MORNING
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
July 14, 2002
One of the more treasured lines from American cinema comes out of "Act One," the 1963 film based on the autobiography of New York writer and playwright Moss Hart.
"So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o’clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience."
So I say, "Good morning" to what I truly hope is that larger and more wakeful audience.
We know that few New Yorkers greet Sunday morning at daybreak, so our service is not at 9:30, or at 10:00, or even at 11:00, but at the civilized hour of 11:15. We aim to please, even in this city where pleasantry bumps up against other rhythms.
For example, a few days ago I was in my usual morning rush hour mode. I zipped down the subway stairs from Grand Central to get the #6 local and was stopped short. The platform was flooded with would-be riders. Where was the local? No problem. The express arrived, and I quickly boarded, confident that I would be whisked to 86th Street and would simply walk south to All Souls. The train lurched and surged forward. At 59th Street, we slowed down but didn’t come to a complete halt. A disembodied voice rang out: "We’re sorry, but this train will not stop at 59th Street due to smoke at the station. The next stop will be 86th Street." A collective moan rose from our car. We zoomed ahead to 86th and arrived with the customary jolt. The doors jerked their way open, and we thronged out, shoulder to shoulder with those thronging in. Among the entrants was a gentleman as persistent as anyone else but with a large accordion in hand. He appeared also to be blind. Once aboard, he began his musical trek from car to car in search of income. Accompanied by the receding sounds of his music making, I joined the masses moving vertically and rose into the steamy mist of the day. "Ah," I thought to myself, "Another New York morning!"
And on my hazy, hot, and humid trek to All Souls, came the words, "For this is the day we are given; let us rejoice and be glad in it." "Okay," I said to myself, "I’m trying."
Morning is a mixed blessing.
This was announced with a certain candor to me earlier this week. I was visiting my doctor for a checkup. Now I always scan the walls in doctors’ offices. Maybe it’s my suspicion that the "MDs" engraved on the doors outside don’t say quite enough. I need reassurance, and I check out the interior walls for diplomas and certificates. While I’d been in this particular office before, I fell into that habit once again. I spotted a diploma or two….then my gaze landed on a clock--not just any old clock, but a clock with a caption, undoubtedly from a supplier. "The Zoloft Morning." Ah yes, it made perfect sense to me. For some of us who bound out of bed ready for the day, morning is a time of promise. For some of us, whose anxiety or uncertainty or depression say, "All is not well," morning is fraught with peril--morning especially. So a few milligrams of antidepressant lend promise to the day. The Zoloft morning? Of course.
Morning is a mixed blessing for a mixed audience. That variably humored poet, Robert Frost, knew this well.
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only for an hour.Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day;
Nothing gold can stay.I think dawn’s early light holds deeply rooted vacillation for many of us. Night invites stillness, rest, serenity, and respite. Night also suggests letting go, closing down, venturing into the unknown, parting with light, and dallying with death. On the other hand, morning brings freshness, new light, another chance, rebirth. Morning also suggests that we wake up, stretch, take action, and venture forth. Daybreak is pregnant with the uncertainty that looms in any who hesitate on the threshold and the boldness of all who are curious about the day ahead. It is a time of vulnerability and a time of wonder.
The 13th century poet Rumi speaks to the vulnerability and the wonder:
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.
She asks, "Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth?[Sure!]
He says, "There’s nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight."Presumed vulnerability and wondrous savvy!
But Rumi also poses the question:
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Have you ever risen before sunrise just to find out? Just to be a witness to it all?
Then there are the good dreams and bad that linger from the night or the bitter and the sweet that linger from our yesterdays. With a few drops of gloom in the eyelids of our soul, we anticipate the worst. With a few drops of contentment, we hope for the best.
Still on the threshold of this mid-summer day, I think of that curious story told by John Cheever and so wryly titled, "A Common Day." Perhaps it speaks to those of us New Yorkers who find ourselves faintly ill-equipped for wandering too far afield from the familiarity if not the guaranteed security of this metropolis. As we venture into the countryside, our senses perk up to sounds and happenings that would go unnoticed in this city of so many sounds and such varied happenings. The setting of the story is rural New Hampshire–rural New Hampshire, that sounds redundant, doesn’t it? The time is just after the end of the Second World War. The protagonist is a New Yorker whose wife has New England roots that won’t let go.
"When Jim woke at seven in the morning, he got up and made a tour of the bedroom windows. He was so accustomed to the noise and congestion of the city that after six days in New Hampshire he still found the beauty of the country morning violent and alien."
Yet,
"It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong."
Jim bumps about in the rambling and well-heeled home of his wife’s family, bustling with too many servants for anyone’s satisfaction. He welcomes the opportunity to go off with the gardener to solve the mystery of what’s destroying the corn. He ventures forth with his wife to explore yet another farmhouse that could be their own Shangri-La with just a little TLC. A seemingly unmarked day moves with slow crescendo into a steady flow of unleashed undercurrents–the bewildering hyper-vigilance of a nanny over a child who would try the patience of a Buddhist monk, the venting of back-burner resentments by a cook constrained years ago from going home the summer before her father died, the gentle lightning between our protagonist and his wife over where home might be–New Hampshire/New York/New Hampshire/New York, the not-so-gentle lightning of an afternoon storm, and the loosening of a gardener’s lifetime of pent-up fury toward the lady of the house. It was a splendid summer day in which nothing quite fit, a "common day."
I wonder how our expectations of the day, any day, mesh with its unfolding reality in ways that catch us unaware, unprepared, and left with a residue of acute uncertainty. Surely we know about mornings that seem as if nothing could go wrong. Yet it is precisely the newness of the day that is so inviting, and especially the freshness of a summer day that seduces us into believing that nothing, but nothing, can go wrong.
"From the east comes the sun, bringing a new and unspoiled day."
(SLT, # 438, Morning, Clinton Lee Scott)
we read earlier.
And from the Psalmist whose echo we hear once again:
"This is the day which the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it."(Psalm 118: 24, RSV)
And from e. e. cummings, that poet who always takes my breath away:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Each morning our senses are awakened to the natural, the infinite, the yes of possibility whatever that is. Each day our senses are aroused for better or worse, compelled by light made visible by the turning of our earth-home. No matter how many sunrises we have known, we are taken by surprise–magic in a golden orb that stretches ever so slowly as we lean toward the light. Carried by the earth itself, we are drawn into a brand new day. We are drawn into the new.
Judeo-Christian Scripture is filled with references to the new–the new covenant, the new Jerusalem, a new heart, a new spirit, a new heaven and a new earth. Paul Tillich, perhaps the most erudite Protestant theologian of the 20th century, considers the old and the new in bidding us to heed the "words of the Old and New Testaments which speak of the new that God makes in life and history." Why, he asks, do the writers of these texts–even the ponderous and seemingly disparaging Preacher of Ecclesiastes–hold the new above the old? "The new," he answers, "is hidden in the profound mystery which veils every creation, birth as well as rebirth."
"Nothing," he continues, "is more surprising than the rise of the new within ourselves….The new being is born in us, just when we least believe in it. It appears in remote corners of our souls which we have neglected for a long time…. It shows a way where there was no way before….[and] it appears when and where it chooses…. Readiness is the only condition for it..."
No matter what the day holds, no matter what the level of our expectancy or dread, the newness of a fresh day calls for us to be ready and prepared for whatever. The sun rises and lights our way, however gnarled the way might be. The night passes and releases us to the morning, however dearly we cling to the night, however fiercely we claim our visions of yesterday. The sun rises and surprises us utterly, whatever surprises the day holds, however ready we are for that wholesale mystery.
And I wonder, yes, I wonder:
How ready for the morning is our friend greeting it in an OR at Memorial Sloane Kettering?
How ready for the morning is our neighbor I’ve encountered more than once lying in a fetal position on the floor of the ATM entrance of Fleet Bank just next door?
How ready for the morning is the mother turning to cover her young ones with the scant blankets offered in our city’s shelters to our city’s 14,000 homeless children?
How ready for the morning is the father bending over the crushed bodies of his family, in the wake of bulldozers in occupied territories?
How ready for the morning is the brother weeping over his sister after a suicide bomber has struck?
How ready for the morning is the accused facing the long green mile?
How ready for the morning is the child of Botswana or Mozambique, orphaned and now ravaged with AIDS herself?
How ready for the morning is the teenager floundering in anxiety and treading the deep waters of depression?
How ready for the morning are we in the face of this morning’s news?
Morning is a mixed blessing. God’s in her heaven and all can seem right with the world, and then we can well wonder where she’s been hiding.
I wonder if blessings don’t just ebb and flow to the tides of indifferent nature and the riptides of free will. And I wonder if in the midst of indifferent nature and endowed with free will, we aren’t each handed the gift of the possible so that we need not turn away, seduced by the illusion that there is really nothing we can do about it all, for as Mary Oliver reminds us:
"The spirit…..enters us —
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning…"Yes, every morning, our spirits are kindled and rekindled by the flame in the east. We are embraced and embraced again by the long arms of its rising body. We are wrapped as a gift to the day by those ribbons of gold that find us again and again.
So stay awake. Stay awake, bids Rumi
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The doors is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.Morning is a mixed blessing, but a mixed blessing is a blessing too. No matter how nightmarish the night. No matter how nightmarish your yesterdays, greet the day if you possibly can in the spirit of the two little boys who were convinced, completely convinced, that it was their guitar playing that made the sun rise. It’s the closing scene of Marcel Camus’s 1958 film, Black Orpheus, a vibrant rendition of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janeiro at Carnival time. Having emptied themselves of their sorrow over the death of Eurydice and their sadness at the grief of Orpheus, they perch expectantly on a cliffside facing east, and the two of them play their guitars and sing their hearts out. Sure enough, the sun does come up.
They are blessed by the morning, and so are we, however mixed and mixed up the night was and the day becomes. We are blessed by the morning. Amen.
Sources
e.e. cummings, from XAIPE, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1950
Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1923, p. 84.
Mary Oliver, "Poem," from Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
Rumi, "The Sunrise Ruby," The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 100.
Ibid., "Unfold Your Own Myth," p. 40.
Ibid., p. 36.
Clinton Lee Scott, "Morning," #438, in Singing the Living Tradition, Beacon Press, Boston, Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993.
Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948, 176-86.
Psalm 188, The Bible, Revised Standard Version, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1952.
www.bertconvy.net/bertact.html
Back To Jan Carlsson-Bull Sermons