“The Sabbath Stranger”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
July 16, 2006
The poet Robert Frost wrote a poem that is an invitation to our theme this morning entitled, "The Pasture."
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the clear water, I may):
I shan't be gone long—You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's too young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long—You come too.
Robert Frost’s poem is an invitation to come along, to take time out and to notice life. We might think of it is an invitation to Sabbath, a time out of the ordinary; a time when we might pay close attention to matters of the spirit and soul; a time when we might explore more deeply what it means to be, and what it means to be human.
We live in an age that does not offer us much by way of time or space for Sabbath. Too often, that leaves us a stranger to it, a stranger to the Sabbath. And so today—this summer morning, sticky and warm and moist—I’ll invite you along on a bit of a spiritual trek. Amidst some poetry and a little prose, I'll invite you to come along too, to meet that Sabbath stranger—the Sabbath stranger who perhaps is you.
I'll share some words from verses old and new,
To hear what sages are so want to say
About the splendor of each wondrous day.
I shan't be gone long—You come to.
In one of my all-time favorite summer poems, "The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver reminds us that the first step is to pay attention.
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?
Why? We might ask, why would we want/need to pay attention? "There is a something, just below the surface in all existence," an unknown writer once wrote. "There is a something, just below the surface in all existence, that ties everything else together. It has existed from the beginning of time, and will continue for all eternity. As we stumble through life, good moments are those that get us in touch with this everlasting still point.”
Why might we want to pay attention? Is it not there—in the attention—that we might encounter that everlasting still point?? Is it not there—in the attention—that we might engage in the mystery that holds us in life? Albert Einstein once wrote, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
But Dostoyevsky reminded us that it is love that keeps our eyes open—that keeps us from death. "Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in [all] things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love." Not an unworthy vision to keep before us on this journey!
Engaging the mystery begins with paying attention and it follows a path that is paved with love. The Brazilian scholar, philosopher and photographer Sebastiao Salgado reminds us that we are not the first pilgrims to have passed along this way. He reminds us that we are a part of a grand succession, which began well before us and will continue long after.
"All of life is a collaboration. The destiny of men and women is to create a new world, to reveal a new life, to remember that there exists a frontier for everything except dreams. In history, there are not solitary dreamers - one dreamer breathes life into the next."
And so now it is our time to be the dreamers, to be the pilgrims. Our call is to attention and our path, if it is true, is the course of love—one that we may find reaches into ourselves so far that we just might find it reaching out to embrace everyone and everything that is. The Indian mystic poet Kabir wrote (translated by Robert Bly):
The flute of interior time is played whether we hear it or not.
What we mean by "love" is its sound coming in.
When love hits the farthest edge of excess, it reaches wisdom.
And the fragrance of that knowledge!
It penetrates our thick bodies,
It goes through walls—
Its network of notes has a structure as if a million suns
Were arranged inside.
This tune has truth in it.
Where else have you heard a sound like this?
The path leads us on by leading us in. The poet D. H. Lawrence speaks of the power we access when we dare to follow where the journey of the Spirit leads us; the power we access when we dare to enter the forest of our souls:
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forest again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
And in another poem, “This Is What I Believe," D. H. Lawrence speaks of the experience that we have when we’ve finally reached an encounter with that central space within, which is at our very core:
This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.
"That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go."
Strange gods coming and going. How do we know when we've encountered a strange god? Is that the person sitting in the seventh row, whom I have never seen or met before? Is it the broken heart I experience today, that I almost cannot bear, but that tomorrow may yet bless me with even greater love than I have already known? Is it the illness that puts my life in peril and at the same moment makes it all the more precious to me? As we walk along on this summer morning, is one of our strange gods one of the birds flying along in the field just ahead?
Mary Oliver recognizes such strange gods in her poem, "Mockingbird."
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing
the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing
better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.
In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door
to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,
but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give
but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them
and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water
from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,
and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing
but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.
Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said
I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying
through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.
In order to better dream, we might attempt to better listen.
There is a very close relationship between the mystery, which is the cause, the source and the sustenance of the universe and that mystery which is at the core of our own beings. When we engage the stranger out in the world, be it the Mockingbird or an ancient Greek god, we open a portal to our own innermost soul. And somehow the barriers that separate us from one another, from the planet and from the mystery, somehow they are made more permeable. And somehow we find our way more deeply into the oneness of all things.
But first it begins with trust. First it begins with faith. First it begins with our ability to let go of the obsession to control what happens. “First Lesson,” is a poem written by Philip Booth. Perhaps on a summer day such as this you can imagine such a scene:
Lie back, Daughter, let your head
Be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, I will hold you. Spread your arms
Wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls.
A dead-man’s float is face down. You will dive
And swim soon enough where this tidewater
Ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
Me, when you tire on your long swim
To your island, lie up and survive.
As you float now, where I hold you
And let go, remember when fear
Cramps your heart, what I told you:
Lie gently and wide to the light-year stars,
Lie back and the sea will hold you.
The struggle to let go, to trust, to have faith is not a new one. Surely it has accompanied humankind from our most ancient of times. “The Quest,” by 20th-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
How shall we be able to forget those ancient myths
That are the beginning of all peoples?
The myths about dragons
That at the last moment turn into princesses?
Perhaps all of the dragons of our lives are princesses
Who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being
Something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you
Larger than any you have ever seen:
If a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows
Passes over your hands and over all that you do.
You must think that something is happening with you,
That life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand.
It will not let you fall.
Still, it is about letting go of our fears and allowing ourselves to be held, allowing ourselves to be healed. By what? Perhaps by the mystery, or the universe, or by the love that our being in the universe makes possible.
The stranger within and the stranger without are so very closely related. They're not even distant cousins. In the mystery, they are two expressions of our common humanity. One not only leads to the other, it is the other. And again in the mystery we are one. In his book, The Company of Strangers, Parker J. Palmer writes:
“The key figure in public life is the stranger. The stranger is also central in Biblical stories of faith—and for good reason. The religious quest, the spiritual pilgrimage, is always taking us into new lands where we are strange to others and they are strange to us. Faith is a venture into the unknown, into the realms of mystery, away from the safe and comfortable and secure. When we remain in the security of familiar surroundings, we have no need of faith.
“The very idea of faith suggests a movement away from our usual securities into the distant, the unsettling, the strange. Even if we stay at home, even if we are not on a conscious pilgrimage, the stranger who comes into our lives may well be a Pilgrim bearing news. Through the stranger we may have something of the unsettling Spirit brought into our domesticated lives. When we meet the stranger, we are engaged in public life, and through such engagement, guests of the spirit will be brought into our lives.”
As we travel even deeper into our soul and spirit, as we learn to pay attention, to walk in love, to let go, to have faith and trust, to be held and healed, to embrace the stranger, we begin to learn that—though our modern world might want us to think otherwise—we begin to learn that we are not so terribly inadequate. Perhaps we are only too long strangers to ourselves. And perhaps such suspicion awakens yet another concern.
In a piece often attributed to the 1994 inaugural address by Nelson Mandela, but which was actually published in, “A Return to Love,” New Age spiritualist Marianne Williamson wrote:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
And so, as we begin to near the end of our expedition this morning, as our road inward leads us back out again, perhaps we can find a word of summary and direction from the scholar and great African-American educator Howard Thurman (who, by the way, once spoke from this very pulpit). Thurman wrote of centering:
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;
A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment—the kinds of people we are.
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?—what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind—
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered,
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!
To center down is to find or to create a place where we can take a stand, but only to stand for just a moment. For in the end, life is always and ever about moving onward. And, we might note on this day when so much blood is being shed halfway around the world, what an impossibility war would be, if people everywhere would get out of the , “…glass bottles of our egos,” and merely center down.
The great contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tich Nhat Hanh wrote,
"Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentry into society. We call this ‘engaged Buddhism.’ When we go to a meditation center, we may have the impression that we leave everything behind—family, society, and all the complications involved in them—and calm as an individual in order to practice and to search for peace. This is already an illusion, because in Buddhism there is no such thing as an individual."
To engage the Sabbath stranger, to engage in the Sabbath, is not an escape from the world, from our challenges, from our woes, nor even from our responsibilities. To engage in the Sabbath is merely taking a moment… to take note, to take stock, to take heart, to build faith and to grow hope. It is about learning to accept forgiveness and offer it. It is about learning to accept love and offer it. It is about stepping into the mystery and engaging with the stranger who we find there. It is about our intentions, and it’s about paying attention. It is about engaging in the everlasting still point that binds each of us to All-That-Is.
It shan't take too long—You come too. |
