Sermons
Holding Center
Rev. Alex
November 20, 2005
On a good street in Adam’s Farm, at a handsome house, all brick, upstairs in the back bedroom, the teenage boy heard his mother putting away groceries in the kitchen. He rubbed his eyes as he awoke and thought how wack it was that she would go shopping that early on a Saturday morning before Thanksgiving. He wondered how long he could avoid her and Dad too…Dad was probably still sleeping though. He looked at his clock – 9:27 a.m.
He knew from being out late the night before that it was too cold to get up and slip away from the house into the woods out back. Thinking of the cold, he pulled his cover back up towards his head and then rolled over and grabbed the stereo remote. He felt a residual buzz left from last night’s high and smiled. Going be a good day he thought and pushed the button to turn the stereo on. Madonna, Mom’s age – definitely old school but his girlfriend said hot new CD this “Confessions On A Dance Floor” and so he’d bought it yesterday at the Target. He let his head back down on his pillow as Madonna wailed out over a strong funk dance beat:
Now I can tell you
About success
About the rise and the fall
Don’t it make you smile
Listening he remembered his mother’s fondness for an old Beatle’s song that had some of the same words in it. He could remember her listening to the Beatles when he was a kid. Madonna sang on.
Now I can tell you
You know it won’t last long
And all those lights
Sleep was creeping back upon him. His eyes closed and his head rolled over to the side. He clutched the other pillow just like it was teddy bear and he looked for all the world, if only the world could see, like the two year old boy Mom used to tuck in every night. Madonna finished her song.
Now I can see things
I guess I’m at the point
Just watch me pray
Mom could hear the full orchestral back-up on Madonna’s funk dance beat as it wafted down through the heating vents into the kitchen. Mom smiled remembering her boy and kept unpacking the groceries.
The TV on the countertop was on but with sound muted. Katie, on the Today Show, was interviewing some hunk of a doctor, blond, blue-eyed, tanned well-toned body in a light brown suit, his name with the “D” “R” in front of it was in white sub-script at the bottom of the screen. Mom picked up the remote and turned the sound back on. The doctor was speaking: “What parents don’t realize is that 1 in 4 college students these days are abusing prescription drugs. We’ve got an epidemic on our hands and no one is giving it the attention it needs.”
Katie spoke: “Doctor, we’ve got a group of NYU students here (they roared as if on cue – Katie smiled) and can you hear them!?” Katie giggled as the TV flashed to split-screen showing both the Doctor with Katie and the group of students at the same time. Katie continued: “Thank you guys for getting up so early this morning. You heard what the doctor just said. Is there an epidemic of prescription drug use at NYU?”
The group of students, or the Today Show producers, has already chosen a spokesperson for the interview. He stood at the front of the group, with red-brown curly, curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and said, “Katie, Good Morning! The way I understand how our generation is with drugs is that while your generation had the Cold War & Vietnam & pot, we’ve got terrorism & 9/11: we’ve got fear and anxiety right at the core of what we are these days and sometimes it just feels like too much. So yeah, a lot of us are using prescription drugs to help but most of us are still doing really well in school and stuff. And that’s what really counts and it’s not easy.”
Katie looked at the doctor and said, “Kids today are under incredible academic pressure – so much more so than when I was in college…” Mom hit the mute button again glancing back and forth at the TV as she finished her work. She wondered if she needed to watch more carefully the hormonal teen upstairs. The music from his room had stopped. Mom turned the TV sound back on and to hear the college kid say, “You know one of the big reasons kids of my generation use prescription drugs as much as we do is because so many of our parents use them too. That’s where most kids get them. And just like their parents go off to work and do well, we go off to school and do well too.” Katie and the Doctor said something else but Mom was lost in thought of the Zoloft and Percosette she had upstairs. She decided to go look at the drugs, to touch the bottles, to check them before she went and woke up her kid and her husband. The TV stayed on as she left the kitchen.
In Oxnard, California, the old man was getting out of bed. 3 hours earlier in California than it was in Adam’s Farm, the old man slipped softly, quietly from under the covers of the bed and then moved out of the room. He closed the door without sound leaving his wife sleeping. With arms stretched out on either side of his body, he felt his way down the dark hall to the study where he lit, not the ceiling light fixture, but a candle on the desk instead. Sitting down in the dim light at the desk, he looked carefully around the room, taking in all the things of meaning for him and his wife that adorned the space. He brought his hands together, prayer position, in front of his chest, straightened his back and checked his breath. He could feel the wheez in his lungs, his cold deepening. He smiled remembering last night’s dinner ritual with his wife. As was their custom of 59 years, they’d gathered at the table at the start of the meal, when some people prayed, to do their ritual: looking into one another’s eyes and then speaking to each other of why and what fed their shared love. Last night, his wife spoke of how she always liked the redness of his nose when he caught cold. He sniffled from both his cold and sentiment as he remembered. Then closing his eyes, focusing on his breath, he moved into meditation to begin his Saturday morning before Thanksgiving.
Under a highway overpass in Tuscon, a middle-aged but-oh-so-thin homeless man was awake. 7:27 in Tuscon and the sun was backlighting Mount Lemon while the sky glowed with desert morning beauty. The homeless man looked around at the big piece of cardboard on which he’d put his sleeping back last night. He checked to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything. Just the half-brick remained. He stood to greet the morning, stopping in thought and action to register with the rising sun. He gazed at it for a timeless while, feeling free of all the challenge of his homelessness, before coming back to awareness of his surroundings and thinking:
Mission kitchen for breakfast; interstate ramp by 10; and with luck, Los Angeles by tonight. Bending over, he picked up the half-brick from his childhood Pennsylvania home - he’d pulled it out of the foundation wall about ten years earlier. Touching it, he remembered all the goodness of the time in that home and smiled and then moved it into the side pouch of his backpack on his Saturday morning before Thanksgiving.
In the ethereal mist that hung over P-Town, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the ghost of a long dead Whompanong Indian hovered. 9:27 a.m. there too on the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, the ghost, heedless of time, remained fixed to the place and circumstances of the event that had moved him from living human form through death to being ghost form. The ghost was stuck in the 300 plus year old shock of being living human murdered by marauding white people who in their first landing there at the very end of the Cape had only relief for their starvation on mind and so found it necessary to kill the Whompanong Indian as they raided his tribe’s food stores before sailing on to settle at Plymouth. The ghost, heedless of time was also without emotion and thought. The ghost simply was, above the place of his human ending, on the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, perhaps even seeing things for what they really were, at the point of no return, just letting it be…
At what theologian Paul Tillich called the “ground of all being” and most others in our culture refer to as God, or The Force, was recognition or awareness or super-consciousness (none of these human words work well enough but you understand) of all that is, all that was, and all that might be. Like the center of the physical universe, the ground of all being/God/TheForce was the center of the spiritual universe. All the religious impulses of creatures and matter, the universe over, rotated around and about and over and under. And while the ground of all being/God/TheForce was not in anyway anthropomorphic, it did resonate with all the manifestations of attempt at wholeness from all that was the Universe, including those oh-so-small human efforts at myth-making and story-telling and performance of ritual…including but not limited to child dedications, scrap-booking, remembering with love, listening to special music, eye-gazing, lighting candles, cooking, squeezing hands, worship and gardening…all the things of humanity that are good and continuous…and on this Saturday morning before Thanksgiving the ground of all being/God/TheForce resonated strongly with all that was.
At Wesley Long Hospital, out to the side of the new entrance that faces Friendly Avenue, stands a nameless piece of bronze yard art donated to the hospital by the Women’s Hospital Auxiliary. About 5 feet tall, the work depicts two hands, each with index finger extended, one pointed down towards the earth, the other pointing towards the sky, their fingertips touching, end to end…like this. To see the work is to remember Michaelangelo’s chapel ceiling. To think about the work is to remember ancient wisdom of how it was that generations of our ancestors thought that at the very center of the whorls at the tips of our fingers was where the soul moved in and out of the human body. And so understood that in all that the tips of our fingers bring into being – writing, painting, cooking, fixing, touching, communicating, loving – was the stuff most connected to the place from which the soul came – the ground of all being/God/TheForce.
With grace and good fortune, we remember our hard earned ancestral wisdom. Like on the weekday morning before the Saturday before Thanksgiving when the old woman, one of our own beloved, lay too close to death at Wesley Long. Seeing her fellow man walk into her ICU room where she lay in pain with awkward face mask keeping her from talking, she held eyes and then claiming the wisdom of the ages, surely unaware of the art out front, extended her right index finger out towards her guest who in turn, knew, from some deep inner core, that his right index finger needed extending too, until they touched and the connection of love and care and compassion and centering wholeness was complete. Both thought, without speaking, of how it is that we best connect with the ground of all being/God/TheForce when a brush with death sharpens our perception.
Gabriel Love is as the beginning of his life. Always we have the paradox of beginning and ending. We are both blessed and challenged in knowing the nature of our life. We carry this paradox in all we do and it can feel at times as if the tensions of it are so great as to keep us from ever holding center. And yet we do. We hold center each time we stop and remember that we all are part of something much larger than ourselves. We hold center each time we remember that of all that gets in our way of remembering and connecting, none is greater challenge than our egos. We hold center too with each chosen act of creation – it is in the act of creation that we are most aligned with the ground of all being/God/The Force.
From cradle to grave we will go. We have been, will be and might be. May we act of our free will to hold center. May we know the grace and goodness of all that is divine. AMEN.