Reading: "For Margaret, Who Fights the Same Battle Over and Over," from "Instructions in Joy," a forthcoming book of poems by Nancy Shaffer.

Listen.
When you quarrel with God
really you are quarreling with
those who have come after God.
It is not God who taught you only
a certain prayer or said reward
lies in only one direction. It is not
God who said "reward" rather than
"embracing love" which is everywhere.
Not God who taught you to hate
God, shun God. Those like you–
two-legged and mortal–did this: those
also hurt, in turn, by others before them.

You could leave off this quarreling:
just begin again, with just yourself
and God. You can choose a different
name for the Holy; stop cringing when
I say mine. Each is only a word for what
can’t be said, the barest beginning,
a glimpse. The rest you may do in private.

But see: what you do there in private,
shows: what you come back with is written
all over you. It doesn’t matter
what the particular word is. Only
that you return there often, opening
yourself to everything that makes it.

Those who taught you what to pray and
how to pray were wrong, if what they
taught you, you hate.

You can begin again.

I have a little secret to share with you this morning, a piece of insider information, one of those clever tricks most ministers learn that subtly yet quite innocently enhance their reputation for prescience, for ever-readiness. This little secret has to do with the selection of sermon titles. Since monthly bulletins go to press weeks before one finally stands up to preach, how, you may ask, do we know what we are going to talk about so far in advance. The simple answer is, we don’t. At least you better hope we don’t. The last thing in the world anyone wants, not to mention needs, is a month-old freeze-dried sermon.

When I arrived at All Souls almost a quarter of a century ago now, I hadn’t learned this yet. That is hardly surprising, because I hadn’t learned much of anything back then, at least anything that required twenty solid minutes of someone else’s spiritual attention. In fact, before coming to All Souls, I had only preached a handful of sermons in my life, three of them devoted to Thomas Jefferson’s religious thought, one of the many slightly irrelevant things that I did happen to know quite a bit about. So what I did the summer before I arrived, the summer of ’78, was to outline 35 sermons, assigning each a date, the topics syncopated in such a way that my ignorance would be broadly distributed. By the end of the summer, not only did I have 35 sermons, I also had thirty-five jokes to go along with them. Those of you who were here back then and kind enough to remain will surely have your own sad memories of this failed experiment. It worked for things like Christmas and Easter, but most of the other Sundays your young pilot ended up steering the wrong boat. In response to the historic Camp David Agreement, I found myself preaching, say, on Liberation Theology in Nicaragua. Even when nothing particularly notable was happening, I still often found myself off-topic. To give you a taste of what it was like back then, let me quote just a single sentence from the sermon I delivered twenty-four years ago this Sunday. Are you ready? (Quote) "This leads me to an explanation for my choice of subject for the morning: Collegium: Its Coming of Age." One reason preachers speak so persuasively about forgiveness is that we have so much first hand experience in the need for it!

In any event, I learned young to try to preach where people were on any given Sunday. Yet the problem of advance time for the publication of sermon topics remained. That is, until I heard the story of a legendary colleague of mine by the name of James Madison Barr. Jim preached in Memphis. He called himself a Calhoun Unitarian. He also valued his privacy and come Monday, when the weekly newsletter was going to press, his secretary often had a hard time tracking him down. So three or four times a year, here is how the sermon notice read. "James Madison Barr: ‘The Great Mystery.’ What Dr. Barr will be preaching about is a mystery, but we are certain it will be great."

My secret is this. If you are one of those satisfaction-seeking sorts who checks sermon titles before deciding on whether or not to bother attending church, not only does this place your souls in jeopardy, but also, from my own sermon titles at least, you will learn very little. That is to say, I deliberately choose sermon titles that will cover almost every contingency. Like "Saving Faith."

Truthfully, there is something deeper going on here than my banter may suggest. If twenty-four years ago, I preached thirty-five different sermons, for some time now I have been preaching only one. You could call it "The Great Mystery," I suppose. I think of it simply as "Love and Death."

The logarithms of love and death are riddled with paradox. The more you love the more you risk to lose and therefore stand to fear. Yet love casts out all fear. The greater your love the deeper your grief at a time of loss. Therefore, grief is good. The heart of Christianity is broken and saved by such a paradox. Empty yourself and be filled, Jesus taught. Lose yourself and be found. In the Christian mythos, Jesus died that we might live.

I learned this lesson first from Dalton Denton. Dalton was my closest friend at Stanford. During the middle of our sophomore year he died of pneumonia while on a skiing vacation at Vail, Colorado. He had been out on the slopes just the day before. That morning he felt a little tired and somewhat congested, so he stayed in the cabin while his friends skied. When they returned home later in the afternoon, Dalton was dead.

People have asked me how if I still believe in God in the wake of last month’s tragedy. If God exists, how could God have let this happen? We don’t need a slaughter to raise this question for us. Where was God yesterday when a drunk driver killed a young woman in Brooklyn? Where was God when Dalton died of pneumonia?

Dalton was a blithe spirit, serious about life but not at all somber. He was tremendous fun to be with, and we spent almost all our free time together. He introduced me to Scotch and Beethoven, two habits he had picked up at Exeter. He was the closest thing to a sophisticate I had ever encountered. In our freshman year, together we pursued–he successfully, I not–two striking girls, both actresses, who were themselves best friends. More than once after an all-night conversation, Dalton and I saw in the dawn.

When Dalton died, my world collapsed. Meaning was stripped like color from my days. As with a kind of x-ray vision, I saw only bones and shadows clustering on corners, laughing and arguing about nothing, unself-knowing spectors of meaningless activity. I couldn’t bear the cacophony of empty chatter. I cut myself off from everyone, stopped attending classes, licked my wounds and tasted only blood.

But then Dalton saved me. His love, especially as expressed during our last hours together, began to work a strange alchemy in combination with my grief. Paying deeper attention than I ever had before, I learned something about everything that matters. You see, for a silly reason not worth mentioning, Dalton and I had been estranged throughout the fall of our Sophomore year. We had so angered one another that I left the house we were living in together and moved into the woods alone. I wouldn’t speak to him. My heart was possessed by anger and pride.

Then, a week before Dalton died, he surprised me one morning by arriving at my burrow in the woods, and we went on a long drive together. All day long, we drove back and forth along the highway between Stanford and the sea. We talked about friendship, meaning, and death.

This meeting of hearts and minds was surely less profound than memory suggests. As often with true friendship, we passed a good part of that time, I am sure, simply enjoying one another’s company: exchanging insults with the immunity that love bestows, delighting in word games and frivolous repartee, talking a private language that only the two of us could fully understand.

Yet there were serious moments. These are the moments that worked their saving alchemy, first within a week of Dalton’s death and to this very day. I told Dalton that I did not expect to live past the age of twenty-five. This was part of a romantic, melodramatic attempt to feel life deeply, at a time when I was struggling to feel anything at all. Dalton was sympathetic but unimpressed. It was enough, he told me, to live and love as best we could.

In the sermon he delivered on the Sunday following the terrorist attack (one of those I include in my new book, Restoring Faith), Arthur Caliandro of Marble Collegiate Church here in New York City, tells of a visit he made to his therapist that week.

"Arthur, how are your?" the therapist asked. "How are you handling yourself?"

"I’m fine, " Arthur said. But he knew deep inside that he wasn’t, and the therapist recognized this too. So Arthur began sharing how he had built a protective wall around his emotions. How he had allowed none of the pain or anguish to get in. He had kept is all outside. He was protecting himself from hurt, from pain, and from feeling.

The therapist asked him, "Arthur, have you cried?"

"No, not really," Arthur replied. "Once I started to, but I stopped it right away."

"Tell me about it. And as you do, cry."

So Arthur told him the story. "I got a call from out of state, from somebody very important to me, in whom I’ve invested so much of myself. We had become estranged. This person had even refused to take my calls. But that person called after the disaster, and then when I heard that voice–‘Arthur, are you all right?’–I started to cry. But I cut it off."

"Cry now," the therapist said. And he did. The tears poured from his eyes. They watered his soul.

It takes a remarkable amount of courage to open our hearts. A hard, armored heart is impervious; it can’t be broken. Yet only broken hearts can be healed.

Dalton is the first of many who have taught me how much courage it takes to love. Whenever we give our hearts away, the burden of our vulnerability grows. We risk being rebuffed or embarrassed or disappointed or inadequate. Beyond these things we risk the enormous pain of loss. When those we love die, a part of us dies with them. When those we love are sick, in body or in spirit, we too feel the pain.

All of this is worth it. Especially the pain. If we insulate our hearts from suffering, we shall only subdue the very thing that makes life worth living. We cannot protect ourselves from loss. We can only protect ourselves from the death of love. And without love, there is no meaning. Without love, we are left only with the aching hollow of regret, that haunting emptiness where love might have been.

Do something for yourself today. Go home this afternoon and pick up the phone. Call someone who was once close to you, but who has drifted away from you, or been forced away by you. Just say, "Hi. With all these terrible things happening, I just had to call and see how you were doing, to know that you were okay." It’s a risky thing to do. I know that. You will open yourself up to more hurt perhaps. It is hard to forgive. And it is hard to ask forgiveness. It is far easier to save face than it is to save faith. But by saving faith instead, you will open yourself up, and that is something fine, something brave and right and well-worth doing.

You may not even need to go as far as the phone. In self-protection, we also armor our hearts against those closest to us. Yet one day, not as part of God’s plan (save in the sense that death is the hinge upon which life’s wonder and mystery also turns), she too will die, he will die, you will die. In the meantime, the one thing, perhaps the only thing that can redeem our death is love. "For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son . . . ." God also sent you. God sent you into this vale of passion and tears, this extraordinary garden of terror and delight. Why? Dalton said it for me: to live and love as best we can. God may not be love. God may not be, who knows, but something is, something bigger than any word, any concept, any doubt or any creed. All we know is this: whether God is love or not, love is divine. Nothing else matters. Only love and death.

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

 

Closing Words

I spent yesterday with a new book of poems from Unitarian minister, Nancy Schaffer, who asked me to write a preface for it. Each of the poems is remarkable. I close with another one.

 

Because we spill not only milk

knocking it over with an elbow when

we reach to wipe a small face

but also spill seeds on soil we

thought was fertile but isn’t

and also spill whole lives and only

later see in fading light how

much is gone and we hadn’t

intended it

Because we tear not only cloth

thinking to find a true edge and

instead making only a hole but

also tear friendships when we grow

and whole mountainsides

because we are so many and

we want to live right where black oaks

did, once very quietly and still

because we forget not only what

we are doing in the kitchen

and have to go back to the room we were in

before, remember why it was we left

but also forget entire lexicons of joy and

how we lost ourselves for hours

yet all that time were clearly

found and held and also forget

the hungry not at our table

Because we weep not only at jade

plants caught in freeze and

precious papers left in rain but

also at legs which no longer walk

or never did, although from the outside

they look like most others

and also weep at words said once as

though they might be rearranged but

which, once loose, refuse to return

and we are helpless

Because we are imperfect and love so

deeply we never will have enough days

we need the gift of starting over, beginning

again: just this constant good, this

saving hope

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