First Parish Bedford UU

“Stillpoint”
A sermon by Rev. Megan Lynes
delivered on Sunday, October 3, 2010
at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Readings

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

---

The words of the prayer are Jacob Trapp’s meditation called “In Stillness Renewed”:

Let this house be quiet.
Let our minds be quiet.
Let the quietness of the hills, the quietness of deep waters, be also in us:
So quiet that the noise of passing events and present anxieties, of random recollections and wandering thoughts, is stilled;
So quiet that the… stillness is like music;
So quiet that we feel the very being which is the life of us all;
So quiet that we are renewed, we feel at one with all others, at home in a tabernacle of stillness;
So quiet that we let the ripples of this pool of quietness and healing pass through us and out into the world.
In the stillness of this winter morning, in the sanctuary of this strong and loving community let us pray for all who are in need of prayer, for all who are cold or hungry, for all who lost jobs this week, for all who struggle.
We pray for strength and courage for ourselves in the week ahead to remember what is important and to live from that. We pray for the joys and sorrows of this community, spoken and unspoken.
Let us rest together in quiet now and pray the prayers of our own hearts.




Sermon

Some of you may know that our bookkeeper Libby Hanna owns over 60 pet gerbils. She keeps them for fun, breeds them for shows, and finds unwanted gerbils new homes.  Although my apartment technically does not allow pets, I have had the pleasure of taking care of two furry friends for the past week.  They are very fun to watch digging tunnels, preening each other and nibbling seeds.  What makes me laugh though is watching them run on their wheel.   One of them gets on and begins to run. The faster he runs the faster the wheel spins. He races, trying to keep up, until suddenly his pace is not maintainable, and he seems to stall, slowing just enough for the wheel to continue spinning, and the poor little guy is whirled in a circle upside down.  If his friend joins him the two of them are constantly flipping each other, over and over, higgledy-piggeldy.  Neither of them can seem to run, alone, or together, at a steady pace.

Isn’t life like this sometimes?  We’re going along at what feels like a good pace, getting into gear for a good long distance jog, and all of a sudden it’s as though we’ve stepped onto a moving sidewalk and it’s been turned up to high gear.  “‘Scuse me, coming through, got baggage, can’t stop now, catch ya later, ‘scuse me!”

How did September go by so fast?  How did the news reels get cranking with this much velocity?  And are our politicians speed talking, or is it just me who can’t keep up? 

Most of us long for a rest from this frenetic activity and information overload.  It all gets to be a little much.  But, to be honest, these same kinds of problems with people and politics, wars, media and greed have occurred before in history, both in this country and around the world.  And like gerbils in the wheel, these same kinds of problems have also occurred anciently in repeated cycles.

Though technology has changed dramatically and we have an ever-increasing array of gadgets with which we communicate and obtain and process information, our basic human needs – physical, emotional and spiritual – have not changed much at all.
The book of Ecclesiastes, written around 935 BCE, says “That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, ‘See, this is new’?  It has already been in ancient times before us.”
Political turmoil is not new, and will not subside in this age. I fear it may even get worse with increasing partisanship and nationalism.  We have some good reasons to be afraid.  As people around the world seek refuge in the familiar, many find solace and hope in their religious home.  We long for a lessening of stress, a place to see eye to eye, and reliable familiar people whom we can trust.  We need a place to feel rooted and guided.  And we desperately need a place to slow down. 

I’d like to try something with you.  This is an activity for all of us to do together, but it requires six volunteers to be the guinea pigs.  Or maybe I should say gerbils.

(Exercise:  Six people try to lower a yard stick to the ground while continuing to keep one finger touching the underside of it at all times.  It’s surprisingly challenging, but almost always works when everyone collaborates.)

My hope in doing this together is to illustrate that when we operate independently, we cannot reach our goal.  But in working together this team was able to figure out how to lower their energy, collaborate, slow down, and ultimately come to a resting point together.  We come to church for just this reason: to be together, work and play and think together, to laugh, and to make each other slow down.  Thank you to all our volunteers.

Let me tell you a bible story.  The prophet Elijah had gone to the mountain where, hundreds of years earlier, Moses supposedly encountered God.  Elijah is huddling at the back of a cave near the summit, having heard that God is about to pass by.  The story continues, "now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks and pieces... But God wasn't in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but God wasn't in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but God wasn't in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.  A sound of sheer silence.  When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said 'what are you doing here, Elijah?'" The text doesn't say God spoke to him, it says a voice came to him.  And the voice said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

There are many interpretations of this text, including that Elijah wanted to have a “magic mountaintop moment” like Moses had when God spoke to him from the top of Sinai.  But in this story I just told you, God said nothing to Elijah, Elijah just sensed words.  Darn, we are led to surmise, we can’t be like Moses hearing or seeing God, that was for Moses alone; that’s one interpretation.  Another interpretation says that God was surprised Elijah had run to a mountain top and God was basically wondering why on earth Elijah was hiding in a cave up there, “why are you here, Elijah?”  This interpretation gives the idea that Elijah could have found God’s presence everywhere, not only in a remote cave at the top of Mt. Horeb, (also known as Sinai.)  But the metaphor I’d like to engage today is that there is wisdom to be found when we engulf ourselves with silence once in a while. 

For a number of summers I worked as a counselor at an overnight camp in New Hampshire.  For many of the kids it was not only their first time away from home, it was their first time being out of the city. Without the noises of the street - the zip of a moped, the drone of a freeway, or sudden bursts of laughter, the world of the forest felt at first like a muffled scream.  Night owls and belching frogs were as foreign as could be. 

“It’s just so quiet!” the campers told me.  “I can’t sleep because the quiet is so loud!”  They were in awe of the quiet, but not yet the awe that comes from falling in love with the endlessness of suchness.  One bright black night there was no moon.  The hot air hung motionless.  I woke my cabin of girls, silently, motioning “shhhh” and pointing to their flip flops and sweatshirts.  I shook my head no when they picked up their flash lights.  We needed to bumble through the dark and cling to one another far more than we needed to see. 

To my surprise, because we’d started off in silence that expectation remained, and no one spoke.  We walked more easily once our eyes adjusted, and by the time we got to the middle of the grassy clearing, we weren’t needing to keep our eyes on the  ground anymore.  Suddenly someone looked up and gasped, “look at the stars!!!”  As if blown over like a house of cards, we fell onto our backs.  The sky seemed to open above us.  The stars in their multitudes flickered and stretched on and on forever.  No matter how far away we looked, there were always more of them.  We were quiet together a long time.  I don’t know how long that silence stretched, but it was like a cloak.  We were covered in it, and it was warm, decorated by starlight, and all of us were beneath it.  At last a still small voice spoke.  “What comes after the last star?”  Was she measuring distance or time, or beauty... none of us could say.  But we let the question rest in the quiet night. 

I do not mean to imply that this depth of discovery cannot be found in the city.  I recall a time when I sat watching the Boston Swan Boats and the whole world seemed to be moving of one accord.  Each person took their place upon the back of the majestic swan ride, and the wiry man peddling serenely in front propelled everyone through the shining water.  No one spoke.  Everyone, including myself, was a part of the stillness.  Time had stopped.  We could rest.

The author, Rainer Maria Rilke, is often best known for the compilation of letters he wrote to a young poet in the early 1900’s.  In it the young poet asks about how to free himself from sadness.  Rilke suggests to his friend that he read good books, that he keep a journal of his thoughts and poems, but most of all he highlights the importance of solitude. 

We must find quiet time to be attentive in our sadness he writes.  Rilke speaks of this sadness as a tension there to experience, because only in the space hollowed by our sadness can a new awareness, or presence, fill us again.  

Rilke’s words, “I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses...But please, ask yourself whether these sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad...

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate...”  He concludes his letter by saying, “Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.”

Welcoming sadness?  Most of us I think, try to chase our sadness away.  We fill our days to the brim, or we talk through what we feel with someone we trust.  When I am sad I do both these things.  Most days I want to rid myself of sadness as fast as I can.  I certainly don’t want to slow down and notice what I’m feeling.  I am afraid if I open myself to sadness that it will not leave.  But church creates a container that is big enough to hold us, big enough to hold us still, big enough to hold us in a safe embrace. 

Sometimes I imagine that every pew contains a pile of cloaks, one for every person who sits down.  Pull it on, and you can feel the warmth or the weight of whatever it is you’ve been needing some time to feel.  No one stares because everyone is wearing one, different as each might be.  Some are the color of purple bruises.  Some are the yellow of a canary trapped within bars.  Some are red like the rising sun.  Some are white like a dove flying free.  And when we have rested long enough, we can leave the cloak behind us in the pew, and walk out into the sunlight again.  The container, (this sanctuary, this community,) remains here even as you take your leave.  The cloaks remain here too, and you are free to return and wear them again as you will.  Rest alone or together in beloved community.

We come to be in religious community for a thousand different reasons.  We come to hear new thoughts, or think our own.  We come to gain perspective, or become more engaged in the world.  We also come to escape the rat race for just a moment.  In religious community we find a sense of security and stability, a place to step off the moving sidewalk for a little while and find a stillpoint, a place to rest.

In the book of Ecclesiastes it is written, “Better one handful with quietness than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind.”

For most of us it’s quite possible to do five things at once but it’s nearly impossible to do nothing.  Worshiping together is a way to cease grasping and become quiet and still, with one another.  We make room for the sound of sheer silence, or a small voice within, and we wait.  In the words of the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, "A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity."  It is a spiritual discipline to do just this. 

 
May it be so.