 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
"DEEP IN OUR BONES" | Psalm 104.24-30 | June 8, 2003 |
Like all things that live, there is something deep in our bones that drives us towards life. Fear is built into our beings to preserve the species; pain is built into our systems to keep us from giving in too quickly to death. At the same time, our culture has instilled deep within us a profound paranoia about death that causes us to stick our head in the sand, hoping it will go away.
Our modern technological society attempts to cheat death at every turn through what Professor S. Brent Plate calls ‘consumerist immortality.’ We simply purchase our way around death by buying things that make us look younger or go faster–more horsepower, fewer wrinkles. It’s all a mode of escape to keep death out of our personal lives. (Context, May 15, 2003)
And if we observe society critically, we will realize that this rite of passage into the next world, whatever form the next world may take, is left to the professionals to do the work. Most of us expire unprepared, relying on others who are paid to do it TO us and FOR our families. In contemporary North America, death knowledge is professional knowledge, not personal knowledge. (Ron Grimes, Context, May 15, 2003).
But there is something deep in our bones that tells us there is more than professional knowledge about life and death. We know there is something personal, something we can’t avoid, something we must embrace in death as a matter of living. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that if we can befriend death, then we are free to live abundantly, as Jesus said, because we’re not constantly looking over our shoulder to see if that grim reaper is following us. In Zen teaching there is a saying that if this is a good day to die, then it’s a good day to live.
Brent Plate teaches in the context of much diversity and says that in teaching about life and death, he emphasizes the importance of religious practices, rather than beliefs. He has found that teaching myths and rituals of religious traditions offer a place to educate people about the plural meanings of life and how we might come to terms with the often-unspeakable idea of death. He firmly believes that it is in the performance of ritual that we are able to embody meaning, to combine theory and practice. Religious practices, rather than ‘beliefs,’ are more powerful tools for finding meaning in life when death is knocking at the door. Ritual becomes the pathway of connection.
When I was younger, in my early days of church work, I thwarted ritual at every turn. Repetitous ritual seemed boring and senseless. So each week on Sunday I’d change things for no purpose than to keep things from getting boring. As I’ve gotten older, and hopefully wiser, I understand more fully what Professor Plate has to say. Religious practices are the stuff of strong spiritual bones, for deep in the marrow of our beings is a need to both fight death and embrace it. Ritual is the means by which we live creatively, and fully, in that tension.
Plate comments that most of his students think of ritual as ‘routine’ and ‘boring.’ They have been raised in a society that teaches us to think for ourselves and therefore participation in any prescribed set of actions indicates that we are lesser beings. But he explains the fallacy of equating ritual with routine. In the aftermath of any tragedy–9/11 or the shuttle disaster–or in the wake of a death of someone young and supposedly invincible–Princess Diana or John Kennedy, Jr.–there is the inevitable ritual of makeshift shrines and memorial sites around the world. All of those candles, poems, flowers, photos, mementos, people standing around for hours and doing nothing except being together or maybe singing or praying are part of ritual to express our grief and get our mind around what has happened.
Deep in our bones is the need to be together during a crisis, even if we don’t know how to respond and especially when we can’t quite get our minds wrapped around the tragedy. Our bones ache for meaning, for connection, for purpose. The candles and flowers are rituals with universal meaning, symbols of connection to the God or Allah or Whomever holds life and death in eternal hands.
Listen to the poem of Theodore Roethke entitled “The waking”:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
to you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Here is the mystery that exists deep in our bones. This journey through sleeping and waking is an evolution of affirmation, of delight and reverence, and it presages some kind of hope found in transformation. This waking and sleeping are the rituals of daily living that keep us connected to things beyond us and make of things routine the stuff of meaning: I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow/I learn by going where I have to go. (David Heim, Christian Century, May 17, 2003)
My grandmother had the uncanny ability to wake up in the morning at whatever time she decided. She never set an alarm. If she needed to be up at 4 or 6, she would just tell herself to do it, and she’d wake up. It was a paradigm for the way she lived her life, for in that same way she knew something profound deep in her bones: that life and death, waking and sleeping are where we have to go, and we learn by going there. But we do not go there alone, and so we light candles and bring flowers and pray and sing as some concrete expression of the inexpressible. There is something deep in our bones that tells us it is ok. Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
PASTORAL PRAYER
Eternal Spirit, who out of the mysterious womb of nature has created us with minds to see truth, hearts to love beauty, and wills to choose righteousness, be present with us in this hour. As fire ascending seeks the sun, so seek we the Source of our being. As rivers flowing into the sea are but the sea itself that has fallen in rain upon the mountains, so have we come from you and go back unto you, O God in whom we live and move and have our being.
We, who through another week have sought the fulfillment of our ambitions in this world and have sought to be more fully what you have created us to be, now bring before you our causes for concern, that we may be ever more attentive to living lives of peace and justice.
We bring our doubts. May we be honest about the yearnings deep within our souls that we may explore all the ways you come to us and become more truthfully all that you would have us be.
We bring our anxieties. May those with heavy burdens find them lifted, and shy of that, we pray for strength enough to bear them. Strengthen us in your Spirit that we may indeed be strong not for having escaped hardship but for having endured it with your power.
We bring our wrongdoings. Some of them we hate and some of them we love all too well. Lift us out of the low-lying levels of our ordinary days and grant us an eternal perspective around all that we do, all that we say, all that we are. Help us to realize that though our deeds–good or bad–are private, they affect the beauty of your kingdom on this earth and give us the desire to become more fully what you would have us be for the goodness of peace around us.
We bring before you our nation and all the nations of the world. It is good that each of the citizens of this world take pride in their countries, but it is good that we should also take pride in the world of which each nation is an equal and valued part. May we learn to respect people who are different from us and learn to walk together in harmony.
And we bring to you the need to be stilled from the too-noisy and too-busy world in which we live. Let the sediment of our churning spirits settle and purify the days of our lives through the filter of your grace that we may live more fully the life abundant given to us. Amen.
Psalm 104
Lord, you have made so many things. How wisely you made them all. The earth is filled with your creatures. There is the ocean, large and wide, where countless creatures live, large and small alike. The ships sail on it and in it plays Leviathan, that sea monster which you made.
All of them depend on you to give them food when they need it. You give it to them and they are satisfied. When you turn away, they are afraid; when you take away their breath, they die, and go back to the dust from which they came. But when you give them breath, they are created: you give new life to the earth. May the glory of God last forever.
The Koran
Give them this parable. Once there were two men, to one of whom We gave two vineyards set about with palm-trees and watered by a running stream, with a cornfield lying in between. Each of the vineyards yielded an abundant crop, and when their owner had gathered in the harvest, he said to his companion: “I am richer than you, and my clan is mightier than yours...Surely what I have will never perish. Nor do I believe that the Hour of Doom will ever come. Even if I returned to my Lord, I should surely find a better place than this.”
And the poorer man said: “Have you no faith in Him who created you from dust, from a little germ, and fashioned you into a man? When you entered into your garden, why did you not say: “What God has ordained must surely come to pass; there is no strength except in God”?
One day the first man found his fruits were destroyed and he wrung his hands with grief at all that he had spent on the garden. “Would that I had served no other gods besides my Lord,” he cried. In such ordeals protection comes only from God, the true God.
Coin for them a simile about the life of this world. It is like the vegetation of the earth that thrives when watered by the rain We send down from the sky, soon turning into stubble which the wind scatters abroad. God has power over all things.
| Copyright © 2003 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |