LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE

LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE
Facing Death and Embracing Life

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

Delivered at a Workshop
on Death and Dying
at the
First Unitarian Society in Newton

10 November 2007

Text

I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving Toward a new freedom
Born of detachment,
And a sweet grace –
Learning to let go.
I am not ready to die,
But as I approach sixty
I turn my face toward the sea.
I shall go where tides replace time,
Where my world will open to a far horizon
Over the floating, never-still flux and change
I shall go with the changes,
I shall look far out over golden grasses
And blue waters…

There are no farewells.

Praise God for His mercies,
For His austere demands,
For His light
And for His darkness.

May Sarton Gestalt at Sixty (an excerpt)

One of my continuing fears in life is some week finding myself too ill to write the sermon. Usually it’s just a little worm burrowing somewhere in the back of my head. For the most part I ignore it as just one more of the general jumble of thoughts that have their own life rising and falling along with whatever is my dominant emotion at the time. This fear of not getting the sermon written is part of my personal constellation of anxieties. I also notice it more when things are piling up than when things are going well.

Of course it has a root in something that can actually happen. For instance, in the middle of the week this week I found myself laid low with one of those viruses that live in the sea we call daily life. It snuck up on me in the middle of the day and by my evening meeting with the Lay Ministers I was swimmingly delirious. Fortunately one day in bed pretty much ended it. That was, by the bye, the day I’d set aside to focus on today’s sermon. The next day, we’re now talking yesterday, I was a bit weak, but by canceling two appointments I was able to turn my attention to the matter at hand.

And as I began the actual writing this little fear had to snuggle back into the recesses of my personal closet of fears. I’m sure it awaits its next opportunity to visit. As is true, I suspect, for the many fears and anxieties we all carry with us in that back of our heads, some small niggling things, others, large, and possibly horrific.

Today we are addressing the biggest of those nagging demons that haunt the human heart. As the Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church once, to my mind rather dryly put it, religion is about being alive and knowing you’re going to die. Today we have gathered here to reflect on the nature of our encounter with death.

Death is the inescapable, the period at the end of the sentence or paragraph or book that we think of as our lives. To think of death is to think of many things, and to feel many things. For instance, fear. I recently was exchanging correspondence with a colleague, Eva Cameron, minister of our church in Cedar Falls, Iowa. She wrote about when she learned she had cancer. “(T)he news of cancer filled me with fear – not so much for myself, but for who would care for my children.” I found that simple line so compelling, so painful, so true.

Even if we think we’ve put the matter of our mortality to rest for ourselves, there is always another way for the fear to arise. What will become of my children, or my aged parents? And, also, what about that small part, or large, in ourselves that is about ourselves, and knowing we are finite, we are ending, we are dying? What about facing our sense of loss and fear?

The truth is everything I really want to present today has been summarized quite neatly by Pema Chodron, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun; when she wrote, to my mind and heart, compellingly, wisely: “Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” Today, as we get ready to launch into a time of reflection and conversation, I hope you don’t mind my holding up a suggestion for how we can allow that room, that space which lets things rise and fall, and where we can encounter a healing beyond the mending of broken bones.

I’ve told this story before, but it’s an important one for me as a pointer to the fundamental matter of life and death and how we might best encounter it. I was doing my parish internship at the First Unitarian Church in San Jose, California when what is called the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. It was a pretty nasty one, part of the Bay bridge collapsed, sections of Highway sandwiched and a number of people were killed. At 6.9 on the Richter scale it came to be known in the SF Bay Area as the “pretty big one.”

At the time it hit I was standing in the front office with our senior minister and the church’s administrator. We were all California natives, so at first we just ignored it. But when it was obvious something bad was happening we each of us took action as we’d been drilled in school. The administrator slipped under her desk, the senior minister and I each stepped into doorways. That’s when I learned that while indeed the frame of the doorway is particularly strong, standing there I had to share it with a door that was swinging wildly. The quake ended, the church itself had survived the really big one in 1906, and did just fine this time around, as well.

Back up in Berkeley, my spouse Jan barely noticed the quake, as the hill on which the seminary is perched is pretty much a giant block of granite. She was ironing and listening to records when there was a single sharp jolt and a book fell off one of the shelves. As we were the house managers of the married students building she went outside to check whether the earthquake valve had been thrown, a safety device most out here would not be familiar with. She saw that it was just fine and returned to her business. She didn’t learn of the actual devastation for several more hours.

So, what has this to do with dying, with sitting with what is, with letting, if that’s the right word, allowing, witnessing, not denying as things fall apart? Well, there are several points of possible connection. For one thing, neither Jan nor I really took in the significance of the event at the time. We were shaken to our core, but we didn’t actually know it for days and weeks to come. We had been shaken badly, but we thought we were fine. The wisdom of the situation needs to unfold in its own good time. We need to continue to be vulnerable from the beginning to the end and not tell ourselves, well that was rough, but now it’s over.

We are alive and we know, somewhere in our bones, that we will die. And we have the most amazing ability to ignore that fact. Until, until something comes along and puts us right. There’s an old Yiddish saying that seems particularly appropriate in this context. “God is not nice. God is not your uncle. God is an earthquake.”

In this context I hold up for your consideration the Book of Job, one of the most important spiritual documents of our common western inheritance. I’ve wrestled with it and I’ve found in that ancient book how, in the midst of suffering and longing and frustrated desire, in the midst of that deafening silence to our pleas and calls for succor: we are in fact given a great gift. It is a terrible gift, no doubt. It is the gift of presence to what is as it is. It is allowing the place of our not knowing, of our not actually being in control, to be. Even when what is turns out to be an earthquake.

Pema Chodron suggests we abandon hope, abandon our fond delusion of control. We need to surrender our notions that somehow we are immune from death, or that our suffering is a punishment, or that our joy is a reward. These are just stories we’re telling ourselves that allow us to not bare witness to what is as it is. We need to shift our attitude about these harsh moments. These moments of confrontation with what is from the tiny ones like my fear of being too sick to write a sermon to the big ones, like being told we have cancer and have little chance to survive it. All of them, Pema tells us, can become our friends, if we are willing, our guides to what is. And this includes, most of all, the greatest earthquake, death.

I’m not calling for a joyful embrace here, at least not exactly. But, when we are genuinely open, and then when our certainties about what and who we are, are torn from our hands, and all we’re left with is not knowing and simply witnessing – then we can know who we really are. Then what is holy is revealed. But it is a terrible holiness. It is a holiness that sees how in the last analysis, we, you and I, indeed all of the created universe exists only for a moment. Our individual reality is contingent; we depend upon this divine universe for everything.

So, Job. After all those horrible things happen to Job, after his great demand for justice, then, there, from the heart of the tempest as it is called in one translation, or in another, from out of the whirlwind – or, you can just as easily say from within the earthquake – he and we get God’s gift of a terrible presence, our roaring confrontation with what is.

It is that confrontation that pulls out of Job his hymn, “I had heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” Comforted that I am dust. This passage has long haunted people. Some rage against it, saying all that Job is doing is wallowing in that dust, squeaking out his submission to the great cosmic bully. But, I suggest there is much more here, much more. That wise commentator on this whole great mess Stephen Mitchell in his now modern spiritual classic, The Book of Job, tells us:
“Job’s comfort at the end is in his mortality. The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.

“(Job) feels he has woken up from a dream. That sense, of actually seeing the beloved reality he has only heard of before, is what makes his emotion at the end so convincing. He has let go of everything, and surrendered into the light.”

So, this is our work, I think. It’s about letting go, being present, surrendering into the light. Even in the face of death. Perhaps, even, because we face death. And from that surrender, from that place of not knowing, of total vulnerability, I believe we can live into grace, into joy, into a world of possibility.

Amen.