A Curious Faith

"Never lose a holy curiosity."
-- Albert Einstein

Reading: by Tamin Ansary from an essay entitled “A Secular Mystic” (Faith: essays from believers, agnostics, and atheists edited by Victoria Zackhaim)

When I was a kid growing up in Afghanistan as part of a family whose status in society derived largely from its religious credentials, God was a word I heard routinely. People didn’t say, “Tomorrow, I’ll do such and such.” They said, “If God wills it, I’ll do such and such.” But no one ever specified who or what they meant by God. In devoutly Muslim Afghanistan, it was deemed unnecessary.

One day, however, when I was about five, I was playing with our neighbor’s son, Suleiman, and he warned me not to do some naughty thing because God would grab me by the forelock, pull me up through the sky, and punish me. Evidently, the sky was a solid blue screen behind which God was always sitting, always watching, rather like those postal inspectors who watch mail sorters through one-way glass to make sure they’re not opening people’s letters.

I looked up and thought, Okay, maybe the blue-screen idea is plausible, but this other concept? Some powerful being sitting up there watching us? A being with arms that could reach, fingers that could grab, and a fanny that could sit? That, I had trouble buying.

I asked my American-born mother if it were true, and she gave me a circuitous answer about different people believing different things, and what I got from her hedging was no, it wasn’t true. Suleiman’s “God” was a myth. Only later did I have the vocabulary to understand that my mother was an atheist….

…After soliciting my mother’s view about this matter, I consulted my father, and he just smiled. A Muslim, he said, could not think of God as having arms or fingers, or grabbing a forelock, or sitting in some spot; these ideas were heretical. He told me about an ancestor of ours, Sheikh Sa’duddin, a Sufi mystic… “The Sheikh saw God everywhere,” my father expounded. “He believed everything is God.”

“Everything?” I gulped.

“Everything. He saw God in the trees, the clouds, the dirt – everywhere he looked, he said, ‘This is God.’”

Reading: by my colleague Bruce Marshall from a book entitled A Holy Curiosity: Stories of a Liberal Religious Faith (p. ix) 

I once was at the podiatrist’s having my feet examined. While the doctor checked one foot and then the other, he told me about his life. As a boy, this man had trouble with his feet and suffered much pain. That ordeal piqued his interest in podiatry and led him to devote his life to curing feet.

In that encounter I may have happened upon a truth of the human condition, for my troubles have also led to my profession. With me the issue has not been feet. Rather, I am pursued by a set of questions. Who am I? What do I trust? In what do I find meaning? How do I understand death? Who or what is God? What brings me hope? From my struggles with these questions of human existence has come my calling: the Unitarian Universalist ministry.

This experience shatters an assumption I used to make of how people choose their life’s work. I had thought that people make a career of what they do best. Those good at tinkering become mechanics. The best students become teachers. The people with the most perfect feet become podiatrists. Those with answers to life’s questions enter the clergy.

But I had trouble answering life’s questions, and I still do. 

Reading: by Christina Baldwin from Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest (p. 36)  

A List of Free Questions, from the Ridiculous to the Sublime:

What’s for dinner?

Who am I?

What am I supposed to do with my life…?

Who am I supposed to be doing it with?

Will I have fun?

What is the nature of spiritual fun?

Will I recognize it when it happens?

Is there a God out there, or is He/She/It all in here?

Is He/She/It laughing at all the silly questions I ask?

Are these silly questions?

Is there life on other planets?

Do they care about life on this one?

Do I care about life on this one?

What would I be willing to give up to save the world?

What are life’s real essentials for me?

A Curious Faith

A Sermon Delivered on May 17, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

As some of you know, but I am sure many do not, we had a congregational consultant named Mark Ewert visit us a few weeks back. We paid good money to fly him in from Washington, D.C. He spent the weekend here, meeting with a bunch of our volunteers and leaders, observing how we do church, what we do well and what we could do better. 

He had a lot to say about things we do well. He remarked on our beautiful building, our sound governance, our solid finances, our strong lay leadership, our support and care for one another, and our fine religious education program. He said this is a “strong, vibrant, and spirit filled congregation.”

He mentioned two things we could do better. We would benefit from a clearer and more compelling vision for our future - how we, as a congregation, want to make a difference in the world, he said. And we could be better at making this place truly intergenerational. We are passionate about providing a religious home for all ages, and we work hard at it. Nevertheless, Mark had the impression that on most Sundays our church is divided into two separate groups: adult activities upstairs, kids classes downstairs.

Our Teacher Recognition this morning was a wonderful reminder of the good things that happen downstairs on Sunday mornings. Ideally, not only the teachers, but all of us would spend time downstairs with our younger religious seekers.

Teaching is a great way to get to know our kids. Contrary to the notion of religious instruction as a one-way process of conveying a body of religious information from a teacher to a student, our idea of religious education is a two-way street, a back-and-forth, in which both young and old pose questions and offer answers, and engage in a process of joint religious exploration. 

This is how we have approached religious instruction for a long time now. I still like the way the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing put it two hundred ago, when he said: 

“The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs… In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish spiritual life.”

The great thing about religious instruction, when done right, is that it awakens the soul of both student and teacher, both young and old. 

* * *

Children are uniquely qualified to serve as fellow travelers on our religious journeys, because they are curious and ask good questions. 

Tamin Ansary was just five years old when he first questioned the religious assumptions that everyone around him seemed to take for granted. Everyone spoke of God, as if God’s existence and God’s nature were an indisputable fact. As simple and straightforward as the sight of the sun.

But it was by questioning the concept of a God as someone sitting behind the blue screen of the sky, ready at any moment to reach down and pull us up, that Tamin was introduced to the more subtle teachings of Sufi mystics, and encouraged to imagine a different kind of God – a God who is everywhere and everything. 

What is God? That is one of the Big Questions with which religion grapples. It’s closely connected to other big questions, for instance: What is the meaning of life and death? What is our place in the cosmos? What is good and evil? And how should we live?

When I was a child, my minister, who was also my teacher, boiled the big religious questions down to just three: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

* * *

Religious questions have long fascinated Bruce Marshall. He was drawn to the ministry hoping to find answers. But over time he realized the questions will always remain with him. He writes: 

“I listen to people speak of God and the attributes they give to this Being, and I wonder if there is a God I can experience. I think about death and how it changes everything, and I wonder how I should live, knowing that I will die. I meet difficult times in my days and in those of people close to me – times of struggle and suffering – and I look for that which may sustain us. Where do we find courage to face life’s terrors, and seek its possibilities?

These concerns keep at me. I may not have final answers, but I do have considerable experience dealing with the questions.”

* * *

It was Albert Einstein who said, 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when [one] contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Einstein’s insight may be well-accepted in the realm of science, but his celebration of curiosity and questioning is not accepted as whole-heartedly in other fields – especially religion.

In a book published just last year entitled Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, the British author Ian Leslie reminds us that 

“our oldest stories about curiosity are warnings: Adam and Eve and the apple of knowledge, Icarus and the sun, Pandora’s box. Early Christian theologians railed against curiosity: Saint Augustine claimed that “God fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” Even humanist philosopher Erasmus suggested that curiosity was greed by a different name. For most of Western history, it has been regarded as at best a distraction, at worst a poison, corrosive to the soul and to society.

There’s a reason for this. Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask… In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point, as everyone from Galileo to Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs could have attested.” (p. xiv)

Curiosity is an innate human trait. It is a restlessness of mind and heart that drives us to explore the world around us, and engage with the people meet, eager to understand their thoughts and feelings. Curiosity takes us outside ourselves, and reminds us how we are part of a much grander scheme, concerned and connected with everything.

But even though we are endowed with a natural curiosity, it is easy to lose sight of its significance. It is easy to forget that in order to thrive curiosity needs to be consciously cultivated.

As Ian Leslie writes: 

“Curiosity is vulnerable to benign neglect. As we grow older, we tend to become less active explorers of our mental environment, relying on what we’ve learned so far to see us through the rest of the journey. We can also become too preoccupied with the daily skirmishes of existence to take the time to pursue our interests. If you allow yourself to become incurious, your life will be drained of color, interest, and pleasure. You will be less likely to achieve your potential at work or in your creative life. While barely noticing it, you’ll become a little duller, a little dimmer. You may not think it could happen to you, but it can. It can happen to any of us. (p. xix)

* * *

People often assume that religion is in the business of providing final answers to the biggest questions of our lives. But I think this is a big misunderstanding of the religious enterprise. Like Bruce Marshall, I was drawn to Unitarian Universalism, because our faith celebrates not religious certainty, but a holy curiosity. Our clergy are not experts at providing definitive answers, but are rather experienced guides and fellow travelers, who help us grapple with the questions that consume us. They help us consider possible answers, and then support us as we move beyond those answers, and come up even better questions, designed to lead us toward to deeper truths. 

Good questions mean a lot to us. This is why many UUs are fond of the words of the German author Rainer Maria Rilke, who in a letter to a young poet wrote: 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The American author Ingrid Bengis makes a similar point. She writes: 

“The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon you consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you “come to terms with” only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.”

* * *

In our liberal faith, we are committed to a never-ending search for truth and meaning. This search will go on and on. No matter how many amazing truths we discover along the way, our questioning continues, because we know there is more yet to be known, more yet to be understood. 

Christina Baldwin shares this view. She writes, “In… the spiritual quest, it is the questions that count. Our quests are defined by the questions we raise and write about, whatever is most compelling to us at any given moment.” (p. 33)

Questioning is not always easy. Yielding to our own curiosity means acknowledging that we don’t know. It means giving up the familiar, it means letting go of old certainties, in order to move toward something new, mysterious, and as yet unknown. It’s scary. We don’t know where our questions will take us. And yet our questions urge us on. Whether we like it or not, sometimes life itself seems to be posing us questions. And if living life to the fullest is our aim, we have little choice but to grapple with them.

For instance, Christina Baldwin writes, 

“When my friend Lynne was dying of cancer at forty-three, her suffering and death raised many questions, in her mind and in the minds of her family and friends who cared for her. These questions were different for each of us, but the process of questioning and coming to acceptance was a holy thread that bound us all together. We each went through a level of personal transformation – Lynne too, in the resolution of her quest, which she reached before dying. Our questioning gave the suffering some sense, even if there were no answers.” (p. 39)

Life happens. For better and for worse. And when something happens, we ask Why? Our curiosity can imbue any event with spiritual significance. Anything that happens in our lives, can be a source of understanding, a source of learning, a source of joy – if we know how to remain curious and ask the right questions.

“Curiosity is a state of heightened awareness,” Christina Baldwin says. 

“Culturally, this has been considered a child’s activity. By the time we’re grown, we’re supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life’s miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.” (p. 41)

We can cultivate a curious spirit. We can cultivate a frame of mind that opens our eyes to miracles all around us. We can cultivate a questioning mind that will take us beyond old stories of gods hiding behind the blue sky, and toward new stories that tell us the sacred is everywhere, out there and in here. New stories that will teach us to care more deeply and help us figure out how we can save the world. 

Whenever we gather here, may we see that we are all both teachers and learners.

Regardless whether we are young or old, 

may we learn how to look inquiringly and steadily with our own eyes, 

to touch inward springs, and to awaken the soul. 

May we remember that life is a journey, 

a spiritual quest, propelled forward by the questions we ask.

Wherever our journey takes us, may we be guided be a holy curiosity.

Amen.

If You Meet the Buddha...

"You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself..."
-- Dr. Seuss

Meditation:  a poem by Greg Kuzma

I begin my life

over.  It’s easy.

You take a deep breath,

close your eyes,

open them, and

there it is,

all the familiar things.

Nobody has to get up.

It’s drawing the chairs 

closer to the fire,

opening the window

louder on the sound

of people walking by 

outside, taking 

another sip of coffee.

It’s habit, too easily

broken by dreams

and regrets.  My 

mind’s a blank, my

heart stirs, my eyes

take on their gentle 

obligation.  My hand 

is steady as a baby’s sleep.

Reading: by the author and professor of English at Ohio University, Dinty Moore, from Between Panic and Desire, a piece entitled: The Koan. (p. 89)  

Two Buddhist monks from differing traditions agree to a meeting, planning to appraise the cultural disparity in their practice and see what can be learned from one another. A small audience waits expectantly to hear what the men will say.

One, a Tibetan lama, sits very quietly on his cushion, fingering his wooden beads while murmering, “Om mani padme om.” The second monk, of Korean descent, is well known for hurling rapid-fire questions at his students until they are forced to admit how little of the world they truly understand. At such moments he will often shout, “Yes! Yes! Keep that don’t know mind!”

At one point during the meeting with the Tibetan, the Zen monk reaches inside his robes and pulls out an orange. “What is this?”

The Zen monk stands ready to dispute whatever answer the Tibetan offers. In his tradition, every preconception is instantly challenged, and open-mindedness is the swiftest path to enlightenment.

The Tibetan just sits, however, quietly fingering his beads.

“What is this?” the Zen master insists, holding the orange up to the Tibetans nose, turning it over and over in his fingers. “Tell me, what is this?”

No answer.

The Tibetan finally leans over to the translator who is assisting in the encounter, and the two men whisper back and forth for several moments.

Eventually the translator addresses the room:

“Rinpoche asks, ‘What is the matter with him? Don’t they have oranges where he comes from?” 

Reading: by the Unitarian author, lecturer, and former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay “Self-Reliance”

[We are] timid and apologetic… [we dare] not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but [quote] some saint or sage. … These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are… what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 

Reading: by Sheldon Kopp from If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients (p. 3-4) 

In every age, men [and women] have set out on pilgrimages, on spiritual journeys, on personal quests. Driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope, singly and in groups, they come in search of relief, enlightenment, peace, power, joy or they know not what. Wishing to learn, and confusing being taught with learning, they often seek out helpers, healers and guides, spiritual teachers whose disciples they would become.

The emotionally troubled [person] of today, the contemporary pilgrim, wants to be the disciple of the psychotherapist… People seek the guidance of a [therapist] when their usual, self-limited, risk-avoiding ways of operating are not paying off…

…Though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic…. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, “My world is broken, and you have to fix it.”…

If You Meet the Buddha…

A Sermon Delivered on April 12, 2015

By

The Rev. Axel H. Gehrmann

This week the U.S. Postal service released a new commemorative stamp honoring the late poet Maya Angelou. Maybe you heard about it. The stamp has a picture of Angelou’s smiling face, and her famous quote: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

What a beautiful, fitting tribute to a great American author. Except, Maya Angelou isn’t the author of this particular quote. This quote is by the children’s book author Joan Walsh Anglund. The quote is reminiscent of lines from Angelou’s poem “Caged Bird”: 

The caged bird sings 

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

In a New York Times editorial this week Erin McKean writes about this unfortunate error, and how misattributing quotes to famous people is not at all uncommon. Citizens of Great Britain, for instance, “tend to attribute anything vaguely political to Churchill; Americans like to credit anything folksy to Mark Twain, and before Twain, Benjamin Franklin,” she writes. 

A metajoke about this kind of things has made the rounds on the world wide web in the shape of a MIME that shows the picture of Abraham Lincoln, next to a quote attributed to him that reads: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” – Abraham Lincoln

This is exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson was getting at, when he said, we are “timid.” We don’t dare say what we ourselves think, but instead quote “some saint or sage.”

I know exactly what Emerson is talking about. And I can’t help but ask myself why I feel compelled to quote our great Unitarian sage, about the folly of quoting great sages.

This is one of the great Catch-22s of the religious enterprise. And I was bumping up against it, again and again, last week as I was re-reading Emerson’s essay. Emerson’s language is a bit dated, and his writing style a bit stilted, but once I got beyond these distractions, and into the spirit of his writing, I couldn’t help but get excited about the ideas Emerson expresses so eloquently. “Trust thyself,” he says, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” And I think, yes, of course. We must trust our own experience, or own thoughts, our own authority. We can’t live our lives by replicating what others have said and done. We shouldn’t settle for second-hand wisdom. We need to find our own path. We need to learn our own lessons. We need to discover our own truths. That's what I believe.

And yet there I was, re-reading the truths of someone who lived two hundred years ago.

* * *

Zen Buddhism is known for its attempts to help us break our habit of looking to ancient scriptures for clues on how to attain enlightenment. We rely far too much on hear-say. We are far too content to live within the confines of convention. We too easily settle for simply going through the motions of what society considers the hallmarks of a “good,” “respectable” and “successful” life. And so we spend our lives trying to conform to images and assumptions that, little by little, rob us of any sense of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Our thoughts grow shallow. Our senses are clouded. Our feelings are numbed. 

The two Buddhist monks, both in their own ways, try to help us snap out of it. The Zen Buddhist holds up an orange – not the idea of orange, not the memory orange, but a real orange – and asks “What is this?” hoping to touch on the truth of immediate, first-hand experience. 

I am not sure whether he is successful.

* * *

Buddhism has many helpful teachings. But rather than sharing the words of ancient saints and sages, let me offer you the story of a modern day American Buddhist named Brad Warner. 

Brad Warner was born in Hamilton, Ohio. As a teenager he got seriously involved in hardcore punk music, and played bass guitar in a punk band called Zero Defex. But he was always interested in Buddhism, and later became a Soto Zen priest. He shares some of his unique insights in a book entitled Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye.

As some of you may know, Dogen is the founder of the Soto school of Zen. Though he lived in 13^th century Japan long ago, Dogen’s life and teachings struck a chord for Brad Warner. He writes: 

“[Dogen] was born…to an aristocratic family back in the days when all Japan looked like the sets in The Last Samurai. His father died when he was just three years old, and his mother died five years later. Having lost the people children believe to be the most reliable, stable things in the world – parents – at such an early age, he started searching for something that was perfectly reliable. That’s what got him into Buddhism.” (p. 4)

Warner could relate this. Though his parents were still alive at the time, several of his close family members suffered from a congenital disease, and died young. He saw this as a child, and knew this particular disease runs in families. 

“So there was the chance,” he writes, 

“that I would suffer from the same illness and linger for years in a pretty miserable condition until the sickness did me in, as had happened to my grandmother and a couple of my aunts. So I started looking into religious and philosophical matters at a very early age. … The first religion I encountered was Christianity. And, although I was very intrigued with Christian ideas, they didn’t really address my concerns.”

When Dogen was a child, he had similar concerns. He was deeply troubled by his experiences of loneliness and loss, and also turned to mainline religion. In Japan at the time, that was Buddhism. But the Buddhist masters he met couldn’t adequately address his concerns. He needed to find his own approach, and ended up starting his own school.

Dogen was fascinated by koans. As Brad Warner explains, 

“the word koan [refers] to those weird unanswerable questions often associated with Zen, like “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” or “If a tree falls in a forest and hits a mime, would he make a noise?” The word koan means “public case.” So the koans are public records recounting encounters between famous Zen teachers and their students… 

For Dogen, the word koan was also a synonym for dharma, the profound truth of the universe in the sense that the universe is a mystery. And by that I mean that although the universe is all around us, proclaiming its truth so loudly you’d have to be deaf to miss it, most of us manage to miss it anyhow.” (p. 17)

* * *

Each of our lives is a journey. Like women and men throughout the ages, we are each on our own pilgrimage, our own personal quest, driven by pain, drawn by longing, lifted by hope. We each have our own moments of grief and struggle, of happiness and love. We try to make sense our experiences. We try to learn the lessons life is trying to teach us. 

And so we seek out helpers, healers and gurus, who can provide us guidance, and perhaps comfort, and perhaps clarity. Or we read ancient scriptures, hoping to find pearls of wisdom that will help us on our way.

These are the natural human instincts, that have led many a patient to office of the psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp. And yet religious writings, like the Bible or the I Ching, as well as therapists and other gurus are poor oracles, Kopp writes. Seekers come hoping to find “something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend.” But rather than providing any simple solutions, the best teachers will instead draw from “wellsprings of wisdom about the ambiguity, the insolubility, and the inevitability of the human situation.” The best spiritual teachings offer the “reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.”

In the end, the fortunate among the seekers will learn that there is nothing anyone else can teach them. Once they are willing to give up being taught, and once they realize they already know how to live, Sheldon Kopp writes, they can discover the secret of life. The secret is that there is no secret.

“Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden meanings. Before [we are] enlightened, [we] get up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep. But once [we have] attained enlightenment, then [we get] up each morning to spend the day tending [the] fields, [return] home to eat [our] supper, [go] to bed…, and [fall] asleep.

The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes. …[We do] not need an answer in order to find peace. [We need] only to surrender [our] existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep.” (p. 187)

This is the perplexing truth the Zen master is trying to convey with the koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Rather than looking outside ourselves for enlightenment, we need to embrace the Buddha nature that is already within us.

As Kopp puts it: “Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”

* * *

We are all seekers. We all hope to find meaning in our lives. We hope to learn. But sometimes we confuse learning with being taught. We turn to others hoping they will fix the broken parts of our lives. As if we were children and they could simply make us feel better. 

When we are young, we do need parents. And we need teachers. But in the end, we are the ones who need to do the difficult work of learning. Learning means changing. It means giving up old habits, and daring to enter the unknown. 

We are the ones who must live our own lives. We are the ones who must make our own choices. We are the ones who must figure out how to make a difference in the world. We are the ones who must speak our own truth. We are the ones who must act, and then be accountable for what we have done and what we have left undone. 

“Trust thyself,” I always say. Sing your own song. Sing with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still. Sing of the freedom you long to find. The freedom to move beyond the confines of convention and conformity. The freedom to live your own life.

We can do this. We can move beyond our fears. We can learn and change. We can begin life over. It’s easy. All we need to do is take a deep breath, close our eyes, open them, and there it is, all the familiar things. 

The mystery of the universe is right here. The secret is that there is no secret. 

May we open our minds and hearts

To this mystery and this secret.

May we dare to trust ourselves, 

and be fearless masters 

of our own lives.

Amen. 

Rediscovered Truth

"Behold, my friends, the spring has come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love."
-- Sitting Bull

Opening Words

Let us gather for worship mindful of the timeless words of the 3^rd century Hindu poet Kalidasa, who wrote:

Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life…

Yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow only a vision

But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,

And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day.

Meditation: a poem by Lynn Ungar entitled “Breaking Ground”

Living in the violence of Spring

Living in a time

where shells are cracking

and shapes alter

Who can afford to risk

forgetting the danger

forgetting the moment

the crocus bulb breaks the ground

Never knowing whether

snow or sun or ice

awaits in warm or jagged welcome

There is no safety in

this restless season

Even the sheltering ground

rejects its own,

thrusting the life it held

into the untrustworthy

and insufficient care

of air and weather

There are no choices here

No careful path or

reasoned way

No holding in reserve for

some more settled,

more propitious time

But only the unconsidered

faith of the crocus

whose saffron petals echo

or demand the sun

Reading: by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron from The Places That Scare You (p. 3)

… Bodhichitta is [an open attitude, and enlightened mind] capable of transforming the hardest hearts and the most prejudiced and fearful of minds… Sometimes the completely open heart and mind… is called the soft spot, a place vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot…

            Boddhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion – our ability to feel the pain we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot – our innate ability to love and to care about things – is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment – love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy – to awaken [compassion].

Reading: from the Jewish Hasidic tradition, words attributed to the maggid of Mezritch, an 18^th century rabbi who lived in what today is the Ukraine (from Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, p. 104)

The Between-Stage

The maggid of Mezritch said:

Nothing in the world can change from one reality into another, unless it first turns into nothing, that is, into the reality of the between-stage. In that stage… no one can grasp it, for it has reached the rung of nothingness, just as before creation. And then it is made into a new creature, from the egg to the chick. The moment when the egg is no more and the chick is not yet, is nothingness… It is the same with the sprouting seed. It does not begin to sprout until the seed disintegrates in the earth and the quality of seed-dom is destroyed in order that it may attain to nothingness which is the rung before creation. And this rung is called wisdom, that is to say, a thought which cannot be made manifest. Then this thought gives rise to creation, as it is written: “In wisdom hast Thou made them all.”

Reading: by Clarence Day a poem entitled “The Egg” (from Scenes From the Mesozoic, 1935)

Oh who that ever lived and loved

Can look upon an egg unmoved?

The egg it is the source of all,

‘Tis everyone’s ancestral hall.

The bravest chief that ever fought,

The lowest thief that e’er was caught,

The harlot’s lip, the maiden’s leg,

They each and all come from an egg.

The rocks that once by ocean’s surge

Beheld the first of eggs emerge —

Obscure, defenseless, small and cold —

They little knew what egg could hold.

The gifts the reverent Magi gave,

Pandora’s box, Aladdin’s cave,

Wars, loves, and kingdoms, heaven and hell

All lay within that tiny shell.

Oh, join me gentlemen, I beg,

In honoring our friend, the egg.

Rediscovered Truth

A Sermon Delivered on April 5, 2015

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Yesterday morning, with the moral support of my wife, Elaine, I engaged in a simple, timeless Easter ritual. I took a few eggs out of the fridge, boiled them for ten minutes, solid. And then – after carefully reading and rereading the instructions on several small boxes of food coloring – measured a few drops of yellow, green and red, into three cups, added two teaspoons of vinegar, and a bit of hot water to each. Then I carefully took an egg and dipped it into one color, and then the next. Creating my very own Easter Egg.

It’s been a long time since I spent my Easter Sunday searching for eggs and candy my mother or grandmother had hidden. And it has been several years since Elaine and I orchestrated Easter egg hunts for our children, who are now college-age.

But fond memories of childhood and parenthood come to mind, as I clumsily decorate my egg, and as I look out the kitchen window, at the bare trees and bushes behind our house, and also the green stalks of daffodils poking out of flower beds. I can’t see them grow. Nothing is happening. But I do see that every one of them is just a bit taller than yesterday.

* * *

The egg is a fitting symbol of spring; a symbol of new life and growth, of fecundity and abundance. And spring in the natural world is a striking symbol of how we humans since time immemorial have made sense of our inner spiritual world.

The hard shell of the egg, the husk of the seed, on the one hand meant to protect the potential for new life hidden within, on the other hand is also a kind of confinement. Life isn’t free to unfold, as long as it is trapped within this tiny enclosure, entombed, confined, imprisoned. Breaking free isn’t easy.

* * *

One of the great Easter stories is the one told in the Book of Exodus. Observant Jews celebrate a Passover Seder this week, with a special selection of foods reminding them of how the people of Israel long ago escaped slavery.

You remember the story: God told Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, into the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. But first of all Moses needed to convince Pharaoh to let his people go. Moses performed several miracles, and unleashed a series of plagues – frogs, gnats, locusts and more. Ten in all. But after each one, Pharaoh remained unconvinced. Again and again, Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.

When Pharaoh did finally relent, and after the people of Israel had fled, he soon changed his mind and sent his army to pursue them. And then Moses performed probably the most memorable of miracles. Just as the Egyptian army was about to catch them at the bank of the Red Sea, the waters parted, allowing the slaves to run to the far shore, with the Egyptian army in hot pursuit. Once Israel arrived safely at the far shore, the waters closed, drowning the entire army.

It’s quite a story. It’s been retold again and again. It was memorably portrayed by Cecil B. DeMille in his 1954 production of “The Ten Commandments,” starring Yul Brynner as Pharaoh, and Charlton Heston as Moses. At the time, with a cast of thousands, filmed on location in Egypt, it was the most expensive movie ever made.

And more recently, with a lot of computer generated special effects - and much less memorably - it was retold in the movie “Exodus,” starring Christian Bale in the lead role. The critic consensus on Rottentomtatoes.com is that “while sporadically stirring, and suitably epic in its ambitions, [it] can’t quite live up to its classic source material.” (The DVD was released just last month. Check it out, and decide for yourself whether it’s any good.)

* * *

It is easy to dismiss the Passover story as fodder for mass entertainment, or an outdated tale of unbelievable miracles and superstition. But if we did so, we would miss its more significant message.

The Easter story of Exodus is one of liberation. This theme is repeated in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and is found in other religious traditions as well. The key insight of all spring holidays, Rabbi Michael Lerner says, is “that rebirth, renewal, and transformation are possible, and that we are not stuck in the dark, cold, and deadly energies of winter.”

Judaism, he says, “builds on that universal experience of nature and adds another dimension: it suggests that the class structure (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or neoliberal imperialism) can be overcome, and that we human beings… can create a world based on love, generosity, justice, and peace.”

The transformations taking place all around us in nature serve as reminder of a transformative force at work in the universe. Lerner calls it God: a force at the heart of justice and love. Or as he puts is, a force which “makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which should be.”

When we celebrate Easter or Passover, Lerner says, we shouldn’t just be thinking about ancient religious stories. We should each be asking ourselves: “What part of our society’s much-needed transformation can I participate in? – both in terms of personal and psychological transformation and in terms of social, political, and spiritual transformation.” (“The Tikkun Passover Seder Supplement,” April 1, 2015)

Whether in Israel or America today, there is much we could do to foster greater justice and peace.

* * *

The most powerful of religious stories don’t provide pat answers and simple solutions to the questions of life. The most valuable of religious teachings convey timeless truths that inspire and challenge us. We are challenged to rediscover how these truths can be applied in ever-new ways to the changing realities of our lives and the world. The best religious stories have manifold meanings and diverse dimensions that can inspire ever-new instances of compassionate and courageous action.

So, for instance, the Jewish psychiatrist Robert Rosenthal sees Pharaoh and Moses, not as historical figures engaged in an epic struggle, but rather as archetypes that represent “opposing aspects of the human mind.”

He says,

“Pharaoh represents the part of the mind that sees itself as separate from God and Spirit: the limited ego-mind [- short-sighted, small-minded and selfish]. Moses represents the part of the mind that is and has always been in full, direct connection with God and Spirit—what I call the Moses-mind. Both are present within us. The plagues brought on by Pharaoh’s stubborn resistance to freeing the Hebrews are our plagues. They afflict us whenever we bow to the Pharaoh-like ego… Likewise, the miracles performed by Moses are our miracles. They arrive the moment we make the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to be free from ego and follow instead the guidance of Spirit that comes to us through the Moses-mind.” (Tikkun, “Exodus: An Allegorical Portrait of the Human Mind in its Relationship to God,” July 25, 2012)

* * *

There is something within us that wants our hearts to be hardened. There is something within us that wants to build up walls between us.

We build walls because we are afraid, because we are vulnerable and we don’t want to get hurt. We build walls to protect the most sensitive aspects of who we are, especially our natural instinct to empathize with others, and to share their pain.

We harden our hearts, Pema Chodron writes, to shield ourselves from this pain, because it scares us. Our opinions and prejudices, our anger and arrogance, our envy and indifference are all barriers built up on a deep fear of being hurt.

And yet every person has a soft spot, a living spark, a seed of compassion that exists within even the hardest heart. And every one us can crack the hard heart’s shell, with our own innate capacity to love and care for others. Any vulnerable moment – whether a moment of gratitude or embarrassment, whether a moment of loneliness or love – can help us break free from the confinement of a hardened heart.

* * *

The arrival of spring in the outer natural world is inevitable. The arrival of spring in our inner spiritual world may require some effort. Breaking the protective shell in which we have learned to live requires courage.

As Rabbi Shraga Simmons points out:

“For the Jews in Egypt, life was comfortable. In slavery, the rations may be meager and the bed made of straw, but there's an up-side as well: all one's needs are provided, and there are no challenging decisions to be made. No laundry, no shopping, no deals, no deadlines. The Hebrew word for Egypt, "Mitzrayim," means a "place of confinement." Sometimes it's the smallest box which makes us feel the most secure.” (http://www.aish.com/tp/b/sw/Jump_Into_the_Sea.html)

The hard heart may be confining. It may imprison the free spirit. It may inhibit our innate compassion. But it feels familiar and safe. Allowing our shells to crack means daring to open our hearts and minds to the unknown.

Yielding to the spirit of spring means stepping out of our confinement, and into the between-stage. It means stepping into the nothingness before creation. The moment when the egg is no more and the chick is not yet. The moment when the seed disintegrates, disappears into nothingness, before new life is created. This experience of nothingness, the maggid of Mezritch says, this nothingness before creation is called wisdom.

The spirit of spring requires of us wisdom and courage, to leave behind the confines of the winter life we have known, and step into nothingness, so we might discover new and unimagined life. The spirit of spring asks us to leave the bondage of old habits behind, and journey into the wilderness, so we might reach the Promised Land.

This is the real spirit of spring, Bishop John Shelby Spong says, from a Christian perspective. In his book Resurrection: Myth or Reality, he writes, “What is real…, is that behind our religious systems, our holy words,… and even behind our fears lies an experience that transforms, deepens, and calls us into … “new being.”  It is that experience which demands of us an openness, a probing questioning mind, and most significant of all, a yearning to [find] what the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel called “the abundant life.”

…and what Kalidasa called, “today, well lived”: the very life of life.

* * *

Allowing the spirit of spring to take shape in our lives is not easy. As Lynn Unger says, living in a time where shells are cracking and shapes alter, we need to be mindful of risks and dangers involved. There is no safety in this restless season. If we dare to break free from the confines of our wintery self, like the crocus bulb breaking the ground – we don’t know what awaits us.

We need courage, we need wisdom, and we need the faith of the crocus, who – regardless of risk - opens her saffron petals echoing or demanding the sun.

* * *

The egg is a fitting symbol of spring. A symbol of new life and growth. Within its hard shell lies all of creation. “The egg it is the source of all / ‘Tis everyone’s ancestral hall… Wars, loves, kingdoms, heaven and hell / All lay within that tiny shell.”

May we have the courage, the wisdom, and the faith,

To break out of our shell

To crack open our hard heart

That we might discover a new life

With more love, more hope, more peace, and more joy.

In this spirit may we welcome

The eternal truth of spring.

Amen.

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.