Sunday, October 4, 2009

OPENING WORDS

The Swan by Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air—
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music—like the rain pelting the trees—like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

READING

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

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.

SECOND READING by Mary Oliver

"Poems speak of the mortal condition; in poems we muse (as we say) about the tragic and glorious issues of our fragile and brief lives: our passions, our dreams, our failures. Our wonderings about heaven and hell—these too are in poems. Life, death; mystery, and meaning. Five hundred years and more of such labor, such choice thought within choice expression, lies within the realm of metrical poetry. Without it, one is uneducated, and one is mentally poor." (ix, The Rules of the Dance)

SERMON

Take yourselves back to first century Jerusalem and before—to the beginnings of the Christian faith. The time when the ancient texts of Judaism and the new writings of the Christian apostles began to combine to create what we today know as the sacred scriptures of Christianity. Contrary to some popular beliefs today, those scriptures don’t reflect the experience of 21st century Christians or Jews, but the experience of their predecessors prior to and including the first century. The importance of them is their testimony to the experience of faith, not the faith itself. Men, women and children from every era, from every climate, region and circumstance; from every boundary of human knowledge have spoken of that experience not in the terms of fact and science, but in poetic terms. Religious language is that which simultaneously soars and grounds. It is the language of the poetic soul of humanity—the language of human experience of that which defies description.

One does not have to "wait upon the Lord" in literal terms to find resonance and strength in the image of an eagle’s flight: "They shall rise up on wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." One need only to have observed the size and strength and majesty of the eagle, to liken it to the human experience of transcending fear, pain, timidity and weariness.

As Unitarian Universalists, we recognize that faith and our descriptions of it are made by human beings—that our understanding of what is holy is based on what we see, taste, smell, and hear of the world and its wonders and on the capacity of humanity to marvel at the grandeur of it all. We recognize that the Biblical poets, the Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, African or Native American poets are merely the ancestors of our own poets. We can find fingers that point to the holiness of this life and the world in which it grows in music, in art, in poetry and prose and in the natural beauty and fury of this planet earth.

While I was away at the General Assembly in Portland, Oregon, I had the opportunity to visit a Rembrandt exhibit on the occasion of the 400th birthday of the Dutch Master. A colleague sent me, knowing I’d be as moved as he was by the sight of these nearly 400 year old paintings, perfectly preserved in their near three dimensional depths—his use of light and shadow, color and texture perfection beyond measure. Standing before them, I was indeed moved to tears.

Sacred texts do that—they serve to deepen our understanding, our appreciation, our sheer joy at living—they serve to move us in myriad ways. They articulate both our experience and our vision as perhaps we cannot. No sacred text is about believing in, but about finding our truth within. Viewing them thus frees us from servitude to any doctrine or dogma, and frees us TO finding our religious truth where it is embodied for us. Today I begin to bring you some of the ways I’ve found mine—the words and the music and the beauty through which I can claim to know faith. Writers from all walks of life are part of my collection of sacred texts. Today I begin this occasional series with a poet, Unitarian Universalist poet laureate, Mary Oliver.

Oliver wrote "We muse about the tragic and glorious issues of our fragile and brief lives. " If we are looking for an accurate and succinct statement about what it is to live a religious life, Mary Oliver’s made it for us. All religion, all sacred literature is about those musings; so is all poetry, all art, all music. The canons of our sacred things are vast and deep, not limited to what was chosen thousands of years ago. If there were a canon of Unitarian Universalism, surely Mary Oliver would be prominent in its annals.

Born in Cincinatti, as a teenager Oliver lived briefly in the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay where she helped Millay’s survivors sort her letters and papers. Following in her footsteps, Oliver became a poet. Oliver’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. She currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (poets.org) Oliver was the Ware Lecturer at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in 2006, following such notables as Martin Luther King, Jr., and May Sarton.

Her themes parallel those of Unitarian Universalism as she strives to discern the meaning of this life with its beauties, its joys and its losses. She asks questions about her relationships with other beings in this world and about the world itself and God, about her connections with what is and about the meaning and purpose of those connections.

In her poem, "The Summer Day", Oliver wonders aloud for us all about the origins of this world, about the miracle of life and the little we know of it, and about how to hold the overwhelming, unspeakable gratitude for it all.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
She snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Tell me, what it is you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And some answers come to her oft-quoted question. What shall one do with their "one wild and precious life"? In "Wild Geese," Oliver says "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." You are, she says, connected in a thousand ways to this world and its lives. It is a profound commandment for this day: "let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." No one, no church, no book, no state, can dictate to you what you will love. From the soft, warm, body of a beloved pet to the lover’s embrace; from grass on bare feet to the nervous dance of the lightning; from the solidarity of protest against injustice and war to the shining eyes of a child, still hopeful in the midst of hunger—the invitation is there always for compassion, empathy, love to enter the human mind. "Faith, hope and love, these three", said Paul, "but the greatest of these is love."

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

"To love what is mortal"—both enough and not enough, all and not-all. To love is to live, and loss is inevitably part of that love. Oliver wrote the poems in Thirst after the death of her partner of forty years.

When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention

"As long as we are able to
Be extravagant we will be
Hugely and damply
Extravagant. Then we will dro
p Foil by foil to the ground. This
Is our unalterable task, and we do it
Joyfully.’

And they went on, "Listen,
The heart-shackles are not, as you think,
Death, illness, pain,
Unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

Lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
Selfishness."

Their fragrance all the while rising
From their blind bodies, making me
Spin with joy.

We humans, if we are lucky, give freely of our love, perhaps many times, knowing that we can hold what is mortal next to us but for a little while. The heart shackles are in our vain attempts to protect ourselves from hurt and loss.

It is her book-length poem, The Leaf and the Cloud, where Oliver’s knowing of our connections is most eloquent. She echoes Emerson’s understanding of the "oversoul" and Walt Whitman’s "child who went forth" in these equally timeless words:

I feel my body rising through the water
Not much more than a leaf;
And I feel like the child, crazed by beauty
Or filled to bursting with woe;
And I am the snail in the universe of the leaves
Trudging upward;
And I am the pale lily who believes in God,
Though she has no word for it,

And I am the hunter, and I am the hounds,
And I am the fox, and I am the weeds of the field,
And I am the tunnel and the coolness under the earth,
And I am the pawprint in the dust,
I am the dusty road who looks up unblinking
And sees (do you also see them?) the white clouds
In their blind, round-shouldered haste;

I am a woman sixty years old, and glory is my work.

The notion of spiritual soul-work is a theme of Oliver’s poems—the same call that came to Moses out of the burning bush comes also to each of us. Oliver’s poet’s mind pays attention to it, and she invites us to pay the same attention through her poetry. "And glory is my work." What is the work of the soul? Oliver’s poet’s mind explores that alongside us.

From Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
Equal seekers of sweetness…

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
Which is my work,

Which is mostly standing still and learning to be
Astonished.
 

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
The blue iris, it could be
Weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
Small stones; just
Pay attention, then patch

A few words together and don’t try
To make them elaborate, this isn’t
A contest but the doorway

Into thanks, and a silence in which
Another voice may speak.

There is a stunning reality to Oliver’s poems, recognition that life is difficult and imperfect—she is not a romantic, but a modern seeker.

From "The Ponds"

Still, what I want in my life
Is to be willing
To be dazzled—
To cast aside the weight of facts

And maybe even
To float a little
Above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

Into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
That the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
Of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

The messages of these volumes of sacred texts are surprisingly universal, pointing to religious truths that are at once simple and that also have to be learned by each of us. The human being grows spiritually by paying attention. The Buddha said that 2,500 years ago. This life, this world is difficult. Pain, loss, loneliness are part of human existence. So are beauty, compassion, wonder and love. "You do not have to be good", but you have to be willing to allow yourself to love what you love, as fully and deeply as your growing consciousness will allow. Our salvation is here—in the boundless grace of connections with that which brings hope, joy and peace anew. There is work to do in the world—work within ourselves that opens us to love and compassion for the world. Buddha saw that, and Jesus and Mohammed in their turns. "This is my commandment: that you love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might and love your neighbor as yourself." How is that different from the invitation to look "into the white fire of a great mystery" and realize that "my work is loving the world?"

Sacred literature is not fossilized in stone or in canon, but is the timeless wisdom that rings true generation after generation in those who are alive and aware of their mortality. As much as the Torah, the New Testament, the Sutras, the Vedas and the Qu’ran speak their truths for their time, Mary Oliver and her like speak for us—our truths for our time. We only need hear. Amen.