Longing

A sermon preached to the congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel

in St Louis, MO on September 15, 2007

I got something unusual in the mail. Even as I saw it, I couldn’t believe they found me. How could they? They found Bonnie, too. How, I don’t know. I’m talking about the alumni organization. My community college from 25 years ago found me here in Kirkwood. How could they do that?

Since I went to that school, I’ve moved across state lines, I’ve traveled, I’ve had many jobs. I”ve changed bank accounts, addresses, credit cards– and still!– 25 years later, out of the blue, they find me in Kirkwood. They want my updated information, and undoubtedly a donation to the alumni fund.

An alumni fund for a 2 year community college? But then I saw a review of one of my classmates in the magazine. She had been in a band called Betty, which apparently was still going strong after all these years.

I began to remember those days– what life was like, who I was, a sort of general unhappiness punctuated by laughing until we cried. I didn’t really long for those days. Because I would have spent them differently had I known what I know now.

But having my community college find me turned out to be the least of who was looking for me. Because then I got the really dreaded mail.

From an organization that is reputedly one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the world. It has 4 letters. Those letters are AARP: The American Association of Retired Persons.

I knew that had to be a mistake. For one thing, not only am I not retired, but I’m not that close to 65. But it turns out– to increase it’s membership I suppose– that AARP has lowered its lower age limits down to 50.

Okay, but I’m not 50 yet. How could AARP find me? They had a little membership card with my name and address already filled in. All I had to do was check a box, promise to pay something like $12 a year and I’d get a new magazine subscription– filled with pictures of grey haired people playing golf or something.

The letter said you had to be 50 within a month. So, I tossed the letter, the little name card and the outer envelope into the paper recycling. I wasn’t going to be 50 in a month.

This is the part where we see the hands on a clock spin around madly. And guess what? The dreaded envelope arrived again. It read like a disappointed business associate. It reminded me I had not taken them up on their offer, and why not? They said it was a good offer, and I should take them up on it, and now I was within the window of their age limit.

I began to think of AARP as a semi-polite representative of the Grim Reaper. I will keep saying “no thank you,” until– I’m no longer able.

I will forever remember Emily Dickinson’s line: “because I could not stop for Death/ he kindly stopped for me.”

It was about that time that I began to notice that the activities for “older adults” at the YMCA had an age limit of 50 or 55 depending on the activity. I happen to know who “older adults” are at the YMCA. I’m over there 5 or 6 days a week to work out. And the old folks tend to take their exercise by swimming in the pool.

The men are constantly making remarks about how they think the pool water is a few degrees colder than yesterday. And the maintenance guy is constantly telling them no– it really is 83 degrees, just like yesterday.

Within the last couple of years, I’ve noticed these guys will include me in the conversation. They’ll talk to me, even though they have no idea who I am. And then I began to notice it at the grocery store, being in line.

Older people have an easier time talking to me than before– me a stranger– why?

And then it hit me like a freight train of fear in a horror movie. It hit me like cold water hit the wicked witch of the west: these older people, these senior citizens in the public square find it easier to talk to me now because– GASP! I’m one of them!

Oh! I’m melting! Oh, what a world!

Older people on the street see me as a possible companion, a confederate, a colleague– which is new and– interesting. I suppose.

Of course, aging is natural. The alternative to getting older is– being dead. Not much of a choice.

Still, the alumni magazine got me to thinking about people I’d known and what happened to them.

At some point in your life you think about old loves, different career paths you might have chosen. Many of you have come to Eliot from more conservative or orthodox traditions. You are firmly UU but you still miss some of the old stuff– maybe the hymns, maybe the ritual, maybe the “smells and bells” of your youth.

Garrison Keillor has this great bit about the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. They are stoics. Don’t talk much, don’t dance, don’t indulge in much of anything. Pain, pleasure, makes not that much difference. They are like mountains of granite– they endure.

But every once in a while– maybe at a wedding or funeral– and particularly at church. When they begin to sing the songs from the old country– when they begin to sing the hymns of their childhood in their native language– they are quickly reduced to tears.

Why?

Perhaps because of loss & longing for those times– who they were then– what the world was like then. And that the loss is so near to them, and so far in time, that the closeness and the distance simply makes their heart break all over again.

And they are no longer 75 year old men with degrees and grandchildren– they are simply human. And like all humans– when faced with real loss– and real emotion– they cry. They are reduced to tears, they are– once again– an acknowledged part of the human family.

Who can blame them for crying?

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a 75 year old man in the congregation, both of us watching a very attractive woman walk in front of us. We looked at each other, and without saying anything, we knew what we were thinking. “It doesn’t go away, he said.”

I think that for many middle aged men there still lives within them an 18 year old who yearns to drink too much, to take drugs to get closer to God, and most of all to have intimate relations with women who are totally wrong for them just in order to experience all the drama that those things would create.

But more powerful than the 18 year old is the man they are now. And their older self knows better. A gentle reminder is all it takes– the reminder that what they have now has been hard won and is worth so much more than adolescent fantasy– even if it is more or less biologically impossible to banish the fantasies forever. Who can blame them for crying?

We are reminded that we are human, and to be human is to be susceptible to such things.

And as it is with getting older and having your past creep up on you, so there is the confusion about yearning for the holy. And I say confusion in the most positive way– as a way of hope.

The word nostalgia comes from the Latin for “homecoming + pain.” I’m sure most of us have mixed feelings when recalling our past.

For some of us religion is a source of “homecoming + pain.”

I think atheists and agnostics still yearn to find the holy– it’s just that atheists have pretty much decided this is 99.9% impossible, while the agnostics are about 1% less sure. The rest of us are somewhere on a continuum. And in this church, and in Unitarian Universalism generally, we do not make a creedal test of these things known only through faith.

Sometimes I think we UUs yearn to find the holy in order to commune with it, even bow down in the Holy’s grandeur. But at the same time, we are leery of bowing down to anything, knowing how often bowing down turns into tyranny & slavery.

And, so many UUs wander, always willing to engage in conversations about the Holy, but are also ever vigilant about invitations to actually encountering the Holy on what might be the Holy’s own terms.

Most religious traditions speak of spiritual longing– that we come from God or the Holy, and are estranged from the Divine while we are here on earth– and long to return to whence we came.

In the 12^th century, Bernard of Clairvaux, a French monk, wrote the following:

The soul can no more be satisfied by earthly treasures than the hunger of the body can be satisfied by air. If you should see a starving man standing with his mouth open to the wind, inhaling drafts of air as if in hope of gratifying his hunger, you think him lunatic. But it is no less foolish to imagine that the soul can be satisfied with worldly things, which only inflate it without feeding it.

And so, if you start a spiritual practice, to try and move closer the Holy, you are immediately set upon by paradoxes which confound the mind: how can you get closer to that whose center is everywhere and whose edges are nowhere?

And with few notable exceptions, nobody gets close to the Holy quickly or easily or sometimes at all. In The Cloud of Unknowing and other works, (Clifton Wolters, trans. Penguin Books, 1978) we read:

When you first begin you will find only darkness, as it were a cloud of unknowing. You do not know what it means except that you will feel [in yourself] a simple steadfast intention reaching out towards God. Do what you will and this darkness and this cloud remains between you and God... By darkness I mean ‘lack of knowing.’– just as anything you do not know or may have forgotten may be said to be ‘dark’ to you, for you cannot see it with your inward eye... So if you are to stand and not fall, never give up your firm intention: bear away at this cloud of unknowing between you and God with that sharp dart of longing love.

But how to pierce the unknowing? Different religious traditions have different prescriptions. One teacher put it this way:

This deepest form of prayer is really just the willingness to be still and let the longing in your heart go out without defining or understanding where it is going. This is faith. Our minds cannot see the goal of our spiritual training.

Our minds cannot grasp God, cannot even begin to say what God is, yet our hearts are reaching out. From an edited version of a dharma talk given by Rev. Kinrei in Berkeley, CA May 2000.

Some would say that all longing is a longing for the divine. Some would say that longing for God and only experiencing absence is itself the experience of God.

Some would say that longing is good– if you long for someone, it means your sense of self is simply larger than your own body, and it means your heart is wider, your circle of concern larger than your own immediate needs.

Others would say that longing is a ghostly feeling, and you can choose which feelings to recall: to do more than acknowledge longing is to indulge in weakness.

Despite whatever explanation, reasoning, or fanciful imaginings you come up with to explain it or deal with it, longing can be painful, pleasant or bittersweet– like a stinky but warm place to wallow like a hog.

Rabbi Marc Gafni writes about the longing for God:

There is something lurking in our souls. It fills us with awe even as it fills us with terror. It strips away all our pretenses even as it whispers to our greatness. It is the inconsolable longing that beats in the breast of every human. It is the knowledge that ultimately this world with all of its dignity and majesty can never satisfy our ultimate longings.

We possess a noble nostalgia for a reality that [we] cannot describe and the mind cannot define. But we know with all of our being that it is there.

The humanist might say awe & terror are primitive, they are part of our animal bodies, which our minds– in some small way can transcend. And that ultimately this world– with all its pleasure and pain, its extraordinary beauty, its ugliness, and its odd coincidences– is all we have. Some things we are not given to know, and that’s all there is.

For myself, I have found a temporary cure for longing. One that is not self-destructive.

It’s meditation. A way to find peace. If you truly feel at peace, then you long for nothing. At least for a few moments. In Connecticut– we had a new baby, my spouse had work struggles. Her family was far away in Missouri. We weren’t getting along very well. We were too busy. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping because I had “monkey mind.” My mind was racing with this thought or that problem.

I decided to try meditation. And it worked. Finishing a session was healing.

You know how you can be on vacation or it’s a Saturday morning, and maybe it’s cool outside. And you begin to wake up– slowly, maybe your eyes are still closed, but you realize you are moving from sleep to wakefulness, and you’re not in a hurry, you’re not overtired or anything.

Your body is very still. You could just open your eyes and leap out of bed. But you don’t. You lie there, enjoying the deliciousness of the simple act of waking up. You let your ears hear the sounds around you: perhaps birds singing, trucks rolling down the road a ways off.

Maybe next, you very slowly open your eyes, letting them get adjusted to the light in the room. Meanwhile, you haven’t moved a muscle in your body. You’re just lying there. And then your eyes are open, and you are at peace. Until the phone rings or your bladder tugs at you, and you’re up and on with your day.

But you remember those moments of peacefulness, those few moments that fed you spiritually. And I think that’s what meditating is like.

After 20 minutes of closed eyes and trying to do nothing more than count my breaths– from 1 to 10, and then starting over. And starting over no matter what the count if I begin thinking about other things.

Always returning to begin counting from 1 if I get distracted. In that 20 minutes, I’m always able to slip away and do nothing more than count breaths. And at the end of 20 minutes, it is like waking up slowly.

First my ears hear the sounds in the room, I feel the warmth or coolness of the air, and slowly, at last, I open my eyes– not moving any other muscle. And I feel at peace, and for at least that one very moment– all is well with the world.

Soon enough worry will make its way back into the room and then into my head– but I will carry that sense of peace with me for a while, and my longing is stilled, longing is quiet, longing has been fed and filled by emptiness. Counter-intuitive, but it works. For me.

Your spiritual homework this week is to try some meditation. Set a timer if you have to, go where you will not be disturbed. Coming into a place like this Sanctuary during the week is a good place, and count your breaths to drive out all distractions and silence the monkey mind.

May you find a few moments of real peace. May that peace refresh you and help restore your soul.

May it be so, Blessed Be, and Amen.