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Temples of the Sun
Offered by Revs. Rolenz & Arnason
Sunday, August 31, 2008
WestShoreUnitarianUniversalistChurch
Rocky River, OH
Sermon – Part 1
We have a dear colleague who, at the beginning of each church year, offers a sermon entitled “What I did on my summer vacation.” I always go to the church’s website at the end of the summer to find out about my colleague’s travels. Now, in the hands of a less experienced colleague, this is a sermon that has the danger of being nothing more than a travelogue, but, in the hands of this master, he is always able to take what he saw and did and experienced over the summer and reflect not merely on the events themselves but rather—the meaning of those events—in his life, throughout time, in relation to that part of our life which we call the religious impulse—our spiritual life. That’s our challenge today! To help us meet that challenge, we decided that for anyone interested, Wayne and I will offer an actual travelogue, a half hour slide show and commentary about our Peru travels, here in the sanctuary at noon. We have stories to tell, and a few adventures to share, but we wanted to do that in a separate time—to remind ourselves that a travelogue is not a sermon, but that the opportunity to travel does give us some experiences to share that have deepened our spiritual lives.
In our UU faith tradition, all theology actually begins with an experience, and so it was for us, one hot and sunny Sunday morning in July, as we stood together and worshiped on holy ground. We weren’t in a traditional cathedral, with its stained glass windows and high gothic ceilings. In fact, our church had no ceiling at all—no real walls, just blocks of finely cut stone, placed one on top of the other, and a vast green field designated not for sports, but solely for religious ceremony and ritual. We were in a city, but an ancient city that in its entirety had the feeling of holy ground. You wouldn’t know it of course, for all the other tourists tramping up and down stairs, posing for cheesy photographs and for some, illegally eating food in the sanctuary. The place, of course, was Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, in the cloud forests of Peru, known as one of the unofficial seven wonders of the modern world, and for us one of the unofficial places where we found ourselves worshipping on a Sunday morning instead of being here with you.
This morning, we want to explore at least three things which we learned from our travels to Peru this summer. first, we want to share some of the inspirations and insights we gleaned from the Incan and pre-Incan spiritual cultures, insights about the rhythms of worship life that are connected to the cycles and seasons of our lives; second—we’ll examine some of the ways that cultures themselves have their own rhythms, cycles and seasons and look at how we can understand America’s place in the rising and falling of cultures; and finally, we’ll look at what remains when the dust settles, when the ruins are discovered, when we aren’t yet sure what life’s next chapter will bring us.
We wished we could have brought the entire church and plopped you down in the middle of Machu Picchu that Sunday morning, so you could have heard what we did. Both of us had heard, of course, of Incan civilization, primarily from Hollywood movies, but neither of us were prepared for the sophistication of Machu Picchu or Incan civilization. It was not a democracy, because it was based firmly around the supreme chief Inca who ruled over the entire empire. All men and women were expected to get married and have a family, whether you wanted to or not. Strict gender roles were assigned to young women and men. At the same time, the empire was well organized with strategically placed food deposits for the efficient distribution to the people. No one in the Inca empire went hungry. Instead of a complex set of rules, there were three fundamental laws that governed society: Ama Sua, Ama Lluya (yeah-ya), and Ama Quella (chella); “Don’t Steal, Don’t Lie, and Don’t be Idle.” What impressed us the most, however, was the ways in which the architecture of not only Machu Picchu, but also some of the ruins outside of the city of Cusco and in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, were so completely aligned with the rhythms, cycles and seasons of nature. Your order of service cover, for example, has a another picture of the famous Temple of the Sun—taken on the winter solstice, June 21st. This temple was built in such a way that the first sun rays of the new solar year align with incredible precision to shine on an altar stone. Buildings are placed in such a way as to maximize their exposure to sun. Everything—from the way stones were cut and placed, to the kind of crops grown, to the seasonable celebrations and assemblies—everything was imbued with meaning and purpose. What would it be like, we wondered, to live in such a way? What would it be like to understand more intimately the ways in which our lives are ruled by seemingly invisible forces—of seasons and sun—of rising and falling light—of survival through a deep connection with earth?
This is, of course, what our brother and sisters who practice an earth-based spirituality have been drawing to our attention for many years now. It’s no surprise that we often don’t live in houses built to take advantage of the sun; we stay up past when the sun goes down; we often rise before the sun gets up. Yet underneath all of our modern living, like stream that runs through our lives, is a rhythm—a cycle—a season. Author Terry Tempest Williams was asked about the rhythms of her writing process. She said: “In winter, “the dreamtime of the bears,” I’m underground, at home. Winter belongs to me as a writer. It’s my favorite season of stillness and clarity. Blue light on snow. Spring and fall are more public. That’s when I’m teaching. Summer is family time, when I just need to be outside and play, nothing scheduled. Summer, interestingly enough, seems to be the most inviolate. I have to have this time outside, whether its in the desert or by the sea, with family. Summer and winter are private times.” [1]
WestShore has its own rhythms. Beginning with the Water Ceremony next Sunday, we acknowledge the gathering of the clan—the coming together of this our community after summer diaspora—from the many places we have been we will gather together as one. The rhythm of West Shore begins to pick up as we feel ourselves turning not yet inward, but towards one another—towards re-engagement with issues of meaning and purpose—and towards spiritual practice. The rhythm of returning to school also reminds us to return to church—week after week—regardless of the topic or speaker—because we can’t orient ourselves to the sun 24/7, but we can orient our hearts and minds to those things in our being which touch deep truths and bring forth profound questions about our place in the larger stream of life itself. Seasons come and go—great cultures rise and fall—the rhythm of our breath, of inhalation and exhalation is the most constant truth we know, and yet, after gazing on the ruins of an ancient, sophisticated city, we realized that it too, rises and falls. We felt, while standing there in the vastness of Machu Picchu, the embodied truth of the world weary Ecclessiastes—for everything there is a season, and a time and purpose, for every matter under heaven.
Sermon - Part II
Rev. Wayne Arnason
One of the most striking things about visiting some of Peru’s most sacred places in the highlands of Peru is that you can actually see the layers of culture and history that have existed on the site. Here is one of the most striking examples: Another Building also called The Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, Peru, the capital city of the Incan culture. Look at how easily you can see the two layers of architecture in this building – on the bottom the amazing stone masonry of the Incas, who built their walls with cut stone precisely measured to fit together without the need for mortar. And above that, built literally on the top of the IncaTemple of the Sun, a Spanish colonial cathedral.
It’s not all that unusual to see this strategy of religious co-option employed around the world – in many European countries you can see Christian Cathedrals built on top of Roman sites - but in Peru today, this sacred site and tourist attraction is only known by its ancient name “The Temple of Sun” and not by its colonial name. The Peruvian people have proudly reclaimed their native culture and the colonial buildings and artifacts that are shown to sympathetic tourists come with stories of colonial oppression. We were profoundly aware as we traveled in Peru of the vast sweep of human civilization here in the Americas. We have become accustomed to thinking of the Middle East and China as the places where they count their history in millennia, rather than in centuries, but before we got on the plane to go to Peru, we read a news story that told us that human remains 12,000 yearsold had been unearthed from the Peruvian landscape.
In one museum we visited, we viewed the archaeological remnants of six different aboriginal cultures in Peru that had their day before the time of the Incas. The Inca civilization became the dominant culture up and down the Andean backbone of South American from the 13th to the 16th centuries, a period of time longer than the United States has existed as a country. The cultures and tribes the Incas overcame and then united lived for many decades confident in the stability of their own lives, and as we viewed the ruins of Inca cities and towns we reflected on how generations had lived their way of life unaware of the larger rhythms and seasons of history that were about to overtake them.
In 1532 Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru, and within just one generation the Spanish Conquistadors overwhelmed and subjugated the Inca civilization. A sacred city like Machu Picchu which had been painstakingly built over many decades and inhabited for a century was abandoned in just a year rather than have its location discovered by the Spaniards. A young man or woman coming of age in Peru the first part of the 16th century had no way of knowing how much their world would change during the last half of their lives.
One of the purposes of religious ritual and communities is to help us place our little lives into the context of a larger picture of meanings, which includes not only the cycles of the year but the cycles of the centuries. Here in the United States, most of us have heard over and over again the mythology of manifest destiny that tells us that we live in the greatest country on earth and that we are destined to bring a new world order of democracy and prosperity to the world.
In this political season of conventions and campaigns, we have found ourselves touched by the ways that the hope and the promise of the American experiment can be re-awakened within us through powerful rhetoric and determined common action.
Even so, this has been a summer in which we have also been reminded by world events that the world does not turn around an axis that runs through the United States. The Olympic Games in Beijing were a powerful reminder that Chinese culture and civilization is one of most ancient and beautiful and profound of human cultures. If Chinese history were reduced to an hour, the rule of chairman Mao is measured by the second hand. Chinese civilization reminds us that evidence of the unpredictable and rapid change that is part of today’s world can exist on the surface of a civilization whose foundations reach down into millennia.
There is more than one theory about how cultural changes have happened in our world, and among them is a theory of discontinuous change, that is, that a civilization’s underlying premises and reasons for being can be pulled away like a tablecloth, and it’s a difficult trick to pull on that tablecloth without sending all the neat place settings tumbling to the floor.
We may be living in such a time, a time when the old premises about how we should live our lives could be pulled out from under us by something that none of us imagined, as few as dozen years ago, would be a dominant conversation in the world or in an American election, the impact of climate change. Even when Al Gore was running for re-election as President, in 1996, pre-Kyoto accords, no one was predicting the apparent pace of climate change, and a serious public conversation in that election about its consequences was not held and not even possible.
The language of Presidential campaigning is all framed in terms of leadership for the future, but the sad reality is that even the most far sighted political leader has to deal with the reality of a four year term and a period of effective influence that is often less than that. The next generation of technological advances and the rise of China and India as economic super powers are likely to influence our lives much more profoundly than Al Quaeda or the National Rife Association. Might this be an election where we have a chance to look with both vision and humility at the truly important issues that face us? It’s hard to say.
What I do know is that if I focus on the breathless panting media pundits, I will miss the point. A short time in Peru, or any other country outside the boundaries of the United States, was enough to remind me that humanity’s rhythms and seasons are bigger than the ones to which we have become accustomed. In our religious communities and spiritual lives, we seek both the grounding in those larger rhythms and the humility to appreciate what they can teach us.
Sermon—Part II
To travel to an ancient civilization is to visit what remains. Amazing, isn’t it, that a billion dollar tourist industry is built around people being fascinated by remnants, shards, fragments, and ruins? In Peru, ruins were everywhere, and they were discovering more each year. Archeologists and historians don’t discard anything they find—a scrap of papyrus, a metal broach, a pin used to hold together a tunic, a broken water vessel—now unable to serve in its everyday function—it becomes an object of contemplation—of wonderment.The passage of time takes these ordinary objects of our lives—and, over time, point to the ineffable—of how people lived, what they cared out, what gods and goddesses they worshipped, and how they died.
While in Peru I became completely captivated by a museum that housed an extraordinary collection of ancient Incan and pre-Incan art. In room after room, from floor to ceiling, were the objects of their civilization, grouped by use; one entire series of shelves devoted to bowls, for example; another to pots; to sculptures, and so on. Standing in front of a woman’s face, a portrait sculpted from clay, I thought about the tools she used; the pots she painted; the clay whistle she may have made for one of her children. I realized that I was looking at the portrait of a woman some 12,000 years ago, a woman like me, who now was immortalized because someone found the likeness of her face buried among her things. What struck me about this clay portrait was how the artist was able to capture her eyes, the hint of a smile, the creases around her eyes, and a bold, defiant look—all this in crude, fired clay. All of the objects in the room fell away from my minds eye as I saw her face—etched into my memory now and forever.
“So, from everything a little remains. A little remains of your chin in the chin of your daughter. …” In de Andrade’s longer version of the poem the poet names those things which remain--“wind in my ears, burbing, rumbling from an upset stomach, and small artifacts, bell jar, honeycomb, revolver, cartridge, aspirin table. From everything a little remained.” After the trip was over, the photographs remained; and after the photographs fade or are lost or put away in drawers, the memory remains; and after memory fades and living in the moment is all we have; then other’s memories of us will remain; and after our passing, the few objects we cling to will remain in someone else’s home; and maybe the one faded photograph that remains will find its way to a flea market and a young woman picks it up and looks at it and wonders who was this woman with the hint of a smile and a touch of defiance in her gaze? That look, that face, that smile—those things remain. We travel to ruins and find them not sad, but somehow, strangely, uplifting and inspiring—not because Incan civilization isn’t thriving today as it was then, but because of all that we have that was not lost—the shards of lives that point to something far greater than our individual, solitary selves.