Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 7, 1996

The Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him. He asked them, "Where is the dwelling of God?"
They laughed at him: "What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of His glory?"
Then he answered his own question: "God dwells wherever we let Him in."
--Hasidic master Rebi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk
reported by Martin Buber

Nobody ever told us that life would be so hard--that it would be so hard to live life well. And perhaps that's as it should be. We wouldn't want to tell small children, "You think that skinned knee is bad--just wait 'til you become a grown-up. Then you'll really suffer." No, we know that they will find pain and disappointment all too soon, and we wish it were not so--for them, or for us. And so we help them each step along the way to adulthood, dressing the skinned knee, explaining why their best friend had to move away, comforting them after the first broken heart.

And we ourselves, time after time, are confronted with the unraveling of the cloth of our expectations.

--a woman discovers a love letter in her husband's dresser drawer--and she didn't write it. Yes, he's having an affair--but how could that be? He has been her best friend for 20 years, and they share everything. Her world seems shattered. If he can betray her, no place, no person is safe. A kind of innocence is forever lost.

--a man works for a company for 17 years and suddenly he is laid off, a victim of downsizing. He has given the best years of his life to the company: forget 8-hour days, he has worked until the job was done, sometimes even neglecting his family. He is 57 years old. And devastated. Now what?

Change comes, and it is wrenching--it twists us into shapes and forms we don't recognize. Where is that smile, that tilt of the chin, that said to the world, "It's nice to be alive"? Change often brings chaos. We are thrown into a place we've never been, and we don't even know where to go for help or how to ask. We are pushed up against the wall of our limits, our mortality, our imperfections. Our assumptions about the future are blown away. We no longer have the luxury of denial--of imagining that we are in control of our life and that it is really going pretty well, thank you.

It is at these times when we must invite resurrection. But first we must descend into the silence of God, into the emptiness of the tomb. We must give up what we hoped for, what we always dreamed of, to come to some place of security that is deeper than we have known. We have the opportunity to face ourselves in a way that is transforming. "But," you may say, "I don't want transformation! I like things the way they are." My friends, I'm sorry, but you don't get to say how you want things in this world. You don't get to say that we shouldn't have illness and death and broken relationships and heartache. Well, you can say it, but you're going waste a lot of time and energy, if you do. This world really is about loss, the Buddhists say--it's about endings of all kinds. And in the Christian myth, it's about tombs and darkness and the loss of the only one you ever loved. And it's about rolling back the stone and facing that loss and finding that the tomb is empty. In other words, life is about death and loss, but it's also about resurrection and hope.

The African American writer James Baldwin wrote in his book Nobody Knows My Name : "Any real change implies the break up of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew, to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet it is only when <a person> is able, without bitterness or self pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished, or a privilege he has long possessed, that he is set free--that he has set himself free--for higher dreams, for greater privileges."

Let's think about these words: to surrender a dream is to set yourself free "for higher dreams, for greater privileges." No, surely I know what is best for me! Surely my plans, my dreams, these are sound and good. Have you ever thought that your dreams might be too small? Have you ever thought that the very nature of your dreams might be transformed by a God who loves you more than you love yourself, who treasures your mind, your body, your spirit, a God who finds you infinitely precious?

I want to tell you some stories, stories about people who have been transformed, who have gone from the darkness of loss, the darkness of the tomb, into a resurrected life.

The first story is about a couple all of you know--Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. It's easy for us to think that people of some wealth and power escape life's pain. But they do not. In November of 1980 the Carters left the White House, after Jimmy had endured a crushing defeat by Ronald Reagan. When they moved back to Plains, Georgia, the family peanut business was in debt $1,000,000, and their youngest child had gone off to school. They were lonely. They were at home together all day every day, and as much as they cared for each other, they found this much closeness difficult. They began to walk through the woods and fields for miles, and to seek ways to serve in their home community. They began to heal.

Then something strange happened. As Rosalynn reported it, "One night I woke up and Jimmy was sitting straight up in bed. He always sleeps so soundly that I thought he must be sick. "What's the matter?" I asked. "I know what we can do at the library," he said. "We can develop a place to help people who want to resolve disputes. There is no place like that now. . . . . He talked on enthusiastically about other areas where negotiations might help . . . " And you know the end of the story. Jimmy Carter is all over the world, from Ethiopia to Nicaragua, mediating disputes. And whereas some have questioned this role, there is no doubt that at times he has been successful where others have not, for he has no political agenda. His agenda is peace, mutual respect. The Carters have also been leaders in the Habitat for Humanity Program in which our church is involved, and because of their efforts, many poor families live in greater dignity and comfort.

The next story is that of a theologian, Melanie May. As an academic, and a Harvard graduate, she was always a high achiever. She gave herself to her work with a fierce intensity, and she was rewarded. But somewhere along the way she forgot about her body. She forgot about her roots. She forgot about Grandma May. Grandma May was a gardener who knew the sun and knew the soil. Melanie remembers her among the corn stalks and bean poles and tomato plants, in her broadbrimmed hat, with her hoe. Grandma May used to say, "A body knows." Profound theological knowledge that academia had covered over.

Then life came along and changed Melanie's plans. She was on vacation in New Mexico when she felt a sore spot on her right breast in the shower one morning. She rehearsed all the reasons why this could not be breast cancer. For one thing, she was too young: only 35. But her body knew: it was cancer, and her world fell apart. She says that everything she had thought was important was "instantly trivial." She knew in a way that she could never forget that she was mortal, that she was dying--whether she would die now or at age 90, that knowing changed her life forever.

She had some work to do--some spiritual work. Mainly her work centered on learning to love herself. It's not that she was not loved by others, she says--she was well loved by parents, by friends, by teachers, by lovers. But she didn't know she was loved, couldn't somehow take in that knowledge. Perhaps it was because when she grew up, she didn't fit society's definition of what is lovable. As a young teen, she was already nearly six feet tall, with acute acne and braces. Her religious tradition was one of shame and unworthiness. Later she was to read the words of African American poet Audre Lorde, and to know their truth, "Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other." But she grew up thinking that she must love others unselfishly, when she didn't even know how to love herself.

What the breast cancer did was to open Melanie's eyes to love--love was poured out lavishly upon her, and she saw signs of love wherever she looked: flowers, casseroles, her lawn mowed, cards, calls, dinner invitations, offers of rides to the doctor, etc., etc. She no longer could deny her lovability. She learned that there was only one thing she was called upon to do: to let herself be loved. She had to "heal the wound of unworthiness." Her books could not teach her to love herself, but her body did--her very woundedness and the simple touch of others: body to body, flesh to flesh. She writes: "When I speak of presence I speak, first and foremost, of presence in my body. I live, and think, in my body, no longer alienated or abstracted as I have been most of my life." The body knows.

"I 'practice resurrection,'" Melanie says, using the words of Wendell Berry. I like that. Practice in a dual sense: make of resurrection a practice, in the manner of a spiritual practice--make resurrection a regular daily experience, for every day brings to us the little losses, the little deaths, that foreshadow the larger cycles of our existence. Even our breathing: breathing out we die to the old, breathing in we become alive with the new. And then practice resurrection in the sense of practicing a skill, until we get really good at it. Be willing to go into the void over and over again, for the void is not a place to fear, but rather a place of gestation, of fecundity.

Maybe, though, words are too easy. They slip off the tongue so glibly. The body knows how hard resurrection is. Nevermind philosophy or theology, how do we respond in our bodies when the unthinkable occurs? When our beautiful, brilliant son becomes mentally ill and we know that he will never, never be well? When the order of things is turned upside down, when we are supposed to die first, but instead our child dies? Or when the unthinkable thing happens to a whole race of people, as it did in the Holocaust? Though Easter is a Christian holiday, paradoxically, I believe it is the Jews who have the most to teach us about resurrection.

The darkness that was made manifest during those years of the Holocaust was, is, incomprehensible. The Jews who survived were deeply and permanently transformed, and indeed none of us who consider the depth of the evil set loose in the human soul during that time will ever be the same. Where does that much hate come from? Six million Jews died, one and a half million of them children. Nine out of every ten rabbis perished. In less than ten years all of Europe was decimated of its Jews. It was a time when evil reigned, and God seemed silent. Martin Buber, a theologian who himself was a refugee from Nazi Germany, calls this moment in history, "the eclipse of God." He writes, "The Bible knows of God's hiding His face, of times when the contact between heaven and earth seems to be interrupted. God seems to withdraw Himself utterly from the earth and no longer to participate in its existence. The space of history is then full of noise, but empty of the divine breath."

Where do we find the will to pray, in these times? Can we trust a God who does this kind of disappearing act? Is there a God acting for the good throughout history, as scripture tells us? If so, where was this god during Auschwitz? Buber continues, "One can still 'believe' in the God who allowed these things to happen, but can one still speak to Him? Can one . . . enter into a relationship with Him? . . . <Can we say with the Psalmist, >'Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for his mercy endureth forever'?"

Edward Feld, Jewish theologian, poses these questions and then reaches for "an alternative vision to madness and nothingness." He believes that we have thought of God too much as a person, and that God is in fact a spirit. It is idolatrous, he says, to see God as a person in control of events. There was a holy presence even in Auschwitz. Whoever survived was helped by another, was saved by help and the memory of that help. Every survivor tells that same story, says Feld. "The woman who, in Auschwitz, brought her friend a half-rotten raspberry for her birthday gave that person her life."

Feld continues: "We can no longer believe in a divine intervention that will come from the outside, but we must learn that we can let holiness enter, that we can make a space for the divine, that which is most deeply nourishing, that which sparks the soul of each of us. When we listen to the silent calling of God, impelling us to reach out and shatter the hard reality constructed by evil, to affirm the humanity of our neighbor--that is divine intervention."

The holiness that we seek is central to the world and is blooms amidst even the greatest evil. Do you seek God? Then notice the impulses toward the sacred in yourself and make holy moments. Touch your wife's face and look her in the eye and risk telling her how much you love her. Be present with a ragged street person, really present, for even just a few moments. Call up somebody who's having a hard time and say, "How are you?" and be open to hearing the answer. Stop and listen to the singing of birds. Hear the promise, and believe.

We do not have an all-powerful God who pulls the strings so that good wins out. And the forces of hate and fear are great. And so it is up to us: We are, as Feld says, "the preservers of the holy." And we do that in the ordinary and in the everyday. There are countless opportunities. We have only to ask, "How can I serve the Holy One?" and the answer will come. Don't expect God to save you; you are to save God. Oh, what a disappointment! Oh, what a terrible reversal! Poet Denise Levertov writes:
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle's nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?

So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let's try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.

Resurrection is hard work. Because it's done after the innocence is gone. It's done after our fantasy is stripped down to the bone. It's done after the wound has left us shattered and sober with reflection. We know we'll never be the same.

When we are left in that abyss, we learn that we do resurrection, and we do it in community. It is we who protect and lift up the good, who make a dwelling place for the holy. It's done through our bodies, as we see, as we touch, as we speak. We "hold to our icy hearts <and in our wounded hands> a shivering God." And love blooms once again.
So be it. Amen.


PRAYER

O Living God, this is Easter Sunday, and some of us are still in the tomb of despair. Let us be open to new life this day. May we roll the stone away from our hearts so that we may be touched by love, receptive to newness of life, awakened to joy. Teach us to make holy moments, tender moments. Teach us to bring your healing love to others. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.