"O Come You Longing Thirsty Souls"
A Sermon by Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman
March 27, 2011
READINGS: ANCIENT & MODERN
Our medieval reading today is the poem, All the Hemispheres,
by the Persian, Sufi mystic poet Hafiz, from the book: 'The Subject
Tonight is Love' , translated by Daniel Ladinsky:
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
Our modern reading this morning is In Time of Silver Rain, By
Langston Hughes:
In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads
Of life,
of life,
of life!
In time of silver rain
The butterflies
Lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth
New leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,
In time of silver rain
When spring
And life
Are new.
SONG
For a Dancer by Jackson Browne:
Keep a fire burning in your eye
Pay attention to the open sky
You never know what will be coming down
I don't remember losing track of you
You were always dancing in and out of view
I must've always thought you'd be around
Always keeping things real by playing the clown
Now you're nowhere to be found
I don't know what happens when people die
Can't seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It's like a song playing right in my ear
That I can't sing
I can't help listening
I can't help feeling stupid standing 'round
Crying as they ease you down
'Cause I know that you'd rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
(Right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play
(There's nothing you can do about it anyway)
Just do the steps that you've been shown
By everyone you've ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you'll do alone
Keep a fire for the human race
And let your prayers go drifting into space
You never know will be coming down
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily, it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around
(The world keeps turning around and around)
Go on and make a joyful sound
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive but you'll never know
SERMON
Did you ever stop to look
at a snow pile on a warming day,
as the softening mass of the once frozen,
once white crystals
were transformed,
before your eyes,
a blessing from the sun,
converted, into rivulets in a cascading stream,
surging, pulsing, newly released, barely born,
throbbing with life in waves
of brilliant syncopation?
Did you ever stop to wonder,
as those crystals dissolved into a pulsating, effluent flow,
did you stop to wonder
what emotion, what spirit, what longing
might have been called out of and into being
in that one moment,
when asking and answering was realized
in a single cycle of ebb and flow,
as the crystals ceased to be so solidly fashioned,
and yielded so boldly to the trickle
of an infant Spring?
I have to admit that I have spent hours of my life
standing and gazing
at this astonishing miracle of transformation.
And I have to tell you that the mystery in it
keeps me mesmerized and stupefied.
Even if the snow melts in some sort of constant fashion,
still the stream that journeys from it
passes in waves.
There is no single gesture of urgency
that moves forward.
The accomplishment is instead, intermittent;
it rises and falls in pulsating rhythm
that is both one and two; plus and minus; yes and no.
It is not now, now, now;
it is now... and now... and now...
in throbbing, alternating, steady intermittency.
I wonder if when the universe began,
it might have been similarly so?
Maybe there was an enormous bank of stored up desire -
the desire to be,
that did not erupt in some big bang,
as some have speculated,
but that oozed out in cascading rhythm
from the want to be -
to being.
Maybe so.
One of the things that I know about the human experience is that
we are born out of pain. I know that historically some have interpreted
that pain to be the result of sin and they assure us that we are
born out of sin. I don't think so. I think pain is the given in
life. Mahatma Gandhi once said that suffering is the badge of human
existence. And on another occasion he defined suffering as pain
given meaning. The opportunity of a lifetime is to transcend pain,
to redeem it with meaning and perhaps with joy, through love.
As for being born of sin, I think that idea is one of our many
efforts to deflect the pain of being. I don't mean to be a downer
here. I'm just saying, pain is the one thing we can count on, and
culturally we seem to spend a lot of time trying to deny it or to
explain it away.
I remember years ago making a similar statement as a part of a
sermon here. A fellow came up to me in the receiving line after
the service and said, "That's great for people who do have
pain in their lives. But I suspect there are many others, like me,
who do not. What about us?"
I assured him that I'd never met a living human being whose life
was free of pain. I told him that mine certainly was not. Then I
discreetly reminded him of a conversation he and I had in my office
a year or so earlier. We had talked about an issue that was of an
ongoing, very painful situation that once again he'd been struggling
with.
"Oh," he said. "I think I'd better listen to that
sermon again." So he walked back and took his seat, and then
he sat through the second service. This time when he passed through
the receiving line when the service was over he said nothing. He
simply shook my hand and nodded his head. I only share this story
for anyone here who might be thinking to yourself, what's this got
to do with me? Now... and now... and now.
To admit our pain is to admit our imperfection. On an intellectual
level we know that perfection is absurd. But on a cultural level
it's much more difficult. Our cultural learning under-girds much
more of our perception than I often suspect we realize. We are taught
that to be worthwhile we need to be white-toothed, fresh-breathed,
well-coiffed and clothed, highly educated, and beautifully and positively
perfect. I think to a great extent these cultural ideas are woven
into the fabric by which we measure ourselves and each other. That
leaves us spending a lot of time denying our pain, denying our humanity.
As a result, in that chasm left between what we are taught and what
we experience, we become longing, thirsty souls all the more.
The truth of it is - pain is part of the deal. Being born is no
easy transition. We flow out of that universal bank of the want
to be, where we truly are one with all that is. And then we are
forced through the Mizrahim-the narrow passage of the birth canal
- out into this human existence. We find ourselves - literally find
ourselves because now we have self-awareness - we find ourselves
small and weak and dependent. That's painful enough, but it doesn't
stop there:
" Some of us human beings grow up in dysfunctional and even
violent families, and the pain is multiplied.
" Some of us grow up as part of an oppressed ethnic minority,
or a minority of gender orientation or gender identification, and
the pain is multiplied.
" Some of us are smuggled across national boundaries and forced
into an imposed invisibility, and the pain is multiplied.
" Some of us get caught up in addictions, or find ourselves
struggling to maintain our mental health, or we find ourselves learning
to live with acquired disabilities, or adjusting to new and threatening
diagnoses, even imminent death, and the pain is multiplied.
" Some of us human beings go to bed at night praying that the
missiles launched by a neighboring country do not have our address
programmed into their guidance systems, and the pain is multiplied.
" Some of us wake up in the morning and find that the earth
and maybe even the ocean have literally shifted in their places,
perhaps we are facing the threat of a nuclear meltdown, and the
pain is multiplied.
" And all of us, all of us, go through life enduring loss after
loss... of love, of loved ones, of dreams, of opportunities, and
the pain is multiplied.
The thing that we can count on - is pain. It's not bad; it just
is. And perhaps, because our very being seems to rely on that pain
as a springboard for our existence, maybe even the pain itself is
good. Either way, pain remains the given. Given pain, given our
longing and thirsting souls, where do we turn for healing? Where
do we turn to have our longings met and our thirsts quenched? If
pain is the given, then transformation of that pain into meaning
and fulfillment is the possibility.
Throughout the human story there've been many religious responses
put forward in an effort to answer this question. I was raised in
the Christian tradition. There's such a beauty to the Christian
response to this longing. The Christian response is - Christ. Even
in the pain that one cannot admit to oneself, Jesus loves you. Even
in the struggles, the heartbreak and the heart ache, the disappointment
and the hopelessness, Jesus loves you. It's a simple message, repeated
over and over. A great many people find a good deal of comfort and
meaning in it. And that is wonderful.
I don't have anything against Jesus. I don't. But Jesus has been
dead for a very long time. On a metaphorical level, I really can
appreciate Jesus as a living symbol of the ideal of universal and
unconditional love that can include me and by extension all the
rest of creation. But I'm afraid that far too often in history,
Jesus has been used as a metaphor for power, dominance, and dominion
in ways that have justified violence, murder and warfare. For me,
the metaphor of Jesus has been far too abused to provide the kind
of experience that I need, that I expect we all need, when our souls
are parched and we must be renewed by the eternal spring that knows
no end.
The opportunity of a lifetime is to transcend pain, to redeem it
with meaning and perhaps with joy, through love. So I say, give
me the metaphor of an undulating universe with a stream of life
that melts into being from a reservoir of endless wanting to be.
Does not wanting give way to being through the warmth, maybe the
fire, of love? We are of the rivulets, the offspring of love, that
course forward into being. We are the emulations, the electrical
impulses - the collectors, the savers, the users and the regenerators
of the life energy that has been entrusted to us.
There is nothing, I trust, that separates us from one another,
from this planet, from all that is, short of our self-awareness.
That doesn't make self-awareness evil or sinful. Self-awareness
is what makes us who and what we are. Our self-awareness is what
was attached to the emulation that melted out of the want to be
and formed the identity of who each of us is. It is the manifestation
of life that is I, that is thou. Our self-awareness is what leaves
us wanting. It creates the hunger that can only be sated by love
and our participation in it. Our self-awareness presents the question,
and love provides the answer of every hunger in our lifetime. One
and two; plus and minus; yes and no. Now... and now... and now.
We are able to drink from that never-ending, ever-pulsing, surging
stream of existence - out of which we came and into which we will
return - when we learn to drink of it with something of humility
that can open us to love. We are able to drink from it when we let
go of ideas of perfection and attitudes of arrogance. We are able
to drink from it when we learn to accept ourselves lovingly, and
then go on to accept others as our brothers and sisters, equal partners
in what is becoming a mad dash just to save this planet from ourselves.
The want to be exists; I believe it is so. The pulsating stream
that issues from it is there for us. It is there of us, as we are
of it. And the invitation that rides upon each crest is to drink
from it, to fill our longing, thirsty souls. Whatever may happen
in our lives - the choice to drink and the choice to love - lie
in front of us at every step of the way. However threatening the
transition before us may appear, however painful it may seem, the
stream is there for us to drink from it. The stream is there for
us to step into it.
Perhaps a better world is drawing near
And just as easily, it could all disappear
Along with whatever meaning you might have found
Don't let the uncertainty turn you around.
The world keeps turning around and around.
[So] Go on and make a joyful sound. (Jackson Browne)
It would be wonderful, wouldn't it, if there were a magic well
we could go to and drink from, one that would cure our pain and
still our longing. But magic is not something that comes of nothing.
Magic is what occurs in the ebb and flow of love. Magic occurs within
the connections that make us more than individuals, within the connections
that make us part of something much grander and much larger than
ourselves.
The stream is a metaphor; love is the truth. And I have to believe
that there is a want to be, and that we are indeed somehow a part
of the answer to that want. If we are going to be healed and nurtured
by that want, we will not only need to explore individual paths
to find where it melts into our existence. We will need to find
collective trails that will allow us to go to it and drink from
it together. We will need to learn to rely on our love for one another
and for our planet to guide us. That will require a great deal of
faith on our part.
The time of melting snow banks, this time of silver rain, could
be ideal for the restoring, the renewing, and the rebirthing of
that faith.
In time of silver rain
The earth
Puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow in
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads
Of life,
of life,
of life! (Langston Hughes)
The opportunity of a lifetime is to transcend our pain, redeeming
it with meaning, perhaps even joy, through the experience of love.
Did you ever stop to look
at a snow pile on a warming day,
as the softening mass of the once frozen,
once white crystals
were transformed,
before your eyes?
The time is now... and it is now... and it is now.
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