The Love Train

So I'm not sure how many of you remember this - and I'll be honest, I hope it's not many, but a little over seven years ago I stood before you as a brand new minister, eager as all heck, and embarassingly unpracticed, too. One Sunday in that first year I had the task of offering the centering meditation - I was all excited because I had this great image I wanted to explore - the image of a train that moved across the landscape of our unique lives, letting some people on and some people off along the way.

Well, it was a good image, but it was a terrible meditation. As one of the kinder and more direct among you said to me afterwards, "Wow Jen, I was really wondering if that train was ever going to pull into the station."

Now of course it is rarely easy to hear criticism, but humor eased the way, and I took that experience to heart, learning the young ministers trap, the temptation to turn every occasion into a sermon, acknowledging the reality that I wasn't always going to hit the mark and we'd still be here, in this amazing ride of ministry and community together.

Over these past seven and a half years, you have shown me incredible forbearance as I have begun to live into the craft that is ministry. And I have to admit, that ever since that pained meditation several years back, I've wanted another go at that image - the train that moves through our life - this time in it's proper form of a sermon. Let's just hope that none of you find yourself thinking the same thing that my wise critic did so many years ago.

So the train image in the month of love, let me explain it. You see, several years before I had been talking with my therapist, bemoaning the fact that several folks I cared deeply about were moving out of my life. I felt sad and disappointed and hurt, and I couldn't help but wonder how I would survive without them - my anchors - and why in the world they would ever consider leaving me.

After I'd talked for awhile, my matter of fact therapist offered up what I came to call the train image. Your life is like a train she said. As you move along through different ages and interests, different jobs and loves and places, people will get on and off your train. Hardly anyone will be with you for the whole ride. It's just how life is.

Well, I remember thinking, I'm so glad I pay you to offer those optimistic images. I feel so much better now. But it did get me thinking. Who really is physically there with us for the whole ride? If we live for a long time, it won't be many people, if any. Maybe a sibling, maybe a childhood friend. I have to admit that at the ripe old age of 25 I'd never thought about it that way before - but after this therapist of mine shared that train image I knew she was right, that hardly anyone was going to be with me for the entire ride, and I was going to have to figure out how to love and say goodbye, whether I liked it or not.

Growing up, my image of goodbye, of people leaving, was a clear one. You see, I grew up outside of Baltimore, and everyone there followed football, in particular the Baltimore Colts. So you can imagine the shock we felt when we woke up one morning and there on the news were images of our beloved football team being packed up and moved away under cover of night. The owner had sold the team to Indianapolis and suddenly, without any warning or explanation, our beloved team was gone. You can imagine the anger that so many people felt. Why would they do this? Why didn't they tell us? Weren't we good enough, weren't we loyal enough, didn't we love them enough for them to stay?

The departure of the Colts, slipping away under cover of night, became an iconic image for us in Baltimore. Everyone could tell you where they were when they heard the news, what they were doing when they saw the footage. Looking back now, I know that this public slipping away in the night came to symbolize all of the unwanted and unanticipated departures that come our way - the layoffs, the illnesses, the accidents, the plain unpredictable-ness of our fellow human beings - all of these losses got wrapped up in that departing football team as we remembered the times when unwelcome events shifted our lives and left us feeling sad and disappointed and alone.

So no wonder we all shook our fists at the Colts as they left, angry that they, too would do this to us. Nobody likes the feeling of being left, of losing a future they imagined, yet as my therapist announced so bluntly to me many years ago now, hardly anyone stays on the train with you for the whole ride, whether you like it or not.

So what is person to do?

Well, I've been doing some reading about transitions lately as we prepare to go through several of them here together at church. With our beloved minister of music of 34 years, Ed Schell, retiring at the end of this church year, and with my departure for a new ministry in Minneapolis at the end of June, we've got some major goodbyes and some major hellos to undertake as individuals and as a congregation. Here is what I've been learning. We need to figure out how to do three things together.

We need to talk about the fullness of our experiences.

We need to stay in it even when it is hard.

And we need to take up the spiritual task of saying goodbye and hello intentionally.

Now let me say a little more about each of these tasks I believe we have before us not just here in our congregation, but in our individual lives as well, as people and places, loves and abilities and passions step on and off the train.

In order to really say goodbye to someone or something, we have to tell the truth, and the truth is always more complicated than platitudes or cliches. The truth about most people or places or moments in our lives is that they are complicated and complex. Real people are messy, as Kaaren said last week, and if we are going to experience the sense of peace most of us long for in our lives, then we need to do the hard work of acknowledging all of it, the bad with the good, when it comes time to say goodbye.

I don't know if you've ever been to a goodbye party for a colleague or a memorial service for a family member where the speaker gets up and says all of the good things about the person, but leaves out the truth that all of us know, that they were an addict, or self-centered, that they let people down, or had a way of making everyone late, or the times when they were crabby or selfish or just plain mean or that way they had of talking that made it hard to listen after awhile. I know it can seem like sacrilege to say some of these things out loud, especially when someone is leaving or gone, and sure, maybe a memorial service isn't always the best place to say them, but in order to allow a person's role to transform in our lives, we have to tell the truth about their humanity, if not to them, then to someone, trusting that life can hold it all, that our sometimes negative thoughts or difficult memories don't take away from the good that was there, too.

We've all got plenty of reasons for wanting to keep things neat and tidy, but when we brush past the fullness of who we are, we end up idolizing those who have left, thereby making it nearly impossible for others to come into our life, and we end up with a pretty distorted idea of who we are supposed to be, too. We expect perfection from ourselves and others as we forgetfully believe that we had it once before.

So this is where I get to lesson number 2 - staying in it, even when it is hard. Sometimes we need the reminder to stay in it with the person or place or situation that is changing, but more often, I think, we need the reminder to stay in it with each other - with those who are being left behind, with the people and places and situations that continue to make up our world - with those around us who aren't going anywhere. We need to stay present with our present, not our past, even when we want to run and push each other away.

This lesson of staying in it with each other is a simple one, but it is by no means an easy one.

When we lose something or someone we care about it hurts - and anyone who's watched an animal or a child get hurt knows to offer comfort, yes, but also to be careful. When we hurt, more often than not we strike out - allowing our pain and sadness to take shape in anger. And in case all this lashing out that we often do wasn't enough to make it hard to stay in it with each other, with those who are still here, well then there is the natural desire we have in times of transition to hold on to the way things were - tightening our grip on the past rather than opening our hands to the future.

And this, friends, brings us to lesson number three. Taking up the spiritual task of learning, intentionally, how to say hello and goodbye.

In saying goodbye, it can be hard to look into each other's eyes and say all that we have meant to each other. It can be hard to say and to hear the ways that we won't be together in the days to come. And it can be wonderful to remember and give voice to the ways that we have changed each other and this world, the ways we will live on forever whether we ever see each other again or not.

Saying hello, with heart, takes intention, too. Opening ourselves to another, especially if we have been hurt, requires effort. Choosing to offer the benefit of the doubt, to trust, to try new things with someone new - it all takes attention and intention. It takes being willing to risk, to hold out our hands first in welcome, it requires the willingness to be wrong, to release our grip on the past and open to the future, offering the gifts of forbearance and humor and generosity that are so present in each of us and in this church community.

Speaking to the fullness of life, staying in it together, and taking up the spiritual task of saying hello and goodbye with intention - this is how we will learn again to love, each day, as our poet asks us - right here in the middle of it, in the midst of lives as complicated as everyone else's.

These three practices of love lead me to a story that has captured my attention these past few weeks. It's the story of Naomi Shihab Nye -the Palestinian American poet - and she calls it, "Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal."

It goes like this. "After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well - one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew - however poorly used - she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said, No, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies - little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts - out of her bag - and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo - we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers - non-alcoholic - and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American - ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend - by now we were holding hands - had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate - once the crying of confusion stopped - has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen, anywhere. Not everything is lost. That encounter that began in fear and hesitation became a halting but intentional hello - a hello that led to connection, to communion, to a facing of all that there is and a shared joy all the same.

There in the Albequerque airport on a four hour delay, or with us for years, there are people and experiences in our lives that make lasting impressions. No matter whether we have known each other for 5 minutes or 50 years, there are people and experiences that change us forever, no matter how briefly we are together - and this is what finally offers me comfort when that image of the train comes back to my mind, when the vistas of my favorite places drift off in the distance and dear people step on and off at the platform.

The gifts that we have shared and the lessons we have learned will continue to teach us, the love of the journey will never end - and who knows, we might even find ourselves surprised again, covered in powdered sugar in the most unlikely of places, remembering that all is not lost, welcoming the new way we never could have imagined, as we learn to say goodbye and hello with wide open hearts.

May it be so, and Amen.

Jen Crow, Associate Minister
January 22, 2012