“Like Sands Through the Hourglass...”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
January 13, 2008
READINGS:
The first reading is from Chapter 64, Care at the Beginning, from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Peter Merel:
What lies still is easy to grasp;
What lies far off is easy to anticipate;
What is brittle is easy to shatter;
What is small is easy to disperse.
Yet a tree broader than a man can embrace is born of a tiny shoot;
A dam greater than a river can overflow starts with a clod of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles begins at the spot under one's feet.
Therefore deal with things before they happen;
Create order before there is confusion.
Our second reading, "The Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver might seem to be out of season, but perhaps it is not:
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?
SERMON:
“Where Did the Time Go?” By Charlie Ortman (Sung A Cappella)
I don’t want to slip right through those years
That some how just slip away.
And somewhere down the road
I don’t want you or me to have to say,
Where did the time go?
Seems like yesterday…
Where did the time go?
There’s a price too high to pay…
Where did the time go?
I never felt it slippin’ away.
I wrote these words for the chorus of a song about 25 years ago. I never imagined, at the time, that I might ever sing them in such a setting and situation as this. And yet by now, my years in the ministry outnumber my years of songwriting and performing by one – 18 and 17, respectively. Talk about the years flying by!
Way back then, besides playing music on the weekends, I was an at-home dad taking care of three young kids. I loved our family and our home, and I didn’t want to fail in paying attention to any of it. And I surely didn’t want it to just slip away. My idea when I wrote, “Where Did the Time Go?” was that I wanted to live every day, every minute if possible, as fully as I could. I surely don’t always live up to that goal, but it does continue to be what I ask of my self and of my life: living as fully and meaningfully as I can. From my perspective now, it’s impossible, often, to keep from wondering, where did the time go?
Henry David Thoreau wrote about living deeply and sucking the very marrow out of life. George Bernard Shaw wrote:
“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.”
It’s January again. Another year is gone and another one begins. It’s as though we’ve been handed yet another new, splendid torch, or that we’ve at least been given a new ration of fuel to burn ours more brightly. And so I wonder, have you thought much about this new year and the newness it might lend to your life?
Since this is our first time together since it began, and before we get any further into 2008, I thought we might take some time this morning to do that together – to consider this new year and the newness it might lend to our lives.
Like the sands of the hourglass, so are the days of the year numbered. And just like the days of the year, so are the days of our lives numbered. Much like the sands of an hourglass though, we have no way of knowing what that number –the number of years we may have –might be. But unlike the sands in the timer, we can make choices about the courses we pursue – in living our minutes in ways that give meaning to our years.
There is a story related by Chaim Potok in his novel, ‘My Name is Asher Lev.’ The story concerns the artist as a young boy, walking with his father in the city, and coming upon a dead bird. The child asks, “Everything alive would one day be still as that bird?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s the way the Ribbono shel Olam (God) made the world, Asher.”
“Why?”
“So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious.”
This new year before you is not yours forever. This one has 366 days and it holds out the possibility of being precious. Your life is something that will not be yours forever. And it too, is precious. The question is: how precious are you willing for it to be? How precious are you willing to make it?
I received an email from our former assistant minister and good friend, Mary Tiebout, a couple of days ago.
Lots of email conversation this week in Robert Bly circles about death, some because of the death of poet John O’Donohue. One message contained this story – it might be appropriate to use sometime, maybe just good to hold:
There is an old story of an Irishman who died when he was near one hundred [years old] and they keened the body [a Gaelic tradition] and left it laid out on a table in the middle of the house as is the custom. And on the third day, some who attended, said they saw his Soul/spirit rise from the body and it moved (of habit, I guess) towards the door, but then it turned and returned to the body and kissed it in gratitude for the life his body had supported.
Ah…a good way to turn the wheel…
As I write my sermons each week, one of my constant challenges is to try to say that which might hold up as being true, no matter the perspective from which it’s seen. And when I’m unable to do that, I have to claim as my own the personal perspective that is no more than a personal truth. And so, I sit as my own greatest cynic, as I write, trying to represent whatever questions I can imagine you might have. In my message today I have to own a major premise that I will make here, as such a personal truth. That is, I hold that life really is the greatest gift of all.
I know that not everyone sees life that way. For me though, life is what makes all other possibilities possible. I have no need to credit some anthropomorphic being for having bestowed life upon me. But it is something that I did not cause to happen, nor is it something for which I did anything to merit. My life was/is a gift to me and I hope to others – a gift that emerged somehow from the universe.
In honesty, for anyone who does not see life as a gift, the value of this message is considerably limited. And so for you, my hope and prayer is that one day you might be able to experience your life as a gift – a time-limited gift that is truly precious and given to you that you might fashion of it something of unfathomable and infinitely greater value. And I pray that until you might experience life as such a gift, you might have faith that one day you will have walked through whatever keeps you from knowing it, so that you might be able to more fully receive this gift that has been given to you.
All of that having been said, there’s no good cause to think that just because life is a gift, we’ve been given some easy row to hoe. There is no good reason to think we can just walk around in some idiotic state of bliss because somehow gratitude provides a superhighway to happiness. It might provide a decent map but it doesn’t guarantee the way and it surely doesn’t place us there. We all know that the way is not often easy; we know it all too well. And we know that with or without good maps, we have to find the way ourselves. And we know that paying attention to our lives, to the people around us and to our world has something to do with finding our way.
In a conversation with one of my locker room buddies at the YMCA this last week – and I’m not sure just how the conversation got to this point because we started out talking about the primary elections – my friend said, “I think it’s pathetic when anybody has to be told what’s good for them by someone else.” I have to say that I suspect part of the motivation for his comment is a bit of discomfort with the fact that I’m a minister. I think his suspicion of ministry is that it’s the minister’s job to tell people how to live moral lives. I would find that view of ministry to be repugnant myself. Actually, my friend is a physician and to a significant extent he makes his living by telling other people what’s good for them.
My job is different. My job is not telling people – telling you – what’s good for you. My job is to try to help you remember what you know to be good, and then to cheer you on your way as you go about seeking to fulfill whatever goodness you might. “I’ve gotta tell ya,” I said to my friend, “I have to be reminded of what’s good for me all the time.”
We all know that we want to live life deeply, sucking out its very marrow. We want to be thoroughly used up when we die. We want to find the world to be good, and then to leave it even better for those who follow. We want to right the injustices of racism, homophobia, eco-side and other oppressions. We want to live good, meaningful and attentive lives.
We know what we want. We have some pretty good maps for helping us get there. If we’re open to them, we all have an ample supply of cheerleaders to encourage us on our way; they exist in our day-to-day lives and in volumes from the likes of Mary Oliver, Henry David Thoreau and George Bernard Shaw and so many others. And yet for many of us, myself surely included, we struggle and stumble and lose our way… constantly. Why?
Maybe it’s because the world is so enormous and its problems are so complex that we feel inadequate to the challenge. Maybe it’s because our lives are so full and so fast and so complex that we sometimes haven’t a clue what to take as a next step. Maybe it’s because it seems ludicrous to strive for excellence in a world that is so mucked up. And maybe it’s because we sometimes feel so wounded by our experiences that we can think only of protecting ourselves.
Maybe it’s some or all of these. And still maybe it’s something else as well. Maybe it’s just part of the human experience. None of us has ever been here or in any given moment before we are in it. It’s always all new. We are always finding our way.
And so it’s always about paying attention. It’s always about gathering up the pieces and holding them together, so that they can make sense, so that they can help us to make meaning of what we find in our lives, and so they can help us make meaning with what we do with what we find.
The genocide in Darfur is happening now. The melting of the polar ice caps from global warming is happening now. Racism through bigotry towards immigrants and in its many other forms is happening now. Homophobia and the backlash to progress toward equal marriage rights are happening now. For some of us losing a job, a failing marriage, a life-threatening disease, coping with depression, or aging, or abusive relationships, or addictions are happening now. And wherever we’ve been before, we are here now for the first time. The pieces that are here with us are the pieces that we have, to put together, to find our way, to fulfill our lives in meaningful ways. And those lives, these lives, have days that are numbered.
And so we need to pay attention in order to not let any of it slip away. It is a gift; this life we have is a gift. And our gratitude for that gift calls us to the service of it. Not knowing the way is not a ticket to ride, not a ticket to sit by and let what happens simply be. We are a part of this creation and so a part of whatever pulls it apart, or a part of whatever holds it together.
How can we know the way to go? We can’t, not for sure. But we can pay attention. We can act in good faith. And if we do, we can live in the hope that we are doing the very best we might, with this incredible gift that we’ve been given.
In the book, “Thoughts in Solitude,” the late Catholic theologian Thomas Merton offers a prayer that might serve us well as we go about finding our way. Please don’t bother getting hung up in the theology that may or may not be implied in prayer. Instead, I invite you to hear the expression of Merton’s heart in recognition that his life is a gift not of his own making, and of the yearnings he has for making the most of that gift:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Let God be God. Or let God be Love. Or let God be whatever might call you to respond to life with the hope and maybe even the faith that you might live it well. Whatever might symbolize the mystery out of which the gift which is your life emerged, may it also allow you to know that, however unclear the path before you might be, you are not alone. You are a part of that same mystery, a part of this world, a part of this community. And you are not alone. You are in the good company of others and of a spirit that is pulling for you, cheering you on, that trusts in you.
Remember the encouraging words of Mary Oliver:
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?
However many grains of sand, however many minutes, hours, days or years there might yet be in the glass that holds the story of your existence, I wish for you that not a grain of it slips through your fingers. I hope for you that when you do come to your end, you might have so much appreciation for the gift that has been your journey that you too, in spirit or in soul, might turn back for a moment when it’s time to leave, in order to return to your body and kiss it in gratitude for the life it has supported. For in all its limitations, it will have been so very, very precious.
As this is January and the beginning of yet another year, may you be keenly, exhaustingly, and fulfillingly aware of its preciousness, the very preciousness that is you. Ah… a good way to turn the wheel, indeed.
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