We Believe in Miracles
A Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 9, 2005
“A Tragedy in Asia Affects All Corners of a Closer World”
“A Devastating Lesson in Mortality”
“Disaster Beyond Compare…..”
“The Vulnerable Become More Vulnerable”
“Awaiting a Miracle: Grieving Parents Return to Sea’s Edge”
From The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington
Post, these are the headlines that day after day carry images that tear
at us. The casualties soar, and we stare back at the faces of the dead and the
threatened, thankful perhaps for the newsprint and the television screens that
mediate our gaze. We nonetheless take it in and shudder and then turn to give
our children a grateful hug, we linger in the embrace of a spouse, we stretch
the boundaries of our generosity. How close we all are. How close we all are.
There but for the arbitrary rhythms of the earth go I. There but for the longitude
of that epicenter go those I love.
When friends ask me where Cohasset is exactly, I sometimes say we’re
nestled between the communities of Hull, Hingham, Norwell, and Scituate, with
France on the east. We’re coastal residents reminded every day by the
lighthouses that line these shores how treacherous coastal waters can be. Yet
summer after summer, we flock to our beaches, and in winter snowstorms we gaze
in awe as the waves crash against our seawalls.
I’m reminded of the women and men of these post-tsunami days who are
shaking their fists at the sea, angry, enraged, at the betrayal of trust. Once
the waters off Banda Aceh served as a reservoir of nurture and sustenance. Now
grieving parents return to water’s edge awaiting the return of their children,
hoping beyond hope.
Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time?
…..that shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking.
How I’ve turned to these words of colleague Robbie Walsh as I’ve
prepared a memorial service precipitated by a death that seemed to come out
of nowhere, or amid the human-induced trauma of September 11. But always Robbie’s
words served as metaphor. Not so in the days since December 26. Not so in the
ebb of waves set in motion by a literal straining of great plates whose
time had come.
What gamblers we are as we rise each morning, stretch our limbs, check the
weather, send our children off to school, head to work, have lunch with a friend,
kiss a loved one good-bye, take a flight, sail in the harbor, check our portfolios,
plan for the future, give thanks for the blessing of earth, sky, and sea. What
gamblers we are. However the course of our lives is heading, we each tend to
hold on as well as we can, because we believe. We somehow believe that life
is there for us, that tomorrow will bring the promise of whatever, that tomorrow
is the beneficiary of today if only we do such and such.
How fragile we are. Some of us know this intimately as we are greeted by an
unwelcome diagnosis. Some of us know this intimately as we bear the scars of
unexpected losses of those we held dear. Some of us know this intimately as
we love from afar those who are about the business of doing this country’s
bidding in a cataclysm that is clearly human wrought. Yet the scale of what
has unfolded in recent days suggests a closer look at the solidarity we share
as guests on this planet that is ever so much more than metaphor.
What a time for choices. What a time to take time for reflection and response.
What a time to take a stance of solidarity with neighbors in this coastal village
and the coastal villages dotting that other ocean. Ethnicity and race and age
and position dissolve in the same waters. Fortune, not grace, determined who
survived and who did not. Fortune and graciousness will determine who survives
in the aftermath.
At an epicenter beneath the sea, plates shifted. Earth was being earth. It
was neither kind nor cruel. Earth simply is. That it supports human life at
all is nothing shy of a miracle when we weigh the odds of that delicate balance
of earth, air, fire, and water over space and time. That any of us exists in
the form that we do is nothing shy of a miracle when we weigh the odds of the
meeting of a particular sperm with a particular ovum that will adhere in conditions
necessary to permit our birth.
“Though we have life, it is beyond us,” observes Wendell Berry,
in his Essay Against Modern Superstition.
“We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going
to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it,
we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage,
be controlled. It is, as [William] Blake said, holy. To think otherwise is
to enslave life, and to make not humanity, but a few humans its predictably
inept masters. …To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on
it.”
Berry is anything but a fatalist. A passionate environmentalist, farmer, poet,
and essayist, he calls us to reverence for life, to affirmation of life as a
miracle.
Just hours before the earth convulsed as it did, we were reminded again of
the miracle of each new life.
“Each night a child is born is a holy night—
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshipping.”
I consider the loss, and I consider the wonder that was the birth of each life
lost. We are each a gift of nature and will be claimed by the processes of nature,
sooner or later. I am in intimate solidarity with every victim of this cataclysm,
every single one. We are each fragile and rooted.
Just days from now, my mother will turn 96. Not so long ago, I headed to her
home in Pennsylvania with camcorder in hand and a beginner’s knowledge
of how to use it, hoping that I would push the right buttons at the right time.
I had prepared questions about her life, which had even then spanned closed
to a century. Given her years, she was in extraordinarily good health, and I
had the gift of time to distill her memories and reflections in a medium that
I might share with other family and friends. Over the hour that I taped, there
were epiphanies for both of us in what she recalled and I discovered. Through
it all came the words that she repeated like a mantra: “It goes so quickly,
Jan. It goes so quickly.” As my Mother blows out those candles on January
22, I trust that she will take another big breath of gratitude for the miracle
that is her long yet fleeting life.
“It dawns on me more and more how trivial and short our lifespan is,”
writes Emmy Arnold.
“It is like smoke; it is like a flower, it is like grass, it is like
a butterfly—for it passes so quickly, flying away. Nobody, no one, can
bring back wasted years. One wishes that one would have always lived with
Eternity in mind.”
So how, I wonder, do we ingest this spare fraction of eternity that we do know?
Perhaps as nothing short of a miracle that we share in solidarity with every
other life form.
I believe in miracles—no, not the miracles wrought by some cosmic magician,
but the miracle that is each of you, the miracle of standing here before you
inhabiting my own precious life, the miracle and wonder that any of us have
surfaced from natural processes that we have barely glimpsed to inhabit what
we call a life—whether that life is a few months, a few years, or well
beyond the proverbial three score and ten. If I believed in miracles wrought
by a deity who wielded a large wand, I would be cursing that same deity for
taking away those I loved, for what would surely be divine genocide on the rim
of the Indian Ocean. Such an interventionist god would seem to play favorites,
rather like the captain of a mythical pantheon, whimsical and arbitrary and
cruel by any standard of decency. No, my understanding of God is that of a Spirit
of Life who infuses the forces of life and dwells as possibility in each of
us as we partake of life. Before and after our time here, I really don’t
know. I just know that our time here matters to each of us—our individual
selves, and all of us—our global family. During this time, this time that
goes so quickly, we have some choices and are also beholden to the rhythms of
a cosmos that offers precious few.
A miracle for me is cause for wonder pure and simple. A miracle for me is an
invitation to respond with gratitude for being and for being here together on
this planet in this cosmos that holds such myriad life forms. A miracle for
me is the capacity to pay attention to what is and to act on what we witness
and to sort it out as best we can through the gifts of reason and mindfulness
and imagination and reverence for it all. The miraculous is that to which we
have grown accustomed in this brief flick of eternity. The incredulous is that
we fail so badly in honoring the members of our human family with whom we share
this miracle.
The face of each and every victim of human-wrought disaster is the face of
my brother or sister or parent or child. The face of each and every victim of
nature’s throes is the face of a member of my family. So when I advocate
for peace or invite a generous response to relief efforts, all I am doing is
affirming the miracle by an expression of gratitude.
As Charlie Clements, head of our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee,
observes:
“The realization of how fragile life can be … requires of us
imaginative compassion and solidarity. Our solidarity with the survivors is
far more valuable to them than our pity. Indeed, if we perceive the survivors
only as a ‘they,’ then our responses may be charitable, but if
we see them as part of a larger, human ‘us’, then our responses
will be more deeply empathic and longer-lasting.”
Without the miracle that finds voice in the cry of each newborn child, we would
not wail when our children are carried off by a wave with no capacity to intend
harm. Without the miracle of human love, we would not double over in grief when
someone we love is no longer here.
This miracle of life strikes a hard bargain, for as nature brings us forth,
nature claims us in ways unexpected. We cry foul and belie our loss of control,
even as we are dubious of a deity that plays favorites. How we need the grace
to sustain what we can, let go of what we must, and distinguish the difference
with neither cynicism nor narcissism.
What can we do but find our place in a human family, with each of us sharing
the reality of arrival and exit. What can we do but hold hope as we reach out
to one another on a planet on which we are visitors and know for a short precious
while the gift of life. What can we do but seize countless opportunities to
enhance this gift for one another and resist all human tendency to take it from
one another.
When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing.
May we do all possible to bring relief, sustain hope, and honor from sea to
shining sea to shining sea the miracle that we inhabit for this precious while.
Amen.
Sources:
Emmy Arnold, “Like Some, or a Flower,” http://www.bruderhof.com/us/Tribute2004/index.htm?source=DailyDig
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,
Counterpoint, Washington, DC, 2000.
Charlie Clemens, MD, President and CEO, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee,
“Responding to the Tsunami,” Letter to Unitarian Universalist
Ministers, http://www.uusc.org/info/article123004_2.htm
Sophia Lyon Ahs, “For So the Children Come,” in Singing the
Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1993, 616.
Dialup Gangly, Associated Press, “Awaiting a Miracle: Grieving Parents
Return to Sea’s Edge,” The Boston Globe, January 3, 2005.
Peter S. Goodman, “A Devastating Lesson in Mortality,” Washington
Post Writers Group, January 1, 2005.
Bill Marsh, “The Vulnerable Become More Vulnerable,” The New
York Times, January 2, 2005.
Carolyn S. Owen-Towle, “Fragile and Rooted,” in Singing the
Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1993, 492.
Craig S. Smith, “A Tragedy in Asia Affects All Corners of a Closer
World,” The New York Times, December 29, 2005.
Farad Stockman, Globe Staff, “Disaster Beyond Compare, Power Says,”
The Boston Globe, January 6, 2005.
Robert R. Walsh, “Fault Line,” from Noisy Stones: A Meditation
Manual, Skinner
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