July 7, 2019 Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Opening Words
Our opening words for this morning are a poem by Marie Howe entitled “Prayer”
Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage
I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
Come into this time together where this morning we will explore the sacredness of the ordinary present moment.
We bring our minds, no matter how busy; our bodies, no matter how tired; our hearts, no matter how broken; our spirits, no matter how worn.
It is good to be together.
Sermon
One night in my early 20s, my friend and I tried an experiment: to see if whether we thought hard enough about a question as we were going to sleep, we would dream the answer to it that night. As I fell asleep, I asked, “What is the big answer—the all-encompassing answer to the complex, deep mysteries of the universe?”
Believe it or not, that night, I dreamt I was turning a book over and over in my hands. I discovered that on the side of the book, along the edges of the pages, were several words scrawled in pencil. They said: “Forget the big answer… You’ll miss the backs of ankles … a grape.”
What wisdom is hidden there in the backs of ankles? In a grape…?
In the first weeks of her poetry course at Sarah Lawrence college, Marie Howe, whose poem we heard in the Opening Words, asks her students to come in each day with just two descriptive sentences about something they saw that day – without using metaphor. They have a hard time with it – they interpret and abstract, or they can’t find anything “important enough.”
She tells them – it’s simple: “I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth with the light coming through it in three places.” By the fourth week, they love it – she says, they bring in their sentences and pour them out on the table – “clang,clang,clang” –: the gleam of the apple, the trill of the bird song, the gritty curve of the curb.
She then tells them they can bring metaphor back in, and they say, “But why? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?” …And she smiles…
She explains that sometimes we use metaphor to avoid experiencing something – she says, “To resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.”
I wonder, why does it hurt us somehow to experience even an ordinary moment as it is?
These days everyone is preaching to be in the present moment. And it’s difficult, right? Is it difficult just because we are busy?
Or are we busy because it is difficult?
Is it difficult because the present moment hurts, as Marie Howe says?
Many Buddhists would say being present to the moment hurts because we see there is nothing to hang on to. As we sit for one pure moment with our own breath… as we look deeply in our children’s faces… even as we wash one glass under the cold, running water, it hits us that there is so much precious life and we can’t pin it down.
Marie Howe watched her brother die at 28 from AIDS. She says, “I began to understand that everything I knew and loved would pass away, and I would pass away. I would die like my brother had died, and the world, the actual “is-ness” of it became and remains very precious to me… the wind, running water, voices.”
Here’s another one of her poems, “The Gate”
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
What do we do with all of the THIS in our lives when so much of it can feel so ordinary? So “cheese and mustard sandwich”? Doing the laundry, the bills, the errands…How many of you have long “to do” lists? We can’t make every moment of our life a stroll on the beach under a glorious sunset or a March on Washington.
Our lives instead are usually full of the kinds of mundane things Marie Howe speaks of in the next poem we will hear – things like fixing the clogged sink, hurrying down the sidewalk, spilling coffee… This next poem I think many have interpreted to mean that, because life is precious, we have to minimize all those ordinary events of our lives and focus on the extraordinary– but I bet Marie Howe would join with me in interpreting it differently. The title of one of her books of poetry is The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.
The ordinary is the stuff of our lives. Perhaps trying to strip the mundane out of our lives will always make us feel that we are failing– failing to live extraordinary lives rich with meaning.
I often hear people, especially Unitarian Universalists, quote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
I get what people are trying to say there, and I agree with it except when it is interpreted in a very dualistic way, divorcing the spiritual from the mundane – from the very human parts of being in this world.
That means my theology is what is called an “incarnational theology” – the sacred is very much IN the world.
The sacred is incarnated – embedded – embodied in the world, beautiful and broken as it is.
Here’s a final poem by Marie Howe I will share with you. This poem is a letter she wrote to her brother Johnny, who as I said, died from AIDS when he was 28. The poem is called “What The Living Do.”
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living, I remember you.
—
In that tenuous, shaky, ordinary moment, she finds love, memory, connection.
The Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has written, “The human experience is an experience of nothing to hang on to, nothing that’s set once and for all. Reality is always falling apart. In this fleeting situation, the only thing that makes sense is for us to reach out to one another.”
So – returning to the dream I told you about… I asked for the “big answer” but was prompted to remember the “backs of ankles, a grape”…the mundane! – and the sacred, I’d say! The back of an ankle is the Achilles heel – vulnerability. A grape, for someone like me who has always been entranced by the mystery of fruit – is curiosity.
When I show up with vulnerability and curiosity in the present ordinary moment, I come face to face with the preciousness of life.
And if I don’t let my heart close down, if I don’t try to pin down the meaning and make plans, if I don’t distract myself by grabbing my smartphone and checking my email for the umpteenth time …
… perhaps inhabiting that ordinary time will transform me, moment by moment. I will be living.
We will be living. May it be so. Amen. Blessed Be.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon