by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Good morning!

Come into this place of peace

And let its silence heal your spirit;

Come into this place of memory

And let its history give you strength;

Come into this place of prophecy and power

And let its vision change your heart.

Come now, and let us worship together!

I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s that we’ve just passed through the anniversary of Katrina, and tomorrow is the anniversary of the terrorist attack of 9/ll.  Or maybe it’s just that I’m getting older. 

Anyway, last week I was in my neighborhood post office, and some commemorative stamps caught my eye—stamps of some quilts from an exhibit I had seen and just loved a couple of years back.  So when it was my turn, I asked for five books of the stamps.  The postal clerk that these stamps were so popular, and he thought he was out, and then he began to search, here and there and everywhere, and he came up with all of the remaining books of the stamps, 7 out of the 1,000 that had come just the day before.  He was a young man, an immigrant from somewhere—I couldn’t quite fix the accent—but he was so pleased and excited:  “You are so lucky!” He said, just beaming.  “These are the last ones here!”  Now I’m not sure why, but at that very moment, looking at his bright eyes and warm smile, the thought came to me, “Lucky?  You’re excited about stamps?  Don’t you get it—you’re going to die one day, and so am I.  We’ll both be . . . dead.  So what’s so great about these stamps?  Just . . . chill, why don’t you.”  Naturally, I didn’t say this.  He might have thought, at the very least, “This lady is intense.”

The question arises, when we stop long enough to ask it, what does have meaning in our lives?  What is real?  What is true?  Well, if there is any human lesson from Katrina and from the events of 9/11—eschewing now the political issues—if there is any human lesson, it is that nothing in this world holds.  One day you can have a family, a wife and children, and the next day, the mom is gone.  Or one day, your health is fine—you thought—and the doctor calls after some routine test and tells you that actually you’re not.  Or there is an automobile accident—who even knows what happened?  And you’re visiting your friend in the ICU unit, and praying that he’ll make it. 

We want to hold on to some kind of ground that will not shift.  It is just intolerable to think that there is no such ground—but what is there on this earth that cannot be lost?  Certainly your job can be lost—lots of us have been there.  Your friends can move away, literally or emotionally.  Children can be unfaithful.  Your spouse can die—or worse, abandon you by going into the arms of someone else.  Whoa!  Houses can burn.  Possessions can be stolen.  The stock market can crash.  You, in fact, can and will at some point lose everyone you love now and have ever loved. 

Now let me check in with you—are you ready for the good news?  It’s there, it’s coming—just bear with me.

But first we have to get down and dirty and realize that there is no “out there” to save us—there is no place of ultimate security.  That’s tough to accept.  I mean, we leave our mother’s womb looking for that place, that place where we’ll be enclosed and kept safe and all our needs, as they say, will be met.  Well, to get to the good news, you have to give that up.  I’m sorry, but really, you do.

When I was a child growing up in north Louisiana with my elderly grandparents and little brother and sister and my ne’er-do-well father, I used to dream about having a home of my own, a fantasy place that included the husband and children and picket fence, and all of that.  Really, it was all there—the whole Hallmark package. 

So we dream.  When we get the job that we finally want, when we find the soul mate we’ve been waiting for, then when the children come to fill the empty house, when our outstanding work is rewarded, and we reach the salary level that we need to live well and send those children to college, etc., etc., etc.—when all of this is in place—well, then it’ll be done, won’t it?  No more striving.  We can just stop and rest and know that everything is going to be okay, everything will hold steady at that point, won’t it?  Nothing will change.  We’ve made it.  What a fantasy that is!

There is no place of ultimate security.  That’s particularly hard for Americans to take in, because we are so outer-directed—that is, taking our cues from the exterior.  We have been culturally conditioned to believe that we are a special people, with a dream to follow—a dream that was once about democracy and opportunity for all, but which unfortunately has now been degraded to mere material success.  The American Dream!  Think about it.  What other country has this sense of itself?  Can you imagine saying the French Dream?  The British Dream? 

Novelist Robert Stone in an essay on John Updike’s new book Terrorist uses the word “Americanization” to speak of Updike’s characters.  They struggle to maintain some kind of viable inner life while being caught in what he calls “the most revolutionary force in history—American capitalism.”  Stone says that the term Americanization evokes, in part, “a setting aside of the social order in ruthless pursuit of profit, a jury-rigged class system based on money, a rootless and dislocated population, a random disordering of priorities.”

My time in Guatemala took me away from the excesses of this culture—as many of you know, this summer ten of us from our congregation went on a human rights delegation to Guatemala, where we visited with indigenous people who are living on a tiny fraction of what most of us have.  It took me a long time to become readjusted to American culture when I returned—but now after three weeks, I’m beginning to be able to listen to the news once again.

The question is, how can we cultivate any kind of interior life in this kind of society, where we are inundated with goods and advertisements for those goods?

Well, moving along now to the good news.  Once you know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to hold on to, nothing that stays, you’re left with yourself—the one and only thing you have any control over whatsoever is you and your relationship to the Holy.  And it is when you know that, in the deepest part of yourself, when you know you are that vulnerable—and therefore that open—that is when you are ready to do deep spiritual work.

It all started with Adam and Eve, you know.  There they were in the Garden, frolicking about, unperturbed by any little thing, and wouldn’t you know they were tempted and they ate the apple—tempted into what?  What did the apple stand for?  The Bible says the knowledge of good and evil.  Or one could say ego, or self-consciousness.  They came to know themselves as thinking creatures.  They came to know that they would one day die.  The Scripture reads:  “And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden./ And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?”  Where art thou, Adam?

And the question comes down to us still through the ages, though we may be tempted to hide from the best and the highest that is within us, “Where art thou?”  Each one of us must answer that question.  Who are you?  Whose are you?

There was a book popular some years back entitled When You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him.  Great title.  Anything that you’re grasping or clinging to, anything that you think will give you solid ground, anything that you think will make you secure, anything or anyone, any guru or priest who you think will bring you absolute truth—no, let it go.

And so is there anything you can count on?  Still waiting for the good news?  The Good News, or the Truth, is to be found within, and it might be known by many names, but I will call it “the eternal”—that which has no beginning and no ending.  Now this doesn’t have anything to do with time.  Eternity is not “a long time.”  It is the source of all things, the god-stuff that is incarnated in you when you were born.  Sometimes I have referred to it as “the divine spark within.”  That’s Emerson’s phrase. 

Well, how can you go there, how can you access that place?  Experience the eternal—on this earth, I mean.  It is possible, at least in brief moments of time, and sometimes longer for those few enlightened ones, those spiritually gifted ones to experience the eternal.  It is a place where you no longer think in temporal terms—all seems as it should be, everything seems in its place, and no one is judged; you feel connected with all that is, and at peace.  You know somehow, contrary to the evidence, that all is well, all is well with your soul.  It is not a place where many people live for very long, but it is a touchstone for the eternal truth, the source, that is a part of each of us.

These moments are rare for most of us, but all of us can find a way, even for a few minutes a day, to get quiet—to become so quiet that you don’t know what your job is, you don’t remember who your friends are, and you have no idea how much you owe the bank.  To become quiet enough for the sacred within to bring forth who you are—your essence—and what you were meant to be.

There is a kind of internal necessity at work in each of our lives, I believe.  A kind of internal necessity.  We are impatient.  We don’t like the fallow times—the days (or weeks) of depression, the long stretches of confusion, the blundering along.  We want to be in that heavenly groove—now!  But every process, including every human process, has its own time and works in its own way.  Our task is to be faithful, each day, to the best that is within us, and simply notice what unfolds.

We are admonished in the scripture to “pray without ceasing.”  What could this mean?  I believe each one of us has a prayer within, and we pray that prayer uncertainly and, yes, impatiently, and incompletely—but that prayer is the deepest desires of our heart—it is the holy yearning within.  Does your heart cry out when you hear of untimely death on the battlefield?  That’s a prayer.  Do you long for peace, maybe long for it so much that your tears fall as you read the newspaper?  That’s a prayer.  Do you want more than anything to be able to love more fully and to laugh more deeply?  That’s a prayer.

I heard a story on NPR yesterday morning.  A man who lost both his wife and her mother in the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center five years ago finally allowed an interview for the first time.  He was a Warner Bros. executive, a man who had everything going for him, and suddenly he was plunged into grief and loss.  “What have you learned in these five years?” the interviewer asked him.  “I have learned,” he said, “I have learned that you should surround yourself with people you can love and trust.”  So all of his achievements have boiled down to that.

Life is inherently uncertain; it is our escape from that sure uncertainty that leads us astray, that causes us to grasp and cling.  We live in fear—and so we distract ourselves.  And there are a million ways to do that—anywhere from drugs to doughnuts.  But if we are in the company of people we can love and trust, people like those in this congregation—we can know that in this world of change, there is an essence, an unchanging essence, within each one of us, and we can connect with that, and we can rest and wait and trust.  And all will be well, all will be well with our soul.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, it is so easy to be pulled away from the center, so easy to dally in the shallows, when we would swim in the depths.  This morning we ask for courage to face the questions and the uncertainties of our lives with patience and with faith.  May we be ever more aware of the truest yearnings of our hearts, and may we learn to trust the sacred source from whence they come.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

My dear people, know that place of truth within, and know that it is Holy, and know that you are good.  Go now in love, and go in peace.