Edges
20 September 2009 TPUUF
© 2009, Bryant Bossler Brown
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As a minister, I get invited to be with people at some of the edges of their lives. The turning points. The hinges. The liminal, threshold experiences. I get to share moments of transition. Weddings, child dedications, memorials and funerals. Counseling. Listening.
As a chaplain, I was often with patients and families at the edge, at “the moment.” The moment of holding a new life. The moment of letting go of life. The moment of getting the good news; of getting the bad news. The moment of questioning all we think we know and believe and can do and can depend upon. That moment.
We human beings often need to share the times of change and stress and turmoil in our lives. We come together. We talk with one another. We light candles. We need to talk with each other; we need to be held; we need to share our joys and sorrows and concerns. It is important. It is so human.
Patrick Overton is credited with writing that “When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen: There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught how to fly.”
Well, I can imagine other possible beliefs as I step out, over that edge. Maybe I will fall in the darkness, and maybe that is okay.
I remember a notebook I saw with a picture on the cover of the Peanuts funny paper character, the dog, Snoopy. He is lying on his back on the roof of his doghouse. The caption is “A successful person is someone who is not afraid to fail.” I’m not sure what that has to do with Snoopy, but the words have stuck with me: “A successful person is someone who is not afraid to fail.”
Sometimes we just step off into the darkness of the unknown to learn what is beyond that edge – to push the edge of what is unknown back, just a little. We are not so much unafraid of failure as curious. Our success is the willingness to take the step.
But I understand, maybe, what Patrick Overton is saying: that, in this life, we get to an edge and can choose to go over. Or, we choose to hold back.
Sometimes it is a choice, a step we take intentionally, and sometimes we even celebrate. Sometimes we call the minister to be a part of it. Often, usually, almost always, there is risk: change, the unknown, the untried, the new, the cutting edge, the bleeding edge. We imagine happy possibilities and we take the step.
Sometimes we are just swept over the edge. Events swirl around us. Stuff happens. Life flows on within you and without you. Life ends. We don’t have a choice.
If you look at my long and checkered résumé, my list of addresses, my passport full of visas, you can see that I am one willing to step off into the darkness. Some find such behavior very, well, strange, bizarre, odd, crazy. Some call it brave. I call it my life. It is an adventure, a mostly chosen adventure – an adventure that now includes all of you.
That is where we are, together, now. This congregation has chosen to re-imagine and remake itself. This congregation has looked for and found and moved toward an edge and has deliberately chosen to take a step. A brave step. A step beyond what was known and comfortable.
That was an exciting, perhaps defining moment in our very recent past. We stepped over that edge because we can envision a good future, a better future, a more fulfilling future for ourselves and this faith community and this planet. It involves our ministry to each other and to the world.
I invite us all to be in this wonderful moment – in the right now, when we do not yet know for sure if there is something solid for us to stand on, or if we are learning to fly. Let us savor this moment.
As Philip Simmons noted in our reading this morning; as Thich Nhat Hanh and the Buddha and many others would teach us,
Dwelling in the moment, on our breath, on the work of our hands immediately before us, we’re drawn into life’s luminousness, into the mystery at the heart of ordinary things. Dwelling in the present, at least at first, involves forgetting past and future, stopping the mind’s whirlwind of memory and expectation, giving ourselves a blessed hour’s calm as we meditate, bake bread, walk through the forest, or play games with a child.
Being mindful of this moment, of all that our senses and intuitions bring to us right now, can give us a new perspective on all that other stuff, of “the mind’s whirlwind of memory and expectation.” Not so much an escape from it, but an appreciation of where it all fits into something larger, more long-lasting.
You will probably recognize the words from the often-quoted Sanskrit poem:
Yesterday is but a memory.
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived
Makes every yesterday a memory of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
I remember, at the age of maybe eleven, watching one of the “Our Gang / Little Rascals” comedies. It was probably filmed in the Thirties. Have you seen them? Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat and Darla. In the Hal Roach incarnations anyway, the kids seemed, and seem to me still, to be acting like kids, not acting like little adults, not acting cute; not acting, just being with a camera aimed at them that they seem to ignore. And there were boys and girls, white kids and black kids, and rich kids and poor kids all being kids together, right there, on the screen.
The eleven-year-old me realized, in one of those blinding flashes of the incredibly obvious, that all of the animals and a lot of the adults that I was watching walking around, right before my eyes, were no more – that the magic of celluloid photographic film let me look at a moment, focused my attention on that moment in time; it let me look at details that the people in that film probably did not pay much attention to.
It occurred to my eleven-year-old mind that, at the same time, that that moment is real – I’m looking at photographic evidence of it – at the same time, that it is no longer.
The reality was that moment, not the image on film, not me looking at it.
Okay – remember, I was eleven years old – I know, this is commonplace. All the pictures in photo albums and shoeboxes and solid-state memory devices, and the various films and videotapes with my image are the same way. Someday, some archeologist will dig down to a picture of a four-year-old me sitting in the shallows of a swimming pool in Pasadena, California.
My question to me is: what did I experience in that moment? How did the chlorine in the water feel? The bright Sun, coming to my eyes through those plastic sunglasses, which were sliding down my nose? How did that straw cowboy hat feel perched on my head? I am sure I didn’t realize the protecting of my eyes and my head that my mother was doing as I sat, “out there a havin’ fun in the warm California sun.”
Those are my now, adult questions. My four-year-old self was probably in that moment; was probably very aware of and enjoying the feeling of the cool water and the warm Sun; maybe even enjoying having the camera aimed at me; or maybe I ignored it. I suspect I was very much in that moment. Four year olds tend to be.
Adults need to learn and relearn about mindfulness.
Paying attention to what is happening right now. Mary Oliver says paying attention – to a grasshopper, say – may be a kind of prayer.
I know it can be hard to separate what you are feeling right now from “the mind’s whirlwind of memory and expectation,” but give it a try. Click the shutter on your feelings memory, sit with your emotions in this moment in your life and in this congregation’s life – joy, apprehension, pride, what they may be – in this magic moment. Notice what Philip Simmons calls “the mystery at the heart of ordinary things.”
In 1976 this country celebrated its bicentennial. During the years before that there was wrangling about what city should be the “official” Bicentennial City. Philadelphia made a strong case. So did Washington, D-C. But there were many contenders, most pointing to their historical importance, some to their place in a forward-looking-sort-of way.
During the run-up to the Bicentennial, I remember my college roommate saying that we Americans should just have a nationwide block party, with everyone invited. And, as I remember it, that’s pretty much what happened.
I was in the now-well-known Unity, New Hampshire in 1976, and I was on the town’s U-S Bicentennial Committee. We, and most other communities, got modest grants for local projects. I remember Unity cleared brush in an abandoned cemetery with Native Americans’ graves in it, and made a path up the hill to it.
I know, there were grand festivities and impressive fireworks displays in many of the larger cities on the Fourth of July that year.
What I pay tribute to is the wisdom of including lots of people in lots of Bicentennial Committees across the country in celebrating, commemorating, how we were in 1976.
At least in Unity, it was not so much looking back or forward as thinking about how we were and who we were at that time.
That year, Unity had a celebration that was maybe a little more elaborate than it might have otherwise been. The parade was much as it always is: all the Unity fire department’s equipment, a unit of two from neighboring town’s departments, a horse-drawn wagon, the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts and the 4-H, Ralph Reed riding one of his antique tractors, a couple of equestrians, the PTA, the historical society, and various folks in various costumes and uniforms.
We all marched or rode or drove – I was in one of the fire trucks – we went from the Unity Country Store, past the school and the town hall to the fire house and around the common three times and back to the store.
And there weren’t too many on-lookers, because almost everyone in town was in the parade. Just like always.
There weren’t huge helium-filled balloons of cartoon characters or flower-encrusted floats; just us looking at us as we are and cheering.
That time, the Bicentennial, 1976, was a good one for celebration. The Vietnam War was over. The Iran Hostage Crisis had not yet happened. The coming recession of the late Seventies and early Eighties wasn’t apparent to most us. It was a good moment in time to just be in. Ah, those were the good old days.
Carly Simon has a song, “Anticipation,” with the ending lyrics, “Stay right here ‘cause these are the good old days.”
But, you know, with attitudes and actions like those of this congregation, forward-looking and forward-stepping, there will be centennial celebrations here. And folks will look back at us, at our pictures and our documents, at our fashions and hair styles, at the stuff we surround ourselves with and they will feel nostalgia for this time. This time, with all we have to worry about and all the hurt we have. These are the good old days.
Archives found in whatever replaces libraries and newspapers’ morgues and Google will hold the record of the Dow Jones’ fluctuations and wars and the tsunamis and of how we helped one another while all that was happening. For all that, we, all of us, regardless of age, are the old timers. These are the good old days.
My undergraduate training is as a geologist. I get to look at the history of the planet as it is recorded in the rocks. I don’t get to talk about billions and billions of years, as astrophysicists and Hindus do; for me it’s hundreds of thousands and a few millions of years that get to occupy my musings. So, I bring you this story:
A million and a half years ago, give or take, a volcano erupted in eastern Africa. It spread a layer of fine ash over a wide area, including what is now Kenya.
It rained on this ash and made a sort of wet plaster. Two creatures, some of our early ancestors, walked across it, the mud squishing between their toes. They left their footprints.
The footprints were buried, the ash-mud-plaster turned to stone. Deposition, uplift, erosion took place. The footprints can be seen on the planet surface again.
The two sets of footprints stay about the same distance apart; they do not cross. It is easy to believe that these two, as they walked with wet volcanic ash oozing between their toes, it is easy to believe that they were holding hands.
I don’t know what record anyone will find of us – of how we are in this moment; of what we are feeling or doing now.
I believe, with all I am, that it will be obvious in whatever record there may be, that, as we stepped beyond the edge of all the light we have, I believe it will be clear that we are holding hands. That we have chosen to step over this edge together, believing – maybe in solid ground or flight lessons. Believing in each other and what we can be together.
So be it. Amen.
