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"Far Flung" by the Reverend Alison Hyder June 4, 2000 Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown
Opening words: Robert Frost "In Hardwood Groves"
Reading: Sara Maitland, from A Big Enough God, p 78
Sermon: "Far Flung" the Reverend Alison Hyder Until the late 18th century, marine navigation was entirely dependent upon the night sky. Once a ship lost sight of land, seafarers were dependent upon clear nights and meticulous measurements of the angles and relations of the stars and planets. The sun moved, and time changed with it. There was no accurate way to measure longitude, those vertical lines that run from pole to pole. Ships ran aground, and well-known routes were beset with pirates. Crossing the Atlantic was chancy. You never knew quite where you would wind up. But even after the development of the chronometer, which was able to keep time precisely despite the motion and conditions aboard ship, sailing was an adventure fraught with hazards. The world was mysterious and unpredictable. Any hurricane could blow you off course. A different culture threatened everything you believed in. Only the stars stayed the same. Familiar landmarks (marks on land) offered more than a sense of comfort. They oriented you to the world, told you who you were and how to go on. In his 1857 work Digressions on the Navigation of Cape Horn (Digressions sur la Navigaton du Cap Horn), Lieutenant Barral stated, "It is far better not to know where one is, and realize that one does not know, than to be certain one is in a place where one is not," We all know that men in our culture are stereotyped by not asking for directions when driving, as if admitting they don’t know where they are is a weakness that gives away power to others. If they just keep going, surely they’ll get there on their own. But we all do this, and not just on the road. We think we know where we’re going, so we set our course, then coast along on automatic pilot, inattentive and self-contained. How many times have we acted on our assumptions, forging confidently ahead, only to find ourselves mistaken, somehow, confused and embarrassed and disoriented? We miscalculated and got off course. The familiar landmarks of our daily lives, our memories, even the facts look different and strange. It doesn’t take much: a broken foot, a misunderstanding with a friend, a mother’s illness, and the world as we know it is changed. The simple truths that we based our daily lives upon cease to exist and call everything we know into doubt. If we were wrong to trust our driving skills, what else were we wrong about? Maybe we’re not as self-sufficient as we thought, or so special. Of course we need opinions, need landmarks to orient us, and ways to measure our progress. But we depend upon them at our peril. And then our lover gets ill and we wonder why we cared so much about a clean carpet, about defending our own opinions. Why didn’t we pay more attention? Why didn’t we appreciate what we had before it was too late? The world of the suffering is a strange community. In some ways nothing could be more self-contained, more self-obsessed. Pain can only be felt – it can’t be communicated. You can’t give it to someone else to experience. You feel alone, isolated, surrounded by a world of health and pleasure, convinced that you are cast out forever from that blithe universe. Other people seem deluded at best. Why do they bother, after all? All your memories of the past seem like forgeries. That wasn’t you, that happy person, sure and motivated. That was no more real than the food you can’t taste. Everyday objects seem out of place, foreign. Colors dull. Nothing makes sense any more. Normal activities become an effort. And yet however isolated we become, our suffering is based on the world, on our very attachment to it and the things of it – relationships lost or unfulfilled, the destruction of beauty, some sense of personal failure. Physical pain and the loss of our functions. Universal feelings all, based on an incarnate existence. We are only relatively well, temporarily healthy. But someday we will join the squirrel hit by a car, the parent with Alzheimer’s, the paraplegic struggling to walk. We will come to grieve. This is our future, no matter our plans. No amount of control can prevent us from pain. We are not separate from this world. Dogwood and dachshund and dietician, we all live by the same physical laws. A colleague of mine tells about being in a workshop several years ago, when her attention was diverted by throbbing pain in her finger. "I was annoyed at the distraction," she stated. The year before, I had severed the nerves in my left hand in a kitchen accident. After hours of microsurgery, the doctor told me that he thought he had restored motor function in all the fingers but couldn’t guarantee sensation. For the next year and a half, my index finger had been numb. The throbbing in my finger was the first sensation I had felt there in a long time. Sensation returns! A miracle happens! And what is my reaction? I am annoyed because it distracts me from things of importance. I wondered why the first sensation that returned was pain. I remembered the words of my friend Bonnie, a recovering alcoholic. She said that once the anesthetic effect of the alcohol wore off, the first thing she felt was pain; pain that was so overwhelming she was tempted to return to drinking. But then she realized that the presence of pain was a matter of rejoicing. Feeling pain meant that she was still capable of feeling! So she resolved to live through the pain in faith that eventually she would begin to feel all kinds of emotions again. [Rev. Roberta Finkelstein, First Days Record November 1993] Celebrate suffering? Rejoice in pain? Well – there are ways and ways. It is not in my theology to create martyrs and victims. But neither can we spend our lives untouched and pristine, separate from the world and indifferent to it. Scientist and mystic Chet Raymo tells the story of St. John of the Cross. John was a 16th century Carmelite friar and reformer. With Teresa of Avila, he advocated a return to simplicity, contemplation and prayer in the lives of the brothers and sisters of his order. But many objected. In 1557, he was kidnapped by some of his unreformed brethren and held in the Priory at Toledo [for 8 months], in a dark, foul-smelling closet, half-starved and often beaten. In total darkness… [and in his head, he began to compose stanzas]. John’s poems affectionately extol the beauty of the created world: "wings flickering here and there/ lion and gamboling antler, shy gazelle,/ peak, precipice, and shore,/ flame, air, and flooding well" He records what he calls the "knowledge of the evening" – as opposed to the daylight knowledge that will come (according to John) only when the soul meets the creator face to face – a knowledge that enraptures us even as it taunts us with God’s absence. John asks God "Where have you hidden away,/ lover, and left me grieving, care on care?/… imploring the empty air." "The knowledge of the evening," Raymo writes: ..is all I have, and all I ask for. God is hidden, and that is the terrible reality of our fate. I cannot pray; I can only praise. … But the air is not empty. It streams with starlight. From the cores of stars neutrinos fall out of the night. The darkness between the stars – and here [where I sit, ] between bank and hedge – is full, like the inside of a cooling oven, with the invisible warmth of the Big Bang. The hedge swells with intricacy….Luminous owls trace ribbons of light in the dark corrie. The setting sun stains the mountains green. Every interstice of creation glows… Whatever John of the Cross saw or felt of God’s daylight face cannot be mine. We are separated, he and I, by centuries and by science. John of the Cross lived in a world [believed to be] 6000 years old and bounded just up there by the dome of night; my universe is measured by geological eons and reaches to the quasars. John’s Earth was the still nexus of Creation; mine is flung like a droplet of spray from a sea of galaxies. John believed himself created in God’s image; I am an atom on a flung drop… John of the Cross, by means of ropes twisted from pieces of blanket and tunic, let himself down from his wretched cell into the darkness. Across the night city he made his way to a Reformed Carmelite convent, "looking like an image of death," and was given stewed pears and cinnamon. The following spring he was at a mountain hermitage in Andalusia, at a place gifted by nature’s unbitter hand. There he completed his verses: "Earth ending, I went free/ left all my care behind/ among the lilies falling and out of mind." [Chet Raymo, Honey From Stone, pp 181-182, rearranged] With darkness all around, starved and suffering, John remembered the sweetness of the earth and consoled himself with its beauty. Creator and creation, it was all worthy of praise. Just to be a part of it was to be in God. But we know less than John, and more. We are not the center of the Universe, maybe not even of God’s world. The Cosmos is vast and fluid. Suns flare and die, sending energy hurtling through space. Stars gleam from hundreds of light years away. Molecules are recycled and reused, appearing now as an asteroid, now in a leaf, its atoms dispersing into a strand of cat hair and last night’s dinner. "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust," a Christian burial service states. Our physical bodies return to the earth from which they were made, like a lump of clay fashioned by God. The world does not revolve around us. But we participate in the world. And this is the puzzle: how do we act in the face of our helplessness? When calamity can strike at any moment, where is our power? For me, it is in our shared reality. Not in knowledge and facts, for those will change in time. Not in our roles as accountant or healer or muse. And not in our presumed superiority as human beings. But in our common experience of pain and decay, of joy and fear, the same fate shared with every living thing. This is what it means to be on Earth. It is that essential. As Sara Maitland says, "if there is a show going on, we are not the audience…there is no place "outside " where we can take a seat and settle to watch." The pain of the earth is our pain, and our fate, bred into our very corpuscles and brain cells. We are interconnected with all that is, one with the asters and the far-flung stars. The Hebrew Bible tells the story of the destruction of Sodom for aggression to strangers. God tells Lot to flee the city, taking his family with him, but on no account to look behind at the devastation there. But Lot’s wife does look back and is turned to a pillar of salt. The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova retells the story:
Lot’s wife turned into the salt of tears, of compassion. She turned back to her familiar landmarks and became the place she loved, forever rooted to the spot. She didn’t know where her life was leading her. But she knew intimately how much would be destroyed, and who. Friends and neighbors and the nasty butcher down the road. And maybe that was too much for her to bear: a lifetime of memory and guilt wherever she went. "It is far better not to know where one is, and realize that one does not know, than to be certain one is in a place where one is not," the navigator states. Maybe it’s time to admit we are lost. We don’t have the answers for everything. Our plans are provisional at best, and the future is as fluid as the sea. At least then we’ll look around a bit, try to get our bearings. Notice what we have, now, who is with us on the journey, and what we’re leaving behind. Look for clues and directions, instead of charging blindly forth. We’ve done that in the past. It’s resulted in DDT and the Tuskeegee Experiment and religious conflict. We know we can cause misery, just as we know what people need to thrive: food to eat, and fresh air, encouragement, and the chance to grow. Everyone is capable of making a difference, even if it’s a kindly word or a note of concern, just as we can make our world polluted and unhealthy. I can’t say why we suffer. Is it penance for our sins, or karmic justice? Is it a token of martyrdom or just the chemistry of our brains? I don’t know the reason. I just know that everything does. New life is built out of death and decay. "However it is in some other world I know that this is the way in ours." But we can learn from it – patience, maybe, and endurance. Appreciation for what we’ve got. Compassion, if nothing else, for a hurt and bleeding world, and the desire to help and heal. That is far short of consolation, I know. But it’s the best I can do. |
