Advice at the Start of a Life
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
One of my favorite comic strips in the daily paper back in the US once had a character who was a baby who had all sorts of profound thoughts. She kept trying to figure out how to speak in order to tell people things before she forgot them all. The idea was that because she was close to one of the portals of life, she knew profound truths that can only be gained by being close to the start or end of life. She struggled for speech, saying wise and true things in her head, until suddenly speech came to her in a babble and the wise words in the bubble over her head stopped. There is a part of me that thinks there something quite true about that, that babies come to us with a wisdom that is beyond our ability to understand, but that they cannot find the ways to let us know.
Well, that is, other than the ways they have of helping Mums and Dads become thankful for a good night’s sleep. Or the ability they have for slowing us down and making us be more mindful of the world around us. Or their amazing ability to help us look at ourselves. When Claire was little I found that it was harder to drive. Not because she distracted me, but because I found I’d have to curb my ongoing dialogue with other drivers. No more name calling. Did I really want my daughter to see me get that annoyed with someone who wasn’t really doing anything wrong? Why not just calm down and drive. I’ll get there in time.
One mum I know told me that she thought of her daughter as her own little Buddha, and it is true. Babies and small children, as Erin and Erich have told us today, give you new eyes into the world, new eyes into yourself. The fact that they are so entirely present to the moment means that they draw you there, too. You have no choice but to go with them where ever they are.
But for all the wisdom that babies bring into the world, it seems that there are things to learn about life early that could help make for a good life. Most of these lessons aren’t one time learnt, like riding a bike or learning to swim. There are a category of lessons to learn in life that we find again and again, as life deals out to us new challenges and possibilities. I’ve come across all sorts of compilations about the truths of life that we need to learn again and again. Robert Fulgum had a list of them published some 15 or more years ago, that one titled ‘Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Another version is on a CD that I listen to with Claire:
Of all you learn here remember this the best
Don’t hurt each other and clean up your mess
Take a nap every day
Wash before you eat
Hold hands, stick together
Look before you cross the street
Remember the seed in the little paper cup
First the root goes down and then the plant grows up.
But, there’s some important stuff that gets left out of those lists. So here’s my try at making a list of what we need to learn, and what guidance I might want to give someone starting a life here in this place at this time. I’ll keep it short, only 5 items on my list, a helping hand’s worth of advice for living a life:
First, trust. As a new life begins, it is perhaps hard to remember that there will be struggle and pain and difficulty, but we all know that those will come. It took me many years to learn that when everything seems dark and lost and frightening, that I have to let go, and simply trust life, trust my friends, trust that a way will become clear. Phillip Booth says it well for me, as he remembers cradling his daughter’s head as she learns to float.
Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let you 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.
Having watched Claire learn how to float over the last few years, seeing her panicked lurch up from the water as her instructor stepped away reminded me how hard it can be just to trust in the water, to trust our own buoyancy. There has never yet been a time that the darkness didn’t lift, that the world didn’t move along, that whatever fear clutched at my heart didn’t ease. It was usually helped along by letting go, lying back and trusting.
This isn’t to say that it is easy, nor to say that everything always comes out right in the end. It doesn’t always. It isn’t to say that whatever happens happens for a reason. In my experience, sometimes random events crash into our lives with no purpose or reason, though we may be able to find some glimmer of worth in them if we look and are open to it. The advice to trust the world, trust God, trust that there is some intrinsic goodness to be found even in the midst of pain and struggle is recommending that we can make a choice about how our lives are lived, and that a life lived in trust is a better life, than one lived in fear.
Secondly, as Rachel Remen suggests, hold life loosely. I am reminded from time to time, as I suppose we all are, that whilst we plunge ahead in our lives, making plans, setting dates, behaving as if we could be certain of what comes next, the truth is that we have little control over most of what goes on around us. God might, as Remen suggests, end the world before the chicken soup. We have to just keep going, really, there’s no other choice, but I am taken by Remen’s grandfather’s constant reminder of how tenuous our lives can be, how framed they are by events we cannot control. Holding life loosely allows us to stay in better touch with what matters most, not caught in the trivial details of life. We get clarity about this when tragedy strikes, when illness comes, when death presses upon us. ‘God willing,’ that lightness of touch in life, keeps us reminded of what we love most, keeps us in touch with what is most important.
Remember to trust, and to hold life loosely.
The third finger of my helping hand is related. Cultivate curiosity. I think there are few attributes that can better serve us in life than curiosity. Some years ago, Peter and I were visiting a museum with my Aunt Eileen, then in her mid 70's. As we wandered through an exhibit on colonial life in America, Peter and Eileen began to wonder if some of the chairs scattered around might actually be from the era. I looked away at some display and turned around to find them both hunkered down on the floor looking underneath a chair to see how it was constructed, trying to discern if it was actually from the colonial period. It was not, as I recall, but I have held that image since to remind myself of the worth and value of being curious. Seeking to learn whatever of life’s secrets you can discover, being ever interested in the people around you, waiting in delighted expectation for what comes next, a healthy curiosity will enliven your life beyond measure.
Remember to trust, to hold life loosely and cultivate your curiosity.
This fourth finger is for joy. There is, as I said, pain and struggle and difficulty awaiting any new life. And there is also immeasurable joy. It is so easy to forget, so easy to lose joy in the round of daily living, in the tensions and anxieties of modern life. Joy means risking ourselves, opening ourselves to possibility and wonder. Joy means being alive to beauty, being alive to your heart. Mary Oliver says wisely, ‘if the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?’ Stay open to joy, however it may come.
Trust, hold life loosely, curiosity and joy.
Finally, remember that you do not live for yourself alone. All the rest of this, all these reminders lose their meaning if we do not reach out into the world, and do what we can to help it along. We are not here for ourselves alone, but are interconnected, bound to the planet, to each other, to the wide cosmos. We do well to find those ways that we can bring some light and healing and justice and peace to others, by acts of kindness and care, or giving of our time and energy to causes that matter, by nurturing a child or being a companion to an elder. We do not live for ourselves alone,
A not so simple helping hand for a start to a good life.
- 1. Trust
- 2. Hold life loosely
- 3. Curiosity
- 4. Joy
- 5. You do not live for yourself alone.
Each can be forgotten in a flash, and lost for days or months or years until something awakens us again. Ah, yes, joy, we might say. Ah, yes, trust.
These five learnt early can help a good life along. Remembered often they can keep us awake in the world.
May it be that you, that we, are ever awake in the world.