How strange that this year's September Song was written by Elton John, "A Candle in the Wind," written in honor of Marilyn Monroe, brilliantly and appropriately revised for the funeral of Lady Diana. And then Mother Teresa died. What song would you rewrite for her funeral? Imagine? All We Need is Love? Maybe Ave Maria? They wouldn't even have to be rewritten.
I had a sermon for this morning which you obviously are not going to hear. September Song. Endings and beginnings. A nice, non-threatening, impressionistic, invitation to the next season of your life. But our September Song has changed and my sermon with it. The subject is the same but the song has changed. The new song was sung yesterday morning before most but not all of us were up. My wife set her alarm for 6:30 and just missed it. I slept through, continuing, even wanting to believe, that nothing all that far out of the ordinary was happening.
She was right. I was wrong. This past week's events finally sneaked up on me, and with Mother Teresa's death I was overtaken. This is no time for business as usual. Certainly not a time for cynicism. It is a time for us to pay our respects to two people who, in remarkably different and remarkably similar ways, changed our lives, not just by being famous, but by investing fame with meaning, by touching our hearts.
Let me step back for a minute and share my thoughts about a preacher's job. I'm just beginning my twentieth year with you. This is about my 600th sermon. I draw from a strong faith tradition, which, if not orthodox, invites me to explore everything from the scriptures to ancient philosophy and current events. But the object is always the same. For me, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with tools, or the animal with advanced language, we are the religious animal. We know that we are going to die and then question what life means. This week two deaths both cast a shadow and shone a light on what it means to be alive and then to die. For several days I tried to avoid the shadow; yesterday I felt the light.
Let me tell you what I hate about much organized religion. It obliterates the ragged edges of our lives, imposing in their place a sterile, dogmatic form that encompasses everyone and no one at the same time. Let me give you an example. Last Sunday the royal family worshipped at their local church in Scotland. These two bereft boys, William and Harry, sat through a church service in which their mother's name and death were never mentioned. The preacher delivered a sermon he had written the week before Princess Diana died. It was filled with sly humor and correct theology. It had nothing to do with anything that really mattered.
Most weeks I can preach to you a sermon I have determined on a month before. At their best such sermons are worth pondering. This morning I am simply going to give my own, unpolished thoughts about what you are pondering, the deaths and lives of these two women, so very different save in this: Each was thrust into a caste system -- Windsor and Brahmin -- and refused to be governed by it. Instead they let their humanity shine through by embracing the constituency of the rejected.
How many of you watched some part of Diana's funeral yesterday? You and one to two billion others. I believe that we are one, all of us, mysteriously born and fated to die, but how often do we even get close to experiencing that. Yesterday we did.
So let me try to make some sense of this, for me as well as for you. I have to begin with a confession. I didn't want to preach about Princess Diana this morning. I decided to on Friday, before Mother Teresa died, but until yesterday I was still ambivalent. I don't believe in fairy princesses. I didn't want to concede more to the death of a fashion plate than to a forgotten young woman in East Harlem, who surely died this week and left two children and whose names we will never know.
The first thing that touched me was my wife's tears. They fell every morning and evening this week. Let me tell you something. Don't try arguing with tears. They come from someplace deep. They almost always matter.
And then I started to cry. I finally got it. Yesterday morning, the little envelope on Diana's casket that said "Mummy." And then the song. And Prime Minister Tony Blair reading First Corinthians 13 as it has almost never been read before, and then Lord Spencer, who spoke the truth, his love expressed in anger, and I was crying. Again and again.
As Lord Spencer said, Princess Diana was not a saint. Mother Teresa was. Yet, when I heard that Mother Teresa had died, I felt nothing other than respect and appreciation for her life. Let me put this bluntly. I didn't feel my own death. But when Diana was killed in a Paris tunnel I did. Not that I wanted to think about it. I didn't. I fought all week not to. But I did. I felt my death.
Even that's not quite right. I felt death itself. Sudden, untimely, the trap door falls: bang, that's it. Remember John Lennon's last song: "Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans." Life, and especially death.
I read all the papers, all the pundits. I even half agreed with most of what I read. But it wasn't until Lord Spencer spoke that I got it. Why did this woman touch so many hearts so deeply. No one had said this before. The reason she touched our hearts so deeply is because she felt unworthy. Isn't that amazing. She touched us because of her openly acknowledged sense of insecurity, because of her lifelong struggle with a feeling of unworthiness.
If you want to know what to do with your own sense of unworthiness, think for a moment about this woman. She touched the untouchables, first children with AIDS, then lepers, finally land-mine victims without limbs. Along the way she paid her price, bulimia, a desperate willingness to give love to anyone who would offer kindness in return, but just think for a moment about this unbelievably beautiful woman who had so little confidence in herself and yet somehow managed to give so much confidence to others.
That picture of her with Mother Teresa in the Bronx taken less than two months ago, we have all seen it. Mother Teresa didn't have, at least she didn't seem to have, a sense of unworthiness. But she embodied humility. Yet even here the two share something deep. As Princess Diana demonstrated time and again, humility is not always born from saintliness. It can also be born from a sense of unworthiness. In some ways that is even more remarkable. A woman has everything anyone could want, everything other than love and self-esteem, which are perhaps the only things that we should really hope for in this life. And so what does she do? She gives her love to others and builds their self-esteem. In a zero-sum game the result would be nothing. In life, it means everything. Empty yourself and be filled. Lose yourself and be found. Give and you shall receive, but more importantly you give. And the world is changed.
How strange it is that those we cannot help but keep remembering almost always die young. How even stranger that the only woman I can think of from the last century who already has anything close to the legendary status Princess Di will soon attain also struggled throughout her life with a sense of unworthiness. And how appropriate that Elton John honored both of them with the same song.
Marilyn Monroe didn't cuddle AIDS babies or fight for the abolishment of land mines. But she possessed exactly the same magic Lady Di did. She was everyone's fantasy but her own. This was captured for both of them in Elton John's original song better than in his beautiful reworking of the lyrics. One line he changed could well have been kept. After he sings "She lived her life like a candle in the wind," instead of "never fading with the sunset when the rain set in" leaving the words, "never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in."
What does this have to do with us? Surprisingly, though I fought this all week, almost everything. We admire other people's strength, but, I think, when it comes right down to it, we identify with other people's weaknesses. We can identify with Princess Diana not because she was royal -- none of us are -- not because she was beautiful -- almost none of us are -- but because we could see our own tears in her eyes.
When this beautiful person died, the beauty lost had nothing to do with her looks. In a strange way, as so often is the case with physically beautiful people, her looks in fact were as much a personal curse as a boon. Remember, this was a woman who often hated what she saw when she looked into a mirror. But when she looked into the mirror of other people's eyes she recognized their pain. It is this that opened our hearts to hers and made her the people's princess.
A sense of unworthiness is not the same thing as humility. A person who feels unworthy may often simply feel humiliated. This leads more often to self-absorption than to compassion. The distinction is important because many of us feel unworthy, unworthy when we measure ourselves against others, our parents' expectations, people more successful than we in work or love. But, even as humiliated people are abased, humble people somehow manage to abound. That's the difference.
I don't want to speculate on Prince Charles' possible sense of unworthiness, in part because it doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't matter because it hasn't led to any proof of compassion or humility.
In contrast, Princess Di's sense of unworthiness translated into something redemptive, a connection with others. Her death is tragic, not because her promise was unfulfilled, but because it was fulfilled and might continue to have been. Not her promise of happiness, the fairy tale princess story we were invited to believe in sixteen years ago, but the larger promise of love given, if never, because of her sense of unworthiness, fully received. My guess is, this would not have changed. Yet, Princess Diana more than fulfilled her unwanted mission. She found a way to invest her pain into other people's hope.
Let me try to bring this home. Because of her position, her beauty, her grace, even her public vulnerability, this woman was bigger than life. Mother Teresa was also bigger than life. History only allots a saint or two every generation, public saints at least. In my book, there are saints everywhere doing Mother Teresa's business. She was different only because of her fame, but rare therefore because fame does everything it can to destroy sainthood.
Yet, though both of these women were larger than life, Diana is the one to whom we can relate. And yesterday morning I finally got it. We relate to her because of her sense of unworthiness. That and her triumph, not over but in spite of it.
Earl Spencer said that her sister didn't need a royal title to "dispense her own form of magic." Neither did Mother Teresa, not even a title from the church. Neither do we. We don't need anything to dispense our own form of magic. We don't need to be titled, beautiful, successful. We don't even have to have a sense of worthiness. All we have to do is help others. To see our tears in their eyes. To recognize that the same sun sets on each of our horizons, that the mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another, that we are one.
In a strange sense we witnessed our own funeral yesterday. No, the pomp won't be there, the horses, the crowds, but when we do die the same questions will be wafting in the air. Did we take what God gave us and make the most of it? Did we overcome adversity when hard times came? Did we love our neighbor as ourselves, perhaps especially this. And did we make the world a more loving and interesting place.
Elton John sang to Diana, and he was right: "You were the grace that placed itself where lives were torn apart." Could we be that? Could we be the grace that placed itself where lives were torn apart? I have to think so. We know about lives being torn apart. We have even done a little of the tearing. But so had she. And we are here. And this is the day that we are given. A new year is beginning, and it is our new year.
So let us inaugurate it well. Let us give our hearts to others. Let us do this before, sooner than you might imagine, either we or they are taken from us.
Copyright All Souls Church 1997