Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 14th of October, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
after a worrisome week
to be together in peace
that we might grow toward gladness
even in these jittery days.
Here, with the timeless structures
of music, word, and silence, blest by fall color
we become vulnerable again
to the deep Love that ever bids us pray
(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 and Anthem [Next] [back to top]
Tossing in my sleep,
flinging pillows to the floor,
my hobbling inner-life these days
takes the strange form of pinwheels in my eyes.
So many worries and wonderings,
so many sorrows, so many uncertainties,
so many strange things to sift
through the clumsy fingers
of my very small soul.
Tossing, tossing in my sleep,
the sound of harsh words
like anthrax and war clashing like cymbals
in my mind… all my easier visions
of the future seem tempered now.
Oh sure, there are joys in my life,
the impossible red leaves
of the tree next door flaring
like the bush of Moses,
the tender embraces of those I love….
these are enough, barely,
to balance out the sad good-byes
I have to say over supper
to friends who are moving away,
or to long term friends like Roz in California who closed their sweet eyes
for the last time.
But though barely enough, they are enough. They do balance me.
And so now let this simple and deliberate silence also be of similar service
to us all…
silence that begins to balance out the tossing sleep, and the pinwheel worries,
and the pillows flung to the floor…
and this so that you, O Love,
my stay and my joy, my limits and my longing,
might find your balance
through anyone on this earth who tries to live his or her life fully, with
nothing held back.
(silence)
No matter what dramas go on in the streets of Kabul, or Islamabad, or Beijing, or Manila, or Brasilia, or Washington, or London, or Rome or Nairobi, ordinary lives in ordinary homes round the world know their unchanged portion of grief and woe. The fiery events of the world never entirely push away the lives that we live next to each other. Thus faces rise before us, faces of all among us who are recovering from surgery or illness, faces of all who rejoice, all who have found new love in their lives, or all who have reached for the sky but not yet been as successful as they wished…these faces rise before the tender hearts gathered in this room. The images of these people, and of all those we love and care about, we gather in our silent hearts, or we make the sound of their names in our mouths as a litany of thanksgiving, our gladness to be alive.
(naming)
Oh may we be glad that we live,
despite the clamor of these days.
May we still be glad for country lanes
in fall, and dew on the bending grass,
and sunlight splashing us with gold
after silver rain, and may we each and
all grow nearer each day to the welcoming
sky of our best and most transforming dreams.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
The First Reading consists of the words of the artist Jerome Witkin, a
Unitarian Universalist of Syracuse, NY. They are taken from the monograph
about his life and art published in 1994. The drawing on the cover of your
orders is a reproduction of a preliminary sketch he made for a series of
paintings called "A Jesus For Our Time."
More and more I am aware of the importance of the figure. / The times are too desperate to have an art that avoids life and world problems. / I want (my art) to be quiet, more profound in its silence, a religious experience, conveying the spiritual, the vision, the rapture. / What I have attempted to do here, and what contemporary figurative (art) is all about, is how to be true to how people live; to take ordinary life and paint it extraordinarily well. / I've ended (my series of drawings) with an edge of doubt, but I think doubt makes (them) better. If the artist were certain, he or she wouldn't make art. / Maybe this (piece I am painting) can cause some doubt about the use of religion to take people away from real life. / The purpose of art, (after all,) is restorative. / The artist must admit to his or her nakedness. It's "come as you are." Otherwise there wouldn't be the searching, the desire to know something beyond oneself.
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
The Second Reading is a poem by Ruth Stone. The title is, wondrously enough,
"Columbus Ohio"
…molded in plastic primary blue and yellow:
bus station seats; like paper cutouts,
scissored replicas snipped from folded newspapers to entertain a child,
these homeless bodies of men.
Hunched in layers, ten of them
asleep in hard cup chairs;
their feet in rotting shoes,
the time, three A.M., when suddenly one of them stands up and stretches
and walks away yawning;
as if this is a decent home in the suburbs,
with children, arms and legs spread out…
As if he is leaving the soft mound
of his wife's secret body,
and going into their kitchen
to fill his thermos with hot coffee.
As if nothing is impossible,
as if it is an ordinary day.
Sermon: Life Drawing Lessons [Next] [back to top]
It's true, as I suggested in the autobiographical prayer before the Great Silence, that I have not slept well in these last weeks. I toss, I turn, my pillows are on the floor in the morning. I struggle to understand all the impossible-to- understand stories of life and death screaming at me from the television set or car radio. So much totally new information floods me each and every day that there are hours when I actually feel dizzy. Life is always unpredictable, I know, but these days, I think, more than ever.
But still, it's fair to say that, in any given week during the last few years of my ministry, the pace can be, at times, just as unpredictable. Five phone calls one day, 20 the next. Ten emails one day, 35 the next. Five meetings in one day one week, none the next. And much of what I hear has to do with human suffering no less than in a time of war. My work as one of your parish ministers is rich and varied and wonderful. But ministers, like everyone else in the congregation, long for times of restoration and equilibrium, times that can help bring us back to ourselves. Such times of restoration are customarily called in our tradition "our devotional life" or even, these modern days, "our spiritual life."
Harry Scholefield, my great mentor, says that if we don't pay attention to our devotional life, we will "dry up and blow away," like fragile autumn leaves in a gray rainstorm. I agree.
Now don't be alarmed by this ancient sounding word "devotional life." It has no formal, final definition. A devotional life can be many things, some sounding traditionally sacred, others sound very secular indeed. I think of daily times of silence, or weekly hours of meditation with a group. It can be sung prayers at a Taizé service or a few hours a week set aside to listen to music by Mussorgsky or The Mahavishnu Orchestra without interruption. The devotional life can be, as it is for some of my friends, regular weekly dancing to the point of near-exhaustion. As for my mentor, Harry, it can be the slow memorizing of poetry until you find yourself living by heart in the same manner as one may learn by heart.
Some religious traditions offer props for the devotional life…prayer beads, temple bowls, incense, a small figure of Buddha or Kwan Yin or Ganesh, or Mary the Mother of Jesus.
But other forms of devotional life are decidedly more "secular" in appearance…a daily walk alone, a weekly supper symposium with friends, a mens' group or women's book group or a couple of hours each week at the wheel, throwing a clay pot you will never even fire. All of these things can accomplish fine restorative work for the human soul, the human soul that is easily and slowly parched by the difficulties of modern life, especially in these last strange and wearisome days.
Now, please, I must tell you that the doctrinal content, or lack of content, in any of these weekly disciplines is usually not important to me.
To get into free-for-alls about whether you have to believe in an omnipotent Lord in order to pray or meditate is putting the cart way before the horse. To get caught up in any debates about metaphysics is a stunning waste of time, as far as I am concerned, too often more an expression of self-importance than anything else.
But I agree with my mentor Harry. It's possible for even rather strong, self-determined people like us to dry up and blow away…unless we deliberately set aside times of restoration.
And the purpose of art, Jerome Witkin says, is restorative.
This is why, every other Thursday night, for the last two years, I have gotten together with some men friends for a drawing group. I helped to get it started because I had been part of such a group in San Francisco for over 16 years, and I missed it terribly when I moved here. My sketch group, here as well as in California, is a group outside the church, made up of people not terribly interested in religious things. We usually begin these evenings by nibbling at some food, or drinking some juice, socializing a bit. Then we get down to a serious session of life-drawing. We ask the model to sit, or stand, or fold up like a rose bud, depending on the character and capacities of his body. We try a variety of poses each and every evening, dramatic, like a Greek statue, or as ordinary as someone lounging in a chair and staring off into space. We play with the lighting to make things vivid, or drape material behind the model to make things more neutral. We often listen to soothing (or, yes, sometimes exciting) music as we do this, some Pat Matheny, perhaps, or Philip Glass or Aaron Copland.
We are of varying skills. We are of varying ages, origins and backgrounds. It is, however, mostly a gay men's group, although women now and then have drawn with us. We draw with charcoal and pen and pencil and crayons and conté and oil pastels and soft pastels. We draw first for a short time - two minutes - then move to ten minute, at most fifteen minute poses.
We draw quickly, focused. We smudge our faces our hands, get chalk on our trousers, and put fingerprints on our drawings. We laugh sometimes, or talk about our lives during breaks. We drape our arms around each other. We embrace hello and kiss good-bye.
We all admit to being restored at the end of the evening. No matter what has claimed our time that day or the week before, no matter how broken our hearts might be, or how overflowing, or how dull, or how exhausted. We are all restored. Life drawing with friends is an extraordinary spiritual practice, visionary, as Witkin says, spiritual, even deeply religious.
Oh, it's not magical or anything. There are no sudden downdrafts of doves, or flashes of light from somewhere else. But we arrive dried up, and leave refreshed, and even transformed. Certainly empowered.
Now for many people, it may be hard to understand how life-drawing might stretch the spirit, restore the broken places of the heart, and then ground that heart in the rapturous reality of the world, to affirm what Jerome Witkin says about art.
Let me try to explain how this works by telling you about the man who first formally taught me how to draw when I was a freshman at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. His name was Kichii Usui. He was a tall man, with a slight stoop, I remember, as if he really wasn't sure he should be quite that tall. He had recently arrived from Japan. His English was halting and accented, especially around the difficult "l" and "r" sounds. I confess I did not always find him easy to understand.
But despite these language limitations, I learned not only how to draw from this man, but a lot about the devotional life.
There are three things he said, over and over, like some mantra from an ancient scripture.
During the story, I listed these things for our children, because I believe it is never too young to learn such things. I also don't think you can ever hear these things enough.
The three things were:
Let me tackle each of them in turn.
1. "Look at model." You are drawing the model, after all, not yourself. You are drawing something outside of you, different than you, not you. If you look at the page you are working on all the time, you are not looking at the model. "Do not look at your page. Look at model," Mr. Usui always used to say simply.
The time this became very clear to me was when, in my drawing group in San Francisco, the model was a person of small stature, commonly called in English a dwarf. That night we struggled to draw the model like we had no other night. Each of us in the group tended to lengthen the lines of the model, making him look like ourselves, each of us being over 5'7". The different proportions of the limbs, the different look of the hands…we had to work very hard to see what we were seeing. Our own self-importance got in the way.
There is in life, as well as, in life-drawing, a tendency to normalize according to our own highly idiosyncratic understanding of normal.
In life drawing it is hard to resist making the skinny thicker, the thicker, skinnier, or to give the larger nose some unscheduled plastic surgery.
In life, it is hard not to see others as being like ourselves instead being themselves. I find a remarked tendency, in most every conversation I have ever been in, to move toward the apparently similar without ever stopping to check whether I am simply assuming these similarities. Life-drawing has taught me to be careful. It has taught me that it's dangerous to make assumptions, or to find, in either similarity or difference, any reason to jump to judgement. Truly fine life drawing is non-judgmental and non-comparative. I say that truly fine living is that way too. Each person, no matter their size, color, shape, or texture, possesses a beauty unique to them. No one need deny who they are in order to appear part of any assumed herd dictated by the media and advertising worlds about how we "should" indeed look. "To look at the model" means to practice our great Unitarian Universalist principle "the worth and dignity of every human person" in the flesh. By treating the model as a sovereign person different from me, I, too in the words of Jerome Witkin, show up just as I am too. Naked, not literally, but in the spirit. Vulnerable to the world as it is, not as I would like it to be.
2. Fill the page.
Mr. Usui told us to stop choking our pencils and drawing little crabbed drawings at the center of the page. "What did your pencil ever do to you that you are treating it so bad? Use your pencil. Use the gift of your paper. Fill the whole page. Do not waste anything. And let your pencil rest loosely in your hand. Stop trying to control it by holding it so tight," he would say.
This advice makes sense in life as well as in life-drawing. The tendency to hold tight and to be controlling is something I have to fight off all the time. Letting loose is difficult. Letting things flow at their own speed and style upsets my patience, as if I were the center of things, and not just one small part of the whole. Keeping myself isolated and unconnected helps things to feel like I am in more control.
A little figure at the center of the page does not do justice to the model in life drawing. In the same manner, if I keep myself a little lone figure unconnected to others, invulnerable before others, I do no justice to myself, either. If I think of myself as an individual first, and not as an individual in community first, I do myself a disservice. My selfhood, my humanhood, is so inextricably linked to others that to speak of myself without also speaking of my friends, family, culture, religious feelings, losses and joys is to flirt with dishonesty. In order to be honest when I speak, I have to fill the page. My privacy is real, surely, but any self-expression in this pulpit or outside it that is not grounded in the whole of my life and all of its relation-ships is to begin to lie, and lying is not a very good thing.
When I fill my page, I invite you to do the same. When we both push to the edge, we are not huddling in the center. This translates into our church community life very well. To be a church is to go to the edges, not to be clustering in the center like a club. We are a living community, not some abstract umbrella opened over a pack of individuals with totally different faiths and religions.
Furthermore, to fill the page is to be faithful to the generosity of the universe in giving us a thousand million stars, a thousand million red leaves on trees, and a thousand million companions with whom to live on this earth.
Lastly, 3. "Draw with your whole body," Mr. Usui said. He would grab his shoulder as he said that, swinging his arm as if it were a compass. He told us that the hand was for grasping the pencil, but that drawing was for the whole body…our torso, our arms, the tilt of our head, the slant of the waist.
Again, what is true of life-drawing is true of life itself. Let's consider that awesome sketch Ruth Stone made with words, a sketch of the Columbus Greyhound station. She too, like Jerome Witkin, like my fellow life-drawers, values the human figure. She describes the homeless bodies of men, when she could just as well have said homeless men. She sketches with great accuracy some real models who pose on plastic chairs at 3 AM in the morning, trying to grab some shut-eye. She tells us that their shoes are rotting…she does not try and cover up that reality. She tells us that one of the men gets up and stretches, just as if he had been waking up in a fine suburban home. This is a painfully poignant detail.
Ruth Stone, like Jerome Witkin, is a good artist. Her sketch is remarkable. She has preserved every detail accurately, looking at the models fiercely, and portraying them faithfully. They are homeless. They are poor. They are sleeping in a public place. They are not like "us" at all. But then she tells the fuller truth. They are human in the exact same way as we are, rising and stretching.
She does not invite us to consider simplistic solutions. She has drawn with her whole body…her emotions as well as her eye, her ethical fierceness as well as her compassion. She does not expect us to respond with only our guilt, as so many religious liberals do when confronted with images of poverty. She wants us to respond not just with one part of our bodies but with the whole of them…our emotions and helplessness yes, but also our sociological sensibility, community spirit, theological reasoning and financial consideration. She is not one-dimensional, but multi dimensional. She wants us to respond in the same way, with our whole lives, our whole bodies, our whole selves. She has not spared us by offering omissions or excuses. She has produced, with her whole self, an accurate picture of the naked body politic in a great Midwestern city. She has done it with words. Jerome Witkin and I try to produce similar evocations of naked reality with our pencils. Does the model have a scar, referring to an assault earlier in life? Show it.
Is the model struggling with an alcohol problem, or depression? Tell the truth about reality. Show the model accurately. Tell the story. And then let your heart be vulnerable toward that story, and what compassionate responses it requires of us. For art goes to reality, and does not run from it.
To struggle to see what you see without putting yourself in the way is the
first step.
To struggle to control less, and fight your fears of failure more, is the
second step.
To struggle to refuse to compartmentalize and isolate, but to see the
interdependence of all the parts, is the third step.
These are three struggles of the devotional life, whatever form it might take…meditation, music, or like me, drawing. It places demands on us in order for us to be refreshed enough to respond to the reality we draw.
Kichii Usui taught me how to draw during the Vietnam War and all the famous assassinations. It was a world not unlike our own present world, really, with its uprisings and wars on poverty and dozens of daily deaths in the so-called ghetto with everything stressing us daily and drying our spirits like powdery crushed leaves. I bet you he did not sleep all that well every night. I bet you his pillows were on the floor in the morning and his eyes went round and round like pinwheels. But Mr. Usui got through those days intact, his spirit buoyed by the devotion of his drawing.
Mr. Usui died last year. Wouldn't you know it, he was a Unitarian Universalist, and the minister in Rochester conducted the Memorial. She called me up and asked me if I remembered anything about him, since she knew I had gone to Oakland University in its heyday, when Mr. Usui was there. And what I told her is pretty much what you heard this morning. Mr. Usui is the man, long before Harry, who first taught me that not to have a devotional life is very risky. He taught me a way far different than Harry Scholefield has, but they do seem to me to be remarkably similar. For anything that helps you to see the world clearly and nakedly, to respond to the world with the fullness of your being, to struggle to understand all things accurately in their interdependence, is devotion, as basic a need as food and water.
I thank Mr. Usui for the gift he gave me, which has stayed me to this very day. Who are your spiritual teachers? What practices in your life strengthen your capacity to face reality with less fear? What do you do to refresh your spirit? How do you do it? How do you talk to others about it? If you ever want to talk to me about your devotional life, you know where to find me.
Autumn Prayer in a Time of Strife: [back to top]
Peace be to us. Yes peace.
A rest amidst our striving.
A breathing that is deep, not shallow.
A sifting in the heart, in the mind,
of gold from leaves, and silver from the sky.
A prioritizing. A letting go of what holds us.
A fresh vulnerability toward firebush leaves,
and men sleeping on bus station seats.
A setting down, a turning from
in order to turn towards,
a pause before bread,
a hesitation of thanks before a glass of water,
another faltering step
on the road to forgiveness.
A tad more laughter, and ample, ample
tears. Study. And more study in the school of life that never closes.
You know. Peace. Peace even in the midst
of strife. Blest are you, Peace.
Be here and now in the dazzling radiant
light that shines on us from blinding oaks,
and is drawn through our bodies in the
singing of this song. (#342)
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