READING:
Marginalia
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive-
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”--
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look look
who wrote, “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page--
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him,
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parent’s living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil--
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet--
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I am in love.”
From Picnic, Lightning (1998) and Sailing Alone Around
the Room (2001)
SERMON
This morning, an August sermon. We are not yet into our official
church year. That begins with our water communion on September 8th.
So this morning I will share with you some words of poetry from our current poet
laureate Billy Collins, and I will tell you some stories.
Billy Collins is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman
College of the City University of New York, and visiting professor at Sarah
Lawrence. He appears often in the New Yorker, and in his capacity as US Poet
Laureate gives once a year a lecture at the Library of Congress. This year I
had the good fortune to see him. I was familiar with his work but had never
heard him speak. He is a delight and he will be in town on Saturday, October 19th.
I will be there if Norah isn’t born that day--she is due October 20th,
so we’ll see! I am hoping that some of us will gather for an afternoon of jazz
and poetry or something along those lines, here at the church, before his
presentation. If you are interested in exploring this possibility, there is a
sheet in the back to sign up for an exploratory Billy Collins Working Group.
So, Billy Collins knows how to work my emotions. He grabs me
unexpectedly, as when he is describing an afternoon of cutting parsley and
onions while listening to Art Blakey’s Version of Three Blind Mice.
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of
“Three Blind Mice”
And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
It if was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.
Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,
how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision,
let alone two other blind ones?
And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife
or anyone else’s wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.
Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving know, is the cynic’s answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail them through the moist grass
or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.
By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s
mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”
which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.
And he makes me chuckle, as when describing a scene with his
neighbor, who is apparently the world’s most content snow shoveler. It is from
a poem entitled Shoveling Snow with the Buddha. And there is a line, that I
promise to you, I will keep close to me forever. This is from the middle of the
poem, “But here we are, working our way down the driveway, one shovelful at a
time. We toss the light powder into the clear air. We feel the cold mist on our
faces. And with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these
sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow.” Now, here is
the line I will keep as close to me as anything Emerson ever wrote, I promise:
“This is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, but Buddha
keeps on shoveling.”
It is, however, this poem that I read earlier, Marginalia, that
gets me every time. His description of that bit of marginalia in the book
Catcher in the Rye that came out of the blue, that came unexpectedly and
touched something in him that expanded his view of himself and the world. There
are these little moments, as when you are picking up a copy of a library book
and see something scribbled along the margins, that rock your world. Billy
Collins invites us to be attentive to those things that come to us as moments
of clarity, moments of grace, moments of new awareness that are pure gift. We
could not manufacture them. We could not will them into existence. And so I
have been on the look out for examples of such moments and want to share a few
with you this morning.
Richard Lischer is a professor at the Duke Divinity School. He
grew up just down the road in St. Louis, and attended both a Lutheran college
and a Lutheran seminary. He calls that the system. And then he got his Ph.D. at
the University of London. All in quick succession. So when it was time for him
to get his first church assignment, the Lutheran hierarchy decides that a rural
church in deep southern Illinois in a town of 230 people, is the right place
for him. And it sounds crazy but it was indeed the right place for him after
all. He writes about it in a new book called Open Secrets, and the experience
transformed him.
There is a great story in that book about his first few months
at the church. He decided that he would invite everyone out for a spaghetti
dinner at the church and after dinner would get everyone in small group
discussion. He would float from table of 4 to table of 4. He writes, The
evening went well until we broke into small groups. The members of my first
group treated one another with a stiff formality, as if they were strangers and
not cousins and neighbors. I meant to break the ice and demonstrate perhaps a
little leadership when I asked the first group, “Why do you want me to be your
pastor?” The first to speak was a man named Leonard. He said rather cheerfully,
“Well, I didn’t vote for you, but I know we will have a good church with you as
our pastor.” Or some such thing. His wife studied the carpet intently, as if
she had dropped a contact lens. The next man--only the men spoke in this
exercise--said without a hint of embarrassment, “I didn’t vote for you either,
but I agree with Leonard.” I looked anxiously to the next person, and when he
flushed and averted his eyes from mine I knew my plan had been a mistake.
I love that story! Now that is a discovery, but a greater
discovery happened much earlier in his life. In another part of the book he
describes how he heard his call to the ministry at the age of 13 while reading
the Lutheran Catechism. He studied and studied, trying to memorize first the
commandments and articles of faith and then Luther’s explanation of them. The
two were linked by the question “What does this mean?” It was nothing special
in the creed or in Luther’s explanation that captured me, but it was the
question, repeated over and over on each page: What does this mean? What does
this mean? It was the question that got me, as if addressed to me and no one
but me. Ask it often enough, and everything begins to mean and glow with
discovery. I experienced the quiet clarity of that moment as a call, which I
accepted on the spot and never doubted for the rest of my life.
It is not the main text that called him to be fully who he would
become--a religious scholar and a pastor and a person of faith--it was this
little statement that first came to be something of a transition--a throw away
line. A little access road, without fanfare, that connects the highway to the
shopping mall, but it was that little thing that got him, that came as a gift,
out of the blue that provided the call of his life.
I think it is fair to say that when Mr. Luther pontificated
about these articles of faith, he could have never predicted that one
Midwestern boy would see the articles as faith as “Blah, blah, blah.” And the
explanations of them as “blah, blah, blah.” And that the same little boy would
see the throw away line in the middle of it all, “What does this mean” as
revelation, as epiphany, as a call.
Another story along these lines. Something that comes out of
nowhere and becomes a moment of grace. This story comes from Barbara
Kingsolver, author of the novels Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven, among
others. Her latest is a book of essays called Small Wonder. The title essay is
a reflection on the events of September 11th. When the bombing of
Afghanistan began, she was reading the news from the middle east, trying to
understand the grief she felt. I sat very still at the table that morning while
my coffee went cold and my eyes scanned one sentence after another, trying to
absorbe the account of explosives raining from the sky on a placed already
ruled by terror, by all accounts as poor and war scarred a populace as has ever
crept to a doorway and looked out. My heart was already burned by grief; only
days had passed since I sat in this same place, at the same time of day, and
listened to a report that unfolded unbelievably, into a litany of unimaginable
terror and assault on a country that holds my love and life.
And while she was sitting there, this story came to her. It is
not the content of that story that gets me, though it is powerful. It is the
timing and the setting and the context. This story of unimaginable grace at a
moment of unbelievable grief, a moment that could not be manufactured, a moment
from the margins, that comes out of the blue and is Tran formative and
life-giving.
It takes place on a cool October day in the forested hills of
Lorena Province of Iran and involves a lost child. A husband and wife, after a
long morning of work return to their home near Kayhan and as they walk along
the teenage girl who was left to keep watch over the babies, rushes out to
greet them. And in frightened fragmented sentences tells the couple that their
baby boy has gone missing. That she has looked everywhere to no avail. The boy
must have walked off while her attention was diverted.
They open the door of their yurt and peer inside, refusing to
believe her. They look in his hiding places. No he is not under the pillows. No
he is not beyond the box where dishes are kept. Their insides begin to turn.
Their pace quickens, believing their must some way out of this trap.
They search the village, exploring every nook and cranny. The
neighbors join in, offering reassurances. As they look further afield, the dark
comes down on them and the cold.
Someone says, “A bear.” Don’t say that, are you mad? His mother
might hear you. Some sleep that night, but not that girl, not the parents. The
next day they are out again. Some are sent to a neighboring village. Large
parties begin to comb the rugged hillsides. They venture closer to the caves.
“Another nightfall, another day, and some begin to give up. But
not the father or mother, because there is nowhere to go but this, we have all
done tis, we bang and bang on the door of hope, and don’t anyone dare suggest
there’s no one home.” The father gathers several men willing to go up into the
mountains, into the caves. The mother cries out, “he is only sixteen months
old. He can’t have walked that far.” But still they go, as they must. They make
their way, into the first cave and the second. At the mouth of one cave that
they enter--the fourth or the hundredth--who knows, but at the mouth of the one
cave that matters, they hear a voice, a cry, a child. They look, but they also
smell bear. The boy is there, a live.
They venture into the cave, they note the dank smell. They stand
still and adjust their eyes to the half light. Then they see the animal, not a
dark hollow in the cave wall as they first thought, but the dark round shape of
a she bear lying against the wall. And then they see the child. The bear is
curled around them, protecting him from these intruders in her cave.
Barbara Kingsolver does not know what happened next, whether or
not they killed the bear. Or whether they thanked Allah, reached for the baby
and went on their way. The baby was found with the bear in her den, that much
is true. He was alive, unscarred and perfectly well after three days, well fed,
smelling of milk. The bear was nursing the baby. The baby was saved. A moment
of unimaginable grace.
What does this mean? Kingsolver writes at one point. For our
purposes this morning, let us reflect for a moment on her situation. She had
been weeping over the bombing of New York and Washington and the additional
bombing of Afghanistan. She had learned that four humanitarian workers had been
killed in a small office in Kabul that coordinated the removal of land mines
from that beleaguered country. My heart’s edge felt as dull and pocked as an
old shovel as it cooped low to take on this new weight, the rubble and grief of
war. And so when I came to the opposite page in the book of miracles, I cleaved
hard to this other story. Out of the blue this story of grace came to her.
People not altogether far away from Kabul--wrapping themselves in similar soft
robes, similar hopes, had been visited by an impossible act of grace.
Two stories. Two moments of unexpected clarity. Two moments of
grace that came in spite of the activities at hand. Richard Lasch sat there
with the considered and weighty ruminations of Luther and the thing that got
him was this simple question at the margins, “What does this mean.” Kingsolver,
sitting in her study, weighted down with her grief and she comes across in the
margins of her experience a story about a bear that serves as an agent of
grace. May we always leave space for such moments, amidst our calendars, our
activities, our grief and our studies.
Another thing that happened out of the blue, that came as a
gift. I’ll leave you with this story. July 11th, Marta and I greeted
the three fellows who delivered our furniture and boxes and welcomed with
considerable delight the appearance of our stuff in our house. As the morning
progressed, each room of our little house on Jersey Ridge Road held a cluster
of boxes, some furniture. Mid-morning we started with the boxes in the kitchen.
We removed the contents one box at a time. A cedar chest came in. A couple of
bookcases. A mattress. A crib. And soon, as early afternoon was upon us, the
pace slowed considerably. I looked out the window and saw the two college
fellows walking together, talking, pointing. I saw the driver, walking around
the opposite side of the house from them. They had used the side door for most
of the unloading. Now they were intently looking at the front door. The French
doors next to the front door. They went around to the back of our house, where
there is a door off our bedroom, heading to a patio from which you can almost see
the river. I looked at all of this with a growing sense of interest. Marta and
I had our plan, our agenda. We were on a mission to get everything out of those
boxes, as quickly and efficiently as we could. I was interrupted by this
activity of the fellows on the margins of my plan.
I went out to the fellows and said, “What’s going on?”
We’re done. Except for that piano. We got to get it from the
truck to the house. And then he said something that provided for me--out of the
blue--a question that will stay close to me for our first year together, our
first two years together, for as long as we are in ministry together. He said,
“We’re just taking a look to see how open the doors are.”
It was a clarifying moment for me. It happened in spite of my
plans. It came as a great surprise. If it were a moment in The Simsons, the
clouds would open up and trumpets would have started to play. But alas, I just
filed it away in a corner of my mind with a promise to myself to get back to
reflection about it.
It is THE question as we build our community, beloved and
inclusive and affirming--how open are OUR doors, the doors to this place. This
place that offers itself to our imagination, constituted by no one but
ourselves. How open are the doors. Let us take a look around this year.
So as we move forward this year--there will be great plans,
there will be triumphs and little missteps, as with everything in life--but as
we move forward let us leave space in our dealings with each other for those
moments that come as little gifts, little moments of grace and clarity, that we
could never manufacture. Let us be mindful of them, as Joe reminded us some
weeks ago.
These little moments of small wonder make up part of the life of
faith and hope that we come here week in and week out to celebrate. Let us sing
now, of that faith, within us, around us. That sense of wonder that will not
let us go. The closing hymn is Now Let us Sing, Number 368 in the hymnal.
August 11, 2002, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Roger
Butts