“Heaven on Earth?”
A sermon delivered by Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister of The Community Church of NY Unitarian Universalist, Sunday, March 13, 2011
Readings
Despite my antipathy toward traditional imagery of heaven, I like E. E. Cumming’s vision of his mother… as poetry. With its yearning, its love, its filial fidelity… a comforting vision.
About his mother, he wrote:
if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be heaven of blackred roses
my father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my….
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow) 94
E. E. Cummings tells a children’s story about a fairy who
… lived on the farthest star, and the people of the stars and air brought their troubles to him. One morning, millions of angry people came to complain about an old man on the moon who kept saying "why." "The millions of troubled angry people cried out together in a chorus, 'We want you to help us all quickly and if you don't we'll all go mad!'"
The faerie flew to the moon, where he found a "little very very very very very very very old man" sitting on a church steeple. He said to the man, "Listen to me:if you say why again,you'll fall from the moon all the way to the earth."
And the little very old man smiled;and looking at the faerie,he said "why?" and he fell millions and millions and millions of deep cool new beautiful miles(and with every part of a mile he became a little younger;first he became a not very old man and next a middle-aged man and then a young man and a boy and finally a child)until,just as he gently touched the earth,he was about to be born.
“Heaven on Earth?”
What if anything useful is there to say about Heaven, so imbued with ancient dualistic faith, misdirection, superstition, or to my mind at least distraction from becoming fully human, fully alive… distraction from growing our souls?
This morning I turn once again to theological, symbolic, poetic reconstruction with a bit of poetry and story, inviting our imaginations to help reason update our faith.
Amid the mysteries of our wonder and wounds, something enchants me in these words of the poet E. E. Cummings, son of a Unitarian Minister:
… how fortunate are you and i,whose home
is timelessness: we who have wandered down
from fragment mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day(or maybe even less)
[“stand with your lover”]
And with winter receding, this E. E. Cummings poem comes from a posthumous collection published in 1963 a year after his death at age 67.
one winter afternoon
(at the magical hour
when is becomes if)
a bespangled clown
standing on eighth street
handed me a flower.
Nobody,it's safe
to say,observed him but
myself;and why?because
without any doubt he was
whatever(first and last)
mostpeople fear most:
a mystery for which i've
no word except alive
-that is,completely alert
and miraculously whole…
a fine not a coarse clown
(no mob,but a person)
and while never saying a word
who was anything but dumb;
since the silence of him
self sang like a bird….
-i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to give me a daisy
As Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian Minister and son of one as well, suggests to us still:
“Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”
His Transcendentalist spirit is alive and well still, whenever we honor Nature and those revelations of the sacred that are first-hand in our own hearts and souls. Joy, strength, courage await us in greeting the divinity of each new day, and in greeting our own divinity, if we only awaken each morning to it. Last week while away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I not only spent some good time among our forebears and their writings at the library of HarvardDivinitySchool, but I also stopped by the Divinity School Chapel, where Emerson in 1838 helped expand our faith so profoundly.
The radical theological gift, the reconstruction project that he gave us, was the affirmation of spirit, grace, available to each of us in the tender and crazy and aching moments of our lives … separating himself from ancient dualisms and supernatural separation from the holy.
This morning in some ways Heaven is a new topic for me….
I don’t think that I have even invoked the poet John Milton, who wrote so wisely:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of hell, a Hell of Heav’n."
Heaven has received but passing mention in the past… mostly the statistics of the 74% percent in our nation who seem to hold rather traditional Christian notions of a pearly-gated place.
My take is quite different. Heaven is here. Holiness is here, which of course is a recurring affirmation of my Unitarian Universalist faith.
Another poem, this one by Nancy Willard is titled A Hardware Store as the Proof of the Existence of God. And I should add hardware stores are among my favorites.
I praise the brightness of hammers pointing east
like the steel woodpeckers of the future,
and dozens of hinges opening brass wings…
and mailboxes sowing rows of silver chapels,
and a company of plungers waiting for God
to claim their thin legs in their big shoes
and put them on and walk away laughing.
In a world not perfect but not bad either
let there be glue, glaze, gum, and grabs,
caulk also, and hooks, shackles, cables, and slips,
and signs so spare a child may read them,
Men, Women, In, Out, No Parking, Beware the Dog.
In the right hands, they can work wonders.
What a wonderful statement of our co-creativity within this world, with its gift of this good Life.
Heaven and holiness are here; “heaven walks among us disguised…”
Jesus celebrated the lilies of the fields and the poor and marginalized… all as sacred. The Kingdom of God he said is like the tiniest of seeds, a mustard seed, growing in our midst into a large plant, as tall as 9 feet. (Luke 13:19) “It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.” And it is here, now, this world, underway….
Pliny, the Elder, in his Natural History a few decades after Jesus lived, wrote of the health-giving properties of mustard. It is also an annual plant; that is, it keeps coming back year after year after year, just like we do.
Hebrew Scriptures have nothing to say about anything like a heaven as a desirable human destination after death.
The Buddha, despite the various views on after-life in the multiple versions of Buddhism that arose after his death, had no vision of anything like reincarnation or heaven. He was a protester, a protestant against the symbolic metaphysics of Hinduism. He was this-worldly, accepting it all in its heartache and its grace.
In an article about Confucianism, I was struck by its multiple variants through the centuries, and that’s no different from most traditions. Tu Weiming, a professor of Confucian philosophy at Harvard, emphasizes its this-worldly approach, our human inter-connectedness, and the goal of self-cultivation. He also describes our innate potentials for good and the primacy of our moral sense that require our attention, and he underscores that we are not only connected to other humans but deeply connected to the cosmos, otherwise called Heaven in Confucian thought.
Largely a humanistic tradition, this scholar speaks of an anthropocosmic insight, akin to contemporary, naturalistic process theologies.
Anthropo – Cosmic! Humankind and the universe inextricably linked.
“Heaven,” the sage professor says, “is creativity itself, but the advent of the human has made a difference. The human as a cocreator imitates but also participates in Heaven’s [that is, the cosmos’] creativity.” He argues, that in this sense “we find an intimate niche in the cosmos as our ultimate source and meaning of life.” (“Rooted in Humanity, Extended to Heaven,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Spring 2008)
And that surely is one way to conceive of Unitarian Universalist affirmations about the interdependent web of existence – for me a useful theological affirmation, but somehow not terribly poetic, at least for me.
Yet I resonate with the Confucian calling that says we are to become “worthy partners of the cosmic process.” Or in more traditional language, with God…
Heaven is creativity… it is in us and around us and beyond us. I like that.
Traditional, ancient imagery of heaven arises with a 3 part view of the universe. Heaven – the word itself – derives from a root word for sky. So, we have the sky/heaven above, this world, and an underworld below…. That’s the ancient Near Eastern cosmology with a certain logic to it.
And along the way so many growing up were taught over the centuries that heaven is pretty much the way Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, when Archbishop of Washington, D.C. and chancellor of Catholic University, described it a few years ago:
“I always think of heaven as being a place where we won't have any troubles anymore. Heaven is a place where there will be peace and tranquility," McCarrick said. As a Catholic, McCarrick believes heaven is more than a spiritual place. Catholics, he explained, believe the body is resurrected. "I'm looking forward to meeting my mom and dad and the rest of my family," he added.
Again, I never understood that though it makes sense to some, and I generally share the school of thought that sees such a Heaven as a means of psychological comfort, maybe a denial of death, as well as often a means of social control by the church or others, who justify injustice here, with promises of other worldly rewards
Yet the dualism and anthropomorphic elements have a certain poetic attraction, or as allegories, and one of the stories that I have told before has many versions:
Once upon a time a priest, or rabbi, or minister, or spiritualseeker was talking with God about Heaven and Hell.
"Come," said God. "Walk with me, and I will show you Hell."
And together they walked into a room of cold, rough stone. In the center of the room, atop a low fire, sat a huge pot of quietly simmering stew. The stew smelled delicious, and made the seeker’s mouth water. A group of people sat in a circle around the pot, and each of them held a curiously long-handled spoon. The spoons were long enough to reach the pot; but the handles were so ungainly that every time someone dipped the bowl of their spoon into the pot and tried to maneuver the bowl to their mouth, the stew would spill.
The visitor could hear the grumblings of their bellies. They were cold, hungry, and miserable.
"And now," God said, "I will show you Heaven."
Together they walked into another room, almost identical to the first. A second pot of stew simmered in the center; another ring of people sat around it; each person was outfitted with one of the frustratingly long spoons. But this time, the people sat with the spoons across their laps or laid on the stone beside them. They talked, quietly and cheerfully with one another. They were warm, well-fed, and happy.
"God, I don't understand," said the curious soul. "How was the first room Hell; and this, Heaven?"
God smiled. "It's simple," she said. "You see, they have learned to feed each other."
Heaven is about our shared lives of sharing.
And there is from our reading from E. E. Cummings’ imagination, a story about the old man in the moon who fell to earth, reborn as an infant, asking why about all things. And isn’t that so much of what makes our lives heavenly, curiosity?
A measure of curiosity, and divinity within….
And let me quickly note that a popular evangelical pastor Rob Bell, with a 10,000 member church, will have a new book released this week titled Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell and the God of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Apparently he may be suggesting that Heaven is here, not somewhere else, and suggesting that he is a Universalist… that God does not condemn anyone to hell eternally – all of which is upsetting some more fundamentalist Christians.
His curiosity is pushing the boundaries of dogma, and he may actually expand the conversation among fundamentalists. Stay tuned…Rob Bell... it should be an interesting week…..
We have had some hellish moments of late, and beyond the earthquakes in Haiti, ChristChurch and the most recent unfolding catastrophe in Japan, there are some closer at hand man-made events. Among these are Representative Peter King’s recent Congressional hearings, singling out Muslim Americans as a special target of investigation. By doing so, he is demonizing an entire religious tradition, being divisive and largely dismissive in his broad sweep … feeding fears.
It brought to mind a brief encounter, an image of this-worldly heaven as I see it, that I shared a few years ago from poet, novelist, and songwriter Naomi Shihab Nye. She writes about “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”
Well – one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
“Help,” said the flight service person. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.”
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly [in Arabic].Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew – however poorly used – she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late, who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her – Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinianpoets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling me about her life. Answering questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies – little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts – out of her bag – and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina,the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo – we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers – non-alcoholic – and the two little girls waiting for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American – ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too.
And I noticed my new best friend – by now we were holding hands – had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves; such an old-country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate – once the crying of confusion stopped – has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen, anywhere. Not everything is lost.
It reminds me of our vision here… still talking about building and still working on the Beloved Community after all these years… trying to create a little bit of heaven on earth, still putting faith into action all these years, planting seeds of truth, love and justice… knowing some things take a long time… wondering, I know, which seeds will bring forth fruit, which need extra care… celebrating the fruit from seeds planted by those who came before us… giving thanks for their generosity and vision.
Heaven is here, emerging, to be affirmed and built amidst the heartaches and challenges. Jack Kerouac in his On the Road put it this way: "all of life is holy and every moment is precious" – a vision – a faith that can unite those of many traditions.
On so many levels, “Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.”
Life is a gift. Our days are brief.
People are precious. Caring counts ultimately.
Serving one another is our calling.
Be at peace even in doubt…
Each day.
This is the day that has been given to us. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!
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© 2011 Bruce Southworth