The Rhythm of Life

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, May 7, 2006

A big part of my job as your minister is to call your attention to God. To tell you, to show you, to help you find the holy in your lives.

I am not a thesist, I don’t believe there is a person or personality that I would call God. So I can’t take you right to him or her. I am also not a atheist. I do believe in the holy. I do believe that life has a sacred quality, dimension or energy. I do believe that human beings, that nature, that the very ground of being holds something true and beautiful, something ( or perhaps, nothing) unknowable, yet compelling. I call it, the holy, it is ineffable. We can’t fully describe it. It is multiform. It is dark, it is light. It is a paradox. It is a mystery. It is clarity. It is the source of creativity…the spirit of life.

And week after week, I try to point to it. To explore it. I try to live in that holiness that I can’t quite see or understand. Because it’s infinite, it’s hard to talk about. Because three are many ways to approach it, because we all see it differently, and mostly, don’t see it at all, it is hard to talk about the divine. And of course, language gets in the way.

This week I’ve approached the holy by thinking about the rhythm of life. For the holy, the meaning of life can be found in dailyness, in the simple rhythms of daily life.

What is the rhythm of your daily life? What are your patterns? Do you move to a waltz, a bluesy beat, a harsh rap sound? Sometimes I think God is in action , in movement, in sound.

One frustration I have with Unitarian Universliasm is that we are too contained. Too quiet, too still, most times; “we ain’t got rhythm”. Or maybe its all playing in our heads, in our hearts even, we just don’t let it get to our limbs.

I-pods are great, but the rhythm of life , the mystery of life, the holy that we seek is the great essential rhythm of creation, the first song.

Many wisdom traditions suggest silence as the path to the holy. I find silence almost as compelling as movement. What is beyond the dailyness, the noise, the schedule of life as we know it? Isn’t a disruption in the obvious rhythm of our living exactly what we seek on the Sabbath? Isn’t silence a source or even the place where God lives?

Don’t you just love the opening scenes in the Bible or in the movie, “A Space Odyssey” silence lay over the deep, the outer reaches of space were full of silence, and then motion happened, breath, there was light and day and night, there was movement of our planet through space, and with it, a waltz!

What mysteries lie in the rhythm of our lives, in our waking and in our sleeping, in movement and in stillness?

Shall I try to enter the silence or shall I get up and dance.
Where is God? Where does the holy reside?
Where is the source of breath, where the first pulse? Why am I afraid to open fully to the vibration, the call, the rhythm of my one life?

19th century German poet Rainier Maria Rilke wrote; “I want to set free my most holy feeling.” I recommend this as a mantra for our time, a mantra for our congregation.
I want to set free my most holy feeling. For yes, holiness lives within us.
The desire to live from a holy place is what brings us to church afterall.

The potential to live from holy feeling is what brings us to teach children, to work for justice, to imagine a better world.

This is a scary and awesome notion that we might all set free our most holy feeling. There is an intimacy suggested in spiritual work. A bearing of the soul, a vulnerability required. A trust. We might prefer to do the work in isolation. We might prefer to take a class with strangers, or talk to a therapist, or go on a silent retreat, but helpful as those things might be, they become, after a time, avoidance of the underlying religious impulse, the underlying human need and potential.

For by whatever path we arrive, whether motion or stillness, whether silence or song, God , holiness resides, most powerfully in human connection. They rhythm of our lives, always leads back to this, family, community, human need and human response. I had an interesting and significant experience this week. On a busy day, my work was interrupted with a phone call from a woman in need. She had first called the Frederick UU Church, where she said she had attended on occasion. I had offered to be on call for pastoral emergencies for Reverend Roberta Finklestein, the interim minister in Frederick, who was out of town.

The woman, I’ll call her Charlotte…said that she was a victim of domestic violence and that as she was trying to escape to a shelter in another state, with her two small children in tow, and being six months pregnant, her car broke down…at the moment, her car was in a repair shop in Baltimore. She herself was in a hotel waiting for the car to be fixed, but she had absolutely no money. Her husband had cancelled the credit cards and was searching for her. She was truly in a panic and needed money to get her car and travel to safety.

These kind of calls are difficult. I almost always feel suspicious. I immediately guard against being taken advantage of, of being conned…times like this I wish I was younger and more naieve…

Gratefully, I have access to a checking account for ministerial discretional use…so I could, in fact, offer help. But she had no way of getting to Rockville to receive a check. So I was being asked to help a stranger, whom I could not look in the eye.

In her desperation, she was making countless calls and requesting help from numerous churches. She needed over $400.

She had succeeded in getting the repair shop owner to accept letters of intent from ministers and priests with the promise of funds to be mailed. She wanted me to fax such an intent to the repair shop in Baltimore.

We don’t have a fax machine.

During the next couple of hours, I pondered the problem and made several phone calls to gather more information. I left several messages with other church offices. Late in the afternoon, my time and energy was running low.

To my surprise I received two phone calls from clergy in other churches around the area. Both said they had checked out the woman’s story , they had talked to the repair shop, they had called the shelter where the woman was headed…they assured me that this woman truly needed our help.

And so a small miracle was in progress. Six or seven different churches had agreed to help. All the churches, but ours, had Saint in their names…they were Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, and Episcopal… Each was offering a gift of support from $40 to $90. On Friday , a priest was going to pick the woman up from the hotel and drive her to the shop to retrieve her car…and to see her safely on her way.

The Lutheran minister offered to fax a letter on my behalf and I agreed. That evening I mailed a note with a small check to the auto repair shop.

The rhythm of life goes on all around us. We separate ourselves from it at our peril. The motion of goodness swirls in the lives of people. The news rarely reports on it. But each of us can become a part of it…at any moment, we can deepen our awareness of holiness in time, at any moment we can connect to the good in people…to the good society.

Each day we can pray; “I want to set free my most holy feelings.” Each day we try to be good and kind and fully human. But rarely can we do this work of the spirit in isolation.

Each Sunday, it is my hope that our hymns, our words, our deep fellowship will set free your most holy feelings. And I see daily evidence that it does.

Annie Dillard writing in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” writes; “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer”. She likens spiritual quest to polar exploration…we seek the most difficult of landscapes, we travel to the edge of the known world, we seek the source, the absolute, the sublime, the most powerful of human experiences…in journeying toward truth, we seek the holy!

And we cannot do it alone. We can only do it in community. This is why it is so important to build and sustain a vibrant liberal religious community. We need one another for the dangerous work of spiritual quest. And it is indeed dangerous work.

Dillard speaks of the danger:
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.

It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and men’s ties to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets and leather jackets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

I share the poets’ intuition of sacred power…by whatever name.

I understand the danger in this work of the spirit…I need to know that if I get lost someone, one of you , will go looking for me. You need to know that too.

The woman who’s car was in the shop, who had no credit card, she needed to escape a violent husband, that woman needed five or six churches to go looking for her. And she was found.

So I am reminded to listen to the rhythm of life, to tune in…to get off the couch, to park the car, to walk among the trees, to lean down and listen to the children…to come to church. To follow the dangerous path toward the holy.

We go forward in all our human limitation …we keep on going, climbing slowing uphill or following the inward path…we go because as Dillard says, “A taste for the sublime is a greed like any other”.

If we are awake…if we awake, we have no choice, but to go, but to try to scale the heights of human knowing, the depths of human caring.

Returning to her polar expedition metaphor, Dillard writes:

“The absolute (the source, god, the holy) is the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility located in metaphysics. After all, one of the few things we know about the Absolute is that it is relatively inaccessible. It is that point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions.

Like the others, it is a Pole of the Most Trouble. It is also, I take this as a given-the pole of great price.”

Helping the woman this week, was a bit of trouble, at the time, it seemed like a lot of trouble, but as soon as it was done…as soon I approached the holiness of this act of compassion…the reward was great…the connection, the profound meaning in working with these unknown ministers, of putting UUCR in concert with this one small act of kindness…it meant a great deal.

Saying yes, sometimes seems so much harder than saying no…but that may be illusion.

Annie Dillard read the journals of polar explorers…again and again, she found the letters P.D. written down for posterity…As the captains and scribes wrote of their experiences, plotted their positions according to the stars…again and again she found P.D. which meant…”position doubtful”.

The explorers with all their instrumentation, with all their experience and Collaboration…with all their might and confidence…they couldn’t say exactly where they were…their position was doubtful…perhaps they were even lost. How many expeditions perished in the search for a lost party?

But to find the Pole, to find the Absolute, to taste the sublime is a greed like any other.

Dillard again, “wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand-that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”

So, the rhythm of life pulls me forward…the pole that exists between movement on one hand and stillness on the other. The outward and the inner search for meaning for me holds, speaks, plays a rhythm. A heartbeat, a hum, a great arc of motion.

“I want to set free my most holy feelings” How? How? How can I become free…free to live from the holy place within?

These are the questions that kept me awake this week. Is the Absolute, the source…a thing or an emptiness? A sound or a silence?

Rilke describes it this way in a poem called “music”

“Place where feeling is transformed…into what? Into a countryside we can hear.
You, feeling space, moving away from us. The deepest thing in us, that,
rising above us, forces its’ way out…
a holy goodbye:
when the innermost point in us stands outside,
as amazing space, as the other
side of the air: pure, immense,
not for us to live in now.”

Pure, immense, a point, both inside and outside of us. A point both human and holy. Too often when I begin to approach this point…this holiness in time…I become self-conscious…I write a form of P.D. in the margins of my journal…my position is doubtful…I begin to back away. I go back to the books.

But Dillard comes through again;
“It is alright, she says, it is alright, believe it or not, to be people.”

Wouldn’t you know it, our search for holiness has let us right back to human caring.

Human care is a gift…a grace. Humanness and holiness are one. Humanness and holiness-One.

I felt this humanness and holiness this week…when I said yes, to joining a small group of angels who helped a woman and her children to safety.

I feel it now in the blessings of this community.
It is the rhythm of life.
It is the sound, the movement, the silence…of our most holy feelings set free.

Amen/ So Be It

From Rilke

“I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
But that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
And I have been circling for a thousand years,
And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
Or a great song."

And Amen.