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Holiday Happiness and Hopelessness 12/15/02 There
is the rallying cry of "Merry Christmas"
around us. And for some of us, this will always be a
season of delight and merriment. For others, this season
is difficult, painful, frustrating, confusing, or worse.
And for a good deal of us, there is a good measure of
truth in both sides of this coin. This sermon speaks to
this time of happiness and hopelessness, that together
we may find new richness and depth in the season.
I'm UU, RU May Sarton wrote many volumes of verse, each one bringing out a treasure of images. Some full of hope, some full of despair. But often they wrestle with the really important ideas of who we really are. As she grows and develops and matures, her poems take on a richer patina of life lived fully and deeply. But always at the heart of her writing, I find a sense of struggling, wrestling, trying to identify what it means to be human. Seeking the Light in Times of Darkness - Winter Holidays in the Face of September 11 I think that I have been avoiding thinking about the coming of Christmas. I always try and avoid thinking about it a little bit, because it has become so commercially focused, so much about presents and getting things, and spending money. But this year I really haven’t wanted to think about it at all. I don’t want to think about light and a season to be jolly . . . all the while that we are thinking about Anthrax sweeping the nation, the potential for nuclear damage at any turn, or our young soldiers being overseas, guns in their hands, killing people.
I spent five months this past winter and spring in a really remote corner of India, visiting Unitarians. Now, some of you know that there are Unitarians up there, and when I was growing up, I had heard about there being Unitarians somewhere in India. But after hearing about them for so long, I really wanted to go and see for myself. And there is a Unitarian Union in that area, and it is made up of people who consider themselves a family in many ways. They are much more inter-related as a group of churches than Unitarian Universalists are here and just about any Unitarian you’d meet would feel he’d found a cousin if he met up with a Unitarian on the street. And the most important thing to know about them, is that they are not related to the Indians on the plains.
Well, usually when I begin these sermons, I always thank the
person who won the sermon in the auction for their choice of
book. Over the years, I have been given some really wonderful and
challenging books. But all of them have been given in the spirit
of having been spiritually nourishing to the person who gave the
book. And so they wanted to share it with me, have me do a
sermon. At first when I heard about what book Tom had in store
for me, that would be “Kaiser-Frazer: the Last Onslaught on
Detroit,” by Richard Langworth, I have to admit that I thought he
really wasn’t playing all that fair. That he somehow had missed
the spirit of fun and pleasure for the whole church in picking
such a specialized book about such a relatively obscure and
unknown topic. Perhaps he will be disappointed to find that I
don’t plan to educate you all in all that intimate detail of
these cars he loves so much. But I will tell you that this book
is a home-grown story of an industry that occupied Willow Run in
our own back yard right after the bomber plant moved out right
after World War II. And if you want to know a lot of details,
read the book! They are in there! Meditation: Pressing two hands together and holding them near the heart, with a gentle bow of the head, say "Namaste." These two hands represent the duality of both positive and negative forces. Bringing them together represents and affirms the singleness of the world. The whole act communicates 'you and I are one, I salute, honor and worship the god within you." It also means, "I prostrate myself before you who is the mirror-image of me, with body, mind and soul." In Sanskrit, the word Namas means 'to bow in reverential salutation.' Te means 'to you.' So Namaste means 'I bow to you." And it serves as a reminder that god is everywhere and in every human being we meet, anywhere, at any time. "I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or in fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us." these words by Lewis Hyde begin today's journey into the realm of the gift.
It
was shortly after the book "Diet for a Small Planet" by Francis Moore
Lappe was published that I became a vegetarian. I didn’t actually read her
book. And I must admit, that although I sure had heard of vegetarianism, I
sure had never considered it as a lifestyle to emulate. In fact, I
remember thinking that the death of animals to feed me was really just the
way of the world--a cycle of life and death--and that I just couldn’t see
the point of vegetarianism. Have you met Kwan Yin? Perhaps you have without knowing it. Kwan Yin is a very popular figure in many parts of Asia, and figures of her are often seen even here in the US, looking very much like a Buddhist version of the Madonna. Kwan Yin is often called the compassionate Buddha, because her name means "One who Hears Cries"--but that's really short for "Kwan Shih Yin", or "One who hears the Cries of the World."
Deep in your center
It is from this place that we can work and our work will be true. I don’t know about you, but I have found that this past summer has been great for weeds. After the long, cold wet spring my garden was just full of weeds, and although I’ve dedicated many an afternoon or cool summer evening to their eradication, it seems that they’ve always got the upper hand. I am a Unitarian Universalist minister,and I like being one, because it allows me to be in a certain way, to give to my religious community, and a sense of place from which to call for certain things. Now let me talk a bit about this being, giving, and calling for. Kali is a striking figure of all the many God and Goddesses of India. She first captured my attention because she is black, and I wondered if her color had anything to do with racial issues. After studying her a while, I found out that this wasn't at all the case. In the Maha-nirvana Tantra, the first sacred text in which Kali appears, they say of her blackness, Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in Kali. Meditation I would like to offer you a section of a poem, the third stanza, of "Song of the Four Mindfulnesses" by Kaysang Gyatso the Seventh Dalai Lama (Buddhism of Tibet, 214). It speaks about the mandala using the English translation "divine mansion." It reads:
In the divine mansion of great bliss, This Sunday I bring to you some of wisdom of The Little Prince. A book written some 53 years ago by Antoine de Saint Exupery, but which continues to be a story which captures our hearts.
Perhaps what makes this book so compelling is that it somehow captures the incredible divide between the world of the child and the world of the grown-up, and that speaks deeply to our hearts. Perhaps now as adults we don’t feel, or think that we are so far from childhood that we can’t comprehend it. But somewhere deep in the recesses of our being we remember what it was to be a child--and how totally alien and foreign the world of the adult was to us. Creation stories are stories about how we came to be here. They also frequently include some notion of how things "got to be the way they are or "how we got to be the way we are. Many of us know the myths or stories about creation which come from other cultures, like the Genesis story, the story of Zeus, and perhaps a Native American tale or two. It is fun to read these various stories - I wish I could read many of them to you. But there is a good collection in this book by Virginia Hamilton called In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the World." The book is aimed at a young adult reader, but the clarity of the stories makes it very good reading. |