Let the Mystery Be

The Rev. Rali Weaver

October 25, 2009

First Church and Parish in Dedham- Unitarian Universalist

Why is the opening sentence so hard to write?

I never ever have anything to say at the beginning.

Even hellos can be hard.

I just want to get down to business.

But endings aren’t easy either.

How do we wrap things up neatly?

How do we say good-bye?

I often find myself trying to slip out of parties and the pulpit unnoticed.

It’s the middle that I want to stay in.

I prefer the ordinariness of every-day.

There is great comfort in the humdrumness of the center where we can become complacent. You can feel grounded in the hub where everything is predictable and every mystery can be explained. I can usually think of something to say in the middle.

Here we are again in autumn, the season that has come to New England for thousands of years. Before any living witness was on hand to view it, the leaves and skies would change their color, the temperature would rise and fall only to rise and fall again.

There is something eerie about this season. In autumn we find ourselves at the end of summer and all its richness and at the beginning of winter where everything goes to sleep traveling on a pathway on the road between the two.

Here we are reminded again of the impermanence of life.

Reminded that everything changes.

This concept of the ever changing life disrupts my desire to have everything grounded in the now.

Last week I went to visit Franny Brooks. Until this year Franny came to church rather regularly (Thanks to a fellow parishioner who faithfully drove her each week) and I know First Church was part of the predictable repetition of her life. Despite living independetly in her house for over 40 years, Franny currently finds herself at Clark House a nursing care center near Fox Hill in Westwood and no longer able to attend worship.

Nearing the end of her life and no longer having the everyday freedoms that come with living an ordinary life has been difficult for Franny. Franny was diagnosed with a brain tumor before entering Clark House. In the weeks since she has moved there I have noticed a significant decline in her ability to communicate and to see and to hear and to keep a positive spirit, all changes predicted by her doctors after her diagnosis.

I must admit that even from my vantage point, watching a person as independent as Francis decline after 97 years is very difficult. Because of the health changes she has endured over the past few months she is no longer able to walk or prepare her own meals, or choose her own clothes or take care of her neighbor’s dog, or sit in her yard communing with nature. To have held these basic pleasures so dear for so many years, to have thrived on her independence for so long makes it seem exceedingly cruel for her to have to face such a decline in her last days. And yet I know that a similar ending will come for each of us at some time.

For Francis I know this change has been excruciating. She is good-natured about it, but she wants answers, how long will she have to be like this? How bad will it get? In her unpredictable state she wants to find some predictability and who can blame her?

This has lead me to the question I hope we will ponder today: How might our lives be enriched if instead of trying to pin down the answers we could train our hearts and minds to rest confidently in the changes?

Yes, I do mean to say that we can have control over such things as our hearts and minds, if only to a limited extent. I am talking here of perspective, vantage point, point of view – these are changeable. To see the other side of the great redwood we need only to train our eyes and neck and heads upward to view the underside of the canopy or stroll around the great trunk. To understand the view from the pitcher’s mound, we have only to walk from our seats to the mound in the center of the infield. To embrace our own lives in every age and stage, whether beginning or middle or end, it may help to train our hearts and minds to shift our vantage point and embrace a new perspective from time to time.

Imagine a sailboat, sail hoisted high to catch the breeze and power its vessel in a particular direction. It moves along at a quick clip, the wake behind the rudder-- proof of moving forward of going somewhere. The sailor, one hand on the rudder, the other on the sail line, smiles with satisfaction. He has charted the course and he knows where he is going and where he has been; and he knows – in his mind, his heart, his body – which he is affecting and controlling the motion of his boat and in doing so affecting and controlling his own path through life.

Now I want you to imagine the same sailboat when the wind slows and then stops. The air is dead and the sail hangs limp, a victim of gravity’s pull alone. The rudder leaves marks on the water only when the sailor wags it back and forth, as useless now without forward movement as a steering wheel in a parked car. As you envision the stationary boat on the calm water, how does the sailor appear to you? Is he frustrated? Is he struggling against a void, an unknown, and, finding no resistance, and fighting harder? Did he not expect the wind to, at some point in time, shift or change, speed up or slow down? Was his happiness so fully rooted in the expected, the predictable, that change could only cause distress?

If we wish to develop the ability to experience comfort in the ever-changing winds of life, we must adapt our expectations to every situation even learning to enjoy the calm water when we can no longer sail.

If as the sailor of our lives we shift our perspective we might begin to notice the clouds perfectly reflected in the glass surface of the lake. We might hear the sound of silence more deeply and let it enter our being. We might better appreciate the wind – its strength and fickleness and experience the sweet touch of the divine in our lack of direction.

In our very familiar opening words today from Corinthians we are given the impression that there are things we will understand as we grow and age that we do not understand as children. In most instances this is true. I mean there are things we understand about life, as we progress through life. There are things we look at differently as we age.

But as we read Corinthians there comes that magical line “For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Naturally, Paul is talking about seeing God after death.

We see in the mirror darkly the God we are searching for.

We have only part access to this divine light now.

Even our mystic Richard Jefferies in our second reading today hints that all of the mystical beauty we see pales in comparison to the very thought of the divine.

As Unitarian Universalists we often find it easier to put our faith in absolute certainties so if we know we cannot see something clearly is not real to us. Today I wonder how it might be for our rational minds if we suspended our judgment and simply let the mystery be.

Every year at this time I consider making a Scrying Mirror. Scrying which, involves looking into a dark mirrored device such as a crystal ball or blackened mirror, or a pond at night, has been used in many cultures over many centuries as a means of divination. Every culture describes the presence in the mirror differently--is it God? is it the Devil?, is it the collective unconscious?

“For now we see in the mirror darkly”

Imagine your own dark scrying mirror before you.

What questions would you want to be answered out of its darkness?

What answers might you find in its depths?

The Pagan ritual of covering the mirror from full moon to full moon and uncovering it on All Hallow’s Eve to speak to lost and dead loved ones is somewhat romantic.

I want to know what the after life contains for those departed and what it might contain for us. Image the mysteries we could reveal if we could speak to our dead ancestors. How it might set our hearts at ease to know the truth of death.

When I visit Francis or anyone nearing the end zone of their life, and we talk of dying I am unable to make any promises. Presently I offer words closer to the letter from Paul.

“What do you believe will happen when you die?” I ask, assuming the dying person must know more than me.

I see through the mirror darkly.

And I want to know the truth.

I wonder how the level of comfort I can offer might change if I could offer a seeking heart a definitive answer to life and death.

And then I wonder if I would want to.

There is some comfort in not examining things too closely and resting comfortably in the mystery and this is the reassurance I can offer a soul near death.

In our poem today Ed Ochester speaks of drinking vinegar for health.

Without empirical evidence Ed drank vinegar to mark his time of healing.

He raises the point that what we believe is in many ways more important than the truth.

Grounding our hearts in a belief in the midst of the unpredictability of life is the foundation of religion and the origin of myth.

And yet our faith tradition is grounded in something less certain.

We hold no common truth about life and death.

And we recognize their ambiguity.

Within this uncertainty many find comfort in the natural world.

Attuning our souls to the cycles of the seasons we know there is neither beginning nor end.

Just as the mystics found comfort in the beauty of nature, our hearts rest in the teachings the changing leaves; swaying grasses and setting sun have to offer.

On October 2^nd I went to the Foster Gallery on the campus of Nobles and Greenough School to view the work of Daniela Rivera. Her installation was titled “Walking Along”. The first exhibit entailed lawn grass being placed in the pains of the windows of a large entryway. The affect of the grass that was in little strips and spaced high and low through this nearly 3-story opening was mesmerizing. Her second exhibit were countless canvasses upon which she painted grass. The canvasses lay on the ground in a rectangular shape filling the room. Some of the canvasses were stacked-- all containing her interpretation of green grass. In speaking with the artist it was clear that she had spent a great deal of time studying grass before trying to recreate it on the canvass and the results were astounding.

Looking at the art had the affect at first glimpse of looking at nature, or more specifically a beautiful lawn on a beautiful day. As time passed I noticed more fully what the artistic representation of grass was missing. Canvass grass and even strips of lawn placed inside window panes do not offer the depth of sound and smell and temperature that we receive from being outdoors.

The “Walking Along” art installation by Daniela Rivera is the best metaphor I can think of for the way our human brains can make sense of the mysteries of life in contrast to the way that life truly is.

Short of using actual grass in her paintings or including some dandelions and crab grass, Daniela Rivera had recreated grass in all its perfect imperfectness but in all its beauty it could never rival the beauty of the real thing.

When deeply ensconced in nature we know there is something larger that we can ever describe and more beautiful than we can ever fully capture.

This is why it is so essential that we let the mystery be. Just as is true in the difference between a painting of grass and a real lawn there are things we cannot fully understand nor describe about life and death.

Now I am not trying to say there is anything wrong with trying to describe it. Daniela Rivera’s contemporary art was quite beautiful despite its inability to rival the real thing and quite brilliant in its ability to demonstrate the limitations of the human portrayal of nature.

What I am trying to say is that our own hearts must be trained to know the difference. Recognizing what is missing is the first step.

The next step in letting the mystery be rests in trusting our first instincts, what some might call our intuition.

A few weeks ago while presiding at a memorial service a woman told me of the grief she had been experiencing at the loss of her father. Being Catholic she had asked God for a sign. At first she said she thought God was far away and had not heard her plea but as she continued she began to tell me of things that she said “could have been a sign” but she had decided were not. She told me of her father’s favorite blue birds flying around the priest’s head at the burial, her father’s favorite song playing on the radio repeatedly the day after his death, and a letter from him that had been lost in the mail coming two months after his death to the day. She explained that these could have been considered signs but that she did not feel that God was listening.

We have all heard that joke about the man who goes out to sea in a row boat and getting caught in a storm cries out “God save ME” and a motor boat comes and offers to tow him in, but he refuses saying God will help him, and then a cruise ship comes and offers to take him aboard and he says no “God will save me”, and then a helicopter comes and sends down a ladder and the man says “no god will save me”. Finally the storm over takes the man and he drowns and gets to heaven and the man asks “God why didn’t you save me?” and God Says, “man-- what more could you want I sent a motor boat, a cruise ship and a helicopter?”

Well this is how I felt listening to this woman. I don’t even personally believe that God is sitting on some cloud somewhere leaving me signs or that my lost loved ones would communicate with me in such a way, and still listening to her story I wondered why she didn’t even trust her instincts and comfort her soul in the fact that all these remembrances of her father were offered for her comfort --what more proof did she need?

What prohibited her from trusting her own beliefs was a sense needing to know the truth. What she was asking for from me in that moment as the minister at the memorial service for her friend, was that I give her an authoritative “yes those are signs” or “no those aren’t signs”. And what I wish I had said to her that day and what I say to you now is “Let the Mystery be”.

It is the richness of mystery that makes life worth living. It is in the richness of mystery that we can look beyond our decline into death and trust in a new life that we cannot see clearly now but -- will know face to face.

When our days come near an ending and we loose all that we have worked our lives to attain may we find reassurance in the unpredictability of life and death and may we rest comfortably in the mystery of all we cannot fully see.