A sermon for Advent by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
December 7, 2003
A couple of weeks ago I spoke of Harvest, the time when things are ripe and it's time to harvest it. There are moments of our lives for some small harvest; there are those few moments that are ripe for some major gathering in of the fruit of long periods of planting and laboring and waiting.
But most of the moments of our lives are planting times, watering times, waiting times, things not quite ripe.
I will not ask, have you ever waited. Everyone has waited, and wondered, felt sometimes the stagnancy and sometimes the dread of waiting.
If your religious background is Christian, you will recognize this season as Advent, and Advent is about that, really. Waiting. It comes from biblical stories composed by Jewish people living under a cruel Roman occupation. They placed their hope in a Messiah who would restore a former golden age. The Galilean teacher Jesus began to teach an entirely different vision of what this Kingdom was that they were supposed to be waiting for.
This is a funny thing. This waiting is not about the restoration of a former golden era. It never works. When things are tough, that is all we know how to do: wistfully to recall a better past.
It's hard to wait, and there is something in us that feels itself to be waiting because it is stirred by hope as well as by fear, something in us that wants to know how to wait, how to be with this time. But we wait. In a hopeful discontent in our private lives, and beyond that, we may feel the advent of some great spiritual renaissance that is slowly emerging from the ruins of our civilization.
There is within you and within me, sometimes hidden where we cannot see its operations, a seed of the self, and it unfolds. You may hope for more transitory things — a promotion or material gain, a change in your personal life. But that is not the deepest hope this season ignites within us, and it's not the hope I want to talk about. The holidays may turn to interpersonal catastrophes. The material gain isn't going to satisfy. Our deepest hopes and dreams have to do with something more essential: the unfolding of our selves.
Hope has to do with the self-transcending power of Nature.
Hope is nothing other than the very evolutionary transcendence that stirs in our breast and in all of Life and in everything that is, and that stirs into being that which must be. Hope is this hunger of ours for something more, for lives made whole and full, and it is our hunger for self-transcendence, because it is Nature itself striving to transcend itself, and we feel it.
It seems that Nature itself has evolved a life-form more ethically developed than itself! Nature does not mind wiping out whole cities with plagues or earthquakes, and no bird or tree or river shouts its protest. But when the human family feels the sting of brutality and violence, always there are those highly-evolved human beings who raise their voices in protest despite the threat to themselves, and so shift the course of history.
I was reading awhile back about the work of the mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum. He wanted to understand how it could be that patterns in this world — all kinds of patterns in all kinds of situations — seem to remain pretty much constant for a long time, and then shift to something quite different, with no apparent cause, and suddenly the world, or some microscopic part of it, is all different, turned on its head, and you don't know why and you can't believe it has happened.
When he put his great mind to all this he was heard talking in language like nonlinearity and phase transitions. He wanted to see the patterns nobody else had been able to see. He struggled for years. Once he spent two months almost nonstop with only two hours of sleep a day in a state of uncommon concentration, at an old computer terminal in Los Alamos National Laboratory. And one day it all came to him in the form of an image, a picture in his mind. When the scientific world was finally able to dare listen to him — which took awhile — the world had been given one of the most brilliant discoveries of chaos theory. For Mitchell Feigenbaum, the discovery was something like Vincent Van Gogh learning to look at nature and see the patterns, grasp what is essential, and sort that out from the details. When he knew how to see, he knew also that by waiting and watching in this enlightened way he would receive from nature a revelation. The meaning would come.1
When you can see that way, then you can understand. Then you know what it is that you are a part of, and you feel its movement, and you understand your place and what is going on. Until you can see that way, you may think nothing is going on and may believe that you are stuck; nothing will ever change;
or the change that overtakes you will bring terrors and confusion. You will not know how to wait. You will act in ways that cannot help because what you do will have no relationship to the larger processes in which your life is enveloped, or you will be paralyzed with hopelessness.
To wait. Do what there is for us to do, but we're waiting. No results to count or measure or inventory.
There is pain in that kind of waiting. It can be like the boredom of a long cue in an airport or pharmacy or bank, or it can be the dread of the unknown. It can hurt.
We may never have the brilliant insights of Mitchell Feigenbaum, or Goethe, who inspired him. They both learned a way of looking into the face of nature and seeing the patterns. But there is great wisdom — from Rumi to Jesus to Emerson — to say that every one of us can learn to see the patterns that count the most.
Rumi put it this way, in a little story he told:
A man came to Rumi and said, "Please God that I could go to the other world; there at least I could be at peace because the Creator is there." "What do you know about where He is?" answered Rumi. "Everything in all the worlds is in you; whatever you are hungering for, work for it here by yourself, for you are the microcosm."2
Jesus said simply, "The Kingdom of God is within you and around you."
And Emerson said
As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where [we cease and God] begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power.
Let [us], then, learn the revelation of all nature; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with [us]; that the sources of nature are in [our] own mind . . .
As for that scientist's breakthrough insights: What Feigenbaum came up with was a number, 4.6692016090. Harvard has web sites with computation engines and formula based on this number (Besides those, I found 92 sites). But it's quite useless to me; I cannot do the calculations, and if I could, nobody alive, certainly not I, could reduce the issues of my life to formulæ that could express them. That scientist has simply found a path to follow to further discovery, and they've got a bit more figuring to do before there will be an end to sickness and poverty and war and despair.
You may listen to Rumi and Jesus and Emerson and feel about the same degree of illumination you feel when you hear 4.6692016090.
But the computations required by their inspired words are easier. The human spirit can understand them.
It is essential to know what Rumi told his inquirer: "Everything in all the worlds is in you; whatever you are hungering for, work for it here by yourself, for you are the microcosm." That's the formula you need to know.
The essential thing to know is that the Commonwealth of God is within you, and you are within it, always, already, It's a matter of perception.
It is essential to know that the Highest dwells with us; that the sources of nature are in our own mind; that there no wall in the soul where our humanness ends and the Divine begins.
Then we can begin to perceive the patterns of Love. In our waiting and longing, we may be warmed by Love's hearth-fire. We may find communion with Life Itself. Sometimes there is dark silence, and fear. But the trained eye can discern the Kingdom, near at hand, always, already, and can discern the warm glow of the Love that is the adhesive power of Life Itself. There is no adequate language for this; you have to experience it for yourself.
And there are places like this where you can feel it palpably, where we may look up and out into the face and eyes of another and it radiates, melts your fears, gives you gifts of courage.
There are those who have learned to see the patterns of Love so vividly that the fear and hurt seem hardly to be factors in their lives at all; I cannot claim that. But I have known the moments of vision often enough; there has been enough light to discern a path; I know better than to think there is nothing there except what I can weigh and measure.
There are moments when the path is not only clear; it commands. We know it is a moment to act, to take another step, to speak. There's thunder, whirl-winds, storm and lightning: and something begins to move and shake, and it is clear in your soul that there is that which, far beyond any efforts of your own, rumbles and shakes from the core of being. You don't know what to call it or how to describe it but you know it, and you feel its flow in your life, and you know it as Love. It may invoke your energies; it may lead you to acts and choices that seem to those around you unaccountable and courageous.
The traditional observance of Advent is begins with the story of John the Baptist, who relied on the traditional, outworn explanations: a messiah, a singular savior, ruling a kingdom with armies and the crowned heads of kings and princes. He threw himself upon the old outworn dream, tried to restore the ancient kingdom, take what used to be, add water and stir and have it all come back, presto, but it didn't work, and his actions ended in chaos and more violence. Our lives may seem a sequence of ill-chosen moves. But maybe not. You may yet see the pattern that connects the dots; you may feel Love's call to the Next Step.
The first revelation is that something is germinating; something is moving beyond your range of vision. Do not despise the seething discontent. Do not be surprised if your life is disrupted. Do not be alarmed if you sometimes feel lost. If you know what is the nature of this quest, and if you have an inkling of what it is that draws us forward, and the preciousness of it, and if you know that the journey is our home — not the destination, — and if you dare to trust and even to love this journey, you will find, amid the discontent and the disruption and the discord with the world as it is and with our lives as they are—within all of these, and beyond them—you will find a joy more pure and more radiant than anything that glitters in the store windows or anything that anyone can sell or make.
This past week was World AIDS Day, and that reminds me of a line from Albert Camus' The Plague. Toward the end of the book, toward the end of the plague, comes this:
Some of them the plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form. Thus even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards.
The second revelation is a vision of the unseen Pattern, the greater Life that courses through our days and discontent and dreams, an enveloping Love that can warm us in the cold and whose great light can reveal a path. After all, Jesus' real point was that this longed-for Kingdom is not actually something you have to wait for at all. If you can see it, discern its patterns — it's here, always, already, here.
The third revelation is the gentle thunder that calls us to take the next step.
And Henry Thoreau:
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society . . . —
heard perchance
gnawing out now for years . . .
— may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial . . . furniture . . !
. . . Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn.
The light which puts out our eyes
is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn.
©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
We gather, today
all that we are
all that we have been
all that we might be
all that we hope
every hurt, every joy
Outside is the noise of the city
The wet snow
The cold wind
People passing, busy, hurrying on their way
Above us, though we cannot see it
The vast sky
And beyond it
The greater Vastness
The drama of the Universe of Life
May we be filled with Silence
Let us be filled with Emptiness
And in that Silence and Emptiness, know —
That we are part of all that is
Sharers of the Life of the Universe
And so we gather, in Silence and Emptiness
In astonished wonder
In reverent amazement
In compassion
In solidarity
In profound and wondering Love.
Let us be together in silence.
© 2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than [we have] ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed . . .
Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table [made] of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it;
which was heard gnawing out for several weeks,
hatched perchance by the heat of an urn.
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society . . . —
heard perchance
gnawing out now for years
by the astonished [human] family . . .
— may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial . . . furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!
. . . Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn.
The light which puts out our eyes
is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn.
Jane Hirshfield: The Door
A note waterfalls steadily
through us,
just below hearing.
Or this early light
streaming through dusty glass:
what enters, enters like that,
unstoppable gift.
And yet there is also the other,
the breath-space held between any call
and its answer —
. . . .
A little sabbath,
minnow whose brightness silvers past time.
The rest-note,
unwritten,
hinged between worlds,
that precedes change and allows it.