Being All Eye
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
At a retreat many years ago, with a group of people some of whom I had known since I was a teen, I led a small informal worship service with a group of people around my age and a bit younger. Without much in the way of shared resources – we wouldn’t know the same songs or readings or formats – I decided that I would tell one of my favorite stories. It’s one I’ve told here before. Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch is a children’s picture book that translates well into a told story.
The basic plot is that Mr. Hatch is a loner with a very circumscribed life, and when he receives an anonymous Valentine’s Day gift of a heart shaped box filled with chocolates, it transforms him. He becomes the life of the party, and a friend to everyone. Months later it is discovered that the gift was delivered in error, and Mr. Hatch falls back into his old life. When his friends figure out what’s happened, they surprise him with a party and a banner that reads that everybody loves him.
It has always been for me a story about the power of love to heal us, and about the power of love to enable us to do and be more in the world.
At the end of the story, two of the women were weeping. That’s not wholly unusual – it’s a story that has moved me to tears. However, when I invited anyone who was present to speak about what they were feeling, one of the women – unhappily single in her early 30's – spoke with bitterness. “It’s not true, you don’t get it back.”
What I knew about her life at that time was that she wanted to be married, and have a family. Months and years have gone by and there was still no partner, no love to save her. At least, there was no love that she recognized as a love that could save her from the life that is not the life she hoped and wished for.
She spoke from a despair that I know well. Though my path was different, I spent most of my 30s waiting and wishing and hoping that I would find a partner who would fill out my life in that way. In my 40s, I had the greatest fortune to meet and marry Peter. My life is very different now but I remember that longing. I remember the brokenheartedness that confronted me in the mornings and the too quiet room in which I went to bed every night.
I wondered then and have wondered since what sort of comforting words I could have offered her that might have made some bit of a difference to her.
I don’t think that there’s much to tell her, truly. What I came to, after some years of trying and struggle, was to have faith, to trust that all will be well eventually, even if it isn’t just what I wanted or asked for. It is a lesson learned after long years of wanting that was not answered. It is a lesson learned from friends and family with a grace for living in faith that I still seek.
It comes to me from experience, some of it hard and it comes from having the guidance and example of those who have found ways to live with that sort of faith. I’ve been lucky to find communities of people who from their own lives offer me that sort of guidance and example.
For several years, I spent time each month with three colleagues in a process called ‘Friends of the Mystery'. The four of us came together and would begin by chatting for a bit about our lives. We were all in different places in our lives: one was in search for a new congregation, another worked in a public agency and was threading through some hard changes, and another was newly married and parenting two teenagers.
We listened to the rhythm of each others lives until we’d heard enough to know that we’d arrived in that place and moment. Then we paused for a time of quiet together.
The seconds and minutes ticked by until the silence deepened and our hearts somehow felt closer to each other. Whoever was leading the process then asked us to share how it was that we’d experienced the mystery since we’d been together.
In the quiet, and without conversation, each one of us spoke as long as we needed. The rest listened absorbing the pictures, the moments, the experiences that the speaker recounted.
What is the mystery that was at the heart of that gathering? Some might call it God – I do most of the time. Others might describe it as that which holds us together, the power or force that connects us to all that is. Others still might call it the power of (capital L) Love. We never tried to define the mystery too closely but rather to speak to each other of experiences of wholeness, of insight, of peace, of trust and of faith.
Once we are done speaking, we pause again in quiet reverence for what has been shared. Then the leader invites a time of conversation. What has moved us? What similarities did we hear? What connections are there between us? That conversation merges into the next question: How has the mystery been present to us here in this gathering? More gentle conversation ensued as we looked to see the mystery of our connections, the mystery of what we share. We ended with another time of silence together. The close of our time together was marked with a brief prayer, the touching of hands, and an expression of thanksgiving for each other.
Over years that we met, we have talked of all sorts of experiences of that mystery:
o the delight of the natural world exhibited in herons perched along the river,
o moments of worship and silence on high mountains in the desert,
o the power of intimacy with another human,
o experiencing the presence of God in the midst of struggle and conflict,
o intimations of hope in the span of a rainbow
o and quiet comfort in familiar surroundings.
There is more, of course, than I could list. One of the features of all of the experiences that draw them into a coherent whole is that they each require watching carefully the world as it passes by and the moments as they tumble forward.
Each month, as the time for our meeting came closer and especially on the day of the meeting, I found that I was more attentive to what was going on around me. I watched especially for the moment that I could share with my colleagues. I reviewed with care the weeks preceding to see where the mystery had shown through my busy schedule and distracted mind. Suddenly, it always seemed, I was all eye, watching for signs, looking to see the moments of possibility and hope.
Just as Kathleen Norris points to faith as a process of remaining open to the future, faith as being “all eye,” so too does Rabbi Lawrence Kushner see faith as a sense of being open. In a lecture, I was very struck when he reminded us that when we read a novel, we are able to see the forces that are at work, we can see the shape of the narrative as it unfolds. It is part of what we love about novels, in fact. The novelist reveals the larger theme to us bit by bit.
In our lives, we cannot always see those shapes, the forces that work to make our story. Perhaps we only rarely see what they are. However that is, he suggested that we need to keep ourselves aware because we never know when chapter two might start. That is faith: the awareness that the next chapter looms and that it might tell us another story.
Andre Dubus, in writing about short stories, speaks to this same phenomenon:
I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking around the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working; spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and we say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful.
Having faith isn’t being relentlessly cheerful, or even believing that everything will turn out for the best. It is, for me, trusting that life will continue to have meaning and that I will be able to discern what that meaning is. It is trusting that there are other chapters that will be joyful in the midst of that which is painful and difficult, and that the new chapter may start at any moment – and I might not even see that it is beginning. Still I have to continue on, trusting and believing. Still I have to continue on in faith.
During a time in my life when I was struggling through the traumatic end of a relationship that sent me scrambling for a whole new life – or at least, that’s how it seemed at the moment – a member of the congregation I was serving came to tell me of her own story of struggle. I listened to the trouble and trauma that she recounted, seeing in her struggle some of my own reflected. Her husband stood next to her nodding gently. “You don’t know how to get through it,” she said, “but somehow you do.” A few years after that difficult time had passed, she told me, she happened upon the metaphor that her family now uses to indicate when life has slid into that zone.
An Olympic swimmer was interviewed after a particularly competitive race. She had been ahead for the first half, and then a competitor began to catch up on her. With extra effort, she stayed in the lead and eventually won. “What did you think when the other swimmer was closing on you?” asked the interviewer. “I didn’t think anything,” the swimmer replied breathlessly, “I just put my head down and kicked.”
I liked the metaphor immediately, and continue to reflect upon it when life starts getting nuts. Yet, there’s something missing from that image. It is not enough to put your head down and kick, you’ve also got to be able to keep your eyes open, to continue to be all eye, to watch for the next chapter to start, and be ready to embrace it.
A journey of faith isn’t one during which you simply make it through, complete the trail from point “a” to point “b”. There is a quality of living that has to attend it, a willingness to welcome what comes, an openness to that which arrives, and at the center, a trust that there is meaning to be discovered, there is a story worth telling to be told, a story whose ending we cannot know.
Living with that sort of faith doesn’t eliminate the longings that my friend was feeling at that worship service. It doesn’t fix the world, it doesn’t even fix oneself.
Lisel Mueller’s poem, Picking Raspberries (from her collection Alive Together), reminds me of that truth. Having faith isn’t like entering that raspberry thicket, and living in the country of sun and silence, fingers stained with red juice, the knobby seeded berries dissolving on your tongue. And it’s not only having the long red marks scarring your arms, that discovery of pain.
Journeying with faith means a both/and sort of living: recognition of the trials and troubles, recognition of delights and joys when they arrive. It means bringing a quality of openness and discernment to the events and moments of your life.
It means being all eye: ready to see, open to what may come, knowing that the next chapter might be starting right now even though you cannot describe its shape or narrative line.
Let me tell you that I think that there are two tricks to this way of journeying through life. The first is to not get lost in trying to tell a particular story. My friend in her longing, it seems, is seeking to tell one story and has lost that there are other powerfully wonderful stories in her life. She is embraced in a wonderful community, she has a close loving family, a beautiful niece who she gets to nurture, she does work that she finds fulfilling and worthy. Far from having an empty life, she is richly blessed, and if her heart is only to be filled by having one story line play out, she will indeed be sad and lost. Noticing and appreciating the other story lines that she lives might well change how she comes to her life. Staying open to the many stories we live is one of the tricks to living in faith.
The other is to learn how to live with that awareness in the midst of normal life. Rabbi Kushner tells a story about learning that he might have a brain lesion. He writes:
I felt what I can only call “a trembling deep inside me.” And I remember thinking: So this is how it happens. One day, I’m well. Then, suddenly and almost gracefully, I’m in possession of an all-consuming new piece of information. The probable cause of my immanent death. One minute I’m preoccupied by a thousand daily tasks. And the next, it’s as if some hand from out of nowhere had swept everything off the game board and onto the floor and replaced all my affairs with a medical diagnosis. . . .
Suddenly, everything I did was suffused with meaning. I couldn’t take anything for granted. The most trivial sensations became gifts: The smell of my children’s hair. The sound of the dog barking. My wife’s kiss. The morning coffee. Each was too precious to let go of.
Most of us, I would guess, have had just such happenings in our lives, when the game board is swept clean by some life threatening or life changing event: the death of a loved one, a diagnosis that threatens our own death, loss of mobility, love that dies, children who slip from our lives. We become all eye and each moment is sweet with the power of life’s gifts. The trick is learning how to hold that, to remember on a very ordinary day – like this one perhaps – that those gifts are still as sweet, still as important, those moments are these moments.
How do we do that? Live with faith, keep open the possibilities and keep before our eyes the gifts? I don’t have any solid answers, only a few hints. In my life, I’ve discovered that the only thing that keeps me in touch is being regularly in contact with others who share that faith. I’ve found it many places but especially in a religious community such as this one. Where we come to pay attention to what is most worthy and true, where we come to be reminded to see the world around in all its wonder, all its loss, worry and pain.
Living in faith, being all eye won’t change the world. There will still be trouble and trauma, there will still be the hard days and sleepless nights. What it can change is how we come to our lives: is it treasure or curse? Gift or loss? Have we come to the final chapter, or is another opening before us? It is set before us all each day to choose how we shall live. What shall your choice be?