Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, October 28, 2007
First Religious Society, Carlisle, Massachusetts
I’m just beginning to get acquainted with Wikipedia - that source of all knowledge that suddenly appears at the touch of a few computer keys. It’s wonderful for many things, not the least of which is checking dates.
Because I was planning to speak about the poet scientist Loren Eisley I turned to “the Big W” to check his dates – and , sure enough, there they were, born 1907 (100 years ago this year), died ‘77 – ( 30 years ago this year )
Loren Eisley – a brooding sort of man, given to depression and periods of melancholy. WH Auden identified Eisley as “ a wanderer who was often shipwrecked on the shores of dejection”
The amazing thing about Eisley was his ability to move through his darkness and discover the light, not only for himself, but for the rest of us as well.
And of all his writings, none captures the personal journey from darkness into light as movingly as “The Star Thrower”.
During one of his melancholy periods Eisley was staying at a motel near the beaches of Cozumel , Mexico
A storm , that had raged during the night , had abated in the early morning and Eisley, unable to sleep, went to walk on the beach.
As he walked he saw fires sputtering up and down the sand – and he knew that the professional shell collectors were at work. Ashe walked he passed one after another shell collector carrying handfuls of shell fish to dump into kettle’s of boiling water..
This was the reason for the fires on the beach. Shells, once boiled free of all living tissue, could be sold to shell collectors and the tourists that come to Cozumel on holiday.
Eisley walks down the beach past the shell collectors. The first rays of dawn have come – and with those rays are intermittent rain squalls. As he rounds a point the sun appears and immediately ahead of him ,a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection.
In the distance – toward the foot of the rainbow - Eisley spots a human figure who is engaged in tossing objects into the ocean.
He draws near and see this man stooping down, retrieving a starfish which has been trapped in a pool of silt and sand - stuff that clogs the creatures pores and kills it.
Eisley comments, “ It’s still alive”.
“Yes”, the man answers, and then, as Eisley watched, the man picked up the starfish and, with a quick but gentle movement , sent the star spinning into the ocean. They stood together and watched it disappear.
“It may live’, said the man, “It may live if the off-shore pull is strong enough”.
Eisley asked the man,”Do you collect ?” “Only like this”, said the man as he picked up another star and set it skipping across the water; and, he added, “only for the living. The stars throw well; one can help them.”
Eisley nodded and walked away leaving the man there on the dune with the great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I want to stress that final image of the rainbow. Eisley’s parable of the Starthrower is so rich in images that the presence of the rainbow tends to get overlooked.
I hold it up because it connects the story of the starthrower with another , more ancient story of Noah and his ark. In a sense Eisley was a modern Noah. Like Noah, the depressed and despondent Eisley is swept away, flooded by depression, left with nothing firm to stand on.
Then Noah receives the rainbow sign ; the sign of continuing relationship between humanity and the source of all creation; the sign of a future.
Rainbows are always signs of hope for the future; and hope is what separates the starthrower from the shell collectors.
I know shell collectors. There are numbers of them in my profession. Ministers who are driven , frantic, workaholics scrambling up and down their little stretch of beach collecting parishioners to the point that their ministry becomes a mile wide and an inch deep. And at the end, only the shell – the outward appearance of ministry remains, the substance having been “boiled away”. That is a concern for the Ministerial Search Committee to bear in mind.
In ministry the point is to encourage the wider, grander view ; to take the risk of discovering a deeper and richer understanding of your own life and then to encourage others to take that risk of entering deeper water in which to swim…
Let me tell you a story of one of the great star throwers of our time. His name is Daniel Berrigan. Dan is a Jesuit priest. You may have heard of some of his anti-war activities - for which he gained a certain notoriety. I’ve known Dan for years and neve fail to marvel at his depth, insight, sincerity.
I remember a meeting, a relatively small gathering of people eager to work for peace and looking to Dan for leadership. Dan began the meeting in the tradition fashion, going around the circle and asking each participant to give her or his reasons for being there.
Most of the reasons were either familiar or predictable , until it came to a youngish man ( perhaps in his 30s ) who said,” OI don’t really know why I’m here. ( he paused ). “ You see, I’ve just learned that I have cancer and the doctor says that its inoperable.”
Without a second’s pause Berrigan said, “ Gee, that’s exciting !”
Not the response you’d expect ! Confronted with such information I would have stumbled through some expression of sympathy and condolence.
But Dan was not only “coming from a very different place”; Dan “lives” in a different place than most of us - and so his astonishing affirmation of the young man’s confrontation with his own death shocked the young man. Shocked him into an awareness of the life adventure in which he was engaged - an adventure in which each one of us is engaged (even as we do our best to ignore or deny it).
That is what a starthrower does; picks up a creature who is clogged and stultified by circumstances; picks him up and throws him back into the sea of life.
In the early 1990s I was minister of the First Church in Belmont. The congregation included a woman named Lillian who had been hospitalized with Parkinson’s Disease and attendant aliments.
Lillian was quickly losing her ability to grasp anything. Sometimes when I visited I would help to feed her. On one occasion I headed for her hospital room, deep in my own problems: I was worried that a check I had written might not clear; the family car was on its last legs and probably wouldn’t get through the winter.
But I tried to shake these concerns as I approached her room. I wanted to be there” for her”; after all I was the self-appointed “star thrower” ; my job was to sail Lillian back into the ocean of healing. And Hooray for me !
I walked into her room and she rose up in her bed triumphant! "Look Victor’, she said, ' I can balance three peas on my spoon and get them all the way to my mouth !"
Lillian’s exultant spirit ; her joy at being able to hold three peas on her spoon and guide the spoon so that she could eat them was an act of worship ! Lillian delight in her success lifted me out of my doldrums and set me sailing ! The rainbow was clearly visible. Both Lillian and I were wrapped in its light.
Fast “backward” in San Francisco in the 1980’s. I was serving as Senior Minister at the First Church in San Francisco. It was the time of the Plague. Young men on the streets walking with canes, often showing the lesion blotches indicating “Karposi”s Sarcoma”, one of the most visible forms of AIDS that had captured the city.
The First Church did what it could. Including a gigantic Thanksgiving Dinner for AIDS patients and their families. The Dinner ran from 10 am on Thanksgiving morning to 11pM that evening. We served over two thousand meals.
Men with AIDS knew the church was welcoming to them – and not only on Thanksgiving. They would attend even when it was difficult for them to get around.
One weekday morning I received a call in my office from a man whose lover was dying, and wanted to join the church , having been rejected by both his own home-town church and by his family before coming to San Francisco. He wanted to formally align himself with our message of hope,courage and love.
“I’m sure we can arrange that “,I said. “ Just speak to me on Sunday after the service.”
“My friend is in the hospital,” said the man, “Can you come to the hospital”?
“Yes, “ I said, “I can pay a hospital call at the end of the week”.
“No”, said the man. “My friend is dying right now. Can you come now !”
“OK” I said. I grabbed the First Church membership book ( a great, old, leather bound volume that looked like the Book of Life), ran out of the office and grabbed a cab. Twenty minutes later I was at the man’s bedside with his friend standing by.
The man was blind, skeletal and had lost most of his hair. I opened the book and his friend put a pen in his hand and held it while he made a scrawl across the page.
I took the book, put my mouth close to the man’s ear, whispered that God loved him and welcomed him home. I moved and kissed him on the lips . I think he died while I was kissing him.
If you are a minister – and you’re lucky – you are gifted with an experience like that once or twice in your life. A moment when the veil that separates the dead from the living parts and those two seemingly unbridgeable categories disappear in a seamless continuum.
The storm had cleared; the rain was only sprinkling. The naturalist looked back at the man standing on the dune with a star-fish in his hand and the great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.