Here's a really good sermon...

...I once heard about saying goodbye to a loved one:

We have come again to that season when families and friends gather to have a great time... We don’t always pull off a great time, but we keep trying, we human beings, to celebrate holy days, and holidays, and coming together in hope to find out what’s new, and what of the old relationships we can count on.

Checking in on the Comedy Channel last weekend, I happened on a program by one of my favorite curmudgeons, Lewis Black. Everything upsets him, and he waxes churlishly about even the things he’s hopeful about. This program was about the holidays. A varied group of actors, comedians and serious scholarly commentators weighed in on holiday customs and the people who celebrate them.

It was a so-so program, and I didn’t watch much of it, but the comments reminded me about how much hyperbole there is about holiday expectations in all directions. I haven’t had a chance to check the science pages of the Times the last couple of weeks, but I bet there was an article somewhere about stress and the difficulties of getting along with family during the season’s festivities.

A moment from the movie, “Butterfield 8” sticks in my mind. Elizabeth Taylor’s character is a call girl. I remember her leaving late at night the place where she had been with a client. As she tosses her mink over her shoulder she looks back at him and tosses off this line: “Well, now I’m going home to the bosom of my family...and a mighty flat chest it is.”

By birth and by choice, and by accident we are all part of families. Near by or far flung, we create families. Emotionally close or deeply estranged, families are compelling – by their absence as well as in their presence.

Our families of origin know us best – they “knew us when,” so to speak. If the old ones are still around, they knew us when we were just forming – when we were full of energy and sass, with our certainties and uncertainties, when we were callow or precocious, just starting our journeys.

If you are one of the old ones, when the whole group gets together, look at those faces... And maybe you can see yourself mirrored among them, before your hairline and your hopes receded a little. Before you were successful. Before you began to understand how much compassion for others you would need in life, and how much compassion you yourself would require. Do we ever start out knowing that? I think of what Mark Twain said about his father: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." It takes a while for compassion to grow in us.

Searching for the origin of a phrase about “home”, I found it in a poem by Robert Frost. In a 1990 lecture, Stanley Burnshaw talks about Frost and about the poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.” He reflects on the sense of the poem bringing together two contraries.

[There are] two contradictory speakers, each one right in his or her way, and only when the points of view are joined is the poem resolved. Yet the resolution is not tied up in a neatly restful way. On the contrary, it is open-ended, that is, we are left with two points of view, but although they have clung to their differences, they have made a species of truce, and the poem concludes, concludes in an open-ended way.

The poem begins as the wife rushes to meet her husband returning from market to tell him that the hired man, Silas, "is back...be kind." She has found the often hard-working but undependable hired man exhausted, huddled weak and asleep against the barn door. She has brought him into the house, and now he is resting on a kitchen chair by the stove... She greets her husband outside, before he can come in the house and complain about Silas within his hearing, and so they sit on the front porch steps as she tells him about it.
[Silas] “is back...be kind.” He answers: "when was I ever anything but kind to him? / But I’ll not have the fellow back." Many lines later, after the sketched-in background – Silas’ good work, his ongoing argument with the young hired-boy bound for college, his estrangement from his own banker brother, his coming and going from the farm unreliably, and, now, his silent weariness – they sit and talk:
. . . .Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
"Warren," she said, "he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time."

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.". . . .

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in. And Burnshaw suggests something profound about home and families when he says these two, husband and wife, cling to their differences, but they make a species of truce, and so the poem concludes, much like some family gatherings conclude, in an open-ended way, nothing much resolved or changed, but open-ended. I should have called it something you somehow don’t have to deserve.

~

I was called home to Akron, Ohio two weeks ago. At her assisted living home, my mother, Mary, had consistently been refusing to eat or drink anything for about a week. My nephew Ben, who is just ending a cruise around the Mediterranean, had planned his trip for some time. He left for it on his birthday at the beginning of the month, satisfied that his grandma was in good hands and doing pretty well. So, decisions were in my hands alone.

I consulted with several people to confirm my initial understanding that my mother was letting go of her life. Over the last few years she had been slowly drifting from us into forgetfulness – a kind of mostly compliant dementia and weakness of body. She wasn’t sick, just old – she would have been ninety-one next month.

A while back when I’d seen her last, she didn’t say my name. Recently when my aunt, her sister Anne, visited, she’d lost her name, too. But one of her most repeated stories was about her family, her brothers and sisters. At dinner time, when all five of them came home from school, they would want to talk at the table about their days. My grandmother would tell them, “Taç si munca – the food is hot – munca!” That means, “Be quiet and eat!”

As I sat with her those three precious last days, I heard her pray. A Unitarian Universalist since 1961, at her core a Baptist heart was still beating. She began as she always did, “Dear Heavenly Father...” and then said some words I didn’t hear; and at the end said, “In Jesus name we pray. Amen.”

On Tuesday I sang to her – “Balm in Gilead,” and “In the Garden,” and “Jesus Loves Me.” She wasn’t responding much by then, but when I sang “Jesus Loves Me,” her eyebrows went up. I made up a song about loving her. More than once I said the five things that a person needs to hear when they are actively dying – I love you. Thank you. Forgive me for anything I’ve done to hurt you or upset you. If you think you’ve done anything to hurt me or upset me, I forgive you. And, We’ll be okay – Ben and I will take good care of each other.

On Tuesday she thanked the staff when they bathed her or adjusted her oxygen cannula. On Wednesday, she said her last words to me. I was leaving her room for a few minutes and said I’d be right back. She murmured something. I didn’t catch it, so I went closer and leaned in near her face and said, “What, Mom? I didn’t hear you.” Eyes closed, she said it again: “Taç si munca.” I said, “Okay, Mom.”

I chuckled all the way to the elevator. She didn’t have the energy to repeat the whole story again, but she gave me the punch line. Her last words were about family.

All that hyperbole about the holidays – Black Friday retail bingeing, stress, “coping” with our families --- it all just strikes a sour note in me, even more discordant this year.

This time we have together on earth is so brief. Sometimes when we’re younger, it seems life will go on and on, or that what’s happening right now is unimportant and what were doing is only on-the-way to the real thing, the better things, the right life. But, ordinary as today is, three days after our American Thanksgiving – that food fest with its murky mythic beginnings; the turkey drying out, the gravy long gone, the pies a memory – this ordinary Sunday is a Sabbath that is a day that will not come again, perfect just as it is.

And, this gathering here, this constellation of souls will never gather again in just the same way, looking out these windows at the bare tree branches against the late autumn sky.

And those families of ours in their generations – large and small, contentious or serene, or troubled by secrets too long untold, or love held back, or full of laughter and intelligence – our families keep changing through subtraction and addition, and next November they will not be like they were this year. And, at each moment, they are what they are, and among them also are seeds and flowers and fruit of all who have come and gone before – perfect as they were in their time, once and no more.

So, Lewis Black and his celebrities can make fun of our customs; and psychological pundits can caution us about the stress of being with our families --- and both their lightness and concern have their place in this most familial of seasons. But, right now I want to open this day and this season to the possibility of the holy in the middle of it all.

By holy, I don’t mean perfect or divine or elevated or rare, even. I mean I want to open this season and this day, and our hearts, to the capacity in us to have a flash of the full goodness of the moment. In the middle of the rush, a moment of ease, a smile, a letting go of some idea of how it should be, a letting go into a moment of being awake to whatever is happening with clear eyes and an open heart.

If you will, take just a moment to be still, eyes closed or open.

Be still in the weather of this day, in the weather of your spirit.
Be still in the climate of your given or chosen family to know them as simply perfect as they are, just as they are, the only way they could be, and

You, perfect just as you are, and

Precious, and all of it brief, and only once.

Then, let it all go.

And, now, know this next moment as once only, too,

All day, moment-by-moment, perfect and filled with blessing,
blessing, blessing.

Say this, then, to this ordinary Sabbath day, and to this season
in the dying of the year:

I love you.

Thank you.

We’re not perfect, but we’re pretty good.

We will be okay. We are okay.

Thank you. I love you.

And, in the name of all that is holy and good, let us say Amen.