Our Hungers
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
One of the sights that I miss since having moved here is the migration of birds. I know it happens here, I’ve not yet trained my eye to see it in the same way that I saw it in the US. On several occasions, I was out on the eastern shore of Maryland in the autumn and watched as thousands of geese making their chevron patterns in the air, heard them chattering in the fields. Out on the other coast, I there were a few similar moments when the sky would nearly fill with birds in flight. Heading home, I sometimes thought. And I have wondered if they ever got homesick, missed the northern environment, ever felt anything that might be like a longing: water that smells just this way, and the tender greens at lake bottom, the familiar rise of a hill, that nesting place that's just right, just the way it's supposed to be.
I know good and well that ducks and geese don't have those sorts of experiences. They move by instinct, and it's not terribly likely that even the word "feeling" as I use it would mean anything to them at all. I know that it is my own longing that evokes the wondering about homesickness, I know it is my own hungering that causes me to wonder about theirs.
It took years for me to figure out that the springtime brought on that sort of longing in me. Over the 12 years that I lived in Chicago, springtime was always, well, wrong. It came later than I thought it should, and was never as long as I expected. Just as I was getting accustomed to spring being around, suddenly it was summer in Chicago, and there was no mistaking the one season for the other. Sometimes it seemed that we had only a day or two of what I would call real spring before the temperature would soar, all the spring flowers would wilt in the heat, and we'd be longing for winter again.
It didn't dawn on me until a couple of years later what I was missing, what I was wishing for: it was spring as I had known it growing up in Maryland. Late February, early March, the crocuses would be blooming in yards all around, and the long, luxurious spring would begin. Cherry blossoms and dogwood trees and magnolias and flowers and flowers and flowers. Soft air that smelled of earth and growing grass. And green as luscious as any green I've ever known.
It wasn't until I was in Vermont and digging my flower beds out from under melting snow banks that I began to understand what it was that I was missing, for missing was just what I was doing. There, too, the spring came much too late, we'd get through the season of mud by right around the end of April and finally it would be like spring – the one I was wishing for – again. Actually, in Vermont we had different ways of telling that spring was near: the dirt roads would take on the consistency of chocolate custard, and the sap buckets would appear on the trees, and you would know it was spring.
The one other thing that I learned meant spring in Vermont was the way that the hillsides would become pinkish as the new buds came out on the trees. I'd never seen that before -- not in Maryland, or in any of the four or other states that I had lived in by that time. The pink trees.
I have to remind myself each year of this: that my impatience with the speed of the seasons, and that my longing for what was most familiar in my childhood is a longing that returns again and again. And new layers have been added on. I now miss the spring in Vermont -- mostly because we had to endure so long to finally get to it. I miss the pink trees, and the landscape becoming obscured by the leaves that grew to cover the hills with green. I miss the humid spring in Maryland, the early blooms.
And I can't imagine, in some sense, that the geese flying back to the north don't have the same sort of longing for the shape of a hill that looks just so, the smell of the water and the comfort of a nesting ground, all familiar.
It is this sort of hungering that I feel each spring, that longing for something that shapes me as surely as that which I love shapes me.
What do you find that you hunger for? What is it that tugs on you?
Some years ago, I came across a paragraph written by a person long since forgotten. His sentiment stuck with me, though, and has stayed with me over the five or six years since I first read it. The author was talking about how he responded to being asked to make a commitment, to dedicate himself, to have discipline. He found it difficult, he said, especially when it related to his religious beliefs. It made him think of unpleasant things, like exercise, for example. It made him feel like hiding.
However, he said, when he thinks of hungering -- in his terms it was hungering for God -- suddenly it all seemed different. No longer was it a matter of dedicating oneself, rather of allowing oneself to seek. It's not a matter of putting your nose to the grindstone, but of opening and inviting.
I think it's especially important to hold on to this sort of perspective when we come to social justice causes and issues. It's very easy for it all to begin to feel like a millstone around our necks. I don't know about you, but I often find that in the presence of people who are admirable dedicated to their causes, I feel like it would take so much for me to give, that there is so much to do and so little that I can give. I often feel that I don't have the discipline and the dedication to do the real work. And that's what it comes down to, is that notion of work. It's not hungering after justice, hungering to foster human wholeness: it's work. Nose to the grindstone. But to hunger after it is different.
And we hunger after so much, at least that's how it looks from here. We hunger for meaning and truth, trying to learn how to live deeply and well. We hunger for a loving touch and a sense of intimacy in our lives. We hunger for authenticity. We hunger for connection. And yes, we hunger for justice and sometimes for mercy. There is so much that we hunger for.
Frederick Buechner suggests to us that we be cautious about such hungering. In his sermon that we heard from this morning, he speaks of authentic feelings as compared with simple sentiment. At weddings, he suggests, it's tradition to cry. But much of the time the tears aren't tears that grow from the recognition of standing in the presence of great human love and the reality of human finitude, the preciousness of love and the sure knowledge of the transience of our mortal existence. As often as not, he suggests, we are captured not by that life force and power, but by the eloquence of our own sadness, by the eloquence of our own good fortune.
He wrote:
It is all innocent enough, surely, except that it keeps us just one step further than we already are, and God knows that is far enough, from the reality of what is going on outside our own skins; and the reality of what is going on outside our own skins is the reality of other people with all their dreams and regrets, their happiness, the pathos not of ourselves for once but of them.
What Buechner is speaking to here is that rare ability to lose oneself, to lose our ego and to be truly in the presence of what is, drawn into relationship and connection with the world, those who inhabit it with us. And that is, I think, near the center of most of our hungerings. It is also the answer to our hungerings in some sense.
The Buddhists for centuries have sought in their practice to detach from this world of illusion. By the method of meditation, they relinquish their hold on this reality. The practice enables them in some measure, to be in the moment and experience what delights and joys are present now. Buddhist philosophy holds that hungering causes pain, wanting and desiring are painful, to long for something is to have to endure going without.
I find that for me it is surely a hungering that calls me forward in the world, that calls me into relationship, that calls me to action. But, I also know that it is when I can remove my self, I am most likely to find real connection, to offer service to another. It's a paradox.
It is standing in that paradox that is both difficult and ultimately rewarding. Knowing and listening to the hungers within, discerning that which is outside of me that calls -- not only my own eloquent sorrows and joys -- and then moving toward it.
What is required of us is the first an ability to be self aware -- to know ourselves, to know which tears are our old regrets and joys and which are shaken out of a deeper connection.
But then, we also have to know to trust. Let's go back to those geese. I still know well that they don't have a longing for a landscape like I have. As we heard in the story from James Carse, they don't know where they are, but they aren't lost. Some internal compass that carries us toward that place we need to be, at least we hope it does.
Marge Piercy says this well in her poem "The Perpetual Migration"
How do we know where we are going?
How do we know where we are headed
till we in fact or hope or hunch
arrive? You can only criticize,
the comfortable say, you don't know
what you want. Ah, but we do.
. . .
Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
and not too much Monday morning,
a chance to choose, a chance to grow,
the power to say no and yes, pretties
and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.
. . .
The salmon hurtling upstream seeks
the taste of the waters of its birth
but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile
trek follows chats mapped on its genes.
The brightness, the angle, the sighting
of the stars shines in the brain luring
till inner constellation matches outer.
. . .
In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips...
Driven like a migrating falcon, I can be blown
off course yet if I turn back it feels
wrong. Navigating by chart and chance
and passion I will know the shape
of the mountains of freedom, I will know.
We are all likely to be drawn off course, shifted away from the mountains of freedom, and our own blindness can cause us to journey in the wrong direction.
That's the purpose of our gatherings here and the joining of people of good will together: to chart together those paths that draw us into relationship, into authentic living, into depth and meaning in our lives, that lead us into the struggle for justice, that lead us toward a future that will be shaped by the hungering we have for all of the children of the earth to have what Piercy names:
Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
and not too much Monday morning,
a chance to choose, a chance to grow,
the power to say no and yes, pretties
and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.
We cannot, I believe, do it all alone, for each of us has limited vision, each of us can be pulled off course, sent off in an odd direction.
We seek and hunger for so much. We shall find that which we hunger for together.