What’s Old, What’s New
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
January 2, 2011
Reading: “The Guest House,” The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1996, p. 109.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
“The Journey,” Mary Oliver, from Dream Work, in New and Selected Poems, vol. 1, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p. 114
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice ‑
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do ‑
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Sermon
Forrest Church tells of an encounter with someone in his congregation who came to him for counseling:
Her eyes told me everything. Within the minute it took for her to enter my study, sit down on the couch, and arrange the notes she had scribbled to herself on little scraps of paper, the fear her eyes conveyed spoke volumes. I could easily imagine how she procrastinated for days before making the appointment, then almost called to cancel at the last minute, and now wished that she had. The first thing she confessed to, even before greeting me, was embarrassment. As people in real trouble often do, she apologized for wasting my "precious time on something so trivial." Beyond these telling words, her body language, too, revealed deep feelings of inadequacy. And also apprehension, perhaps that I might judge her as severely as she judged herself, or let her down somehow And yet by the end of that long, fear-packed minute, I began to sense something else—how relieved she was at last to be unburdening herself of a weight she could no longer carry.
Over the past three decades, I have spent thousands of pastoral counseling hours helping people unload their fears. I am a minister, not a therapist. Rather than listen and work patiently over a protracted period, I tend to meet with people only once or twice, as I did with this young woman. Time being of the essence, we got right down to business She had come seeking practical advice, so I tried to offer nuggets of wisdom that she could take home and put right to the test. Fear lies at the center of so many of our troubles….
I said this to the fearful young woman sitting across from me—"Don't feel alone." I also told her she would be all right. If she comes to believe this, she almost surely will be all right. (Her fears had to do with an unresolved personal relationship. I had no idea whether it could be made right, only that she could, as long as she framed her thoughts and directed her actions in a courageous, positive way.) But fear is a persuasive advocate. It does everything possible to turn each of us into the Little Engine That Couldn't.
Over the years, I have discovered that fear has a logic (or an illogic) all its own. This woman feared getting married and remaining single. Others of us fear illness and doctors, or being isolated at home and being trapped in a crowd. Many of us manage to fear both failure and success. Such confusion extends across fear's spectrum, culminating in the fear of death—which leads directly to a fear of life. Afraid to die, we fear to live, because life is dangerous.
In fact, life is fatal. Attempts to eliminate risk ultimately fail. To the extent that we do eliminate risk from life, we may also succeed in sucking the air out of it….[i]
After “the season” comes the rest of winter. We pause at this turning of the years – an arbitrary date, different in different cultures, but for us just yesterday, the first day of another year. The name of this first month of our new year is of course taken from Roman mythology, after the god Janus, he of two faces, one looking to the past, the other to the future. Among us we have by now had several thousand occasions of observing the coming of the New Year, and as we get older the charm of actually staying up to greet the exact moment of the transition from the old to the new becomes less compelling; but no matter how often we have been faced with these days of transition from the old to the new, something primal reaches out to us and demands an accounting: what matters from the past year, and what doesn’t; in what ways we want the coming year to be different than the past year has been for us. If we choose, it can be a time for a “fearless moral inventory,” in the language of twelve-step programs, a time for reflection and resolution.
This is a good time to consider the words of Rumi, the great Persian mystical poet of the thirteenth century, who reminds us that
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor….
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
We all know about New Year’s resolutions, of course; they are the stuff of late-night comedy. Many of us draw up a list of intentions to live differently than we have been; to lose weight, eat better, exercise better, live better. The joke, of course, is that our firm resolve too often vanishes under the next snowfall, only to be revived a year later. Let me be candid: I, too, have made these resolutions this year. In truth, though, my minor stroke nine months ago was much more effective than the New Year in forcibly drawing my attention to the need to really follow through on those resolutions. Still, there can be no harm in a timely re-dedication to those goals. That brings us back to the fear experienced by Forrest Church’s parishioner, the fear that inhibits us from risks in relationships and in life. This is a time for confronting fear with love. As the New Testament puts it in First John: [NRS 1 John 4:18] There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
This hinge of the years is an appropriate time for asking ourselves whether we want to orient ourselves to living in a different way than we have been. It’s a good time to ask ourselves some challenging questions: Are we living in such a way as to honor our bodies? Are we properly concerned about our health, our vitality, our longevity, and all of those ways of living that help rather than hinder having a responsible and satisfying relation to our own bodies? Then, beyond ourselves, are we lovingly cultivating the relationships that form the social world we inhabit? Are we acting with integrity in those relationships, saying what needs to be said even when it’s hard, praising, thanking and forgiving those with whom we live our lives? Finally, are we living in such a way as to fulfill the meaning and purpose we have found for ourselves at whatever stage of life we inhabit?
If we fail to ask these questions periodically, we risk losing out on part of what it means to be alive. If we allow fear to inhibit us from the possibilities before us, this is as good a time of year as any to confront the fear and determine to live more fully. If we fail to do so, we get trapped in the habits and routines of our lives as we have been living them. And, as Maddie, the heroine of True Grit, reflects in the later years of her life, “Time goes by.” Our task in living is to ensure that we fully inhabit that time. As our story for the children put it, the secret of happiness is to experience the wonder of what is around us while also being careful to meet the responsibilities we have been given or have accepted. Neither, though, is the be all and end all of our lives.
There are times when we lose track of what our lives are given to us for. We may conclude, in the words of the wise teacher of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The author of this unusual book of the Jewish Bible is said by tradition to be none other than King Solomon, reputed to be the wisest man in the world. Another translation would render this as “Vapor, nothing but vapor, all of life is no more substantial than a passing breath.” If we adopt that as our motto for living, time will indeed pass us by.
This moment at the hinge of the years is a good time to give up those things in our lives that we experience as nothing but vanity, nothing but vapor. Looking ahead, we may realize that it is fear that is holding us back, fear of losing track of what we must do, desperation – we tell ourselves – just to survive. Instead, we are called toward balance in our lives – marveling at the wonders all around us, while also keeping carefully the responsibilities that have been given into our care. We need to be fearless but attentive, vulnerable but confident, accepting temporary failure as an opportunity to learn rather than an outcome to be avoided at all costs. The wise teacher of Ecclesiastes also says,
NKJ Ecclesiastes 3:1 To everything there is a season, [and] A time for every purpose under heaven…. 10 I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. 12 I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, 13 and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor -- it is the gift of God.
This is also a time to nourish our souls. A regular practice of reading scripture and prayer has been valuable to many, not to answer every question but to open our eyes to new possibilities, new vistas, new ways of understanding our lives and remembering to offer them up for enrichment and for service. In uncertain economic times, lending a helping hand to those in greater need than we are can be an especially valuable way of expanding our own capacity, our own gratitude, our own souls.
This is a time for what Forrest Church calls “thoughtful wishing,” wishing, not for what don’t have, but rather “for what can be ours, what we can do, who we can be. Unlike wishful thoughts, thoughtful wishes tend to come true.” As he puts it,
Meaning doesn’t emerge from longing for what we lack, things we have lost or will likely never find. The past if over. Pine over it and what we are pining for is probably very different in selective memory than it was in reality.
And longing for something in the future may distract us from our enjoyment of the present. Wishful thinking tends to be both sloppy and sentimental. We should wish to think instead for things closer to hand:
The courage to bear up under pain;
The grace to take our successes lightly;
The energy to address tasks that await our doing;
The meaning to be found in giving of ourselves to others;
The liberation that follows when we forgive another;
The comfort to be taken in opening our hearts to another;
The joy to be gained even in the most common endeavor;
The pleasure of one another’s company;
That wonder that wells within the simple fact of our shared being.[ii]
Finally, let’s remember to cultivate simplicity. We flourish from becoming calm, giving ourselves time each day to rise above the worries and preoccupations we carry like a heavy burden; we need let them go, give up worrying about outcomes. We need to cultivate our souls, care for them, nourish them, work on developing and nurturing our character with the same attention we give to our bodies. And then we can open our eyes for glimpses of a special light glowing around us, speaking to us from the marvelous web of all existence that surrounds us, and reaching out from the eyes of each person we meet. In that way we can find peace like a river. In that way we can “delight in the way things are and keep your heart open, day and night.”
For this is the day we are given.
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Amen.