Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 7th of October, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
to celebrate, not to be celebrated,
to worship, not to be worshipped,
to join in community, not to play hide and seek,
to let love's light brighten forgotten corners,
to see the world in a grain of sand,
and to pray with dizzy, stubborn hope
(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 may together become.
Preface
to the Silence [Next]
[back to top]
We hear that our life is new now and will never be the same
because of the events of almost a month ago.
But today is one of those days
when I begin to grow perplexed
that this is news.
My life has been new every day of my life,
both before and after the eleventh of September.
My life has been new whenever the sun shouts Good Morning,
and the last star is swallowed down the hungry mouth of the hours.
But now I am not sure I noticed all this enough.
Maybe the opportunities and hopes for the new day were buried
under the heaped rubble of my routines, of my never wanting to rock my own
boat
by asking the question
"Why did I pretend I am invulnerable when I know I am not?"
Maybe all this time I could have noticed more, questioned more, been dazzled
more,
felt less alone in my aloneness.
Maybe the silence that is now tiptoeing toward this very moment,
will not, this particular morning, embrace me like an old friend,
or call me from its soaring minaret to deeper meditation,
but rather, maybe it will fling itself down in front of me like a threshold
stone,
and whisper to me,
"Cross me slowly and enter the life that is Life, the day that is the Day.
Here is the news that is no news,
the tidings that have never been less than glad.
Today is a new day, things will never be the
same, all that is past is past and all that is to come has yet to arrive,
so put your house in order to welcome it.
Cross me now, and enter into the new Day.
Silence.
The rhythms of life and death, joy and woe do not follow the rhythms of
history…
they come when they will come.
So this week we share the sadness of Jeanne Desy, who lost her mother,
and we share the sadness of all who mourn.
We celebrate all new grandchildren and personal joys.
We join our hearts in solidarity with those who have been to the hospital
this week,
especially Elizabeth Waring and George Schoyer who have been recovering from
surgery,
and Jane Connelly recovering from a fall,
and all those who are fighting illness in any form, for however long,
and all those who support them.
I remember the worries of the parents whose children are overseas or about
to go overseas,
and the worries of those who live overseas burdened by the sure knowledge
of coming violence.
And on this day I also find it meaningful to remember
that some nations have so many hard things to deal with on a daily
basis…
so I lift up the 25 Aghanis each day who are blown up by one of a million
land mines left by a former invader.
And in the very midst of all of our worldly worries,
I call us all to lift up in silence or aloud in the common air the names
of those in our own lives whom we know, miss, long for,
or quarrel with, that we may make present in this service the substance of
our lives.
Naming….
Let the poetry of the names give way now
to the poetry of the song,
that the new life of love and peace
we dream of on our best days
may be sung into being,
beginning here and now.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
The readings are short this morning. The first reading comes from a newspaper
interview of Allen Ginsberg in 1997, in San Francisco, just after I heard
the great poet read at Herbst Theater.
Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulations and brainwash.
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
The second reading is a definition of poetry from an introductory essay
to a book by Judy Grahn by the great Adrienne Rich, 1978
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Sermon: Telling the Truth - Poetry and Religion [Next] [back to top]
This is the first of three sermons where I hope to establish the complete interdependence of the various arts and religion.
Also, this is the first time since September 11th that I am returning to my original preaching plans, but as you'll see, my meditations are not far from the rubble in New York, the rocky landscape of Afghanistan, and the excruciatingly hot crucible of the whole Middle East. For great art never runs away from reality, but runs squarely toward it.
My father and I once had an interesting exchange. I was, as I remember, out of college, but I still read books and articles as if a test was coming around the next day.
I had just read an article in Scientific American about subatomic physics. Now pardon me, but this was a long time ago, and I cannot not retrieve the exact names of the particles in question. Suffice it to say that physicists were completely baffled by their discovery. Seems that there are two particles that move as if they were looking in mirror. If one particle curved to the left, the other curved to the right. If one particle zigzagged up, the other one zigzagged down, with the exact same zigs and zags, but as if in a mirror. The scientists were baffled to find something so unexpected and strange, and could not imagine what invisible, unnamed force was behind this peculiar symmetry, (although they clearly claimed as their joy the research that would one day pull back the veil from the mystery.)
My father responded in a way that surprised me. He became furious. "What baloney!" he said. "I can't believe Scientific American has fallen for all that nonsense. The world is not a mist of strange particles. The world is solid, like this."
He knocked a book on the floor. It thudded.
"See. Gravity is a knowable, real force we can all test. It's obvious at once. No one has to spend two billion dollars to research it to figure it out. I just don't understand all this new science stuff. For me, what's important is that two plus two always equals four until the end of time. No one can change that, deny it, fight against it, or interpret it. It just is. Forever. You can build a bridge with the knowledge that two plus two equals four. You can't do anything with two particles that never touch, only dance in the air.
I like my bridges strong and secure, not built of the flimsy conjectures of screwball science."
Well, this was not the reaction I expected. I thought the knowledge of the particles was fun and playful. It filled me with wonderment. My father did not feel the same about these particles. For some reason, they made him mad. I left the room in huff, suddenly mad myself that my joy was not as contagious or even as obvious as I had hoped.
After I thought about it for a while, I realized that for the most part, I am a lot like my father. I like my world solid, predictable, reliable. And I want my bridges built by people well acquainted with the solid, the predictable, the reliable.
But, all of my experience tells me that the world is not solid, predictable, or very reliable.
Mayhem and death, bad luck and whimsy come when they will. No predictable patterns despite those who believe in the influence of the stars. No solid evidence for automatic justice despite our wish that we could know such convenience. No reliable formulas for calculating tomorrow.
Two-plus-two works in the world of commerce and engineering, but the arithmetic of the human heart is not so easy to memorize. Anyone who has ever experience the death of a loved one knows that one minus one does not leave zero, but 100…a hundred confusing feelings and inner struggles. Anyone who has ever been married knows that one and one hardly equal two, for great numbers of family members and unrealistic expectations make any relationship as complex as an algebraic equation, with the x often left unsolved forever.
Thus good religion, which cradles the human heart as much as the intellect, relies on poetry, not calculus, for its expressions. The poetry of prayer and promises. The poetry of image and imagination. The poetry of psalms and solace.
Our Unitarian Universalist movement is like other religious movements. Since the days when the first unitarians and universalists walked the boulevards of Alexandria Egypt 18oo years ago, our religious life has been supported by the poetry found in worship and in private devotion. Our great ministers and lay people have written poems and prayers for hundreds and hundreds of years: the Longfellows, Amy Lowell, Dirck Coonheert, e.e.cummings, Jones Very, James Martineau, Theodore Parker, Thomas Starr King, Vincent Silliman, Ken Patton, May Sarton, Carolyn McDade, Fanny Kemble, Frances Harper, Phoebe Hanaford, Seth Curtis Beach, Frederick Lucien Hosmer, William Carlos Williams and more members of this con-gregation than I can count. And that is the most incomplete list I have ever offered.
But maybe you don't like poetry. I certainly hear that. So do poets. Listen to Szymborska, the great Nobel poet of the last century. Her poem is called Some Like Poetry.
Some---
not all that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there'd be maybe two such people in a thousand.
Like---
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments, or the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.
Poetry---
But what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer has been given
to this question.
But I do not know, and do not know,
and hold onto it as to saving banister.
So you see, even poets know that not everyone gravitates toward poetry. They do not expect universal acclaim. They do not count on being understood. But they continue to write poetry, which they have a hard time defining. And hold onto that un-definable thing as if it were a saving banister.
To many, this sounds like a banister made not of solid wood, but of those ghostly particles I read about…not too sure a thing. But for me, poetry is most often much more reliable and solid and true than prose.
There is, as Adrienne Rich reminds us, a concentration of power in the words of poetry that can help us relate to everything in the universe. A vast and amazing statement. And as Ginsberg asserts so masterfully, poetry is candor as opposed to brainwash and manipulation.
Newspaper articles are rarely demonstrations of candor. Newsweek is not candor. Editorials are often more brainwash than brain. The whole internet is filled with manipulation after manipulation. These days I often find myself saying to my friends when I am disgusted by one more stupid attempt to manipulate fate and make a profit off of gullibility "Repeat after me."
I say. "Everything is a racket, I say, a racket. But not poetry."
Poetry is a condensed and concise and economical way of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For truth is rarely in this world "either this" or "that." Truth is complex, involving not just facts but the interpretation of fact, not just brains but heart, not just moments but lifetimes.
Poetry can excavate into the rubble of our days past the severed pipelines and gas-mains torn by falling buildings and place our bare feet right on the foundations deeper than the ones that hold it all up. Take this poem for example by the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuquan, who wrote this poem "Song of Becoming" in 1985.
They are only boys
who used to frolic and play
releasing in the Western wind
their blue red green kites
the color of the rainbow
jumping, whistling, exchanging spontaneous jokes and laughter,
encing with branches, assuming the roles of great heroes in history.
They've grown suddenly now,
grown more than the years of a lifetime,
grown, merged with a secret word of love,
carried its letters like a Bible or Quran
read in whispers. They've grown more
than the years of a lifetime, become the
trees plunging deep into the earth
and soaring height towards the sun.
They're now the voice that rejects.
They're the dialectics of destruction
and building anew, the anger burning
on the fringes of a blocked horizon,
invading classroom, streets, city quarters,
centering on the squares
and facing sullen tanks with a stream of stones.
With plain rejection they now shake
the gallows of the dawn,
assailing the night and its deluge.
They've grown, grown more than the years of a lifetime,
become the worshipped and the worshipper.
When their torn limbs merged
with the stuff of the earth,
they became a legend.
They grew, and became the bridge.
They grew, grew, and became
larger than all poetry.
We will hear a lot about the Middle East in the coming weeks, about Palestine and Israel and Iran and Afghanistan and a lot of countries we still have to struggle to pronounce, thrown off by all the z's and the extra y's. But Ms. Tuquan has dug deep to the foundations and beyond and told us the truth. That we are not talking just about politics, but about boys who once flew kites and laughed. That we are not talking about right and wrong in some abstract sense, but about boys who grew up too fast, and have indeed grown more than the years of a lifetime. We are talking about young boys who grew up too fast, and have become so identified with a cause in their flesh and bones that they are no longer boys, or even men, but the worshipped, symbols that transcend everyday life. And these boys will soon die, their rainbow kites falling over them like a pall, their childhood taken from them by too many people who have confused the status quo with being human.
Instead Ms. Tuquan sings a song not of human being, but of human becoming…wishing that young boys can grow gracefully into men without having to be distorted into heroes.
I long for that too. And the poet helps me to long for it, to remember the bottom line, to not get caught up in foolish and painfully icy abstractions like good and evil, them and us. The poet tells me the truth. Not many other people bother. "We have lost our innocence," the pundits on TV told us, wishing they could have it back.
The poet however, tells the truth; in all the world, we were the last to lose our innocence. It's been gone for a long time everywhere else.
When I was down in Chile on my second sabbatical, I used to visit the house of Pablo Neruda every day while I sojourned in Santiago. I would just walk over there in the morning and watch the sun illuminate the stucco slowly, like a revelation. The poet died long ago, but it was clear to me that the spirit of his magnificent poetry still hovered in the clear Chilean air.
We have been reading about how some folks in the world do not like us, we who call ourselves Americans. We see signs on TV. "Are they crazy?" we ask? "We're pussycats. Sweethearts. Nice people. We shovel each other's snow in the winter, drop quarters into the cups of beggars, and live rather kind lives."
Ah, but if we had only been listening to the poets telling us the truth long ago, maybe we wouldn't have been too terribly surprised: Hear the Nobel Laureate Neruda: (the title is also the first line)
America, I do not Call Your Name
Without Hope. When I hold the sword
against the heart, when I live with the faulty
roof in my soul, when one of your new days
pierces me coming through the windows.
I am and I stand in the light that produces me.
I live in the darkness which makes me what I am.
I sleep and awake in your fundamental sunrise:
as mild as the grape, and as terrible,
carriers of sugar and the whip,
soaked in the sperm of your species,
nursed in the blood of your inheritance.
The title is important. He is not without hope, Neruda, in calling out our nation's colloquial name, America. He knows we are fundamentally good people. Yet he recognizes that his Chile lives in the American sunrise and not vice versa. Our Kissinger helped to overthrow his government when Allende tried to say that Americans were not the sun, and Chile would run its own country without outside inter-ference. Allende was no Soviet Communist, but our government painted him out to be. We had Allende assassinated and helped to inaugurate a reign of Pinochet terror that was no different, really, than the colonial reign of terror against the native people many of our ancestors participated in without remorse. This is "the blood" of our "inheritance," in Neruda's truthful words. Our interference has made the roof of his soul leaky, and pierced him like a sword. The Chileans were nice enough not to take signs to the streets telling us how much they hated us, but when I was down there, I found out that all educated Chileans regarded us with some suspicion because of our remorseless foreign policy.
I go to poetry because poetry gets me to wrestle with truth faster than anything. And poetry helps truth to win more often than not. Let's consider the Afghanistan poet Khiyali of Herat, who was a Unitarian, that is, a Seventeeth century descendent, in all probability, of one of our own Transylvanian ancestors who had been taken to serve in the Ottoman Court in the days of Suleyman the Magnificent.
Praising God, Khiyal wrote:
The targets of your arrows,
o Divine Hunter,
are the hearts of your lovers.
The people are concerned about you.
And you remain absent from them.
I retire sometimes to a monastery.
And at times I reside at the mosque.
I see you constantly from house to house.
You are my goal, whether I go to Mecca
or some Temple.
You are my aim.
What is Mecca? What is any temple?
They are mere pretexts.
Everyone praises you in his or her own way,
in his or her own manner:
the heartbroken love in sorrowful laments,
the composer in beautiful tunes.
Here the Afghan poet, undoubtedly one of the poets condemned by the Taliban, expresses the truth gorgeously. The mosques at Mecca and the Temples at Benares are all mere pretexts.
No one knows the final truth about ultimate reality…we each have our own views, prejudices and styles, and not one of these are ultimate. No single person's story is the whole story. No single culture's way is the only way. There is no one and final sacred text, site, land, word, ritual or story. Fighting over or fearing or ridiculing cultural styles is just plain foolish. Defending them to the death is foolish too.
Finding ways to let ourselves be hit by the arrows of a more divine kind of loving that any we offer each other now is a more truthful way, the poet says, of expressing any worship of God or adoration of humanity. Or as the Persian poet Sa'adi put it in the year 1200 CE, "To worship God is none other than to serve the people."
I could go on forever of course about poetry and read a hundred more poems that hold the mirror of truth up to my face. Time and taste and exhaustion reign me in from going on and on.
But it's possible that I may have been hasty while reflecting on the odd event between me and my father. I said that I too want my bridges built by those who want things reliable, solid and predictable. Well, yes, maybe bridges over waters or canyons. But bridges between human heart and human heart in these days are far more important than anything that connects one county to another. And I believe that it's the poets who have the power to lead the way in this regard, for like birds, they have the power to cross every single frontier that exists.
Poemprayer: [Next] [back to top]
Like the bud of rose, let me blossom red
and dark and beautiful in my life.
Fire, burn away the chaff, and if necessary,
even the kernel, if peace might thus prevail.
Sing, bud of rose and rose of fire
in my uncertain soul that is so, so certain about love.
Love, blossom me, kindle me, turn me into the
song that sings past rage and red and raw,
and soars high toward the truthful sun
who shines so bright I cannot see,
and whose reality cannot be denied by any cloud.
Soothe me, challenge me, hold me with
unfailing tenderness and praise!
may the abundant peace I sing be for
all, no exceptions, no exceptions, no exceptions.
Blessing:
[back to top]
this is a poem from Theodore Roethke
Now I adore my life,
with the Bird, and abiding Leaf,
with the Fish, the question Snail,
and the Eye, altering all:
And I dance with William Blake,
for love, for Love's sake;
And everything comes to One,
as we dance on, dance on, dance on.
First UU Church Home |
Church Newsletters |
First UU Staff |
Sermons | Elected
Officers
Email Mark |
Email the Church
Office | Email
the Webmaster
Last update: 02/02/2003