Mosaic: Making Beauty from Broken Pieces
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
This week has been a week of turmoil in a lot of places. Perhaps you have experienced it yourself. The news of the death of Osama Bin Laden early in the week seemed to fill the airwaves and choke the papers. The images from the night that the news broke of some Americans dancing in the streets, chanting and drinking, caused some commentators to remark upon the feeling of unity that they were experiencing among Americans, and caused others to shudder in distaste at the exhibition of haughty nationalism. As details came out, some declared the great victory that had been won – certainly, President Obama suggested that this was a success for the US, politicians in this country agreeing as well. Still others found the summary execution of any fugitive to be appalling, while others worried about the disposal of the body at sea.
There were areas of contention to be brought up on every side of the issue and people to argue with at every turn.
My ministerial email list bubbled with every sort of response you could have: some happy about the event, some mourning, some finding the mourning to be wrong, the happiness to be wrong. It felt neverending.
All along, I found myself feeling that there were not really any good paths to be taken in this mess of a moment. A man who had been identified as central to a whole series of terrorist attacks had been killed. Capture him? Shoot him on sight? Both have their difficulties, both have their satisfactions and feelings of justice.
And it feels like the world is fractured in new ways, with old wounds being bumped so that they bleed once more, and new wounds being formed that it seems are unlikely to heal. The wars that nibble away under the surface are back in front of us all, with all their complications, too.
My colleague Marilyn Sewell says it well for me:
So what it comes down to, for me, is this: the terrible grayness of morality. The evil that we're all drawn into. The violence that is a part of our lives. The fallenness of us all. There are no good guys and bad guys, except in relative terms. We can only try to see as clearly as we can and act with as much integrity as we can.
Amen, sister, though unlike Marilyn who takes the Biblical notion of our fallenness, I tend to speak of the brokenness that lives within us all. Instead of claiming some stain of sin, I find that everyone I know, everyone I meet has secret sorrows and heartbreaks, everyone has failed – sometimes spectacularly – and I’ve yet to discover that person who hasn’t been injured by life, sometimes quite profoundly. We share in a condition of brokenness. And if there’s nothing else that I can say clearly about the death of Bin Laden, it has surely reminded me that this is a broken world where the good is sometimes impossible to discern, and where evil wears many masks, and that we all share in that human condition. We are, all of us, from Bin Laden to the newborn babe, joined in that condition, one human family.
And I have to remind myself that the brokenness isn’t the whole story, nor is it the end of the story. We don’t end up in only mud and loss and confusion and that gray morality. For all of the impact of that event, still people got up in the morning and made tea. Someone fell in love and someone else died after a long, happy, productive life. Babies were born and that on its own speaks a word of hope and promise into the world. The week after the 9/11 in church, a woman stood to say that her child her daughter had been born on that day, and it would thus always be a day of celebration for her.
It is this essential truth of life – that we have all been broken and lost AND our lives are touched by amazing goodness and wonder and beauty – that makes the image of creating a mosaic as a metaphor for our religious quest so appealing to me. Because it seems to me from where I sit that we aren’t ever going to be rid of the broken bits of our lives. There are tears in our hearts that may never heal, life experiences that change us forever and maybe not in a happy way. Our task is to find the way to set those experiences, those broken bits, into a whole picture so that beauty can emerge.
We know that many stories other than that commanding one happened this week. I offer one that when set with all the other stories helped to make a greater wholeness.
Some of you will know that the southern United States was hit by a series of tornadoes just over a week ago. If you’ve not seen the damage that tornadoes can do, it’s worth knowing that they are incredibly erratic and random in the damage that they do. One side of a street can be utterly obliterated while the other side still has delicate flowers sitting on stems. The funnels inhale all of what gets in their way: the splintered wood from homes and everything that was inside, cars sometimes get deposited miles and miles away.
After the destruction, a woman saw paper rain down into her front yard, mail from 150 miles away, and most movingly, a picture from someone’s baby scan. There was no identifying information on it, just the grainy image of a new life forming. She was heartbroken by the loss she was certain the parents felt, and she knew instantly that there were thousands upon thousands of similar items scattered across more miles than she could count.
She made a Facebook page, and suggested that anyone who found documents or photos should post them there. She put up a picture of the scan photo she had found. In hours, there were more photos posted, and now days later there are thousands of photos and scraps of documents there.
There are surprised looking babies and lovers kissing. There are blueprints and receipts that have been found and want to be sent back to their owners. There are school pictures and new born babies. There are photos gray haired smiling friends, diplomas, scraps of thank you cards that were saved for reasons we’ll never know. There is children’s art. Christmas decorations. Paper programmes from important events. Handwritten letters. Copies of obituary notices. There is nothing extraordinary about the bits and bobs that have been collected, photographed and posted there. It’s the kind of thing that’s in my house, in your house, small, mostly unimportant mementos of the life we’ve led.
But someone cared enough to see if she might be able to hand it back to someone who might have lost everything. Their house gone, the collection of objects and items that had cluttered the kitchen and bedroom and lounge unfindable in the unimaginable loss and destruction.
Their faces look out of the page on the computer screen, with smiles or wistfulness, and that someone cared at all changes the loss even just a little bit.
It is in common, plain, homey goodness that the world is put back together.
These many, many acts of kindness and care do not in any way erase the broken condition and the moral complexity and grayness found in our larger world. Indeed, it cannot erase the brokenness and the moral complexity we sometimes find in our own lives. We cannot pour it all into a liquidiser and come out with something called ‘all right’, because our hearts don’t work that way. What we can do, however, is to be conscious about making that mosaic of our lives, placing the broken pieces together with the goodness and beauty, so that if it doesn’t become beautiful, it becomes pleasing enough, it represents the whole of our lives and reminds us to keep looking, to keep placing the bits together into that whole, to keep making that picture of our lives and the life of the world around us.
And grounded well in the truth of our lives, in the truth of the world, we can strive to see clearly, as Marilyn suggests, and to act – I hope – with wisdom and integrity.
So may it be.
Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
which moves within and between us,
in every moment of our lives,
the world is before us:
in its wonder and beauty
the blessings of birth,
the blessings of earth and sky
sun on roses,
scudding clouds over a brown landscape.
In every moment of our lives
the world is before us:
the terror of the power of earth to destroy,
the terror of the power
within us, within those like us,
to kill and maim, to destroy,
loss and despair.
These live with us, too.
Yet it is possible to gaze at it in love and compassion,
drawing strength, drawing hope from what is good,
from the gifts that come unbidden,
and to hold in our hearts,
the pain and trauma,
to know it is a part of the whole.
Spirit of life,
you attend us in each moment,
gathering us into that wholeness
that exists, and dances at the edge of our consciousness.
Flood us with an awareness
of our connections,
to you,
to each other,
to all that is.
And in that moment,
may we know some measure of peace and hope,
for ourselves and for all the world.
Amen.