A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 8, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 8, 2004
Shakespeare had words for winter. "Barren winter, and his wrathful nipping cold."
The short days, days and weeks of ice and slush and grey, prolonged darkness. The cold. The naked, ice-encrusted earth.
It is winter and everywhere about us there is a starkness you sometimes feel in your soul.
We had dreams. And now we must face the possibility that the promise of our lives, or the potential of much of this human race — may lie fallow for awhile.
Maybe for someone here today, that is how your life feels now.
Stalled, off-line, made to lie fallow.
There are seasons for growth, for progress, for harvest; and there are fallow times. The growing times and harvest times are exhilarating: they are times in human affairs when things can be done that would be at other times impossible. These are the times when our lives seem full and fulfilled, when there is an opening to act in such a way that our selves seem to expand to worlds and it all feels right and complete.
And then there are the fallow times. Is anything happening? Is anything possible? Must all that we dreamed remain a dream without possibility of accomplishment?
A stark and barren field. Or — if I may shift the imagery — maybe a stark emptiness of the sea. I have crossed the sea a few times to escape for awhile the busyness of my usual life. Of course, I crossed the sea at 35,000 feet above it.
Two American ministers, Samuels Johnson and Longfellow, shared a sabbatical in the 1840s, and their Atlantic crossing was more interesting. Johnson describes a real sea-voyage, dependent on wind and tides, weeks at sea without the benefit of British Airways, but you don't have to cross the sea to have this experience. There are periods of our lives that feel like this. Samuel Johnson writes:
Cross the Atlantic, and you shall know how far the ocean can carry this function of breaking spells, and renovating by surprise. The sea voyage is a stream of oblivion. It devastates the mind; vacates memory; sweeps away tradition, fiction, routine, and blind belief; scatters fixed moods and haunting sorrows; takes you from your very self. You shall not think, nor study, nor grieve, nor will, beneath this heavy hand of the sea. That old personality of yours, that looked so real, suffers a "sea change;" for you are drawn apart, as by ten thousand magnets, dissipated on this restless, heaving space, and can but wait a resurrection in some new and wondrous form, on some virgin shore.1
The wondrous shore will appear; it will. But in the meantime. Spells are broken by the emptiness. Emptiness: a stream of oblivion, devastating the mind; vacating memory; sweeping away tradition, fiction, routine, and blind belief; scattering fixed moods and haunting sorrows; taking you from your very self. Your "sea change:" be drawn apart, await a resurrection in some new and wondrous form, on some virgin shore.
When I lived in Bangor, Maine, on Fridays, my day off, I used to drive along the Penobscot River, from Bangor to Stockton Springs, for the joy of its beauty. But in February, around Winter Haven, the fecund shores admired by the summer tourists for their lavish vegetation, were seen to be flat, featureless ice flows, giant sheets of frozen grey, cold and dead and flat. Its stark emptiness, I tell you, affected me as much as the splendor of summer's green life. The sight of it went right to someplace at the core of my being. It was that same mind-devastating stream of oblivion that sweeps away tradition, fiction, routine, and blind belief.
In the Spring it always re-created itself, in time to show the procession of visitors its extravagant profusion of life. But I remember far better the haunting aspect of it in February.
There is something about times like that.
It is right and appropriate that we should mourn our losses and lost opportunities. But there is a way of mourning that honors what is lost and gives it a new and better life. There are the times when nothing grows, when the ground is frozen, the landscape bleak. Or when the sea seems endless. Maybe your life just seems stalled, dead in the water.
But here we are. We must figure out how to be here.
We idealize the state we think we ought to inhabit. But the day brings different conditions that we thought ideal.
This reminds me of another myth of an ideal place that was blown apart by 19th-century science.
For ages, people cherished myths about the ocean deeps. They were unfathomable: — it was thought; and heated by earth-fires, and perfectly still — an ideal place in the imagination. But nineteenth-century science found otherwise. The dreamed ideal turned out not to exist. The sea was only so deep; v and it isn't warm, but about the freezing point of water; and instead of perfect calm and peace, there were found to be extremely powerful currents. Ancient dreams were rebuked by the facts of existence. But there was a surprise in this. As the new science blew away an ancient belief, it was found that these unexpected conditions, so far from the imagined ideal, were what made possible the existence of life in the hidden floors of nature.
It is not always in the most comfortable place, the place we'd wanted to be, where we find our own voice, do our best work, open the pores of our being to the deepest currents.
Forgive my mixing of metaphors: but a barren field and a winter sea both seem somehow to evoke what I am talking about. So let me give you another passage from Samuel Johnson — who was an authority on world religions — about the sea:
For Hindu, Greek, and Hebrew, out of heaving deluge-waters, come the good men, in saving arks, to repeople the desert earth. Out of ocean, after the "Twilight" of the Norse gods, and their ending of the world, rise these fresh isles, where the new race finds the old dice of destiny unharmed in springing grass.
He speaks of an ancient Norse myth about the sea. There was a very wise god named Mimir, who was held hostage by rival gods in the farthest part of the sea, and from that place deep in the farthest sea grew the great world-tree that supported the Universe. The great god Odin went to the farthest sea to drink from those waters to gain his wisdom. Odin did something even more astonishing: he sacrificed one of his eyes there, paying the price of the sight of one eye for what Johnson calls "a larger and better knowledge, . . . an all-compensating light."
Is there some wisdom, some strength of soul, to be found in the fallow time, in the place that feels like the farthest sea?
I think of how others have used such times: those imprisoned, writing some of the best, most revolutionary works: Gandhi, Havel, Bonhoeffer, Mandela. Those, less dramatically, who used the fallow times to think deeply, to plan carefully, to lay the foundations of a later work, to make a local start to something that would later spread like wildfire.
We've passed the Christmas and Chanukah season with its light and laughter and joy and all that sort of thing. But eventually the lights on Main Street are turned off: and in our lives — for this light there is a necessary corollary of darkness, and it is reasonable to expect that if you experience the light and the joy, you also experience the corollary, the dark —and that is where to begin. You may have been there: remember that now, don't forget. You may be there now: be there now. You may anticipate that in the dying and rising cycles of our lives you will be there again.
How does this happen? What happens after the harvest when the fields lie bare? Does anything happen?
The quiet dark, the bare field, the farthest ocean depth — these are the places of birth and creation.
Our own religious movement had a fallow season for quite a few years. And in the United Kingdom, we're still in decline. A fallow time —
You can walk around the Unitarian Universalist holy city of Boston and I can show you condominiums, parking garages, and Baptist churches that were built to be home to Unitarian and Universalist congregations. Around the year 1900 there were forty Unitarian and Universalist congregations listed in the Directory just in Boston.
At one time, the Universalist Church in America was the third largest denomination in the United States. And then, the decline began, and it reached a terrible pace during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
In the United States, the mainline churches are still declining. Only the Fundamentalist Christians are growing — oh yes, and the Unitarian Universalists. We have grown every year for 18 of the past 19 years or so. Not fast, mind you, but something has changed. But why this turnaround?
In part, the answer is that in the dark, disheartening time when it looked pretty hopeless, something was happening, in the souls of individual people and the soul of the society. After all, human beings are, by nature, religious.
The other part of the answer has to do with our ourselves — our leadership, the heart and soul of our religious movement. Something shifted here, too.
For many years, attending a Unitarian Universalist worship service in the United States had gotten to be like a visit to a lecture hall where nobody wanted to admit to being religious; confess to any spiritual hunger.
We couldn't seem to figure out what Unitarian Universalist spirituality could possibly be. We were sure about what we didn't believe, but it kind of ended there. And then we seemed to be sinking to the bottom, and there we gained a second sight, "a larger and better knowledge, . . . an all-compensating light."
It is important to be clear about what you don't believe. That is like a beginning. It's like the turning over of the earth, a dying so that new life can come. And the life that came is more sound, more deeply rooted; found deep resources of the spirit. We found in our own tradition stories worthy to be our scriptures, oracles as fine as anything St. Paul ever uttered. We had Emerson and Channing and Olympia Brown, and prophets and poets in abundance. We had the great religious and wisdom traditions of the world. We had a new and better science that had no quarrel with a newer and more informed spirituality. But most of all, in that fallow time, we outgrew our embarrasment about being religious.
The human spirit can grow in the dark, and cold, and winter, and it may not appear that anything is happening. But I say to you, let us undertake this work, and not be ashamed to do it.
If we use well the fallow times, the times that feel like the farthest, deepest sea — if we think new thoughts, see bolder visions, dare what the times demand — history will need us. And history will require that we be ready.
Which brings me round to mind Sam Keen, and his little book Beginnings Without End.3 He says:
"Human life comes from the humus, that "brown or black complex and varying material formed by the partial decomposition of vegetable or animal matter; the organic portion of soil." To be human is to remain humble, rooted in a past that is always dying, and to flower into some unknown future. We are always ending and beginning at the same time.
"Begin with an ending, a death, a failure. In a crisis old patterns don't work anymore. . . . I must face the soft feelings of grief and confusion. I must remain vulnerable to the trembling.
"To get to the Kingdom of the Sun, learn to be at home in the dark. . . .
"To move toward Spring, live through midwinter. Invite awareness. Open your eyes to your blindness. Feel deadened nerves. Look for death (gaining on you) just a step behind nervous preoccupation. Look for signs of defeat in fallen shoulders and collapsed chest. Look for despair in the short, anxious rhythm of breathing. Look for grief in the breath that catches in the hollow of the chest. Look for depression in the dullness of the eyes and the blues in the night. Look for resignation in the absence of desire. . . .
"Begin with the end. . . . Death lurks beneath the symbols of my security, the grasping I call love, the bondage I call commitment, the frenzy I call creativity. Death hides behind bushes of my consciousness. He tricks me into fighting the wrong enemy. . . ."
And then — then, Sam Keen says —
"There is a moment in the downward spiral of any "negative" emotion when an escape route opens up. Stop running away from the dreaded thing. Turn slowly. Face it. Walk deeper into the anxiety and know the pain. Cease resisting. Breathe deeply. . . . Listen. Be attentive to the voice of the pain. Invite it to speak to you about your life.
"Where I tremble I find the lost scent of the sacred. At the raw edge of fear and desire I face the unknown mystery. Near the site of the fear and trembling is a burning bush. . . . When did I tremble last? . . .
"Pay attention to the holes. It is in the empty spaces — lacunae, vacuums, interstices, pauses, voids, black holes in space — that new things begin. Creativity is born from silence. Novelty comes from the unexplored spaces, the badlands.
The hole in the egois where the holy
flows in and out . . ."
It is closer than your breath. It is here. It is now. This Inspiration, this Light, this Love, this great power, has no cause. It just is. It is what remains when everything else is gone, when all the clutter is cleared away. We need only recognize where we are, a fallow field, an oceanic oblivion that clears away the clutter,
It halts the comfortable reliance on authority and past experience, the low-quality expectations, the limited thinking and bad thinking.
It can halt the hurt of past injuries, the fear of whatever we have been taught to fear.
May we, somehow, in this season, find the space, and the silence, or the desperation, or the abandon — may we find the space to let go and die so that we might live; so that the New might come to us.
I
To get to the Kingdom of the Sun, learn to be at home in the dark. . . . To move toward Spring, live through midwinter. Open your eyes to your blindness. Feel deadened nerves. Look for death (gaining on you) just a step behind nervous preoccupation.
Begin with an ending, a death, a failure. In a crisis old patterns don't work anymore. . . . I must face the soft feelings of grief and confusion. I must remain vulnerable to the trembling.
Where I tremble I find the lost scent of the sacred. At the raw edge of fear and desire I face the unknown mystery. Near the site of the fear and trembling is a burning bush. . . . When did I tremble last? . . .
In his essay, Symbolism of the Sea,
Rev. Samuel Johnson speaks of:
. . . those meanings of the sea for the free imagination, which have made it in all ages [humanity]'s consoler and strengthener, teaching [us] by the conditions of toil, peril, and renunciation, the greatness as well as the sadness of [our] destiny. It is well to remember that the sea is not a mere heaving mass of salted waves. It is an idea. What broods over us and rolls around us on the shore, with stir to adventure and discovery, is the mystery of our own being, — that blending of longing and rest, of what we are with what we may be . . .
The bitter brine, this barren waste, this low moan as of heart-break, are the limitations that best our life, — our sense of failure in the past, of impotence in the present, of decay in the future. The boundless reach, the mystic winds and currents, the grand uplift of unseen power over far horizons into depth of sky, are the ideal insights and faiths that transform these limits into enforcements of courage and desire. . . .
Light whose brightness blinds the sun
Light that is everywhere even in the dark and cold
Illumine our minds and shine in us.
Divine wind, breath within us, — find the pores of our beings open to you
drive away the clutter
and make us free.
Water —
flow of tears that cleanse our sight —
ocean depth — restless heaving space —
bouying us up and carrying us where it will
devastate illusion
encompass us in unexpected deeps of love
Fire — passion of life, crucible of transformation —
Earth — dark soil, decay from which springs life and renewal —
Mystery beyond our naming
Life of our lives and life of all Being —
we wait in this silence
we tremble
in love
in deep hope
in renewed courage
in this gathered silence.
Copyright © 2004 F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.