SERMON NOTES: Breathe on me breath of life (March 22, 2020)
Introduction
What a beautiful, demanding, terrifying, blessed, confusing, troubling, frustrating, generous, open-hearted, close-minded, complicated, compassionate and sacred week this has been for me: you, too? It has been ALL of these things – and more – all at once. There were times last week when I was in awe at the grace of God being revealed and reclaimed within and among us – and I rejoiced. And there were other times when I literally burst into tears of sorrow and uncertainty.
+ The creative outpouring of holy human love that has been released all over the world during this shared crisis is breath-taking. Perhaps you’ve seen on the Internet or the news scenes of Italians in strict lockdown sectors opening their windows and filling their empty streets with sweet songs of tenderness and hope? Remarkable and brilliant.
+ In Iran, doctors and nurses in some of the most dangerous and infected “red zones” have been posting videos of themselves dancing to wild music in what is being called the Covid 19 dance challenge! They want to keep their patients engaged in life – and encourage their colleagues to keep fighting this battle – so with humble good humor they are dancing in hazmat suits, helping to restore their neighbor’s spirits with laughter and delight. Other medical staff brought in their musical instruments to serenade patients in quarantined areas.
The evolutionary anthropologist, Agustin Fuentes at the University of Notre Dame, says that built into our human nature is a capacity for creative connections. “One of the amazing things about the human species,” he told Robin Wright at the New Yorker, “is that these once harmless critters, not much more than monkeys running around have, in time become… incredibly imaginative in finding connections even when we’re not in the same physical space together.” One of the poems of the pandemic that went viral last week was by Kitty O’Meara who wrote:
And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested and exercised and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being – and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some even met their shadows: and the people began to think differently. And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless and heartless ways, the earth began to heal. And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully as they had been healed.
Like Wavy Gravy said back at Woodstock: “There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area, man.” Listening to the pre-debate reporters a week ago talk about the statistical consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, however, was much more sobering. Perhaps for the first time I finally heard that in the worst case scenario millions of deaths could take place in our country – millions - and out of nowhere I burst into tears. They washed over me spontaneously like a thunder storm on a lake in the summer and I sat alone in front of my TV in the dark and wept for grandmas and grampas, friends with kidney or heart disease, neighbors with high blood pressure or autoimmune problems, those in treatment for cancer. Millions.
A few nights later I awoke from a sound sleep with anxiety coursing through my veins: I had been dreaming about my friends in Pittsfield – and Montreal – who run restaurants, jazz clubs and coffee shops. Most of them have been pleading on-line with their customers to stop by, make a “to go” purchase or buy up some of their food stock that will otherwise rot. They were grieving not simply because they had to close down their businesses, but because they love their employees and have no way to pay them during this shut down – and I work up in a cold, aching sweat.
I think the American Buddhist master, Pema Chodren, got it right when she Tweeted: if you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you too have been on a comparable emotional roller coaster: we are living into a time of unprecedented suffering that was unimaginable just two weeks ago. The bard of Vermont, author Frederick Buechner, likes to say that the best way to discern the presence of the Lord is by listening to our lives. He writes:
I believe that there is NO event so commonplace but that God is present within it – always hiddenly, always reaching out to you compellingly and haughtingly, asking you to listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, and smell you way into the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments – and life itself is grace. Buechner then cuts deeper adding…: YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes (or the words on the TV) … almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure: whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
This morning our texts in Scripture invite us to do precisely this: pay attention to our tears, listen to our lives, that we might discern what the holy is saying to all of us in the scandal of our particularities. So first let me share a Biblical insight with you concerning the Shepherd’s Psalm, Psalm 23, and how it can help get us grounded in our most anxious moments. Second, a few of the challenges set before us in the story of the blind beggar in St. John’s gospel.
Insights
Today, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, we’re halfway through a journey with Jesus into Jerusalem and the Cross that culminates on Easter. It is not yet clear whether that journey will take place on-line or in person. However it happens, we know that it is a slow pilgrimage, intentionally paced to help us acquire eyes to see God’s love being revealed within and among us in the most unlikely places. St. Paul used to tell his friends that he was certain that God worked something good for all those who lived by faith. By faith he did NOT mean doctrine or theology, but rather trust. And please be careful to note that St. Paul never said that all things WERE good, or that God forced bad things to happen to teach us some cruel, cosmic lesson.
No, taking the Cross as his guide, he clearly confessed that: God can bring blessing into every situation for those who trust the Lord and have eyes to see the holy emerging in the most unexpected places. And that is my prayer for us at this moment in time: that we don’t waste this crisis with distractions or misdirected action. Rather that we choose to listen for God in our lives and trust that the one who brought new life into the world after the Cross will do so for us, too.
Psalm 23 in the songbook of ancient Israel offers three settings where we might see, feel, smell, taste, and touch the presence of God’s love in our ordinary lives if we are paying attention: a meadow, a valley, and a banquet table. I want to consider just the meadow with you because this prayer/song is so familiar we might miss its message.
+ Notice that the Psalm opens in nature – not the Temple, not a sanctuary, not a tent or a residence – just a grassy meadow and a quiet stream. We know that being outside – for a walk, doing yard work, tending the garden – is restorative. What we forget is that nature is God’s first word of love to us. The 13th century Italian Dominican priest, Thomas Aquinas, told us that, “Creation is the primary and most perfect revelation of the Divine.” It is the FIRST word of God – the organic Bible, if you will – for creation itself reveals to us the true heart of the Lord. Dare I suggest that simply going outside is a prayer? Communion? An act of worship we share with everyone and everything else on the planet?
+ One of the reasons why Psalm 23 encourages us to get out into the beauty of nature - especially whenever our spirits are troubled – is that it heals our soul. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In grassy meadows God helps me lie down and rest, by quiet streams of water God guides me and restores my trust so that my life can be saturated in peace.”
Robert Alter, master of the Bible’s poetry, teaches that the traditional words – maketh me to lie down – come from a unique Hebrew verb having to do with the way a shepherd helps his or her herd prepare for sleep: the shepherd calms the fears of the flock by creating a place of safety. Then – and only then – can they rest in the experiential assurance that even in the darkest night they will not be left alone.
They do not have to fend for themselves because they have been comforted by a loving presence greater than themselves. They don’t fully know how the shepherd does this, mind you. They just sense – trust and experience – that the shepherd’s security is real. That’s why the Psalmist tells us that the Lord restoreth my soul. The Hebrew word here is nefesh – not soul – but the very breath of life. It is the same word used in the second creation story of Genesis where the Lord breathes spirit into the being formed of mud. When that happens, when the Spirit/ breath of God fills us, we become NEPHESH CHAYAH: a living, breathing being animated from the inside out by God’s spirit.
In this, the ancient Psalmist is telling us about two time-tested ways to reconnect our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies to a trust that evokes rest even within the darkness of our current crisis: 1) we are called to reconnect with nature, and, 2) to use the breath God gave us to become a centering prayer for God’s peace. It is a poetic invitation to practice two simple spiritual disciplines that help us move through hard times with grace and tenderness.
This time of solitude and distance socializing are great for reclaiming God’s restoration of our souls. Many of us have lost touch with this aspect of the sacred. With 24/7 electricity – and the security of warm, safe homes – we don’t have to go to sleep when it’s dark or get up when it’s light. Most of us rarely have to worry about building fires when it’s cold or constructing shelter from the storm. Small wonder we have forgotten the spirituality of the seasons – what it means to build a life honoring the first word of God in the ebb and flow of summer and winter, autumn and spring – let alone how to overcome our alienation from what is taking place in the ground below our feet or the very air we breathe.
I am a big fan of the Quaker author and teacher, Parker Palmer, who suggests that listening to and living into the spirituality of the seasons is essential for the restoration of our souls. “Seasons,” he writes, “Is a wise metaphor for the movement of life."
It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all and to find within the seasons opportunities to go deeper into lives of peace. I love the fact that the word “humus”– the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants – comes from the same word root that gives rise to the word “humility” as well as “humor.” It is a blessed etymology. It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave “mud on my face” or that “make my name mud,” may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.
That’s an earthy way of saying we humans can learn how to get it right from our mistakes – or to use theological language – that we are all being made whole by forgiveness and grace. He goes on to say:
Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long. But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope.
Nature is telling us exactly what St. Paul confessed: that God can redeem all wounds for those who trust God’s presence within and among all of creation. Which tells me that now – especially now – it would be wise for us to get out into some of that sacred, blessed mud - or at least the fresh air – and soak up some of that grace! A Kentucky farmer by the name of Wendell Berry celebrates the holiness of God’s earth in poetry. He knows that God’s first word is not only revealed in nature, but it brings us restoration, too.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The ancient wisdom of our tradition teaches that to be healed we must step away from the clutter of a culture obsessed with control and consumption to “come back into the peace of wild things.” It is a time-tested way to pray, worship with the whole of creation even when we can’t be in church, and open our hearts for the Lord who yearns to “restoreth our souls.” The same is true every moment of the day when we breathe: like the soil, water, air, meadows and woodlands, our breath is a gift from God that centers us so that we experience the peace that passes understanding from the inside out. Some of the older folk – like me – who are listening right now know an old hymn by Edwin Hatch that goes: “Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew, that I may love what Thou dost love, and do what Thou wouldst do.”
So how does that happen? How can our breath become a prayer that soothes our anxieties, quiets our minds and restores our souls? The late Benedictine master, Thomas Keating, called it centering prayer – the simplest version of which uses our breathing in and breathing out with a few simple words – as a natural way to reconnect with grace. It wasn’t an accident, you know, that the modern rendering of this psalm says: you help me catch my breath and set me off in the right direction. When I used to visit people in the hospital back in the day, I often asked what practice did they use to stay grounded while waiting for surgery and then during the long wait afterwards in recovery? More often than not they would pause, shake their heads and say something like: I just try to endure it.
So let me teach you now what I taught them then so you can use it whenever you feel rattled, ok? If you already know about centering prayer with your breath, let this be a refresher course, ok? Here’s what you can do:
+ Whenever you feel yourself bracing, becoming tense or slipping into uncertainty: just close your eyes. When you breathe in, think: “God of peace” – and when you breathe out, think: “Fill my heart.” In and out: God of peace – fill my heart.
+ You can use any words that help ground you trust and tenderness, too ok? These are just the ones that work best for me. I used them the other night when I woke up with a panic attack: God of peace, fill my heart. And it works. It takes a little practice and time, but whenever the anxiety flares up – and it will – just feel it, own it as true and then move into that gentle in and out breathing prayer for God’s peace.
Now let me say something that is obvious but important: it is perfectly natural and normal during days like these to feel overwhelmed and anxious. It means you’re alive – and fully human. It happened to Jesus all the time, too you know? That’s one of the reasons he was always wandering off into the hills, gardens or deserts to pray. He, like you and me, needed time to practice what we now call centering prayer so that he could enter into the suffering of his generation with equanimity and trust. I think that’s one of the reasons this story about the beggar born blind is included in St. John’s gospel: it shows what trust as well as anxiety looks like in the extended movement of events
You see, this story doesn’t start off with the healing of the blind beggar. It begins back in chapter eight of St. John’s gospel where Jesus finds himself in an argument with the religious authorities of his day. While honoring his own Jewish tradition, Jesus also trusts that the way of love sometimes has to break the rules. For a number of reasons, those in charge of the tradition at that time vigorously disagreed with Jesus: they insisted that there are those who are ritually clean and those who are unclean, those who are morally right and those who are morally bankrupt, those who are for us and those who are just nasty people. To which Jesus said: Look, we both agree that Abraham was the father of our tradition, but please remember that even he started his journey by faith – by trust – through an inner experience of God’s presence, not a set of rules. He left his home by God’s inspiration before there ever were rules – so I have come to trust this truth as much as the later rules – which infuriated his adversaries so much they tried to stone him to death.
That’s the on-going problem with fundamentalism of any variety: its heart is good, its intentions are holy, but it can so quickly become cruel. So Jesus gets out of town as quickly as possible – for some quiet time. Some Psalm 23/Centering Prayer/restoration of his soul time. And on the outskirts of the city his own disciples start a similar argument when they see a beggar born blind: “Who sinned, rabbi?” they ask: “This beggar or his parents?” Can’t you feel the tension surging through Jesus at this moment?
I really don’t think it is outside the scope of the gospel to say that after being violently threatened and banished from the temple, Jesus was particularly open to the pain that this unwanted beggar felt as he sat beside the side of the road crying out for spare change. He too had been excluded and denigrated. I think that when Jesus felt unwanted and alone his feelings and experiences helped him connect with another who was equally isolated and vulnerable. So with love and tenderness, Jesus offered to the beggar what he himself had been denied: vision to see what was really important and acceptance of his humanity beyond his disability.
We’re in one of those moments right now where our suffering can either make us more rigid and afraid, or, cultivate a gravitas and compassion that is salvific. Fr. Richard Rohr recently framed our moment in history like this – and it bears quoting at length. “We are in the midst of a highly teachable moment. There’s no doubt that this period will be referred to for the rest of our lifetimes. We have a chance to go deep and to go broad. Globally, we’re in this together. Depth is being forced on us by great suffering, which as I like to say, always leads to great love.”
But for God to reach us, we have to allow this suffering to wound us. Now is no time for academic solidarity with the world. Real solidarity needs to be felt and suffered. That’s the real meaning of the word “suffer” – to allow someone else’s pain to influence us in a real way. We need to let our personal feelings lead us into communion with everyone. What is going to happen to those living in isolated places or for those who don’t have health care? Imagine the fragility of the most marginalized, of people in prisons, the homeless, or even the people performing necessary services, such as ambulance drivers, nurses, and doctors, risking their lives to keep society together? Our feelings of urgency and devastation are not exaggeration: they are responding to the real human situation. We’re not pushing the panic button; we are the panic button. And we have to allow these feelings – listening to our lives and our tears, if you will – as we invite God’s presence to hold and sustain us in a time of collective prayer and lament.
Conclusion
Like Jesus, who knew anxiety, rejection and uncertainty, we must take this time to get ourselves centered in God’s peace. We must weep – and feel all the complexities of this challenge. Do you know the shortest sentence in the Bible? “Jesus wept.” I have come to believe that tears are our most profound prayers of pathos in solidarity with the pain of another, so don’t be afraid of them. We must pray in all kinds of ways – and – we must breathe, beloved. Breathe and breathe and breathe again that we can move forward in God’s love – not our fears – nor the political and economic ideologies of those in power. This is our moment when love must drive the healing, the transformation and restoration of our world.
If we know anything from the arc of the Lenten story it is that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is at the core of creation. What we’re being asked to do now by God is trust that truth. It has become abundantly clear that we need one another. Over and over I realize in a whole new way during this time of self-isolation and quasi-monastic living that we really are ALL in this together: black and white, Latino and Pacific Rim, adults and children, rich and poor and those in-between, Christians and Jews and Muslims and every other faith tradition as well as atheists, too. Someone from the Sikh tradition by the name of Valerie Kaur is one such person who helps me live by faith. She keeps saying that the darkness of these days is NOT the darkness of the tomb alone, but also the darkness of the womb. Sure there is death – and there will be more – because death is a part of the cycle of life. But so too is new life – and right now it is being shaped and formed in this dark of these days. Recently Kaur wrote:
What I wish for you now is stillness. The blistering pace of the pandemic, the cacophony of commentary, the relentless barrage of breaking news without rest kills the root of our own wisdom, our ability to think clearly. It drives us to act on fear and panic — to hoard, to ban, to isolate, to self-protect, to act on racist impulses. But this is a time to gather the facts, to get quiet and summon our deepest wisdom — and let that wisdom lead us. For we have difficult choices to make in the coming days. This pandemic is testing who we want to be, as individuals and as a people. Will we succumb to fear and self-interest? Or will we double-down on love? Will we let social distancing isolate us? Or will we find new ways to reach out, deepen our connections, step up community care, and tend to the most vulnerable in our communities? Is this the darkness of the tomb — or the darkness of the womb? I believe this is a time to love without limit. This is a time to see no stranger. In doing so, we gather information for the kind of world we want, where no one is uninsured or disposable, where our policies and public institutions protect all of us. And if you get overwhelmed sometimes, it’s ok. It just means that you are alive to what is happening. Our work right now is to breathe through it all. Let it become for us a dance – to panic and then return to wisdom – to retreat and then find the courage to show up with love anyway. For like any long labor, we are going to take this one… one breath at a time.
This rings true for me, my friends, that we are now learning to live into a deeper, life-giving love. It can nourish our connections, strengthen us to feel the sorrow and the suffering, and also unite us in a movement towards new. My friends in AA like to tell me: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. We want to come out of this darkness with a restorative love and that takes time. It takes practice and lots of breathing. We can do this hard thing – one breath at a time. Breathe with me now as an affirmation: God of peace – fill my heart….
One of the blessings of being a retired clergy person is the chance to freelance from time to time and help out in ways that make sense. For a few years most of my volunteering has gone into sharing music, presence and prayers with my friends at L'Arche Ottawa. Given the travel restrictions and self-isolation that is essential during this new reality, however, I have not been able to be in Canada since mid-February. Beyond some teleconferencing - and a wonderful Zoom prayer and music gathering last Friday - my current sharing during this season of contagion has taken the form of live-streaming worship reflections, music and prayer on Sunday mornings using Facebook. It is my version of what Martha Wainwright is doing in Montreal ( https://www.facebook.com/popmontreal/) and a host of other musicians and artists are doing every day on Facebook: sharing a hopeful presence in this unsettling time.
