BirdFebruary 22, 2004On a December morning, two years ago, I brought a young
injured black-backed gull home from the beach. It was, in fact, Christmas
morning, as well as bitter cold, which may account for my act. Injured gulls
are common; nature’s maw receives them again implacably; almost never is a
rescue justified by a return to health and freedom. And this gull was close
to that deep maw; it made no protest when I picked it up, the eyes were
half-shut, the body so starved it seemed to hold nothing but air. So begins Mary Oliver’s poignant essay, Bird. It is about just
what you’ve heard, the coming into her life of a seriously injured gull, one
Christmas morning. A stranger, in need. And Mary Oliver, knowing that the story
surely ends with death, nonetheless picks up the bird. It made no protest,
you’ll notice. And she takes the bird home. She accompanies this stranger on
the way to its death. The Hebrew scriptures suggests in Duetronomy that God loves
the stranger—almost solely is God’s love directed toward the stranger. And of
course human action is to follow suit. Herman Cohen, 19th and
early 20th century Jewish thinker says this: The Biblical
commandment protecting the stranger was the beginning of true religion.
"The stranger was to be protected, even though he/she was not a member
of the family, clan, religion, community, or people; simply because he was a
human being. In the stranger, therefore, man and woman discovered the idea of
humanity." The stranger need not be human to be a reminder of our linked
connection, one with another and with the earth. So, at various times, and in
a variety of circumstances, we sit with Bird, or some other seriously ill,
and maybe dying, life. In fact, this whole sermon comes out of a realization
that over the last 2 years, since my arrival here, we’ve had …deaths, and a
number of serious illnesses. Larry Underdonk is dying just now. Mabel
Oschnerafter 102 years on this sweet old earth. It is time to acknowledge
that and to set this reality into a kind of frame through which we can begin
to make meaning out of our shared experience. A bathtub, Mary Oliver writes, is a convenient and cool place
in which to put an injured bird. One wing was broken, the other was injured.
It was a shattered elegance. It was bankrupt, she says. But it accepted food
the second morning; it lifted its head and drank from a cup of water, little
sips. Soon, she says, accepting some fresh cod, it became almost jaunty. She discovered upon building a habitat for the bird that it
was also leg injured, unable to walk, and so the perch, which overlooked the
deck and a harbor, was built up, that he might see outside. At the arrival of
evening, she and her partner, turned him around to face the room, that he
might be part of the evening circle. You have perhaps sat with someone gravely injured, perhaps
dying. The coming on of evening is a metaphor for the whole experience of
waiting for some resolution, some release. This is especially true when
sitting with the dying and the deeply lost. Poet Jane Kenyon, whose husband, Donald Hall, died of cancer
knew this feeling all too well. She captured it, in a poem that she says came to her from the
Spirit, the muse—as a gift. The poem was given to me she says. I had written
all the other poems in the book in which it appears, and I knew it was a very
sober book. I felt it needed something redeeming. I went upstairs one day
with the purpose of writing something redeeming, which is not the way to
write. But this just fell out. I really didn’t have to struggle with it. Bill Moyers asked her, given all that she had experienced with
her own illness and her husband’s cancer if she still believed what the poem
expresses. Yes. She replied. There are things in this life that we must
endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great
goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there
is love, kindness, beauty? Let Evening Come is the name of the poem. Let the light of late afternoon Shine through chinks in the barn, moving Up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing As a woman takes up her needles And her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed Go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop In the oats, to air in the lung, Let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come. Some of you know that I served as a hospital chaplain, while I
finished my last two years of seminary. There is no great secret, I think, to
sitting with the ill and the dying, and those that love them. It takes
presence, of course. Woody Allen, right, once said something about 90% or 80%
of life being about showing up. One must be there. Muster the courage to see
things as they are. --Sitting with-- takes patience. I had a professor of
pastoral care once say that if you sat there silently long enough, you may
learn something valuable about the sick person, and if you sit there silently
really long enough, you might learn something about yourself. When I first started my chaplaincy, I was afraid. I was
nervous. I thought maybe there were some perfect words to say and that my job
was to work hard enough to find those words. There are no perfect words. The
words that come are perfectly fine, whatever they are. Your presence is the
perfect word. One day, I was called to a situation that made me see that
words were not the important thing. One day, I was called to visit a couple
trying very hard to have children. There was a medical complication in the
pregnancy. And the baby, so very small that it fit in my palm, was
still-born. The family wanted to name and baptize the baby. Normally, under
such circumstances, I spoke to the family and then used a baptism script
taken from a few sources, including the prayer book from the Unitarian
church, King’s Chapel in Boston. That day, I put the script aside and just
sat with the couple, and handed over tissues when necessary. At some point, I
picked up the baby, dipped my finger in the oil and the mother’s too and said
to the mother and father, while the baby was out in front of us, just so. This
is Sarah. She came from love and returns to love. There was nothing more to say. I put the baby down, took a
seat, and just sat with them for a while. After I left, I took off my pager
and I walked and walked and walked, all the way from my hospital to the other
side of the inner harbor, almost to Little Italy, maybe 2 or 3 miles. I knew then and there, personally not academically, that I
would have to live contented as possible knowing that I would never, ever be
able to come up with an answer to the question of theodicy—why injustice and
misfortune exist alongside the promise of a God whose love knows no bounds. It—the question faced that day—would forever be an open wound.
My hope was—and is--that my faith, my belief, that all souls will be reunited
with love, would at least provide some solace in the face of that undeniable
reality. Your belief might tell you that we have one life, and that we are to
live it as well as we can and that is the whole story—may it provide solace
for you as well. Maybe you are somewhere in between, and say with Theodore
Parker: One life at a time. May it provide solace for you. Your belief may be
something completely different. May it provide light to you. Whichever. All of it is akin to something like this piece from
Mary Oliver’s Bird. He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This
is not fact, this is the other part of knowing something, where there is no
proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. The light holds us, and will not let go, no
matter how much we forget or take it for granted until something snaps us to
attention. Shortly after my walk, I came back to the
hospital, and met a man who went to American University with some famous DC
weatherman, you know the still fat guy on the Today program, and we laughed
and laughed about that. Bird loved light Mary Oliver says. We are invited, at every turn, to consider our good fortune in
drawing breath. No matter what, we breathe. So Seize the Day, as they say. Jane Kenyon captures that in her poem Otherwise: I got out of bed on two strong legs/It might have been
otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been
otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the
work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have
been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and
planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be
otherwise. The very best friend of Francis in that movie Under the Tuscan
Sun, newly pregnant and so excited about building her new life, her new
family. The fifth time she tried to get pregnant and finally it came to be.
And then early in her pregnancy, her best friend Francis leaves for France.
And then 6, 7 months pregnant her lover decides that a baby and family isn’t
what she wanted after all. And she travels to France to see Francis and says
simply to her, How do you keep breathing? Under the Tuscan Sun is all about attempting to respond to
grief by establishing a new, chosen family. We have all of us at one time or
another known the wounds that come from broken relationships, that come from
an inability to clean out the stuff inside our heads. We have all of us at
one time or another fallen short of our aspirations. So Francis looks at her friend, and starts breathing as if in
labor, breaking the tension, for just one moment. Hope, in the form of
laughter, breaks out. In Bird, the great sub-text is how much fun Mary Oliver
and that bird had together, learning new games, keeping each other company,
looking at the harbor together to see what might come around next, even as
the poor bird’s feet are falling off, they are, at the end of the day,
laughing in the company of each other and hope. It takes one more thing I suppose to sit with the grieving and
dying. A fierce belief that hope and healing will come. Hope and healing come
as they will, unexpectedly, quietly. I am thinking of a teenaged-boy in
Bethesda, a student at River Road Unitarian whose father, a high-powered
attorney just died one day at the office, in his early 50s. Out of the blue.
Teen-aged boys in deep trauma don’t speak a whole lot, but they know when you
are present with them, and slowly over time, after many car-rides to church
and back, slowly something starts to emerge. He said to Marta one day, while
the kids were at their youth group worship, he whispered to her, that she
could light a candle for him and his family if she wanted. She wanted. She
whispered back, Should I say anything. And he said, simply, Yes, say what
you’d like. The power of presence. That hope and healing come when we face what we wish to avoid.
After 21 years of total separation and disconnectedness, former childhood
best friends, Christine and Heed, characters in Toni Morrison’s new novel
Love, get together over a struggle around an inheritance. Heed, at 11,
married Christine’s grandfather and they haven’t spoken since. They do not
know what to expect, screaming, violence, accusations. They are broken,
brokenhearted and grieving. Whose fault is it they are abandoned seven miles
from humanity with nobody knowing they are there or caring even if they do
know? No one is praying for them and they have never prayed for themselves.
Still, they avoid rehearsing accusations, a waste of breath now with one of
them cracked to pieces and the other sweating like a laundress. Up here where
the solitude is like the room of a dead child, the ocean has no scent or
roar. The future is disintegrating along with the past. The landscape beyond
this room is without color. Just a bleak ridge of stone and no one to imagine
it otherwise, because hat is the way it is—as, deep down everyone knows. An
unborn world where sound, any sound—the scratch of a claw, the flap of webbed
feet—is a gift. Where a human voice is the only miracle and the only
necessity. A fierce belief in hope that is willing to take you to places
you never imagined you’d go. The Rabbis tell this story. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi put the question to Elijah himself.
Where shall I find the messiah? Elijah responded: At the gates of the city.
How shall I recognize him? He sits with the lepers. Among the lepers, what is
he doing there (this, at a time when certain rabbinical teachings directed
how far to stay away from lepers)? Elijah said, He changes their bandages,
one by one. This fierce belief in hope, enables one to say, in the midst
of broken relationships, broken bones, broken dreams, that over time those
broken places are going to gain strength. That those broken places are what
allow for the presence of grace/connectedness/wholeness to come around and
visit you. This song says it. The singer is David Wilcox from North
Carolina. Stronger than ever now, in the broken places. In the Broken Places from What You Whispered .............................................. IN THE BROKEN PLACES Your presence with the suffering is important. Your friendship
with them is important. Your words, and your hope, are important. It doesn’t
take training. It doesn’t take an academic degree. It takes a phone call. It
takes a visit. It takes a measure of courage and two measures of a fierce,
undying sense of great hope. February 22, 2004, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa.
Rev. Roger Butts |