June 09, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
The likelihood is: that while most of us may have met or brushed up against our “Higher Power” once or twice, or have had wee inklings here and there of God’s presence in the world; we were probably not awakened from a bad dream like Scrooge or a born-again gardener in the form of “The Changed Man” poem. Where does that leave us? If we are not in love with god, utterly fixed upon God as the object of our desire the way Scripture so often presumes, or the mystics imagine, where does that leave us?
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Sermons @ Trinity
May 17, 2009
“Love poems”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Love poems…
Love poems to God.
The ancient world was full of them –
gliding over the tongue
and slipping out between the lips
of Hebrew, Christian and Sufi Muslim mystics,
like swans-down silently parts the water.
For us…
not so much.
I wrote a love-poem to God once,
in response to my favorite psalm –
itself a kind of love poem.
Psalm 139,
if you stop at verse 17 anyway,
is a kind of love poem to God
and it inspired me to write this:
What if I could dance again?
What if my fibrous heart softened
and the tendons in my distant feet
uncurled
like the first breath of spring fills a sail
or as easily as my mother-in-law’s fingers
roll cookie dough?
What if I could dance again
and it was you
the one who presses upon me behind and before
that suckled the rhythm
through my newly nimble hips
as a butterfly pulls nectar?
What if I could dance again
and it was you
who studied my inmost thoughts
and opened the trap door of my eyes
and pulled me out on a slip n slide
into the arms of the world around?
What if I could dance again
and it was you
who called me from my mother’s womb,
called me up out of my wallflower dread
like the sun reaches down
and pulls a wet wobblesome calf to its April legs?
What if I could dance again
and the Fred of my broken days
twirled the Ginger of my restless nights
and this clumsy stumble along a rutted path
swooned forward
to became the poetry of my days?
If you will lay your hand upon me
I will know that I am marvelously made;
and then,
even after so many years of watching from the wall
and sitting at the table while others pranced upon pillows of air;
even after the muscle of my heart hardened
to its own touch –
I will dance again.
If you lay your hand upon me,
behind and before,
I will dance again.
(“What if I could dance again” by Cam Miller”)
You see,
my poem is not altogether unlike
“imitating Pavarotti in the shower”
or “a born-again gardener”
or “I’ve become one changed man.”
Only this morning’s Liturgical Reading
was to a woman or another man,
depending upon Mr. Phillip’s orientation.
But there is little difference
between love-poems to a Lover
and love-poems to God
in the mystic tradition of our Western religions.
I bring it up because of this:
“No one has greater love than this:
to lay down your life
for your friends…
You are my friend…”
How very lyrical,
how very lovely,
how loving and tender
in a very muscular kind of way.
But here is the problem:
Most likely, none of us here
have a love relationship with God
as mystic poetry describes it.
The closes thing we have today
to the poetry of
Rabia of Basra,
Julian of Norwich,
Hildegard of Bigden
or Rumi,
are pale imitations in the form of
modern Christian Praise Songs
that are in fact
love songs to Jesus.
But many of us here recoil at such songs,
partly because they are cookie-cutter pop tunes
and partly because we get embarrassed
when such emotionalism is exposed in public.
Frankly, I think we have something to learn
from both the Evangelical tradition
and the Pentecostal tradition
about seeking intimate contact with the holy
but that is grist for another sermon.
The likelihood is:
that while most of us may have met
or brushed up against our
“Higher Power” once or twice,
or have had wee inklings
here and there of God’s presence in the world;
we were probably not awakened from a bad dream like Scrooge or a born-again gardener
in the form of “The Changed Man” poem.
Where does that leave us?
If we are not in love with god,
utterly fixed upon God as the object of our desire
the way Scripture so often presumes,
or the mystics imagine,
where does that leave us?
I had an interesting experience
with some of the students
in the college class I teach.
They had a group assignment for the semester
that included designing their own religion
using criteria I had given them.
They were required to build their religion
around some core principles or values
and one of the groups was really struggling.
I regret to say that the presence of women
in the groups is a tremendous benefit
and the struggling group was all guys.
So I sat down with them
and gave them some prompts
to see if I could evoke their sense of a core principle.
Finally,
after all else had failed, I pulled out the big gun:
“Well, who or what
would you be willing to die for?” I asked.
Total silence.
They did not have the slightest idea.
I don’t imagine, from their response,
they had ever thought about it.
There was a veteran of the Iraq war in the class,
and he had a two-year-old daughter;
and he overheard me.
He had a lot of clarity on the subject
as you might imagine.
Dr. King once said that the question is not
what we are willing to die for,
the question is,
what we are willing to live for.
Love poetry,
to God or to our Lover,
requires the same kind of intimate self-knowledge:
What are we willing to live for?
When we know that…
when we have a resonant clarity about that…
when it gurgles in our gut
and hovers around our heart
then we become the recipient of strange,
disassociated wisps of love
that visit and sometimes linger.
I have an odd
and perhaps even crass,
metaphor of what I am talking about.
I lost my sense of smell more than fifteen years ago.
It just disappeared
and a reason was never pin-pointed.
It was a definite advantage
when I was still changing diapers.
But now I am visited by random
olfactory memories.
I’ll be walking down the street
in the middle of a Buffalo winter
and the smell of watermelon will come drifting by.
Or sitting in my office
working on a sermon
the fragrant memory of Indiana cow pastures
will enter my awareness.
At first, the randomness of such smell memories
was disconcerting
but eventually I just learned to enjoy them.
Likewise, when we have clarity
about what it is or who it is we are living for,
we receive random visits of holiness
that evoke in us strange moments of love.
Perhaps the most universal experience
is that stunning sensation
of being an intricate part in the glorious creation,
when we stare out upon Nature
and are visited by the amazing complexity of it all
and the tender love that must be its author.
But there are other such visitations.
9 times out of 10
we may hustle past the panhandler on the street
and feel somewhat annoyed at being put in the position of inner-turmoil
about the right thing to do.
Then, for no reason, on another day,
a deep and pervasive compassion
is triggered inside…and even lingers.
It just hangs there and haunts us a bit,
regardless of what we finally decide to do.
Or we catch the glimpse of a face,
perhaps even a stranger’s,
and a softness,
even an affection is engendered,
as if we knew them or cared about them somehow,
and most importantly, for no reason.
Or another time
we are emboldened to do something
that we would otherwise have been afraid to do.
Or still another time
we have an intuition or an inkling
or an otherwise unexplainable notion
about what is going to happen and how to respond.
You see, the love of God
is visited upon us
in many shapes and forms and faces…
and our love of God,
never so obvious as it is supposed to be
according to all the old stories and poems,
is evoked in strange and unpredictable ways.
But clarity and intention
about what it is we are living for
acts as a line, hook and sinker
upon which the holy nibbles
and pulls
and otherwise sends us signals
from out of our very own depths.
Not many of us these days
would be willing to be thrown
to the lions in the Coliseum
in the name of our religion.
Post-modernism has seen to that:
the natural pluralism
that comes with living in our present
glass bowl of diversity
and culture of hyper-information,
makes martyrdom and crusading in the name of any one institution or religious brand
seem far-fetched.
But that does not mean the end
of loving God
or experiencing with intimacy the love of God.
What it does means is that
clarity of purpose,
depth of intention,
the rootedness of hope
become the vehicles through which
the love of God
and God’s love
move within and among us.
Now I am not saying that a lack of clarity,
or natural and healthy confusion,
or an on-going tug-of-war between competing loyalties and commitments within us,
means we can’t feel the love of God
or our love for God.
In our relationships with one another,
we can be gripped by conflict and stress
but still have a strong sense of on-going love.
Likewise with God:
we have to be deeply constipated by the
strains and struggles and wounds of life
for nothing to get through…
or…
very distant and disconnected
from our own inner life,
so much so
that the holy can only be imagined
as some distant other
with no possibility of tangible connection
to any single life.
Certainly it is difficult to imagine
a greater love
than the one willing to give itself away –
to forsake the only
truly valuable thing within our grasp
which is life itself,
on behalf of someone
or something else.
So we wind our way
back to the question underneath John’s poetry
about no greater love than this…
Which is to ask ourselves,
what
or who are we living for?
I invite us to take a moment now
to ask ourselves
who or what are we living for?
It may be a long list
or it may be concise and focused.
Either way,
I invite us to bring it with us
as we come forward to light candles this morning,
and to light a candle in prayer
for the people or causes
to which we have given the fullness of our lives.
And one more thing.
A love poem to God,
or a love poem to someone you love,
does not have to be a good poem to be written.
Nothing collapses our intentions or focuses our hearts
like the effort to put into words or images
the very loves of our lives.
So I invite you, this week,
to put your love into a poem or song or painting.
You don’t have to share it for there to be value in doing it. Amen.
