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“How To Begin Again”
January 8, 2012
Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
Rev. Bruce Bode
Lighting the Chalice (in unison)
We are travelers. We meet for a moment in this sacred place to love, to share, to
serve. Let us use compassion, curiosity, reverence, and respect while seeking our truths.
In this way we will support a just and joyful community, and this moment shall endure.
(QUUF Covenant Statement)
Opening Words
Holy and beautiful is the custom by which we gather together near the beginning of
this new year.
Here we come to give our thanks, to face our ideals, to remember our loved ones, to
seek that which is permanent, and to serve integrity, beauty, and the qualities of life that
make it rich and whole.
Through this hour breathes the worship of all the ages, the cathedral music of all
history; blessed are the ears that hear that eternal sound.
Responsive Reading
MINISTER: Near the beginning of this new calendar year, we gather in our sanctuary to
prepare our hearts and minds for the year before us.
CONGREGATION: What lies ahead of us in this coming year belongs to the unknown.
MINISTER: There may be challenges we have never had to face before, sorrows we have
never had to bear before, joys we have never glimpsed before.
CONGREGATION: With anticipation and wonder, fear and humility, again we stand
before the unknown seeking to find our way.
MINISTER: We depend upon strength that may be more than we now know, resources
from hidden springs to sustain us.
CONGREGATION: And we depend upon each other, for we do not journey alone in this
adventure.
ALL: We walk together into this new year, strengthening, supporting, encouraging, and
caring for each other.
Reading
This morning’s reading is from the American poet, Mary Oliver. As with so many of her
poems, this one expresses the connection of the poet’s smaller self to the larger world of
nature to which she goes for repair. It’s titled, “Am I Not among the Early Risers.”
Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?
Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing
free to everyone, and everything?
Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?
What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly
at the top of the field,
her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,
has not already done?
What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
Here is an amazement – once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
Above the modest house and the palace – the same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and the child who will
not recover, the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.
I bow down.
(Mary Oliver, excerpt from “Am I Not among the Early Risers,” West Wind)
“HOW TO BEGIN AGAIN?”
Introduction
Here, near the beginning of the new year, we are called to reflect upon the passage of
time and the course of our life with respect to that passage of time: to consider where we
have been, where we are going, and what to make of it.
I have two poems for you on this occasion of the turning of the year, two poems that
reflect two different perspectives.
The first perspective is represented by a poem related to the incessant hoof-beat of time:
the linear, historical, horizontal dimension of our lives. It’s a straight-forward, easy to
understand poem that has to do with our ego-orientation – our sense of personal identity,
our plans, our hopes, our dreams.
The second poem is not so straight-forward or easy to understand. It points us to a
vertical dimension of our being: not time but eternity, not our ego-orientation, but the
orientation of a deeper self not related to or bound by time.
Clock-time
Let’s begin with the first poem titled, “The Clock,” written by Dennis O’Driscoll, and
published by the Copper Canyon Press here in Port Townsend.
The Clock
With only one story to tell, the clock strikes
a monotonous note, irrespective of how
musical the bell, how gilded the chimes
its timely conclusions report through.
Time literally on hands, it informs you
to your face exactly where you stand
in relation to your aspirations, stacks up
the odds against your long-term prospects,
leaves your hopes and expectations checked.
Keeping track of time to the last second, it gives
the lie to all small talk about your reputedly
youthful looks, sees through the subterfuge
of dyed hair, exposes the stark truth beneath
the massaged evidence of smooth skin.
(“The Clock” by Dennis O'Driscoll, from Reality Check, Copper Canyon Press, 2008)
The tick-tock of the clock
A couple of days ago, someone sent me one of those humorous dispatches that make their
way around the Internet. It advertised itself as, “The Meaning of Life in 13 words.” The
e-mail memo showed the photo of a man, probably around 85 years old, alert, whitehaired, thin-haired, loose-skinned, well-worn … and with an open-mouthed, startled
expression. Underneath the thirteen-word caption read: “Inside every older person is a
younger person wondering what the [bleep] happened.”
More poetically, you may recall a poem from the 17th century English poet, Andrew
Marvell, that was a standard in college literature classes, titled, “To His Coy Mistress.”
It’s a poem in which the poet addresses a woman who has been slow to respond to his
romantic entreaties. It begins:
“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.”
And, then, the first stanza goes on to describe how much time the would-be lover would
spend admiring the various features and qualities of his beloved: a hundred years to
praise her eyes, and a hundred as well for her forehead, and two hundred years to adore
each breast, and thirty thousand years on all the rest. And, lastly, a whole age admiring
the qualities of her heart. The poet says that his beloved deserves this much time for his
praise and adoration.
However, the poet is keen to point out one small problem, namely, that this leisurely
process of adoration won’t be possible given our time-bound conditions. And then
follow the famous words:
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;”
The grave, says the poet, is:
“… a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.”
And so, my coy mistress, enough with being coy – “carpe diem,” let us seize the day:
“Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
The significance of the ego-oriented perspective
So this is one perspective we can consider as we change calendars at the beginning of this
new year: the consciousness of “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” The clock is ticktocking away, and our time is running out. Therefore, seize the day. Make use of the
time you have. Give of your gifts now. Make your contributions to the world while you
are able. Go after those things on your bucket list NOW, because if you delay, decay and
decrepitude will overtake you and win the day.
This perspective has its value – I would not disparage it. I would give the ego-oriented
part of our being its day in court; I would give it its rights.
The underside of the ego-oriented perspective
I would, however, point out an underside to this ego-oriented perspective, namely, that if
this is one’s only perspective, it is not enough … because this perspective moves
irresistibly, irrevocably, irretrievably toward diminishment, anxiety, and ultimately death.
The ego part of our being is time-bound and identity-bound. It is connected to the parts,
not to the whole.
And that’s one of the points made in the poem, “The Clock.” As the first line says, the
clock has only one perspective, “only one story to tell,” a story it tells with monotonous
and irritating regularity, giving the lie to our ego’s denials. But with such truth-telling by
the clock, it opens up the search for an additional perspective than clock-time.
A non-ego orientation
And, thus, I suggest that we need another perspective as we make the turn into a new
year, and that is the perspective of – and here you will have to find language that works
for you – what I would refer to as the perspective of “a deeper self” or of one’s “soul.”
This is the perspective of the vertical dimension of our being, the depth dimension, the
dimension that connects us to the creative power of all being and is not just concerned
with our individual, isolated being.
This is a perspective that we find explored in the second poem that I have for you this
morning, titled “Luing,” and pronounced “Ling” – the “u” is silent.
Background to “Luing”
“Luing” is a poem that a good friend of mine in Michigan pointed out to me a couple of
months ago, a poem that appeared in a New York Times article on October 9. The article
was titled, “Poetry Made Me Do It: My Trip to the Hebrides,” written by Jeff Gordinier.
The article describes the author’s visit to the small island of Luing, just off the mainland
of Scotland, where the author had an opportunity to meet the Scottish poet who had
written the poem – the poet, Don Paterson.
Let’s turn to that poem now to see what answer it gives to how to find your life again
when it seems totally run by clock time … or when you are lost, out of control, can’t find
your center, have lost touch with the eternal and transcendent dimension of life and
being. Let me read it through first, then we’ll come back and look at some of its features.
Luing
When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,
I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.
Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,
watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?
Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,
aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.
“The lover’s wound”
This poem begins by posing the issue to be explored. The first four lines read:
When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,…
As I see it, these lines have to do with our unwillingness to let go of what we are attached
to. When you love someone or something, you are attached to that person or thing. It’s
in the nature of things for the ego to attach itself to the things of this world.
But there’s a price to be paid for that attachment that comes due when you are called to
separate from that to which you are attached. And, as we well know, breaking the bonds
from what we love is most always a difficult task … and done with reluctance.
And this, I take it, is the “lover’s wound.” It’s the wound that occurs when what you are
attached to is taken from you. That separation might occur through rejection, through
change, through death, and so forth; but whatever it is that pulls you from your
attachment, the pain is there.
And so you resist such separation; you refuse to let go. Perhaps, you even develop some
mental confusion around this process and somehow think that what you are attached to
belongs to you … that you are an owner of something, rather than just a borrower … and,
thus, you refuse to give up what you take to be yours … refuse to let go … refuse to
empty yourself … refuse “to take that lover’s wound again.”
But, paradoxically, says the poem, you complete yourself when you let go – “that cup of
emptiness that is our one completion.”
The cup in the Garden of Gethsemane
With regard to that “cup of emptiness that is our one completion,” I think of the gospel
story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the struggle between holding on and
letting go – sweating, as it were, drops of blood – that’s the intensity of such a struggle.
But, finally, letting go, the spiritual master says, “Not my will, but thine be done.” And
in that moment of release, there is completion. The one who would lose his life – let go
of his or hers ego plans for it – finds it.
But here we won’t let go. We refuse the lover’s wound. It’s almost inevitable that we
would do so. But we are also refusing the thing that would complete us.
Any advice here? What do you do when you are in this state of holding on to what you
take to be yours?
The rest of the poem will presumably try to answer that question. So here we go with the
next four lines:
I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.
Now we’re setting off on a journey. In this poem the journey is at two levels – an
outward, literal journey to the little Scottish island of Luing, which will also serve as a
metaphor for an interior place, “our unsung innermost isle.”
We should note that often in both actual life and in the arts the journey to discover or reconnect with one’s innermost soul is accomplished through some physical journey of
some kind, some kind of pilgrimage or another, like the pilgrimage portrayed in the
recent movie titled, The Way.
Now, to find your way through the pilgrimage of the soul portrayed in this poem, you
need to be briefed on a little Scottish geography.
“Luing,” according to the Jeff Gordinier, the author of the New York Times article that I
referred to, is an obscure 5.5 square mile island off the west coast of Scotland in the Inner
Hebrides. It has two small villages and a population under two hundred of farmers and
fishermen. One reaches it by a ferry that is more like a raft. What Jeff Gordinier
discovered when he went there is that:
“It [Luing] had no tourist industry to speak of. It had no pubs, no hotels, no
restaurants, no blood-soaked battlefields. Luing was a place that you might spy in
the distance as you traveled to somewhere else.”
And one of the places you might be traveling is to another more popular island named St.
Kilda Island in the Outer Hebrides to the west. In contrast to the island of Luing, St.
Kilda Island is a much more dramatic place, a place that is a tourist attraction, a place that
people seek out when they want to go on a vision quest. Here’s what Jeff Gordinier
reported that Don Paterson, the poet, said about St. Kilda when Gordinier interviewed
him:
When people in Scotland want to embark on some kind of vision quest, he
[Patterson] said, they usually venture way out into the North Atlantic to St. Kilda, an
isolated and storm-ravaged cluster of rocks that has become “very much a place of
romantic pilgrimage for people.”
“You get there and it’s full of librarians from Glasgow trying to find
themselves,” he said. “That’s not what you want.”
What you want, he continued, is a hidden gem like Luing, an island that’s “both
protected and open,” close in distance to the mainland but eons away.
The journey of the soul is a humble journey
So here’s the deal: This journey toward your deeper self, you interior soul, is not the
sought-after public and popular way. It’s a humble journey toward a humble place.
Metaphorically, it’s a place beyond the vision quest island. It’s the vision quest island
within, and it’s not for tourists.
Nevertheless, this island is functional. Just as the literal island supports its inhabitants –
Luing, as the poem says, has its own anthem, and its yellow milkwort and stunted kye –
there’s a type of cattle known as “Luing cattle” that were bred on this island … just as
this island supports its own plant and animal life, so, too, your innermost soul will
support you.
And so, says the poem, this is where we are journeying to in order to find ourselves, and
in order to add another perspective to that of clock-time.
Continuing the journey
So continuing with our journey to Luing, we pick up the next five and a half lines, which
read:
Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,
watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills.
So this journey to our innermost island from our motherland – the land of clock-time – is,
as we are learning, a humble affair. You get there with a little two-car ferry, the smallest
of the fleet, that crosses the minch – the body of water, a strait, separating the islands
from the Scottish mainland.
Thus, you don’t need a big vessel to find yourself. And it’s not really very far at all. Not
a great distance in terms of space.
But, now, a bit of a surprise: As you leave the motherland, you can see her with greater
clarity. You get a new perspective of the place you are leaving as you leave it: There she
is just across the strait. There are her hills. You can see her everyday activity, the vans
traveling the hills.
And now, suddenly, you feel your deep love for your mother. You can almost physically
feel her arms around you, the rhythm of her breathing. You are like an infant tenderly
cradled in your mother’s arms.
Intimate exile
And now the remaining two and a half lines of the fourth verse:
In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?
This was the part of the poem I had the most difficulty with, until it was pointed out to
me that “burn” means stream or creek. Thus, a possible understanding is this: “In such
intimate exile” the poet feels the stream behind the house to be like a narrowed ocean.
On a local map, the stream could appear to be the size of the ocean (on a larger world
map) – and perhaps the stream feels oceanic in scope to the poet as he gazes with new
eyes to the mainland from his island haunt.
The conclusion
And now we come to the conclusion of the poem, the last two stanzas, and the answer to
our quest.
Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,
aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.
What’s happening here?
Rebirth. Regeneration.
At the literal level, the Atlantic Ocean is very shallow and can be crossed here. And, at
the symbolic level, you can make it across this divide to connect with your deeper self –
it’s very doable. Think of it: You are the only one stopping yourself from being reborn
into a secret candidancy.
A candidate is a person who seeks a certain office, or one who is destined to come to a
certain end – to be reborn into a new position. But this is not a public position or an
exterior election, but a secret one, something interior – a birth into a new inner power and
position.
That new birth is as if the fontanelles from your infancy were to re-open one by one – an
arresting image to me.
The fontenelles are the tough connective tissues covering the open spaces between the
bones of a human infant to allow for growth in the brain and skull. We are most familiar
with the fontanelle on the top of the head of babies, the so-called “soft spot” in infants
that closes and becomes hardened into bone within the first year and a half. But, actually
there are six fontanelles in the skulls of human infants.
In my research, I didn’t find any mention of fontanelles in other parts of the body. But,
here, in this poem, there are fontanelles all over … and now these fontanelles re-open one
by one. The open places that allowed physical growth to take place in our infancy, now,
metaphorically, re-open so that mental and spiritual growth can take place.
After a time in nature, or in solitude, or away from your everyday life, the old habits drop
away and you open up. You can feel it happening, one by one: in the palms … and the
breastbone … and the brow.
Amazing! You can feel things again, like you did in your childhood. You feel an
“aching” at the cry of the seabirds. And you connect with all of nature, as represented by
the rowan tree that has bright orange berries that don’t seem to follow the seasons, but
feed life when there is no other food. So, too, you have a source of sustenance in all
seasons.
The concluding sentence
And, finally, the concluding sentence of the poem:
One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.
Here is the culmination of this regeneration, this rebirth. The poem returns to the
paradoxical image at its beginning – “the cup of emptiness that is our one completion.”
You have now let go of the old ego needs, and you are empty. You’re cup is empty of
ego-desire. You are on the verge of leaving the ego-world altogether, like a Buddha who
has achieved enlightenment. You are so close to the center of things that with one more
touch of the light, you will be gone. You could disappear forever and it would be okay.
However, “finish,” here, as in “finish work” in carpentry, can also mean to be completed.
The first touch of the morning light and you will be completed … filled to overflowing
… re-born into the beauties and the glories of this world.
In this way of considering it, you are on the verge of a total mystical experience in which
the barriers fall and there is no separation between yourself and the source and power of
all that is. That is an experience, as the poet Robinson Jeffers says, where the “walls
have fallen – beyond love – no room for love.” (from The Double-Axe)
... they have not made words for it, [cries Jeffers] to go behind things, beyond
hours and ages,
And be all things in all time, in their returns and passages, in the motionless and
timeless center,
In the white of the fire... how can I express the excellence I have found, that has
no color but clearness;
No honey but ecstasy; nothing wrought nor remembered; no undertone nor
silver second murmur
That rings in love’s voice, I and my loved are one; no desire but fulfilled; no
passion but peace,
The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion; no time but spheral
eternity.”
(from The Tower Beyond Tragedy)
Spoken Benediction
Our closing words at the beginning of this new year are from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some
blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is
a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered
with your old nonsense.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Extinguishing of Chalice
We extinguish this flame,
But not the light of truth,
The warmth of community,
Or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts
Until we are together again.
(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the service of The Reverend Bruce A. Bode
given at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on “New Year’s Sunday,”
January 8, 2012. The spoken message, available on CD at the Fellowship, may differ
slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)