Signs of Life

"What most counts is not to live, but to live aright."
-- Socrates

Meditation: by Mary Oliver a poem entitled “The Summer Day” 

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.

Now 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,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Reading: by the German-born minister Albert Schweitzer from a sermon he delivered on February 16, 1919, at St. Nicolai Church in Strasbourg (Reverence for Life, p. 114) 

Explore everything around you, penetrate to the furthest limits of human knowledge, and always you will come up against something inexplicable in the end. It is called life. It is a mystery so inexplicable that the knowledge of the educated and the ignorant is purely relative when contemplating it.

…What is the difference between the scientist who observes in his microscope the most minute and unexpected signs of life; and the old farmer who by contrast can barely read or write, who stands in springtime in his garden and contemplates the buds opening on the branches of his trees? Both are confronted with the riddle of life. One may be able to describe life in greater detail, but for both it remains equally inscrutable. All knowledge is, in the final analysis, the knowledge of life. All realization is amazement at this riddle of life – a reverence for life in its infinite and yet ever-fresh manifestations. How amazing this coming into being, living, and dying! …

What is this recognition, this knowledge within the reach of the most scientific and the most childlike? It is reverence for life, reverence for the unfathomable mystery we confront in our universe, an existence different in its outward appearance and yet inwardly of the same character as our own, terribly similar, awesomely related. 

Reading: by Gregg Levoy from his new book Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (p. 2) 

This is one of the features of wonder: it’s gripping. You’re stopped in your tracks, riveted to the spot, your gaze held. Consider the lingo of the awestruck: spellbound, captivated, transfixed, rapt in wonder, entranced, arrested, stunned, mesmerized, and at the further extremes, petrified. The world swirls by you, a river around a rock. Your workaday life is forgotten – appointments, deadlines, to-do lists, a friend waiting for you in the cafeteria…

There is, of course, no universally agreed-upon checklist of awe-inspiring experiences. You either swoon at the opera or the art museum or you don’t. You either get worked up about feats of engineering and groundbreaking new theories or you don’t. Your mouth either drops open when you watch a baseball player pitch a perfect game or it doesn’t…

Obviously, wonder isn’t something that happens out there, but in here; a function of the observer, not the event. Yet the experience of wonder is universal and speaks of our hunger to be moved, to be engaged and impassioned with the world, to take pleasure in it, to be attuned to it, and be fascinated by it. To be grateful for it. 

Reading: by the Unitarian educator Sophia Fahs from Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development, published in 1952 (p. 120) 

[There is a] unity of all existence. If this interplay of forces, this inevitable giving and receiving, goes on between each individual and the totality in so commonplace an activity as breathing in and out, what shall we say of other more intangible activities through which we are continually receiving and giving away. Is there an end to this interchange?

What is an individual apart from these relationships? We give the seeds of life, and new personalities are born from them, while we experience what is called death. The new generation grows to manhood and womanhood. They surrender the seeds of their life, and still another generation is born. Thus life goes on and on. Forms change, but Life breathing through all the forms survives. Life has already risen from the dead for every one of us a million times and more!

And whose life is this? It is yours as well as mine. It is mine as well as yours.

Signs of Life

A Sermon Delivered on March 29, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

I don’t know if you caught the story in the news a few weeks back about the 22-month-old toddler, who fell into a creek near his home in small-town Pennsylvania and almost drowned. I would have missed it, if my wife, Elaine, hadn’t pointed it out to me. 

On March 11^th, Gardell Martin was playing in the back yard with two of his older brothers, when Greg, a seven-year-old, suddenly realized Gardell had disappeared. Greg ran into the house screaming that he couldn’t find Gardell. 

In a heartbeat his mother, along with two teenage daughters, did a quick search of their 5-acre property and figured that Gardell must have fallen into the creek that runs through their property, and been swept away by the fast-moving current. The icy stream was unusually high because of the melting snow. 

They called 911 and frantically searched downstream along the creek. A neighbor found Gardell almost a quarter-mile away, stuck in a tree branch, face down, with water gushing all around him, and without a pulse. 

An ambulance arrived moments later, and immediately the crew began CPR, without success. But they kept at it. They continued trying to resuscitate Gardell, in the ambulance, and in the nearby community hospital, and in the helicopter that took them to the pediatric wing of a medical center 80 miles away, where a team of 30 doctors and nurses leapt into action. All told, a series of medical professionals performed CPR for an hour and 41 minutes.

And then, as Gardell’s body slowly warmed up, after having been chilled in 34 degree water, they detected a pulse. Against all odds, his heart began to beat. And he began to breathe.

A week after his ordeal, Gardell was back home, and – according to the doctors – fully recovered. In hindsight, one doctor said, Gardell’s hypothermia probably helped. It slowed down his metabolism and gave his organs some degree of protection from cardiac arrest. The doctors called it an extraordinary survival story.

Gardell’s mother said, “It was an act of God… There is no doubt in my mind it's a miracle.”

* * *

The story provoked a wide variety of responses, in the comments posted on the ABC News website: 

“I am so glad this little boy survived and his family still has him. I know they are thrilled and happy. When people bring God into it, however, it's a slap in the face to those families whose child did not survive. They are saying God turns his/her back on those children and families. This just rubs me the wrong way for the families who lose that child forever. It was science that saved this baby.”

“In FACT, it was science and taxpayer dollars that pay for fire and rescue teams that saved this baby. If they cut those budgets, there are fewer responders, response times lengthen, lives are lost.”

“Oh for crying out loud! Can't anyone in this whole entire world simply be happy this little boy survived??? Be thankful for what you can!”

“His family is conservative Mennonite, similar in many ways to the Amish, so everything for them has to do with God. If it makes the mom happy to say that, let her. Doesn't change the fact that secular humanism is what developed scientific thinking and that is what actually saved the kid.”

“God saved this child...and he used modern technology to accomplish His Will. I am glad for the family...sad for those who have lost their children.”

* * *

Life is a mystery we struggle to make sense of. Whether we approach it from the vantage point of fact-based science, or faith-based spirituality. 

No matter how far our knowledge has advanced, we always come up against something inexplicable in the end. It’s called life. And for all the powers of creation we have come to understand, and control, and for all our wisdom, we cannot create life. The only appropriate response to the unfathomable mystery of life we find in the universe is reverence, awe, and wonder.

Life is a wonder. But the experience of wonder doesn’t happen out there, Gregg Levoy writes, but in here. Wonder, he says, 

“is both stimulus and response. It’s our response to being moved, and it’s our desire for it. [Wonder is] our desire to feel radically alive rather than bored and disinterested or so caught up in the toils and troubles of daily life that we miss out on its multitudes of marvels. It’s our desire to part the curtain and get a load of the grander scheme.”

Levoy describes one example of such an enlivening moment. He says, 

“I was sitting at my desk one recent overcast afternoon when just such a moment was spliced into my day. A pinhole opened in the cloud cover, and a bolt of sun suddenly spotlighted a patch of dark mountain on the far side of the valley. It caught my eye, and I heard myself say, “Whoa.”

The taxonomy of wonder begins here, with the mere tickle, with surprise and puzzlement as cheap thrills, and it moves through the jolt and the jar, the gape and the gawk, the boggle and the epiphany, and finally to the awe that’s four-fifths terror – watching a tornado bearing down, scuba diving while sharks circle around you, or seeing the ground rolling in waves during an earthquake, as my mother once did near Mexico City.”

Wonder, he says, “sets itself over and against the still background of daily life, the routine and orderly, the familiar and predictable – those unravelers of awe – and…  against the endless irritations of life that tend to build up our calluses and desensitize us to [life’s] marvels.”

* * *

Wonder is at the heart of spiritual experience, Sophia Fahs says. Our experience of wonder reaches back to the earliest days of human history, the most ancient roots of the religious impulse. And a sense of wonder also touches into every individual’s earliest life experiences.

It is not a coincidence that the Buddhist sage Shunryu Suzuki describes the enlightened mind as “beginner’s mind” – the ability to see the world and oneself, as if for the first time, like a child with eyes not yet clouded by expectations and preconceptions; to be completely open to the immediacy of experience, without the distractions of hope and fear. 

This is where religious instruction for our children should ideally begin, Sophia Fahs says. Religious instruction should begin with children’s “own experiences of wonder in the presence of the mystery of birth, their fears of the dark and of dreams, their awe in the face of sickness and death, their inner conflicts between right and wrong, and their feelings of littleness and helplessness before the world’s great immensities.”

In this way, children would come to understand the long history of our human religious strivings, not in terms of creeds to be committed to memory or conventions to be copied, but as expression of a universal human experience found in every faith tradition, and with which they can sympathize because of their own experiences of wonder, curiosity, and awe.

* * *

When I was a child, I learned about Albert Schweitzer from my grandfather, who had also been a minister in Germany, and was just sixteen years younger than Schweitzer. Like Schweitzer, my grandfather was also a religious liberal who struggled to make sense of the senselessness of two World Wars. Schweitzer, of course, was much more than simply a minister. Schweitzer was a widely respected musician, historian, theologian, humanitarian and medical doctor who built a hospital in what today is Gabon, two-hundred miles from the west coast of Africa, 14 days by raft up the Ogooué river, at Lambarene. This was his hands-on effort to right some of the wrongs of colonialism. And Schweitzer was recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

My grandfather was deeply influenced by Schweitzer’s notion of  “reverence for life,” the foundation of an ethical philosophy which Schweitzer considered his greatest accomplishment.

For Schweitzer himself, the sense of wonder and reverence began early in life. Like many young children, he had a natural fascination and sympathy for animals. As a boy, when he went fishing with friends, he couldn’t help noticing how cruel it was to pierce a worm’s body when putting it on a hook, and how brutal it was to wrench the mouth of any fish they caught. So he gave up fishing, and slowly developed an unshakable conviction that it was wrong to inflict suffering on any living creature. 

Schweitzer later describes the roots of his pacifist conviction like this: 

“Life is feeling, experience, suffering. If you study life deeply, looking with perceptive eyes into the vast animated chaos of this creation, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness. In everything you recognize yourself. The tiny beetle that lies dead in your path – it was a living creature, struggling for existence like yourself, rejoicing in the sun like you, knowing fear and pain like you.

…. I cannot but have reverence for all that is called life. I cannot avoid compassion for everything that is called life. That is the beginning and foundation of morality. Once [we have] experienced and [continue] to do so – and [anyone] who has once experienced it will continue to do so – [we are] ethical. [We carry our] morality within and can never lose it, for it comes to develop with [us]. [Those] who have never experienced this [have] only a set of superficial principles.”

* * *

Life is a mystery and a wonder. It moves within us and around us, like the air we breathe. And like the air we breathe, it is so commonplace, it becomes invisible and too easily taken for granted. We become bored and disinterested, and caught up with the toils and troubles of our days, and we miss out on life’s marvels. Sometimes we may even try to escape life’s immediacy and the intensity, because it simply feels like too much. We give up the possibility of pleasure, because we are afraid of pain. We give up the exhilaration of true love, because we are afraid of disappointment and loss. Sometimes the wonder of life is four-fifth’s terror, feels like an earthquake, like a tornado, or like sharks circling around – and we don’t think we can handle it. 

And yet, deep down, we long to be radically alive. We have a hunger to be moved, to be engaged, to be impassioned. 

Experiencing the wonder of life doesn’t have to be an earth-shaking event. Often it is just the opposite. For Mary Oliver, it is revealed in something as simple as a grasshopper who flung herself out of the grass, and landed on her hand. Who gazes around with enormous and complicated eyes, and then snaps her wings open and floats away.

Life is a miracle. The simple act of breathing, the simple act of a heart beating, is a miracle. 

I don’t know whether the fact that a child’s heart began beating again after 101 minutes at rest was an act of God or an act of skilled doctors, or maybe both. Rather than getting involved in that argument, I would rather think of Gardell’s recovery as an act of Life. 

I would rather remember the words of Kahlil Gibran, who wrote: Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.  

Life goes on and on. Forms change, but Life breathing through all the forms survives. It is a miracle.

May we remain forever mindful of the mystery and wonder of life.

May we be attuned to its vital signs -

the subtle signs of life all around us and deep within our hearts.

And may we respond with renewed reverence and gratitude and joy.

Amen.

What Will You Give Up?

"Fasting is an amazing thing. It gives people heart and soul."
-- Rumi

Opening Words: 

Let us gather for worship this morning, mindful of the words of our Unitarian forebear, Henry David Thoreau, who asks:

“Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?

We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

Instead, may we learn to live deliberately,

To front only the essential facts of life. 

May we learn what life has to teach, 

And not, when we come to die, 

Discover that we have not lived.

And as Thoreau implores,

May we live deeply, mindful that living is so dear.

In this spirit let us worship.

Meditation: by Sheri Hostetler a poem entitled “Instructions”

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.

Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,

passers-by, your cat.

Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.

Make it simple; make it clean.

No carry-on luggage allowed.

Examine all you have

with a loving and critical eye, then

throw away some more.

Repeat. Repeat.

Keep this and only this:

   what your heart beats loudly for

   what feels heavy and full in your gut.

There will only be one or two

things you will keep,

and they will fit lightly

in your pocket.

Reading: by the Catholic priest Thomas Ryan from The Sacred Art of Fasting (p. xi)

The person who fasts stands in a noble tradition. In the religious experience of humankind, fasting has always been a prelude and means of deeper spiritual life. … Fasting is a choice to abstain from food at certain times in order to put our attention on something more important to us than ourselves and our sensory appetites.

Our unlimited freedoms and resources have not brought us unlimited fulfillment. The time has come for the consumer society to generate its antithesis: the person who stands against the conditioned reflex, who is free not to consume, who chooses to fast because of the self-transcending meaning and values perceived. 

Reading: by Cherie Lashway a poem entitled “Lenten Dissent”

There once was a logger, named Paddy O'Connell,

Who at lunch during Lent, found himself at McDonalds,

And had just settled down to his Big Mac and fries,

When along came his priest, much to both their surprise.

The priest said to Paddy, "Just what are you eating?

In this season of Lent, I sure hope you're not cheating."

Paddy said to the Father, "I'll tell you no lies.

I'm enjoying a Big Mac, along with some fries."

The priest said to Paddy, "I see no repentance.

Because of this sin, you will have to do penance.

"By Friday or sooner, I say that you should,

For our fireplace, deliver a cord of chopped wood."

Now our timberman, Paddy, an overworked man,

Did think to himself, "I don't think that I can."

But early on Friday, our priest, he heard shoveling,

And looked out the window at Paddy not groveling.

And saw with confusion, dismay and disgust,

That the wood bin was now almost filled with saw dust.

He called down below, barely hiding his ire:

"Hey Paddy, your penance was wood for the fire!"

To which Paddy said, rising up from his work,

While wiping his brow and concealing a smirk:

"I've brought you a cord, like you said that I should,

But if burger be meat, well then sawdust be wood!"

Reading: by the pastor and professor of preaching Kay Northcutt from a piece entitled “A holy, mundane essence” (Christian Century, 3/21/2012)

Living with a chronic illness is much like Henry David Thoreau's experiment on Walden Pond: life is pared down to essentials. The difference is that Thoreau chose the constitutive limits of Walden Pond as part of an experiment in "living essentially," while my confinement is unbidden.

The spiritual practice of Lent is nothing less than an invitation to live essentially, whether one is healthy or chronically ill. Lent, with its introspection and sparseness, aims at stripping life down to its holy, mundane essence so that bits of heaven on earth might be discovered: without and within. For those whose physical limitations constrict them to the footpath of home, Lent's discipline is a familiar one.

The freedom to choose --so central to Thoreau's experiment--is typically among the first liberties eliminated by chronic disease. My limitations began with difficulty swallowing and escalated into the slurring of words, fatigued neck flexors and breathlessness. My vocation as a… professor relied upon the strength to speak, but by noon each day I felt as if my muscles had been peeled from my bones: the effort to speak a word or to smile at a student felt Herculean. Little by little, the grid upon which I lived shrank to that of a postage stamp.

That was over two years ago, approximately the length of Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Unlike Thoreau, I cannot walk away from this way of life. My spiritual practice of living essentially will be that of a lifetime. Lent has come to stay, and living essentially has become my liturgy of hours….

Yet Thoreau's delight in the freedom of his experiment resonates fully with me. The greatest surprise of my enclosure has been the freedom within a constricted life. I am the author. It is mine to write. My task is as simple and complicated as merely choosing what has come to me unbidden and unchosen. My new vocation is that of loving extravagantly the shreds of life that are wondrously left to me.

Surely that is Lent's gift year after year when the imposition of ashes re-inscribes upon our souls the tender and hard work of fiercely loving what is essential.

What Will You Give Up?

A Sermon Delivered on March 22, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

This week Elaine, my wife, is driving to Washington, D.C. to see her mother. Two weeks ago her mother spent a few days in the hospital after a health scare. Feeling dizzy and weak, she had taken a fall. Luckily no bones were broken. She is back home now, trying to return to her familiar routines, now with the help of an aid who spends a few hours at her apartment every day. Elaine hopes to lend a hand and see what kind of support we can offer in the weeks and months ahead.

Her mother’s health has become a more serious concern, since she was diagnosed with a condition called myasthenia gravis two years ago. Myasthenia gravis, I learned, is a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease. It interferes with the process by which nerve impulses are transmitted to muscles. It produces antibodies that block neurotransmitters and receptors. This means our nerves can’t communicate with the muscles we are trying to move.

Since the last time we visited her in Washington, over Thanksgiving last year, Elaine’s mother and her husband have decided to sell their car, and give up driving. It was not an easy decision to make.

Many of us may have family members at this stage of life – or we ourselves may have faced similar situations – when, for the sake of safety or for the sake of our health – we have little choice but to give things up.

Giving up things we value isn’t easy. Giving up aspects of the life we cherish, giving up our freedoms, giving up our prized possessions, giving up our favorite foods because that’s what the doctor ordered, isn’t easy.

And yet, learning to give things up - whether by choice or by necessity – learning to give things up is an inescapable aspect of our lives.

* * *

We are now in the midst of Lent, the 40-day period in the Christian liturgical calendar, that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Easter Sunday, during which the faithful are encouraged to fast. (That’s forty days of fasting, not counting the six Sundays during Lent.) 

For the past 32 days countless Christians have been turning their thoughts to prayer, penance and repentance, to almsgiving and atonement. The forty days of Lent are reminiscent of the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, fasting and coming to terms with devilish temptations. 

In the Christian tradition, fasting during Lent can mean different things. For some it means eating only one meal a day. For others it means abstaining from sweets or alcohol. And for others still, it means eating no meat. 

* * *

Fasting is not unique to Christianity and the story of Jesus. The Bible says that Moses, Daniel, Elijah, and King David fasted. Moses fasted for forty days before he was handed God’s Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb. King David fasted every other day. A series of biblical saints including Ahab, Anna, Esther, Ezra, Hannah, John the Baptist, and the twelve disciples all fasted. 

As Thomas Ryan points out, 

“Fasting… has been practiced for centuries in connection with religious observance. The religions that practice fasting encompass the vast majority of people on the planet: Baha’is, Buddhists, Christians, Confucianists, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Native North Americans, and Taoists. You might justifiably conclude that any spiritual practice embraced so universally has to have something going for it.” (p. ix)

And in this day and age, even many non-religious people have discovered that fasting is a good habit to cultivate, simply for the sake of the health benefits involved. Taking a day every once in a while to refrain from eating is a fine way to purify the body. Plenty of medical professional consider an occasional day of fasting an important part of our overall body-ecology. It’s right up there with daily exercise and a good night’s sleep.

From a purely secular perspective fasting is worthwhile. Think about it: normally our bodies are constantly working to digest the food we eat, to eliminate waste, fight diseases, replenish cells, and nourish the blood. Of all these biological processes digesting food is the most demanding, requiring the greatest amount of energy. When our bodies aren’t busy digesting food, we can direct more of our energies to other endeavors. A lot of people fast regularly, because doing so sharpens their senses, creates a sense of calm, helps them think more clearly and sleep more deeply.

* * *

From a purely practical, pragmatic perspective fasting makes sense. But from a religious perspective it makes even more sense. It is in opportunity to turn our attention to something larger and more important that ourselves, our own self-interests, our appetites, our own desires.

The scholar Aliza Bulow describes this from a Jewish perspective. Judaism, she says, has always sought to integrate the spiritual and the physical. They are intertwined. “We use the physical as a doorway through which we access the spiritual,” she says. 

“This is one of the reasons that we clean the house, prepare delicious foods, and wear beautiful clothes for the Shabbat.  … [These acts] all help create a sense of separation from the routine of the mundane and heighten our ability to connect to God. We manipulate the physical to gain access to the spiritual.” 

“Hunger is a feeling of emptiness, of desire for sustenance. … Feeling hunger on a physical level helps us access the concept of desire and need on a spiritual level. …[It] helps us activate the longing we have to walk on a path that leads to a rectified world.” (Ryan, p. 26-27)

In Jewish thought, fasting has long been considered a path that brings believers closer to God by deepening their commitment to justice and mercy. Fasting is about much more than observing the letter of the law when it comes to dietary restrictions.

This point is made most memorably in the book of Isaiah, when the people of Israel complain to God, because their diligent fasting isn’t being rewarded. They ask God, “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

And so God explains: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”

“Is not this the fast I choose: To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” The kind of fast God has in mind involves not merely refraining to eat, but sharing their bread with the hungry.

When we fast, our hunger should deepen our concern for the oppressed and the poor, who  perpetually hunger. Our fast should deepen our sense of solidarity, and our commitment to serve others.

* * *

The religious practice of fasting doesn’t necessarily involve food. It is about resisting unchecked impulses, thoughtless consumption, and knee-jerk indulgences. 

Thomas Ryan suggests a number of different ways we can fast that have little to do with how we fill our stomach. 

We can fast with our eyes, when we choose to watch less TV, and instead reflect on our lives by keeping a journal, or perhaps educate ourselves about the causes of hunger in the world. We can fast with our ears, by listening to the radio and music less, and instead listen more to our inner heart and spirit, and listen more closely to the people around us. We can fast with our hands, by taking a break from our endless busyness, and take time to simply sit, rest and reflect. And then use our hands to share our goods with those who have less. 

We can fast from anger, resentment, and bitterness, by getting to the bottom of these feelings. What is hidden underneath them? We can instead do the hard work of talking it through with the other, expressing ourselves clearly and respectfully, and working toward healing and forgiveness. We can fast from complaining. And instead, whenever we feel the urge to complain arise within us, choose to stop and look at the many ways we are blessed, and give thanks instead. We can fast from glossing over our losses too quickly. We can instead allow ourselves to feel the emptiness, the ache, the sadness. We can take the time to do the inner work of grieving. 

* * *

Kay Northcutt, whose reflections on Lent are linked to her experience of chronic illness, was a presenter at a minister’s meeting I attended a few years back. When she isn’t leading preaching seminars for UU minsters, she serves a small congregation near Tulsa, Oklahoma, outside the bounds of mainstream society there. Her congregation is made up of recovering drug addicts, gay and lesbian folk, and homeless families. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but have since learned that the condition with which Kay Northcutt is coping was diagnosed as myasthenia gravis. Rather than allowing her illness to incapacitate her, she approached it as an opportunity for deeper learning about life. As she explained in a brief bio, she has found that sickness can be “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.”

Despite the levity of her remark, her illness is certainly a serious challenge. It severely limits the amount of muscle strength she can muster on any given day. Now that the disease has been diagnosed, and is being properly treated, she is learning to cope. And she is striking up friendships with others who are afflicted with the same illness, many of whom have been coping with it for decades. 

Kay Northcutt now spends a lot more of her time resting and in bed. But her appreciation for life has not diminished. Just the opposite. As she put it concisely, with a wide grin across her face: “I’m just so relieved to be alive.” 

* * *

Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Northcutt is learning the art of “living essentially.” Living with chronic illness in not something she chose. What she did choose was to see her fate as an invitation to focus more fully on the essentials of life – to strip life down to its holy, mundane essence so that bits of heaven might be discovered. 

Unlike Thoreau, whose practice of fasting lasted just two years, Northcutt’s spiritual practice of paring down to the essentials will last a lifetime. 

Like Thoreau - to her own surprise - she has found an exhilarating sense of freedom within a constricted life. She has chosen to take on a new calling: to love extravagantly the shreds of life that are wondrously left. She has chosen to take on the tender and hard work of fiercely loving what is essential.

* * *

If you were to give up something for Lent, what would it be? If you were to give up a habit, a pleasure, or a pre-occupation in order to turn your focus more fully on the essentials of your life – what would you give up?

This is not a question just for Lent. This is a question for life.

When we learn to freely give up the world, give up self, and finally give up God, we will find God everywhere – in rhododendrons and rocks and passers-by.

Our instructions are this: Examine all you have with a loving and critical eye, then throw away some more. Repeat. Repeat. Keep this and only this: what your heart beats loudly for, what feels heavy and full in your gut…

May we dare to give up all the ways we waste life

And instead learn to live deliberately.

May we be mindful of the essentials – deep love, real justice –

And with these one or two things, build a better world.  

Amen.

Seasons of Growth

"The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
-- Bertrand Russell

Reading: by Marya Hornbacher, who has written on addiction and 12 Step Programs, from Waiting: A Nonbeliever’s Higher Power (p. 17) 

I am standing knee-deep in the snow, staring down at my garden, or the snow-buried place where my garden should be. May be. Really, if all things go according to natural law, the place where my garden will be, come spring. There are bulbs tucked into the frozen ground, doing whatever it is that bulbs do in their preparations for growth. There are plants that bloom year after year, their cut-back black and wheat-colored stalks just barely visible above the snow. And I know, technically, that they should bloom. 

But this year I have my doubts.

It’s very weird. My friends with gardens laugh at me, but I persist in my anxiety, certain that my garden won’t come up. I’m convinced that this year, when the snow melts, it will leave mud and then soft dirt and then… nothing. No green shoots, no bulbs bursting and sending up their many-colored blooms. My friends tell me this is the order of things: things sleep all winter, then bloom. It happens every year. But my hydrangeas, I’m pretty sure, are good and dead, killed off by an early frost last fall. And I know almost for a fact that all my perennials will fail. So here I stand, knee-deep in snow, staring at the place where my garden should be, and I am full of doubt.

The year [my friend] Brian died, I was quite sure spring would not come, at least for me, because I could not conceive of a way to survive without him in the world. I was half-crazed with grief; I truly believed I would die of the pain. I couldn’t see how any other outcome was possible. And so I spent February staring out the window, drinking, waiting for the pain to finally break me in half. 

It didn’t. Obviously. Obviously, I survived. Obviously spring came, and when it did, I was genuinely shocked. How could it be spring if Brian was dead? What sort of unlikely notion had the universe taken to go and make it spring?

But spring came again the following year, and again, and again, and the universe kept operating in the way it does, bringing winter, bringing spring.

Reading: a poem by the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye 

Yes, it hurts when buds burst.

Why otherwise would spring hesitate?

Why otherwise was all warmth and longing 

locked under pale and bitter ice?

The blind bud covered and numb all winter 

what fever for the new compels it to burst?

Yes, it hurts when buds burst,

There is pain when something grows and when something must close.

Yes, it hurts when the ice drop melts.

Shivering anxious, swollen it hangs,

gripping the twig but beginning to slip -

its weight tugs it downward, though it resists.

It hurts to be uncertain, cowardly, dissolving,

to feel the pull and call of the depth,

yet to hang and only shiver -

to want to remain, keep firm - yet want to fall.

Then, when it is worst and nothing helps,

they burst, as if in ecstasy, the first buds of the tree,

when fear itself is compelled to let go,

they fall in a glistening veil, all the drops from the twigs,

blinking away their fears of the new,

shutting out their doubts about the journey, 

feeling for an instant how this is their greatest safety,

to trust that daring that shapes the world.

Reading: by the British-born American poet Denise Levertov, a poem entitled “The Thread”

Something is very gently,

invisibly, silently,

pulling at me - a thread

or net of threads

finer than cobweb and as

elastic.  I haven’t tried

the strength of it.  No barbed hook

pierced and tore me. Was it

not long ago this thread 

began to draw me? Or

way back? Was I 

born with its knot about my 

neck, a bridle? Not fear

but a stirring 

of wonder makes me

catch my breath when I feel

the tug of it when I thought

it had loosened itself and gone.

Seasons of Growth

A Sermon Delivered on March 1, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann 

Elaine and I were driving west on Route 101, a few miles south of San Francisco, when I felt a distinct “thump” from somewhere deep within the engine of the car. The car – a bright yellow VW Rabbit – lost power, fire and smoke billowed up from under the hood. I quickly pulled over, and jumped out of the car. So did Elaine. Luckily the flames went out without the help of a fire extinguisher. Elaine and I stood there, scratching our heads looking at the immobilized, smoking vehicle wondering what had happened, and what we were going to do next. 

This all happened in early 1988, when Elaine and I were going to school in Berkeley, California, and I was serving as an intern minister in Hayward, a few miles south. Just a few weeks ago we had lunch with Rev. Mark Belletini, who was my internship supervisor. We were reminiscing about the “good old days,” and Mark mentioned my automotive trials as one the most memorable aspects of my internship. 

A generous member had donated the old used Rabbit to the church for my use. I had never had a car before. I didn’t know anything about cars. And, frankly, I wasn’t interested in cars. But at that stage of my life, I needed one to get around. 

Having the engine explode that afternoon on Route 101 was an eye-opening experience. “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” Socrates said. If he’s right, I don't think I have ever again felt quite as wise as that day at the side of the road, completely clueless. 

What I learned later is that the engine had “thrown a rod.” A piston had gotten jammed up in its cylinder, and then shot through the top of the engine block. How could this happen? Well, I learned that part of the reason car owners periodically check their oil level, pulling out a dipstick and examining it closely, is that if you don’t have enough oil in the engine, the pistons won’t have the lubrication they need to operate, and may jam up. Prior to my experience on Route 101, I didn’t even know what the Rabbit’s dipstick looked like.

But I needed a car. So in the weeks that followed, with help of many friends, and a dog-eared copy of an auto repair manual called something like “The Idiot’s Guide to the VW Rabbit,” and especially the help of a mechanically skilled housemate, I found another engine in a junkyard, hauled it home and amazingly, after a lot of trial and error, got it installed and working. It was quite ordeal. Dealing with that Rabbit, learning about oil and engines, was a real growth experience.

* * *

Ah yes, a growth experience. That’s what we like to call those painful mistakes and mishaps that are an unavoidable part of every life. Errors and accidents happen. They are no fun. We would avoid all unpleasant life experiences if we could. But we can’t. And so the least we try to do is learn from them. Our trials and tribulations aren’t punishments, and our mistakes don’t mean we are failures. Instead we consider ourselves fortunate to be granted growth experiences.

* * *

I remember when I was a child, I would sometimes wake up at night with a strange aching pain in my legs. Puzzled and afraid, I would crawl to my mother in tears complaining. She would try to comfort me, and explained that these were simply growing pains. Hearing this explanation, I was less worried about my aching legs. And because I did want to grow to be just as tall as the older kids at school, thinking about it as growing pains, made the hurtful experience more bearable.

Doctors say that so-called “growing pains” are common in young children: an aching or throbbing feeling in the legs, the front of the thighs, the calves or behind the knees. But although they are called growing pains, doctors say, there is actually no evidence that physical growth hurts. They think the pain at night is probably simply a consequence of having been too active all day, doing the things children like to do: running, climbing and jumping around.

Modern medicine says that growth is not necessarily painful. And not all pain necessarily leads to growth.

* * *

Dragan Bogunovic is a doctor who was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1930, and then emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1960s. He wrote a book called Heavenly Wisdom about some of the insights he gained throughout decades working as a family physician in Wisconsin. “I worked hard, and my life was so good in my new welcoming country,” he writes. “However, happiness never lasts forever. When I lost my son Boris in a car accident, my life completely changed from one of happiness to one of greatest possible sorrow.”

He got the idea for his book after he retired, and was a doctor to only one remaining patient: his beloved wife, who now suffered from dementia. He now found time to meditate deeply on the lives of the many good people he had known, and the meaning of his own life - all the sorrows and joys he had known, and his deepening faith that life – despite its moments of pain – is nevertheless good.

He writes: 

“Growing is painful. That is why we have the term growing pains. It is not the physical pain that hurts; it is more the mental pain in which we face daily difficulties while moving through the unknown world. As we move forward, we grow, and at the same time we hurt…We move through what is for us a new world. We grow, and with that growth we experience more responsibilities and, with more responsibilities, more pain. (Heavenly Wisdom: Talent, Imagination, Creativity and Wisdom, p. 375)

Dr. Bogunovic finds comfort and spiritual sustenance in his reading of the Christian scriptures. But he is also inspired by words from a multitude of non-Christian and non-religious prophets. There he finds a secular religion which, as he says, “combines all colors, all languages, and all ethnicities with many different religious practices to form one solid, united earthly paradise according to heavenly wisdom.” (p. xiii)

* * *

Growth is a strange and mysterious thing. Growth is surprising, it is painful, and – more often than not - it is invisible. But nevertheless growth happens. Growth is at the heart of all things living. It is the driving force of life. 

From the day we are born, we grow. We grow in weight and size. We grow tall and strong, in body and mind. And when we are physically at our peek, we continue to grow intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. We grow in knowledge, in experience and in wisdom. We grow, and grow and grow, even as our bodies become worn out, and our vision grows dim, and our hearing is diminished, still we grow until the day we die. And after that when our bodies return to the earth, and our actions exist only in the lives of those we have touched, we continue to grow in others, giving sustenance to other lives. 

Despite all advances of science and technology, we have still not unlocked the mystery of life. Though we are able to observe its innumerable manifestations. We can’t create it. And we can’t control it.

Growth is the animating force in all things living. It is like a spirit of life, that stirs in our hearts, that rises in the sea, and moves in the hand. Some call this spirit holy, imagine it divine, or call it God. 

Marya Hornbacher isn’t one of them. She is a nonbeliever. She doesn’t believe in God or a Higher Power. But she does believe in spirit. The word spirit comes from the Greek, and means breath. Similarly she imagines spirit is “that which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out.”

She says, 

“When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection, human life. This is the force that feels and thinks and gives us consciousness at all… It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.

So when I speak of spirit, I’m speaking of something that frustratingly defies articulation… I’m speaking of something that is urgently important in ourselves, the very thing that has sent us searching, the thing that feels the longing, the thing that come knocking on the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in. 

When we… to let it in… we begin to walk a spiritual path. …There are many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around.

And those are the places where we wait. We’re not waiting for the voice of God, or for the lightening-bolt spiritual experience. We’re not waiting to be saved or carried. We’re waiting for our own inner voice – for lack of a better word, I’m going to keep calling it spirit – to tell us where to go next.” (p. xiv)

Waiting isn’t easy. Standing in her snow-covered garden in February she doubts whether spring will ever come. Sometimes it is hard to believe that there is a spirit at work in the world. And yet, as she see’s it, this spirit of doubt is the first stage in any process of spiritual growth. Without doubt, we would never ask the tough questions about life and death and the nature of existence: “Why are we here? How did we get here?.... What is our purpose, what are our ends? These are spiritual questions,” she says, “asked by spiritual people, and they lead to spiritual growth.”

* * *

Like buds at the brink of bursting, like drops of ice slowly melting and still holding on to the tips of twigs, and like spring itself, we hesitate. We cling to the past, to familiar things that feel safe. Growth is mysterious, beyond our understanding, beyond our control. And moving into the unknown is scary. 

Henry James put it well. He wrote: “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

And yet growth happens. The spirit moves, whether we are ready or not. Growth experiences present themselves. 

We can’t make growth happen. But we can help it along. We can’t create spirit, but we can pay attention to it. We can honor it. We can welcome it. We can guide it. Or we can be guided by it.

There is a spirit of growth in all things living. It moves in mysterious ways. We don’t always see it. We don’t always feel it. But it is always there, very gently, invisibly, silently pulling at us, like a thread – a thread finer than any spider could spin. It’s the same thread that every year gently pulls green shoots out of the earth. That gently pulls buds out of branches, and gently pulls open the petals of blossoms, and flowers of all shapes and sizes.  

When we pay attention to the magical beauty unfolding all around us, a stirring of wonder will make us catch our breath, that is: catch the spirit - the spirit of life, the spirit of growth.

May we have the courage to face our fears,

And despite the uncertainty of doubt 

And despite the possibility of pain, 

May we follow the spirit that would lead us to life more abundant.

May we have the wisdom to see that our greatest safety 

is to trust that daring spirit that shapes the world.

Amen.