Creations
We've begun our worship conversation this year with the theme of Creations - acknowledging and exploring beginnings and fresh starts: our own Ingathering ritual and holiday, the Jewish Days of Awe, and now we turn to the Islamic New Year. Here are a few excerpts, quotes and sources for further exploration. See you at church! - Rev Jennifer
The Story
The whole of creation, is good. Very good. This cannot be said enough, not in ancient
times, and not now. What we know with our whole hearts, and have recorded to
one another again and again, is how breathtakingly lovely all of this is, this
planet, this life, this love and longing and hope and help, this sky and these
trees and the flowers beneath them. A butterfly, a new born child, the wash of
ocean over the pebbles on the beach. Exquisite. Sublime. It is good
....
The problem was the seventh day of creation. It
rained. Imagine being here at the beginning, with the smell of the first
rainfall on the fresh earth, filtered through new grasses and the heat left by
a young sun. ...You can believe that
‘good’ did not sufficiently describe the wonder of that moment. What happened
in that moment is that some of the human beings began to cry. They hadn’t known
they were going to, it just happened. On that seventh day the lesson was that
it would never be enough, for the human animal, to live and work and love, they
would also reflect. They would consider why things were the way they were. Why
were some of their most beautiful creature cousins also the most dangerous,
like the viper and the leopard? Why were babies such a joy and yet birthing
them so painful? Why do we persist in falling in love when that’s the one and
only way to end up with a broken heart? Why is it that when you plant
vegetables and other good things to eat the ground also produces more weeds and
more thorns? In the midst of undeniable good, beauty, plenty, there is also
pain, and that every human being becomes more human as they develop the ability
to acknowledge this truth, to acknowledge the fear that it evokes in us, much
like the fear we learn to feel about the slither of the poisonous snake, or the
teeth of the mountain lion, and to move through that fear again and again and
help one another. All of this when the human animal stopped for a moment to
rest, the lesson of the 7th day, and knowledge began.
This is the story of creation.
Rosh Hashanah
"So there's attention, creation, love and dessert." - Anne Lamott, Stitches
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Here is the paradox of the sweetest thing, which is you, and
the life you have been given: we all know, and we learned it very early on, I
hope, that it takes a lot to create a life worth living: By which I mean, it
takes perseverance and hard won self-awareness to create a life free from all
the seductions of the capitalist world so that what informs our sense of
well-being is an ethical and spiritually fed inner world that we can count on
to make us act like full human beings in good times and in bad. It’s a life’s
work, and it takes all of us to make it happen for each of us.
On the other hand, as the great theologian Walter Bruggeman
is fond of saying: “The well being of
creation does not depend on endless work”
Yom Kippur
We don’t like to burn. It feels dangerous, like the
end of us. How much time we’ve spent, trying to douse our own flames, and
smooth over the hot spots. What we will do to avoid any situation, any
conversation, in which the blood rushes to our cheeks and betrays our inner
heat. I was sitting at a table the other day, in a tense meeting here in town,
and watched a woman blush while she spoke of things that should have held deep
meaning for us all: I was transfixed. This is what I long for – the daring of
sheer authenticity.
We deny it, and ourselves. Our creation myths speak
of the life that comes out of darkness, of the rich soil of sleep, dreams,
grief and guilt. But we have pitted the sun against the night and are open 24/7
to thinking only happy thoughts. We’ve turned our good guilt into shame and
taken up arms against all the dark corners within us, shutting down our own
inner temples and places of prayer. We are, instead, mechanisms of production,
"rewarded for our unconsciousness", says Barbara Brown Taylor, but we should
count the costs.
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....
Father Richard Rohr says “the great and merciful surprise is
that we come to [that which is Holy] not by doing it right, but by doing it
wrong.” I think we lack an understanding of and a permission to inhabit
liminal space. Most people drawn to this complex faith of ours do not lack, in
my experience, an acquaintance with their own “dark and dappled” side, but few
have been taught the good news that there are places and ways in which to
safely come to know and love all that resides there. We can enter into liminal
space, and we can create it for one another. The Native American religion that
influenced my upbringing called this space Coyote energy, or Fox energy – they
pointed out that at the edge of every ecosystem is a rich and fertile ground
that attracts the widest variety of plant and animal life, and that these
places are most populated at dawn and at dusk: the in-between times, the times
of transition and change. The same is true inside ourselves. We are given many
opportunities in life to walk the path of a space in-between, and it will be
easier, during those times, to explore, embrace and inhabit our wholeness – to
live in both the light and the dark sides of our being, and to receive the
gifts of both. Opportunities such as birth, the beginning of a new relationship,
our teenage years, death, the end of a relationship, when we fall in love, when
we are very ill, when we move to a new geography, when any creative project
that has our heart and mind begins or ends, when we play, when we learn, every
day at sunrise, and every day at dusk…and often we do not give these
opportunities the time and space that they deserve. And often when we are in
them we refuse to remain open and receive our own truth, and the gifts that are
being offered to us. That is why we need our spiritual practices; to learn to
reflexively open to the darkness and the silence and the in-between times,
rather than shut down. That is why we come to church, sit in sangha,
participate in adult ed, go to yoga, say our prayers, and record our gratitude
– because those practices teach us to remain open. That is why we benefit from
being influenced by Yom Kippur - - honor this yearly time for contemplation,
honesty, humility, integrity and forgiveness. Turn around and move beyond your
mind to a new place that is waiting for you, calling you forth, calling your
name, beyond blame, and beyond fear.
“…If I had my
way I would eliminate everything from chronic back pain to the fear of the
devil from my life and the lives of those I love….At least I think I would. The
problem is this: When the lights have gone off in my life, the monsters have
not dragged me out of bed and taken me back to their lair. The witches have not
turned me into a bat. Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could
never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over
again…. (BBT 5)
In ways large and small we strive to honor the
whole self. To allow authenticity in our relationships, and to honor that which
is alight and alive in our hearts. Burn brightly.
"We were whole, we became broken, but we shall be whole again." Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz
Sources:
Jack Kornfield, The Ancient Heart of Forgiveness http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_ancient_heart_of_forgiveness/
These are the titles and authors from which the Creations sermons and adult RE offerings have been gleaned. All are available through your local bookstore, as well as through Amazon
The Jewish Holidays, Michael Strassfeld
Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor
Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr
Stitches, Anne Lamott
Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann
Does God Have a Big Toe?, Marc Gellman
Gershon's Monster, Eric Kimmel
Swan, Mary Oliver
The Divide, Matt Taibbi
God Revised, Galen Guengerich
We will be revisiting many of these authors, poets and theologians in the months to come!
