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Water Communion and Ingathering Sunday
There is a wonderful rendering of that idea on the first page of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh.
“When you wake up in the morning,” asked Piglet of Pooh, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
It’s the same thing,” he said.
This year I hope we will answer the question of why we
gather in religious community again and again. And as
we do, remember that each answer - and I think we all have
many, is only a fragment of a larger, inexpressible truth.
Today I will share one way I answer – and I invite you to
ask yourself about what draws you here.
This summer as I’ve worked in the garden and spent quite a bit of time outdoors, I have had some time to slow down and experience awe in communion with the natural world. It has occurred to me that in seeking the Holy we reconnect with the fundamental rhythms of creation that govern our being.
Our house is very old with a working fireplace in the kitchen. Our two boys, have always had a hard time sitting still - one way to capture them for some family time has always been to light a fire in the fireplace. In August we built a fire pit in our yard. The site of it –large rocks for sitting in a ring around a campfire, remind me that generation after generation have been warmed by fire. Our relationship to fire, if not encoded in our genes, is still built in by necessity.
Year round, Larry and I walk a route near our home. It has amazed us to see large snapping turtles lumbering up out of the river to lay their eggs in the sand. It’s enough to see one turtle, but over the years we consistently notice, three or even four over a brief couple of days and then no more for another year - - This points to the quite precise inner clock which controls them in another very fixed rhythm.
The water from which the turtles emerge has its own rhythm. We have a little man-made pond in our yard which lost so much water through evaporation at the coldest part of winter that Larry and I had to pour gallons in by hand from the kitchen sink in order to save the fish that were living, dormant at the bottom. Water is constantly in motion around the earth, some of it always evaporating, some flowing from streams and rivers to the sea, some falling as rain, some freezing. In spite of all that motion, scientists tell us that the amount of water on the earth has remained constant - for some 18 billion years – that’s because all that motion is in a healthy rhythm. Without that healthy cycle, life could not have developed on our beautiful, blue planet.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust – we too are in our own mysterious rhythmic dance with creation. But we are very small creatures in the scheme of things – and we so easily lose our rhythm – At some basic level, I believe this is why we come to church – to bring ourselves into a more healthy relationship with the larger rhythms around and within us.
Several years ago, when I was the secretary here at the church, a parishioner asked to borrow a tape of a service she had missed. As we walked to get the tape she asked if I had noticed that runners sometimes run with headphones on. "If you run with headphones on, you can't hear if cars are coming, and you certainly can't hear the birds and crickets," she said. I agreed, not knowing in particular where she was going with her observations. "That's why I come to church,” she said, “because afterwards, at least for a little while, I feel like I have taken the headphones off." .....
I knew the noise of daily life that she was referring to – the mental clutter which blocks out so much that is important. I come to church to let it go. I often like a runner, running with headphones on, and the headphones are telling me what I have to do next. My head can get so full of minutia and details that I fail to hear what is truly going on around me. Here in church there is an opportunity to listen for an hour to the rhythm of the heart, and let other details fall away.
I believe I‘ve shared this story before, but it has a bearing here. Years ago I was given a lesson in how to juggle. I learned the rudiments - enough so that I could go home and impress my children. Much later when we were camping in Florida, our family met a talented juggler named Owen. My kids mentioned to him that I could juggle a little bit - and after being pressed, I juggled for him. Owen watched in astonishment - amazed, not because I, an elderly woman by his standards could do it, but because my technique was so bad and yet the balls were staying in the air. I was succeeding, granted for perhaps only a minute or so at a time, by force of brute concentration. I was concentrating on each ball at every moment -- and because I had decent reflexes, I was catching each ball at whatever point I caught up to it and sending it airborne again. I thought that with even more concentration I would be able to juggle indefinitely.
Fifteen year old Owen, who had juggled at the Orange Bowl, didn't think so. In fact, he was hysterical. As far as he was concerned, although I was managing to keep the balls up in the air, I wasn't juggling. It just looked like juggling to anyone who didn't know what juggling was supposed to look like. What I was doing, he explained, was much too hard. Good juggling does not require so much concentration - in fact, you know you are juggling well when you feel yourself being released from concentration. Correct juggling relies on rhythm not concentration - and that is the secret to being able to juggle indefinitely.
Owen's insight is one we all might want to think about. Life, of course, requires that we all be jugglers. Think of the number of different relationships that define you and you know that you are a juggler too. Partner, parent, sibling, child, inhabitant of the earth, co-worker, neighbor, committee person - I could go on - each of our relationships comes with an unending script - a sequence of roles, obligations and expectations - that we juggle.
Sometimes in our everyday lives we lose our rhythm and end up working much too hard, and even though we may look like we are keeping all the balls in the air, we are not really living well, because what we are doing is requiring much too much concentration - too much work. Our act -our life - may look okay to others, but we can find ourselves asking "Am I having fun yet?" - it is possible to have everything - and even seem to have everything in fine working order, and yet know secretly that we are miserable. When we are out of whack in this way, church is a place we can come where we might be able to restore our natural rhythm. For I know as surely as my heart beats that there is a rhythm inside of me that I come to church to listen for - that reconnects me more closely with the rhythm of creation. It tells me who I am and what is meaningful. And I believe completely that connecting with that rhythm is a revolutionary act that has the capacity, one person at a time, to repair a broken world.