I wanted to start this morning with Fredrick Buechner's turnip and Brian Doyle's prayer because whatever they're tapping into is what so many of us desperately want, but so often are unable to get.
Last Saturday, Jen officiated at the funeral of a three year old girl. This Saturday, just yesterday, Kaaren officiated at the funeral of a boy who was six. And today Fredrick Buechner wants us to say "Life is Good." How are we suppose to do that?
Well, most of the time, or at least for a long time, we can't. This morning I want to take that seriously.
Last Sunday, I stood up here and said that we are never completely helpless. I still believe that. But I also think there is another sense in which we certainly are helpless. There are times when no matter how hard we try, we just can't pull ourselves out of our pain. There are times, when, no matter what the preacher says or the inspirational quotes assert, we just can't see life as anything but fragile and scary.
To say otherwise is to be in denial. Life takes what we love. Life makes a mockery of our plans. Life, with ease, crushes our ability to control it. We are regularly and dependably left helpless, and yet...
And yet. . .we are also regularly and dependably saved.
That, in a nutshell, is my message this morning: We are regularly unable to help ourselves, but we are never without help.
It's what I have come to think of as "a fall faith." Being an upstate New Yorker, I know I'm biased, but I think we live in a part of the world that is most real. My little brother lives in southern California, and, unlike us, his life now is almost never bothered by a cloud and is completely absent the season of fall. "Life here is an eternal summer and spring," he says. (in a cocky little brother sort of way.) And I'd be dishonest, if I didn't say there were days I envy him, but mostly I think he's missing out. Because, fall tells the truth; whereas the easier seasons, it seems to me, lie. Spring's pervasive blooming and Summer's stability have a way of leaving the tragic behind. Fall refuses to do that. It dazzles us with wonderful colors and incredible sunsets, but never lets us take our eyes off the cloudy skies, muddy ground, and fallen leaves. An opinionated season, fall forcefully denounces spring and summer's versions of hope as rubbish. For fall, hope is not to be found in summer's promise of predictability or spring's faith that beauty eventually always conquers, but rather in the simple awareness that while you can't prevent the mud, you also can't keep out the beauty.
And please notice my use of the passive voice. This is a very different sermon than last Sunday's. Whereas last Sunday was about our power to respond to life; today is about noticing what we receive from life. Today is not about what we are able to do, but what is done for us when we are able to do little or nothing at all.
And that's not a conversation we're used to as Unitarian Universalists, or even a conversation we like. We are much more comfortable in the realm of celebrating our amazing capabilities and capacities. Indeed, historically, this has been our specialty. In so many ways - from our rejection of inherent sin and the need for the resurrection to our embrace of Emerson's self-reliance and humanism's belief in progress "onward and upward forever" - we have been a religion dedicated, above all else, to affirming and propping up the power of human individuals. So, it's absolutely wrong to say Unitarian Universalism doesn't have a doctrine of salvation: ours has just focused on all the ways we save ourselves, rather than on everything life does to help us. As one of my seminary professors put it, whereas other religions lift up salvation by grace, Unitarian Universalism has placed its trust in salvation by grit.
Now, I love our tradition, don't get me wrong. But today as I think of those two sets of parents who had to say good bye to their children, I'm glad it wasn't grit alone that Jen and Kaaren had to offer them. What makes me most proud of our tradition these days is how, despite our unwavering commitment to human capabilities, we are also now maturing into a faith that understands being saved by our powers alone is just not how life works. It is much messier and mixed than that - wonderfully so.
A story I came across recently gets at this. It's by a doctor turned writer named Rachel Naomi Remen. She starts her story by saying it's very hard to trust something you can't see or aren't steering yourself. She was born with a condition that significantly impaired her digestive system. This required not only constant monitoring but on-going major surgeries once she entered adulthood. After six successful surgeries, she ran into a problem with the seventh. Sutures holding her intestine together gave way a few days after the surgery and by the time it was caught she had become gravely ill with infection. She went into another emergency surgery to correct it. She is not a surgeon, but because she was a pediatrician, her surgeon just naturally used medical jargon to explain what was to happen. Before going into the procedure, her surgeon noted that because of the infection, they were not going to stitch up the incision, but instead let it close by "primary intention."
Reman says that - in her pain killer-induced haze - she remembered thinking to herself: "Hmmmm. . .'primary intention.' I used to know what that meant." Then she went under and woke up several hours later to a very visual and real reminder of what it meant. The nurse came in to change Rachel's dressing, pulling back a bandage that revealed, not the usual fourteen inch scar neatly stitched up tight, but a great gaping wound several inches wide, not a stitch in sight. She knew from school that the text books said it would close on its own, but for the life of her she couldn't convince herself of it. She panicked about dying. She obsessed about having this gruesome scar forever and how that would mean not only no bathing suits ever again but maybe also no clothes that fit tight around her waist. But day after day over a 3 week period, she watched as her body and this amazing "primary intention" closed the wound for her leaving only a simple, delicate hairline scar.
Looking back on the ordeal, she realized, she says, that it wasn't really the loss of bathing suits that scared her, but the lack of control. The crazy, infuriating task of trusting a process not of her own making, was the hardest thing she's ever done. As a physician she was used to being the one in charge. But with this, she had not only to give up the lead, but hand it over to this mysterious and invisible "otherness" called "primary intention." And while that word once was for her just an overly-fancy medical term; now she sees it as wonderfully wise. It's provided her with a container - a way of finally describing a force or pattern that has been present and at work in closing all the gaping holes in her life - the emotional as well as the physical.
It's never been just her intention alone, she says. Now she can see that there was always another intention at her side that was clearly "primary" to her - one that clearly preceded and was independent of her, one that arose, not from her act of will, but instead was woven deeply into the fundamental structure and pattern of life itself.
Now if you're like me, talk of an invisible non-human intention may at first not resonate with you. Many of us are here in this church because we are doubtful and agnostic about not only the existence of an invisible intention, but any intention at all to the universe. And yet as a descriptor of one's experience, I think we have to grant some usefulness to the idea. Because, whether we are theists or atheists, believers in a holy spirit or believers in natural law, all of us have at one time or another been on the receiving end of a remarkable array of circumstances all clearly intent on closing the emotional wounds that separate us from joy and trust - all clearly intent on "bringing us back to life," you might even say.
And if "religious" words like grace don't work for you, call these circumstances "unearned and unexpected gifts." Don't get caught up in whether there is a plan or will or consciousness behind them. Who or what causes the circumstances and gifts to happen, in the end matters little. What matters most is that we recognize their trustworthiness. Another way to put it might be to say that what makes us a church is not that we all agree about whether or not there is a giver behind life's gifts, but that we all are committed to helping each other notice that the gifts are there.
Local celebrity Philip Seymour Hoffman is best known for the movie, Capote, for which he just won the Oscar for best actor. But my favorite of his is an earlier film called Love Liza. It's about noticing the gifts. Hoffman plays a young man who's just lost his wife. He's devastated and walls himself off. He wants nothing to do with a world so unfair and unworthy of trust. His house is empty. His refrigerator is empty. He stops going to work. He stays inside and numbs himself in a whole host of ways. He tries with all his might to quit on life. But it won't let him. Random, unconnected events keep getting in the way. Nagging mothera-in-law, teenagers who break into his house, lies that lead him down the unlikely path of having to spend a weekend with a bunch of overly-enthusiastic, remote-control model airplane enthusiasts.
I won't spoil the plot, it's too good; but I do want to share what Hoffman says about the film and why he wanted to do it: "It's about this thing that we all experience but quickly act like we haven' because it's sort of spooky. It's about the way life conspires to pull us back to living. The way the world just won't stop helping us. The world just keeps tossing Wilson - the main character - these eggs. It's not even like the world cares which egg he catches, as long as he eventually grabs one. And until he does, the world keeps tossing."
A conspiracy on our behalf! I love that. It's not the usual conspiracy we mention when talking about life. Usually it's the other way around - a conspiracy out to get us. And here too Hoffman's movie helps us, at least it helps me, because it makes clear that the reason we so often feel like life is out to get us is not really because bad stuff is suddenly the only thing life throws our way, but instead because life suddenly decides not to throw at us the exact thing we want. What keeps Hoffman's character stuck in pain is not the fact that he's not getting any eggs; it's that none of them are his wife. And he - like all of us when we've been wounded - doesn't want healing, he's wants a particular kind of healing - he wants his wife back; He wants the wound to go away, or better yet, for it to have never happened.
Which brings us back to a Fall Faith, because erasing or fixing what happened is just not the way life works. Again, the wound and the mud don't go away; all we are offered is the messy consolation of wound and joy, mud and beautiful skies side by side. Joy and beauty come - we can count on it - but our specific, hand-picked joy and beauty often does not. This is the messy, tragic and difficult truth about life. This is what makes this journey of ours so hard. As the great master of human myth, Joseph Campbell said, "We must be willing to give up the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." And that, friends, is by no means easy.
Indeed, if anything, that is what I want to make most clear today: that all this is very hard. I wish the answers where easier, we all do. If we could tell each other, "It will all work out in the end" or "There's a mysterious greater plan in place that is making things only seem bad," then we would. We would tell that to each other in a heart beat. But we can't. All we have to offer each other is this uniquely cloudier and muddier Upstate New York version of hope.
Yet having said that, it's important to point out that what makes this a joyful and life-giving version of hope, not just a depressing one, is that we're not just saying life's consolation is messy and hard. No, our message is that a messy and hard life is a darn good life!
We can bank on that. We can trust it, because all around us people testify to it and reaffirm it every single day. The fact that the messy life is the good life is what enabled Fredrick Buechner to feel so good about that muddy turnip of his. It's what enabled, as I said a few weeks ago, my little three year old daughter to say, "Sure Dad, I can handle the scary Halloween monsters, because, you know, I'm going to get candy too!" It's what enables Kevin Kling, the significantly handicapped storyteller I talked about last week, to look at his so-called "broken" body and say with a smile, "Life is like a haircut: There's the haircut you wanted and then there's the haircut you got. And at some point we all just learn to be glad we had the chance to have hair!" And it's what enables Brian Doyle to look at his two sons - one healthy and one with half a heart - fold his hands and then offer an angry, humble, but ultimately grateful prayer of praise.
No matter how messy, it's still a gift. All of it. Every last impermanent, ultimately uncontrollable piece of our lives. It's all a gift! That's what each of these, in their own way, are saying, and asking us to see. It's all a gift.
We may indeed be helpless, friends, to keep the precious pieces of our lives safe and clean and neat. But we are not at all helpless to say "Thank You" for them, all of them, every last muddy and magnificent piece.
May we live our lives in a way that makes this "thank you" loud and clear.
Amen.
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