Singing a Song of Life

Though the end of November is near
it still has not rained.
Dry winds sweep across the land
swirling dust through vineyards
and snapping trees in the canyons.

What will our relatives have to eat?
Deer reach for what leaves they can find
unconcerned about humans in their place.
Coyote and Mountain Lion are more wary
leaving scat but not showing
their coats.

Hawk shrieks high in the air
wheeling in the dusty smoky sky;
all is brown and gold and painfully dry.

Then on the hillside
there is suddenly red:
California Fuchsia
blooming in profusion,
little red trumpets
singing a song of life.

Here is a miracle
of evolution:
a plant that blooms every autumn
no matter how deep the drought.

Resilience, it seems,
is the very essence of this world.

Life will always find a way.
Life will always find a way.

Growing Together

Spirit of Life,
Great Immensity of Love that birthed the stars
and washes through our bodies
with every beat of our hearts:

Help us know you as the greening force
that pushes tender shoots through hard pavement.
They penetrate and then grow, and grow,
prying apart the hardest places.
Lush green life reclaims ugly surfaces.

May it be so in our own lives.
May we welcome in the seeds of love.
May we encourage them to take root.
May they take hold and pry apart
any hard casings on our hearts,
anything that separates us, one from another.

Cracked open, may we all weep
with one another’s sorrow.
May we all laugh
with one another’s joy.
May we grow together, our roots intertwined,
beautiful with the life we share.

Blessed be.

The Call of Life

We all knew it was coming;
we knew that if the man was caught
at something explicitly illegal
and it looked like he was really in trouble
he would start a new war.

But the thing is

The thing is
that the baby titmice fledged
and everyone exited the nest.
The internet says titmice
have only one brood per season
so we took the nest down,
wanting to clean the porch.

Apparently that was a mistake
because the parents are now
building a new nest,
flying to and fro
carrying grass and twigs
to the new location,
also on the porch.

This has happened to us before.
Once we watched mourning doves
raise five broods in a row
on top of a kayak
hanging under a portico.

So the thing is
the titmice
just keep nesting.
Despite all setbacks,
they do the work
that is theirs to do
in response to the call of Life.

Let us go and do likewise.

 

 

 

 

 

Memorial Day Prayer

Spirit of Life,
Source and Sustainer of All:

Now is the growing time.
Life burgeons in a riot of color everywhere we look.

Help us know you
as that force that arranges stardust
into patterns and shapes more astounding
than anything we could ever dream:
green maple leaves, purple lilacs, singing wrens,
clear waters, laughing babies of every color.

Help us remember how holy is your work,
how precious each life.

Help us remember:
it is on behalf of these lives
that we must resist hatred and greed and cruelty
for we are all interconnected
in one vast and living whole.

May we know that
it is possible to resist without violence.

And at the same time,
may we be thankful
that when violence and cruelty do come,
there are those who are willing
to give their lives
to try and stop it.

May we never take their sacrifices lightly.
May we always remember them.

Blessed be.

Sunlight After Long Rain

For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Truth-Teller and Bringer of Light

Spirit of Life, Source of all Love:

In this place the sun has come out
after months of rain
and the trees are showing off their finest jewels:
droplets sparkling in rainbow colors.

Steam rises from the ground
and from the trunks of the giant cedars
and the forest looks like Life begun anew
Creation just set in motion.

There is nothing in this world
like the feeling of sunlight on our faces
just when we thought it would never come
and darkness and gloom
would prevail forever.

Yet the sunlight does always return.

There are parts of our lives
in which we have little power
and this is good
for it keeps us humble.
We cannot make the sun come and go
on our preferred schedule.

But there are other parts
where we do have power
and if we want the sun to come out
we have to work for it.

Help us know the difference
and do the work.

Help us shine the bright light of truth
through the obscuring clouds of lies
so we can bask in its warmth.

Help us set Creation in motion anew.

Blessed be.  Amen.

When Humans Are Just Too Awful For Words

It is not that I don’t think about evil—
I do.  Often.

It is more that I will not let it have the last word.

Horrible things happen
in every part of this world
every day, and
if I allowed myself to feel all the pain there is
I would be paralyzed
and that would do no one
any good
at all.

So I choose a different way.

I know I cannot solve everything—
save the children from sexual slavery
get clean water to every person
remove all the plastic from the oceans
and somehow get rid of this strutting emperor
who dismisses reports of his nakedness
as fake news
while inciting acts so heinous
that we will be ashamed for generations to come—
and it is not that I do not feel angry.

It is more that
I prefer to think about the way,
every spring, even in dry years,
the bright poppies bloom
on the green hills
under the blue sky,
and the shore birds fly up
in vast murmurations,
flashing first white and then gray
and then silver
in the shafts of sunlight
that pierce the soft spring clouds.

It is more that
I prefer to think about the way
the children are rising up in the streets
to remind their elders of their proper work
which is not to sit and wring our hands
and feel helpless,
but to act
and to create
new ways of doing everything.

Life is more powerful than evil
and we are part of it
and must act on our own behalf.

“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless,”
said Dorothy Day,
“There is too much work to do.”

Think of how much work it is
and how hard
for a baby bird to hatch from an egg;

Think of how much work it is
and how hard
for a tree to grow through a boulder;

And yet they do it all the time.

If the flowers can bloom
and the children can rise up

If the birds can hatch and then they can fly
and if trees can grow through stone

then, certainly—
certainly!—
we have the strength
to overcome evil.
To outgrow it,
to create something different
and more interesting.

Let us hatch
and let us fly
and let us grow
and let us bloom
and together let us
create something beautiful
and new.

 

 

 

 

For All That Is Our Life

Spirit of Life, Source of all Love:

In this place that we dearly love,
this place where there are forests and grasslands
and beautiful wild rivers,
this place where our neighbors are
coyotes and ravens and hawks and deer
as well as human persons,
fire is raging out of control.
So many have lost everything,
including their lives.
It is a hard and terrible time,
and yet it is nearly Thanksgiving.

For what do we give thanks,
if everything we have known and loved is gone,
burned, nothing but ash and rubble?
For what do we give thanks
when the very air we breathe
is full of the remains of others,
and their homes,
and all the life around them?

Let us give thanks that we are alive.

We are alive in this moment
in our own body
here on Earth.

If we made it out of the fire,
we give thanks that we are alive
to mourn and to grieve,
to remember the moments when
we were not sure we would make it,
and then that moment when
we knew we had.
We give thanks that we have this chance
to start over,
to receive kindness from others,
to build a new life
different from the one before.

We give thanks that we are alive.

If we are watching the fire from afar,
we give thanks that our home still stands
and our friends and neighbors are safe
and that we are breathing at all,
even through a mask:

We give thanks for our breath.

We give thanks for the coming rain,
which will fall on our faces,
and mingle with our tears,
and cool and wet the parched ground,
and put out the fires and soothe our fears.

We give thanks for the rain.

We give thanks for You, the force of life
that will rise greening
through the deepest ash
at the slightest touch of rain.
We give thanks for this chance
to ourselves rise from the ashes
as new beings
alive with love.

For all that is our life,
even now,
we give thanks.

Blessed be.

This Being Human

 

Spirit of Life, Source and Sustainer of all:

Now is the time of brilliant leaves against blue sky,
scudding clouds on the horizon,
shortening days.

As leaves fall, we become aware
of how temporary all things are,
and how beautiful.

We realize how small we are
in the face of the great mystery
that is life and death.

This being human is not easy:
being alive and knowing we have to die,
loving our world and knowing
its terrible pain.

How can we cope?

Perhaps if we breathe.
Perhaps if we lean a little
toward someone sitting next to us.

Perhaps if we think of a brilliant red maple leaf,
twirling down from the very top of a tall tree,
all the way to the ground.

Perhaps if we remember that this brief time
of being alive
is our one chance
to really love,
and our one chance
to heal what is wrong here.

Perhaps if we remember
that when we are finished,
we are gathered back into You–
like the leaf that lives
and then falls in a flash of scarlet
to become part of the whole again,
and nourish new life.

Blessed be.

Not the Opposite of Life

Aditi by Peg Green

I have a joyful story to share with you today.  Some years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer.  Three years after that, she died.  Whoa, whoa, back up, stop.  You might be wondering if you heard me right.

“What did she say?  Her grandmother ?  Her grandmother died of cancer?”

“How could that possibly be a joyful story?  Should this person be a minister, this woman who can so cheerfully announce the death of a loved one, from an illness so dreadful?  Is she crazy?”

Well, I might be crazy, but if I am, I got it from my grandmother.  My grandmother’s given name was Helen, but starting in her mid-seventies, she went by a different name, Pam, because she liked having a secret identity.  What my friends used to say when they met her was, wow, she’s a real character.  She was kind of like Lucille Ball, and Auntie Mame, and a slender Mae West all rolled up into one.  I can’t tell you how old she was when she died because according to her, a lady never reveals her age, but at that very advanced age, she was absolutely beautiful, with bright orange hair and a perfect figure.  She was an elementary school teacher, but people were always asking her, “Were you On Stage?”–in capital letters—because she was so dramatic, and so gifted at making people laugh, and she knew so much poetry by heart.

For about ten years, Pam lived in a retirement community a mile from my home. Friends told me how lucky I was to have such a vibrant woman as my role model for old age.  What they didn’t know was that for as long as I can remember, my grandmother went around neighborhoods and peered into other people’s windows when they weren’t home.  She also picked flowers from their yards!  And while my friends heard her recite Shakespeare and Robert Frost, they did not hear her repertoire of dirty limericks, nor her poems of horror.  Here’s one of her favorites:  “Love to eat them mousies, mousies what I love to eat, bite they little heads off, nibble on they tiny feet.”

And none of my friends ever knew Pam’s greatest secret, which I received her permission to reveal after she was diagnosed with cancer.  For the last twelve years of her life, what Pam wanted most in this world was to die, or as she put it, to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” She hated being old.  She missed her late husband.  For all her bright wit and beauty, she was depressed.

When this started, my mother was alarmed.  She took my grandmother to the doctor and they got her on antidepressants.  After a while Pam felt a bit less depressed, but the conversation about wanting to die stayed the same.   She put “DO NOT RESCUSCITATE” signs up all over her apartment, and made sure she had a copy of her DNR paperwork taped to her refrigerator.   She researched the Hemlock Society.  She researched methods of suicide.  She joined the ACLU so she could fight for the right to die.  She repeated at every opportunity:  “he yearns for immortality who doesn’t know what to do with himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

But here’s the strange thing.  During all those years, every time Pam’s heart rate got too high, or she fell, or got very sick, she called me in a panic and demanded to go to the emergency room.  She had dozens of near-death experiences, and she lived through every one.  She could have simply let go, but she did not.  Instead, she continued to loudly lament living.  I remember once when my then-college-age son and daughter visited her, and she brought out her scrapbook of information on how to commit suicide.  There the two tall kids sat, one on either side of their dear great-grandmother, nodding attentively, as she explained the helium method of dying.

Then, in 2009, my grandmother began to take to her bed for days at a time.  She gave up many of her activities because she had no energy.  My mother took her in for some tests, and we learned that she had between six months and two years to live.

With this terminal diagnosis, my grandmother bounded out of bed and resumed most of her activities.  When hospice came to meet with our family, they asked her where the patient was.  Soon, I could hardly get hold of her because she was so busy, and she said she had more energy than she’d had in years.

So this is why the terminal diagnosis was good news:  My grandmother was finally getting what she wanted.  She was going to die.  And we, her long-suffering family, began to cherish each moment we had with her.  We began to see her foibles not as unbearable, but quirky.  And best of all, once my grandmother knew that she was really and truly dying, she began to love her life.

This simple truth is at the heart of many religious teachings about life and death.  Francois de la Rochefoucauld said:  “You cannot stare into the face of the sun, or death.”[1] But religion—our religion–tells us that while staring into the face of the sun would blind us, staring directly at death can instead deepen and clarify our vision.

Death is something many people deeply fear.  Some fear it so much that they refuse to think about it or to acknowledge it will actually happen to them.  They won’t sign up for life insurance or make wills or advance directives or do anything that might bring death closer to their consciousness.

Others go to the opposite extreme and obsess over death, spending their nights sweating with anxiety.  This is particularly prone to happen when we get a strange test result, or develop a new health issue.

There is a simple reason for our fear:  the reptilian part of our brain.  Actually, both the reptilian brainstem, and the mammalian limbic system, are programmed to do all they can to keep us alive.  That’s why my grandmother used to go to the emergency room every time she was in trouble.  That ancient, instinctive fear is what makes it so hard for us to look directly at death.  But as long as we avoid the topic of death, especially our particular death, the fear prevents us from living fully.  Only if we confront it squarely can we overcome our fear and truly live.

How do we do that?  How do we learn to stare death in the face without flinching?

Well, there are many things we can do.  All of them may seem morbid to people who normally avoid thinking about death, but in fact they are anything but.

One is to be present at the deaths of others.  In this way we learn everything we can about what death looks like up close and personal; we learn that death, like birth, is a sacred transformation.

Another is to celebrate autumn festivals like Samhain, and Dia de los Muertos, in which we invite those who have died before us to join us in celebrating their lives.  When we join in these kinds of celebrations, we begin to understand that death is not truly the end of anyone.

A third thing we can do, and the one I really want to focus on today, is a particular spiritual practice around death.  It’s common to most of the religions of the world, though it takes a slightly different form in each.  This is contemplating the moment of death.

Episcopal priest Alan Jones writes:

“In my tradition we try to practice dying every day so that we may be fully alive.  What I understand of my prayer life is to place myself on the threshold of death, to participate in my dying, so that I may live each day and each moment as a gift.  What I cultivate is a grateful heart; each moment then becomes a new thing.  My gratitude comes from the sheer gift of life itself.”[2]

Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and ecological activist, explains:

“To confront and accept the inevitability of our dying releases us from triviality and frees us to live boldly.  Meditation on the twofold fact that ‘death is certain,’ and ‘the time of death is uncertain’…  jolts us awake to life’s vividness, its miraculous quality, heightening our awareness of the beauty and uniqueness of each object and each being.”[3]

Now, if we are going to meditate on our death, or practice dying, this means imagining what happens to our consciousness at that moment.   This is where our theology comes in, or our idea of ultimate reality.

In my experience, some ideas about ultimate reality are helpful when it comes to death and some are not.  I worked as a chaplain for a year, in a hospital where many people died.  I noticed that the people most afraid of dying were fundamentalist Christians whose idea of God was that vengeful deity who would condemn some people to hell.  The people who were least afraid were Buddhists, and Christians whose concept of God was all loving.

Buddhists hope to achieve nirvana, the state of enlightenment in which the ephemeral self disappears.  Why should the disappearance of self be desired?  Because it disappears as a separate, fearful, grasping thing, into oneness with all that is: from small and limited it becomes infinite. But if the Buddhist does not achieve nirvana, he or she is reborn as another being with another chance to achieve enlightenment.  So there is nothing to fear.

Many Christians who believe in an all-loving God believe that at death, they will become one with God, meaning they will rest in a love so large that it holds all that is.  We might say this is another way that the small self disappears, into the infinite Self of God.  This is what our Universalist ancestor Hosea Ballou taught:  that at the moment of death, all people are immediately united with God, which is love.  All pain, all sorrow, all illness vanishes as we are welcomed into infinite love.

My own understanding of ultimate reality is informed by my life experience as an ecologist and mystic.  It falls somewhere between the perspectives of religious naturalism and process theology.  Religious naturalism says our starry universe and this living planet are worthy of reverence for their own sake.  It says that when we die, our molecules disperse into the larger universe and become available for the creation of new life, and that this is such an astounding and beautiful thing that we need not look for any further meaning.

But I am also a mystic, and I often experience the universe as having not just more meaning, but consciousness.  At those times I lean toward process theology.  Process theology is a union of contemporary physics and mysticism.  It says the universe is alive, in a constant process of becoming. What some people call “God” is the creative, generative love that animates the universe and is its consciousness; the universe is the Body of God.  Humans and all other beings are members of this body and this consciousness, so that we are in God and God is in us.  We ourselves are ever in process, changing from one moment to the next, influenced by and influencing all other beings.  Thus we are co-creators of all that is.

In process theology, our death is merely a change from one being-state to another:  when we die, the energy and matter of our bodies, as well as our consciousness, are gathered back into the larger whole, which continues to body forth in new and beautiful forms.  Life and death are two halves of a cycle, neither of which is possible without the other.

This is the way of things, here, within the divine body:  each time something dies, something new begins.  This is the great and sacred mystery.

All of these ways of understanding the moment of death—Buddhist, Christian, religious naturalism, process theology, — all have something in common.  This is a deep knowing that we are part of something larger than ourselves, so that when we die, instead of being forever separated from all we love, we actually become forever part of it.

So, far from being morbid or life-denying, practices of looking death in the face are deeply life-affirming.  This is why nearly every indigenous culture in the world has a festival like the Day of the Dead, and why nearly every religion recommends contemplating death.

So I invite you to try this practice.  Put on some soft music, or go out to a sacred place, and meditate on the moment of your death.  Practice dying.  Imagine what happens at each step.  Imagine your self dissolving into a love, or a consciousness, or a starry universe so vast you cannot comprehend it.  In doing this, may you be freed from fear.  May you be awakened to the vivid beauty of this life.  And may you seize the time you have to live boldly.

May it ever be so.

[1] De La Rochefoucauld, Francois, as quoted on p. iii in Yalom, Irvin D., Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Terror of Death.  (San Francisco, California, Jossey-Bass, 2008, 2009.)

[2] Jones, Alan, p. 23 in Stillwater, Michael, and  Gary Remal Malkin, (eds.)  Graceful Passages: A Companion for

Living and Dying. (Novato, California, Wisdom of the World, Inc., 2003.)

[3]Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown, p. 187 in Coming Back to Life:  Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World.  (Vancouver, Canada, New Society Publishers, 1998.)

Let It Shine

Sometimes despair creeps in during the night and I wake to a world from which all hope and possibility have vanished.  It feels as if the sky is roiling with clouds that blot out all light.  At those times I long to pray to the God of my childhood, that omnipotent deity who could make everything better if only He chose, if only enough of us prayed hard enough to move His heart.  I long to say, “Dear God in Heaven, help us.  Won’t you help us, please, our world is coming apart.  The people in power have something wrong with them and they are destroying everything.”

I long for a ray of light to suddenly come down through the clouds in response, moving across the face of the earth and healing and repairing everything it touches: the burned hills, the war zones, the polluted waters, the dying animals, the shriveled hearts of the people who have brought us to this pass, the broken hearts and bodies of the people whom they have harmed.  In its wake the light would leave green meadows and trees and whole mountains, clear rushing streams and lakes and rivers, plentiful singing whales and smiling turtles and giraffes and polar bears, laughing children with their loving parents, leaders of all genders who nurture and protect life, humans of all shapes and sizes and colors dancing together and singing.

Oh, how I long for this with every fiber of my being.  Yet the only way such repair can occur is if we ourselves take charge of it.  We are the ones whose hearts must be moved.  We ourselves must be God’s hands; we ourselves must beam God’s light out into the world to heal it.

This is a lot to ask of people who are weary and sad and afraid.  It is a lot to ask of people who can see how very many things are wrong and how very little each one of us can do.

But we are not alone, because God is not somewhere far away.  God is not an omnipotent being who is separate from us. God is the force of life that moves in and through us and in all beings, which we feel in our hearts as love, and which calls us, always, toward healing.

The force of life is so powerful that a tiny seed can sprout into a shoot that grows right through pavement and becomes a plant that breaks the pavement as if it were nothing at all. Love is so powerful that it can survive anything, even death.  All we need do is align ourselves with life and with love.  All we need do is let God move in us and through us, and God’s light will shine from us, and we will indeed heal the world.