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Sermon Index

THIS VERY PLACE, THIS VERY TIME

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 5th of March 2000

Reading:

The high school I attended in Amsterdam was a modernwell, then modernbuilding dating from 1918, one of the features of which was a number of beautiful stained glass windows. One window adorned the landing of a stairway, an inauspicious place for so beautiful a window, especially because it bore the Latin legend Hic Incipit Vita Nova, Here Begins the New Life or more freely and possibly more accurately translated, Here Life Is Renewed.

During the four years I spent in the upper school, I passed that window at least twice a day. I remember wondering as a boy whether they could not have found a more suitable place for this window with its compelling message. Until one day I realized that the window was placed very appropriately, for the renewal of life can take place any day, at any time, without fanfare, without incantations, so to say in passing.

G. Peter Fleck, The Blessings of Imperfection: Reflections on the Mystery of Everyday Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987; 52).

If it werent for the Latin, perhaps the legend on Peter Flecks high school window might serve for a banner outside this church, for it speaks to our deepest hope in coming together: Here life is renewed.

It is my purpose this morning to help us understand that we are surrounded by beauty and possibility, in which we may find hope. Sometimes it breaks through and seizes our attention, as the burning bush, which was not consumed, finally got Moses attention. But much of the time, it is veiled from our sightby obstacles of our own making.

This year I have been enjoying more of the wisdom of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. Kushner, like Peter Fleck, writes of the everyday-ness of lifes openings to the holy, the spiritual, the Spirit of life itself. He fills his pages with stories, from his own life and from Jewish tradition. Here is a favorite:

Jewish tradition says that the splitting of the Red Sea was the greatest miracle ever performed. It was so extraordinary that on that day even a common servant beheld more than all the miracles beheld by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel combined. And yet we have one midrash that two Israelites, Reuben and Shimon, who had a different experience.

Apparently the bottom of the sea, though safe to walk on, was not completely dry but a little muddy, like a beach at low tide. Reuben stepped into it and curled his lip. What is this muck?

Shimon scowled, Theres mud all over the place!

This is just like the slime pits of Egypt! replied Reuben.

Whats the difference? complained Shimon. Mud here, mud there; its all the same.

And so it went for the two of them, grumbling all the way across the bottom of the sea. And, because they never once looked up, they never understood why on the distant shore, everyone else was singing songs of praise. For Reuben and Shimon the miracle never happened. Eyes Made for Wonder: A Lawrence Kushner Reader, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998; 11-12).

We, too, live in the presence of miracles. How much of our lives we spend grumbling about the mud, oblivious to the miracles all around us.

Im not talking, now, about exceptions to the laws of nature. Im talking about exceptions to our experience of life. And about enhancing the quality of our living by opening our eyes to more miracles. To the holy, within and around us, in which we live and move and have our being.

How many times have we experienced life as dreary and boring, just like Egypt, when all around us are miracles waiting to be experienced? Beautiful peopleboring because we have put them in a box, already labelledbeautiful skies and horizons, even the silhouettes of trees, bare and barren in the grey of a November drizzle; a sense deep within ourselves of oneness with all that is.

We expect to experience miracles only when we or others have experienced them before. We see beauty in people only where we have seen it before, or where the media tells us to look, among lifes celebrities. We feel oneness within ourselveswell, how often do we let ourselves look inwards? We go to great lengths, much of the time, to divert our attention from our inward selves, as we surround ourselves with sounds, sights, and busyness.

We dont, in fact, expect to experience many miracle moments in our lifetimes, so successfully do we wall ourselves off from the possibility. Thats why we think of them as miracle moments.

So much of our time is ordinary time. Weve been there, done that, know that nothing special awaits us. We see what we saw yesterday. We see what we expect to see. We see what we have been conditioned to see, what others tell us is there to see. And pretty soon we feel blase, bored, and at our worst, cynical and angry.

If we are lucky, though, life now and then grabs and shakes us. Look! it says. It took a burning bush to get Moses attention. Kushner says it is not a miracle but a test. How long would it have had to burn before Moses noticed that it was not consumed by the flames? Even dry kindling, he says, will burn for several minutes. The makers of television commercials, he adds, know that for most of us, our attention span is measured not in minutes but seconds. Yet Kushner assures us that we are surrounded by another world, a level of reality that we see only occasionally when a burning bush grabs our attention. The rest of the time, we may not notice even a parting of the seas.

How often have we turned away from the silence, the opportunity to look inward, as we flick on the radio or reach for our Walkmans? How many rainbows have we missed? How many sunsets and sunrises? How many chances to look into each others eyes, to take each others hands here in this sanctuary where we come each Sunday hoping for a miracle? How many times have our fears turned our faces away from each other, and kept us from experiencing what we most long for and perhaps most fearbeing known?

What stands in our way?

First, fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear that if we open ourselves to the unknown, it may make demands on us. Fear that if we open ourselves to each other, we may be discovered and judged, perhaps rejected. Fear that if we let ourselves go within, we will be confronted with a dark side of ourselves that we have denied in shaping the masks we choose to present to the world around us. So many fears.

Second, assumptions. Assumptions that we know where to find beauty, and the rest of the time the muck is all there is. Beauty is in the Springtime, or at least the sunshine. Beauty is in museums, or at least in human creations, like music and architecture. Beauty is in some other place, at some other time.

And third, preoccupations. Complaints. Negative habits of mind that can see only the mud and the muck.These are no small obstacles. Easy for me to list, enormously hard to dispel. How many miracles have I, too, missed in my grumbling?

In a Beacon column this winter, Phyllis spoke of childhood memories of her mother singing as she went about her housework. Phyllis knows that I love to singbut she also knows, all too well, that I do not sing as I dust or run the vacuum cleaner. No, I feel sorry for myself, that I must demean myself with such menial chores. Singing is a habit of mind. For Phyllis mother, it was spontaneous. For me, with all my preaching about miracles, it is a habit I have not cultivated. But singing as we work is, I think, a spiritual practice, a Godly habit, for it speaks to our embrace of life, even in its dailiness.

Spirituality, writes Lawrence Kushner, is that dimension of living in which we are aware of Gods presence (12). For God, read the holy; read the invisible lines of connection (the title of another of Kushners books) which bind us together; read Gordon McKeemans phrase, which we used last week: the so much more that life offers.

It is that dimension of living that opens our eyes to the beauty and possibility in which we may find hope. And in all of the worlds great religious traditions, the spiritual path to opening that dimension of living begins with self-awareness. It begins with becoming aware of and confronting the fears, the assumptions, and the preoccupations that keep us from seeing the miracles that surround us, miracles of beauty and possibility. Habits of mind and heart. Strong habits, deeply rooted, overcome by most of us, at best, only sometimes.

But oh!those sometimes. Those times when the hairs on our necks stand straight up! Those times when we feel, this is it! Those times when insight illuminates our minds like the proverbial lightbulb!

These times may pass into history as sacred, though they began as private: Jacob, waking from his dream of a ladder linking earth with the heavenly realm, declared Surely the Lord is in this place -- and I did not know it (Gen.28:16).

Or they may remain ours alone. Years ago, after living for a long time with an Irish setter that took joy in running, a little black Welsh corgi came into our family, a dog that took its joy in sniffing the earths endless scents, and never seemed ready to move on. I was utterly frustrateduntil one night, forced to stand still, I looked up, and saw a full moon casting the earth in a light I shall never forget. It was as if for the first time I saw the world in all its three-dimensional beauty.

Kushner reminds us that Holy gates are everywhere.

They are in the cathedrals of the world, including sanctuaries like this one, where as we recalled last week, generations of our ancestors have come to worship and to seek, and to celebrate lifes passages.

They are outdoors, in cemeteries where we remember our religious forebears, as Kushner experienced in visiting Safed, in the hills of Galilee, where Rabbi Isaac Luria and other Jewish mystics once formed a legendary spiritual community and now lie buried.

They are at the grottoes of Lourdes, and on the hilltop of Cumorah, in western New York, where Joseph Smith met the angel who inspired the church we know today as the Church of Latter Day Saints. They are in Mecca and in Jerusalem, and along the River Ganges.

But when people come, as they will, who would sell us tickets, who as Kushner says, once and perhaps still, but probably never, were themselves graced to witness or themselves to ascend higher, we must remember that culture and organized religion conspire, sometimes, to trick us into believing that entrances to holiness are only at predictable times and prearranged places. It is then, he warns, that we must remember that entrances to holiness are found not just in these sacred places, but everywhere and all the time (20-21).

There is a storyI think in Kushner, but I cannot find itabout a little boy who goes out walking with his father. The little boy keeps discovering the beauty of tiny things on the ground, hidden in the grasspebbles and twigs, leaves and insects. At length, the father asks, How is it that you see these things and I do not? And the boy answers, It is because I have little eyes.

If we are to live more fully, see lifes much more than, we must learn both to look up, that we may see the waters of the sea, parted above us; to look eye to eye, that we may see the beauty of each others lives, hidden behind our masks and assumptions; and to look down, not at the mud and the muck, which are the same everywhere, but at the little miracles which we can see with little eyes. And wherever we look, we must learn to see with the eyes of childhood innocence and awe.

Earth's crammed with heaven, wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

It works in reverse as well. Let us take off our shoes, as we journey through life, that we may see.