Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Gratitude & So Long …

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
August 3, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

 

Reading from Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy

 

Indeed, as we heard in the reading from Joanna Macy, Earth justice advocate of great wisdom, gratitude is fundamental to human life. And we have so very much to be thankful for … and certainly chief among the gifts of grace, the gifts of chance, the gift of being conscious of it all, is the gift of life itself: That we have it, that it is at the essential center of our wakefulness in these wondrous bodies, is so truly amazing.

And at that very point of awareness of our wakeful appreciation, our sense of aliveness … is the equally powerful sensibility of our fragility. Our fragility so horrifically evident in the deranged assault and murders that were perpetrated in our Knoxville UU church last Sunday. That there are no guarantees, absolutely no guarantees in life; that life is fragile, evanescent as delicate bubbles, and just as beautiful … is rock certain.

Which only deepens the gratitude, doesn’t it. Seeing how tenuous is our life, our one wild and precious life, deepens our joy in it, our love for it, doesn’t it.

This is the last sermon I will share with you in this one-year ministry the Board of this congregation hired me to serve. I began in August of last year, and now this “consulting” ministry is ending. Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern will return to full time ministry with you on the fifteenth of this month, after enjoying her year with her daughter Indigo serving you half time. It was a gracious gesture for the Board to honor her request for this one year of part time ministering so she could more fully enjoy her daughter’s first year of life and engage more completely in becoming a mother, surely one of the most important tasks any human can have the privilege of fulfilling.

So … gratitude to the Board, for granting the half-time ministry to Amy. And … gratitude to the Board for hiring me to be her evil twin for a year.

One of the benefits for me of this year’s ministry, for which I am extremely grateful, is that the income I received for my service here allowed me to help my daughter, Caitlin, reestablish her self as a freelance illustrator upon her return to California after receiving her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I am grateful, as well, that collectively you have the wherewithal to support ministry well enough that I could do that for her.

 

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So this is “So long.” At least to this year of ministry. Since I am not an interim, nor an intern, there is no restriction on my returning to offer a sermon once in a while. You were the first congregation in California that I served as a fully accredited and ordained minister: I was ordained in my first ministry in Chicago where I served a year’s interim (95–96); I spent four years in Boulder, Colorado as settled minister (96–00); and then I took a long loop back to California by way of Atlanta, Georgia in another interim (00–01). Then I came here for two years as your interim while you were searching for Rev. Amy. The first sermon I preached as your Interim was the Sunday after 9/11. Because you were my first California congregation as a Rev, I feel a special bond to you all, and to this area of the San Francisco Bay bioregion. I would be happy to return on occasion when our schedules permit.

Speaking of California, and feeling its special power over me, a power that drew me back after those ministries out of state with a force of love and passion for this State that only became known to me once I had left — speaking of California, calls to mind, as you might expect from me, a poem. It was written by a man named Gary Young, who is one of the Fresno poets. (The power of California emanates from all quarters of its broad magnificence, which is no more clearly evident than in the fact that there are people who love Fresno dearly; the power of California, is further evident in the very fine school of poets that has arisen in Fresno, a phenomena that is surely testimony to the fact that miracles exist.) The poem I want to read is called: Our Life in California.

Our Life in California

Near San Ardo the grasses tremble
and oak trees bend to the south against a constant wind.
Here our faith is tested
by the air that passes us ceaselessly
and takes each lost breath as we stumble through the hills.
The monotony of breathing, like our heartbeat,
is not the reassuring monotony
of the hills stacked row upon row
beyond our bearing and our ken.
The sun moves with the wind and will be gone,
but there is another light
coming from below, casting trees from the shadows.
There is a shadow beneath me
which moves as I move,
and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass
know more than I know of my duty here,
my worth and my chance.

“The sun moves with the wind and will be gone, / but there is another light / coming from below, casting trees from the shadows. / There is a shadow beneath me / which moves as I move, / and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass / know more than I know of my duty here, / my worth and my chance.”

That poem, in a fine collection called the Geography of Home, all poems by poets who have lived in, or are here now in California, that poem and the book kept my spirits up when I was living in Atlanta. During that year my heart cracked open in homesickness so deep I had to carry this book with me everywhere I went in that city, a city so unbearably hot and humid in the summer its citizens call it “Hotlanta.” I had to keep this book by my side for reassurance and hope, hope that I would someday return, return here to this blessed geography of home.

So I’m home now, and I will be here until I die. Gratitude, then, that I have a bioregion for home that is so beautiful, so powerful, so culturally and racially diverse, and so politically cutting edge. Gratitude.

But that poem of Gary Young’s … Its last two sentences, set up so well by the others before it: “The sun moves with the wind and will be gone, but there is another light coming from below, casting trees from the shadows. There is a shadow beneath me which moves as I move, and the tracks I leave in the fragile grass know more than I know of my duty here, my worth and my chance.”

We are born out of shadow. We are born out of a dark womb, and though our brilliant science can track the entire physiology of conception, gestation and birth — that all these things come together as they do, the enormously complex chemical and biological forces, intricately timed and building from simple cells into a fleshy, living human infant, who grows its wondrous tiny body into a marvelous, graceful adult, is one of the marvels of the universe. Out of the darkness, through the labyrinth of an organic path so wondrous it stops the breath, out of darkness our human destiny is born.

And what Gary Young named in that last line … “the tracks I leave in the fragile grass know more than I know of my duty here, my worth and my chance” … naming there that out of his contact with the real, with the earth, where he gave of himself in his own journeying, and where the blessed grass hills of California received his steps, out of that … his worth and his chance to live a true life are born. Gratitude for this land, violently become a state, this land of golden light and golden hills, become my home, become my home from the time my parents drove here from Philadelphia in their black Plymouth coupe when I was three years old, 62 years ago; a coupe with a rumble seat where I used to sit alone when we drove back from the beach in the cool of coastal southern California evenings, my skin still warm from a day wild in the sun, my nostrils still aching with the sweet pungency of the wave foam and sea salt.

Gratitude that my chance came with my father’s restlessness, and his dream of California, my chance to find my worth as a man, as a human being. Working first as a teacher of disordered and disturbed children of this land, the children no regular public school could tolerate, the children who suffered the deepest wound, the severing of the bond with their parents. Gratitude for those adolescents, children all, who taxed my spirit like roaming hordes of pain-wracked banshees, active and fierce in their demands, and so devastatingly fragile. Working later as a therapist, training for a number of years with Carl Rogers and the community of person centered therapists and change agents that rose up around him. Gratitude to meet and work with one of the world’s greatest psychologists.

And then … the call to ministry. My ego hooked by the power of the pulpit, and then my hooked ego, crumbling again and again, as I tried to meet the demands of the love and the truth telling that ministry requires. Love and truth telling beyond the abilities of any human being, no matter how gifted.

Gratitude for all of it, even my father’s violent alcoholism that taught me the power of human suffering so deep it can disorder the mind and soul … his violence that made me struggle for every ounce of integrity I have finally secured … Gratitude for that and for the continuing struggle, ever more creative and lightly held, to live a truly liberated and authentic life.

Gratitude, as well for a community crazy enough, open enough, daring enough, quirky enough, to certify me into ministry — surely one of the most astounding professions to which any woman or man could choose to subject themselves.

But in that choice, the developing skill of heart to be able to hold, within the single chalice of my body-mind, both pain and joy, both the ravages of oppression, particularly of racism (to which I am deeply dedicated to address), and the healing fire of dissent. All that … gifts of my work for which I am deeply, deeply grateful.

Gratitude, too, that the preciousness of life has begun to take up residence in my heart, rooting itself in my heart so that I know I am truly at home on the Earth. At home on this Earth and at home in the company of life and “the ten thousand things,” as they say in Zen, that make up the vibrant complexity and richness of life on this gorgeous, imperiled planet. Gratitude that that preciousness has given birth to a new intimacy that breathes tenderness into a mind that has known more disorder than I would ever have chosen had I been given the chance to live otherwise.

It all calls to mind another poem — dark and joyous of W. S. Merwin, great poet of the Vietnam War, still writing today from his home in Hawaii. His poem Listen … Thank you. Let me read it:

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you … and waving …
dark though it is

There it is … the pain and the witness to pain … the violence and the heart that embraces even that … the acute awareness of the difficulty of our times, and what could be immobility before the full recognition of how very late is the hour of our stay on this planet, that intense awareness and recognition — and still the thanks keep flowing, tumbling from the heart and the lips in a song that will never, as long as I have breath, never give into evil; never relinquish the field of human integrity to hate, to greed, to ignorance; never stop speaking truth to power; never stop speaking truth; never stop loving, never stop loving, never … never … never.

May you all, here, go on. May you go on to speak your own truths. May you go on to find your own voice, as persons and as a community, the voice that is willing to speak even when there are threats. You remember the Buffalo Springfield lyrics from For What It’s Worth:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

Stop children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down.

May your open minds see, your welcoming-risking hearts reach out. May your sweet spirits rise courageous: never stop speaking truth to power, never stop speaking truth, never stop loving, never stop loving, never … never … never …

 

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.