Opening Words
Why am I always surprised
when you tap me on the shoulder
and steal my breath as I look up
and lose myself in a cloudless
starry night?
The impossible distances and the infinite emptiness
bring
a gentle shiver as the earth radiates into space.
The universe is more than
my imagination can bear
yet in the witnessing of meteoric streak I am
comforted.
I reach for a handful of black loam and feel my
immortality.
Come let us join together in the celebration of life.
READINGS
Night Blooming Flowers by Katha Pollitt
In the vacant lot behind the hospital
where rainbeaten trash, smashed
bottles, gutted bedsprings
sprawl in a flyblown drowse among cinders and
slag
how suddenly
dusk takes on strangeness that is more
than blue air and the
blue
transient aspect of things.
Look at the ground now, how it pales and
glows
as one by one, night wakers--
catchfly, dame's violet, evening lychnis (lik-nis)--
petal by petal unfold
their secret hearts
and lift to the moon a whiteness like the moon.
Why does such candor move me
more than these failed acres?
I have
cherished my refusals.
I have loved them
as if they were love, I stand,
as in the
nineteeth-century photograph
the women of the house, four generations
in formal black, as for a great
reception,
stood breathless, hushed in the shadowy conservatory
while under its glass dome
the night blooming cereus (sir-e-us)
strained
its whole being to an inward rhythm
stiffened its thick stalk
and pulsed out its one flower
huge, fleshy,
heavy-scented, glowing, green . . .
and later little Alice Emmeline
was carried upstairs by her father, half
asleep,
not understanding what it was she'd seen
but trusting it, a
mystery that would keep.
SERMON
When I think of my childhood and I think of the words, wonder and awe, I think of trains. Almost all of my childhood, I lived close enough to railroad tracks to hear the trains horns as they approached my house and feel the vibration as it sped by. Newark, Delaware, my home town, has two major rail lines which run through the middle of it, the B & O Railroad and the Penn Central. The B & O freight trains rumbled by right near my first home in Newark when I was a preschooler. The Penn Central today is the major Amtrak rail corridor from New York to Washington D.C. and ran less than a quarter mile from my second home.
At the tender age of 6 years old, I remember going back to walk beside the tracks hoping the light of an oncoming train would appear in the distance. One direction I would look down the tracks until they merged into a dot on the blue hazy horizon. The other direction the tracks curved mysteriously into green overgrowth. Then a light would silently appear. Seeing the circulating light get closer, hearing the singing of the rails, feeling the vibration in the ground, plugging my ears against the penetrating sting of the horn, stepping back overwhelmed by the size and the power of the engine, feeling the blast of air as the train screamed past, all these experiences left me with a tremendous sense of wonder and awe of these iron horses. During my teen age years, I would walk to the old semi-abandoned train station near my house, sit and watch for the trains to come and wonder about life and my future. That station became almost a religious shrine for me when I was lonely or troubled. And when it came time for me to leave home and set off to seek my way in the world, I left on one of those trains that past by that station on to a larger world than I had known.
Wonder and awe have been experiences I have regularly encountered throughout my life and I hope too for many of you. What distinguishes the experience of wonder is an element of surprise or astonishment. Wonder has a dimension of rapt or questioning attention toward the extraordinary or mysterious. Not knowing when the next train would come by added the element of surprise to the train's approach. The immensity and speed of the train made if extraordinary and mysterious at the same time.
Awe though is slightly different than wonder. Awe unlike wonder contains a component of fear and reverence, a reverent wonder with a touch of fear inspired by the grand and the sublime. For me the awesome dimension of the trains was their danger. My mother constantly warned me to stay away from the tracks and never to cross them. As a train passed by, part of me was terrorized by it and feared its power to destroy. Yet that power also inspired a curiosity, an interest and an attraction.
Wonder and awe are the daily experiences of young children encountering the world for the first time. Everything is fresh, new and fascinating. Watching a child blow her first bubble, chase his first rabbit, meet nose to nose with her first cow, master the remote control for the television, fly his first kite, and swim her first strokes, all these childhood passages can be awe inspiring and wonder-full. Keeping in regular contact with wonder and awe are tremendously helpful in the child's development into adulthood.
Yet something happens us once we mature into adults, perhaps marry, settle down into routines and become normalized. These moments of wonder and awe can become less and less frequent as our lives become routine. One of the gifts of contact with young children for parents and grandparents is the reconnection with a child's innocent experience of what has for us become mundane. Things we take for granted like putting on a shirt or tying our shoes, mastering the knife and fork, hitting a ball with a bat, or riding a bicycle, are challenging adventures for the preschooler. And their eyes frequently see what we have missed or forgotten.
My interest in trains led to an interest in engineering by route of building a Heathkit shortwave radio my father bought for me one Christmas. I remember getting the box full of parts, carefully assembling the circuit boards, soldering the resistors and capacitors in and clipping off the leads. I loved the electronic component's different miniature sizes, shapes and colors. This radio had vacuum tubes which glowed and mysteriously allowed unseen electrons to cross from one electrode to another through a screen that modulated them. How often I wondered how all these parts worked together to allow me to hear someone from the Netherlands or Australia speak to me through my earphones. My decision to enter electrical engineering in college was influenced primarily by my desire to answer this long held wondrous question: How radios work?
Once entering college, I was captured by the wonder and awe of computers. In those days, computers still took up entire glassed-in air conditioned rooms. I remember well the awesome experience of being allowed on the other side of the glass to stand close to the noisy, frantic sounding hard disks of the Burroughs 6700 computer, the main one for the University of Delaware. I learned to program reading and questioning a thick printout of a chess program written in algol, a cryptic programming language no longer used much anymore, I found in a trash can.
Twenty years have passed since I ran my first deck of punched cards to simulate an electronic circuit through the card reader. While the technical revolutions seem to keep coming as the computers get faster and bigger at a mind boggling rate, they are no longer the source of wonder they were for me as a college freshman. Once I understood their mysteries, the enchantment for me diminished.
This is the sadness I think many of us experience in relation to wonder and awe. As we get older, there is less and less that is new and surprising. We have all seen so much in our lifetimes. It is the curse of a good education and a sharp, perceptive mind that by middle age, you know a great deal and by old age, you have seen it all. Sure there is more for us to know than we can ever take in, but the experience of surprise comes less and less. One becomes more inclined to see a sunset, rank it against all the others seen and give it a number. "Oh," as a friend commented to me when we were in Boca Grande at the beach watching the sun dip over the horizon illuminating a delicate lattice of cloud wisps with a light pink, "I'd rate that one no more than a 3."
This was the kind of consciousness that I brought to the Religious Education workshop at the Orlando UU Church in March with Dr. Anabel Proffitt, a professor from Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. I was anticipating a series of lectures and discussions about how to use wonder and awe as tools for working with our kids. I brought my camera thinking I would be able to capture the experience on video and bring it back.
No such luck! Instead of lecturing, Dr. Proffitt had us do a number of creative projects engaging us to look inside for our own sense of wonder and awe. At first I was resistant to examining my own experiences of wonder through writing, drawing, working with clay, cutting pictures out of magazines, doing basically what we often ask our kids to do in our religious education classes. Through the exercises I realized I had developed some resistance to opening myself to the experiences of wonder and awe.
Does that sound familiar? Do you at times feel that resistance too? It is almost as if we defend ourselves against the wonder and awe opportunities in daily living. The experience of surprise that comes with wonder can also be a little disturbing since our expectations about reality are challenged. In a moment of wonder we are confronted with something that is new or perhaps out of our mind's control. One troubling aspect of awe is the experience of fear. An awesome experience can diminish our sense of ourselves. That train was much larger and more powerful than I was and could easily crush me if it jumped the tracks. Beholding the stars at night, I can feel small and insignificant. I don't know about you but as I've gotten older, I've become more interested in comfort and safety than stimulation and excitement. And there isn't much awe and wonder in comfort and safety.
Well, I didn't come back from the workshop with much videotape but what I did return with was greater appreciation for the importance of wonder and awe as the way many Unitarian Universalists express their religious emotion. Holding a new born baby, watching the pelicans gliding along the surface of the water, circling up and diving in to catch a fish, walking in a cypress swamp watching for alligators and enjoying the majestic trees, being surrounded by butterflies in a native plant garden, feeling a sense of intimacy in relationship that opens one's heart beyond it, listening to a performance which lifts the hearer outside of their skin watching the performers seem to surpass perfection, looking into our children and grand children's eyes, at any age and marveling at what has come out of and into our lives, these experiences of wonder and awe are for us the essence of what it is to be religious. The source of these awesome and wonderful experiences may or may not be conceptualized as a God or Gods who are busy at work in the heavens. It is not necessary to add that layer of interpretation to experiences of wonder and awe to appreciate what they bring us. We need not believe in them, we need only let them work their way through us.
The morning my mother died almost seven years ago, her good friend Grace, my father, my sister and I were there by her hospital bed we had put in the den of my childhood home off the Penn Central. Having suffered of and on with cancer for the last 16 years, in the past year she had been in steady decline. The cancer of the breast had metastasized to her back and her internal organs were failing. My father, sister and I had been tending her round the clock moistening her mouth with a swab and giving her a sip of water if she wanted it. She wasn't able to speak much and faded in and out. The last two weeks before her death, she started going down hill very quickly. She had lapsed into unconsciousness the day before and now was taking irregular breaths feeling her way cautiously, carefully into death. With her last breath we all felt a rush of sadness and loss.
All of us, I think, felt an absence of her presence. It was almost as if she had withdrawn and disappeared in her dying process. My mother was a very private person and I think wanted to shield my sister and I from her pain. One of her last projects was to plant an unusual flower called the night blooming cereus. It is an unusual flower because it blooms for only one night. If you don't keep a close eye on it you'll completely miss its incredible display. The flower had been budding for a while and we were wondering if it would bloom at all.
The night after she died, to our amazement, the flower began it's spectacular show, opening its petals and releasing a strong pungent fragrance which filled the room. With each passing minute its display seemed to become more and more grand as the unfolding proceeded in slow motion. It "strained its whole being to an inward rhythm / stiffened its thick stalk / and pulsed out its one flower / huge, fleshy, heavy-scented, glowing, green..." None of us could sleep so we sat silently and marveled at the flower's beauty. The stillness of the warm humid summer air was only broken by the Metroliner passing by. I don't know if my mother's spirit somehow coaxed this flower along but the wonder and awe of the experience brought us all great comfort. I felt as if she was communicating that she had found peace in her death and so should we.
There is always much more going on than we can know or comprehend. There are moments when we have to let go of trying to change or control the world and accept the reality in which we find ourselves. Experiences of wonder and awe are open doors which invite us to a greater experience of living than we have know before. And when we embrace and welcome them, when we accept their reality and integrate them into our being, we too can be transformed. This may mean leaving behind thoughts and views that do not fit in this expanded vision. In those moments it is important to remember that concepts are our servants not our masters in living a good life.
If we take off the dark glasses and blinders of our conditioning and programming, we will discover every aspect of existence is suffused with wonder. Beholding the magnificence of life in all its forms from an ameba, to dandelion, to a sweeping elm tree, to a furry kitten, to our amazing ears, eyes and fingers, to water in all its forms to the pinnacle of a mountain, to a simple rock in the hand, all can inspire awe of what we have the privilege to witness. If we let the wonder and awe we witness work though us, it will bring us in touch with a joyfulness woven into the substrate of all creation.
May we welcome wonder and awe into our lives and find the sustaining joy which is their origin. These experiences are not a long way off. They shine every day out of the eyes of children.