“A Completely Divine Day”
A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for the Sunday of our Annual Meeting
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 17, 2009
This past week my brother and I have been on the phone many times. The topic is our mother’s declining capacity to function. I know that some of you have experienced this with your loved ones. It’s heart rending. Whether dementia or Alzheimer’s or another malady altogether invades our capacity to be present and to recall what happened yesterday or even a few moments ago, it’s as if the person we’ve known in ways particular and reliable elude us. Who is she? Who is he? With my Mother, her temperament has turned contrary too. Accountability is simply not in the picture. As I said to my brother, “We’ve really already lost our Mom, Jeff!”
Our mother, who turned 100 years old this past January, lives in a retirement facility near Jeff and his wife, Donna, just outside Philadelphia, in one of those towns known as the Main Line. Just a few months ago we celebrated her hundredth year with a full array of family, including five grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and the surprise appearance of a longtime friend from Nebraska. It was memorable—her favorite food, her favorite birthday cake (chocolate through and through), and stories, stories told and memories shared of our Mom, our Gram, our GiGi, as she’s called by her great-grandchildren. There were balloons. There were toasts. There were antics by the little ones. It was a fine day, a memorable day.
I wonder now if she remembers it. Day by day she slips into what psychologist writer Mary Pipher calls “another country.”
“The only thing worse than having aging parents,” observes Pipher, “is not having aging parents. The old-old die by inches. ….At first, Mother is no longer the best cook in the country, then the children worry she will poison herself with spoiled food or burn down the house.”
Yes, there are the frustrations and the negotiations with caregivers, lay and professional. Yes, there are the matters of where our Mother can receive the best possible care. Yes, there is the undercurrent of guilt that we can’t provide it directly. Yes, there are the considerations of what to do when. But what goes missing above all are the common days, the days in which our Mom as we’ve known her could enjoy a cup of tea with a good friend, could go for a walk in the gardens planted by fellow residents, could attend a school performance of a great-grandchild and laugh and cheer them on, could call us on the phone or sit with us in our living rooms and talk about matters spanning family to friendship to statesmanship. What is missing are not so much the days in which she may have been “Queen for a Day,” which she surely was as we feted her in January, but the common ordinary days; and she’s been blessed to know at least 36,500 of them.
At what point in life do we grow sufficiently attuned to our mortality—and even moreso, to our prospective reversal from operating at full capacity? It’s not always a matter of age. This congregation knows that well. An accident, an illness, a loss, a trauma beyond the sphere of family can stop any of us cold, flipping our world upside down and our hearts inside out. Precious days become the stuff of reflection. Why not attentiveness, I wonder? Why not attentiveness to the time that is now?
“This is the day which the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24)
The psalmist gets it! Whether we agree that God made the day or we simply acknowledge that it’s here and we’re in it, we’re called to “rise up and welcome the day,” echoing the words of George Mack sung by our choir at the outset of this morning’s worship. It can be any old day, an ordinary day, a common day, a day to be longed for one day.
Consider the musings of Gordon McKeeman, his account of the late Japanese Emperor Hirohito, born into a position of royalty and power, which meant isolation, formidable isolation. How the emperor longed “to live just one day as a common person.”
“performing simple chores: dressing, making the bed, eating breakfast…
doing ordinary work, whose impact is largely unfathomable but would be missed by someone if it were not done: the laundry, cleaning, meal preparation…
looking out upon the ordinary world, breathing the air, drinking the water, enjoying children at play…”
all the stuff of “one day as a common person.”
Common, the root of community, the name given to this space outside our Meeting House, a space whose historic purpose derived from that of the English common on which sheep grazed. For us, it’s a space on which we gather on warm days for Frisbee and Farmer’s Markets, for a restful stretch-out on the soft grass, for a chance conversation with a neighbor. A common day in a common space holds the jewels of the wondrous ordinary.
On a seemingly ordinary day, I stood as a young child with my nose pinched up against our screen door, gazing across the mellow thoroughfare of North Adams Street....and wondering. The place was a small town in the heart of the heartland. I stood in the front hall of our frame house across the street from the public school I attended. I was six years old. There was a smoky, gently pungent scent in the air. Time stood still.....It is now, right now. Right now has never been. It will never be again. Today has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. This very moment has never been. It will never be again. I know it. I feel it. I breathe it.
My epiphany of the nowness of time has lingered. It is reflective, recurring, mildly anticipatory, and conscious. “Only connect” reads the prologue to E.M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. To connect with ourselves and with one another, we connect with a moment in time—sometimes through intense consciousness, sometimes through immersion in the moment that feels so pure it is indelibly inscribed in our memory.
Such was the preciousness of Emily Gibbs’ connection with her family on the occasion of her 12th birthday in Thornton Wilder’s drama, Our Town. It is a day she returns to as a silent invisible observer from the other side of life as we know it to witness herself in life as she knew it. “Choose the least important day in your life,” admonished a fellow shadow, as Emily pondered which day she would visit. “It will be important enough.” A new arrival on the other side, Emily stood at the open window of this early birthday. The vision and voices of her mother, father, and brother moving through their morning litanies were more than she could bear. “I can’t. I can’t go on,” she anguishes. “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another....I didn’t realize....Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”
“It goes so fast,” were the exact words of my Mother, as I interviewed her for posterity just ten years ago, and even then, she had lived Emily’s lifetime more than six-fold. “It goes so fast.”
What day would you choose to return to? Would it be a birthday? A wedding day? Every week I open the Cohasset Mariner to the inside front page, the piece titled “Picture This.” Every week a resident of this town is featured with a photograph and a bulleted bio. This week the spotlight was on a young woman with a radiant smile. Always the featured personality is asked to name the best day of their life. Usually it’s a birthday or the birth of a child or a wedding day. This week it was: “When my Dad surprised me with my car.” Okay. I’ll bet those favorite days change over the course of a lifetime, but getting a new car when you don’t expect it can score pretty high for a young person.
Best days are as relative as time. What would yours be? Not your chosen new car, but the best day of your life? Would it change if you were given a choice, like Emily in Our Town, to relive a single day from the imagined time after your death? What would it be for you?
A sea of days ordinary and common floods my memory. Yes, my wedding day to Dan scores high. Yes, the birth of my birth children scores high. Yes, our daughters’ weddings score high. But I’m thinking of two otherwise ho-hum days that surface in that foggy sea of remembering. One I’ve already cited—that day that had never been and would never be again as I pressed my nose up against the screen door looking out onto our front porch, my six-year-old nose twitching to the scent of what was likely early autumn. The other was a summer day, most likely late June. School had been out for about a month, as is the custom in the Midwest. Every June my Mom would take me and head up to “the farm,” the ramshackle frame home where my grandparents grew corn, soybeans, and alfalfa and kept cows and pigs and chickens. My grandmother was hunched from scoliosis, and my grandfather was not one to pitch in with housework. Gathering her thirty-something stamina, my mother did. Every day she rose early, fixed breakfast for all of us, and dived into the chores—not quite the chores to which my granddad referred (milking the cows, running the combine), but the equally exacting chores of deep cleaning that Mom undertook with all the energy I’ve known her to possess for so many years.
I would usually take a book, run outside, climb a tree, and perch there for hours at a time, reading in shelter from the riveting Iowa sun. Then I would scamper inside and wonder aloud to my Mom when she was ready for a break—that is, when she was ready to spend time with ME. It probably happened more than once, far more than once, but I recall a specific noontime of my Mother packing us a lunch, taking me by the hand, and walking with me through the fields down to the banks of a river—a creek, really. There we sat ourselves in the shade of a giant cottonwood, took out our sandwiches, our fruit, and our drink, and dined. I can’t even remember if we said anything, just that we were together. This was my time, my sacred time, with my Mother.
The sun still warms that day. The sandwiches are still fresh. My Mother’s hand is as firm and sure as it was then, even with a slight scent of bleach from house cleaning. The wind blows anew through the cottonwoods. “Only connect?” Oh yes, that was the heart of the day, the common ordinary day of we two commoners.
I hope my children look back on such times, when all else was let go, and I took them in hand and carved a circle around the universe of just us.
Such are days of holiness. They are ever ripe, how ever they recede in the relativity that is time and memory. Such are the days that are ordinary but were never ordinary. Such are the days fused into our heart’s memory as we lean into them from our now.
No, it’s not nostalgia. I believe it’s a latent understanding that what stands out are those times when we’ve known communion in this world in which we find ourselves. I think of my Mother now and witness her receding inch by inch into that “other country.” I think of my Mother surrounded by four generations feting her long life and ingesting the elixir of her stories. I think of the longing of an emperor to live a single day as a common person.
Whether we are witness to a life long-lived or a life cut short; whether we are privy to our own lives long or bent or gnarled or broadsided; whether we understand ourselves to be part of this world that hurts in so many places; whether we understand ourselves period, I invite us all to consider today as a completely divine day. It is worthy of tending to; it is worthy of stopping for; it is worthy of breathing in; it is worthy of our time, so fleeting and precious.
In the words of poet Mary Oliver:
Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
May today be a day long remembered, closely held, and passed through with all possible grace. With all my heart, I know that today is a holy day. Today is all we have and everything we have. Live it! Love it!
I love you, each and all. Amen.
Sources:
E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, Edward Arnold, London, 1910.
George Mack, “Rise Up and Welcome the Day,” composition for the choir of First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Cohasset, MA, 2008.
Gordon B. McKeeman, “Common Day,” in Out of the Ordinary: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2000, 30-31.
Mary Oliver, “Mindful,” in Why I Wake Early, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004, 58-59.
“Picture This,” in Cohasset Mariner, Friday, May 15, 2009, p. 2.
Psalm 118, in The Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)
Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, Coward McCann, Inc., New York, 1938.
What day would you choose to return to? Would it be a birthday? A wedding day? Every week I open the Cohasset Mariner to the inside front page, the piece titled “Picture This.” Every week a resident of this town is featured with a photograph and a bulleted bio. This week the spotlight was on a young woman with a radiant smile. Always the featured personality is asked to name the best day of their life. Usually it’s a birthday or the birth of a child or a wedding day. This week it was: “When my Dad surprised me with my car.” Okay. I’ll bet those favorite days change over the course of a lifetime, but getting a new car when you don’t expect it can score pretty high for a young person.
Best days are as relative as time. What would yours be? Not your chosen new car, but the best day of your life? Would it change if you were given a choice, like Emily in Our Town, to relive a single day from the imagined time after your death? What would it be for you?
A sea of days ordinary and common floods my memory. Yes, my wedding day to Dan scores high. Yes, the birth of my birth children scores high. Yes, our daughters’ weddings score high. But I’m thinking of two otherwise ho-hum days that surface in that foggy sea of remembering. One I’ve already cited—that day that had never been and would never be again as I pressed my nose up against the screen door looking out onto our front porch, my six-year-old nose twitching to the scent of what was likely early autumn. The other was a summer day, most likely late June. School had been out for about a month, as is the custom in the Midwest. Every June my Mom would take me and head up to “the farm,” the ramshackle frame home where my grandparents grew corn, soybeans, and alfalfa and kept cows and pigs and chickens. My grandmother was hunched from scoliosis, and my grandfather was not one to pitch in with housework. Gathering her thirty-something stamina, my mother did. Every day she rose early, fixed breakfast for all of us, and dived into the chores—not quite the chores to which my granddad referred (milking the cows, running the combine), but the equally exacting chores of deep cleaning that Mom undertook with all the energy I’ve known her to possess for so many years.
I would usually take a book, run outside, climb a tree, and perch there for hours at a time, reading in shelter from the riveting Iowa sun. Then I would scamper inside and wonder aloud to my Mom when she was ready for a break—that is, when she was ready to spend time with ME. It probably happened more than once, far more than once, but I recall a specific noontime of my Mother packing us a lunch, taking me by the hand, and walking with me through the fields down to the banks of a river—a creek, really. There we sat ourselves in the shade of a giant cottonwood, took out our sandwiches, our fruit, and our drink, and dined. I can’t even remember if we said anything, just that we were together. This was my time, my sacred time, with my Mother.
The sun still warms that day. The sandwiches are still fresh. My Mother’s hand is as firm and sure as it was then, even with a slight scent of bleach from house cleaning. The wind blows anew through the cottonwoods. “Only connect?” Oh yes, that was the heart of the day, the common ordinary day of we two commoners.
I hope my children look back on such times, when all else was let go, and I took them in hand and carved a circle around the universe of just us.
Such are days of holiness. They are ever ripe, how ever they recede in the relativity that is time and memory. Such are the days that are ordinary but were never ordinary. Such are the days fused into our heart’s memory as we lean into them from our now.
No, it’s not nostalgia. I believe it’s a latent understanding that what stands out are those times when we’ve known communion in this world in which we find ourselves. I think of my Mother now and witness her receding inch by inch into that “other country.” I think of my Mother surrounded by four generations feting her long life and ingesting the elixir of her stories. I think of the longing of an emperor to live a single day as a common person.
Whether we are witness to a life long-lived or a life cut short; whether we are privy to our own lives long or bent or gnarled or broadsided; whether we understand ourselves to be part of this world that hurts in so many places; whether we understand ourselves period, I invite us all to consider today as a completely divine day. It is worthy of tending to; it is worthy of stopping for; it is worthy of breathing in; it is worthy of our time, so fleeting and precious.
In the words of poet Mary Oliver:
Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
May today be a day long remembered, closely held, and passed through with all possible grace. With all my heart, I know that today is a holy day. Today is all we have and everything we have. Live it! Love it!
I love you, each and all. Amen.
Sources:
E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, Edward Arnold, London, 1910.
George Mack, “Rise Up and Welcome the Day,” composition for the choir of First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Cohasset, MA, 2008.
Gordon B. McKeeman, “Common Day,” in Out of the Ordinary: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2000, 30-31.
Mary Oliver, “Mindful,” in Why I Wake Early, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004, 58-59.
“Picture This,” in Cohasset Mariner, Friday, May 15, 2009, p. 2.
Psalm 118, in The Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)
Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, Coward McCann, Inc., New York, 1938.
Posts
