My father-in-law, Earle Buck, died on Wednesday of Pancreatic cancer, the same merciless disease that took my own father seventeen years ago. Earle was 81 years old and had lived a full life, but that did nothing to diminish our pain at his loss. Carolyn was with her father when he died. Over the past few weeks, I occasionally and she often had stood by his bedside, holding his hand. "Dying is like labor," she said to me. At the end of a terminal illness, often after hard labor, we finally give death even as our mother’s gave us birth.

Not just for Carolyn and her family, but for all of us, especially here in New York City, death and birth find themselves in sharp juxtaposition this Christmas season. The angels of birth and the angels of death seem almost effortlessly to slip in and out of each other’s clothing. So this morning, to celebrate the gift of life, let us enter the precincts of myth and listen to the angels’ song.

I am aware that myth makes people nervous. How eagerly it is abjured by biblical literalist and logical positivist alike. There is a fundamentalism of the left as well as of the right. If grounded in a radically different set of principles, the approach is similar. Positivists and fundamentalists share a penchant for thoroughgoing rationalism.

Both true believer and hardcore atheist test the Bible for its facts. To the former they are absolutely convincing. Following the logic of one fundamentalist leader–"I believe that Jonah was a literal man who was swallowed by a literal fish and vomited up on a literal beach"–the scriptural record is an exact transcript of events as they actually occurred. The skeptic finds this incredible and loses his or her faith. Both forget that the Bible is a religious storybook, not a historical record that will stand or fall only upon its facts. It is a storybook rich with mythic overtones and parabolic undertones, helping us to set humanity in divine, and divinity in humane, perspective. As for its stories, like every story, their truth depends entirely upon their listeners. They will prove as true as love and hope are true, but only if they awaken us to possibilities for love and hope within our lives.

Imagine. We are back in the fields surrounding Bethlehem. Suddenly, the sky shines with a great light, an angel of God. We are terrified, but the angel says, "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which will be to all people." What could be simpler or more startling? A child is born: the spark of cosmic consciousness planted in animal flesh; the miracle of human birth fixed at the cross point of the vertical axis, which is God's axis, and the horizontal axis, which is the axis of temporal as opposed to eternal things. Here birth, death, and eternity link inextricably in a mythic pattern expressed within a parable. As Emerson reminds us, "Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men and pleads with them to return to paradise." With every birth, something of eternity is made incarnate in time. In this sense, not only does Jesus’ birth prefigure our own, but also, in the bloom of its promise, the birth of the baby Jesus witnesses to the limitless nature of our own possibilities. Placed within our arms, Jesus reawakens us to the one true gift, the gift of life, the one true miracle.

By placing birth in a sacral setting, one shot through with angels, Christmas reminds us that nothing (including any imaginable afterlife) could possibly be more amazing than life itself is. No revelation is more compelling or worth pondering than that of a new-born infant emerging from its mother’s womb. When "doing theology" theologians would be wise to close their learned tomes at times and re-open the book of nature. Theology’s heartbeat is the miracle of our own existence.

"Jesus spoke of miracles," Emerson goes on to say, "for he felt that all life was a miracle. But the very word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain." "What is a day?" he asked. "What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But to the wise a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables."

If Emerson is right, and I believe he is, then to all who would divine its presence the miracle of life, natural and unalloyed, is made manifest in every living thing. Yes, in Jesus, who was indeed a Son of God–even as we each have it within our power to be sons and daughters of God–and in the words Jesus spoke and in his deeds. But no uniquely there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was at heart a poet, schooled in paradox and gifted with an eye for God’s presence. For years I slighted Emerson. Today he is among my favorite guides. To the cosmic voyager, Emerson cautions, "Thou seek’st in globe and galaxy, He hides in pure transparency." Rather than losing himself in the cosmos, Emerson perceives God’s tracings in the most intimate create object. For Emerson, "the fresh rose . . . gives back the bending heavens in dew." He views his own life through the same cosmic microscope. Finding a fresh Rhodora on one of his many walks through the woods neighboring Concord, a recognition of divine kinship tempers his solitude. Of this beauty ("its own excuse for being") Emerson ponders,

I never thought to ask, I never knew;

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

One of Emerson’s tough-minded critics, the philosopher George Santayana, dismissed the sentimentality of Transcendentalism, while admiring Emerson’s ability to entrance an audience. "They flocked to him and listened to his word, not so much for the sake of its absolute meaning as for the atmosphere of candour, purity, and serenity that hung about it, as about a sort of sacred music." With a tin ear for sacred music, Santayana truly puzzled over Emerson’s appeal. The man had no doctrine. The deeper he got into something, the vaguer and more metaphorical Emerson became. "Did he know what he meant by Spirit or the ‘Over-Soul’?" Santayana asks. "Could he say what he understood by the terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, Benefit, or Beauty? He could not." Santayana is right. The old language is imprecise. All Emerson could do was to mirror his awe and humility in childlike reverence for the creation and his small yet consciousness-charged place in it. Santayana was at home in his books and nothing if not confident in his aesthetic doctrine; Emerson, with Fuller, was at home in the Universe, because the universal God dwelled in his mind and heart.

Emerson would have understood Santayana’s criticism, having cautioned, "Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods." He resisted codifying his experience of life and God into doctrine for another reason as well. He had no interest in others seeing through his eyes. For Emerson, a true disciple would be one who would greet each dawn in a new way, one unique to his or her particular insight and vision. For this same reason, he called on American artists and philosophers to liberate themselves from thralldom to the received old world models–not that these were false or bad in and of themselves, only that what was authentic to the experience of others would prove itself inauthentic for a different time and place. Not only is derived experience certain to leave the creation muffled in multifold disguises, but there also are as many gates to perception as exist travelers who would venture to enter them. Since no doctrine can possibly encompass our collective intuition or experience of God, neither can one individual walk for another down the road that leads to God. Each of us defines the road we take and our heart determines its destination.

Thomas Merton compared the great religious traditions to spokes of a wheel, all of which lead to one and the same hub. Emerson instead saw each of us at the hub, following out one spoke or another toward the same rim and beyond, with the entire wheel turning by divine motion. One can play with this metaphor in many ways. In his first sermon, the Buddha spoke of "the wheel of truth" with its eight spokes representing our eight-fold path to right conduct, and our "constant mindfulness the hub on which the axle of truth is borne." For him, this wheel would take us home by guiding our conduct in such away that we might find liberation from the misdirection of self by untutored desire. Emerson took a more cosmic view, echoing that of the 17^th century Metaphysical poet, Thomas Traherne, whose childlike sense of God and self is that both are of the same spirit, with each soul,

Being Simple like the Deity

In its own Center is a Sphere

Not shut up here, but everywhere.

Transcendentalism appears in many of the world’s religions. The Sufi mystic, al-Halraj writes, "I saw my Lord with the eye of the Heart. I said: ‘Who are you?’ He answered: ‘You.’" In such expressions, Transcendentalist mysticism does not affirm that we are God (for we are but a tiny part of the creation), only that God–greater than all and yet present in each–dwells within us.

We shouldn’t forget the story of Jacob, however. Not only do angels of awakening attend our birth. They also wrestle with us when we need blessing, reminding us how vulnerable we are and how precious the honor of vulnerability is. Once we survive the crisis of such an awakening, we remember, as if for the first time, that all our earthly cares are nothing when measured against the privilege of having them–that any day in which we do not acknowledge how blessed we are in our loved ones, in the tasks we are called to do, even in the burdens we bear and trials we face, is a day squandered. Though nothing could be more important to remember, there are few things in life that we so easily forget.

Religion is a peculiarly human enterprise, because we humans are driven to explore the mysterious ground of our own being. We may not be the only creatures who know that they are going to die, but I wager we are the only ones who wonder why we live. Many religions give final answers to these questions. Like Jacob’s angel, mine does not. In either case, in face of death, by not giving up in our struggle for meaning and demanding to be blessed no matter what the cost, by consciously receiving the gift of life, we too can be born-again.

When we awaken to the angel’s song, we stand at Heaven’s door: not a Heaven beyond, but Heaven within; not an eternity of time, but eternity in time, expressive of life’s abundance. Because eternity is not a length of time, but instead the very depth of time, this Heaven can be entered as easily through doors that swing open and closed as through doors that are open forever. One who sat at William Blake’s bedside when Blake was dying reported that, "Just before he died, his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst into singing of the things he saw in Heaven." But this same poet also saw the trees outside his window filled with angels when he was but a boy of seven.

The author of the New Testament Book of Hebrews wrote long ago that "Some have entertained angels unawares." In a sense this is so true. Everyday we are called to an awareness of the wonder that dances within and about us in our daily lives. What this requires is not so much a discovery of the supernatural, but rather a rediscovery of the super in the natural. It is to this that Emerson and other Transcendentalists in our liberal religious tradition call our attention.

Does that mean angels really exist? Not in the sense that you might imagine. In fact, it is impossible to prove the existence of angels without leaving their realm. Like God, angels are beyond proof. Once we start arguing about whether or not angels exist, we have already missed the point. I will venture this, however. When angels dance on the head of a pin, they don’t concern themselves with how many can fit, as if they were crowding into a phone booth. Their full attention is devoted to the joy of the dance.

Numbering is a grown-up game. But, if we follow Jesus’ counsel and become again as children, we will be able to dance in the ring of eternity. At the very least, by remembering that some not too distant day the song of life will play for us one last time and then its earthly strains will cease, we will join the dance of life with more exuberance. How much finer it will be, when our band is struck, if we have loved the music while it lasted and enjoyed the dance.

Amen. I love you. May God bless us all.

 

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