-- 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.
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