The Germans have a word for it - gerissenheit - which literally means "torn to pieces hood." It is the state of being fragmented. It is the life of distraction. It is the condition of being flung about by centrifugal forces. It is the country of utter confusion. Have you been there lately?
Last week on the plane from San Antonio to Chicago I read the American Airlines magazine, American Way, and found an essay on bumper stickers, which the author called "the graffiti of our inner selves." They express the zeitgeist of our times: "Out of my mind. Back in five minutes." "Give me ambiguity or give me something else." "Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?" "Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off NOW!"
Then there is a graphic depiction of this state of spiritual stress in a cartoon of an unfortunate goldfish, swimming frantically about in a leaking electric mixer that is plugged into the wall socket. The caption is, "And you think there's stress in your life!"
This week's downsizing announcement by Eastman Kodak has placed many from this congregation in a similar state of stress. Let's face it, we are living in stressful times - just like everyone else in human history. Stress, confusion, uncertainty, gerissenheit are simply part of the architecture of human nature. Only we experience our own stress as utterly unique, and so it is.
As a Parish Minister I encounter a great deal of gerissenheit. Suffering, confusion, meaninglessness and death are part of my daily routine - there must be an easier way to make a living. And yet it is out here on the painful edges of human existence that life is deeply lived; we discover courage we never knew we had or could have; we create meaning out of the raw stuff of our own experience; and we find hope in the bleakest places.
Over the years I have made the remarkable discovery that people are quite incredible - we can take a great deal; we can endure suffering with grace; we can face death with equanimity; we can transcend the seemingly insuperable obstacles of life. We can and do put the pieces of our lives back together. We can and do center our lives.
Center. Centering. To center. Why is that notion so appealing? One of my favorite meditative readings is by the late Howard Thurman, preacher extraordinaire: "How good it is to center down." It has become my mantra. Why?
My mind drifts back to theological school where I took a seminar in Religious Education and the Creative Arts, a course I needed, for I am artistically challenged. The St. Lawrence University Theological School had acquired a potter's wheel and our instructor, Dean Angus Hector MacLean, insisted we experience its discipline and its magic. After one kneads the clay to the proper consistency, the most important thing is to center the clay on the wheel. That should be easy, I thought, after all, I was a high school and college quarterback - quite used to accuracy.
But those of you who have tried to throw a lump of clay on a potter's wheel know how hard it is - one master potter said it took her seven years before she could "with certainty center any given piece of clay." If the clay is not perfectly centered, then as the wheel turns and you begin to shape a bowl - there are inevitable distortions - that grow worse as time goes on. If we are not centered in the beginning, life can become distorted and we are subject to gerissenheit.
The saving grace in this metaphor is that we can always stop the wheel, scrape off the clay, round it in the palm of our hands and try once more to center it. And, mercifully, human life functions in much the same way. We can almost always take time to pause, scrape ourselves up off the pavement, pull ourselves together and try once more to move to the center of our being.
How do we move there? I can speak only for myself. I must write to get there. For each of the last three years I have led a workshop at our annual Soul Food Retreat on "Writing Meditations As a Spiritual Discipline." Not too long ago, as I prepared a Sunday service, I would choose a spoken meditation from among selections by some of humanity's great spiritual leaders - Reinhold Niebuhr, premier Christian theologian; Annie Dillard, the Henry David Thoreau of the 20th century; Howard Thurman, a black preacher whose voice was as mesmerizing as his words; Thich Nhat Hahn, A Vietnamese Buddhist monk serene in the midst of war; Dag Hammarskjold, whose Markings is one of the great spiritual writings of all time; Unitarian Universalist poet May Sarton.
How could I do better than invite people into companionship with these great prophets of the human spirit? Gradually, however, I felt this was not real, not honest - it was derivative - it was not me. And however inadequate I feel as a minister, what there is has to be shared as it is - warts and all.
And so I began to write my own meditations for worship - my version of the pastoral prayer - reflecting on what I knew of life, drawing often from my experience with the people of this congregation. I was in a unique position to know something of what you were experiencing - your mountain tops and valleys and plateaus. And so these became the inspiration, if not the topic, of my meditations, as I tried to catch up where we were as a congregation, or at least where I was as one among you.
Almost invariably, the spoken mediation is the last piece of liturgy written for Sunday worship. It is my attempt to connect with my own center, congregation and cosmos at the same time. There is struggle in writing these words - choosing the proper themes - creating the right tone - selecting the appropriate words - and there is serenity when at last they fall into place and I am eager to turn them loose upon the world - at least this small slice of world. That is one way in which I center down. And so last year I wrote these words in that workshop:
Willingly they come; eagerly they come; expectantly they come;
One by one move through determined doors,
Each with their own histories, unique journeys of the spirit,
Singular experiences of joy and sorrow.
They form themselves into a human circle
Surrounding the question they come to answer.
They give length and breadth and depth to what they are.
Eyes meet eyes - with a smile or surprise -
Wonder or embarrassment.
Hands tentatively reach for hands - meet in tender touching -
Squeeze - hold tight - release - smile
And know it has been good to be together.
And why does this center me? When I try to put on the page in words what I am thinking and feeling I am making explicit what is implicit - setting them down to contemplate. In attempting to express what is at my core I am mining the soul - or to change the metaphor - releasing the living water that like an aquifer resides beneath the surface. Meditations are for me memorable speech - a kind of poetry of the spirit.
What is more, writing these meditations becomes a kind of useable truth - they have the potential to change me. There are phrases there that become part of my consciousness that I try to make part of my life - gentleness in living, life is always unfinished business, in the holy quiet of this hour, we are all more human than otherwise, celebrate the interval, the nourishing dark, thanks be for these, in betweenness, to savor the world or save it, when life is messy, embracing the limits of life, living on paradox drive, and tending the hub of the wheel.
These are phrases with which I have wrestled, ideas about which I have thought long and hard, feelings which have struggled within me. They are probably not original to me - I do not know how many I have borrowed from others - I only believe that I have earned the right to use them to center down.
And then, more recently, one of you suggested the congregation needed more time to prepare for the spoken and silent meditation in our services. They suggested some preparatory words - and I agreed - which is why each Sunday now I invite you to get physically comfortable, purge your mind of its clutter, and center down.
How do we center down? For me, I need to think in images. As Anne Morrow Lindberg puts it in Gift from the Sea: "The problem is...basically how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel."
Consider the wheel. It is sturdy enough to be the point at which the several spokes converge - spokes spanning out to the rim which rolls along the ground. We live at many points on this wheel: often on the rim where life turns quickly; on one of the spokes - the many dimensions that mark our lives - work and play, self and family, church and world, nurture and nature. But this complicated life is lived from the center - from the hub of the wheel - the hub which is in touch with each spoke - the hub without whose sturdiness the whole wheel would fall apart.
I like to think of this church and this celebration of life as helping each of us tend to the hub of the wheel - recognizing that the rim must continue to turn, that it is spokes that give strength, but that it is tending the hub of the wheel that makes it all possible. Centering - whether it be the center hub of the wheel or the centering of the clay on the potter's wheel - it is in centering down that we find the strength to continue. Not that our center is always a place of peace and quiet - it can be quite disturbing.
Annie Dillard writes: "In the deeps are the violence and the terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned."
We're not always sure what we will discover there deep in the center of ourselves; we know only we must seek to find it. I find there a man of passion and compassion, anxiety and meaning, fear and courage with a few sound convictions that sustain him and many questions yet unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable.
Yet I like this man for all his foibles and intend to get to know him better. And what centers me is that I know this hub is the still center that nothing can ultimately disturb. Things do fall apart, but the center can hold. It must.
There is the parable of a nobleman riding through a town who passes a potter at work. He admires the pots the man is making: their grace and a kind of rude strength in them. He dismounts from his horse and speaks with the potter. "How are you able to form these vessels so that they possess such convincing beauty?"
"Oh," answers the potter, "you are looking at the mere outward shape. What I am forming lies within. I am interested only in what remains after the pot has been broken."
We are broken and recreated many times in the course of a life. What lies at the center is what is ultimately important. Be not afraid of what you find there. Be not afraid to center down.
And so my first and only experiment in being a potter has given me an image that helps sustain me. I know how hard it is to center the piece of clay that is my one and only life. I know there will be failure and I will constantly miss the center. I also know that I can scoop up the clay, mold it in my clumsy hands and try again.
What sustains you? What is there in you after the pot has been broken? What centers you amidst the distractions and fragmentation of your life? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions of a lifetime each must answer at the center. The struggle itself will sustain you. Believe me.
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