Life Issues – Page 6 – Dan Harper

Memories of Things Past

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2008 Daniel Harper.

Remembrances

On this day, Memorial Day, we take time to remember those who have died in the past year. We pause now to remember those from this church community who have died since Memorial Day in 2005; and we pause to remember those from our own lives who have died since Memorial Day in 2005.

In the past year, several members and friends of this congregation have died. I will read the names of members and friends of this church who died in the past year, followed by a moment of silent meditation:

Phyllis Grosswendt
Patricia Tansey
Philemon Pete Truesdale

In the past year, someone you knew may have died. If you would like, in a moment I’ll ask you to speak the name of that person, or those people, aloud; and you may say that name aloud at any time, when your heart moves you to do so, not worrying if someone else is also saying a name at the same time.

To say these names aloud is to keep alive the memory of that person. So it is that I invite you to say the name of persons you knew who have died since last May; or to sit in communal silence as any names are spoken….

We pause to remember the dead; may remembrance help to bring peace, may it help to heal. Amen.

Readings

The first reading this morning is Orphic Hymn no. 76, as translated in 1792 by Thomas Taylor. This is a hymn to Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory.

“The Fumigation from Frankincense.
The consort I invoke of Jove divine,
source of the holy, sweetly-speaking Nine;
Free from th’ oblivion of the fallen mind,
by whom the soul with intellect is join’d:
Reason’s increase, and thought to thee belong,
all-powerful, pleasant, vigilant, and strong:
‘Tis thine, to waken from lethargic rest
all thoughts deposited within the breast;
And nought neglecting, vigorous to excite
the mental eye from dark oblivion’s night.
Come, blessed power, thy mystic’s mem’ry wake
to holy rites, and Lethe’s fetters break.”

…

The second reading this morning is from Marcel Proust’s book Swann’s Way, as translated by Lydia Davis:

It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon [the past], all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect….

…One day in winter, as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather, this essence was not merely inside me, it was me. I had ceased to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come from — this powerful joy? I sense that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third that gives me a little less than the second. It is time for me to stop, the virtue of the drink seems to be diminishing. Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me….

[Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1. Trans. Lydia Davis, pp. 44-45.]

Sermon

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a holiday originated by the African American community of Charleston, South Carolina, as a way of remembering those who had died in the Civil War fighting to end slavery. Since its origins as a holiday meant to commemorate the Union soldiers of the Civil War, the scope of Memorial Day has broadened. It is now a day on which we commemorate all those family, friends, and loved ones who have died. The central purpose of Memorial Day is captured in its name: Memorial Day is a day to remember.

So it is that Memorial Day and religion overlap. One of the central functions of religion, and of religious organizations, is to help us remember. This is true on a very broad scale — for example, one of the main purposes of the Christian religion is to keep alive the memory of Jesus of Nazareth. This is true on the local level — part of what our church, First Unitarian in New Bedford, does is to keep alive the memories of what liberal religion has accomplished in New Bedford; which is why it is important for us to celebrate our 300th anniversary this year. And this is also true at the personal level — our religion can help us to remember key moments in our lives, moments like birth and marriage; and to remember key persons in our lives who have died.

The ancient Greeks personified memory into a minor goddess, the goddess Mnemosyne; her opposite was the goddess Lethe, the goddess of forgetfulness. As we heard in the first reading this morning, Mnemosyne was supposed to link the intellect with the soul; she was the goddess of reason and thoughtfulness; it was she who could break us free from the bonds of the dark oblivion of forgetfulness. Because of her ties to reason and thoughtfulness, I think of Mnemosyne as the Greek goddess who is of perhaps greatest interest to those of us who are religious liberals today. Memory links our souls, our spiritual selves, with our intellect and our reasoning selves.

1. A dozen years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet Barbara Marshman. A lifelong Universalist, Barbara became a religious educator, an ordained minister of religious education. She was perhaps the most creative and interesting religious educator I have known, and she had a deep insight into children.

Once I went to a workshop that Barbara led, where she said that her key to success was to ask children in her Sunday schools, “What do you remember?” Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools do not require children to memorize Bible verses, nor would we count our Sunday school a success if the children memorized lots of Bible verses; nor do we have formal testing, for we don’t require children to memorize facts about religion. We want children to learn how to lead religious lives, and from a pedagogical standpoint it’s an interesting problem to figure out how to test them to see if they’ve learned what we hope for them to learn. So pedagogically speaking, when Barbara Marshman asked children what they remembered, she was testing them to see if they had learned what we hope for them to learn. But asking children what they remember is more than some kind of test.

I remember the first time I tried asking a group of children what they remembered. It was a Memorial Day weekend, and I gathered together the few children who actually came to Sunday school and sat down with them and asked them what they remembered from a year at church. Of course, I anticipated that they would tell me things they had learned in their Sunday school classes. Well, it took a little while to explain to some of the younger children what I wanted, and to remind them that the church year started in September, and when September was. Then an eight-year old girl raised her hand and said, “Do we have to talk about the things we did in Sunday school, or can we talk about anything?” Somewhat surprised, I replied, “You can talk about anything, I suppose.” And then they began to raise their hands to tell me what they remembered from church. I still vividly remember that the first child who raised her hand remembered seeing a baby get dedicated during a church service. And I also remember that less than half the children remembered something they learned during Sunday school.

Over the years, I have continued to ask children what they remember from going to church, often on Memorial Day weekend. I still some notes I took a few years ago when I asked children this question at another church. Here are some of the things those children remembered from a year at that church: they remembered singing the doxology every week during the worship service; they remembered playing card games at an intergenerational potluck dinner; they remembered acting as an usher with their parents and greeting people coming into the worship service; they remembered lighting the flaming chalice during a worship service; they remembered participating in the no-rehearsal Christmas pageant; they remembered helping to take the offering during the worship service. What strikes me about what children remember is that they have the most vivid memories of participating in worship services, and they also have vivid memories of times when they are allowed to participate with adults in various church events. In short, one of the most important things children learn at church is that they are a part of a community.

Now these children also remembered specific church school lessons as well. But I have noticed that the lessons children seem to remember best are the lessons when they are doing something together with others. When we tell them a story, they may or may not remember that story; but if we help them to act out the story together, they are far more likely to remember it. They remember games, and they remember cooperative projects that they do together. Here again, the children are learning what it means to be a part of a religious community.

Barbara Marshman said to ask children what they remember about church, and what they seem to remember best is the communal aspects of church. To be entirely honest with you, I don’t think we Unitarian Universalists are very good at getting children to learn what is popularly known as “Bible literacy,” that is, characters and stories and facts from the Bible. Nor have we been very good at getting children to know much about world religions, nor much about Unitarian Universalist history. But in the past couple of decades, I think we have been very good at teaching children how they can be a vital part of a religious community, which is a far more difficult thing to teach them — and, I think, far more important in the long run. I don’t care as much about Bible literacy as I want children to know that this church is safe community for them; I want children to know that there are lots of caring adults out there besides their parents, adults who want them to succeed in becoming wonderful human beings. Those memories will shape them, shape them in positive ways, shape them for years to come in ways we can barely imagine.

The same is true of us adults, too. Think about your own religious past; and think about how those memories have shaped you; and think about how you can shape those memories as you move forward in your spiritual journey. And then think about the times this church has provided a safe community for you; a safe place to reflect on who you are; the times when this church has been a community which supported you as you strive to become the best person you can become.

To put it another way: we become our memories. Thus one of the most important religious acts is the act of shaping our memories, such that we turn ourselves towards wholeness and becoming the best persons we can become.

2. Part of moving towards wholeness is not just remembering, but also learning how to keep our memories from taking over our lives. An obvious example of this would be the person who has suffered serious grief, the worst grief you can imagine. It would be easy to let an unbearable grief take over your life; but letting grief take over your entire life is unlikely to lead towards spiritual wholeness. This is an extreme example, but there are less extreme examples.

In the second reading this morning, we heard a charming anecdote written by Marcel Proust. Proust tells us that one day when he was an adult, his mother served him tea with a little cake called a petite madeleine; he dipped the cake into his tea and when he tasted it, something he hadn’t tasted since childhood, that taste released a whole horde of childhood memories. Tastes and smells seem to prompt old memories; you’ll taste or smell something and suddenly you’re transported back in memory to another time. For Proust, this initial memory led him to start writing a massive six-volume novel, a project that took him the rest of his life to finish. The fact that Proust lived with his parents until they died, and never really went out on his own, and spent the last years of his life in a sound-proofed bedroom, may make us view him with a little bit of alarm: yes, he was a great artist, and yes he wrote great books, but I’m not sure I would want my memories to take over my life like that.

Yet this does happen to many of us. Sometimes our memories take over our lives. I don’t think it’s a good thing to have memories take over our lives; it’s just as bad as forgetting completely. So what I’d like to do is to talk with you for a bit about grief, and how memory and grief are linked together.

What happens when someone close to us dies? If you know someone close to you — a family member, friend, or loved one — is going to die, grieving might start even before that person is dead. When someone close to you does die, most people experience numbness for about three months. Of course, everyone is different, and there are no absolute rules. But for most of us, when someone dies, you’re numb, and you don’t feel much or think much or remember much. Because they are numb, some people make the mistake of thinking the grief is over, they no longer need to remember, and they can just get on with life.

Usually, after about three months of numbness, serious grieving sets in. More than one person reports that they think they’re doing fine when suddenly they start crying for no apparent reason — it’s not uncommon to be driving by yourself in the car, when suddenly you burst into tears; for some people the crying is so violent that they have to pull over to the side of the road. However it happens, the real deep grief begins. It is a peculiar state of affairs; as I have both witnessed it and experienced it, this deep grief mixes up recent memories, often of the last month or day of the loved one’s death, and much older memories. I believe this is may be because the pain of deep grief is so intense that the memories get all jumbled up.

Most people experience at least a year of deep grief when someone close to them dies, and then another year of serious grief when the memories really start to bubble up. Thus, grieving is a time to feel sad, and it is also a time to devote oneself to remembering, a time to let memories bubble up, a time to come to terms with memories. This intensive time spent remembering can and should be a time to deal with powerful memories; which is another way of saying, it is a time to deal with our deepest selves, and to grow spiritually and emotionally.

I want to be sure to acknowledge that there are other kinds of loss besides losing someone to death:– there’s the loss of innocence, there’s the loss of self, there’s the loss that comes with the end of a relationship. Each kind of loss requires a greater or lesser amount of grief. I am told that the death of one’s child leads to the greatest grief possible; but I have also seen other kinds of loss, the loss of innocence for example, lead to debilitating grief; so I refuse to predict or judge which loss will cause how much grief. I also want to acknowledge that loss and the memories that come with loss can be unmanageable, and more often than not we have to accept help from those around us in order to deal with grief, loss, and the associated memories.

I also wish to say that I worry when people get frozen in grief, loss, or memories. Unfortunately, the wider culture prompts us to become frozen in one of two ways. On the one hand, the surrounding culture tells us that we should ignore grief. On the other hand, the dominant Christian culture that obsesses on the death and execution of Jesus while ignoring his life can prompt us to cling to death or loss while ignoring life. Neither extreme is productive; both extremes are life-denying.

Thus it seems to me that a central purpose of a religious community should be to help us cherish our memories, while making sure we don’t get frozen in the past. On the grand scale, religion should help us remember a great religious prophet like Jesus, but above all religion should help us remember the living teachings of that prophet rather than the manner of his death. On the communal scale, religion should help us remember the whole story of our religious community — in our case, all three hundred years of our story — so that we may remember how our religious community has successfully lived out our values in the world, rather than dwelling on whatever defeats we may have suffered. Finally, on the personal scale, religion and religious community can help us remember the lives and deeds of those who went before us so that we may live out the best in their lives.

3. On the personal scale, one of the most important functions of a religious community is to help us remember the dead. To remember the dead is, of course, an intensely personal act. But it is also a communal matter. When we hold memorial services in this church, what we try to do above all is to remember the person who has died — that’s why we call it a memorial service. In other religious traditions, there are different customs: thus, in the dominant religious culture of our immediate area, it seems to be very important to have the dead body present during the funeral service, and it seems to be very important to talk about abstract beliefs in God; this is because in many religions what is most important is to focus on the fact of death, and relate that fact of death to belief in God and the afterlife. This is perfectly fine, but I prefer what our religious tradition generally does, which is to focus less on the fact of death and instead focus more on how that person lived his or her life; rather than focusing on one moment of death, we try to focus on a lifetime of memories.

And we do that in a communal setting. What is most powerful to me about our memorial services are the people of the religious community that show up, often at an inconvenient time, to bear witness to the memories. So it is that those memories take on a larger significance.

What we’re really doing at a memorial service is telling the story of someone who has just died. These stories are powerful, powerful things: these stories pass on the stored memories of other people; these stories pass on the accumulated wisdom of our religious community. And this, by the way, is what we’re doing with our children in the Sunday school: we are preparing them to take their place in the religious community, to become a part of this community of memory, so that they can pass along the stories to the next generation.

A trend that I have observed I find very encouraging : and that is the trend of asking people to tell their own stories before they die — preferably long before they die! I don’t know about you, but more than once I have walked out of a memorial service thinking, I wish I had known more about that person before she or he died. So I am encouraged when I see things like small groups ministries where people can tell their stories, or spiritual autobiography classes, or times in worship services where each week someone get two or three minutes to tell their own story.

Let me end by telling you a story about a Sunday school class from another church:

There was a Sunday school class for fifth and sixth graders. Three adults signed up to teach that Sunday school class, including one retired man who had never taught Sunday school before — he told me that the main reason he signed up was that he was trying to get over the death of his wife, who had died a year previously. Well, these three adults planned everything very carefully, and took their responsibilities very seriously, and they were all prepared on the opening day of Sunday school — and only one child showed up. They came to me afterwards, and said that maybe they had better let that one boy join another Sunday school class. But we asked him, and he said he had a pretty good time, and that he would be back. But the teachers had to change all their lesson plans, for they had planned for a big class. The retired man taught the next class, and he devoted the whole class to field grass, something he cared deeply about since he had been a botanist who spent his career studying field grass — of course, what he was really talking about was himself, he was telling that boy who he was. Time went on, and I discovered that the boy’s father was suffering from a debilitating disease that took about ten or fifteen years to kill. And at the end of the church year, that boy went to Sunday school just about every Sunday, and when we asked him what he remembered best about church that year, he said — the class when we talked about grass.

So we move forward through the ages, learning from the generations that precede us, bringing up the generations that follow us.

Healing

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2005 Daniel Harper.

Reading

The reading this morning is from a sermon by Theodore Parker, a sermon which almost split the Unitarians in the middle 19th C., by minimizing or denying the importance of the miracles of Jesus which are reported in the Christian scriptures. The sermon was called “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” and Parker wrote:

“Let us look at this matter a little more closely. In actual Christianity — that is, in that portion of Christianity which is preached and believed — there seem to have been, ever since the time of its earthly founder, two elements, the one transient, the other permanent. The one is the thought, the folly, the uncertain wisdom, the theological notions, the impiety of man; the other, the eternal truth of God. These two bear perhaps the same relation to each other that the phenomena of outward nature, such as sunshine and cloud, growth, decay, and reproduction, bear to the great law of nature, which underlies and supports them all. As in that case, more attention is commonly paid to the particular phenomena than to the general law; so in this case, more is generally given to the Transient in Christianity than to the Permanent therein.”

SERMON — “Healing”

If you had read our church’s newsletter, or our church’s Web site, you would have seen that I gave my sermon topic for today as “Forgiveness.” No doubt some of you actually came here this morning to hear me preach on forgiveness; and no doubt some people stayed at home so they wouldn’t have to hear me preach on forgiveness. Well, I started to prepare a sermon on forgiveness, but I didn’t get very far before it turned into a different sermon. Yet even though this isn’t quite the sermon that was advertised, I hope it will do nonetheless. And some Sunday, I promise you that I will return to the topic of forgiveness.

As I was preparing the sermon this week, I found myself thinking about something that happened late last winter, when I wound up at the beside of a man who was unconscious and who… but let me back up a little, and tell you a little bit about where I was late last winter.

Last year, I was serving as the interim associate minister with the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois. They were a congregation of down-to-earth, no-nonsense Midwesterners without an ounce of pretension. And they have long been a congregation of radicals and skeptics. The Geneva Unitarians took the word “God” out of their congregational covenant in the 1880’s, with the result that the congregational church in Geneva broke off having shared worship services with them in the 1880’s because, said the Congregationalists, the Unitarians couldn’t be trusted to actually believe in God. Even more radical, the Geneva Unitarians had three women ministers before 1910. In other words, they were and are typical Midwestern Unitarian radicals who have had no truck with the supernatural for over a century.

The current senior minister in Geneva is a woman named Lindsay Bates, a hard-headed New England Yankee who grew up in the Bridgewater Unitarian church. Like many of us New Englanders, Lindsay is plain-spoken to the point of being sharp-toungued. She does not tolerate sloppy thinking, and she’ll let you know when she thinks you’re not quite up to snuff. Which meant I liked her pretty well.

I was surprised, therefore, to learn that Lindsay was a certified Reiki master. I admit that I know next to nothing about Reiki, except that it is a kind of system of healing based on the old Chinese concept of “ch’i,” or the energy flow within a person. (I’m sure some of you know quite a bit about Reiki, and will be able to tell us more during social hour.) I don’t know much about Reiki, but it didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of Lindsay’ Bates’s personality. There were some members of the congregation who were also Reiki practitioners; and, since it is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, there were also those who thought the whole Reiki thing was a crock of beans.

Yet no matter what people thought of Reiki, there was this strong sense throughout the congregation that part of the business of the congregation was healing. Not just spiritual healing, or emotional healing, but physical healing as well. Lindsay was widely credited with one or two definite physical heaings (not that she’d make that claim herself). Now I realize that historically religions have been in the business of healing. But my sense has been that for the large part North American Unitarian Universalists feel that healing is a very small part of what we do in our congregations. Many of us don’t even pray, and we certainly don’t do anointing or laying-on-of-hands, or anything like that.

The Geneva church, however, placed some stock in the healing powers available at that church; even the ones who didn’t believe in Reiki. And as I thought about it, even a skeptic like me could think of some good and reasonable explanations for the repots of healing: coincidence; the mind-body connection we’re learning about; the reported power of prayer; and so on. And I found myself becoming more attuned to the possibility that even Unitarian Universalist congregations might have something to do with healing. Maybe I had missed something in the past. I was willing to keep an open mind.

One Sunday afternoon in late winter, we got two pastoral calls – crises, really – that needed the immediate attention of the ministers. A long-time member of the congregation died suddenly (but not unexpectedly), and it made the most sense that Lindsay, as the minister who had been there 28 years, should visit that family. And a man in the congregation had been in a terrible car accident, was in the Intensive Care Unit or ICU at a nearby hospital, having just come out of surgery. I’d spent some time doing volunteer chaplaincy in a hospital, so I went of the visit him.

I arrived at the hospital to find the family in shock. Only his wife had been allowed in to see him yet. She came out to get her children, and invited me to go with them into the ICU. He was still unconscious, completely unresponsive, and he looked pretty bad. His doctor came to talk with his wife; the doctor was pretty non-committal: He’d probably recover (probably!), he’d likely have some cognitive impairment, there was a good chance he’d wind up in a wheelchair or he’d probably need crutches or a cane for the rest of his life. All the nurse would say was that they had the best ICU around. It’s always very worrying to me when the doctors and nurses remain so noncommittal.

After the doctor left, I talked with the family. They wanted to pray (one never knows with Unitarian Universalists, because some of us don’t do that kind of prayer, or don’t pray at all). We gathered around the bed, they held his hands, and we did some praying together.

Then I thought it might be a good idea to do a little praying for healing – not something I ordinarily would do, but it was a part of that congregation’s culture. So I had his wife take his hand, and I took his hand, and we prayed in silence for a while — I emptied my mind of all thoughts, and just focused on healing.

And that was that. From then on, what I did was pretty conventional pastoral care and counseling. Much of pastoral counseling involves what are known in the trade as “active listening” and “presence.” Back in the 1950’s, psychologist Carl Rogers did research at the University of Chicago demonstrating that listening and just being present contribute to mental and emotional health, and the pastoral care and counseling I do is a kind of healing that draws from the research of Rogers and others. So that’s what I did, and after two hours at the hospital with this family, I went home.

When I got home, though, I wondered: when it comes to healing, what did my religion actually provide? I borrowed a few healing techniques from psychologists, true. And I thought then, as I have often thought: our liberal faith can claim to provide some relief from spiritual distress in times of accident, crisis, or illness; and that little bit is enough. There exist religious traditions which offer the certainty of healing –- physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual healing. We Unitarian Universalists do not deal in such certainties. We offer a “faith without certainty,” in the words of theologian Paul Rasor. We do not claim to have religious certainty of any kind; we know that we are limited beings and that we cannot ever know for sure about the mysteries of life and death, or of sickness and health. While you may feel that our religious uncertainty is not as comforting as you would like, I try to remember this: knowing that we are uncertain about many things is better by far than a certainty that doesn’t work in the end; consider what it would be like to pray to your God in the certainty that you will be healed, only to find your prayers don’t work; you pray for a loved one to recover and he or she doesn’t.

Religious certainty can back-fire, and I would rather accept the uncertainties that must come with my limited understanding as a limited being. I don’t want to pray that Lazarus is going to rise from the dead because odds are pretty good that when Lazarus is dead he’s going to stay dead.

At the same time, there is more than one kind of religious healing. We don’t have to ask for people to rise from the dead. We don’t have to ask for the cure of uncurable illness. There is the healing that comes after grief. If someone close to you dies, it is possible to become so burdened by the weight of grief that you are smothered by it and literally die of grief. I’ve seen it happen: one member of a couples dies, and the other, though in perfect health at first, dies within a year or two. Or if someone close to you dies, it is also possible to deny your grief, to the point where something inside you becomes frozen and you can never fully love again. Hatred and anger can consume us, when we find it impossible to forgive, leading to physical disease.

For all these: — grief, hatred, anger, and so on –- religion can provide healing. But this seems different than physical healing. Yes, I know body an mind are connected, are truly one, but I also know that a supernatural miraculous healing of physical illness requires a suspension of the generally accepted natural laws. I don’t need to believe in supernatural miracles of healing. But I do know that within ourselves we human beings to have the ability to heal ourselves; and perhaps to heal others. We get sick and somehow our immune system fights off the disease and we are well again; that is a true miracle. We get sick, and a doctor or nurse helps us to heal, sometimes with medical procedures and sometimes with just a good bedside manner; that’s a true miracle. We suffer from a broken heart, grieving over lost love, but with time we can heal and love again: another miracle.

That we heal at all is a kind of miracle; that we can promote healing in ourselves and in others is a miracle; these small miracles are enough, and help me be more understanding when the day inevitably comes when healing does not take place.

Last February, I stood by the man in the ICU, and I was convinced it was going to be one of those situations where complete healing does not take place; I was ready for him to make only a partial recovery. I left the hospital feeling down, worried about him and his family.

But he did recover. He recovered consciousness with all his cognitive faculties intact; after a couple of months he was able to walk without assistance, and has had essentially a complete physical recovery. His recovery is a kind of miracle.

Did our little beside prayer help effect that recovery? Perhaps it helped, but of course it’s more complex than that. He was in excellent physical condition before the accident, and that always betters the odds for recovery and healing. He was immediately surrounded by love and support, and that must have helped. His entire extended family came as soon as they heard he had been hurt; the church provided the family with casseroles and child care and rides; and as a result of all that support his immediate family were able to devote their time and attention to helping his healing. I think that the presence of all that love from friends and family and church must have had positive effect. We do not heal completely on our own. Doctors and nurses and primary caregivers promote healing, sometimes by what they do and sometimes by their mere presence. That’s why we visit people in hospitals: just the presence of a friend or a family member can promote healing; you don’t even have to say or do anything besides sit there.

I have come to believe that healing is one things that our Unitarian Universalist congregations can actually do pretty well. Now you and I know that churches don’t do everything well, and sometimes they can be frustrating places. You can wind up arguing and fighting with people at church, sometimes about minor matters. And you and I know that churches can be boring places at times. We come for that blast of inspiration but wind up with a dull sermon or music you don’t. Yet the core of what our congregation does well is it allows us to be with other people, to be present with other people. As when you visit someone in the hospital, healing can take place in churches just be present for one another; as we sit side by side with other people who care about truth and goodness. I’ve never been healed by sitting on a crowded subway car, so I know there’s something qualitatively different about sitting in a church: being in the presence of other people who are willing to be present for you, willing to sit near you while recognizing your human value and worth; recognizing that we heal each other, that we can be healed by each other.

We can come to church to be healed and to heal others by our presence: when we are in grief or in joy; when we are dying or sheltering new life; when we are embarking on a new relationship or ending one that has gone wrong. We come to church for healing. And while being a Reiki master might help some people, you don’t need to be a Reiki master; nor do we need miracles or supernatural explanations. All we have to do is show up, and be present. We need the caring presence of others to begin to promote our own healing; we can join in the collective caring presence of the congregation to help others heal.

That’s one of the main reasons to come to church, my friends: to heal ourselves; to help each other heal; that we may in turn begin to heal the world.

A Place To Call Home

Readings

I have one short reading this morning, by the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet, Ryokan.

Though travels
take me to
a different stopping place each night
the dream I dream is always
that same one of home.

SERMON — “A Place To Call Home”

I want to speak with you this morning about what it means to call a place home. No doubt I got interested in the topic of home because Imy partner and I have just moved for the third time in three years. But it was just by chance that last week I came across the poem by Ryokan:

Though travels
take me to
a different stopping place each night
the dream I dream is always
that same one of home.

To dream of a place we can call home:–

Even if you live all your life in the same place, it can seem as if you have a different stopping place each night; even if you travel continuously, each place you stay can feel like home.

Scientists who study the earliest human beings, and the earlier humanlike beings, speculate that our ancestors moved from place to place depending on the availability of food and water. In this place that we call home, the south coast of Massachusetts, the indigenous peoples that lived here before Europeans arrived spent winters in upland hunting grounds, moved to fertile ground to plant beans and corn and squashes, spent summers by the sea to fish and gather shellfish, moved back to their fields at harvest time, and ended the circle of the year by returning to the hunting grounds. Home for them might have meant the length of a river and the watershed it drained; or an annual round of fields and hunting grounds where ancestors got their food, places that would change slowly as the fertility of the soil waxed and waned or game animals moved in and out. Today we tend to think of home as a room or an apartment, or a small plot of ground in the city with a house, or a slightly larger plot of land in suburbia with a house. But home is more than a building, more than a house lot. When we call a place “home,” we mean something more complicated than that.

Ryokan, in his poem, says that when he is traveling with a different stopping place each night, the dream he dreams is always the dream of home. Some people try to tell us that we should be at home wherever we are, because wherever you are, there you are. Or that we should be at home in our own skins. Or that we should feel at home wherever we are. I have never been satisfied with any of these sayings, any more than I am staisfied by saying home is a few rooms where I sleep and watch television. You can be sure that Ryokan was not dreaming of a television set.

In common useage when we say “home,” oftentimes we are referring to a room or an apartment or a house where we go to sleep at night — after having watched some television of course. But if you really think about it, your home is more than that room or apartment or house. It’s not enough to have a room or three. If you walk through any suburban neighborhood you can see the houses where people try to make it enough: those are the houses with the rooms lit by the blue glow of a television set or video game. Televisions are marvelous inventions, and I do enjoy watching reruns of “Will and Grace” while I’m at home. I like having my familiar desk and dishes and chairs, too, but while all these thigns might make a place feel homelike, they aren’t home. Maybe we have to look farther afield to discover what home means.

A job or a workplace are often another place that becomes a sort of home to us. Work need not be paid employment. Henry Thoreau writes: “For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; suveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes….” I have done some of that work at times when I had insufficient paid employment; like Thoreau I have found that “my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.” But work is work whether you are paid for it or not.

Work is the way you contribute to the grand working of the cosmos. Work offers a second place in our lives. Even if you work at home, the work you do can make your house or apartment feel like a different place. Work also brings us into contact with a different set of people. You have a circle of family, housemates, neighbors, and friends that come and go in your house or apartment; and you often have a different circle of acquaintances, co-workers, customers, and friends that come in go in your world of work. Although it’s never quite that simple, since if you work in a family business or stay at home to raise children, you might see much the same circle of people at home and at work.

The place you live and the place you work are both parts of the place you call home. I am convinced we human beings need at least one more place in our lives. Two years ago, we were living in Oakland, California, and there was a Starbucks coffee shop a few blocks away from us. A group of men gathered there each evening, sitting outside when the weather was fine, and talking for hours in some language I did not recognize — a friend of ours said they were Eritrean. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Starbucks coffee shops, but that Starbucks in Oakland offered another place in the lives of those Eritrean men. I have no idea what they actually talked about; but for a price of mediocre coffee they could go and sit for hours at a time, reconnecting with old friends or striking up conversations with a new acquaintance.

Not that I think that going to a Starbucks coffee shop is going to make your life complete. We do need that place where we can go and have informal conversations with people outside the inner circle of family or housemates, conversations that stretch beyond the limits of the workplace. Those informal conversations take place at Starbucks, or at the mall, or on the edge of the soccer field while you’re watching kids play soccer, but those informal conversations are not quite enough.

In the times of our ancient, prehistoric ancestors, I like to imagine that we had still another place:– sitting in a circle around a fire at night. Sitting around that fire in the evening, we (or rather our ancestors) had time to talk with friends and family and neighbors. And that was also where we told the stories about where we came from, and who we are, and what the meaning of life might be. That was where we sang the old songs and chants together. It’s where children learned how to be adults by watching adults who were not their parents. It’s where we dreamed dreams and where we sometimes managed to share the great mysteries of being — not necessarily where we encountered the great mysteries of being, but where we shared those mysteries with others.

Unlike our ancient, prehistoric ancestors, we rarely sit around communal fires any more. But I believe our congregation fills much the same place in our lives today. Our congregation is, or should be, a place where we can sing the old songs (and maybe some new ones too), and ask the big questions about life, the universe, and everything; and share together something of the mysteries of life.

So you can see, in spite of the way we commonly use the word “home,” that home is more than, or should be more than, just some rooms in a building with a television set. Yes, we need a safe place to lay our heads at night, yes we need food and clothing besides, and maybe in the crazy postmodern age we need to watch “Will and Grace” before going to bed at night. Adding a workplace helps complete the picture of what a home is: we also need to contribute to the workings of the cosmos, however we may do that. And we need places where we can have those informal conversations with other people. But we also need that place by the ancestral fire, to hear the stories of olden times, to tell our own stories, to help nurture the children, to explore the great mysteries of the cosmos.

I want to point out something about these places that make up home, and it’s going to sound pretty obvious, but still needs to be pointed out. You can live in a room by yourself (and maybe a television set). You can work by yourself. But the ancestral fire has to have other people sitting around it. When you come to the proverbial ancestral fire to hear the stories of olden times, there pretty much has to be someone else there to tell the stories. When it’s time for you to tell your own story it really helps if there’s someone there to listen to you. When you face the great mysteries of life and death, you need to share those with other people.

Or to put it another way, when you explore the great mysteries of the cosmos you ahve to do it in conversation with, in partnership with, other human beings. You can’t do it alone. Our culture values the loners, the cranky individualists, the characters like John Wayne who seem to be totally self-sufficient. But the myth of the loner, the myth of John Wayne, is just fiction. The reality is that those who try to be totally self-sufficient wind up being less than fully human. We need other people in order to be fully ourselves.

So it is that we have our homes, the place where we lay our heads at night; and we have our work, where we have a hand in the workings of the cosmos; and we have a place around the ancestral fire. That’s why I keep going to church — because without that place around the ancestral fire, I don’t really have a place to call home.