November 6, 2005
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
We gather
this morning to say thank you. Thank you. In
the Universalist Tradition, this is all Souls Sunday. Let us say thank you for all souls! Let us say thank you, with Alice Walker, for
our ancestors. In her words, “The grace
with which we embrace life in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a
measure of what has gone before.”
So let
us say thank you for those who have gone before. In our own faith tradition, let us say thank
your for Ralph Waldo Emerson; let us say thank you for Susan B. Anthony.
And let
us say thank you for loved ones who have passed away this past year.
Let us
say thank you for Sandy Allen’s brother, Gary Allen.
Thank
you for Carolyn Banfield’s dear friend Donald Carr.
Thank
you for Gary Cook’s uncle Leonard.
Thank
you for Tom Darner’s mother, Birchie Virginia Darner.
Thank
you for John Fanselow’s mother, Peggy Fanselow.
Thank
you Josie Arens step-mother Josephine Felix,
Thank
you for Andy Wolf’s sister Susanna Lenzer Wolf,
Thank
you for Gail Scarbrough’s mother Helen Scarbrough,
Thank
you for Cathy Roma’s mother-in-law, Nell Smith,
Thank
you for Emily Hodges mother, Harriet Moffett Snyder,
Thank
you for Judy Strong’s brother, Robert Lowell Strong
Thank
you for Howard Tolley’s mother, Dorothy J. Tolley
And let
us say thank you for Ruth Anne Wolfe’s aunt, Rev. Miss Edith Helen Wolfe,
So many
gifts we have been given: gifts of love, gifts of hope, gifts of life.
These
loved ones have given us another gift. A gift we might not be so quick to reckon but
that Alice Walker reminds us of. In
their passing was the gift of suffering, the gift of grief. The least welcome of the gifts, yet perhaps
as important as any. When loved ones die, after a long life and slow decline,
or suddenly, young in a terrible accident, we are called to consider the gifts
they brought us; called to find meaning in the passing.
These
dark moments, short, long are important and never to neglected.
We do not want to go there, but consider the words of Howard Thurman
from our reading. He says that “It is the central conscious ground
of personal being that is at last confronted by suffering, and in that ultimate
private encounter the battle is won or lost.”
Thurman
tells us that times of anguish are not only real, but central for our self-understanding,
of answering “who am I.” Thurman’s words:
But
if the person comes to grips with his suffering by bringing to bear upon it
all the powers of his mind and spirit, he moves at once into a vast but solitary
arena. It is here that he faces the authentic adversary.
He looks into the depth of the abyss of life and raises the ultimate
question about the meaning of existence. He
comes face to face with whatever is his conception of ultimate authority,
his God. (Page 45)
In Twelve
Step Programs, the times Thurman speaks of are called hitting bottom.
An alcoholic, a drug addict cannot turn to the path of recovery until
they hit bottom, until they take that look into the abyss of their life. If
the drug addict is not sick and tired of being sick and tired, she will not
turn to recovery.
Addicts
have no special purchase on hitting bottom. We all have moments of great pain. Are they meaningless, or do we wonder why we
are sick and tired of being sick and tired of how our lives are going, that
quiet desperation Thoreau spoke of?
One such
time for me was during my seminary education. As part of my practical training I spent an
academic quarter on a children’s cancer ward as a chaplain. It still amazes me how differently each child
responded. Most dealt well with it,
I would say. One child, however, seemed
in the very pits of despondency. There
seemed to be a great grayness about him. None
of us, nurses, myself, would go to his bed in the hall when he came back from
X-ray, to return him into his room. The
darkness about him seemed so impenetrable.
There
was also a 16 year old young man whose way of coping was to spend his time
being cheerful and constantly busy helping the other youngsters. He had Hodgkin’s disease. He had me fooled. One night when I was not around he broke down
and shared his fears with another chaplain.
I ended up in therapy, beginning a quest for answers which still desert
me.
When loved
ones die, the pain is real. We fool ourselves if we think we can walk away
from the pain. It is real, grief is
natural. And so much of the pain of
loss seems innocent. Yes, we say to
ourselves, an elderly parent passed away; that’s human life. But was the suffering still not innocent? How did anyone come by a racked, suffering body?
If a young person dies in a terrible automobile accident, we see the
innocence of it. Perhaps we call it meaningless. But was it?
But it was innocent. We hit bottom. How we deal when confronted with suffering;
what we resolve in the ultimate private encounter determines who we are more
than anything else.
The great
Victorian poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, struggled with the issue of
why innocents suffer. He wrote one of his greatest poems “In Memoriam”
as a response to the death of his closest college friend, Arthur Henry Hallam.
Hallam died suddenly in 1833 when Tennyson was twenty-four. Tennyson spent the next seventeen years struggling
with his death, struggling to write “In Memoriam. “ His death seemed innocent,
perhaps meaningless;
Are
God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That
I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear,
Nature
does produce so much more, an abundance of diversity, more than appears necessary.
So if the single one goes down, it seems meaningless. Here Tennyson
seems to hit bottom. He encounters
a glimmer of hope and grasps at what little he can:
Oh
yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That
nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
The poet
hits bottom, in that private encounter with what is ultimate for him.
He knows his struggle goes on. In
that ultimate private encounter, was his battle not won; through it, he became
a great poet. He turned his personal struggle with innocent
suffering into great poetry for us all.
Yes, we
all know this struggle. This morning we gave to the relief effort for
the victims of the horrific earthquake in the
An old
man limps down a mountain side, in robe, turban and staff.
What did
they do to deserve this? These people suffer innocently. We need to appreciate
what innocent suffering is, because it can escape us.
While we reject in our conscious thoughts that people suffer because
they are bad, yet such is an all too common childish thinking.
As Thurman remarks, “It is easy to inflict pain indiscriminately upon
others by the simple device of defining them as subhuman and therefore as
nonmembers of the human family.” (page 38) And if it is easy to inflict pain
on those we define as subhuman, how much easier to cast them aside in our
thoughts as just more rubbish to the void.
Our struggle
to grasp why innocents suffer, a child dies after living for five days from
a doctor’s failure to tend to her; our parents struck down by a loss of electricity
in the wake of a hurricane, those struggles with the suffering of those
we love as well as the tribulations of strangers, is age old. There are many stories our tradition offers
us to help us to come to terms. In
the Bible, the book of Job is most celebrated in this regard. Job suffers innocently, as far as the story
goes, because Satan, the Father of Lies, tempts God. If this good man Job
suffers, will he curse God? And so
Job suffers. His so called comforters
come along. Good Hebrews, good Pharisees
as Jesus called them, say Job suffered because he was bad. There is much theology that says that all suffering
is the result of being bad. There is not such thing as innocent suffering.
Your very pain proves you are bad, as Thurman recalled of his breaking his
arm.
I spent
a number of hours this past week watching several memorial services for Rosa
Parks. Jesus and the image of the cross
were prevalent. For Rosa Parks, one
picked up one’s cross and went with it. “You go girl!” Suffering is part of life. “It is the central conscious ground of personal
being that is at last confronted by suffering, and in that ultimate private
encounter” that Rosa Parks won through. Somewhere
she knew those dark moments, hit bottom. Her quiet strength was already part of her when
she was arrested. she knew.
The cross
is one of the common images for suffering in our culture. And I think that Jesus was saying, as his death
on the cross makes plain, that most suffering is innocent. He didn’t deserve
to die on the cross. Not even to prove that God loved humanity. Justifying Jesus’ death on the cross for any
purpose destroys his message to humanity:
most suffering is innocent, undeserved.
Powerful stuff.
More important
than why we suffer is what are we going to do about it. What do you do with
it? As Thurman says, as Rosa Parks
says, as Jesus says, so what? The question is, what do you do when you hit
bottom, when you say enough is enough. All
of us have these moments. Another way
the question has been put, “It’s not about the cards you were dealt, but how
you played them that matters.’
When we
see the innocent suffering that seems to have been so much part of this year,
the tsunami, the hurricanes, how do you respond?
What’s your attitude? It has been overwhelming. It has been hard to struggle at times with all
the suffering. But do we want to be
part of the solution, or part of the problem?
When suffering
happens, to those we love, to ourselves, to innocents thousands of miles away,
we want to wish it away. We want… what do we want? We want to play God and make bad things disappear. Is it okay not to be God, not to be able to
fix others pain?
We sit
at the bedside of a dying loved one. As we sit there, can we accept that we are
not God, and let the life of our loved one unfold, perhaps as it should?
One time
I went to a gathering at a church down the street from the one I served.
They were having three Tibetan lamas speak.
When I got there, one of the people I recognized was a woman who lived
upstairs from my office. She was a
temporary doctor, filling in for six months here, six months there when permanently
positioned doctor went on sabbatical or had other leave.
We had
talked a few times before, and I knew that she had spent time six months at
an Indian reservation in
When the
lama called for questions, she asked how we should respond to the suffering
of others. The lamas gave a traditional
Buddhist answer, that suffering is caused by attachment to self.
I knew her well enough to know that it was not the answer she was seeking.
As a doctor, she saw particular faces when she thought about helping
people.
During
the reception afterwards, I chatted with her. Knowing that she had asked a
somewhat different question than the one answered, I suggested that it was
not up to anyone one of us to help everybody, only to help those we are with, those who we are able to
help. Hopefully others help those we are not able to help, just as we help
those they cannot reach.
A few
days later, I received in the mail one of my most prized mementoes of my ministry.
The cover of the card shows two mountain goats resting near the heights
of the
Thank
you for the souls of those we love and will not forget.
Thank you for our parents, thank you for our dearest mates, for brothers
and sisters, for children, for ancestors.
Yes, and
also, thank you, thank you for the gift of our lives.