First Congregational Church
165 Main St, Amherst, MA
1 Kings 19:7-13
Romans 12:1-18
Matthew 5:1-12
A story. It is about a fishing village. There life was ruled by habits, routines of working, and loving and dying. The men brought in their hauls from the sea and mended their nets. The women cooked and cared for the children. Life was lived, but boredom and loneliness filled the air. Day after day, the same empty words, the same empty gestures, the same empty faces, the same empty bodies. Their religion recalled the great and noble race that had settled the land ages before, but it too was empty, lacking any intimation of mystery or transcendence. The joy of life was something nobody knew or seemed to miss.
Now it happened that on a day like all others a boy saw a strange shape floating far away on the sea. He cried out. The whole village came: in a place like that even a strange shape is an occasion for interest. And there they stayed, on the beach, looking, waiting. Till the sea, slowly, with no haste, washed up the thing and put it on the sand, to the disappointment of all. It was a dead man.
All dead men are alike because there is one thing only to do with them: they must be respectfully disposed of. In that village the custom was that the women prepared the dead for burial. So, they carried the corpse to a house, women inside, men outside. And the silence was great as the women washed the algae and green things of the sea from the dead man’s body. But suddenly a voice broke the silence: one of the women…
“Had he lived among us he would have had to bend his head every time he entered one of our houses. He is too tall…” And they all nodded in approval. Again the silence was deep. Then another woman spoke…
“I wonder about his voice…Was it like the whisper of the breeze? Like the thunder of the waves? Did he know that secret word which, once uttered makes a woman pick up a flower and put it in her hair?” And they all smiled. Silence. And again, the voice of another woman:
“These hands…How big they are! What did they do? Did they play with children? Did they sail a boat through the seas? Did they fight many battles? Did they build houses? Did they know how to caress and to embrace a woman’s body?” And they all laughed.
And they were surprised that the funeral had become a resurrection; that is, a movement in their flesh. Dreams, long dead, returning; ashes becoming fire; forbidden desires emerging to the surface of their skins, their bodies alive again. Memories returning; remembrance returning.
Their husbands, outside, listened to what was happening to their wives, and they were jealous of the drowned man, as they realized that he had a power which they themselves did not have. But then they thought about the dreams they had never had, the poems they had never written, the seas they had never seen, the women they had never loved. The story ends as they finally buried the dead man. But the village was never the same. The women and men had come alive.
C. S. Lewis writes this in “Surprised by Joy.”
“As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of (an) earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden…comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. ---and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
What Lewis experienced was “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He says “I call it Joy,...(but) it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures of this world.”
This unsatisfied desire, this particular grief, is what, I believe, Jesus was referring to in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This is the first of the classic, perhaps original, seven beatitudes. Commentators in the Eastern Orthodox tradition have long noted that it is the only beatitude of the seven in which what has been promised is now fully realized. Not “they will be” or “they will have” – but theirs is now the kingdom of heaven. To know poverty of spirit is not to see it as something to be overcome or worked through. Poverty of spirit is itself living in the midst of the “enormous bliss” of heaven.
In Brazilian Portuguese, there is a word that does not seem to have an equivalent in any other language. The word is saudade. It has been defined as “an intensity of heartfelt connection that is yearned for passionately.” It combines grief, nostalgia, and yearning, but yet with a special kind of joy at being alive. Theologian Rubem Alves calls it “longing remembrance.” I think it is exactly what Lewis and Jesus are describing. Brazilians believe that you aren’t fully alive until you know saudade. Perhaps you’ve seen the remarkable Brazilian film “Central Station.” In it a bitter old woman, Dora, survives on bilking illiterate poor people by having them dictate letters to her which, after taking their money, she never sends. A woman and her young son named Josue come for Dora’s help in writing to the woman’s husband, the boy’s father, who lives in the Brazilian outback. But after Dora takes her money, the mother is hit and killed by a bus. Improbably Dora and Josue embark on an odyssey to Northeastern Brazil to find the boy’s father. Dora behaves really quite badly and selfishly, but over the course of this journey, you begin to realize how, because of her own broken family, her buried pain, her own long lost hopes, she came to be such a person. Josue is also no angel either. But he is clever and shows great determination to make it despite his tragic life. And on their long road trip the two begin to connect. As things go from bad to worse you begin to empathize. Though they fail to find Josue’s father, they do discover his brothers whom he has never met, and Josue finds a new family, a family of fatherless, motherless young men. Though now attached to the boy, Dora knows that she must return to Rio. She slips out of the house by night and boards a bus, without saying good-bye. As wrenching as this departure is, you sense that some re-connection with her own heart has been made. On the bus she writes Josue a letter and her tears set the ink running down the page. She ends with these words, “I have saudade for my father. I have saudade for everything.”
A yearning so vast that no-thing, no object, no person, can ever satisfy it. “An unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” This yearning for everything is what it means to be alive. It is a yearning for all that has been lost, but is now remembered, and in the remembering, the hope of an enormous bliss is granted us as a grace. Like the husbands in the story listening to the women’s joy, we think about the dreams we have never had, the poems we have never written. But now, perhaps we can dream. Now we can be poets.
On one of my cluttered bookshelves at home there sits a little pink porcelain vase, about six inches high with white flowers on it. It is the kind of knick-knack that one could buy at a yard sale for ten cents maybe. But it is magical to me. I look at it practically every day. It was the first gift I ever bought with my own money as a present to someone else. I gave it to my grandmother, whom I adored. When I look at it I remember her boundless gentleness and patience and sweetness. I remember her sun porch where I slept when I visited her. I remember the colorful decals of different kinds of birds on the cedar paneling in the room. I remember the cereal bowls with animals pictured on the bottom that you would discover only when you finished your Rice Crispies. I remember the stories she told me as we sat together on her “glider” on the front porch. And I also remember the feeling of pride I felt in picking out that little vase and paying for it myself, and wrapping it up. And how happy she seemed when she opened it. Those memories come back to me both as the past remembered and as a longing to recover that sense of peace and wholeness and joy. Rubem Alves says:
(It is lovely) that there should be things that are more than things, things that make us remember…Things present that open us to the world of absences. Isn’t that what longing remembrance is? To feel that something is lacking, someone, whom the heart desires, is far away. But absence is not enough. There are a lot of things which have been lost and left behind, of which we have no longing remembrance. It’s because we didn’t love them. Longing remembrance is born when there is love and absence.
So that little vase is, for me, not just a reminder of the past – it is something that becomes transparent to the present truth. It becomes a means for the recovery of my longing and remembrance, and something through which intimations flow. The intimations that come to me are that I loved my grandmother and she loved me, and that I am loveable and can express that love. It is an inner-connection between me and my own heart, between me and the divine love itself. And it happens now.
C. S. Lewis notes when he reflects on the “joy” he experiences standing beside the flowering currant bush, that what came upon him came “from a depth not of years but of centuries.” What he experienced transcended simple personal memory. I believe that this is at the heart of what sacrament is. On the night on which he was betrayed Jesus took the bread and the cup and said to those with him, “Eat this. Drink this. This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” On a temporal level the bread and the cup are reminders of the time Jesus was with us, and means of sustenance until he returns. But the Eucharist is much more than this. With the repetition of the words “This is my body; this is my blood” these simple “things” become transparent to the invisible Christ. Those who lived in the village had forgotten a wholeness and happiness they once had. But more importantly, they had forgotten that they were capable of wholeness and happiness, capable of the “enormous bliss of Eden.” But they gained the capacity for intimations; intimations that the mysterious source of life itself was already within them. We say, in temporal terms, it was the recovery of what had been lost – early happiness in life, perhaps even the bliss of life in the womb. But in spiritual terms, what they experienced was a reconnection within themselves - the experience of longing remembrance, of saudade, the intimation that “All will be well” “Ours is the kingdom of heaven.”
Well, how does all this connect with the church, and with the installation of a new pastor? Howard Thurman said “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I believe that. For me, those words sum up the mission of the whole church, the call of a pastor, and the job description of the laity – to be a community of the alive and awake. Paul, in Romans 12, gives us a picture of what has been called both the vertical and the horizontal axes of the Church. The vertical is the transcendent mystery of the gospel. “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice…Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind…” Then he goes on to describe the horizontal axis, giving us a picture of how a community of the transformed becomes a community of loving non-conformists.” It is remarkable to me how many times Paul in this scripture talks about our bodies – as what are sacrificed and as what come alive: both in spiritual transformation and in non-conforming community.
For each of the past five years, I’ve been attending an annual seven day silent retreat for Christians interested in practicing meditation. Led by a Jesuit priest who is also a zen master, a roshi, the retreat is organized as a traditional sesshin. The rules are ritualized and strict. Fifty people or so agree to sit in silence for seven or eight hours a day. Silence is observed at meals. Any interaction, greeting, or eye-contact is discouraged. You may only speak in brief conferences with one of the teachers. But mostly it is sitting in silence. When the sesshin ends, with great mental and physical relief, seven days later, I always notice something remarkable. These fellow-sitters, most of whom I do not know and have not shared a single word with, are somehow, mysteriously, my community. A very palpable bond unites us. It is very hard to explain. But when I think of the lack of community in our culture, the phony communities that beckon us, and the gap between what the church promises and so often fails to deliver, I feel a tremendous gratitude for this kind of experience. A community of transformed non-conformists devoted to supporting one another on their inward journey of silence.
The poet Rilke once famously said, “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” Thomas Merton, a great fan of Rilke, enlarged on this to suggest that the task of Christian community is to stand guard over the solitude of its members. Through the nurture and preservation of our spiritual solitude; that is, through prayer, sacrificial love and service, and the emptying of the self – all the way from ego to earthly possessions, we can each be given the gift of poverty of spirit, the gift of the kingdom of heaven.
A closing story. I was on a transatlantic flight earlier in the summer and sat next to a young Austrian woman named Angelika. She was a journalist from Vienna who was returning from a Microsoft conference in Seattle. As we got acquainted on the long flight she told me that she was interested in leaving journalism and becoming a psychotherapist. We ended up talking for hours about psychology and religion. And she wondered aloud whether some people who had been so wounded in early life, so deprived of basic love and nurture by their parents, that they could never really have happy and healthy relationships. As I learned more about her life, it became clear that she was talking about herself, having lost both her parents in very tragic circumstances. She thought the answer was no, some people would be forever emotionally crippled, with no hope of real happiness. Now, whenever I hear the words “no hope” that mobilizes the preacher in me. I leaned toward her and said that I believed they could really be helped. I said that it took me many years to realize that my own father had tried his best to provide such love, but that he simply didn’t have it to give. My anger toward him was rooted in my belief that he had withheld his love. But when I realized he didn’t have it, I was able to forgive him. But, importantly, I couldn’t fully forgive him until I realized that all the love I needed that I didn’t get from him was still available, still out there, in other people, in life itself. In fact I was surrounded by it- immersed in it. I sat back. And I noted a tiny, but unmistakable flicker of inner satisfaction that I had expressed this important truth so eloquently. Angelika was silent for a moment. Then she looked at me and said sadly, “No. There are those who can never be fully healed, but they can be loved and helped to accept their brokenness.” And she said this with such honesty and compassion. And I realized that what I had said may have been true, but it was too neat, too pat, too preacherly. What was lacking was the saudade, that yearning that can never go away. And I remembered Dora in “Central Station.” “I have saudade for my father. I have saudade for everything.” We all do. Yes, God’s love surrounds us. It is there. But in important ways, it does remain out of reach. And we yearn all the more.
The village I described in the beginning was a group of lonely non-transformed conformists. But somehow it was in their mysterious encounter with the total emptiness of the drowned man, the man of whom they thought they had no memory, that they discovered their own emptiness, and into that emptiness flowed the long lost remembrance of who they really were. And with it, the yearning, the grace of poverty of spirit.
And what if, in the end, it is this yearning itself that connects us not only with our own hearts and with each other, but also connects us with God? Martin Buber puts it simply:
You know, always, in the depths of your heart, that you have need of God, more than of anything else. But do you not know that God also has need of you, that God, from the fullness of eternity, needs you?
We, in our emptiness yearn for God, that we might be full. And God, even in the fullness of eternity, yearns for us, and is willing to become empty, that we might come alive.