In What Flows Between Them

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

November 23, 2008

READINGS

“The Most Living Moment” by Rumi

The most living moment comes

when those who love each other meet each other

and in what flows between them then.

To see your face in a crowd of others,

or alone on a frightening street, I weep for that.

Our tears improve the earth.

The time you scolded me,

your gratitude, your laughing,

always your qualities increase the soul.

Seeing you is a wine that does not muddle or numb.

We sit inside the cypress shadow

where amazement and clear thought

twine their slow growth into us.

“The Family is All There Is” by Pattiann Rogers

Think of those old, enduring connections found in all flesh –

the channeling wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,

plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending boles and coral sapwood,

those common ligaments, filaments, fibers and canals.

Seminal to all kin is the open mouth –

in heart urchin and octopus belly,

in catfish, moonfish, forest lily, and rugosa rose,

in thirsty magpie, wailing cat cub, barker, yodelers, yawning coati.

And there is pervasive clasping common to the clan –

the hard nails of lichen and ivy sucker on the church wall,

the bean tendril and the taproot,

the bolting coupling of crane flies,

the hold of the shearwater on its morning squid,

guanine to cytosine, adenine to thymine,

fingers around fingers,

the grip of the voice on presence,

the grasp of the self on place.

Remember the same hair on pygmy dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,

covering red baboon, thistle seed and willow herb?

Remember the similar snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose and sumo wrestler?

Remember the familiar whinny and shimmer found in river birches, bay mares

and bull frogs, in children playing at shoulder tag on a summer lawn?

The family – weavers, reachers, winders and connivers,

pumpers, runners, air and bubble riders,

rock-sitters, wave-gliders, wire wobblers, soothers, flagellators –

all brothers, sisters, all there is.

Name something else.

SERMON

We will be traveling this year for Thanksgiving. A friend in Milwaukee has graciously agreed to let her house serve as a kind of Grand Central Station for the holiday, a meeting ground of our own disparate family, which lately has been gravitating again to the Midwest, and for friends of hers from the area. Each of us has received her or his assignments for the meal, which inspires opportunities for all sorts of creativity and chaos. We’ll see how it goes. But whatever appears on the table, I look forward to the moment when we are gathered around it: dear faces we see too infrequently present to us and each other once again.

It is in anticipation of that moment that the words of Rumi’s poem that we heard earlier speak to me. “The most living moment comes when those who love each other meet each other’s eyes and in what flows between them then.” Rumi’s words seem to present themselves as a poem of romantic love, one lover searching in the crowd for the singular face of her or his beloved, weeping in anticipation of that moment of returning embrace. But, translators of this 13th century Sufi master tell us that the poet’s intent is actually far larger, that he is inviting the reader to consider love almost as a state of being.

A colleague of mine has quoted Coleman Barks, one of Rumi’s preeminent contemporary translators, describing the poet’s intent as suggesting that “a human being can become a field of love, embodying compassion, generosity, playfulness, rather than being identified with any particular synapse of lover and beloved.”

As a mystical vision it has a lovely ring to it that certainly resonates with me, but I also recognize that the path to such a state poses a challenge to any of us. And sometimes the Thanksgiving table is the place where that is most painfully apparent. Many of us have been a part of gatherings that were given an air of enforced jollity where the clear message was that we were going to be nice to each other or die, and we wondered if we just might.

Much of this has to do with our expectations around family: who counts as family and how behave around them. Of all the holidays Thanksgiving is the one most redolent with family time. Whether or not all those gathered are in fact related there is usually a family feel to the day. And with the family feel can come all the conflicting feelings that families leave us with, since thoughts about family are often a repository for many of our fondest hopes and yearnings, as well as disappointments and frustrations.

Parent, child, sibling, in-law – we each bring not only our complex selves to the table but also the roles we inhabit. All this is further complicated by our own and others’ understandings of those roles as well as our history of how we have inhabited them, and, as if that weren’t enough, the ways the roles have shifted. Children arrive at the table as parents, parents as grandparents. Some who were partnered arrive unpartnered, or with new partners. And into this mix are stirred the many others – friends, acquaintances, college roommates, boyfriends, girlfriends. Sitcoms are built of the many perturbations of how families organize and reorganize over time.

Still, as frustrating, even exasperating as families can be, we find ourselves drawn to them because they represent the way that love is most reliably shared among us humans. It was from our families, however imperfect, that we received our first taste of how sweet and how essential love is, and it is in part as a way to kindle that deep flame again that we reach out to others, despite, sometimes, even hurt and misgivings, in the hope of giving and receiving such love. We have many varieties of acquaintances in our lives but for those who hold an enduring place in our heart we set aside a special category. “You’re not just a friend,” we say, “you’re family.”

It is with such people that we find Rumi’s “most living moment,” experiencing in them “a wine that does not muddle or numb,” people with whom, in the poet’s words, “amazement and clear thought twine their slow growth into us.” In a culture like ours that is prone to atomizing all of us, peeling us off as self-seekers adrift and alone, connections like this are essential. It is one of my central beliefs that living our lives with a broad sense of family is a good thing; it may even be the hope of the world. On my car you will find only one bumper sticker, published a few years ago on behalf of a group promoting what were called Unitarian Universalist Family Values. These values are summed up very simply: We are all family; we all have value.

Of course, as important as they are and as delightful as they can be, families also can be destructive and a source of despair. Families that are clannish or dysfunctional create chaos and feed our fears and anxiety. Sometimes even with the best motives families can get off track when it is not love they serve but individual self interest, when they make a practice of erecting walls and projecting suspicion.

Writer Jane Howard says that in the variety of clans she has found herself a part of, including the one she was born to, she has discovered what she considers to be some of the traits of families that work. Good families, she says, are hospitable, “knowing that hosts need guests as much as guests need hosts.” They are generous about opening their circles and drawing others in and offering emotional fealty. Such treaties, she says, “begin with but soon go far beyond the jolly exchange of pie at Thanksgiving for cake at birthdays. It means you can ask me to supervise your children for the fortnight you will be in the hospital, and that however inconvenient this might be for me, I shall manage it.”

Good families, Howard says, are affectionate. The style of interchange will vary from person to person – a handshake for some and a bear hug for others – but there is no doubt the affection is there. “More and more,” she writes, “I realize that everybody, regardless of age, needs to be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. Preferably now.”

Good families deal squarely with what Howard calls, “direness.” “Pity the tribe,” she says, “that doesn’t have, and cherish, at least one flamboyant eccentric. Pity too the one that supposes it can avoid for long the woes to which all flesh is heir.” We all mess up, make mistakes, stumble, ail, and die. A family makes room for it all. But it makes no place for what Howard quotes a friend as calling “malarkey,” the blame-laying foolishness, hypocrisy or evasions that fear sometimes evokes in us.

Good families have some link with posterity. They know they have a history, embodied in those advanced in age, and they have a strong sense of the future, embodied in the young. They are part of a story much larger than themselves, and they own and celebrate that story.

And, Howard says, good families are much to all their members, but everything to none. They have permeable boundaries and wide interests. “The blood clans I feel most drawn to,” she writes, “were founded by parents who are nearly as devoted to whatever they do outside as they are to each other and their children. Their curiosity and passion are contagious. Everybody, where they live, is busy. Paint is spattered on eyeglasses. Mud lurks under fingernails. . . . Catchers’ mitts, ballet slippers, overdue library books and other signs of extrafamilial concerns are everywhere.”

“The family is all there is,” writes Pattiann Rogers, but she invites us to think far beyond the borders that we usually draw: look, she says, to those enduring connections found in all flesh – the open mouth, the grasping claw, the snorts and clicks and hoots, right down to the twisted double helix of DNA that marks us all as life on Earth. Might there come a time when we would truly extend our extrafamilial concerns as far as that?

Perhaps. But first it seems to me we must demonstrate that we are prepared to expand the circle of our concern more broadly to our human family. And the state of affairs in our nation today provides a test of that. The forces at work right now are no mystery, for everyone of us is touched by it. An economic downturn centered in the credit industry has triggered a cascade that has sent the stock market spiraling downward, endangering major lenders and prompting layoffs and a collapse in the already ailing housing market. How wide and deep this crisis will go is unclear, but its effects are everywhere. I expect that many of you have read the series in the Asheville paper detailing how it is affecting people here. Those who had felt financially secure are watching their financial cushions narrow and many who had been living on the financial edge are falling off: losing homes and jobs, facing a precarious time as we head into the winter.

This last week I asked our Social Justice Council here for help in thinking about how we as a church might respond to these times. We are doing much now to respond to need here – and you’ll get a chance to participate in a minute in our communion of generosity – but it is plain to me that the downturn we are entering will require more from us, and more than our individual effort. We will be looking for creative ways we can partner with agencies or other churches, and I invite your ideas for what our next steps might be.

Meanwhile, we are aware that this downtown is causing hardship for people in this church community. If you are facing hardship or you know someone here who is, please let us know. I have access to a Ministerial Discretion Fund and other resources in cases of immediate need. Also, beginning this week we are posting listings of job openings we hear about on the member bulletin board in Sandburg Hall. If you know of openings, please notify Susan Yost in our office and we’ll add them. In addition I am grateful to our Stewardship Ministry Team for offering help in the form of personal budgeting assistance and other forms of support for those who are struggling. It is my hope that in these hard times we as a church community can be as family to each other and a force for hope in this city.

“The most living moment,” Rumi wrote, “comes when those who love each other meet each other’s eyes and in what flows between them.” What might it mean to be to become, in Coleman Barks’ term, “a field of love,” where we live compassionately and generously? It is an image that at least at first glance is foreign to us, and yet I think is in keeping with who we as Unitarian Universalists aim to be. It embraces an idea that is also in tune with the best that family can be: a viewpoint that confers worth and dignity without exception, inherent to each person we encounter, no matter how we mess up, no matter how foolish we may act sometimes; a viewpoint that is hospitable, affectionate and forgiving.

It is a viewpoint, of course, that we can never learn in the abstract. Love only has meaning in the particular and, luckily, families give us a great place to practice, and what better place to begin than the Thanksgiving table? So, let me invite you to try it out this year. In the spirit of Rumi, take a moment before the meal begins and try looking across at whoever sits opposite. Let go for a moment of whatever baggage you may carry with him or with her. Look into that person’s eyes. Be aware of the love that that person awakens in you and with gratitude take it in. We have too few occasions to attend to the love we share. Let this be one of them.

Such occasions are, I believe, those “most living moments,” those moments when we are most deeply alive and, ironically, most deeply ourselves. They are a good time to remind ourselves that none of us is “self-made.” We are ultimately completed by others, specifically by those we love.

Perhaps in time this learning will spread and with it the opportunity to broaden the width of our “field of love.”  For now, let us be grateful for those eyes across the table for whom we, too, might bring amazement and clear thought. Weavers and reachers, hopers and dreamers: brothers and sisters, all.

Note: Jean Howard’s words, from her essay “Families,” and Pattiann Rogers’ poem can be found in the book Families: A Celebration, edited by Margaret Campbell, 1995