Rev. Tom Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 19, 1998

Preparing for teacher recognition this week brought to mind teachers in my life. I think we all have them, people who open doors of understanding, knowledge—even the spirit for us. I remember a teacher I had in college who taught a beginning philosophy course.

Her name was Dr. Beatrice Zedler. When I entered class on the first day, there she was: a slight, frail looking woman. She seemed awfully old to me—too old to be teaching a class. I remember her eyelids, they were wrinkled with age, so much so her eyes barely seemed to peek through.

After a few words of introduction about the logistics of the class, she got down to business.

“Why,” she asked, “do skinless wieners have skins?”

A slight grin came across her face, pleased with the puzzling question she had asked.

I have to admit that I don’t remember all the points of the answer to this question of the ages. It had something to do with the changing meaning of wiener casings. Skinless wieners have skins, it seemed, because they didn’t have the same kinds of skin they did at some previous time. At some point in the old days, wieners had skins that were tougher and they were probably made differently than the wieners of today. So they have skins, just not the same kinds of skins. Hence the question.

Thus began my formal learning in philosophy. I’ve considered myself a student ever since. Perhaps it is only in Wisconsin where philosophy starts with a query on sausages.

I remember that day, and I remember Dr. Zedler.

The spirit was present for me, not so much because of the subject matter, but because of the life and the spirit of the teacher. Dr. Zedler was a person who lived her life to teach, and she did just that. As the semester went on, we would go on to engage more seemingly important issues, but the essence of what I took from her was present on that first day. The essence of her spirit came through in her engagement with life, and living out that call through teaching. She cared deeply about what it was we learned and what it was she was doing.

She supplemented her work with many, many newspaper clippings and there were always readings from the classics.

But all that was secondary to her being. Her presence and passion opened a door for me, and I still carry that with me today.

When I think of times that the spirit has clearly touched my life, I think of times like these. I am connected, I am engaged, I am in the world and very aware of the relationship.

They are times when we touch the divine. It may come in the form of smells from an apple pie baking in grandmother’s kitchen. It may come from a stroll through a garden with a friend. It may come from the presence of sunshine. We aware that there is something larger than ourselves.

And they are not always happy times. The spirit is present when we grieve the loss of a loved one. Or on that morning when we simply ask if we are going to be able to get on with the day. It is present when we are told we only have a few months to live.

The spirit is that connection to the mystery.

It calls us to go deeper. It calls us to be in relationship with the world.

It challenges us to leave the zone of comfort.

It calls us to be open to the lesson it offers.

It calls us to carry on, to go forward despite our fears or obstacles.

It calls us forward, into discovery of ourselves and our community.

And it does not promise that it will be easy going.

It can be a divine disturber—it is the agent that shakes things up and they are not the same afterwards.

In the Christian tradition, today is Pentecost, which marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. The biblical account of the story doesn’t sound comfortable:

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like a rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they (the Apostles) were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

The atmosphere sounds pretty chaotic. Pandemonium is about to break out. And what happened next was amazing. There were people from all the nations living in Jerusalem at the time. They spoke many different languages and were not able to understand each other. With the coming of the spirit, they could hear and understand others. The arrival of the spirit brought down the barriers. Suddenly they were able to understand a common language. Their old ways of relating to one another and how they thought of God was blown out the window. Now they stood on common ground.

This coming together, the story says, was the beginning of the church. It was the time when that common language was brought to all the people and they were connected as a community.

In the Hebrew scriptures, wind and spirit have the same root. The spirit of God moves over creation and is perceived as wind as it works its way through life.

The wind is an apt metaphor for the spirit. It is something we are aware of in our lives, like the rain and sunshine. It is a presence whether it comes in the form of a gentle breeze or a mighty gust that stirs the dust in the street. Whatever its manifestation, we are aware of it. We know its power.

I once read a child’s definition of wind: “It’s like air, only pushier!”

And indeed when it is pushy, it can take us to places we didn’t expect to be.

One morning some years ago, about this time of year, I woke up to the news on the radio that a small town in southern Wisconsin had been almost completely leveled by a tornado. The town was Barneveld, just a few miles down the road from where I grew up.

Like many villages in the area, it only had a population of two or three hundred people. The kind of town that is not in the news, unless one of its sporting teams wins a championship or some other such milestone.

I don’t remember any particularly distinguishing features of the town. You drove into it and before long you were driving out of it. It sat on high ground and the tornado seemed to go right down the main street. Most all the homes were gone.

The town was a mass devastation. Help poured in from all over the country. People were in shock at this sudden loss. One of the only structures left standing was the steeple of the Lutheran church in town. There it stood, alone against the sky.

The steeple became the symbol of the town’s future. It seemed that despite the tragedy, the people would continue on. A sign also showed up in the newspapers and on television that became the town’s motto. It said simply: “We’re not giving up, we’re going on.”

And it did. Today the town is larger than it was before. It has more businesses than it did before. Scars remain, it is not the same. But the people have gone on.

It is a common story, in the face of tragedy, people come together and they carry on with their lives. And it is now part of the collective history. And the town, a relative who lives there tells me, has a different sense of itself. People are more connected than they seemed to be before.

In discussing the workings of the spirit, one theologian has used the term conspiracy to describe how it moves through and among us. It comes from the roots words con (meaning with) and spire (meaning to breathe). Breathing together. Breathing with. Now this is not in the usual meaning of conspiring against something as much as conspiring for the good, for the larger whole. It is a coming together, a breathing together. A joining of efforts and lives.

It is a working for a consensus towards the good. Its workings, over time, bring people together. It means going from a place of isolation to a stronger sense of community. These past weeks it can be seen in places like Northern Ireland, where people have been at odds for generations upon generations. After much fighting and the loss of much life, it seems that there is a genuine possibility for peace there. It seems that a majority of the people are willing to work for a process that eventually may bring reconciliation.

The events a few days ago in Springfield leave us longing for the spirit in such a tragedy. Such violence, particularly when it involves children, and especially when it happens in our backyard, is hard to comprehend.

It is an experience that knocks the collective community off its feet, and we are left searching for answers.

As in other such instances, it seems that almost instinctively people have come together. In Springfield we see images of the fence of remembrance outside the school. It is full of flowers, of notes, of photographs, of glowing candles. People have come from far and near, coming in search of meaning in the face of the tragedy. In the midst of the tumult, it is a touchstone. It is a place for the community to come together and to search for answers.

It seems that this may be the beginnings of a conspiracy toward the good, a breathing together in the face of this suffering. This is how the spirit moves us forward, to redeem the anguish of these events. To move us forward from the anger and grief of the situation to a place of action and new life.

We come together here each Sunday. We come seeking answers. We come seeking hope. We sing “Spirit of life, come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.”

When the spirit came to the apostles and their followers, they came together understanding the same language, empowered to build the church and to bring that spirit to the people.

Today, things are different in many ways. But the essence of our coming together is not. We come here to honor that connection we have to others and to that which is larger than ourselves. We come here seeking answers and understanding, and to live lives in service to the larger whole. We come to listen to the spirit, whereever it may lead us.

Words of Pablo Neruda:

We were taught the very same things: respect the church,
no hawking and spitting on porticos
don’t soak your socks on the altar—
but here things are different—life smashes religions
and only the God of the Winds inhabits this island.
This is the only true church, the rock of all ages,
and around it, fornications and deaths come and go.
On Easter Island, the altar is everywhere,
All is smithy for the unknown,
and mothers suckle their newly born
on the very same stairways reserved for the feet of the gods.

Our altar, too, is everywhere. The spirit connects us to the life around us, whether it be in Springfield, in the classroom where we teach or learn, here in this community, in Northern Ireland, or in our garden on a lovely spring day.

The writer Peter Marty tells a story of a spring day when the gusts were howling and his 4-year-old daughter asks her mother if she can go out and play with the wind. Not long after she is seen outside on the family’s deck, twirling and swirling and very much engaged with the spirit.

Children can teach us and bring us many insights. Dancing seems like something we all could do. And indeed it is something we all must do.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.