November 01, 2009
‘Do I See What You Saw?” November 1, 2009
Rosedale United Church
(Wis. Sol. 3:1-9 , Rev.21:1-6) Doug Norris
A poem, to begin – from Wendell Berry – some thoughts for this ‘All Saints’ Day.
We follow the dead to their graves,
and our long love follows on
beyond, crying to them, not
‘Come back’ but merely ‘Wait’.
In waking thoughts, in dreams
We follow after calling ‘Wait!’
Listen! I am older now, I know
Now how it was with you
When you were old and I
Was only young. I am ready
Now to accompany you
In your lonely fear’ And they
Go on, one by one, as one
By one we go as they have gone.
———
I will come back to this shortly.
You may have seen, in yesterday’s Globe – after many weeks now of confused and confusing opinions and assertions about how to best cope with the emerging Flu virus, who should get treatment, when to stay home, how bad might it be – the front page had snapshots and one-liners from a bunch of famous Canadians about how they were going to cope and whether, if it is made available to them, they will get the vaccination.
Anne Murray said no – they are on tour, they are keeping lots of hand sanitizer nearby, and they are avoiding human contact as much as they can. One of her road crew commented that this was taking the fun out of being on the road – though I have to wonder how much excitement there might be even at the best of times to be a roadie for Anne Murray. What does the mosh pit look like at an Anne Murray concert?
David Suzuki said of course he will be getting the shot – he seemed amazed that we would second guess the public health experts. “I’m astounded at people’ he said. ‘Do they think that doctors, scientists and government are out to poison them??’
And among the undecided was Margaret Atwood. And it’s not so much that she is undecided that baffles me – it is her reason. She said ‘A talk show host in New York told me that because I am over 65 I may have some immunity…” Margaret Atwood, long understood to be one of our brightest and best, is taking medical advice from a New York city talk show host… Now I’m worried…
I mention this because all of the concern and the various reactions as we make our way through this seem to me to boil down to two fundamental questions. Two basic moral categories for us to be clear about. And, as it turns out, they are two of the fundamental Biblical questions.
Who will we trust? Who will get our compassion?
The Scriptures are forever reminding us that there are two ways through the world, two paths to consider, one that leads to ways of life and one that leads to ways of death and so much of the human journey is about discerning and choosing. And ultimately putting before us that there is a Way of God that is good and Holy and we are invited to follow this Way.
And, the Scriptures are forever reminding us that while God is good and the earth is generous, there are many times when there is not enough of everything and we will have to decide who gets what – the very basis of the practice of economics – who gets what.
There may not be enough flu serum to accommodate all of the at-risk women and the front line health workers and the children and also the able bodied middle aged men. Should I try to get a shot anyway?
There is a bond trader in New York who is set to collect over 100 million dollars as a bonus this year and it may be close to the time when we say – there is not enough for us to live in that kind of system any longer.
Who will we trust? Who gets what?
Here’s how I think it might work.
If we sort out the first question, we will understand something about sorting out the second question. If I have some clearer sense of who to follow, who to trust, who to listen to, I will develop some clearer sense of how to live well, carefully, and with an intelligent compassion. To be more Christlike.
Which brings me back to the poem by Wendell Berry.
We follow the dead, and eventually we learn to trust them, he suggests. And this is the conviction of the Church in our celebration of All Saints Day. We honour the ancestors.
I propose two tasks with respect to our ancestors. Or, more precisely, one task that will likely lead us in two directions.
The task is to see what they saw. To understand them deeply. The postcard version of this is the old idea that says – Learn From The Mistakes Of Others, You Won’t Live Long Enough To Make Them All Yourself !. The theological version of this is that God is still in the process of emerging into the world, and God emerges into the world in the form of the living things that fill the world, and so everything that has been – and every one that has been, is prepared to teach us, to point us toward what is still to come.
And we are so slow to learn this. In our fundamental sin of believing that it is all about us, and in the hubris of believing that God is now perhaps completed in us – we fail to see back and so we fail to see ahead.
So our first task for making our way with intelligence and compassion into the future is to deeply understand the humans who have come and gone before us. Our ancestors are often our parents and our grandparents, but sometimes the humans who have come and gone before us are our spouses and even our children. So this is hard work.
As some of you know because I got to show the pictures off here, in the couple of years after my father died I spent a lot of time with his old photographs – retouching and recomposing and reprinting – finding, in a kind of surprise, that he had a very fine way of looking at things – noticing light and shadow, angles and compositions, people and places worth recording. I thought as I worked away – this is very cool! He was very cool! I never really knew that. I saw that I had not seen this about him. Seeing now, more carefully, in the way he saw, taught me that I have not yet been seeing clearly.
When I saw what he saw, then I understood that I have more to learn about seeing.
We follow the dead – calling out – Wait – I know now how it was with you… I understand something now… Thank you…
The task is to see them well – to understand what was full of life in them – and to turn and be driven forward by that Life.
If, on their best days and at their strongest, they were fine and noble humans – then what a privilege to pick up that torch! It is a fine thing to have noble ancestors who have done noble things in the world. That’s the first direction this task leads us in – to go as they have gone – to love their work, publish their poems, print their pictures, hang their degrees on the wall – say – we will find our way further and better into our own days because this is how they lived. It is a good thing.
But of course not all our ancestors were noble. And the noble ones were not noble all the time.
We had some very good friends over for dinner last night and because it was Saturday night and these are folks who have been in my congregation in the past, they understood that if you come to dinner on a Saturday night you have to bring something that will be useful in a sermon the next day. So I asked them to each tell a story about an ancestor.
Ellen told us a story her grandfather used to tell - about a great-great aunt, whose family had emigrated from Sweden – good sturdy honest and upright Scandinavian stock, and at the turn of the last century this great-great-aunt headed to the Oregon coast, where she built houses, married and had children. Then one day she met and fell in love with a man who was a missionary and they took off together for the mission field in China. It was a bad time to be in China and she eventually returned to Oregon, where she rejoined her family. And as the grandfather told the story – she came back to her husband and children, but – he said with a twinkle in his eye – there was never any more ‘connubial felicity’!
Even our noble people were not noble all the time, and some of our people have been downright nasty. And many of our people have been neither entirely noble nor entirely nasty but they have experienced hardship and evil – have made tragic choices, made their way through wars, have had to kill and be killed. And some of our work – in order to make our way with intelligence and compassion into the days ahead – will be to see and deeply understand what has been hard for our ancestors, and redeem it.
At almost every funeral we conduct we recite together the Lord’s Prayer. And as we come to the eighth line of that prayer – as we say together ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’ – I always wonder about the family sitting in front of me, and about the life that has just ended, and I wonder what there might still be to forgive. Are there vast tracts of anger and broken relations that we are breezing past with that one phrase? Should we stop when we get to that line – should we let it hover for a minute – soak in it – our people have sometimes hurt us, and they have hurt others, and sometimes they go while we are still royally ticked off. And we will not grow at all, and we will learn nothing from their pain, if we don’t linger in that mess for a while.
This is the second direction our task leads us into. To redeem their pain. To understand their sin. And then to do two things. To release them from its hold on us. To say – ‘Wait! I understand now… And then to let them, as broken and flawed as they were, become our teachers, part of God still emerging into being – pointing us ahead and saying ‘do you see how I wished it could have been? How I longed for it to have been? There is the path you can take. There is how you can be in the world…’
Our ancient ancestor John saw it this way in his vision, his revelation :
“Then I saw a new heaven, and a new earth. And I saw the Holy City, and I heard a voice from heaven saying , God is among humanity, and death will be no more. Write this down – this you can trust.”