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Every Day Sacred
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Dr. Roberta Nelson
on July 25, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
A couple of years ago, I received a book in the mail, Everyday
Sacred by Sue Bender. It was a gift but I do not know the giver.
I glanced through it and was intrigued by the title and the journey
it explored. From time to time since then I have pulled it from the
shelf, browsed, used a quote or two and returned it to its place. It
resonated with one of my favorite quotes by Rabbi Abraham
Heschel, "the place to look for spiritual substance is in every day
existence. Even the most simple deeds can be full of wonder."
The word sacred in the dictionary is defined, "entitled to
reverence." Close by is sacrament, a practice that is considered
especially sacred as a sign or symbol of a deeper reality. Sue
Bender asks, are ordinary, familiar things, "entitled to reverence?"
She also says "to begin to make every day sacred, I first had to
step back and look at the judge [in me] and everything else in my
life. Maybe I wrote Everyday Sacred to learn more about
miracles."
Bender begins her story with a story attributed to Jean Genet, the
French playwright, who said he wanted to roam the countryside
like a monk, holding a begging bowl to be filled with what he
needed for the nourishment in his life." The idea being that
whatever is placed in the bowl will be his nourishment for the day.
The idea of begging does not appeal to me, but the idea of
discovering on a daily basis those ideas, events, spaces that nourish
is something that does.
Each of us has events in our lives that could be identified as
sacred. Yesterday I performed the wedding of Tara Thompson and
Padraic Rengahan. Tara grew up in this community. Her mother
and father were married here at Cedar Lane. Her mother received
the Unsung Volunteer award in June. As closing words for their
wedding ceremony, Tara and Padraic chose the same ones used for
Tara's parents wedding. It is a sacred moment when two people
pledge their love and commitment to one another.
It was a sacred time when the family and friends gathered in the
Chapel on Friday to celebrate the life of Rae Herrmann and to
grieve her death. Ten days ago I experienced almost continuous
sacredness while Chris and I worked with 30 other people learning
to train teachers who will be using the new sexuality curriculum,
Our Whole Lives. The work with that curriculum, we all believe,
is sacred work, teaching, learning, exploring with young people one
of the most important aspects of living.
It was greatly enhanced by the setting in the Santa Cruz Mountains
of California, where we were surrounded by towering redwoods
and immersed in awe inspiring silence.
These are sacred events, but they are not of a kind that can or do
happen on a daily basis. Helen Keller wrote, "I long to accomplish
a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small
tasks as if they were great and noble."
So what of the begging bowl -- what is put in your bowl that will
nourish you? What surprises are in store that can awaken you to
the possibility of the sacred each day? I suspect most of us take
each day more or less as it comes. We move from one task or duty
to the next rarely stopping to think. We may not even have time to
think. This was a particularly busy week for me. When someone
asked me how I was, I replied, I think I'm okay; I haven't had time
to think about it. I used to laugh at Ken MacLean's response,
which was "about the same." Sue Bender, the author of Everyday
Sacred, asked a friend "what should I do, I have 13 possibilities on
my list?" Her friend replied, "do more of less." It is good advice,
but hard to follow. Often doing less may open us up to more
feelings of satisfaction and wonder.
I have had to learn to find the sacredness in daily living. I had to
learn to look at what was in my bowl and become more discerning
about what was presented to me. It is not an easy task but possible.
I am particularly unhappy with this weather because it deprives me
of my garden. I like to weed. I like to sit in the garden and watch
the butterflies and enjoy all that is growing. I have to be satisfied
to watch the garden from inside.
It was a sacred moment when James, my 5-year-old grandson,
called to ask if I was coming over.
When I asked why, he replied "my room needs to be cleaned."
Work with a young child who stops to examine and wonder at
everything can be an opportunity, not just a task.
Cooking and sharing a meal is the most sacred of events. I love to
cook, to explore new recipes, to share food, to grow fresh herbs.
My family knows that I can become quite out of sorts when I am
away from the kitchen for too long a time. In many ways the
kitchen is for me the most important room in the house -- space for
hospitality, community, connection -- a room for smell and taste,
sounds and seeing.
Sue Bender's story about David and his grandmother helps me to
see that some of the most obvious things are often the most sacred.
David sends a card to his grandmother age 89, every week. He
takes time to find the right card, one that will please her. He has
been doing this for 3 years. He says the challenge is to find the
right card. On her birthday, David went east to visit his
grandmother. "I never understood how much getting a card means
to Grandma. She looks forward to checking the mail. I could see
how happy she was." We all have our version of David's card to
his grandmother. Too of ten we take these small acts of kindness
for granted. We think we have to have a large gift or achievement
to offer others.
Small acts of kindness make a difference -- they have echoes way
out of proportion to the effect they take. David and his
grandmother each had a sacred experience -- each the giver and the
receiver.
Mother Teresa once said, "We do not do great things, we do only
small things with great love."
But, each day our bowl also has the possibility of not nourishing
us. Instead it can deaden us, shut us down, turn us away from the
people and possibilities that might restore us or affirm. In her book,
Sue Bender tells this story:
One week after the terrible Oakland-Berkeley Hills
fire, I met Helen, a woman my age, on the street in
Berkeley. She walked up to me and said, "I heard
you talk at the Women's National Book Association
last month. We lost our home in the fire. We lost
everything." She took a breath and continued, "I
loved Plain and Simple. I kept it next to my bed
and I'm going to reread it when my life is normal
again."
I stood there listening, not knowing what to say.
The fire had left our community in shock. You
could tell by the look in a person's eyes who had
lost everything. But the look in Helen's eyes was
different.
"There aren't many people I can say this to," she
continued, "I certainly can't say it to my husband,
who is devastated by the fire, but I think I can say
it to you." She took a long, deep breath. "I have to
trust that something good will come out of this," she
said, and then repeated, "I think something good
will come out of this."
Helen didn't say she wasn't grieving. Everything --
every family photograph, quilt, a grandfather clock
designed and built by her husband, all the hand-knit
sweaters that had kept her warm -- all were gone.
"The fire forced me to look at what really matters,"
Helen said.
The day after I met Helen, a statement by the monk
Thomas Merton stared out at me from a book I was
reading. An essential principle of the begging bowl,
he said, is that a monk accepts, with gratitude,
whatever is given.
"After the fire one of the things that pleased me so
much," Helen said, "was that all my favorite recipes
came back to me. Just three days ago I went to a
lecture with a friend and she said, 'Oh, I was
thinking about you last night because I made your
lemon ice cream.'
'Oh, you have that recipe?' I thought it was gone
forever. Another recipe that came back was for my
mother-in-law's cannelloni, which she gave me long
before I married my husband.
I was a pattern-drafting teacher in an adult
education program, and I just retired in July, and the
same thing happened with patterns. When I was
teaching, if I saw something stylish, a wonderful
coat, for example, I would borrow it from a friend,
draft a pattern, demonstrate it to the class and
several people would make their own pattern. Right
after the fire many students called to ask, 'What
patterns do you want?'
The pleasure of sharing comes from wanting to
share. But it certainly gave me tremendous delight
to have some of these lost things come back."
"Good deeds have echoes," my husband said, when
I told him about Helen and her students.
We are not monks and we do not live in monasteries. Where
decade after decade of life flows by with each day unfolding in the
same rhythm, the same rituals, the same chants. However, perhaps
there is something to learn from creating regular routines for daily
rituals that help bring rhythm and heighten the possibility of the
sacred in our lives. The hard part is finding the time and
remembering to do them. Even the best of intentions does not
always make it happen.
Sometimes it is hard to say, "i thank you god for most this amazing
day." I think most of us wish we could.
Each day our bowls are generally full to overflowing. We have
difficulty discerning what to savor and what to dismiss.
"Pour me a cup of tea" the monk says "and I will tell you when to
stop." The dutiful student starts pouring tea, and is horrified,
watching as the tea spills out of the cup and over everything.
"Can't you see the cup is full" he says. "It can hold no more."
"And so it is with you," the wise teacher answers. "Your mind is
too full of too many things." And so it is with most of us. Few of
us find it easy to escape entirely and revive our own spirits. When
our spirits are sagging and our lives seem burdensome due to
circumstances beyond our control, we begin to wonder if we shall
ever have the time to find our center. At times like these I hope
you will recall this story by Anne S. Bowman:
Two travelers on their way to Japan were standing
at the rail of the ship looking out upon the vast
open sea. After but a few moments, one of the men
turned about and walked away, disappointment
written on his countenance. Throughout the day, the
man returned to the deck rail, turned his back upon
the scene, each time appearing more disconsolate
than before. Finally, the second traveler who had
remained at the rail felt compelled to ask his fellow
traveler what it was which made him so downcast
on what was evidently a pleasure trip. The man
replied that he had been told that at this point of the
voyage he would be able to see Mt. Fuji rising in
the distance. However, the haze over the water was
apparently not going to lift, depriving him of a sight
which he had so long anticipated. Taking him by the
arm, his shipmate led the man back to the rail of the
ship and said quietly, "Look higher." The traveler,
raising his eyes above the haze, saw in all its beauty
and majesty, the great mountain peak.
Poems:
"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches"
by Mary Oliver
"White Pine" by Mary Oliver
"i thank you god" by ee Cummings
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