Message from Jan

“Message from Jan”
First Parish
Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
February 15, 2009

Greetings and love to each and all on this mid-February Sunday morning as you gather once again to worship.

What does it mean to worship? Of course we’ll never reach consensus on an answer. We’re Unitarian Universalists after all. I do believe our capacity to worship together without consensus on what it means is a clue to how exactly we are bound in this strange and wonderful community of faith that we share—that is, love as a covenantal relationship. Not love as something distilled in a stale and dubious definition. Not love as an unattainable standard that is instant pie in the sky. Not even love in the form of chocolate that is savored, digested, and quickly forgotten—though the savor part is probably a point on which we actually could reach consensus. Rather, love as a dynamic fluid relationship of joys and concerns, silence and song, activity and respite, questioning and wondering, striving and stumbling—all laced with a behavior of deep caring.

For me, love is how we care. One of the most important questions to which I’m called to respond day after day is how I love, how I care, and what I love, what I care about.

Lest we lean too quickly into the ethereal stuff of love, what I sometimes call glazed donut theology—glazed on the outside, preservatives on the inside, and a hole in the middle—consider our morning reading, Teilhard de Chardin’s “A Hymn to Matter.”

“Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock,” moving into:

“Blessed be you, universal matter, unmeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations..”

From the immediacy of soil and rock, we travel into the far-reaching stuff of “universal matter” and “unmeasurable time.” We travel right out into the stars. This is affirmation that is grounded and transcendental, immediate and ultimate, here and now, and time without borders.

What do we love and how do we love? Loving the soil and the rock and the stuff that we recognize as earth-stuff is just as “spiritual” as loving the outer realms of space and time, the far stretches of imagination. It reminds me of the phrase chosen by a longtime Christian Ethics professor at my alma mater, Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Beverly Wildung Harrison referred to “embodied spirituality.” When I think of Bev, this notion works on a personal level. While Bev became one of our nation’s foremost feminist theologians, my first encounter with her when I arrived at Union was as the senior counselor on my dorm floor in McGiffert Hall, standing in the kitchen and teaching me how to make a proper cheese fondue! I love Bev for what she taught me about feminist theology AND for what she taught me the fine tunings for a sumptuous fondue. I know now what an artery clogger it is, but I can still savor the smell and the taste and permit myself every year or so to prepare a batch, no recipe needed.

We love and we remember with an embodied spirituality. Sometimes our sense of taste figures in, sometimes our sense of smell, sometimes our sense of touch. Commonly our object of love is within our field of vision or our field of hearing. All are constructs of the material world. As for love itself, it’s both grounded and transcendent. I do believe it outlasts our material selves as we know ourselves; but while we’re here in the form we assume as living breathing humans, our material selves matter mightily.

We’re brought hard into this truth this very winter as so many of us find ourselves challenged by injury and illness. You bet your life, we matter as matter! How well we function physically is intimately related to how well we function in ways that we don’t commonly consider physical. How we could ever buy into a tension between the physical and the spiritual is beyond me. Teilhard de Chardin observed and affirmed their intimacy. Charles Darwin observed and affirmed their intimacy. My friend Beverley Wildung Harrison recognized and affirmed their intimacy. We are body bound, body constrained, body defined; and it’s a matter of opinion as to whether we’re body liberated when we die.

The expressions of love and caring that you have shown me in these past weeks have been wondrously material. I smile with appreciation at every card, every e-mail, every visit. And my husband, Dan and I, ingest with appreciation every magnificent meal that you have delivered. Who even fantasizes about cheese fondue when you deliver the likes of aromatic stewed apples, citrus crusted fish, Swedish meatballs (prepared with ground turkey, thank you), acorn squash laden with apples and cranberries, chocolate meringues, and a tart that goes straight to my heart through my tummy. A Hymn to Matter? Absolutely! Food for body and soul? Explain the difference; I can’t.

I know this morning you’re hearing the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach through the sounds of organ, oboe, and voice. What can be more sublime than the music of Bach? Thank God or whomever or whatever magnificent twist in the process of natural selection that permitted us, who are human, to make music and enjoy it.

As this morning’s offering is given and received, ingest the sublimity that is this segment of Bach’s Magnificat, and be reminded of the truth held in the words of our closing hymn:

“…we are in the making still—as friends who share one enterprise and strive to blend with nature’s will.”

In this extraordinary here and now in which you sit side by side singing, praying, listening, leaning into whatever it is that you need this morning and whatever it is that happens this morning, we are like grace notes in a composition that goes on and on and on. As such, may we share the measures of our lives note by note, act by act, life by life, honoring the dynamic covenant of love that girds our glorious lack of consensus on what exactly it all means. It is the variation that enriches the community, the variation that makes harmony possible.

Consider what you love. Consider how you love. Consider that lyric of our final hymn reminding us that “what we love we yet shall be.” Trust it. Trust the love. Trust the covenant of love. There are no hard truths in this hard winter, but the songs that we sing and the notes that we heed are buoyant with the sacred here and now and the vibrant possibility of what can yet be.

“This is the marvel of life, rising to see and to know;
out of your heart, cry wonder: sing that we live.”

ring the words of Robert Weston.

The intricate twining of body and spirit, intimate and ultimate, here and now and time without end proclaim that the wonder of Creation of which we are a part is barely underway.

In this winter of hard realities, breathe, taste, touch, smell, listen, watch. Sing a hymn to matter. Sing a hymn to the love that matters most of all.

I love you each and all—
Jan


Sources:

Teilhard de Chardin, “Hymn to Matter,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 549.

John and Mary Evelyn Grim, “Teilhard de Chardin: A Short Biography,” http://www.teilharddechardin.org/biography.html.

William DeWitt Hyde, adapted by Beth Ide, “Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 289.

Robert T. Weston, “Out of the Stars,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 530.