A Promise and a Hope

January 21 2007
Westminster Unitatian Church
Rev. Barbara Fast

Opening Words From Raymond Carver:

And did you get what you wanted, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself, beloved.
To know myself beloved on this earth.”



A Promise and a Hope
 
I been walking along the beach this mid winter. I got to remembering my son Dan at the beach in mid summer. Afternoons at the seashore have a kind of eternal quality.  He loved to build sandcastles on the beach. He lost himself in his work. Enthused, engaged.  I can see him constructing those fortress castles. I’d read my book. He was onto the turrets. I’d take a walk. He’d dig deep escape tunnels. He’d alternate all of this enterprise with races into the waves.

With time he came to know that he needed to construct moats and mountains of sand to hold back the rising tide of the lazy late afternoon.  He’d excavate moats to form  levees to hold off the full assault of the rising tide of the always rolling ocean surf that pulses in time the heart at the center of creation.

And when the waves raced toward his castle he’d yell out “Incoming” and throw himself onto the sand, arms and legs reaching out into infinity. He would fling his full length in front of his sculptures, crashing onto the land with glee, protecting the battlements.

He was playing like a holy man. Delight filled him as the castle was nibbled away, consumed by the sea, returned to the flat lay of the shore, pulled out past him, his every effort futile and filled with adventure, for grain by grain, the moat muddied into puddle, the tunnels tumbled down into what  had been.

Dan loved it all, every moment. He gave himself away to it rising up and its going down.  He lay down that night, on cool summer sheets, and dreamless satisfaction.

We don’t, do we? Look forward to the aging, dying, failing, ending, the way we look forward to the borning, birthing, building, beginning? We have no faith in the adventure?

The castles were there- still – just their shape had changed!
But oh – wasn’t the beach shining and beautiful!

Do you remember the first time you realized that you would die? I do.  I was 7 years old- lying in a cool summer bed in a back bedroom up at the LAKE – it came over me- that I would die-  inevitably – and I felt in my heart of hearts- no matter how good or religious- I would die- nothing to be done about it. Over: Awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It was a distant shoreline, but one day, it I would arrive there and Death.  It was just a matter of time.
 
Human Beings, we live with that realization. We live mostly in denial, which is useful, but we know.  That might be why out of our imaginations we invented rituals and religions.  We want life to mean something.  

Marilynne Robinson , novelist, author of  a luminous novel, Gilead. The arch of her narrative is an older preacher, husband, father, who knows he will die before his young son comes of age, writes him a letter.

He writes:  “The word preacher comes from the old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble.”

That is what religion does, we hope. It help us find meaning in trouble. To remind us call us back to best selves: restore our faith, hope and love.

So when those we love come to that shoreline, here is a promise we can keep and a hope we can hold onto. 

One of us it a candle two weeks ago and said of a friend who had come home to die, “I will not abandon him.”  That is a promise we can keep. That we will stay connected.  A human hand can convey the truth- you are loved.
What is a greater gift than the gift of your presence.

We keep faith with each other when we keep our promises…
By showing up we restore our faith that we are loved, we love, no matter appearances. We are loved, we love.

I think of Paul McCartney describing how he sat silently holding George’s hand as he was actively dying of lung cancer, when there was nothing left unsaid.

We can abide and bear it when there is nothing else to “do” but be there. That is a promise we can keep.

Kind of. 

‘Kind of’ because the truth is we are human. We are finite. We cannot be everything, do everything. Be everywhere.   I have come to learn, in my life, that there are things that won’t get done. There are things we won’t get to say…comforts that will be missed…mistakes made…and that is life.

Ministers know that there are times when things are left undone, mistakes are made.  If you cannot accept that, forgive that, wake up and try again to do better, you cannot minister. If we are going to practice sharing care here in community. It is a practice and it takes courage and discipline and faith.

A mentor once told me that it helped her leave the hospital every evening,  to have faith that a force of greater strength and love than human- was accessible and available and faithful. It helped her go home at night. It is no just up to us.
There is so much grace in this world, we cannot imagine.

We will believe from time to time that we have failed each other. Maybe even ourselves. Is that forgivable?  Let us have humility about who we are, human merely being, as e. e. cummings wrote or ‘cumin’ beings as my mother in law Bette would say.

I heard from a friend that her husband’s mother had died.  Her husband had faithfully traveled great distances to visit her over the years. She died, after a long stay in nursing care facility, where her husband and local family regularly visited.

He had planned to call and speak his love to her over the phone, even if she could not respond. She died the day before he could do this.

Oh- how he is punishing himself for being human.  We have this magical thinking, that we can do it all. Show up at all the right times.  That we can save- our loved ones. Our parents. Our beloveds.

Perhaps, he is punishing himself for the one thing he could not do- for all his preparation…the big thing he couldn’t do as her son- save his mother.
 
The big grief, we can keep at bay, if we fuss, fight, get mad.  It is easier to be mad than sad and suffering  in the face of decline and death. 

We can’t save anyone. Truth. We are human. It is what it is. 
We face our own humility before creation…We face our own mortality.
It helps me to know that things do not begin and end with me.

And Hope? Where does hope reside?  In times of trouble? 

Emily Dickenson wrote:
HOPE is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all…                      

Hope never stops at all!  There are no words to explain it….no words to express itself…but it never stops…HOPE  is always ready to take wing…It never flies…It perches- prepared ….ever ready…in our soul..

We need only be quiet and still long enough and listen… hear the song without words… Words would confuse us, contain us, misdirect us…no words…
To what tune?  There are infinite tunes  – enough for each one of us human beings. No doubt there are infinite tunes within one of us…

Do you know?   Every ED poem?  It might also be the tune “Yellow Rose of Texas.”  Garrison Keillor once said that almost every Emily Dickenson poem can be sung to the Yellow Rose of Texas! 

(Sing)

My husband’s mom Bette, at family dinner parties, loved to sing when Jon played the piano. As the tune progressed she’d lose the words and start to la, la,,,then hum…drove him crazy!

She also loved to give dinner parties… Jon’s mom loved dinner parties- she loved them. After she died I found in a kitchen drawer a small book where she kept a record of her dinner parties: Date, guests, menu. It was like archeology.

Bette was gracious…elegant… She was a sculptor, Jewish by birth and practice and devout atheist, creative artist her whole life.  Her arms were so strong…from sculpting and baking bread…Her sour dough starter…I kept it for over a decade…

When Jon and I started dating, she embraced me from the very first day.

The day I got accepted to Yale Div School Bette was diagnosed with Colon cancer. That was April. She died the following November. I  was with her the day she was diagnosed and the day she died.

In the hospital elevator, after her surgery, after they knew her liver was ‘involved’, the doctor told us she would die…He did not tell her. 
‘Why not’, I asked him.
‘Hope.’ The doctor told us he did not tell her it was terminal because it would take away her hope…and she did not ask…so that was a sign…you follow.

I have thought about that remark. I guess for the doctor the hope of cure was gone.
But what about all the other fluttering hopes- the hope for care, healing, blessing, connection, meaning, for living every day.
Yes- the hope for cure may not be possible, probable, but the other hopes, for connection, for healing, for forgiveness, for reconciliation. for loving…  Hope perches in our capacity to bring love alive, in face of all the insufficiency of our mortal lives.

The words to the song that your presence brings do not matter…hope is what is perches there between you…What brings you , keeps you, connected..

‘And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble.’

It takes humility and courage to keep loving,  to keep being willing to see through to the beauty, the beauty… the beauty beyond all appearances. Beyond all judgments

That is why I love the poets. Virginia Woolf’s birthday anniversary is January 25th. Mrs Dalloway is a novel she wrote in 1925, about one day of a very ordinary woman. We know her for one day. This passage is but a few moments from her life. .She is giving a dinner party that night. She is wondering why she gives dinner parties and about life.

‘What she liked was simply life. That’s what I do it for”, she said speaking aloud to life. ..
But to go deeper, beneath what people said  (and these judgements , how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing called life? Oh, it was very queer.

Here was so and so in South Kensington: some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair,  And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence;
and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together ; so she did it.

And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.

Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenian and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense; and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. 

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park;  it was enough.
 
After that, how unbelievable death was! That it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she loved it all; every instant…’

Art!  Bette’s art was her SCULPTURE. It was her work and her religion.  It was sacred to her. It was how she made meaning. Her last sculpture, worked on before her diagnosis… was of a woman,  head in hands…bare headed, boney. She began and essentially completed it before her diagnosis.   It was how she looked in the end… And so what!

I would go and be with Bette- We all would spend time…and sometimes I would rub her back ….words were not important…but that one day should follow another …

Two nights before she died, while I rubbed her back and her elegant voice had become pitched high like a bird,  she looked at Jon and said, ‘You have done good. You married a woman who can make your mother feel better…”

Bette was blessing…Blessing me…blessing our lives…by being completely herself.. just where she was…loving…it all …every instant…

I am just the messenger here…the reporter…I’ll describe what I observed…Her last morning…Jon and his father had gone to get pain med…she had been weak and semi conscious….She sat up in her bed, blue eyes—riveted on a place above and beyond my shoulder…And she stared there …eyes wide open…filled with a vision.  Amazement….Then she fell back and let go her last breathe….

‘All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky…it was enough.
 
After that, how unbelievable death was! That it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she loved it all; every instant…’

Hope, life, love, meaning perches many places: every breathe, gesture, slant of light of the day, soft black night, in the silence, when we sing…even when we forget the words.

Does anyone know how much you love it all ..every instant?

What if that is it!  Maybe what if…the way to feel beloved is to love…
Maybe we should assume that we are beloved…
Isn’t that faith!
To know in our bones..that we are, born, and before birth, and after death…beloved…
Instead of doubting it and fearing we are not and proving over and over that we should be, deserve to be
Instead of testing this life, our friends, ourselves, if we just let ourselves BE- BELOVED.
What if- we lived as if we are beloved…
And just loved…anyway…

When we do that…We build belovedness in this world…we build beloved community in our lives..we build up and we delight in the building…
Like Dan….in all our creations…
And then we also can delight – if it all about being beloved no matter what…Then we also delight in the letting go..then we bless no matter what..
then we love no matter what.
 
Then as the waves draw down the castles we have created in the sand-
thinking as we do that they are forever…. We have faith that we are no less beloved..because of death…They are not forever but our belovedness is forever…And we can delight as Dan did – in that rising and falling tides of creation…

So I will end with this story- a Hindu story. (I have heard ?)
Of a wave…bobbing along in the ocean..having a grand time…enjoying the wind and fresh air..
Then he notices other waves in front of him..crashing into the shore
‘My god, this is terrible’ he says, ‘Look at what is happening! They are all crashing! And it is going to happen to me!’
And then along comes another wave…who seeing the little wave, asks:
‘Why are you so sad…’
‘You don’t understand—how can you be so calm! We are all going to crash..all us waves..we are going to be nothing!’

‘Listen’- says his companion- ‘you are not a wave…you are not a wave.
You are part of the ocean.
You are a part of the ocean.”

Now let’s humm …..that tune…..( Yellow Rose of Texas).

END


Copyright Barbara Fast 2006
May be used with attribution.


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