February 19, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
In such moments we do not really trust ourselves. We just cannot allow ourselves to be present to miraculous moments. We start thinking. We go right from awe to thought without passing go.
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“Hang Time with Jesus”
Last Epiphany, Year C
February 14, 2010 @ 10:30 a.m.
by The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
She was the only African-American member
of my first congregation
in suburban Indianapolis.
Most of the people in that tight-knit community
did not know her,
because she only came to the early worship.
She was always elegant
even though she carried an oxygen tank to breath.
Her elegance remained
even as she shrank and became stooped,
and eventually had to pull the tank on a little cart behind her.
She was one of those people who always looked pressed
no matter what they are doing.
My dad was one of those people –
he could be painting all day
but he would be wearing old dress pants,
the bottom of a suit that still had a sharp creases in them.
And he never got paint on himself
or anywhere else but the wall.
Anyway, that is how she was…so elegant and reserved.
I visited her several times as she was dying.
In the hospital bed,
smaller than ever,
oxygen mask over her nose and mouth,
she still appeared serene and un-mussed.
The last time I saw her it was late in the afternoon.
It’s funny how you can remember time of day for so long.
It’s because of the light.
I remember the light of day:
that crisp, yellow light that so clearly delineates lines and edges with shadow.
Anyway,
when I walked in I could see her looking away from the light,
down toward the end of her bed
and she was smiling.
I kept looking to see what she was seeing
but of course, all I could see was the wall
and her toes making pyramids underneath the sheet.
Knowing the answer already,
but not really knowing,
I asked who was here.
She turned her face toward me with such grace.
Her eyes were smiling,
here lips, even under the cloudy mask, were smiling.
She tried to remove the mask but could not quite achieve it.
I removed it for her.
“He’s here” she smiled.
“Who?” I asked innocently.
“Jesus. He’s here.”
And then, just as gracefully, her face turned back
toward her Savior.
I placed the mask back on her lips.
I think I remember here saying, but can’t be certain,
that he had been checking in on her all day.
I did not know what to say.
It was her mountaintop
and I was, unfortunately, still a flatlander.
It was her moment without the veil between them
but I was sitting there thinking.
Thinking…
thinking gets in the way of religious experience, you know.
It is a problem for me,
I imagine it is a problem for lots of us.
That is wonderful story about Peter, James and John,
flatlanders, while Jesus is having his mountaintop.
They can tell that wherever Jesus is,
the veil has been lifted
and the light of day has been removed
and that he is standing there naked
with only light between himself and God.
And then Peter starts thinking.
He can’t allow himself to just be there.
He can’t stay in the moment.
He can’t just bask in the presence
of whatever it is that is taking place,
and accept it at face value,
and trust that later he will have some way to understand it.
And that really is the issue, isn’t it?
Trust.
In such moments
we do not really trust ourselves.
We just cannot allow ourselves to be present
to miraculous moments.
We start thinking.
We go right from awe to thought without passing go.
It happens with very small miracles too:
a spectacular sunset;
an ancient, gnarled and twisted tree older than the nation;
a tumultuous river, its thunder yelling from a broiling froth;
mesmerizing images from the Hubble telescope,
of galaxies crashing
and an explosion of space-life
billowing outward like cirrus clouds across the cosmos;
or that fraction of a second
when two eyes meet, and the touchless contact
detonates within them both,
a spontaneous fury of co-mingled passions.
Oh so many miraculous little moments…
so many,
and so often we just cannot allow ourselves to be there.
We just cannot allow hang-time in the moment
to shiver
and shake
and stutter,
the heart pounding fast our skin alive with dancers.
Instead we think.
So very often, so many of us, move right up into our thoughts.
Now there is nothing wrong with thinking
in its own time and in its own place,
but thought is a real kill-joy at the wrong moment.
Peter asks Jesus if maybe they should build three little booths,
one for Jesus
one for Moses
and one for Elijah.
Can you imagine?
This spectacular re-arrangement of physics going on
and Peter goes right to his head.
“What shall we do?” he asks himself.
That is the killer question right there.
What shall we do?
We always want to be doing, you and me.
What shall we do?
You see, if we are doing
then we are in charge.
If we are doing,
then we are controlling the process and the moment.
And that is what we do.
We have a nanosecond of experience and jump back.
“Wow! What should we do?”
Staying in the moment,
in the presence of a miraculous moment,
or in the presence of someone’s pain,
or in the presence of our own woundedness,
is something we often jump out of as soon as we are in it.
Such things threaten our sense of well-being,
they rattle our façade of control
and they put a glitch in the matrix of pretense
that our life is orderly and predictable
and that we are in charge of it.
Mystical moments, even small ones;
miraculous moments, even infinitesimal ones;
painful moments, even those we cannot fix;
woundedness, even that which will always be with us;
beg for our presence –
our simple, unadulterated, do-nothing presence.
There is nothing to do with a magnificent sunset
except to sigh in utter awe of its beauty.
There is nothing to do in an unexpected visitation of the holy except to stutter in gratitude.
There is nothing to do in the presence of one who is dying
except to be present with them as they slip away.
There is nothing to do in the presence of pain and woundedness that cannot be taken away or fixed
except to be present and listen
as we yearn to have someone be present and listen with us.
But we go right into our thoughts and wonder what to do.
Please do not hear more than I am saying.
There are always things to do,
as in giving comfort
or listening
or addressing problems.
But we know how to do lots of things, you and me.
We are doers.
We do, do, do and do some more.
Our weakness is more likely in the area of allowing ourselves
to be present in the moment,
and to simply be present to moments
that would shed their light upon us.
Even with the season of Lent that is almost upon us,
what is our programmed response to it?
We do something,
or don’t do something, which in fact, in this case,
is doing something.
It is intended as a season in which to be present to
our woundedness,
and to be mindful about how our own woundedness
can generate thoughts and behavior within us
that then wounds other people.
Our woundedness does not get fixed.
We have wounds that we were born with
and some we have picked up along the way,
and all of those wounds will forever be with us.
They do not magically disappear.
When it comes to our woundedness,
healing does not mean curing.
Rather, the healing of internal wounds comes from
being cared for
so that they do not cause scar-tissue to build up
within our hearts and minds.
To care for our wounds, our internal ones,
we must be able to be present to them
without trying to fix them.
We need to be present to our own woundedness
simply to listen,
and to be with them
so that we come to know them and the source of the hurt.
We need to be present to our own woundedness,
simply to be present and listen,
not to do anything…
not to do anything.
If we can allow ourselves
to be present to what hurts within us and around us,
we will learn a deeper wisdom than we have ever known.
Again, not doing something
in the presence of some moments
and some things,
will create a deeper and more profound discovery
than anything we might possibly do.
It is a paradox, isn’t it?
God is composed of paradoxes as far as I can tell.
Anyway, she died later that day, quietly.
Sitting there in her presence,
a flatlander to her mountaineering moment,
I kept thinking about what I should do.
There must be something, as a priest I mean,
that I should do.
That is what I kept thinking.
But I could think of nothing that I could do or should do
while she had hang-time with Jesus.
So finally I gave up and said,
“Tell him ‘Hi’ for me.”
