"You can't have it all...but there is this" the poet Babara Rass reminds us. This morning I would like to focus on the "this" of our lives which comes to us not in sagas or great dramas but in anecdotes, in small epiphanies, in moments when we are aware.
Before that, however, I feel an obligation to state straight out why "you can't have it all": You are not God.
I am a member of the Unitarian Universalist Associaton's Pamphlet Commission where five of us initiate, publish and distribute those pamphlets you can pick up from racks and on tables in every UU congregation. One of my first assignments was to take-over, mid-process, the the pamphlet titled: "UU
Views on Prayer", which is conceived as series of six or seven very succinct views that try to encompass the wide spectrum of UU attitudes toward prayer. This is not, as you can imagine, an easy task, (Partly because UU's have some difficulty being succint) However, if you can find thoughtful people who are willing to accept some editing, your writers will carry the day. For example, what about humanists and prayer? Our pamphlets, being Unitarian Universalist, usually carry one firm debunker on any religious subject.
Roger Cowan, minster of the West Palm Beach congregation, who is strongly identified with the UU humanist strain was invited to submit his view on prayer. His response startled us all. He wrote, "I am a humanist who prays. I pray to remind myself I am not God."
We are not in control and we don't have the power to manage everything. We piece and patch together our lives. Although the story of our families over generations constitutes a saga of sorts and there are inevitably moments of great drama or adventure in our lives, mostly, our lives are "but there is this".
The tools at our disposable to recognize a design in the piecing and patching of our lives are varied: We can accept a world view from "above" whether religious or political or cultural and when things occur, simply shrug and say, "Well, it was meant to be; stuff happens. It is part of a greater plan".
At the other end of the spectrum is the concept that someone, an expert, can fix everything. This is perhaps most highly identified with science;
whether the hard sciences such as chemistry and physics or the soft sciences such as psychology and economics. What these two views share is a "peak of the pyramid" view. Someone is on top, knows more, and is responsible.
What about if we looked around? What if we just took today, or August, and had it fully. Observed it, felt it, acknowledged it, cared for it, reflected upon on it. What if we just noticed that we are alive. And then said it aloud, or wrote it down, or called a friend or relative and shared it. Would it be a spiritual or religious experience? The Buddha thought so. The haiku poets we heard in our opening words thought so. Most poets think so.
What if we told an anecdote today during iced tea hour out there in the vestibule. What you don't know anybody? Just use this opening to someone out there: "You know I thought of an anecdote." An anecdote is a little story about real life. It has a beginning, an end and not much middle. It is short, small. It is not a joke although many of our best anecdotes are quite funny. Often it is poignant. It is always self-revealing in a benign way. It is self-revealing because it gives some insight into our vision, our sensitivity. Now, I would like to tell you and anecdote. It is about the black, cast iron frying pan which I keep on my stove.
When I was a little girl about four-years-old, I was taken to visit my Grandmother in Ohio who lived on a piece of land where she commercially cultivated gladiolas and kept a few chickens. During my visit there, she called me out into the kitchen where a chair was pulled up to the stove. She invited me to stand on the chair and watch her fry some eggs. I climbed up on the chair, watched her reach into a bowl, and pick out an egg, hold it over the pan, and then she seemed to crack the egg but instead of the raw egg, the running white and the solid yellow ball I expected, out popped a baby chicken!
The cast iron pan on my stove sixty years later is the same pan into which the chicken emerged from the egg shell. Upon reflection, there is a great deal for me in this anecdote. Now a story is a litle different than an anecdote because it requires some shaping. Before you can really tell it, it needs a more formal concept of introduction, a beginning, some action, something happens, some change occurs and for a story to really work, you have to really work to be certain you have expressed its core meaning. Many stories grow out of anecdotes.
Stories are the key to our lives. The one's we tell; and the ones we don't tell. They shape and form our experience in a larger way and if followed can lead to meanings and understandings that are ordinarily hidden from us.The Bible is a collection of stories to which people turn in all manner of ways. Also, myths, sagas, soap operas, dramas, novels that have entered our lives, come to mind. Yet these are other people's stories. What about our own story? Our own stories begin in anecdote, little stories, small adventures. These smaller stories are pathways to a larger story of our own, filled with meaning.
One of the current modes exploring this larger story is through journal-writing. Today, the difference between a journal and a diary is nearly interchangeable yet a diary connotes more of log, a recording of facts while a journal implies more of a reflective quality. I don't know why we keep journals and diaries, exactly, but surely it has something to do with the transitory quality of time. We wish to aid our memory but we are also shaping our experience, tuggging out of it the meanings that are not readily available in the midst of experience itself. The modern concept of a journal owes much to Henry Thoreau who took the very popular concept of the travel journal, carried it a mile-and a-half down the road from Concord to Walden Pond, and took a spiritual journey which he shaped into a classic of world literature.
I have kept a journal for over twenty years. While it is in no way literary, I will say this: one thing about keeping a journal is that you never have to whine in public. My journal has a few photographs, some drawings, crude though they may be, of how I felt at a particular time. My journal is an ever-faithful friend, a travelling companion. It is also a space where I can reflect and shape an event or an experience, where I can pull together strands of intentions and reflections. There have been in the last decades a number of books written on keeping a journal which emphasize the spiritual nature of journal writing. Spiritual, in the sense that there is the recognition of travelling, of moving through time, and life, although , in fact, one may never leave home. It is a record of a journey through life.
Thoreau, who travelled those few short miles from Concord to Walden Pond to discover meaning, reported: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one addresses confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
A journal is a compilation of small entries on everyday days, which can, upon reflection, lead to greater insights. Another way in which we record our experiences is through writing letters. These too can serve as the source of much insight. History is often based upon the documentation of letters. Angie Henry wrote letters home to her mother when Angie was a student at Elon College during the early 1940's. Her mother kept them, then gave them to Angie who promptly stored them in a closet and forgot about them. One day last year, nearly fifty years later, as Angie was cleaning out a closet, she opened the box and began to read.
She has learned a lot from those letters. First, she is astonished at how much she told her mother, how openly she discussed all kinds of things; in the letters she also meets a young man, Kenneth Utt, and tells her mother a good deal about him. This is important because Angie and Ken will marry. When Angie and Ken Utt are on the road with "Winged Victory" during World War II, when they come to New York after the war and Ken begins what will become a distinguished career in television and film, the letters record the very ordinary ways in which they spent their days. The letters in their collection become a source of great insight and reflection for Angie and for some become a document of historical interest. In one of the Elon series, Angie records a fire in the dormitories. These letters in particular are of interest to Elon College as they add a human dimension and human detail to a fact of the institution's history. The experience comes to life with new intensity through Angie's letters to her mother.
Now the most formal approach to reflection upon experience and that most highly identified with religious practice is meditation. There are many, many kinds of meditation but all require silence, a kind of attention, and discipline. One kind of meditation asks you to meditate upon an object, such as a sea shell, to really see the shell, to see it in its fullness, in its shape, in its color, in its light and shadow . Is this different from an artist about to paint such a shell? Not really. The motive may be different but the act of seeing is similar. If you go to the beach this August, one way to meditate would be to to say "What would I need to see to paint this shell?" If you do it often enough and gain attentiveness your next experience at the Metropolitan Museum or walking into this church sanctuary or even entering your own life can be different, can be richer, can be more alive.
Too often, when we think of the words "pay attention" we have connotations of a tough moment in school, a stern voice in an unhappy moment, or the time we really messed up and someone (often ourself) said: "You should have paid attention to what you were doing." It was good advice, perhaps poorly dosed out. What after all did the Buddha say but "pay attention". What after all did the teacher Jesus say but "pay attention", the kingdom of God is within you. What they did NOT say was "Pay Attention To Me". They said "pay attention to what you already know" but have drifted away from, have lost track of in the hurly-burly of ambitions and seductions . It is a discipline and it takes practice to recognize the adventures and gifts of the journey through life.
Once many years ago, someone said to me (no doubt after my telling some anecdote: "Mary-Ella, you have a very adventurous life." To which I replied, "Adventures come to those who recognize them." A year ago, I went to Prague in the Czech Republic for the week-end to attend a conference where I was representing the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I left New York on a Thursday evening and was back at Kennedy airport on Monday at mid-day. Let me report that on Saturday, mid-morning, sitting in a room struggling with following a English translation from the Czech, I was in a very poor state of jet lag, exhaustion and disorientation. Then I said to myself, 'Mary-Ella, this is not going to happen again. This is it. This is where you are. This is your one chance to be here to experience this day. To be. To be here. Now. With these people. With this struggle." I saw and heard and learned much in Prague. But it is that internal moment of the struggle for the discipline to pay attention, to be there, that returns to me. It was that moment that was the key to the adventure of Prague. Perhaps, it was that moment, itself, when I learned that I had the discipline to pay attention that was the real adventure.
Finally, I would like share the biography of one of the Haiku poets, whose words opened this service, Issa. Issa (born in 1762 and who died in 1826), was the eldest son of a poor farmer, orphaned. In later life his wives and his children died before him. Issa wrote poems with such compassion for all living creatures that he became one of the three most loved poets in the haiku tradition. Issa was especially sensitive to insects, which are usually ignored or scorned in the literature of the Western world. Here are two more of his haiku:
The cricket proudly picks up its whiskers and sings. Singing as it goes, an insect floats down the stream on a broken bough. And so here we are in August. How shall we have August fully? It is commonly reported that not much happens in August. That "nobody" is in town. This, in a city where several million people got up today and fed the children. Some went to work, some to church, someone now is plunking on a guitar writing a song. There is this: Everything is happening. All of life is here while "everyone" is apparently out of town. Babies are just now being born. Some one is dying. Some are swimming, some walking along the beach, just now noticing a shell.
Observe something on the streets of the city. Reflect upon it. Tell that anecdote. Hear your own story. Write a letter. Pay attention. Broken as the bough may be, you are floating down the stream of life. Pull up your whiskers and sing. You are having an adventure.
Here it is. There is this. Copyright Mary-Ella Holst 1999
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