I want to take us back to an earlier point in our service - to the song that Lew sang - "How Could Anyone" - just before our readings. I first heard that song in the small Unitarian Universalist church I told you about last week - the church that welcomed me just as I was and taught me that I was indeed whole and beautiful despite my own beliefs to the contrary. It is a beautiful song to me, and the words - "How could anyone ever tell you, you were anything less than beautiful? How could anyone ever tell you, you were less than whole?" - these words are a clear reminder of what we believe here - that each of us is filled with the spark of the divine, of the holy, of possibility beyond our wildest imagination - and that each of us, whoever we are, wherever we are on our journey - is welcome, is beautiful, is whole.
I carry these words with me in my life when I feel strong and confident and caring - and I carry them with me when I am in need of shoring up and a reminder of my innate worth and dignity. They are a good reinforcement against all I come up against in this world -and I carry them with me as we turn to the poetry of Mary Oliver, as well. Filled with images of nature and life, of joy and wonder and attention - and full too, of incantations drawing us forward toward a more authentic life - Mary Oliver's poems, beautiful as they are, usually come with something else, as well, a little kick in the pants generally found in the closing stanza if not sooner.
"I don't want to end up simply having visited this world," she writes at the end of "When Death Comes."
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" she asks as she closes "The Summer Day."
Her words and images and stories capture my attention - they pull me forward in my seat - they ask something serious of me and of my life - and when I am honest with myself, I must admit that there are times that her words cause me not only hope and anticipation - but fear and anxiety as well. On a bad day, Mary Oliver's words call forward the shoulds and the have nots - the literal reams of expectations that I and so many others have heaped upon my little life - and in those moments I wonder if she really means to be speaking to me - to be calling to me, scared and imperfect, disappointed and small, feeling powerless to live as boldly as she has chosen to do with her words.
In those moments when I wonder if I am up to it - if I am up to the seriousness of her questions, to the reality of my life, it is in those moments that I gently remind myself, that I am whole and beautiful and that Mary Oliver never did write to shame me, she did not write to make us feel guilty about our pasts or our choices so far, but rather she wrote quite simply to offer praise to the world and if possible - to awaken us. In her essay, Performance Note, Oliver writes about what it is like to step on stage to read her poems before an audience and she tells us, "The hope of the audience is palpable. The people sitting quietly in the chairs - they have come not to rest, but to be awakened."[1]
And so it is that we come to her poetry, to the poetry and music and wisdom of others - and so it is that we come to church - not only for a moment of rest in a harrying world but also carrying with us the beautiful burden of hope, as we lean forward in our chairs catching the words and the sounds and the beauty around us in hopes of being awakened yet again.
For as the poet, Audre Lorde wrote, "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."[2]
After all, who among us has not wondered what we will make of our lives and what they will mean - who among us has not wrestled with those questions of depth if even only in passing - and how would we ever ask these questions and give voice to our hopes and desires and fears without the poetry of people like Mary Oliver, without communities of faith such as this one, without paper and pen and paint and relationships with one another to work it all out within.
For you see, our deepest fears and worries carry the most weight when they are kept in the dark, when they are kept at a distance and viewed through the fog and the fuzziness of night - but when we hear and know of another grappling with the same questions and fears through art and through poetry - when we know that others too, are wondering, what am I making of my life - when we turn and face the demon chasing us in our dreams or fling open the closet door that houses our night-time monsters - it is then that the fear lessens its grip on our hearts and on our lives - it is then that the air in our lungs escapes in a sigh and we begin to breath again - it is then that we know our commonality and our differences - and it is then that we can take an honest look at the facts of our lives - that we might make of them our strength and our direction.
And the facts, as I see them, are these - that we are, all of us, mortal. It is guaranteed - if nothing else in the world is - that at the end of our lives -whether that comes after dozens or a century or more of years - that we will die. And we know this - we know this inescapable fact as surely as we know the sound of our own breathing - the question it presents to us, though, is what will we do with this simple and clear fact. What will we do with this one wild and precious life?
Will we run, avoiding all references to our own mortality and the mortality of our loved ones, pushing away the questions that might call us forward into fully living - or will we turn and face our fears, trusting, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, that "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength and our reasons for acting."
Dealing with the topic of our own mortality -of death - inevitably brings up fear and discomfort in us - that is why some Buddhists literally spend their entire lifetimes practicing for it - imagining it in meditation - embracing the reality of it - getting comfortable with their own death that they might let go of the fear. It is natural that we are afraid, but it is important, also, that that fear not run our lives, that that fear not turn us away from the beauty and the wonder all around us and within us, that that fear not cause us to leave this life sighing and frightened and full of argument. Might it not be true, that just as it is with so many of our other fears, that if we turn and face this one too, we might find ourselves not only relieved but empowered as well?
Writing after her diagnosis of cancer, the poet Audre Lorde did just that - she turned and faced her fears and she left us with these words. "What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?"[3] Who can ever have power over me again. What a wonderful and freeing feeling - to move without fear, fully empowered.
When I come upon moments of crisis and confusion in my own life, when I am asking the big questions and struggling to find answers - a dear friend of mine reliably asks me the same question no matter what the circumstances are. "What would you do," she asks me, "if you were not afraid?" What would we do if we were not afraid? What if we chose to look at death as Mary Oliver does - stepping through the door full of curiosity, wondering what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? What if we let go of our fear of death, if only for just a moment - what if we loosened our grip on all of the expectations we and so many others have for our lives - what if, instead of slipping into the shame or disappointment or smallness - we faced Mary Oliver's question without fear. What would I do, what would you do, with this one wild and precious life if you were not afraid?
It is a good thing to daydream about - to spend some time imagining what our lives might look like if we moved in them without fear - if we let our lives longings take shape in this life, in this world. What would you try, who would you meet, what would you stop doing all together if you were not afraid? It is a good question - a guiding question for me - but it is also true in my experience that fear rarely leaves us all together, though it does lessen when we deal with it honestly and directly. And so I have learned to move with the fear - to trust my judgments and decisions - you know, the ones I made before the fear crept back in - and I've learned to hold those decisions up in front of me like goal posts - keeping myself moving toward them one small step at a time - trusting that my small steps will add up to something larger and before I know it there I am, living into the life I imagined and so much more.
When we choose to live this way - being driven not by our fears but by our imaginations - by our lives deepest longings - it is then, I believe, that we find ourselves wrestling fully with the question Mary Oliver puts in front of us - it is then that we are living into each moment of our lives with our fullest attention - and it is then that we are doing something that matters in the world
For this question she puts in front of us - what will we do with our one wild and precious life - it has many answers - only two of which I'd like to touch on briefly today. First, I believe, that given this one wild and precious life - there is nothing to do - as she says in her poem, "The Summer Day," but to kneel down in the fields, to attend to the wonders of the grasshopper, to feel oneself idle and blessed, to live in the moment we inhabit, letting its fullness become manifest with our attention - after all, what else should she have done - what else should we do with our day? But there, in that question, amidst that attention to the moment, there lies within us a second calling as well, one that can make us antsy about sitting still. Our second calling, I believe, is the natural human desire to make something real and particular of our lives, it is the longing to contribute to our communities and societies, to make a difference in this world that will last long after we are gone. This longing, this paradox we encounter as we wrestle with our mortality can make us wonder if living in the moment is really ever enough - but what else is there, really, I wonder, to build our life and our legacy upon, but these moments that present themselves to us each and every day - these opportunities for attention, for kindness, for beauty and wonder.
It is these moments that make up our lives, and I believe, along with Mary Oliver, it is our habits - the way that we repeatedly approach these singular moments - that carve the shape of our lives and the legacy we leave for others. And so it is that our daily acts of attention and awareness - our daily striving and practicing culminate in a life of value - much as Mary Oliver's life of - as she says, standing around in the weeds scribbling in her notebook - has culminated in poems that move and shape and awaken countless others - poems that will live on long after her death - perhaps for hundreds and even thousands of years speaking to those who join her on a journey of the spirit.
The opportunity is there for each of us in every moment, I believe - to live - to move into a life of wholeness and integrity and attention - releasing our grip on the fear that can so often and even unconsciously rule our lives - that we too might use the knowledge of our own mortality - the genuine facts of our lives - to move us forward into the joy and intensity of this moment - that we too might build of our lives something real and particular - looking upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, seeing each body as a lion of courage and something precious to the earth - knowing that when it is over we can truly say that all our lives we were a bride married to amazement, that we were the bridegroom taking the world into our arms.
So let us remember as we ask the essential questions of life - that the fear is just that, fear - it is not a fact, it is not necessarily even real once we stop to look at it. Let us remember, especially as we grapple with the reality of our own mortality and the questions it brings, let us remember that countless others have walked before us and walk with us now, and may we be drawn forward by the possibility inherent in the questions, may we allow the longing we feel to help us make of our lives something real and particular, to guide us in our daily actions - that when we come to the end of our days we might greet whatever comes next without regret and argument - with maybe even a sense of curiosity and wonder.
Let me close, this morning, with just a few more words from the poet. In her book about living titled, Long Life, Mary Oliver puts it to us plainly. This "is just the point," she says: "how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'"[4]
What will be our comment?
Let us move forward with curiosity and with courage.
May it be so, and Amen.
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