Breathing Lessons…
Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, Sept. 30, 2007
First Religious Society,
Once a month I travel from
my home in
Dorchester People for
Peace” came into existence at the beginning of the current
The meetings often include
speakers with liberal to radical political views; in addition to continuing to
protest the war, we oppose the
presence of military recruiters in public schools and
So why do I involve myself in such a group? Why do I leave my very comfortable home in Arlington to travel (usually by Red Line T) to the mean streets of Dorchester to engage with people with whom I would not ordinarily come into contact around issues that often escape public notice.
My answer can be summed up in one word: “ oxygen”. So much of my life is spent traveling well worn narrow, predictable paths; reading the same news in the same papers and journals; meeting with people who think much as I do; people who are predictable on issues of Dafur or of AIDS in Africa; people who are confused by the issues of Immigration or grouse with impotent anger about the direction of the Supreme Court. In short, people who are as in need of spirited, life -giving “oxygen “as I am.
These people are just like me . We get along with only a superficial grasp of what’s going on in the world beyond our own neighborhood and our own lives, we seek a deeper ,richer atmosphere to sustain us , that will fill our spirits and refresh our vision -- I’ve called it “oxygen’. Another word for “hope”…what we all need to live in the world.
I
get my “oxygen” in
It seems to me that the ministry has a large responsibility in this department. The ministry (and this is especially true of the Interim Ministry) is called to provide breathing lessons for the congregation; to encourage the congregation to take deep breaths, regularly.
Often , and particularly in times of leadership transition , a congregation doesn’t get sufficient oxygen and the spiritual, social activist lungs start to size up in much the same manner as the lungs of heavy smokers.
When that happens it takes an act of courage to “take a deep breath”. What you take in seems alien – maybe even a bit threatening. You become so used to taking in just itty-bitty samples of oxygen that a sudden rush of the real stuff and the right stuff entering your lungs can seem just a bit overwhelming. intoxicating.
So it is with hope. We have a hard time taking it in. Our spiritual lungs, unprepared for the rush, can’t adjust to it. We prefer to think of it as “fantasy” or “wishful thinking”.
Bill Coffin, of “blessed memory”, of
Put it another way: hopelessness rests upon numbness and denial; hope looks to vision and renewal.
I want to share words from the great Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney.
History says don’t hope, on this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longed for tidal wave of justice rises up
And hope and history rhyme.
I count myself among the most fortunate because, not once but twice in my own lifetime, I have seen that “tidal wave of justice rise up” and rhyme hope and history.
First in
I can tell you that during
the period I serve the
Even as the political situation slowly began to shift in the 1980’s the hope of a regime change seemed either a pipe dream or a blood bath from which few would escape as the country descended into utter desolation.
Yet hope was maintained,
by Mandela, long incarcerated on
My witness to the second “rising of the tidal wave of Justice that rhymed hope and history” occurred four years ago, here in Massachusetts, when a white woman, herself a native of South Africa and a strong opponent of “apartheid”, now wearing the robes of this state’s Supreme Court, wrote the law that was passed, giving gays and lesbians the right to marry in Massachusetts.
Who knew? Who anticipated such a thing? Who could have guessed?
I know for a fact
that most if not all lesbian and gay couples never expected the validity of
their long relationships ever to be legally honored. Hope was just
too remote. And then it happened! Gays and
Lesbians in
On the first Saturday after the legislation was passed I performed three weddings (two lesbian couples and one gay couple).
One half of the gay couple was the chairperson of the board of the church I was serving at that time; He had been in a relationship with his partner for twenty-five years. On the Sunday morning, during the candles of celebration section of the service he lit a candle of joy and said,” I never in my life beloved that one morning I would wake up “ a married man!”
I had been performing “ceremonies of union” for lesbian and gay couples since 1970, almost forty years ago. I must confess that while I whole heartedly believed in the rightness of such unions and that they should be granted full legal and spiritual status and “Marriages”, my hope for such a thing ever happening was slim indeed.
Two years before the passage of the law permitting “marriage equality “ in Massachusetts a UU ministerial colleague Fred Small, over in Littleton, proposed that we clergy refuse to perform heterosexual weddings until the passage of such a law was in affect.
It was a bold challenge to
Fred’s brother and sister clergy. I certainly felt challenged
by it! But I was reminded of my time as minister in
So I “signed on” to Fred’s suggestion - and expected both a long “wait” and some “flak” from those who would consider my refusal either “empty headed grand-standing” or an implicit violation of my ministerial contract with the congregation I was serving at the time. Both the charges of “grand-standing” and “contract violation” were delivered; I’m grateful that my expectation of a “long wait” was not born out. I breathed easier. So did the congregation.
When my wife asked me what I planned to preach about and I said “ breath and hope” she was less than enthusiastic. “Haven’t you said enough about that?”
I replied that you can’t say, “ Enough” about hope; that’s like saying, “haven’t you breathed enough!”
You can’t breath “enough” or “ hope”enough or “love” enough. Although I have to confess that I have attended UU worship services where both hope and breath were in such short supply that I started to look around for an oxygen canister.
And frankly this is never more true that at UU memorial services at which the “celebration of life” might be summed up as “ Well, that is that – and that is all!”
I speak of UU memorial services were I seemed like all hope had been sucked out of the room and the assembled congregation along with the deceased had stopped breathing.
At the end of which the gathered throng had nothing to look forward to beyond a cookie being served at the reception in the church basement.
I think our responsibility in such circumstances is to breath life and hope into the living as well as to honor those whose breath no longer enlarges and sustains their loved ones.
One of my favorite lines of poetry - linking breath to the sacred, the eternal - appears in our hymn “O God of Stars and Sunlight”. “We breathe in thy long breathing,” writes John Holmes; “ our spirits spirited…”
Two plus years ago our daughter Gracia died. Gracia was both autistic and profoundly retarded; she lived in a group home close to us and we were in constant touch with her. The exact cause of her death - an imbalance of medication upon which she depended – remains uncertain. What we do know is that, suddenly, her spirit was spirited from us.
Nnothing knock’ the breath out of you like the sudden death of a loved one !
For days we were, quite
literally, breathless. It took the ministry of
Carl Scovel, former minister of Kings’s Chapel and dear friend to
resusitate us.
In his eulogy for Gracia my colleague and dear friend Carl Scovel described Gracia’s life and then directly addressed the question,” Where is Gracia? Where has she gone?” Carl then proceeded to ask if these are the “wrong” questions and, if so, what are the “right “ questions? Or “no questions at all” – just the simple resignation to the prose called death??? Just simply saying,” That is that and that is all????”””
Such a brisk dispatch wouldn’t work for me and I was grateful when Carl continued:
“Gracia was body and mind and personality, of course. And we who loved her loved her in mind, body and personality, of course. But, to love Gracia was to honor and respect her.
It was to know her within a tradition that tells us that honor and respect are to be accorded the sons and daughters of the eternal; we are the heirs of a transcendent destiny, centered in soul.”
Gracia like us was “soul”, one more example of God’s creating - from whose Being she surprised us and to whose Being she has now returned…
To love her now
Is to imagine her journey into transcendence, which is her destiny
And OURS, O Ours as well.”
And then Carl concluded with a passage from the Wisdom of Solomon:
The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God
And there shall no torment touch them.
In the sight of the unwise they seem to die,
And there departure from us is taken as misery,
And they’re going from us to be their destruction,
But they are at peace.
For grace and mercy are to the saints,
And God has care for God’s chosen ones.
Take a breath. A deep breath. Move beyond breathlessness, literally and figuratively. Know that life, at its deepest and most meaningful, is unbounded by both our reason and our imagination.
Take a breath; the breathing lesson is complete. Amen