LET IT RIP

 

April 1, 2007

Forrest Church

 

We are nearing the end of the Lenten season, that time in the Christian year when people are invited to change their patterns of living in order better to reflect upon the meaning of their lives. It is a good thi ng really, though for some reason I felt no call to participate in Lent this year. I’d already given at the office, I suppose. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that I am so eager for the advent of spring. I welcome the conspiracy of nature to reawaken my ambitions, for the warmth to unfold me like a flower, for the glint of sun to catch my eye and awaken me once agai n to life’s wonder and fragility.

Spring is the most temporal, most ephemeral of seasons. It bursts upon us in a riot of color, buds and blossoms, crocuses and tulips. We are besieged by beauty that we know will quickly pass. Our lives are a little like that. We are born with the gift of touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight, for a brief time delight in these gifts or, more often, take them for granted, and then are wantonly plucked from the earthly garden, or wither a nd fade in our own season, at our appointed time.

If there is a goal in this most improbably sequence of miracles it is this: to live before we die, to wake up and smell the flowers. Think of consciousness as beauty, as the unwrapping of a bud in spring, such are the awakenings, the little epiphanies, that strip away our blinders and invite us to front our being with passion and praise.

At one level, of course, t here is an advantage to sleepwalking through life. It is certainly easier and much less problematical to avoid such awakenings. At the price of a diminished humanity, we can, for instance, attend to death only when death calls. We can wrestle with life’s meaning only in extremis or when dramatic choices are of a sudden forced upon us. I am sure that few of us would consciously choose indifference over love; bor edom over enchantment; superficial knowledge over deeper wisdom: yet too often t he patterns of our lives, the habits we form, route us in just such directions as these.

And that’s just it. Among the greatest impediments to our being prodded or startled awake to life's wonder are our cherished routines. Each of us has a bevy of them. We must. The irony is that while we cannot live effectively without them, at the same time we cannot b egin to approach living fully without breaking them.

Even the most benign routi ne, if never varied, limits our freedom to grow by veiling our need to change. Accordingly, to one extent or anot her, every routine is a rut. Not o nly are we stuck in it—which may of itself not be so bad—but so lon g as our wheels turn in the same groove year in and year out, our illusions are reinforced, our illusions concerning who we are and what life is about.

It is a little like the story Cleveland Amory tells in The Proper Bostonians. Every day for more then fifty year s a Boston judge had eaten oatmeal for breakfast. One morning, to her surprise and shock, the judge’s wife discovered that there was no more oatmeal in the pantry. “Judge,” she said. “I have terrible news for you. We’re out of oatmeal.” To which he responded, “Oh, that’s all right my dear. I never really cared for it anyway.”

More than anything else, I suppose, freedom is the issue here. Conspiring with spring, Passover, which begins tomorrow, reminds us of how precious freedom is. Yet unwittingly, over time, we construct prisons for ourselves, prisons to hide in, places where our illusions will be safe. It is a kind of death row situation, lacking only one thing: any sen se of the reality that we are stuck in Egypt.

To part the waters and escape from Egypt, what we need is our own prison breaker. Scissors over paper; stone over scissors; paper over stone. Whatever breaks the pattern, not to replace it but to interrupt it. As if awakening one from a living sleep, drawing the eye to look anew at life and death, leading perhaps to a deeper understanding of what gives meaning to our days.

The stories of the season complement the spirit of spring: unpredictable, liberating, immodest in their aspirations. With both as a prod to our awakening, perhaps our best shot at a prison break occurs right now. But it entails responding in kind. My own formula for this is somethi ng that I call “excess in moderation.”

“Excess in moderation” has two opposite numbers, each of which tends to be debilitating to the spirit. Of the two, I am somewhat better acquainted with what might be called “Excess in Excess.” The other, no less perilous, shall be known here as “Moderation in Excess.”

As to the former, to be consumed by one’s passions is to be daily eaten alive and left for dead. One can fool oneself only so long, the length of a lifetime, say. And then it is ended, not only the pain and the pretense and the folly, but also the hope and promise, each of which, however deeply hidden, however obscured from view, abide in us so long as we may live.

“Moderation in excess” is different and in one way more dangerous. One whose life is out of control is generally aware of the fact that all is not well. With this awareness comes the chance at least for an act of will to work a saving change, thus liberating one from the grip of self-destruction. On the other hand, those who lives are under complete control—moderated excessively in all respects—generally remain unaware that all quite probably is not well with them. Life flies by, days and weeks and years consumed by steady, predictable, unexceptionable actions. Such a life avoids death by disguising itself as death, until the real thing happens along and lifts the veil. Of course, the less you risk the less you have to lose. This, however, is the mark of spiritual poverty. On the other hand, one might try, just on occasion, putting on wings and flying too close to the sun. The heights and depths are dangerous but they do remind us what it really means to seek and fail, love and lose, live and die to a soaring fare-thee-well.

Today is Palm Sunday. It is a day of celebration as well as commemoration throughout the Christian world. But let us not forget what is being celebrated and commemorated here. Jesus was in danger of his life and he knew it. As long as he remained in the hills he was safe. In Jerusalem the rel igious authorities were after him because his followers claimed that he was the promised Messiah, scion of David, King of the Jews. The secular authorities were after him because of the controversy that surrounded him. He posed the threat of a disturbance. Their responsibility was to maintain order in the name of Rome. And so what did Jesus do? He threw caution to the winds. He allowed himself to be mock-regally enthroned on the back of an ass and processed toward Jerusalem, his motley followers providing all of the trappings of a royal parade, setting before him a bed of garments and flowers, lining his passage with a flourish of fronds. By this single act, Jesus managed to ridicule the pretensions of both the secular and the religious authorities; he had irreverently donned the mantle of “King of the Jews;” and, he had made a civil disturbance. The first thing he did when he got to Jerusalem was to go straight to the temple and overturn the moneychangers’ tables. In less than a week he was dead. And then, one by one in the hearts of his followers, love was reborn. They were saved.

“Oh, that teapcup!," E.M. Forster once exclaimed. “Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at love, till we are quite sane, quite useless to God or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need not drink it always. Here is our proble m and our salvation. There comes a moment—God knows when—at which we can say, ‘I will experience no longer. I will create. I will be an experience.’ But to do this we must be both acu te and heroic. For it is not easy, a fter accepting six cups of tea,” Forster adds, “to throw the seventh in the face of the hostess.”

Which brings us to this mo ment, perched as we are on the very cusp of a new beginning. With the images before us of Moses risking the wilderness, Jesus overturning the tables in the temple, and the seventh, or Sabbath, cup of tea being thrown in the face of the hostess, we gather this day to celebrate the advent of spring.

What, then, is the proper way to celebrate? With a touch of irony, I think, a dash of anarchy, and a brightly painted, eye-stopping, splash of exuberance: this is the proper way to celebrate spring. To unwrap our uniqueness, to trump out our outrageous and diverse human finery, marching like kings into the corri dors of pretense and temporal power, disarming the hostess in some demure salon, shaking up the party, waking up ourselves.

There are a thousand ways to let it rip in honor of spring. The best of these involve doing something slightly irresponsible and certainly surprising. Surprise yourself. Bob your hair. Put on a bright red dress. Play hooky from work. Stay up all night. Buy something you can’t afford. Take a ride on a metaphorical donkey. Make a lavish donation to a worthy cause. Or you might try what my father used to do—go to a fancy restaurant and bellow when you put your fork into a piece of rare roast beef.

Remember, in a month’s time all the color that is just now hinting of its burst into flower will be muted, the force and power of spring spent, returned to the bulb.

Here nature bears a lesson . Birth and re-birth are not routine s, not patterns repeated day in and day out, but cycles of growth, of freshness and ripeness and age. Such life contains within itself its own full recompense for death. So it is that springtime is a favo red poetic image for life’s fragile yet so ravishing beauty. As with youth and new love, the flowers of spring flourish in undaunted splendor, only to wither within a week or two’s passing. Excess in moderation, that is what it is, this brief bounty of color. The humble and steady earth tones, the many shaded greens and browns: soon enough these will again regain their sway.

For now, however, the day is ours to embrace, ours to seize by some act of noble exuberance. It is the day of our awakening, wh en, in the words of e.e. cummings:

faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-

—it’s April (yes, april; my darling) it’s Spring.

Fortunately, not only does nature cooperate to awaken us, but the religious season too reminds us of o ur forgotten promise and spurs us to imagine what it might mean to be, if but for an instant, truly just, truly loving, truly free. Courtesy of the conspiracy between nature and the season’s festivals, hope abounds this morning. At least it should. Spring follows winter. Passover reestablishes justice and freedom through an act of deliverance from bondage. Easter bursts through the darkness after all hope has failed. In each instant, faith is reborn and love flourishes anew, venturesome and unafraid. Even as Passover re minds us that freedom and justice are gifts of God, it also awakens us to our own responsibility to cherish and nurture them. And even as Easter reminds us that life springs from death, it also reminds us that love springs from the death of love, and faith from the death of faith.

So ask yourself, are you in bondage? If so, then follow t he journey of Moses. Break free from your chains. Test the parting waters. Dare to enter the wilderness, the unknown, the beckoning world of new possibility, where mean ing and justice can be found.

As for Easter, if the signs we see today, in the papers and on the evening news, are signs of death, so we re they too on the day Jesus died. What are Easter’s early warning signs? According to the gospels—just follow Peter through their most harrowing tale—the signs of Easter are first restlessness and fear, then disaffection and feelings of emptiness, and, finally, worthlessness, failure and self-despite. We must look into the darkness for the hints of Easter’s dawning. They too are harbingers of soul’s eternal spring.

Try this for a wake up call. Take a two thousand year leap, from Jesus’ day to our own. Open the morning paper. Herod is there on the front page of the T imes. And Pontius Pilate too. And the Centurions. And the cross. To bring love out of this death, we must dare to engage the reigning forces of darkness that count on our apathy to secure their power. One way to let it rip, in honor of Easter and Passover and spring, is to rise from the soft couch of sophisticated resignation, throw off the smug mantle of cynical chic, and confront the principalities and powers of our own day and time. Right here at All Souls, there are action groups and task forces and service programs in abundance to enlist our heart and mind in. Let it rip .

All I know is this. Caution will not lead us down the road to the Kingdom. Fortunately, spring and the sacred stories of this season—the Passover journey from bondage to freedom, the Christian triumph of love over death—awaken us to thr ow all caution to the wind. To upset the tea tray and set out on a journey toward somewhere important, someplace true and fine, where the heart beats faster and life rings out with song.

Amen. I love you. And God bless us all.

 

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