enough to carry all those troubles, when something a commentator said made me come to attention. I'm sorry to say that I don't remember the words I heard, but my reaction was, Hey, I could try to mobilize people to work together to solve problems, and in order to do that, I would have to preach. I could preach. I would preach. Within a few months I was enrolled in seminary and studying Hebrew. (It was a requirement.) Simultaneously, I began building a relationship with the UU congregation near my seminary. Ernie Howard, the minister there, invited me to participate in a sort of apprentice mode.
I began to feel that I had at last found my path. I devoted more and more time to church work, taught, preached, met with committees, entered into the social life of the congregation. Ernie taught me how to structure a wedding and how to conduct a wedding rehearsal. He had me sit in while he interviewed a family regarding a memorial service. And he met with me every week to talk about ministry. He was a wonderful mentor, and he affirmed my call. I have been actively engaged in ministry of one form or another for twenty-four years now. Most of that time I have even been paid. I can't conceive of doing anything else. Oh, there are moments of frustration when I ask why I ever went into this crazy business, but that's just venting. I really wouldn't give it up. I still feel myself growing in ministry almost every week. Why would I want to do anything else?
I was fortunate. I had enough money to do what I had finally chosen to do. I didn't have to worry about need getting in the way of love, to borrow Robert Frost's words. But for most of us, those two are in constant tension. What we want to do gets set aside because of the need for income, or reputation, or status, or loyalty. It takes special circumstances or special courage or a sudden change in our life expectations to push us into realignment. Keeping head, heart, and hand in harmony is never easy. But it is the goal.
Over the last couple of weeks I have talked to several people in this congregation and elsewhere about their choice of vocation. I spoke with people who have left professional careers in law or civil service to pursue elementary school teaching, or sales, or work as a handyman, because they felt pushed out by the tensions of the job they had been doing and they trusted their aptitude for something they had always enjoyed. For each of them, the change in career was like a call that they could finally answer because they were ready for it. As Pippin put it, dreams have a way of sticking to the soul. The change may have entailed considerable financial cost at first, but they had found a place where they could thrive spiritually, where before they were making time while making money that didn't allow them the possibility of doing the things that made them happy.
And I have spoken to people who are in the midst of a discernment process right now, growing into second careers but not yet certain where their hearts lie. They have direction but haven't yet decided on which of several possible paths to step out. For each of them the important question is not where do I want to go, but how far do I need to go to feel fulfilled and to be able to do good work.
And I have spoken with people who truly feel fulfilled by the work they do. "This is what I was meant to be doing," they told me. This is what my life was preparing me for. Although one person hedged a little. He told me, "this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now," leaving open the possibility of further developments in the future. For some of the people I interviewed, there was even an element of spiritual truth to their vocational choices. They could speak of being called.
Roman Catholic writings on discerning a vocation start with the question, "What is your relationship with God?" They go on to discuss whether one might have a vocation for ordained ministry or for marriage. They understand a vocation for marriage to mean special gifts for intimacy, rather than questions of sexuality. I very much like the idea that marriage is a vocation, a way of finding oneself and growing spiritually. But the central question for Catholics remains, how may I serve God, regardless of the career I choose.
I recommend the question to all who hear my voice today. To use the language of Michael Lerner, how can we create a connection to some higher meaning than our success in the marketplace. How can the work I do add to the fairness, the compassion, the general fulfillment in the world, the peace and harmony of the world, the health of the world. What can I do to mend a broken creation. How may I play the part of the tiger who feeds the hungry fox, in the old Hindu story, rather than that of the fox who waits to be fed?
That's the flame at the top of the candle, that sense that this is my part to play; this is what life is asking of me; this is who I really am.
Stewardship Story -- DUI -- Rev. Daniel
From the state where drinking and driving is considered a sport, comes a true story from Texas, although I've also seen it placed in Australia, so it may just be apocryphal.
Recently a routine police patrol parked outside a local neighborhood bar. Late in the evening the officer noticed a man leaving the bar so intoxicated that he could barely walk. The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes with the officer quietly observing.
After what seemed an eternity and trying his keys on five different vehicles, the man managed to find his own car which he fell into. He was there for a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off. Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off (it was a dry night), flicked the hazard flasher on and off, tooted the horn and then switched on the lights. He moved the vehicle forward a few inches, reversed a little and then remained stationary for a few more minutes as more patrons left in their vehicles. At last he pulled out of the parking lot and started to drive slowly down the street.
The police officer, having patiently waited all this time, now started up his patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over and carried out a breathalyzer test. To his amazement the breathalyzer indicated no evidence of the man having consumed alcohol at all!
Dumbfounded, the officer said "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the Police station. This breathalyzer equipment must be broken."
"I doubt it." said the man, "I haven't been drinking. Tonight I'm the designated decoy."
Such comradery! Yet it is possible for a group of people to create a sense of solidarity without the heavy drinking. We have an example right here. We stick together, look out for one another, pitch in when needed, share resources, and enjoy each other's company. We also contribute generously to the costs of running the church, and to other causes which the church supports. Why, I'm sure that if one of our number were chosen to be designated decoy, the money that person didn't spend on booze that night would show up in the collection basket the next morning, don't you think?
Would the ushers please receive this morning's offering now. And as the baskets are passing among you, please remember to add $2 to your contribution so we can create the cushion we need for our budget.