-- Emily Dickinson
Opening Words: by the Rev. Gordon McKeeman
Ministry is all that we do—together…
Ministry is what we do together as we celebrate triumphs of our human spirit—
miracles of birth and life, wonders of devotion and sacrifice…
Ministry is what we do together…
in grief… and pain, enabling us in the presence of death to say yes to life.
We who minister speak and live the best we know
with full knowledge that it is never quite enough
and yet are reassured by lostness found,
fragments reunited, wounds healed and joy shared.
[Mindful that] Ministry is what we all do—together,
let us worship.
Meditation: by the Rev. Mark DeWolfe
A person is a puzzle.
Sometimes from the inside it feels as if some pieces are missing.
Perhaps one we love is no longer with us.
Perhaps one talent we desire eludes us.
Perhaps a moment that required grace found us clumsy.
Sometimes from the inside it feels as if some pieces are missing.
A person is a puzzle. We are puzzles not only to ourselves but to each other.
A puzzle is a mystery we seek to solve –
-- and the mystery is that we are whole even with our missing pieces.
Our missing pieces are empty spaces we might long to fill,
empty spaces that make us who we are.
The mystery is that we are only what we are
and that what we are is enough…
…let us know that we are accepted… exactly as we are.
Accepted – missing pieces and all.
Reading: by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, economist and philosopher respectively, from How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life (p. 12)
Perhaps the chief intellectual barrier to realizing the good life for all is the discipline of economics, or rather the deathly orthodoxy that sails under that name in most universities across the world. Economics, says a recent text, studies “how people choose to use limited or scarce resources in attempting to satisfy their unlimited wants.” The italicized adjectives are strictly redundant: if wants are unlimited, then resources are by definition limited relative to them, however rich we may be in the absolute sense. We are condemned to dearth, not through want of resources, but by the extravagance of our appetites. As [one economist] put it… “we live in a rich society, which nevertheless in many respects insists on thinking and acting as if it were a poor society.”
Reading: by Mark Matousek from When You’re Falling Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living (p. 195)
How often does anything feel like enough? When, for more than a random instant, does life appear completely sufficient, with nothing to edit, improve, aspire to, arrange, or nudge forward in some way or another? Isn’t there always something more to be done, work to be finished, ground to cover, prospects to investigate? When it came to enough, I had always believed, it would not be my personal fate in this lifetime.
But burnout is an insidious process. You don’t know you’re choked until you’re already smoking. For a long time… taking a break [for me] seemed an affront to the gift of vitality. Living fully meant overdrive. Forced to choose between sanity and productivity, I would have gladly chosen prolifically nuts. But the smell of smoke was in my nostrils. I woke up too many mornings feeling like toast. My calendar was booked, my downtime upbeat, but my life had turned into a run-on sentence. … I needed to figure out how to stop.
For someone like me this was difficult. I was the insecure geek in school who wrote twenty-page papers when five pages were assigned... Double the effort for half the self-esteem, that had been my lifelong motto. My Swiss-cheese ego just wouldn’t stop leaking. These cheese holes announced that I was fully deficient and nothing I did could keep them stuffed.
Reading: by Sam Keen from In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred (p. 1) A brief description of his religious journey.
I stumble, unstable on shifting ground. My mind wanders through layers of rubble, discarded beliefs, outworn creeds, broken hopes, shattered illusions, bones of failed heroes and false saviors.
Socrates, that old trickster, taught me a way of thinking, dialectic and dialogue, an endless approach. But I never arrived at the promised vision of the good, the beautiful, the true.
I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, with as much heart, mind, and soul as I could manage, but he failed to save me from death’s dominion and the fear of nothingness.
I trusted Freud to lead me down into an underworld... from which I returned wounded, with little redemptive wisdom other than a sermon on coping and the virtues of love and work…
Should I mourn and build again? Clear away the debris, smooth out the ground, prepare a solid foundation for a new edifice to house my spirit?
Wherever I stand, tectonic plates rumble. I am earth-quake prone. Not a good insurance risk.
I think it is better to dwell in the desert under open skies, look for hidden oases, make a hearth, light a fire, cherish sunrise, noonday, moonset, a flight of Canada geese, an ant empire being built an arm’s length away, the comfort of touch, the language of glances, smiles, laughter, tears – sacred moments.
More Than Enough
A Sermon Delivered on February 1, 2015
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
When they were little, our kids loved to play with puzzles, jigsaw puzzles that came in all shapes and sizes. For Elaine and me this seemed like a good thing. Puzzles seemed like the next best thing to perusing picture books or learning to read. It taught them to concentrate, look closely, and imagine how a jumble of pieces could fit together to create a coherent whole.
When they were preschoolers, one of their first favorites was a big puzzle shaped like a red and yellow fire truck. It was made up of twelve easy pieces, each about the size of my hand.
The bigger the kids got, the more challenging the puzzles became. I remember when they were a few years older, they got a lot of mileage out of a puzzle their German grandmother gave them: it was a map of the world, with about forty sturdy pieces in the shape of countries, continents, and oceans. Every once in a while, playing on the floor, one of the pieces would go missing: a glaring hole in the middle of Africa, or the Atlantic. This provided them a real incentive to keep their play area reasonably picked up, and – thankfully – what was lost was found.
By the time our kids were in their teens, the puzzles they tackled depicted dizzying landscapes, made up of a thousand tiny, almost identical pieces. For days or weeks at a time our dining room table was covered with a work in progress. And at this point, more often than not, the most ambitious puzzles would never be completed. Gaping holes remained empty.
The fact that we have two cats certainly didn’t help. Our cats love to play with little things they knock off the edge of kitchen counters, and coffee tables, and then bat around floor, into the darkest corners of the house. Some of those missing pieces are gone. Some of those puzzles will remain forever incomplete.
* * *
Our kids are in college now, trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They each have their own unique collection of interests and abilities, their own passions and past experiences, which they are trying to put together into a coherent picture, a vision of the life they would like to lead, their vision of the good life.
Putting all the pieces together isn’t easy. And as an anxious, over-involved parent, I have to tell you, it isn’t easy to watch. I feel like I am looking over their shoulders, constantly trying to point out pieces that are lying right in front of them, that they don’t seem to see, and offering sage advice about where I think the pieces should go, how they should put them together, so that they end up with a solid education some day, and – dare I hope – gainful employment.
But I bite my tongue - or at least I try to – because I know at this stage of life parents need to step back. The children are adults. And I remember my own struggles, when I was in my early twenties, trying to figure out what to do with my life.
I remember when I was two years into my seminary education, profoundly doubtful as to whether I was cut out for the ministry. Much younger than many of my peers, I had a very clear sense of my own inadequacy, of all the wisdom and life experience I lacked.
Gordon McKeeman was the president of Starr King School, and my advisor at the time. I remember clearly the conversation we had, when I had decided to take a year off from school. My plans for the future were a jumble, but my self-doubts were unmistakable. I remember clearly how, after expressing my conflicted state of mind and heart, Gordon looked at me kindly over his the top of his reading glasses, and quietly but firmly assured me: “You are enough.” Despite any feelings to the contrary, you are enough.
Today, thirty years later, Gordon’s words still echo in my mind. And today I know that his quiet conviction was not merely an expression of his confidence in my personal potential. He was speaking of a much larger truth, a universal human experience, that also happened to apply to me. Gordon died a year ago. He was 93 years old. But his words are still with me: You are enough.
* * *
Mark Matousek gets at this experience, when he asks, “How often does anything feel like enough?” No matter how hard he tried, he always had the sense that there was something lacking, something missing. “Double the effort for half the self-esteem,” was his lifelong motto. His “Swiss-cheese ego just wouldn’t stop leaking.” The holes he clearly felt confirmed in his mind that he was deficient. And nothing could fill those holes. So what could he do?
Struggling with these existential questions, Matousek finds helpful answers in Buddhist teaching. “The drive to fill internal emptiness stems from fundamental doubts about our own existence, the Buddha taught… [And] because confronting this emptiness feels so scary, we’re driven to keep trying to cover it up, to papier-maché the abyss with stuff.” (p. 197)
* * *
Trying to fill up our existential emptiness with stuff can take many different shapes. Sometimes we try to satisfy our spiritual longings with material things. Economists call it “an attempt to satisfy unlimited wants.” Some would say this is a good thing. It is a driving force of our consumer culture, it fuels the free market, it keeps our economy strong.
But our extravagant appetites exact a cost, and are ultimately not sustainable. Ultimately, even the greatest over-abundance of material wealth and possessions will fail to fill our spiritual holes. And yet once we have joined the economic rat race, it is very difficult to stop.
The problem, Robert and Edward Skidelsky write, “is that a competitive, monetized economy puts us under continual pressure to want more and more.” This is a kind of madness. The beginning of sanity, they say, is to realize that even though we feel and act as if we were needy and poor, we are in fact profoundly rich. They say, “Considered in relation to our vital needs, our state is one not of scarcity but rather of extreme abundance.” When we realize this we will be one big step closer to toward creating a world in which all can attain the good life.
* * *
Coming from the Christian tradition, Sam Keen describes our sense of existential emptiness, as the absence of God. Many of us experience a “god-shaped hole.” Sam Keen has tried in different ways to fill this hole. He studied the wisdom of the ancient sage Socrates. He tried the teachings of Jesus. He followed Freud into the underworld of the psyche.
But none of these beliefs bring lasting satisfaction. One after the other breaks down, until Sam Keen stands in a wasteland amidst the rubble of discarded beliefs, shattered illusions and broken hopes.
There he slowly realizes, rather than fill his emptiness with yet another philosophy or yet another creed, he is better off opening his eyes to the world around him. The world as it is. It is better to stand under open skies, to cherish sunrise and moonset. To watch the flight of Geese overhead, and the army of ants at work beneath his feet. It is better to find the simple comfort of a friend’s touch, smile, laughter and tears. It is better to recognize that these are sacred moments.
Rather than frantically trying to fill imagined holes, it’s better to realize what the great Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel put so succinctly: “Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”
* * *
If only we could believe that being itself is a blessing. If only we could believe that life itself is holy. It is much easier said than done. Many of us have tried.
In a book entitled Everyday Sacred the artist Sue Bender writes of her efforts. Like others before her, she begins from an experience of inadequacy. For as long as she can remember, a voice has been echoing inside her head. It is the harsh voice of a critical judge, who passes judgment on everything she does. “You’re not measuring up,” the judge shouts. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s supposed to measure up to, but only that she never will. The harsh judge tells her nothing she ever does will be enough.
For Bender, an understanding of the sacred somehow became associated with the image of a simple bowl, a begging bowl. It is the empty bowl monks carry in their hands every day. And whatever generous givers place in the bowl provides nourishment for the day. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always enough.
For Bender, the image of the bowl conveyed a sacred simplicity, generosity and humility. Carefully crafted bowls are beautiful and fragile. They can break. But still they are beautiful.
A Japanese tea bowl that had been broken was pieced together again. Instead of hiding the flaws, the cracks were emphasized, filled with silver. The bowl was more precious after it had been mended than before. The image of this bowl inspired her.
And a friend named Kevin inspired her. Kevin was a potter, who specialized in making cracked pots. He made beautiful sturdy pots, broke them, and then glued them back together, creating even more beautiful pots. Fascinated by this practice, after some initial reluctance Sue Bender, joined him. The simple act of putting the broken pieces together was a revelation for. She writes:
“Holding together the first two pieces of what would become my new old pot was deeply, unexpectedly satisfying. Holding those two pieces, waiting for them to be joined, knowing there was nothing else I could be doing in those moments, I felt I was holding a baby in my arms – just holding, with such a quiet tenderness, doing a task and being still at the same time.
“All of me” was present.
I could not have imagined that holding two pieces of broken clay together and waiting could be so deeply satisfying. Time felt full. Closer to the truth, there was no time. That same calm engulfed me as each one of the pieces was joined to make the pot whole.
This simple act was so full of sweetness that now, when I am feeling rushed, I try to remember the stillness of that moment…
When I finally held my own pieced-together pot in my hands, a circle was completed.
I looked at my bowl and saw that it was beautiful.
In the past, no matter what I did or accomplished, I still felt that something was missing. When I put the pieces of my cracked pot together, I saw that nothing was missing.
Nothing.
I saw I was WHOLE.” (p. 155-156)
The bowl, broken and restored, is a puzzle. The pieces, created by accident, are assembled with greatest care and attention. Put together, they reveal hidden patterns of beauty – now made visible. Because we care, because we stop and pay attention, we can see how truly precious it is.
* * *
Every person is a puzzle. Sometimes it feels as if some pieces are missing: a loved one lost, a talent longed for that remains out of reach, a moment that required grace but found us clumsy. We dropped a bowl, and it broke. The mystery is that we are whole even with our missing pieces.
The empty spaces – like Swiss cheese holes that never stop leaking - make us who we are. The mystery is that we are what we are, and that what we are is enough.
This mystery is at the heart this place. It is at the heart of what we practice here, the heart of our shared ministry.
We speak and live the best we know how here, trusting that despite our emptiness we are enough, despite our brokenness we are whole.
This is our ministry: everything we do together. Together we make this a place of caring, where fragments are reunited, wounds healed, and joys shared. We make this a place where, even in the presence of death we say yes to life. Here we celebrate the spirit, the miracle of birth, the wonders of devotion and sacrifice. Here we realize that our lives are full of riches, when we share our extreme abundance of love and care.
We are enough. We are more than enough.
May we remember that just to be is a blessing and just to live is holy.
May we remember to cherish every sunrise and every moonset.
May we remember the smiles, the laughter, the tears we share are sacred.
And may we remember the mystery hidden and found in every act of care and kindness here, in everything we do together.
Amen.
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