5.1.16
OPENING WORDS
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
The days of my life, already lived,
And held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
To another life that’s wide and timeless.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Come into this space, where today we consider how to rest from the busy-ness of our lives, and rediscover our place.
SERMON
I begin with a Reflection by Rev. Kathleen McTigue:
It was the end of a hectic day and the start of the kind of evening familiar to anyone who’s juggling work and young children. Time is the enemy, relentlessly streaming past, leaving in its wake an endless clutter of unfinished tasks. Like a flustered hen in a barnyard, I clucked and fretted as I hustled my children along through homework, dinner, bath time and bedtime stories, always trying to get things to move a little faster against the ticking clock.
With the kids finally in bed a half-hour later than I’d aimed for, I fussed my way out the door to give the dog her walk, bustling along as my fretful mind danced through a dozen other still unfinished chores. I was halfway down the driveway before I glanced up. My jaw dropped- there before me the whole spread of the Milky Way splintered out across the clear black sky, stars behind stars in the deep pool of space. And then I finally stood still, washed in starlight that had been traveling toward me for millions of years. I was brought to my senses, and very nearly brought to my knees.
Because bedtime had been late, my children were still awake. To their delighted surprise, the mother hen reappeared in their bedroom doorways, no longer clucking, and carried them one at a time, pajamas and all, out into the crisp winter air to bathe in that ancient light.
Maybe this is all we can bear of the cosmic perspective on time, this little glimpse of eternity that lets us see our small lives connected to everything else on so massive a scale. My awe at the immensity revealed in a clear night sky doesn’t leave me feeling diminished or irrelevant. Instead it reminds me that if we can be present exactly in the moment we are living, we can step outside of time altogether. We live immersed in that eternity after all – we just forget, until something like starlight wakes us up to it again.
The busy-ness at the beginning of this story is all too familiar to me. How many times do people ask me how I am, and I respond, “Oh, so busy.”
Sometimes I feel like a broken record; I know that life needs to be more than just “busy.” Yet it consumes me.
My mind often feels like the desktop of my computer: so many windows and tabs open: this unfinished task peeking out from the corner of the other – My attention always vigilant to that thing I may have – and inevitably did – forget or neglect.
And the busy-ness isn’t just me: the rushed traffic, the long check-out lines full of weary, impatient people… email inboxes overflowing, birthday cards not written, bills that need to be paid, tasks piling up…
Does this sound familiar to you?
Now, before I press on you some
naïve message just to let it all go –
just to relax…
I want to acknowledge that sometimes the busy-ness is real
because our culture creates it.
As I wrote this sermon, I imagined myself preaching about busy-ness
to that single mom, three kids, working two jobs and taking night classes to get her degree, and supporting her ailing parents.
Imagine me telling her: just rest from your busy-ness: take a break!
I cannot preach that message in good conscience unless I also acknowledge the societal forces that create cultures in which so many people go it alone with too many burdens. Parents, for example, are often too stressed because in our culture we have largely forgotten the truth that it takes a village to raise a child. And we’re one of the only countries without paid parental leave. Mothers often have to go back to work before their bodies have even healed from childbirth. Fathers or domestic partners rarely get any time off. Then there’s minimum wage. How can you make ends meet on minimum wage without benefits? And we’re a culture that has often forgotten that many hands make light work. The structure of our culture has changed in a way that getting those many hands together takes so much coordination.
And so our burdens are heavy.
And we end up thinking we must be doing it wrong – that we’re not enough.
It’s the “Not Enough” Voice. Perhaps you have it, too.
The “Not Enough” Voice pesters us if we can’t rise to meet all these demands. If we can’t secure that American Dream, if we can’t work hard and play hard and be perfect parents or children or partners.
And The “Not Enough” Voice is tricky – it even comes in when we’re not busy – it tells us: “If you’re not busy, what’s wrong with you? What are you doing with your life?”
And so “Busy” often becomes like a reluctant badge of honor… These days the usual response to “How are you?” is “Busy.”
We are busy.
Despite the fact that scientist have found if you don’t have downtime, your brain and productivity suffers. The benefits of napping, meditation, daydreaming have all been confirmed.
But we remain busy.
So what do we do? Two things:
First, we work to acknowledge the societal forces that create this myth that we must each pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps, carry heavy weights alone. We must shift more toward community, where a few aren’t burdened with more than their share, and where many hands make light work. (That’s a topic for a sermon in itself.)
But second, in the meantime, as we transform our culture, and even after we do,
we need to remind ourselves
to break from the busy-ness –
even for a moment.
Even for just that glimpse of the Milky Way. Or a blade of grass.
Because when we can break from the focus on what’s right here in front of us: the task, the need, the lists…
when we can break from it, we can drop into mystery, wonder, connection.
But why – what’s the point?
Albert Einstein said:
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
All our striving will be in vain, all our work will just burn us up, unless we can stay connected to something larger than ourselves.
Transcendence.
For some that Transcendence is God… the Sacred…for Others, it is the Mystery of Nature…or the workings of Humanity at our best, or Reason…for some it is all of these together…
It’s about finding our place in the whole.
It’s about this Mary Oliver poem:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
This is our first Source of Unitarian Universalism:
Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.
If, in the midst, of all the busy-ness of our lives, we lose touch with that transcendence, we lose touch with the forces which create and uphold life.
We don’t want to be busy, dead people.
We want to be connected to all of life.
So this week, in the midst of our busy days: let’s do two things:
First, let’s take a moment – even just a moment,
to drop into wonder and joy.
And second, to fully inhabit that moment
enough that it tells us what we need to know:
You are ENOUGH.
Blessed be.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
