Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 15th of April, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
to celebrate our lives and Life itself,
whether it blossoms in delicate spring flowers
or rises strong in women, men, and children
protesting on behalf of peace and a world made just.
The alleluia of this Easter is a call to such rising,
an invitation to such blossoming.
It's a summons in word, sign and music
to refuse to be ashamed of our joy and our love
And thus, throughout our time of worship
(assembly) May our reason and our passion
keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together
become…
Affirmation[Next] [back to top]
Easter Exultet excerpted from Sermons of the Big Joy James Broughton 1994:
Shake out your qualms.
Shake up your dreams.
Deepen your roots.
Extend your branches.
Trust deep water
and head for the open,
even if your vision
shipwrecks you.
Quit your addiction
to sneer and complain.
Open a lookout.
Dance on a brink.
Run with your wildfire.
You are closer to glory
leaping an abyss
than upholstering a rut.
Not dawdling.
Not doubting.
Intrepid all the way
Walk toward clarity.
At every crossroad
Be prepared
to bump into wonder.
Only love prevails.
En route to disaster
insist on canticles.
Lift your ineffable
out of the mundane.
Nothing perishes;
nothing survives;
everything transforms!
Honeymoon with Big Joy!
Call to the Great Silence [Next] [back to top]
The silent glory of the dawn
by the edge of a dark green wood
is woven with birdsong.
The silence of the red rose blossoming
is woven into the shouts of children at play nearby.
The silence of starlight behind the clouds
is woven into the drone of a plane beneath them.
The silence of the white page
is woven into the black notes of a choral anthem,
enabling music to be carried through the generations.
The silence of one who grieves is woven with tears.
Silence and noise are woven together forever.
The whole universe is a tight weaving which cannot be rent.
Now quiet blends with commotion, life with death,
falling with rising, all working together to make a whole, a wonder,
the emblems of Big Joy itself.
Blest, therefore, is the silence that follows these words, and precedes other words. Without it, the whole would be broken, the songs would be mere noise, the weaving of creation, tattered. Therefore I bid you, welcome the silence as presence, not absence, for there is no universe without it.
(bell-sound)
Some among this congregation are traveling this week.
Others welcome family and friends to their home. Others, like Lisa Cox, lie in their hospital beds, drifting in and out of sleep and anguish. Some will have a holiday supper this afternoon, others will take walks, others might read alone, content for a few moments of memory and solitude. Whatever we do, we are all connected, woven into a whole, and even absence is a presence to us. Thus we set aside this time to call to mind the very real communion of which we are part, naming in our hearts, or aloud in community, as we desire, all those who are present to us in our loving, our remembering, our struggling.
(naming)
Spring too is a weaving of memory and hope, of green and rose, of praise and longing. Easter is a weaving of extravagant alleluias with unbelievable flowers, fragrant breezes, and the coursing blood of spring fever.
Today is the spring of the spirit, the turning of the fleeing heart toward life, the singing and singing and singing of Big Joy at the heart of all things.
The First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
Reading this morning comes from the Autobiography of Nobel
Prize winning
author, Bertrand Russell, written in 1946. Please note that when Lord
Russell
uses the phrase "public school education" he is referring to the
British
system he knew in his own day, not modern American public schools.
"…When we came home, we found Mrs. W. undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes, I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that, in human relations, one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did, in actual fact, find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an Imperialist, I became during those five minutes…a Pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, and with an intense interest in children and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in my children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations."
The Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
is a marvelous poem by Rosario Castellanes, written in 1960.
Presence
Some day I'll know. This body that has been
my refuge, my prison, my hospital, is also my tomb. That which I
gathered
around: a longing, a grief, a memory, will desert me, seeking water, a
leaf,
the original spore and even the inert, a stone.
This knot that I was (inextricably composed
of anger, treasons, hopes, sudden intimations, abandonments, hungers, cries of fear and helplessness and the joy resplendent among the clouds, and words, and love and love and loves), the years will finally cut.
No one will see the destruction. No one will pick up the unfinished page. Among the handful of dispersed actions, scattered to the wind, not one will be set apart as a precious stone.
And yet, brother, sister, lover, child, friend, ancestor, there is no solitude, no death even if I forget, and although I am no more. Humankind, wherever you are, wherever you live, we - all of us - shall survive.
Sermon: Experiencing Easter: A Great Skeptic's Transformation [back to top]
My grandfather, Nazzareno ("the Nazarene") Belletini, would have appreciated the poem by Rosario Castellanes, that is, had he ever learned to read poetry, which he never did. He was too busy in his garden and wine-cellar to do any reading, too busy creating the poetry of red tomatoes, dark green rosemary, bright green spinach, pinkish-blue snowball bushes and deep ruby wine, to ever find any great satisfaction in the kind of poetry made only of words. "This body that has been my refuge, my prison, my hospital is also my tomb," writes Castellanos. Why would my grandfather have liked that poem? Because I remember one Easter day, when I was ten years old, over-hearing him talking to my father about, of all things, death. "Oh, death doesn't worry me," he said. "The way I see it, life is a lot like spending the day gardening. You dig, and hoe, and prune, and weed. You smell the blooming flowers and imagine how sweet the tomatoes will be on your plate. Then, at the end of the day, you lie back in your bed, satisfied. You pull the quilt up over your shoulders, and you feel sleep coming warm and heavy upon you.
"No one really knows if they will wake up in the morning, but nonetheless we are happy to leave our aches and pains behind us, and drift off to rest and sleep."
"When my turn to die comes one day," continued my grandfather, "it will be the same thing. Except on that day I will lie down in the same earth that my tomatoes grow in, and allow the earth itself to be my blanket. I will be happy to fall asleep, not thinking, as usual, about whether I will wake up or not, but just satisfied that I lived and created and loved."
I remember being amazed when he said that. Stunned to the core of my ten-year-old being. After all, in my church school, we were taught that death was something to be saved from. We were taught that death had "a sting," like a scorpion, and that all human beings would be glad to have a chance to live forever. My grandfather, however, did not seem to want to live forever. And that simply amazed me.
Now, I need to tell you that my grandfather never read a book, especially any book of philosophy by Bertrand Russell. I'm sure he never even heard the word philosophy. He never attended school one day in his life. He grew up in great poverty up in the hill country above Modena, Italia, in a tiny village called Fannano.
When he was still a child, he left Italy and worked with his brother Pipa in a coal mine in Corsica. The two brothers crawled on their bellies daily, through a shaft less than two feet high. They did this for years, earning only pennies a day. He immigrated to this country when he was a young man, seventeen, I think, only to end up working in dangerous coal mines here, too. His lungs were black as tar all of his life from his work. He was often sick because of his work. He even lost one of his eyes.
But he was more than a man of work. He was a man of sorrows. You see, when he came to this country, he left his parents and never saw them or talked to them again. Without any schooling, he had to make his way in a country with an odd language and strange ways. He and my grandmother were always very poor. I think you can probably see that his was not an easy life. Yet, despite this, he did not live his days waiting for another life, a reprieve from death, a promised, saving resurrection one day. And I was amazed. My grandfather wasn't finished talking with my father. He seemed to have guessed, somehow, that Jesus must have been a poor peasant from the hills, much like himself. This is the reason, I suppose, why he finished his conversation with my father offering this: "I'm sure Jesus must have been a very good man. But when they killed him," he said, "his body was placed under the blanket of the earth too, and that is where it stayed. "Obviously, the traditionally told Easter story made no sense to him.
It does not make sense to many modern people, as you well know. We modern Unitarian Universalists too, although very often a lot more educated and more fortunate than my grandfather, have mostly shared my grandfather's opinion about Easter through the years.
Oh, there have been some exceptions, I know. There have always been a rather wide variety of beliefs among us about such things. And yes, some folks find it very important to affirm that something good happens to people after death, as our Universalist ancestors maintained so eloquently for hundreds of years.
But I'm clear, at least, that the great majority of us do not spend much time imagining a life beyond this one, howsoever conceived. We seem to want to primarily focus on this side of the grave no matter what ultimately happens to individuals after death. And I, for one, count this a deeply spiritual, yes, even religious, position to take.
Now when I personally think of Jesus, the man whose name is so clearly associated with Easter Day, I tend not to think of his sad and cruel death, or suspect, scandalous, and thus highly fabled, birth; Like my grandfather, I imagine his life, his daily hours, not his disturbing death. I think of his ethical passion. I think of his deliberately peaceful living. I think of his call to all who heard him, his invitation to so transform society that the hardships of poverty, illness, and cultural cruelty would no longer rule the roost and distort the powerful and central reality of love… a love most often reflected in kindness and compassion. Yet despite my typically Unitarian Universalist untypical view about Easter Sunday, I am always intrigued by the story of transformation which Easter represents.
You see, like my grandfather, I do not personally find that my death needs to be remedied by resurrection, howsoever defined. Like most modern Unitarian Universalists, my life experiences have made me wary of accepting stories with heavy theological overtones as some sort of sober history that is essential for my wellbeing and spiritual welfare.
But I cannot deny that under all the amazing stories of Easter, with their contradictions and lapses, there is an authentic report of an amazing and life-changing transformation.
Not of a dead crucified body into something dazzling.
Not of a filled tomb to an empty one. But the transformation of a group of unschooled peasants into a group of pacifist preachers that would eventually challenge the might and rightness of an empire entirely based on the unquestioned enslavement of at least half of all people alive in those days.
With most modern scholars, I have no doubt that Jesus was a teacher, one well-loved by his students. I have to note, however, that modern Christian scholars like John Dominic Crossan for example, suggest that this wonderful teacher was killed quite suddenly, and unexpectedly. He was killed, not after a dramatic trial or betrayal, but only because of the most anti-climactic and totally well-oiled machinery of the government, which trucked no opposition. There was nothing heroic about the death of this teacher. His was just a typical, utterly unfair crucifixion of a non-citizen in the provinces, run by a particularly inflexible and humorless governor.
For his students who loved him, of course, it was a drama. They were devastated utterly.
I think I can imagine what that devastation might have felt like in part, because I cannot believe it was too much different than what I felt after my best friend Stephen in California died following a terrible span of quite unbelievable suffering. He was something of a teacher to me too, and to Richard, his partner in life.
I could barely function after he died. I could barely get out of bed for weeks, even months. The fact that I preached on Sundays during the period could actually be considered a bonafide miracle.
One day, some months after Stephen's burial, as I walked along a park path in a part of Golden Gate park with lots of beautiful, twisted, dark green Monterey Pines, the sense of my friend suddenly overwhelmed me. I began to feel as if his life lived in me, his noted fearlessness in social situations coursing in my veins.
I knew in my heart that this strength could be with me, too, during certain trying situations. Knowing, from all of our years of deep conversation, the deep loneliness that actually hummed underneath his extravagant love for others, I began to want to reach out to others in new ways, looking as best I could to their deepest soul, not to their smiling faces saying, "Oh, everything's OK."
The sun began to set west of the park into the silver Pacific. The first star blossomed in the periwinkle sky. And it seemed to me, as I saw this star framed in the dark branches of a pine tree, that it would be just as easy for me to pick that star and hold it in my hand, as it would be for me to reach up and pick a cone off the tree. The universe became very small for a moment.I felt a sense of mystical illumination, a feeling that a ligament ran from my heart to everyone, and to everything else. I felt a suffusion of warmth and wonder that was pure joy.
I was overcome, in that upwelling of wonder, by the sense of the presence of Stephen, my best friend.
I realized that his love for me, his deep and authentic relationship with me and with his partner in life and all other friends, was also the best and most authentic part of him, and that nothing could take that from us.
After this time, I felt like a somewhat different person. I began to be less affected by people who tried to hurt me, or who attempted to use me in some way. I began to try to find other ways than anger or righteousness as my response. I tried to relate to them more compassionately, more from a sense of peace in my heart instead of from a desire for vengeance. I did not deny I was hurt by people, mind you, as I stoically did at one time. No, I felt pain deeply and bled all over the place. But then I painstakingly refused to return in kind.
When I read the section of the Autobiography of Bertrand Russell you heard this morning, I began to think of the meaning of Easter in a new light, precisely, the light of my own mystical experience in the park.
For, I assure you, despite the foolish and quite negative definitions of mystical often found in the popular press, and even among religious liberals, the word "mystical" has a very positive, uplifting meaning. The word mystical most deeply means…"to accept the wisdom of experience without limiting it by the concept; It means to accept and be moved by the wonder of inner-communion before interpreting it away. I think Dr. Einstein, in his famous quote I offered you at the top of the page, got it right.
("The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. Who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead. In this sense, and this only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious." Albert Einstein 1947 )
Lord Russell (certainly not a Christian, as he makes clear in one of his famous essays) once wrote a book called Mysticism and Logic in which he comes down pretty hard on the inexactness of such mystical feelings.
He lifts up severe logic as the better of the two.
And yet, in his autobiography, Lord Russell claims that a single, five-minute-long mystical rapture, triggered by being in the presence of a suffering person, a certain Mrs. W., transformed his life till the end of his days.
He finds he is suddenly filled with a sense of his intimate connection to all things. He finds that he has become transformed, in a very brief period of mystical insight, into a pacifist instead of a committed Imperialist.
This pacifism and his reluctance to support violence, while not as thoroughgoing as Mr. Gandhi's, was indeed born out in his life until his dying day, according to all of his biographers. Russell's relationships with others grow warmer, more genuine. His love for children especially deepened. He, the great agnostic, with a marked negative attitude toward all and any religion, suddenly speaks longingly of "the love that religious teachers have preached." He even compares his insight as being similar to the kind of insight the great Buddha struggled with.
Lord Russell uses remarkable imagery in his description of this mystical experience. He writes, "Suddenly the ground gave way beneath me and I found myself in quite another region."
Am I to suppose the great mathematical genius, Bertrand Russell, \actually had soil yanked from under his feet, or that he was transported by an angel to another land? No, no, don't you see, these are clearly metaphors, figures of speech, poetic ways of talking about impossible-to-talk-about feelings of communion and ethical transformations.
But it seems to me that such imagery is not far removed from the imagery of the gospel stories of Easter, which talk of equally concrete things… the earth shaking when Jesus died, a great stone rolling away from the mouth of a tomb.
Will you try and convince me that the writers of these stories really had a totally different approach to language than Bertrand Russell? Can you make me believe that when he said the earth gave way, it was just a metaphor, but when they said the earth shook, it was not?
The "young man at the tomb," in the gospel of Mark, tells the mourning women who come there to grieve that they should not seek for "something alive among things that are dead." The risen Jesus has gone to another region, "to the Galilee," says the young man. "Go and tell his students to go there."
And what's back in the Galilee? You can figure it out, can't you? Their families, their boats, their knotted fishing nets, their everyday lives, their children, the heavy taxes of the government, and the ordinary political folderol of the era. That's what waits for them in Galilee. Not a resuscitated corpse, something more nearly dead than alive, but something completely alive…themselves living their lives.
Themselves transformed by their mystical and metaphorical meditations on the suffering of their teacher. Lord Russell's experience was also triggered by the suffering of a human being a certain Mrs. W.
My grandfather knew suffering, too; he saw plenty of it.
More than his share, if half the stories I was raised with were even half true. But I only knew him as someone who was fully alive, alive in his garden, alive in his wine cellar, alive with his grandchildren whom he would toss in the air, alive in his love for me.
But he believed that when he died, his capacity to say, "I am Nazzareno" would be buried with him under the earth. Yet he had no doubt that I would be alive after he died, and that my capacity to say, "I am Mark" could and probably would live out the deepest part of his soul.
His soul? Yes, his soul… his capacity for love and redemptive relationship.
In a similar way, one of the earliest preachers of the idea of resurrection came to his conclusions about what such an idea could mean while he was persecuting (i.e. inflicting suffering) on various students of Jesus. He wrote down his letters about his ideas long before anyone came up with the metaphor of the empty tomb.
In a mystical experience he had, he imagined he heard a voice asking him, "Why are you hurting me so?" "I am not hurting you," the preacher said. "Oh yes, but I am Jesus, and when you hurt these my students, you are hurting me."
It's clear to me that this preacher never understood the resurrection as a literal event but as the compelling, life-transforming recognition that we are all profoundly connected with each other, and that to hurt anyone is to hurt all.
Anyway, the way I see it, if the survival of my own "I am" was so important, which "I am" would it be? The awkward 10-year-old? The doubtful 30-year-old? The mourning forty-year-old? The hard-working 51-year-old? The empty echo of my 90-year-old Alzheimer's-stripped mind?
No, the deepest part of me is not when I say, "I am."
The deepest part of me is when I relate in love to you, to myself, to the trees, to the earth, to the memory of a beloved friend, to the memory of a great ethical teacher.
And that love, that relationship, is what survives me, is what rises in alleluia "forever and ever, Amen."
As Castellanos reminds us in her poem, "There is no solitude, no death, even if I forget and although I am no more. Humankind…all of us…shall survive." Survive in our relating, our communion of relationships, not in our idiosyncratic "I am."
Easter for me is not some particular Sunday in April or March. Easter Day, the Big Joy, is when I no longer think that my self is more important than the network, the web, the communion of transforming relationships I live among. It's when I choose, at last, to live every single moment of life, to feel it all, love it all, and refuse to hurt or control others as if I am somehow more important than they are. To insist on living any other way, I fear, is not to live at all. And as the man at the tomb asked: "Why would anyone look for what is alive among the dead?"
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