The Gift
A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Lafayette, Indiana
by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia
September 23, 2000
Readings
Rainer Maria Rilke from the Ninth Duino Elegy:
Because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. And us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
--Whom can we give it to? We would hold onto it all, for ever...
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the Rope-Maker in Rome or the Potter along the Nile.
And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient
They look to us for deliverance; the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
Within - oh endlessly - within us! Who ever we may be at last.
Earth, isn't this what you want; to arise within us?
Oh Earth, What, if not transformation is your urgent command?
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who was gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Last Friday I came home from the startup late in the evening and sat down with my family to watch the end of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. I found myself deeply moved -- watching the torch make its final way from woman's hand to woman's hand. The smiling, silver haired women--their silver hair seemed like an Olympic medal each had been awarded by life. Each had risked, pioneered, and won new ground for every woman who would run or participate in any sport after them. The torch passed from Betty Cuthbert in the wheelchair to the women loping slowly to the younger champions running toward the Olympic cauldron and then to Cathy Freeman, an Australian aboriginal athlete. Finally, she stood as though walking miraculously on water, holding the torch high and then touching the water around her into a ring of fire that rose and rose, both flaming with fire and flowing with water, up and over her like giving birth to a vision of hope.
What amazing dreams the Olympics are made of!
You know, four years ago I was just about to move away from Atlanta as the Olympics came to town. I walked, carrying my daughter in my arms, with my best friend, to the corner of our street to watch the torch go by. First, it was preceded by open bed trucks where young people danced to pop music from a local radio station, then people came by and handed out free Coca-Cola. Then a man rode by on a motorcycle shaped like a Coca-Cola bottle. Surrounded by all this pretty tacky spectacle finally appeared the runner - flame held high. I couldn't help but wonder what was in his mind as he ran by - did he see himself running in the midst of all that commercial spectacle or did he run in some self-selected other dimension - some place where the torch he carried was handed on by generations of athletes – running free - in some other dimension of finer meaning - where the torch was carried less as a trophy than as a gift passed from generation to generation.
The Olympics are about dreams but as I watched Cathy Freeman I found myself thinking about aboriginal dreams - about the dreaming - about the dreamtime. The dreamtime, say the aboriginal people, is the primeval time when life was created. But it’s not simply a time in the past - it is both past and present - and future - all happening now -- the ongoingness of creation. Aboriginal people say that the dreaming is about waking -- to the true story of the present. Waking to the place where meaning lives – the region of life that we work to encounter here. Unitarian Universalists are passionately concerned with learning the path to meaning -- clearing away obscuring dogmas and unseating idols in order to directly experience meaning and truths. We seek the place where the truth lives –
Some traditions hold that there are two worlds - a created world and an eternal world, a material world and a spiritual world. I understand that the two worlds are simply worlds of awareness. We move at every moment through both for they are one. When we speak of the interdependent web of all being it is this, the constant interrelated movement of life forces that we mean. And it is constant -- being is vibrant, enormous, hungry, and bountiful.
Like us - Life takes and gives - it is no statement of pessimism to say that life is demanding, woeful, and ravenous -- Joseph Campbell was fond of saying that all life lives on death. Death may -- will -- bring us great grief but beyond its tragic face death feeds, fertilizes, makes room - relentlessly - it is our partner - a rough partner but a partner for life.
And it is no statement of romanticism to say that also life is giving, growthful, joyful, nourishing, and generous. It pours forth beauty, sustenance, variety -- the conditions for flourishing endlessly.
Life is giving and receiving -- this is what we are held within whether we see it or not - whether we run amid motorized coke bottles or in the presence of clearer and truer dreams. It is this we mean when we say interdependence - but even that word can hollow a little - loose its religious dimension - its depth, power - meaning and look more like a painting of the peaceable kingdom than the demanding and generous surging of life.
Jacob Needleman writes: "There is no such thing as just existing. Everything is in service to something else. Existence is giving and receiving. A stone gives and receives no less than a saint." (P. 182 Money and the Meaning of Life.) It is the unique, as far as we know, condition of humanity that we give and receive consciously - the rest of being as some place in the great chain of giving and taking that they seem to know without consciousness but we are different - we do know.
Giving and receiving we know. We live in the world of things which are always more than simply things for they hold within them deeper meanings always and this is true not only of wedding rings, or diplomas and mortar boards, or contracts -- every thing speaks in the voice of deepest meaning and we are the creature capable of hearing that voice and of using those things to speak of those deepest meanings.
The poet Rilke said:
"These things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: to us, the most transient of all."
So wrote the poet. We are the conscious givers and receivers for what that is worth.
We have chosen different ways in different times--food, shells, barter of labor, gold, human life. There are dangers always in these exchanges of power and life force. Dangers -- and possible redemptions. And in this time the medium chosen, the medium of power exchange, of energy exchange is money. Money. It is neither the root of all evil, nor is it a pure blessing, nor is it neutral. Money has power and moves through our hands. Money moves between the worlds of meaning, touches the truth, brings the truth into being, brings lies into being, and festers among the idols -- becomes and idol. Money is elemental-- transforming as fire, strong as Earth, fluid as water, and ethereal as air. And we here have inherited and now participate in this character and life of money, this definition of the central medium of exchange of life and energy in our time. Money is how we deal with things those things that open to us the fullness of being or a lost superficial galaxy.
For as strong a force as money is in our lives -- how hard we work for it, how it controls the details of our daily life do we really have money in perspective? At times it seems as though we take money much too seriously, and yet, perhaps as Jacob Needleman says in his amazing book, Money and the Meaning of Life, perhaps we do not take it seriously enough. For it carries our dreams and our power between our known worlds.
We live in the midst of this powerful cycle of giving and receiving and money is one of our chiefest keys -- entry point. We seek ways to understand this cycle, to participate in it, and sometimes we seek to forget it. Still we are bound into the cycle...
Mary Oliver wrote
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
In that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.
So wrote the poet. I think one of the hardest things about that creation story is the feeling that we're left with that we were given a great gift and then that the gift was taken away. However, as Unitarian Universalists we don't have to see that story that way -- no, we know we are still in that garden, living in the bounty of that gift. We know that those who live without bounty are not those thrown from the garden for sin but those robbed by other humans -- by history, or those who have lost the path toward their own bounty and the bounty of the world. We know that ours is the gift to hold, to keep, to increase, to share, to pass on.
The gift - every life on earth is given into life -- and we – the conscious ones - we choose how we use that giving -- on our behalf, on the behalf of others. I think of those women--the silver haired women working hard -- to make room for all of those vibrant young women gathered around them in the year 2000 waiting for the games to begin. What gifts these athletes made of their lives. To pass the torch from their hands is to carry a great light and to pass on a true gift indeed. And I think of Cathy Freeman and the labors of love and ambition and dreaming that she has made of her life to run to that place and to stand for the dreaming of her people and, in a sense for the reconciliation of all people -- for a world in which peace is a possibility and creativity is in the service of unity. Beneath the special effects and pyrotechnics. The dreaming beneath the dream. And that reminds me of a conversation I had recently about Joe Lieberman, democratic candidate for vice president, though his is a much more modest accomplishment. Still he stands, as a Jew, in a place no Jew has stood before - he is pioneering. And whatever I may think of the Democratic platform, I know that he has done a lifetime's work as a Jew being visible and standing on new ground.
But, to be honest, what I’m really thinking of is us – Unitarian Universalists. We have had occasion to revisit our history a number of time in these last few weeks -- because our scripture -- the gift of truth that we revere -- is found in one anothers’ lives. Last week when Kaye McSpadden told Mary Collson’s story she reminded us of the Iowa sisterhood - these were Unitarian and Universalist women -- the earliest of American female ministers -- who devoted their lives to the spreading of a liberal faith -- they spoke of the church as a home and of the work of ministry in terms of the sweetest generosity -- of hospitality. So many people before us gave their energy and fortune -- their comfort and safety -- that we might gather here -- there are so many -- Pelagius, Faustus Socinus, Miguel Servetus, Mary Safford, Abner Kneeland, James Reeb. And I think of the people who worked to establish this church here -- those who planted the seed and labored and offered commitment over the years. Those who struggled and remained committed, those who gave generously and consistently, those who planted a church here and then allowed it to grow -- allowed it to grow into a stronger and stronger place – a place not only for today but for tomorrow. So many of our congregations have stood in new places - so many Unitarians and Universalists have created freedoms where there were none -- broken ground that was hard and seemed unyielding - just as this congregation has. Made a place hospitable to the liberal spirit. We gather there today because so many people took the gifts of their own lives and created this place and brought it to this day.
We live in the legacy of the many gifts that preceded our lives – this gift nature is the core of existence -- existence when it is supported and when we live in cooperation with it. And this givingness requires our cooperation.
Our religion itself is a gift - it's a breath of life. My husband calls it -- hope without easy answers -- in fact this is what people hunger for now -- oh, there will always be those who crave easy answers but so many more people want to wrestle with reality, want to engage reason in their faith explorations, demand it, in fact. What we offer is what people seek now - and it is not that we are simply a community of searchers and seekers – there are strong core articles of faith here - we spoke of them last week – that reality is one - that we are interconnected, that something abides – like love - which connects us - finally that there is great hope and that hope is ever being evolved and revealed from within ourselves -- that our strong core articles of faith will and must change over time. Our religion has built a place where free and modern minds can gather - hold fast to healthy values, seek new revelations, deliver justice into the world and do all of this in the context of a mutually supporting and affirming community of faith.
Some of you may have grown up UU -- grown up in a context where you were encouraged to think freely and live responsibly and to abide with respect for all life. Some of you -- many of you, probably have had the experience of feeling out of true with other homes of worship and even of intellect and then found yourself within the walls of a Unitarian Universalist Church. You may remember the sensation of knowing that you had found both home and freedom -- that you had found kindred spirits and found those who would challenge you to keep stretching and growing. You may remember the sense that -- this was who you had been all along and finally found a place that would celebrate and affirm that -- affirm you. You may remember the sense that you had found something -- here -- or in some UU church in some other city... that you had found something and it was given freely to you -- and the gift is free. The gift you receive here is created and recreated by the dedication of generations of people -- people here and beyond these walls -- who first dreamed Unitarianism and Universalism and free thinking. Yet this place is not a gift you can keep -- like the Olympic torch it is a gift passed from generation to generation.
Today's sermon is entitled the gift - you know that's what we call the amount that each person here pledges for the future home of this church -- for the Capital Campaign - a gift. It is a gift - given not with hope of service rendered but of dreams fulfilled - not with desires for yourself but with a generous dream for the future here in Lafayette, in the larger community of Unitarian Universalism, and in the world. We call it a gift because as you encounter it and ask yourself about it, if you cooperate with the great chain of giving and receiving, and allow yourself to struggle with numbers and choices and deep dreams and generous hopes for the future, it may ask of you more but it will certainly make of you more.
The gift is what we call that amount because it will outlive the giver, because it is toward a dream larger than the giver could dream alone, because it calls forth resources from a giver which are special -- not routine – not ordinary -- but in the nature of a gift -- it opens the heart of the giver and offers the key to that great and deep cycle of being that is the true nature of existence. The nature of existence as a great chain of giving and receiving -- we have the choice - because we are conscious -- we have choice as to how we respond to knowing this chain of giving and receiving -- how we will participate -- as we engage and cooperate with it -- we are made more whole and woven more deeply into the web of existence -- we are made stronger and our world is made more whole -- and no place is this more true than our church -- our church which affirms and strives to promote the sacred wholeness of earthly life. Our church which endeavors to unseat idols and encounter deep meaning directly and truly. Our church which is rich – with the hopes and dreams of so many -- and even the hopes and dreams of those who have not yet found us. Those dreams are the deep stuff of which life is made-- the stuff of the dreamtime -- the stuff of the first moments of creation that coexist into the present. In every moment the future is held in seed form. In every moment the gift is given to each of us -- life and its myriad forms and forces. In every moment the choice is given to each of us to stand with and cooperate with the great chain of giving and receiving that will make of our lives a gift as redeeming as heaven -- as powerful as the hand of God in the first moments of creation.