"Little Things and Nothing"

Have you seen the herring this year? Last Sunday's Globe ran an article about Middleboro's herring run saying that this year there are too many fish. The Fish and Game people have transported some 10,000 herring from the Nemasket to other rivers because the Nemasket is just too clogged. The season may be just about over by now. Larry and I stopped by the fish ladder on Wareham Street a couple of times, bringing friends from out of town. The scene at the little park there was the type that might have been immortalized by the idealistic artist Norman Rockwell: it was a family scene with children clustered together at the river's edge pulling fish out of the water with their bare hands, there was a little girl with ice cream fresh over from Peaceful Meadows all over her face; gulls were flying overhead, and the sun shining...

The herring run feels like an ideal image with which to begin talking about the value of slowing down and about the worth and importance of having nothing special to do once in a while. Norman Rockwell paintings gave doing Nothing Special the highest possible value. The subjects of his paintings - children playing marbles, a little boy sitting next to a policeman in a soda shop, a boy having his hair cut in the barber shop - document ordinary life - people in between the big moments - people doing nothing special. Rockwell's gift was to make us see that doing nothing special could be special indeed.

A year or two back I found one of my kids cutting a front-page newspaper headline out of the Middleboro Gazette. The headline read "Dispute Over Fish Ladder Ends On a Positive Note." Curious, because school was out, I asked what the article was for.

"I can’t believe that I come from a town so stupid that this is the kind of newspaper headlines we have," was the reply.

I can remember feeling the same way about my home town of Hingham, when I was young – when I was impatient with small-town life, just short of college, and eager for Experience.

On some level, I understand the criticism. It is easy to think that nothing happens anywhere in small town America. But thinking along the same lines, it can be easy to think that nothing happens in ordinary apartments in our cities either or in our barber shops, our businesses or our parks. It's easy, fed on headlines, movies, and television, to believe that Life with a capital L is being lived somewhere else. Youth, inexperience, impatience and untested dreams can cause us not to recognize Life with a capital L when we experience it, because we're after something that we expect to be bigger, brighter that will announce itself by grabbing hold of us and slowing us down in our tracks and make us aware that Something Big is Happening.

 

Fulfillment can knock one over the head now and then - I'm thinking of that great moment when Sarah Hughes won the Olympics after skating with the freedom of total abandonment because she thought she had no chance of winning. Time must have stood still for her for a few moments when she found herself suddenly and unexpectedly at the center of the world , holding the winner's trophy. What a fulfilling moment that must have been. But that's not the usual process, and, of course, it followed years of practice, probably in small town ice rinks. I wish you all a moment or two of Sarah Hughes-type fulfillment in your lives.

But fulfillment for most of us arrives through gestures we may not recognize, in moments when Nothing Special is happening. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, it comes in the form of ordinary hard work routinely completed, and through stability, valued relationships, trust earned and reliability. It steals in, unexpected, over time, in the mundane moments.

The following poem is about such moments:

He volunteered with a dying patient
expecting to go through the five stages of grief
at the first meeting. Instead
she talked about hooking rugs:

the needle, the thread, the cloth,
the rhythmic movement of the hands.
He tried other matters in conversation —
she talked of hooking rugs.

On the next visit she spoke of the intricacies
and hardships of ice-fishing that her husband
had done before his death. Week after week,
hooking rugs and ice-fishing.

Angered, he said to friends,
"I can’t go on with this
interminable hooking rugs
and ice-fishing."

One day as they sat
in the hospital cafeteria,
she going on, he bored and vexed
with hooking rugs and ice-fishing

the room
went silent, air turned
a luminous shade of green, hooking
rugs and ice

fishing stopped. She leaned over and said,
"I could not have done this
without you,"
then on again with hooking rugs

and ice-fishing. Soon after she died. At the funeral
relatives said to him, "Thank you,
all she ever spoke about
was you."

The sum of our lives has the potential to be vastly greater than the parts. Our lives are really tapestries of smaller moments, woven into a larger design we often cannot see and sometimes cannot sense. You have to trust that Something Big is happening in your life. It flows out of your love, your genuine appreciation of little things, out of grit and determination, it comes from your listening and little acts of care and kindness. It comes from living the little moments fully. The completed picture may not be yours to see. But your image exists, and emerges in the stories people will care to tell, you're woven into the community around you, and into the hearts of your children and grandchildren. I have been powerfully impacted by the memorial services which I have been privileged to officiate enough to have experienced the truth of this again and again. We are remembered for a collage of the little moments; it is the quality of our daily living which adds up to a life well lived.

This is all very easy for me to say. Yet I am apt to cook dinner while talking on the phone, to fit in one more task instead of stopping. When the alarms go off in our house some mornings it could be a comedy, the speed with which we accomplish our routines, go over the essentials with one another and flee the house. A visitor from another planet, or another culture, maybe, might thing we were engaged in some sort of competition.

The Reverend Elizabeth Tarbox, my predecessor here, as well as my mentor, gave me some pieces of advice in her change to the minister at my ordination. Some of you may remember. One thing she said counseled strongly was not to do too much. "Learn how to say 'no,' so that life does not overfill," she cautioned. "Saying 'no' appropriately leaves a minister the strength to be fully present when truly needed." Life is no different for any of us. Making indiscriminate overcommitments is a weakness - knowing when to step out and relax, taking appropriate time to do nothing special in order to replenish and reconnect is a strength.

As we heard in the reading by Sarah Voss this morning, carving out free time for ourselves can take an iron will. To begin with, we take pride in overwork. It's a sign of dedication and being needed. Some unhealthy part of me takes pride in the fact that I sometimes over work and there isn't an inch of some days unaccounted for. Working hard makes for an easily won positive identity.

The pace of live has speeded up so much in recent years that our children can get disoriented by free time.

Sometimes I can pretend to relax, fooling mainly myself. I have been guilty of taking an obligatory walk of a mile or two and arrived home having no memory of anything along the way, I was so preoccupied. I believe it was Anne Morrow Lindbergh nearly 80 years ago who said that our lives are not only cluttered with the trivial, but the important as well. There is such thing as a healthy idleness, and it takes character to develop.

Renewal comes when we genuinely let go. Letting go happens when we exercise the disciplined attentiveness of meditation, reflection and prayer, or it can come from letting go from genuine play, fun or healthy relaxation. And for those of you who are thinking you really don't have time to slow down most days or weeks because you genuinely have too much on your plate, I've got a anecdote for you ----

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. "What are you doing?" you ask. "Can't you see?" comes the impatient reply. "I'm sawing down this tree" "You look exhausted!" you exclaim. "How long have you been at it?" "Over five hours," he returns, "and I'm beat! This is hard work." "Well, why don't you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?" you inquire. "I'm sure it would go a lot faster." "I don't have time to sharpen the saw," the man says emphatically. "I'm too busy sawing!"

Here's a maxim for you from Peter's quotations: "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

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None of us has the luxury of so much time that we can afford not to relax! So, how to develop that skill at saying no occasionally? The Reverend Meg Barnhouse said she learned a healthy attitude toward no-saying, not through her ministry, which was probably sending her all the wrong signals, but through her earlier work in life as a waitress. She writes:

The most helpful thing I grasped while waitressing was that some tables are my responsibility and some are not. A waitress gets overwhelmed if she has too many tables, and no one gets good service. In my life, I have certain things to take care of: my children, my relationships, my work, myself, and one or two causes. That's it. Other things are not my table. I would go nuts if I tried to take care of everyone, if I tried to make everybody do the right thing. If I went through my life without ever learning to say, "Sorry, that's not my table, Hon," I would burn out and be no good to anybody. I need to have a surly waitress inside myself that I can call on when it seems everyone in the world is waving an empty coffee cup in my direction. My Inner Waitress looks over at them, keeping her six plates balanced and her feet moving, and says, "Sorry, Hon, not my table" ("Waitressing in the Sacred Kitchens," included in 100 Meditations, ed. Kathleen Montgomery, Skinner House Books, 2000, 13).

I believe I have preached on this once or twice already this past year. (And I promise I'll let this go for awhile after today!) And you may feel you are getting mixed messages from me since I may occasionally be the voice on the other end of the phone, waiving that empty coffee cup at you, trying to enlist you for a task I think you might be interested in. This church is doing a good job if it is able to match a cause and skill to the person with appropriate passion and gift for the task. The work of the church and the gifts of this community are very important. But we are not doing a good job if we become a constant source of pressure to its own members. It's important to learn, and not to feel guilty about saying, "Sorry, Hon, that's not my table," even to the church..... (Ouch!)

All religions teach the virtue of down time, of the Sabbath, of contemplation. Jesus often went away to pray and to gain strength in silence and meditation on mountaintops and by lakesides. He took his disciples with him into the desert. I receive a spiritual gardening magazine (which I've put out on the Parlor table) that offers many statues of Buddhist images for the garden - many of contemplatives, but also a laughing Buddha and a Buddha 'at ease' that has fallen asleep in the garden. These images link spiritual health and leisure.

It was Al Jolsen who said, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" When he said that he was implying that something bigger and grander was happening next - the moment we were waiting for. I'd like to take that phrase actually literally. If the pace of your life is such that you haven't seen "nothin' yet, or for a long time, then your life, the parts of it that should be valued most, might be passing you by. Make some room for Nothing Special in the rhythms of your life your life - perhaps you'll have to take it on faith, but much of the quality of life emerges in our 'down' and 'in-between,' and are revealed at last, as small and simple sacraments only through the filter of memory.