"Heart Aches and High
Stakes "
A sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
March 22, 2009
READINGS ANCIENT AND MODERN:
Our ancient reading is Chapter 6 of the Tao Te Ching, by Lao
Tzu and is translated by Peter Merel:
Experience is a riverbed,
Its source hidden, forever flowing:
Its entrance, the root of the world,
The Way moves within it:
Draw upon it; it will not run dry.
The modern reading this morning is an excerpt from the poem,
"Evening Solace," by Charlotte Brontë:
…there are hours of lonely musing,
Such as in evening silence come,
When, soft as birds their pinions closing,
The heart's best feelings gather home.
Then in our souls there seems to languish
A tender grief that is not woe;
And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish,
Now cause but some mild tears to flow.
And feelings, once as strong as passions,
Float softly back as faded dream;
Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,
The tale of others' sufferings seem.
Oh! When the heart is freshly bleeding,
How longs it for that time to be,
When, through the mist of years receding,
It woes but lives in reverie!
SERMON:
"Some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed."
(From, "The Rose," by Amanda McBroom) There is a poem,
"The Song of the Reed," by the mystic Sufi poet Rumi that
begins:
Hear, how yon reed in sadly pleasing tales
Departed bliss and present woe bewails!
And then a few lines further along it goes on:
Who [ever] roams in exile from his parents' bower
Pants to return, and chides each longing hour.
It is a poem of lament. I'll bet I read over a dozen translations
of those lines, and putting them all together, here is what I find
they mean to me:
Whoever has loved and lost,
And who has not,
Knows deep longing… and its cost.
Heart aches and high stakes. It's not possible to speak on the
topic of heartache, without realizing that I'm speaking to a room
filled with experts. The source of heartache varies from person
to person, as much as it does from era to era within each person's
life. Mohandas Gandhi talked about suffering as the "badge"
of human existence. "To be human is to suffer," Gandhi
quoted the Buddha. But then he went on to define suffering as the,
"…pain in our life given meaning."
Beyond the big three that are so often listed - birth, death and
taxes - the one thing I know for sure about the human experience
is that pain is a given. It is our first experience as we leave
the comfort and security of our mother's womb, and the unity of
unconscious, universal being. Calvin Miller, theologian and prolific
author, wrote in his book, "The Valiant Papers,"
"Crying is common in this world. It does little good to
ask the reason for it. Muddyscuttle [Earth] is what one might
call a weeping planet. Laughter can be heard here and there, but
by and large, weeping predominates. With maturity the sound and
reason for crying changes, but never does it stop. All infants
do it everywhere - even in public. By adulthood most crying is
done alone and in the dark. Weeping, for babies, is a sign of
health and evidence that they are alive. Isn't this a chilling
omen? Not laughter but tears [are the sign of life]. It leaves
weeping and being synonyms."
Suffering is the pain in our lives given meaning. We are born into
this world through the experience of pain, and then we have our
whole lives to define who we are through our responses to it. Aldous
Huxley wrote, "Experience is not what happens to you; it is
what you do with what happens to you."
Pain and fear of pain can cause some of us to shut down; sometimes
temporarily, sometimes for very long periods. But most of us get
through childhood and even through the God-forsaken wilderness years
that we call adolescence. Some of us are nearly oblivious to it,
because perhaps there are more important things to attend to. Some
of us struggle mightily. Still, as we grow, we learn to absorb our
pain. It becomes, it is, a part of our experience and our identity.
And as we grow, we form a world view that gives us a sense of meaning,
and allows us to feel safe and connected. We develop a vision for
our futures. Maybe we map out a career path, plan on being in a
love relationship, maybe with a future family. Maybe we imagine
where we'll live, a particular house, a supper table where we'll
gather, maybe a style of living.
We learn to trust in our visions, our expectations, of what might
be. And our pain is abated by those visions and our trust in them,
and buoyed by them. The song writer, Tom Dundee, warns though, "Expectations
we have can lead down that path, where the devil discouragement
lives."
Dr. James W. Fowler, Professor of Theology and Human Development
at Emory University, was director there of the Center for Research
on Faith and Moral Development, as well as the Department of Ethics
until he retired in 2005. I know Dr. Fowler mostly for his work
in the area of stages of faith development. He cites that in every
life there is an experience, often in the late teen years or in
early adulthood, which he refers to as, "…the shipwreck."
It comes about as the result of some serious disappointment, or
loss, and it causes the shattering of an idealistically held sense
of reality and the loss of the expectations that accompanied that
reality. To progress, the individual - each individual - must first
learn to survive and then again to thrive. If we are going to mature
towards our potential fullness as human beings, we now have to recognize
the pain and find our way through it in order to learn what is not
so that we can determine what is, and what yet can be.
Whoever has loved and lost
And who has not,
Knows deep longing… and its cost.
So each of us enters this earth through the painful experience
of birth. We are cared for and nurtured, more or less, until we
come of age. And then, at least for most of us, it happens all over
again. We are ejected from the cocoon of our expectations of an
adult life, through the painful experience of the shipwreck, into
a world, which now must be very much of our own making.
This time, we have to put ourselves back together. That's how we
differentiate ourselves from our parents as adults. We don't do
it, probably cannot do it, totally by ourselves. We live in a world
with others who we are in relationship with. But putting ourselves
back together is our job, not theirs.
So, hopefully we have the tools or we can learn where to find them,
because the truth is - there are more shipwrecks coming. The first
one may be the toughest, and it may not. There will be deaths and
illnesses, breakups and divorces, lost jobs, lost friends and lost
ideals. There will be betrayals by others and our own great failings.
There will be bitter disappointments and we will often and repeatedly
be left to put the pieces back together, not like Humpty Dumpty
- not all back together again. But our task will be to put things
together in ways that keep, from the past, that which is usable
in forming new understandings of reality and that help us to form
new ways of being and being in relationships and in the world.
Last week in my sermon on "The Larger Good," I mentioned
that we recognize that healing comes about, once we have accepted
our loss and have found our way to renewing our efforts in reaching
out towards others and towards serving the larger good. It doesn't
work, I have to think, to deny our pain and stuff it down inside
ourselves, while reaching out to others. If we are going to reach
out to others from our wholeness, it will be because we have been
able to learn how to accept, express and exorcise our pain. That's
why people keep journals or write poetry. That's why there are ministers
and counselors, therapists and good friends, and loved ones, so
that we can express that which we need to let go of.
Throughout our lives we will encounter grief and pain-filled experiences;
they are part and parcel of this human experience. They are ours
to absorb, to redeem, to make meaning of, to grow from. We don't
have to go it alone, though. We are social animals, and often it
is through the help of others that we are able to do the work that
is ours to do. That work is to accept, to express, and to learn:
so that we are able to move on, able to grow, able to live.
You might be wondering why I would want to speak of such things
this morning. Maybe some of it has to do with this being the season
of Lent - a time for shedding that which is no longer constructive
in our lives. To some extent it is.
But more, it has to do with the fact that I'll be leaving here
soon, for several weeks, and I'm not very confident about what's
happening in the world around us. And I don't know how that all
might impact upon our community while I'm away. I know that our
disastrous economy has already begun to affect several of you, and
in one way or another, to one extent or another, it will hurt all
of us and bring hardship to the lives we love. So my hope is that
I can leave you with something that might be of use, now and in
these times, or in any time that is to come. My hope is that you
might have something in store, that could bolster your faith, that
could help you to remember that you have lost before, and you have
survived, and you have learned over and over that you can thrive.
There have been losses and there will be more losses. And we can
live through whatever they might be. We can live until we are no
longer alive. And we can have faith that even after that moment
- life itself will go on.
Whoever has loved and lost,
And who has not,
Knows deep longing… and its cost.
The thing is, while I know pain is a given in our human experience,
I believe that there is the possibility of transcending that pain,
transforming and redeeming that pain. Often, I think such opportunities
have a better chance to occur within the context of the religious
community, where together it is our object to intentionally seek
transformation. I had an interesting and moving experience last
weekend that assures me of these possibilities. Even at times when
we aren't looking for transcendence and grace, they can occur in
ways that we don't expect, don't look for, and yet can be so redemptive.
One of the guys at the Men's Group last Saturday mentioned that
something I had said several months earlier in the Five Questions
Class had caused him to change the way he and his wife and their
family experience dinner. In the first session of that class, as
we explore what it means to be human, I asked the class to share
some of the pivotal moments in their lives. To make it as organic
a recollection as possible, I asked them to remember where these
events took place. As an example, I said that for me the dinner
table was a particularly formidable scene in my development.
So this fellow in the Men's Group, who had been a part of that
class, said that he'd taken this to heart. He'd shared it with his
wife, and ever since they and their children have been having supper
together. They make it a real family experience that everyone anticipates
eagerly. They share all kinds of things, he said, but mostly love
and togetherness. And then he thanked me for having shared my experience
because it had made such a difference in the way his family is a
family.
What he did not know, what he could not have known, was that the
formidable experiences at my family's table while I was growing
up - that I had referred to - could have hardly been more the opposite
of what he and his family have created. In my family, on most nights,
the kids ate in the kitchen while our parents ate together in the
living room. It was best that way.
The dining room and the dinner table were most typically reserved
for Sunday dinner, an event which mostly I dreaded. My seat at the
table - you have to remember that there were ten kids, so we're
talking about a big table - my seat was right next to my father's.
This was not particularly because he enjoyed my company. It was
because it put me within close reach of the backside of his hand,
which was often extended, cuffing me for yet another offense, generally
something that I would have said that was deemed inappropriate or
would somehow raise his ire.
This went on for years. So, the dinner table was indeed the site
of ongoing, very formidable experience in my life. What it did for
me though, was that helped me know what kind of parent I did not
want to become. Of course my own children's experience was much
different from my own, but still the experience in the Men's Group
last week was a gift like you can not imagine. Years of personal
pain were redeemed, as they became transformed by a young family
in this congregation, having turned those painful experiences into
something of value and meaning in their lives. It was an incredible
gift of redemption for me.
The child that I was did not deserve the mistreatment that was
inflicted on me. It was wrong and it was painful. And it caused
considerable grief in my life. It should never have happened.
The adults that we are do not deserve the abuses being inflicted
on us by the markets, by disease, by death, by so many random and
not so random causes. They too, are painful and they cause considerable
grief in our lives. Whether or not they should have happened, we
can not be sure, but we can be sure that they have happened and
that they will continue.
Whoever has loved and lost,
And who has not,
Knows deep longing… and its cost.
We can't always know how our experiences might be redeemed. We
can't cause transformation to happen. We can have faith, though,
and we can be open to the possibilities of transformation. We do
that, we build faith and stay open to life and its myriad possibilities
of transformation, when we open hearts and refuse to close them.
And then somehow grace enters the picture, call it serendipity
if you want, but it occurs… and we take the next breath, and
we take the next step, and we go on living our lives.
Experience is a riverbed,
Its source hidden, forever flowing:
Its entrance, the root of the world,
The Way moves within it:
Draw upon it; it will not run dry. -Lao Tzu
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