Prayer

Creative Spirit, We are thankful for this beautiful day. As we struggle to be our best selves and offer our best to one another, help us find comfort and strength from all the beauty around us the beauty in another’s smile, the beauty in the sky, the beauty of the greening earth, the love we receive from our families and friends. Every day we live, we make choices teach us to make the choices that are most life sustaining and filled with love and compassion for ourselves and for one another. Teach us the stories of our hearts and minds, the stories that have shaped us to be who we are, and let us start from the best we know of ourselves, let us choose the best paths along our way. Our hearts long to love better and to be loved we search for forgiveness and gentleness; we wish to offer hope and kindness. Hold us in the sustaining strength of the beauty around us. Let us find comfort; let us be blessed. Let us give back the kindness, love and compassion within our hearts. AMEN

Sermon

I have always loved rocks and stones. I read once that rocks are the earth’s eggs, symbols for all that is waiting to be born within the earth. These remnants of the earth can be round or harsh chunks, chipped away through erosion or human blasting, or flat stones that have been smoothed by centuries of wear in a river.

When I was a little girl, I would put the rocks I found in my mouth. I can still remember how smooth and black they always felt on my tongue, the earthy, metal taste. I knew this was a habit I didn’t want my grandmother to know about, it was in her yard where I found my treasures. And then, of course, one day, I accidentally swallowed one. I didn’t tell what happened, and the rock, really a pebble, felt huge inside me, giving me a terrible stomach ache. Being 6, I worried that it would kill me, it seemed a big secret at the time.
I never put a rock in my mouth again. But I kept collecting but the way I collect is more to pick up rocks, look at them, weigh them in my hands, see their shapes and colors and sizes and then to put them back, I always imagine that they belong where I have found them, so I’ve actually kept very few rocks over the years.

When I am looking down, standing with my feet firm upon the ground, in some beautiful moment upon the earth, absorbed in what I find around me, I am closest to what I call Spirit. I have come to realize that I am closest to the sense of nature, the essence of being, the ultimate source, the creative spirit, because I am not trying to be close, I am simply looking for stones, symbols of eggs, holders of the earth’s wisdom, witnesses to many stories, carriers of the millennium’s of sediments, ancient bugs and plants and fish and dinosaur bones, holders of hardened volcanic ash and molten lava, crystalized lights of white and purple, blue and pink, specks of silver and gold. I am lost, so my inner spirit is connected to the spirit of all that is.
At the end of each year that I have the privilege to be a preacher of sermons, I have decided to follow the path of a few others and give an annual “update” so to speak on my theology. To tell you where I’m at, if I have learned anything, changed anything, or even taken a few steps back.

This year, a year of international war and tragedy, you could say that I have taken a step back. If you will think with me that the stones we find are the wonderful, beautiful symbols that move us forward, and the rocks are the chunks that fall on our toes and push us back, then this year has been a rock it’s hard to talk seriously of peace and beauty in a year of war and terrorism and a serious unfolding of the sexual predatory evil against children in the Catholic church, which I know is not the only place where such evil occurs.
Rocks keep us from being too blind about the reality of how harsh life can be. But rocks are not bad they are our messengers; they keep us honest. I led a spiritual retreat for 16 of you last weekend, and I realized in preparing for the retreat, that the strongest, best spiritual advice that I could give was to ask you to stop, to be still and to know who you are, and in this knowing, to ask if there was anything deep inside that you have always known, and that if there is, whatever that is, not to easily give it up, to hold firm to anything you deeply know, no matter how sophisticated your thoughts and religion have become, no matter how angry you may still be at some past church or some past religious belief, no matter how much you have developed a meditation or prayer practice, no matter how lost you may now feel, or how uncertain, no matter how little you may have ever thought about what you most deeply know.

Over the years, I have come up with various spiritual and intellectual ways to describe my belief in Creative Spirit, what some would call god or goddess, others nature or beauty, others, still, the spirit of love or the heart of compassion. For in my theology, I am a theist, someone who believes that there is a spiritual force in the universe. I have tried to describe this belief primarily in terms of process theology which has a vision of god as a creative, undefinable force that moves life imperceptibly forward, usually towards the good, creating new and wondrous and mysterious things as it goes along. This vision of god does not ask us to pray to it, does not judge us, does not solve our problems, does not sit on a mountain top in long flowing robes this vision of god simply is, a part of the universe and a part of each one of us.

I’ve tried to explain my theology through Taoism, a philosophical way of religion that comes as close as I know to trying to describe the indescribable mystery of Creative Spirit. Taoism holds all the world together and sees everything connected it sees the yin within the yang and the yang within the yin, good within bad, bad within good, how love and hate stand together, peace and war, kindness and malice. How we choose and move and fail because we think we know. It asks us to be very still, very calm and always listen to take action from only the deepest part of ourselves, to develop our inner power. To always be present, to know that every act and word, deed and thought carries intention. Process theology and Taoism are ways to describe my theism, my belief in a mysterious force, a force beyond ourselves, something bigger than our human hearts. But they are only descriptions; they are not what I know. What I know, deep within myself, I learned when I was young.

I do not know my biological father. He and my mother divorced when I was four. I have a younger brother and sister they were three and two at the time of the divorce and we went to live with my mother’s mother, my grandmother. My father came to see us once, when I was five. He took my brother for the weekend, they went to Six Flags over Texas, hundreds of miles from our home in Odessa, in west Texas. We never saw our father again.
My mother was unhappy and very young in these years. She had me, her firstborn, when she was 18. She had to work and I spent most of my waking hours with my grandmother. At my grandmother’s house, I learned to read, know my numbers, and I began school.

I have talked before about the peach trees that grew in my grandmother’s back yard, how I spent hours and hours outside, pretending to be in all kinds of exotic places for which I didn’t even have names at the time. Outside, under the sky and beneath the trees, any harshness melted away. I felt the loving power of nature holding me and moving me. I have always known that I was loved by something outside myself, that life was good, that life was full of beauty and bounty, that it can be found in the stillness, that it is held in stones of promise. This is what I know deep within myself, it is something that has always been with me, always sustained me.

You may know something different. Or you may describe it differently or you may feel more the rocks of reality, rather than the beautiful simple stones. It seems so basic, so simple, even naive or immature, what we know. But what we know is at the base of who we are, and it is from there that every step is taken has been taken or will be taken within our lives. Until we know this, what we fundamentally believe about life, and who we are from that, we cannot move or grow or change, we cannot begin to know or define what exists outside the shells of our bodies and inner lives, how to respond to the world, how to offer ourselves to the world, how to serve or how to consume. How to build up or how to destroy. We may not even know which one we are doing, or when we are doing both.

The second part of finding your spiritual way once you know who you are and what you believe most deeply is the part we usually start with first, trying to respond to what’s outside ourselves, how to meditate, how to pray, asking the questions to what do we meditate? to what do we pray? how do we practice? What are we searching for? We take on and off religions and spiritual practices, philosophies and theologies, like so many pairs of shoes, trying to find the one that fits best, looks best, feels best, when we have not really examined ourselves, our own feet.

For those of you who know yourselves well, you may have found a pair of shoes that fit well, at least for now, and you are walking in these shoes down the path of your life. You have much to share with the rest of us. What I know in the deepest part of myself is that we are held in the hands of a loving power that can keep us from sinking into nothingness, if we can feel its presence, the presence of life or the presence of nature or the presence of mystery, the thing that catches our breath and makes us see that grasshopper moves her jaws back and forth to chew the sugar in our hand, instead of up and down, as Mary Oliver described in her poem this morning.
If we can know that the pain we feel is the depth of our capacity to love, a gift from the loving presence of all, then we can always go on, we will not fall into a void of nothingness. It’s this connection to the Spirit, a belief or faith, or actual feeling of connection, that takes my theology from an intellectual exercise more into a synthesis of how to live. Because I feel connection, I have come to believe that connection is what counts. This is called relationship. We have our relationships with one another, our relationships with families, our church community and all our other communities, and we might have a relationship with ourselves, a knowledge of our inner spirit which connects to the spirit outside ourselves. Sometimes we might feel that spirit in another’s love, another’s smile, a connection and relationship of tangible human proportion. But sometimes we feel that connection to nature, to the beauty of the sky and flowers and trees and grass and wind and clouds a relationship to the spirit of nature, to what the world tells us. And sometimes we feel the connection through other forms of beauty, through dance and music and art and poetry, intellectual and visual beauty that comes to us from the creation of human hands, the human spirit.

Within our human hearts, we hold the spirit of justice and peace, fairness and freedom, gentleness and compassion. These human connections flow through us, and we offer them back through words and art, music and heart beats. Sometimes we feel the spirit move, even at church, through the music or words or through the closeness of those we love. We are in constant relationship with a thousand things, they pull at us, and they call to us, with the silence of a rock that has weathered the storms of a thousand years, that is smooth on one side from resting, embedded in sand for a hundred years and rough on the other from being blown by the winds, shaped by rain and cracked by snow, full of interesting jagged edges and crevices it becomes both rock and stone, a reminder of the harshness, the potential for evil, the reality of nature and life, and a reminder of the beauty, peace and deep love at work in the world. AMEN