by Bruce Davis, Intern Minister

A sermon given May 30, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Readings:

“The Larger Circle” by Wendell Berry

We clasp the hands of those that go before us,

And the hands of those who come after us.

We enter the little circle of each other’s arms

And the larger circle of lovers,

Whose hands are joined in a dance,

And the larger circle of all creatures,

Passing in and out of life

Who move also in a dance,

To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it

Except in fragments.

“The Well of Grief”  by David Whyte

Those who will not slip

beneath the still surface

on the well of grief,

Turning down through the dark water

to the place we cannot breathe,

Will never know the source

 from which we drink the secret water,

cold and clear,

Nor find in the darkness glimmering

the small round coins

thrown by those

who wished for something else.

“Blessing the Wine” by Lynn Ungar

Wine, like memory, full in the cup

What do you taste in the glass

I have poured you?

Years ago I went picking

grapes—did I ever tell you?

One hot September Sunday

my friends and I staged

bacchanalian revels among

the dust and bees and heavy vines

Watched the juice of our

labors running off the wooden press

Some days I feel that liquid

running slowly through my veins

Unfiltered and impure, still

carrying its sediment of dust

and stems and old sunlight

I have been storing up

these memories for you—

racked and turned and tasted them

Grape picking and the afternoons

spent foraging for berries

along the tracks, up to our

elbows in berry juice and scratches

I know I have mixed

the earth’s blood with my own

Can you taste the blood

and berries?  You are holding

my history against your tongue

I want to drink with you

from the common cup

May memory gather

the fruits of all seasons

May our stories all linger

like wine on the tongue

Praised be Thou, Eternal God,

creator of the fruit of the vine.

Sermon:

It wasn’t until about my fifth year of medical practice that I began to sense the healing power of memory. I remember Foss and Alicia so clearly still. By all appearances this couple, near their eighties, was happy and healthy. They had no children, and they were family enough for each other.

One year, at Alicia’s annual exam, we found an early but aggressive cancer. She died about a year later. This was always the hardest part of my medical work, letting go of people whom I had grown to love in the course of their care. I feel a sweet sorrow now in remembrance of her.

Alicia’s cancer was a painful one. At times she would bear the pain with the help of an array of increasingly potent narcotics. But they caused her to feel not herself. They asked if I might help her find an alternative.

One day they gave me a clue. They came into the office, and her face was deeply lined with the unremitting discomfort. Somehow we began to talk about world traveling they had done in their fifty years of marriage. Foss talked about what it was like to be in Tahiti before it was overwhelmed by tourism. Alicia talked about a secluded saltwater lagoon where they swam beneath a waterfall. I noticed that her face had softened. She was smiling. They were holding hands.

It wasn’t that she’d found relief for her suffering, as a narcotic might offer. Instead, by entering into the delight of a fond memory, she’d found a world that her pain could not touch. So I suggested a regimen, several times a day—a meditation based on travel memories. Foss jumped in enthusiastically, saying he had slides of more than a hundred trips they’d taken. He’d show the slides, they’d talk about their memories, and she’d gently slip into a meditation of images, people, feelings, sounds, aromas . . .

For months this was their practice. Her suffering lessened, and her narcotic dosage could be kept much lower. Day after day they pieced scraps of memory together, an image here, a feeling there, until, by the time of her passing they had quilted a tapestry of the stories that were the measure of their five decades together in marriage. I would call what they did together a memory prayer.

Harnessing the power of memory in prayer or meditation is not new. Just remember for a moment a place that is sacred to you. What does it feel like when you are there? I was at a meditation training in San Diego last weekend, and a neurologist talked about the role of meditation and prayer to decrease suffering. Only a small part of suffering is the pain sensation itself. Most of our suffering is born of anxiety and resistance. Relieving the anxiety or remembering delight lessens the pain.

The neurologist went on to show that meditation and prayer also reduce pain directly, mediated by hormones in the brain.

The natural increase of Serotonin in the brain during meditation and prayer results in a strong sense of well-being.

The natural increase of Dopamine favors the experience of joy and happiness.

The natural increase of Oxytocin gives a deeply pleasurable and loving nervous system response, as when a mother holds her newborn for the first time.

And the increase in Endorphins, naturally occurring narcotics within the brain, reduces pain and stimulates euphoric feelings.

I began to look for opportunities to engage people’s memories when I thought it might help them find a way to decrease their suffering. Several years later, Chuck came to me, as distraught as any person I have ever worked with as doctor or as minister. He’d fought an aggressive cancer in his neck for about ten years with surgery after surgery. Now, finally, the tumor had wrapped itself completely around the great arteries that serve the brain, and no more surgery could be done.

Chuck’s pain was mild, but his suffering was profound. He felt he’d lost a protracted battle with the enemy. He was at the end of the line, the loser. Now there was nothing left between himself and his own death. I asked if he had any spirituality that might help him through this hard time, and he insisted he had no interest in religion. So I translated my question into different words. Was there ever a time when he felt profoundly at peace with himself and with the world? I had him close his eyes to encourage his remembering.

He remembered loving times with his daughters, and hard times because he’d not seen them for years. He remembered sunsets, sitting quietly at the end of the day, watching the shifting colors, until the sun seemed to merge finally with the sea. Chuck’s face softened. By the end of an hour he’d made a dramatic shift from thinking that his life was over to living with the cancer for as many days as he might have left. He reconciled with his daughters, and he moved to Santa Barbara so he could watch the sun set every day. Nine months later his own sun set.

The song says, “Deep in December it’s nice to remember those times in September…” Seasons provide a context for memory because we are different one season to the next. Seasons symbolize the different tones, colors, and flavors of our life episodes. Autumn can suggest nostalgia. The loss of a loved one may feel like winter, whatever month it may be at the time. And when we find new life at the eleventh hour, as Chuck did, it is spring again.

We are a people of all the seasons. Our lives unwind like a spiral, and in all our years we will meet each season again and again, and experience it as for the first time. Again it is summer, and I rejoice. Again it is fall, and like the leaves I begin to let go. Again it is winter, and I am dormant. Again it is spring, and I wake again to my life.

When we open our remembering to moments recent or long ago, we recall our stories of hope and joy as well as our stories of fear and loss. Being the whole humans that we are, our memories will bring us to gather the fruit of all the seasons of our lives. There was a movie in 1973 by director Alan Pakula that I really liked. It was called “Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.” The healing power of memory, the spiritual practice of remembering, can take us to that place of wholeness where we begin to accept and integrate the complexities and contradictions that make up our lives as they are.

I remember one summer, several years ago, when a friend and I sat by a small campfire in the woods. Our friendship, and a couple of glasses of Zinfandel, opened our memories and our invited our stories. I remembered my grandfather and told my friend about the man who had introduced me to gardens. It seems to me now that it was always summertime with Gramps. As a small boy I followed him in his loving garden rounds—trimming, mowing, digging . . . Then, a bit older, I remember doing the work with him. I remember so clearly the look and feel of the oak handles of his tools, polished smooth by use. Later on, when he was as age-worn as his tools, I would often do the harder work for him. One year he shared with me one of his summertime spiritual practices. “Close your eyes,” he said, “and facing the setting sun, turn your head from side to side. Let the light massage your mind.”

Back at the campfire, it was my friend’s turn. He poked at the wood and it blazed up in the darkness. He also had rich memories of a gardening grandfather, a retired Lutheran minister, whom he’d loved enormously growing up. He said that he remembered one particular day in early summer when he was walking with his grandfather between the tilled rows of a kitchen garden. At one point they knelt down together, as if in prayer, and the older man plunged his strong hands into the dark, soft loam. “Feel the earth,” he said to my friend. “Feel the earth well because it is as close to touching God as you will ever get.” 

Summer memories must give way to recollections of fall. Do you remember getting ready for the first day of school in September? New books, new clothes, new teacher, new friends. Letting go of the freedom of summer. I recall a fall ritual that I shared with my children many years ago. We would go walking in the park near our home on an autumn morning. The cold night air colored and loosened the leaves, and the morning breeze freed them. They would fall, spinning fast or spiraling slowly, alder leaves or maple, down and down, to be caught if possible by our waiting hands. They try to fool you, these leaves, jumping out of reach when you least expect it. The myth that accompanied our ritual was that catching even just one leaf would help to prevent the sense of loss and the desire to withdraw that many of us feel mid-winter.

For me the season of winter symbolizes our memories of the losses we have undergone. The fruits of the season of winter for me are the hard blessings of working through our grief. In poet David Whyte’s words from our reading, “…to know the Source from which we drink the secret water, cold and clear….”

I remember when my cousin drowned. In Whyte’s imagery I did everything I could that I might not slip beneath the still surface on the well of my grief, lest I also drown. I shut out my sorrow for this beloved friend and mentor, now gone forever. Bobby was one of those natural heroes for a young boy like myself. Six years older, he was a star baseball pitcher when I was ten, and when he went to college he was a Ricky Nelson guitar-playing ladies man. Then, one day, my mother said he was dead. Drowned. That was it. Gone. I had no place to put the fact of his death, no way to access my feelings about it. I simply tried not to think about it. Many years later, by remembering him and his death, I was able to work through my grief. The gift of memory, though painful, is that we can deal with something that we have not dealt with fully before. I could feel the feelings that I wouldn’t let myself feel at the time. I let myself be real in the loss of a loved one, finally.

Several years later, when I was in college a man I knew well, a scholar-football player, became a Marine. He was killed in the Vietnam War. I mourned my fallen friend. And I mourned the Vietnamese families who lost loved ones at his hands. Now again there are war dead, Americans coming home for their final resting to be nearer to heartbroken family and friends. And Iraqi families also sob in grief and anger at their own losses. On this Memorial Day, let us remember the price that is paid in sorrow for all of those who have fallen at the hands of war.

Each of us must live our losses. Sometimes our grief is concurrent to the loss. More often we heal over time, allowing memory to bring back the grief, now, and again now. So that eventually we integrate the full reality of the loss and so that we accept our feelings of sorrow as essential parts of our wholeness.

[My patients taught me a lot about grief. One older woman was understandably distraught when her eighty-year-old partner died finally of lingering heart disease. In her grief she felt pain, in her loss she felt disoriented, having lived together for fifty-five years. Over months, and finally years, the acute pain gave way, yielding to blessed memories of a full life together. She treated me like a son, and when she died, a bit of my own heart broke. Now, in fond remembrance, the pain has given way to images of her and her frail husband, arm in arm, steady in their togetherness.]

We are a people of all seasons. And so, always again comes the spring. Whatever the nature of our dormancy or somnolence in the winter times of our lives, we look forward to awakening. Fresh hope fills us. Unforeseen possibilities await. As John sang earlier in our Schubert song, there’s a faith in spring:

The world grows lovelier every day,

One cannot tell what yet may happen

The flowering will not end;

The farthest, deepest valley blooms,

Now, poor heart, forget your pain!

Now everything must turn.

Ah, those memories of spring. We remember walking, or maybe running, hand in hand with a first sweetheart. We remember the fresh beginning that we see in the face of a newborn baby. We remember that first warm, sunny morning of April when the robins wake us with their loud and joyous song. 

We are a people of all the seasons. Remembering, we heal. Praying through the images of times past, we heal. Sharing our stories of sorrow and delight with beloved others, as many of you do in covenant groups, we heal. Untying the knots and tangles of our complex lives with a counselor, we heal.

What do we mean by “heal?” Not only the knitting of a bone or the resolution of an infection. The word “heal” relates to the word “whole.” Healing is coming to wholeness. Healing, to be healing, must be holistic. The word “remember” literally means to bring the member fragments of our life story back together into their complex wholeness. In the ancient wisdom traditions of India, the essence of spiritual practice is this: remembering the wholeness that is the gathering of the fruit of all the seasons of our lives. Spiritual truth is known in the oneness that we realize from the totality of our life experiences.

It is as if loving and healing Creator Spirit weaves us as the persons we are, and are becoming. Thread by thread we are built. Reds and greens. Sorrows and joys. Autumn and Spring. Warp and woof together we become whole. To know the tapestry that we are, and are becoming, we must remember the life given from God, by whom we are woven.  May it be so.  Amen.

Prayer

Will you pray with me.  Dearly Beloved, Holy Weaver of our lives, we’ve known love and joy, we’ve known loss and sorrow.  We’ve become people of all the seasons.  Help us to discover the pattern and purpose of this complex tapestry you are making.  Help us to remember the wholeness that we are, and are becoming.  Help us to glimpse your weaving hands at their work.  Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis.  All rights reserved.