LOVE REACHES OUT
A Meditation on the Small and Great Cycles of our Lives
James Ishmael Ford
22 June 2014
First Unitarian Church
Providence, Rhode Island
I am deeply aware that starting the next time I stand in this pulpit, everything will be the last time I do it as the parish minister of this congregation. And, actually, the last time I do it as a parish minister. Water communion, Christmas, Amnesty International Letter Writing Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Maundy Thursday communion, Coming of Age Sunday, these and so many more events we mark annually. And, then, then, finally that last flower communion as the church year ends.
I feel fragile. I feel my heart open.
And I find myself thinking of Gary Snyder’s old poem, For/From Lew, one of my favorites.
Lew Welch just turned up one day,
Live as you and me. “Damn, Lew” I said,
“You didn’t shoot yourself after all.”
“Yes I did” he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
“Yes you did, too” I said – “I can feel it now.”
“Yeah” he said,
“There’s a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don’t know why.
What I came to say was,
Teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All other cycles.
That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.”
Cycles. Solomon sang of the cycles, as well. To every season…
Really noticing these things can be hard. We’re so caught up in the busy of our lives. It takes something to pull the membrane of our routine thin, and to allow us to see larger. We might notice this when, as it is for me right now, so vivid in knowing one of the cycles is coming to an end. Of course, here I’m what, the seventeenth minister? There will be an eighteenth, and a nineteenth, it will continue for a good while yet. There are cycles within cycles.
Here we are, raising children, making livings, enjoying friendships, feeding the hungry, advocating for a more just world, going about our ordinary lives. Each part its own cycle. And. There is something special about this place, and our returning to it within all the other cycles of our lives.
I often talk of how this special dedicated space particularly invites us into that knowing. This is particularly true in a community like ours, old enough that members of this congregation conspired together to overthrow a king, and within these very walls of this Meeting House members of this church dedicated themselves and their fortunes and their very lives to end the horror of slavery, and in years that followed to bring about women’s suffrage, and for the last few years to bring about marriage equality.
All this seen within the cycles, ordinary time, and special time, children growing up and assuming their places as adults, ministers coming and going, each of us living and dying in our own time, cycles within cycles. Mind you, cycles, not circles, which are static things and allow no change. Rather cycles are more like spirals, where things change although often in subtle and frequently mysterious ways. Ways we rarely completely notice, until, of course, they are the way things are.
Like ministers coming and going.
Seeing the cycles and the larger cycles opens our hearts, reveals the powers of love; reveals love.
That is what we find. It is love that dances within and between the cycles.
By attending to what is happening, we notice it. Love. Love like electricity. Love like life-giving blood.
It is in noticing the love that connects and binds and enlivens that allows new possibilities to birth.
Whole new worlds.
We come into this place, we open our hearts, and miracles abound. We see the cycles, we find the mysterious connections as nothing less than love. And from that, from this love, we reach out. Our lives become gifts to other lives.
The cycles all joined together. Like garlands of flowers.
Our individual lives like the gift of a flower. Fragile. Beautiful. The dying already in the living.
And, mysteriously, but truly: fully enough.
Fully enough.
This is the lesson of the cycles.
Love reaching out.
Amen.
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