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Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault

STARTING Again and again and again
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
January 1, 2006

OPENING READING: from The Joy of Being Human (p.11)

The beginning of the year is a good time to shake hope down from the heavens where it has been thought to dwell for so long. It is also appropriate to reflect on our own responsibility to generate hope by responding to the needs of others. That is the kind of resolution that each of us keeps best in the circumstances of our own lives and relationships – in those intimate areas that only we can enter, the sacred places in the lives of those we love that are known only to us. Hope is what we plant in the lives of others; the more we plant the greater is the harvest. Hope is what makes the future for all of us. It is our best gift to an old world in a new year.

Eugene Kennedy

MEDITATIVE READING: from The Human Side of Human Beings (pp. 87-91)

…we do not ever really give up trying to get our hurts out of our system, not even as weary adults. The more we observe people with these insights in mind, the more it is clear that each person, every day of…life, reaches out to someone in some way or other…

All of us feel deeply this need of our own to have someone to listen to us, to pay real attention to us, to care about us, but all of us are thoroughly conditioned to refuse to meet this need in others…

We continually seek this concern and attention from others, even though we are continually disappointed. I have on occasion asked a lecture audience, “What would it be like to have someone really, deeply interested in you and wanting to hear you talk about yourself indefinitely?” A deep, yearning sigh always goes up from the audience, before the realization of what they have admitted triggers embarrassment and the following burst of laughter.

Harvey Jackins

SERMON: “Starting Again and Again and Again”

Happy New Year! But let’s be real: time is not so easily categorized into a new year or an old one; into a beginning or an ending.

The Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing that rock up the mountain, only to have it fall back down - thereby forcing him to try again and again and again - tells us about the blending of beginnings and endings.

About continuing. About hope.

Like Sisyphus, we must realize that to exist at all means we will forever be starting – and ending - again and again and again. But that we have a chance, with such a reality before us, to remain expectant, wishful, and confident or resigned, hopeless, and unsure.

Indeed, sometimes with all this blending of beginnings and endings, our very perception of “time” blurs. It does for me at the turning of the year – whatever year the calendar names it. It is the time when I remember the year just officially over as well as other years. I remember my achievements and picayune necessities; expansive joys that called me beyond my ordinary existence, in addition to deflating occurrences that pushed me back into a dark cave.

But this New Year time is also the time when I ruminate on the possibility of new adventures in the coming year. The excitement comes – it always does. Well, at least so far.

So, the past and the future connect. And hope surrounds the process.

The image that comes to mind is one of tapestry weaving; of mixing the old with the new; of fashioning a whole piece, complete with scraps of yesteryear and the newest cuts of future cloth; of hoping to make a thing of beauty.

So celebrating a New Year allows us to breathe a bit between who we were and who we might grow to be; this can be a meditative, and therefore instructive time for us, leading us into more satisfying lives.

And let’s hear if for the New Year, certainly, but let’s also send a rousing “huzzah” for all those Old Years that, in truth, had to happen before we could have this New Year. Let us know, that really, they all are mixed in; they all make up the tapestry of our individual and collective lives.

Not that all the things of past years have been wonderful. Still, they have led to this moment.

So what are some of those experiences this past year that can lead us to a deeper appreciation of life and of the future before us?

Think about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami, the Pakistani earthquake and other natural disasters – of how, despite the horrors these aspects of nature gave to so many, life goes on. The people keep pushing the rock up the mountain, hoping beyond hope.

The words of Emily Dickinson come to mine, when she speaks of hope:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

Truly, hope is within us, says the poet; it sings the song within us, even if it does not know the words - that is, it cannot tell how or why our life will get better. Still that “thing with feathers” sings.

Perhaps Emily was thinking of the dove that is a symbol of hope in the story of another flood – of Noah and the Ark. Of how Noah set the bird free and it came back with an olive branch in its mouth – meaning that dry land had started to reappear after the flood. And how, after a period, Noah let the bird fly free again – and how it did not come back, meaning that it had at last found a home on land, and therefore Noah and his family and all those animals could once again come ashore, too.

Here the dove represents the hope of humankind that things will get better – that dry land will reappear for those who have been displaced by the devastations of nature this past year; that existence can start again and again and again.

So may the dove on our order of service cover this morning, speak to us of our own lives – of how each of us might find our particular safe harbor, our place of serenity, our community of dear friends with whom we might travel life’s path.

Langston Hughes also has that image of a bird as a symbol of hope when he says:

Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.

But you know it is about more than just what we hold inside ourselves that can give us hope. Truly, one of the things that disasters of a global magnitude and our own personal tragedies can teach is that foundational to being a human being is our need to know that somebody else cares enough about us to do something to help us; to be that dear friend with whom we might travel life’s path.

As Harvey Jackins in our meditation reading says:

All of us feel deeply this need of our own to have someone to listen to us, to pay real attention to us, to care about us, but all of us are thoroughly conditioned to refuse to meet this need in others…

Jackins’s last phrase: “but all of us are thoroughly conditioned to refuse to meet this need in others” might be overstating it a bit, I think. But truly there is often hesitancy for us to get involved in the tragedies of others – except in polite, often distant ways. Still, most of us – if we have a charitable conscience - feel that as a global community we really did not do enough to help those who suffered this past year.

But the need to help others and be helped in varying ways and measure is forever there: the need to have someone there to hear us out: to be there when we need to expose our emotional wounds; to be there when we need to share our good fortune, too.

As the Taoist writer Deng Ming Tao puts it:

Hope is our reaction to pain. We suffer, but in our suffering we sense that there is some way out of our pain, and we search for that opening.

In remembering the stories of these terrible acts of nature this past year, I particularly remember the stories of children who died in these disasters. Let us hope that their families had friends to help them, the way the dancer Isadora Duncan did when a friend consoled her. Says Isadora upon the death of her young children in a car accident:

The next morning I drove out to see (Eleanora), who was living in a rose-coloured villa behind a vineyard. She came down a vine-covered walk to meet me, like a glorious angel. She took me in her arms and her wonderful eyes beamed upon me such love and tenderness that I felt just as Dante must have felt when, in the “Paradiso,” he encounters the Divine Beatrice.

From then on I lived at Viareggio, finding courage from the radiance of Eleanora’s eyes. She used to rock me in her arms, consoling my pain, but not only consoling, for she seemed to take my sorrow to her own breast, and I realized that if I had not been able to bear the society of other people, it was because they all played the comedy of trying to cheer me with forgetfulness. Whereas Eleanora said:

“Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick,” and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said, “Cease to grieve,” but sue grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone. (My Life by Isadora Duncan)

All of us feel deeply this need of our own to have someone to listen to us, to pay real attention to us, to care about us… (Harvey Jackins)

Our closing hymn this morning - written by Carolyn McDade - reflects this sentiment as well, when it says:

And I’ll bring you hope when hope is hard to find,
And I’ll bring a song of love and a rose in the wintertime.

So as we consider the years that have left us, might we bring them back into memory recalling those who have throughout our lives, given us hope when hope was hard to find; might we also use our past experiences and lessons learned from those who have comforted us, to help others in the future that we have left to us.

Granted, there are many aspects of the past that blend with the present and the future – some of which can be beneficial. I do know one thing in this regard: that every New Year I have a bunch of resolutions – usually the same ones. Any of you know what I mean? Sometimes I write them out, sometimes I merely think about them. This year, 2006, I have decided to indeed blend the old with the new – given the fact that upon looking back on some of my own essays, I discovered the following one which seems quite appropriate for the year ahead, although I had to delete some references to past cultural phenomena. So here goes, my old resolutions back again as new ones – the rock has slipped and I need to keep pushing it up the mountain sloop.

My 1986 Resolutions
(Edited for purposes to make them:
My 2006 Resolutions)

The New Year is here! Let it be an ethical one. Here are some ways I suggest this might happen. Let us strive for:

OPENNESS: to those who share a species with us: to the fanatics, single-issue pontificators, politically murky, and those whose 2006 resolutions differ from ours.

WILLINGNESS: to react with thoughtful responses, rather than knee-jerk ones. Let us own the freedom to think, feel and act wisely, not necessarily in a prescribed manner.

EAGERNESS: to meet people where they are; to listen intently to what they have to say; to offer guidance when it is appropriate; to really “be” with them when we are with them.

ACCEPTANCE: of human imperfectability, so that we might be easier on others and ourselves. Let us appreciate the reality that mistakes come with being human.

DESIRE: to take more chances, knowing that playing safe can deny personal growth; that wanting to venture into the unexplored but never doing so, can be self-destructive.

QUESTING: for the passion of commitment to deeply felt causes. Let us have the tenacity to carry through with the hard task of turning abstract hopes into concrete realities.

DEDICATION: to appreciating life’s complexity, the scenario that makes us all villains and clowns. Let us understand the fragile web linking tears of sorrow with tears of joy.

PURSUIT: of our undiscovered being that awaits release. Let us seek more moments to discover the wisdom within us that wants to guide us toward greater fulfillment.

DEVOTION: to improving that uniquely constructed miracle of the planet: our very own body. Let us promise to treat it wisely, knowing that “vigilance” means survival.

JOURNEYING: on the pathway toward greater love of others and ourself, no matter how seemingly unlovable we might be at times. Let us think, feel, and act with love.

So, my dear friends, 1986 morphs into 2006 – the past links up with the present and into the future.

And might you and I get it more “right” this year than we have in previous years. Might we know as well that pushing that rock up the mountain is an ongoing task, but might we continue to push, keeping hope alive during even the most impossible tasks that might lie ahead of us.

Happy New Year to us all!

CLOSING WORDS:

Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life, if it be not too often frustrated; but entertaineth the fancy with an expectation of good.

Francis Bacon

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe