March 08, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
God is not within our grasp. The holiness of life is not within our comprehension. As an infinitesimal little piece of the cosmos, we are in no position to perceive or comprehend or know the infinite whole. The best we can do is stutter in awe or squint in bewildered confusion and use pithy metaphors to point with. Poetry does the same.
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Sermons @ Trinity
March 7, 2010 @ 7:00 p.m.
by Cam Miller
I have had the same conversation
a dozen times or more
with each of my four children.
It just emerged again with my youngest;
rising slow and stiff like a mummy from its sarcophagus.
It begins with something like this:
“I hate poetry.”
Or, “What is it with you and poetry,”
one of them asks incredulously,
“it’s so stupid. I hate poetry.”
It is a conversation that has taken place with
each of the four of them more than once
as they moved through middle school and high school.
Part of it, to be sure,
is trying to push Dad’s buttons.
Little do they know I had no use for poetry
until I was almost 30,
and even then,
it has taken me a very long time to enjoy it.
And even still,
I have a pretty limited range of enjoyment.
My kids, as do many others,
assume I am some kind of sophisticated connoisseur
of poetry simply because we use it a lot around here.
Not so much.
Like a moth circling a flame,
poetry sucked me in because of metaphor.
You see, metaphor is to religion and spirituality
as the heart is to the brain –
there is no one without the other.
God is not within our grasp.
The holiness of life is not within our comprehension.
As an infinitesimal little piece of the cosmos,
we are in no position to perceive
or comprehend
or know
the infinite whole.
The best we can do
is stutter in awe
or squint in bewildered confusion
and use pithy metaphors to point with.
Poetry does the same.
Poetic metaphors are like waves in the ocean,
they proceed rhythmically through the poem
holding in silence
all that is in between.
So I have had these conversations with my kids
about how horrible it is for them
to have to read or learn poems,
or even worse,
to write one in class.
But then, sometime later,
usually weeks or even months,
they will bring me a poem they discovered.
“Look at this,” they will say with unrestrained enthusiasm.
Inevitably it will be a Billy Collins
or Maya Angelou poem
that has made its way through Facebook
or landed on their desk in school,
and to their surprise
it grabbed them by the collar
and grimaced at them out of their own experience,
and placed a gnarly finger
right on the spot they had felt or seen or known before.
Suddenly, without warning,
they like a poem.
In fact, they like a metaphor.
In truth, they like the knowledge that someone out there
has had the same experience they have had,
and has captured it with a fortunate arrangement of words.
I am waiting on my youngest now,
since we just had the conversation about
how stupid poetry is.
It will take awhile before a poem and him
cross paths serendipitously
and smile at one another.
But, some day, it will happen.
Many years ago,
when I was a philosophy student
struggling uphill to become a theology student,
a wise mentor told me something that didn’t make sense
to me at the time,
but has reverberated in my hollow head ever since.
He told me that theology was a dead language in our world.
Like Latin or ancient Greek,
theology had died
from neglect and the loss of empire.
He said music was the theological language of our day.
He said that only music
could carry the muted soul with wings
above the heavy earthen lives we live.
Come to think of it,
he didn’t say it quite that poetically
but he made it clear.
It wasn’t until I left seminary
and tried to speak to ordinary people
using theological language
that I understood how right he was about its death.
We might as well be speaking Latin
as talk about
Transcendence
Salvation
Sin
Kairos and Chronos
Samsara
Covenant
Bodhisattva…
Each one a concept pregnant with meaning
but without a public patient enough
to listen through their unpacking
long enough to make sense in our world.
Why speak Latin
when everyone else here speaks English?
My mentor, all those years ago,
was certainly correct about theology being a dead language
in our world,
only spoken by a die-hard few that love preservation,
but he was wrong about music being the only
language of the holy.
All the arts can become powerful sacraments of the holy –
outward and visible signs
of the inward and invisible presence of God
we encounter now and again.
Creativity,
physicality,
sensuality…the holy meets us in our bodies
as well as in our imaginations.
We can dance
and sing
and stretch
and run our way into that presence.
We can be snagged
with unexpected force
by a poem
or musical phrase
or exquisitely rendered colors,
any of them voices of the holy
calling for us to open up…
listen…
feel…
touch…
even smell and taste our way into that presence.
My point is this:
we cannot think ourselves into presence with the holy.
We cannot think ourselves into openness.
We cannot think ourselves into the moment.
We cannot think ourselves into an encounter with God.
We can only open ourselves to the experience,
or be opened to it
when we least expect it
by some creative, imaginative, artistic media
that grabs us by the throat of our own experience
and grimace’s in our face
to hear and see and feel and touch and taste
the moment.
As that first poem says about the soul,
“We can count on it when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.”
So as we light candles tonight,
I invite us to open up.
Close our eyes perhaps, before we even think about rising,
and let the music seep into our bodies,
and let the tingle of life running through our flesh
awaken us.
And let the sounds
and textures
and smells
and even the faces here in this place,
penetrate our senses and enter us.
Let our feet talk as we walk forward to those candles,
not our heads.
Let our toes and arches and ankles,
with all the weight bearing down upon them,
speak up our legs
and talk to us.
Let the music flutter into our ears
and dance like a dragonfly around our empty minds.
Allow our fingertips to feel the heat of the flame,
the dim burn of the wax.
Breath in the aroma of oil and flame and wick
and allow it to completely define our world for this moment.
So take a moment before getting up, breath slowly and deeply, and open your body to the presence.
