Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 29th of August 1999
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
after a wet and
muggy week in late summer
to worship, to join the stories of our lives
to the larger
story of all lives,
and the story of the mysterious universe itself
our larger home,
our true school and temple.
Soon comes the fall and its rhythms and requests.
But right now, the
glory and gift of this day
Invocation [Next] [back to top]
We are not our own. (italicized lines are sung from the hymn)
Born of forgotten stardust,
woven of ancestral genes and spiritual heritage,
all that we are we have received.
We are not our own. Earth has formed us.
The summer has enfolded us in robes of heat
that we did not make ourselves.
School teachers and students prepare to learn
and teach together wisdom they did not invent
for the first time,
fruit of many generations
Our earth has decked California with cascades purple bougainvillea
vines,
and dried up Ohio corn,
and at the same time shaken the poorer citizens of Turkey to the ground
without
pity.
We are not our own.
Ah. Ah.
Oh Love, see, we are what we experience.
Can it be we are what surprises us, what claims us,
what visits us, what shakes us, what breaks upon us?
Then so be it.
Let us sing then, that we might become the singing.
(hymn # 317)
The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from Dave Barry's book 1998 book "Dave Barry Turns 50" Its title is 10 Signs That You Are Losing It (i.e. Have Turned 50)
1. You tend to forget things.
2. When you drive your car, you notice that people yell at you a lot. Often, these people are lying on your hood.
3. On more than one occasion while shaving, you have noticed that your razor seemed kind of dull. Upon closer examination, your razor turned out to be your toothbrush.
4. You're always searching for the right word or name. You'll be telling an anecdote, and you'll get stuck on a name, and you'll tell your listeners: "You know! That guy with the thing on his head. You know, that guy. He has that thing." And everybody will start trying to guess who you are talking about, as if you're playing charades; and finally, after ten minutes of this, it will turn out that the name you are trying to remember is "the Pope." By this time, of course, you have no recollection of the original anecdote.
5. You sometimes address your spouse as "General Eisenhower."
6. You tend to forget things.
7. You sometimes wear a bathrobe to your office.
8. And it isn't your office.
9. It isn't your bathrobe either.
10. You tend to forget things.
The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is a poem by the great Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska, called "It Could Have Happened" 1972
It could have happened.
It had to have happened.
It happened before.
It happened later.
Nearer. Farther away.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Because you were alone.
Because you were with others.
Because you were standing on the right. On the left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because it was a sunny day.
You were in luck...there was a forest.
You were in luck...there wasn't a single tree.
You were in luck...there was a rake. A hook.
A beam. A brake. A door jamb. A turn.
A quarter inch. A single second.
You were in luck...just then a twig went floating by.
As a result. Because. Although. Despite.
What would have happened if a hand,
or a foot, or an inch, or a hairsbreadth was
there during an unlucky coincidence?
So you're still here?
Still reeling from another close shave,
another reprieve, another narrow escape?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more speechless!
I couldn't be more shocked.
Listen! Can you hear your heart
pounding in my chest?
Sermon: Accidental Tourist [Next] [back to top]
First, this is not a sermon about the novel or film called "The Accidental Tourist." I hope no one was expecting that because of the title I put in the newsletter. But I did choose that wonderful title for reasons that will become clear later
Instead, I am offering you a sermon on the gift of chance experience in our lives. Or at the very least, the gift of chance experience in my life. After all, I have never personally experienced any event in your life. You have never experienced my life.
I can put it plain: "I live inside my skin. You each live in yours."
But, don't accuse me of radical individualism here. Look, I couldn't preach at all, nor could we even have church, unless you and I both suspected that the last line of Szymborska's great poem is at least metaphorically true.
"Listen," she writes, "can you hear your heart pounding in my chest?"
That's a great line But true as it is, I still don't think I can preach on any "experience" except my own.
But before I tell you about a few of my summer experiences, I need to offer a warning against treating any of our experiences as some sort of final authority. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
I told you last week I knew a number of Shinto priests. I invited one of them, Tetsuji Ochiai, to visit the congregation I served in California and do the Autumn Purification Ritual. He arrived in full regalia and after I talked about Shinto for a while, he performed the rite.
One man stormed out of the service in disgust. I thought maybe he was someone who really hated religious ritual, but later, when I talked with him, he told me he left because he just plain hated the Japanese people.
This took me by surprise and I was speechless. So he filled the silence by telling me he had been locked up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II, and had suffered many degradations and witnessed many deaths in that terrible place. Since his experience, he told me, he could not be in the presence of any Japanese people, whom he considered, in his word, "monsters."
He was too bitter to talk to me about his hatred any more that day or, for that matter, ever again. He was angry at me for bringing Tetsuji to the church at all. I felt spiritually impotent to respond to his prejudice.
I began to think about it a lot. I realized that his formative experience was not an experience of the Japanese people. It was an experience of war, which is always uniquely terrible. This experience literally filled his unlucky heart to its edge. He no longer had any room within it for any other experiences of Japanese life. He was, sadly, closed off completely to the tea ceremony, a piece of slip-glaze pottery, a novel by Lady Murasaki, a film by the late Kurosawa, a bento box, a poem by Basho, the footfall of a Buddhist nun, or even simple conversation, human to human, over a lacquered table. None of these, surely, are monstrous things.
Eventually, I reasoned, his singular experience simply hardened into a prejudice he was never willing to face. And later I learned that this prejudice affected his marriage, his children, and even his grandchildren. Sadly, I knew rigid prejudice could be clogging up my spiritual arteries as well as his...for we are both human beings, and his is a very human experience. Thus, I came to the conclusion that "life experience" per se is not a perfect teacher. Some experiences can curdle into something sour.
I believe with all my heart that our reason must teach us too, and our shared knowledge, our shared stories; and even our faith must teach us...our faith that in time, when we face it with care, even prejudice may be conquered. But despite this warning about taking "experience" too seriously, I do think that our life-experiences, both positive and negative, can still be powerful teachers.
So, that said, this morning I am going to share with you three important summer experiences. 1. My experience of love and friendship. 2. My experience of aging. And 3. My experience of an auto accident.
Not one of these experiences is unique, of course. I've known love and friendship in my life for more than just a summer. I'm sure that's true for you too. And, I've been aging since I was born, as have you. Finally, this was, unfortunately, not my first auto-accident. And yet each of these summertime experiences was unique in its own way.
First, the experience of love and friendship. I went "home" to visit my heart-family and friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. This took two full weeks since after 24 years there I grew to love many, many people. But never before have I spent quality time with all of them bunched into a two-week time. I stayed with Richard Sinkoff, the brother of my heart, and dined and laughed with my good friends Doug Robson and Leonard Nightingale. I stayed with Doug Basinger and John Flickinger, my sweet Mennonite friends. I conversed with Harry Scholefield and Roz Reynolds, my wisdom teachers. I spent a rich and engaging time with Paul and Janice Price, and their 2 year old, my godson Mark. I had lunch with my dear friend Greg Gagnon as we discussed love and loss, went to a spendid Mexican circus with Kevin Woodson, the artist whose fine work fills my loft, and house-sat for and visited with my talented friends Matt Czajkowski and Jim Hunger. I hiked in a redwood forest with my colleague Ken Reeves. And my gay men's drawing group threw a lavish party for my return to the Bay Area. It was a rich time, warm and affirming.
Then, after the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Salt Lake City, I flew to Portland, Oregon to visit my dear friends Tom Disrud and Matthew Nelson, (and also turn my July paycheck over to the single best bookstore in America, the venerable Powell's.)
After I returned to Columbus for Bill's final service in July, I flew to Boston, dined with Kim Vaeth and Jim Vetter; and then my good friend from High School, Chuck Rzepka and his wife Jane Rzepka, (whom many of you met when she preached my Installation Sermon) and I drove up to Montreal together. There we visited their son Toby. We had a ball. We stayed with Toby's friends, Kaveh and Shannon, two twenty-two year old film school grads. We three fifty-year olds slept till noon on the old stuffed couches and mattresses students seem to collect.
Shannon and Kaveh live in this outstanding blue and gold loft with twenty-foot ceilings, exposed pipes, French windows overlooking the cobblestones, glass blocks...and a great view of the downtown skyline. We ate French Canadian and Brazilian food, strolled the ubiquitous street festivals and otherwise had a perfect time. Jane and I agreed that our time there was like a 3 day vacation from adulthood. It was pure, unadulterated bliss. I often mention young people I call my "godchildren." God, how I love them. I've mentioned Toby already. And my namesake Mark.
In early August my San Jose godson, Ben, age 15, flew out from California for a few days. The next weekend I drove up to Michigan both to see my goddaughter Andrea who was up from Puerto Montt, Chile with her mother, my dear friend Bonni; and, to have dinner with my parents and sister's family. Unfortunately, I didn't see my oldest godson, Adam. You see, after his graduation from Harvard he decided to work on the Let's Go guidebook for tourists to the nation of Turkey. Yes, Turkey. He is OK, thanks for asking, having decided to go visit friends in Delhi India scant days before the great quake.
I know I just gave you a long list. But take my word for it. I love all of these people. I love them with my full heart. They really help to be who I am, just as I help them be themselves. No matter how alone I look up here in the pulpit, I assure you this, I am not now, nor ever have been alone.
My second major experience this summer was turning 50. On my fiftieth birthday I went over to my friend Harry's house in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Harry is 86 now. He is the emeritus minister of the San Francisco Church, and he is dear to me more than I can say. I did not tell him it was my 50th birthday. I just spent the day basking in Harry's stories, embraced by his memorized poems, and lifted by his laughter.
As I spoke to him, I found myself routinely forgetting names. We would be talking about a friend we have in common and I would say "You know who I am talking about, don't you? You know, that guy with the thing he wears on his lapel, you know, that squiggly thing?" Sometimes we would figure it out, sometimes not. After a while, I got frustrated. I could not remember anyone's name right off the bat, it seemed. I could not remember where they lived. I could just remember pieces of them. If their names did come to me after a while, they came only one blurry piece at a time, like a photo coming into focus on a very slow computer.
I said to Harry, "I guess I am getting old. I keep on forgetting names I know very well."
Harry just tossed me a great laugh and said, "Just wait."
And all the way to Montreal, Chuck and Jane and I, all of us newly 50, kept on having the same experience. "Remember that guy who wears that thing on his shirt?" or "You know whom I'm talking about, that woman, her name has an M-sound in it, I think; you know, the one who always talks with her hands like this." It was exactly like Dave Barry puts it in his hilarious list. In fact, I brought Dave Barry's book along in the car to read aloud, and when we got to that passage we almost went off the road, we were laughing so hysterically. Who could imagine that something so funny could also be so true?
My third major experience this summer was an auto accident. I'm OK; again, thanks for asking. But boy, I really wrecked my car. I didn't hit anyone. No one hit me. I, the Chief Airhead of Columbus, was responsible for the whole ludicrous thing. Foolishly, with afternoon sun in my eyes, I turned too sharply into my open garage door and creamed the side of my car on this yellow cement pillar some dodo put between the "in" garage door and the "out" door for reasons I can't fathom. The sound of my passenger side door crumpling like tinfoil will not leave my memory for a long time...unlike the names and faces of every single person I know.
After the accident, I felt like the poster boy for the Dingbat Club. I dumped on myself for hours for being so vacuous as to wreck my own car without there even being so much as a film of ice on the pavement the size of a postage stamp. I had destroyed my car in broad daylight in summer, for God's sake. All by myself. I was too embarrassed to call the insurance company for a whole day. I just sat on my couch perfectly mortified that I had done such a foolish thing. It took over two weeks to repair the car. It would not have taken so long ordinarily except, as you remember, it got outrageously hot, and no one could bump a side-panel out in such a sizzling season without passing out. So they just closed down for a while.
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Now I'd wager that all of these experiences ...love and friendship, a birthday, and an auto accident... seem unrelated to you. You may think I am just telling you about my summer vacation. But after pondering these experiences for a few weeks now, I think they are related. I think all of them have to do with the word accident. Or chance if you will. Or even, in Szymborska's word "luck."
I know a number of folks who sincerely follow Plato's philosophy and believe that they existed before they were born, and that they chose their own parents so they could learn lessons both for this life and the next. Me, I haven't found anything yet to convince me that I lived before I lived. And so for me the relationship between my parents and myself is...accidental.
The friends I listed?...I met most of them quite by accident...on a bus, on a plane, in a store, through the friend of a friend. I could have taken a different bus that day, or a different flight, and not met many of the very people I count as vital in my life today. Their presence in my life is just that accidental. Lucky, if you will. As Szymborska reminds us so beautifully in her poem, any number of things could have happened to me in my life. I could ...I could have...I could have been hit by a car when I was ten, but I wasn't. I could have been born in Sumatra, but I wasn't. I could have been drafted and sent to war, but I wasn't. I could have had polio like my friend Jane did, but she had it and I didn't. I could have been born with perfect eyesight but I wasn't. I could have had blue eyes like my brother but I don't.
A thousand million chances flow by me every minute... and don't grab me. I had an accident in my garage. I could have had an accident on I-70 where the cars careen by at 70 miles an hour, but I didn't. Does this safety on I-70 make me blessed? No. Singled out? No. A good driver? Not necessarily.
How about Adam...he "escaped" possible death in a terrible earthquake by just "happening" to want to go visit some old haunts in Delhi. It was completely accidental that he left when he did. And it was also accidental...a terrible accident...that so many folks stayed where they lived and died there the day after he left. It was also an accident...a "good" accident... that the people living in Southern Turkey didn't feel a thing.
I say this: to live anywhere is to be subject to the accidents that make up our lives...accidental meetings, accidental fortunes or losses, accidental genetic realities, accidental everything. And I mean that accidents are exactly that.... accidents. Of course some coincidences are wonderful and strange. But I cannot believe that some great power actually directs the accidents of our lives...bringing us to our sweethearts, leading us to our fortunes, yanking us to our bliss while leading others to their doom. Someone becomes our sweetheart because we are open to love at that moment, not because it "just had to be." But we could have been closed too, just as easy, and the moment would have passed. I may have missed out on a hundred romances I never realized I was close to.
No, the deaths and tragedies in Turkey are just that, deaths and tragedies. It makes me very sad. It makes me realize just how little power we have as human beings on this vast earth, how little like gods and goddesses we are, and much more like the humble animals with which we share this globe. Creatures we are, not lords and ladies.
But this theology that accidents are indeed accidents, this religious philosophy which so comforts me and feeds my spirit and bids my thanksgiving, does not prevent me from learning things from the accidents that befall me, the chance experiences I have. For example, I learned from my car accident that if I really want to experience the true diversity in Columbus, I need only give up my car for a while. I rode the bus when my car is in the shop.
On the bus up High St. in this fair city there is balanced and remarkable diversity...by nationality, age, gender, orientation, class and personality. I assure you, in my car by myself there is no diversity. My birthday memory-loss taught me once more with great forcefulness something I already know...to wit, that my life on this earth is but accidental voyage from Mystery to Mystery, and that the luckiest thing of all is to be alive on this earth even for a minute. I myself am the "accidental tourist" who finds himself touring the world at the turn of the millennium in a place called Ohio.
I forget things a lot these days. Eventually I may forget everything, for, as every scripture in the world points out, I will lose everything, even my body.
So life is to be lived now. Even if I am reduced to talking about the "man with the thing on his head," even if my memory is perforated, I still need to live in the fullest way I can. I have to live and accept the limitations that come part and parcel with this wonderful accident called "life" without thinking of them either as reward or punishment.
And as for the sweet, sweet accidents of friends and family, of glorious loving godchildren, 86 year old mentors and 20 year old friends that restore my youth...what do they teach me? They teach me my foundational theology. They teach me that the author of the ancient wisdom-book we call the Gospel of John was very wise to have written: God is love.
If you ever hear me speak of God from this pulpit, rest assured I will never speak of God as thunder, earthquake, fire or might. For Love is God. I will never speak of God/dess as creator, savior, deliverer or divine androgyne. No, love is the simply the most high. I will never speak of Divinity as fate or judge or infinity or omnipotence. For the deepest Depth is Love, my means and my end. No, my loving summer taught me this: that in this world of accidents, "chance," and "luck," the only thing that is not chance or luck, the only thing that is not an accident is when I choose to respond to the world in a godly way, that is, with love.
Listen. Can you hear your heart pounding in my chest? I'm speaking of the love that is not a concept but a relationship; not a creed, but a recognition of mutuality and inescapable communion one with another.
Listen. Can you hear your heart pounding in my chest? I am speaking of a love that poet e.e.cummings calls "the every only god who spoke this world so glad and big..." In other words, I am not speaking about any God in a book or a creed or bylaw. I am speaking, however, about the only power that is both deliberate, and equal to the accidents of chance experience that shape our lives. Love itself.
Thus you may be assured that I am not accidental in how I love; I am very deliberate. Friends and family may have come to me by accident, "could have happened, had to have happened," but that does not mean I don't have to cultivate them deliberately and studiously. My father tells me that I am very much like my grandmother Anna, who used to write many letters each day so she could keep up with all her friends round the world. For me its e-mail as much as written letters, and phone calls even more than that, to be sure, but I thank my grandmother for showing me such a wonderful way.
For love after all demands of me my whole self, the best hours of my time and my fullest and deepest worship.
For Love is God/dess, the tearer-down of prejudice, the open door of the heart, the flexibility of the mind, the generosity of the hand.
Well, that's what I learned from my summer vacation. And that's a brief summary of but one way I talk about theology. As I said at the beginning, I can't speak for anyone in this room. And no one here can speak for me. Our experiences are very different. What comforts me may not comfort you, and vice versa.
But I wonder, I just wonder, no matter what you believe or do not believe about accidents, chance, love or God, "can you, can you...hear your heart pounding in my chest?"
Gloria for Two Voices [back to top]
Gloria in terra pax et amor. (chanted)
Villages and cities, care and more care.
Power meeting power, love responding to love.
Gloria in terra pax et amor.
Dreams and laughing, safe and sound.
Bless our children. Bless our elders.
Gloria in terra, pax et amor.
Home and hearth, fire in the heart.
Truthfulness and mercies ever flowing.
Gloria in terra, pax et amor.
Glory, peace and love upon the earth.
Glory, peace and love upon the earth.
Gloria in terra, pax et amor.
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