Dec. 27, 2015
Matt Alspaugh
Introduction
Tis the season! Of returns and exchanges, for some of us. For others, lamenting the gifts we expected but did not receive. For others still, it’s the time to be thinking about regifting possibilities.
There’s lots of advice out there about regifting — advice that is undoubtedly hard earned. For example, you are wise to attach a note to each regiftable item saying who it was from, so you don’t inadvertently give it back to them next year. You are wise to inspect the gift carefully, looking for inscriptions or other personalizations that would scream “regifted”! One writer noted: “I once read about a woman who gave a cookbook with a $100 bill tucked inside as a wedding gift. A couple of years later, the happy couple regifted that cookbook back to her for Christmas. How did she know? Because the $100 bill was still where she’d placed it.[1]” The short short on regifting is — if you are giving a gift as if it were new, it had better be in new condition. If you want to give anything other than new, then be honest about it. Be authentic.
Of course, you can always bring those used, funky, hideous gifts to a holiday gift exchange like we will have today during coffee hour — and don’t worry if you don’t have something to give, for some of us brought extra unwanted items to share.
WA Readings
I want thank John and Christine for serving as a Worship Associate today for the first time. Even though Christine is new at the Worship Associate role, she searched for readings for the service. Some Worship Associates do this, and others don’t. She suggested several readings and stories related to the topic, and one of these one really grabbed me and did not let go. This is how our Worship Associates program works best, for I would not have considered our reading today, Grace, by Joy Harjo, and yet it inspired me, and took me in a different direction.
Unexpected Gifts
Life is a gift. And yet, most of us have experiences in our lives that we look back on and see as unexpected, even unbidden gifts. I mean, times where one would say, “I would not wish that experience on anyone, but I am grateful to have gone through it.” Have you had experiences like that?
Last Sunday, I alluded to a difficult time in my life. I didn’t share details then, but I will now. Eight years ago, I was half way though my ministerial internship, a one-year full-time assignment, more compressed than Kristina’s two-year half time internship here, when my supervisor blindsided me with this comment, “What other work could you be doing? Because I’m not sure you’re cut out to be a minister.”
I was floored. I had a difficult stretch of days, and weeks, and months ahead, as I both discerned whether what he said was true, and as I convinced myself and then others — including him — that I was indeed cut out to be a minister. As I look back on that experience, I have come to see that conversation as a gift. I would not wish that experience on anyone, and yet I am grateful to have gone through it.
Kristina, our intern, shared with me this short poem by Mary Oliver:
The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.[2]
I have come to see that the box full of darkness I was given during my internship was in fact a gift.
Slaughter of Innocents
Now the first reading today was not picked by our Worship Associate. I picked it. If you were here on Christmas Eve, you will recall that we had a pageant, telling the birth story of Jesus, but I commented that the end of the story as told by Matthew is violent, and is never included in anyone’s Christmas pageant. This reading, from Matthew 2:16-18, known as the Slaughter of the Innocents, is that violent ending. And it has a connection to my internship experience.
You see, at the church where I was a ministerial intern eight years ago, they have a practice of having their intern preach on the Sunday after Christmas. The same topic is assigned every year. As you may have guessed, the intern is compelled to preach on Matthew 2:16-18. Today, right now, this moment, there is some poor intern, an innocent in her own way, preaching from that same pulpit on that same text. To me, it’s kind of a sick tradition, or a strange game? A game: what will the intern do? Dance around the story? Try to find goodness and light in there somewhere?
I — with my ministry called into question — I stared into that text face on. Jesus would have been in Egypt with his parents, out of the reach of the murderous Herod. In my sermon, I wondered how Jesus would have felt if he, as a child, learned that all the kids his age, all his cousins, potential friends, are dead, slaughtered, and that he was somehow connected with their deaths. Talk about survivor guilt. Self blame. That would change a person. That would be a box full of darkness.
Mary Oliver’s Story
That short poem by Mary Oliver caused me to begin to wonder about her poetry and her life. Many people do not think much of Mary Oliver’s poetry. They see it as too obvious, cloying, — lovely little verses about wild geese, and grasshoppers, and our soft animal bodies. But that poem, “The Uses of Sorrow”, suggested her story was more complex.
Mary Oliver’s childhood, in Maple Heights, Ohio, was not a happy one. She does not share the details widely, but she did talk about her past in an interview with Krista Tippett on OnBeing near her 80th birthday this year[3].
She tells Tippett:
“It was a very bad childhood for everybody, every member of the household, not just myself I think. And I escaped it, barely. With years of trouble.”
Oliver tells Tippett that she could not handle talking about her childhood except in a handful of poems she’s written. Here is one of those, which Oliver wrote when she was 50.
Rage
You are the dark song
of the morning;
serious and slow,
you shave, you dress,
you descend the stairs
in your public clothes
and drive away, you become
the wise and powerful one
who makes all the days
possible in the world.
But you were also the red song
in the night,
stumbling through the house
to the child’s bed,
to the damp rose of her body,
leaving your bitter taste.
And forever those nights snarl
the delicate machinery of the days.
When the child’s mother smiles
you see on her cheekbones
a truth you will never confess;
and you see how the child grows–
timidly, crouching in corners.
Sometimes in the wide night
you hear the most mournful cry,
a ravished and terrible moment.
In your dreams she’s a tree
that will never come to leaf–
in your dreams she’s a watch
you dropped on the dark stones
till no one could gather the fragments–
in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.
But Oliver survived. She tells Tippett:
“I saved my own life by finding a place that wasn’t in that house. And that was my strength. But I wasn’t all strength. And it would have been a very different life. Whether I would have written poetry or not, who knows? Poetry is a pretty lonely pursuit. And, in many cases I used to think, … that I [was] talking to myself. There was nobody else that in that house I was going to talk to. And it was a very difficult time, and a long time.
… But I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.
Only through her poetry, and only over the decades, has she been able to recover the memories of what she called that “very dark and broken house”, and to a degree, transform them. But only to a degree.
Oliver says,
“But mostly what makes you angry is the loss of the years of your life. Because it does leave damage. But there you are. You do what you can do.”
Sometimes a box full of darkness is a box full of darkness.
Sometimes a box full of sorrow is a box full of sorrow.
Narrative Therapy
When I worked as a chaplain in the hospital, one of the techniques we used in working with people was called Narrative Therapy. Yes, we as chaplains often found ourselves tapping into psychological and therapeutic methods as we did our work.
The premise of Narrative Therapy is to encourage the person to tell their stories, and look for areas in the stories where the person has made problematic assumptions that are not backed up by experience. We called these the ‘thin’ stories, that is the ones where the truth is stretched thin.
In the practice of Narrative Therapy, we’d help the person to reframe these stories with elements of their experience that were positive and life affirming, rather than the parts that were problematic. We called this ‘thickening‘ the story, as if we were leavening the narrative with parts of the truth that supported a hopeful future for the person. Through Narrative Therapy, we hoped that people would come to see their experiences as a gift, in a box full of sorrow perhaps, but still a gift.
But Narrative Therapy is just a tool, and tools can harm as well as help. I’ve come to understand it is not my place — nor, I think, the place of any of us — to do more than offer the tools and support for people hoping to thicken the narrative of their lives. We do not serve people by telling them to “look on the bright side”, or telling them “it’s all a lesson”. Sometimes the situation just sucks. Sometimes the situation is not a gift in their eyes. We, in our humility, need to respect who ultimately owns the story of their life, and let them frame it in their own way.
The Communal Story
Who owns the story, and how it gets told, becomes even more complicated when the story — or stories — are a communal narrative, perhaps the narrative of an oppressed or downtrodden people. I was drawn to Joy Harjo’s poem “Grace”[4] for this very reason. Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke nation, one of the nations of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the southeast US to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. The tribal history is complex, bound up with slaveholding, internal conflicts during the Civil War, postwar race conflicts, and a constant overlay of oppression and assimilation by the US government.
It is hard to imagine what grace looks like under these circumstances. Indeed, in her poem, “Grace”, Harjo paints a scene icy, frigid, “how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks”, how the “sun struggled to break ice”, how we “skated through fields of ghosts” — images that make me shiver even as we sit in the unusual warmth of El Nino this late December.
Joy recalls her friend Wind, and others — Coyote, and Rabbit — who could not contain their terror, and had to swallow the “town that never wanted us” with laughter, clowning, “so it would go down easy as honey.” And somehow, in the truck stop on Highway 80, they found grace, or grace found them. A promise of balance. Grace only got them so far, of course — but maybe far enough — Harjo ends saying:
“And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.”
Something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. I rejoice with Harjo that she discovers this, even as I acknowledge that such an awareness is of her own choosing, and belongs to her and her alone. I rejoice with Harjo, and all the others who are given boxes full of sorrow, and who find their own meaning in those boxes, whatever that meaning may be.
Conclusion
We cannot tell you what you should make of what you find in the boxes of sorrow you may have been given, as a person, or as a nation, or as a people. We can only offer our help and support to you in your narrative interpretation, for that interpretation is yours.
But here is a final consideration: Will you regift your boxes full of sorrow? For we do pass our sorrows along, to our children or to others. Sometimes we do it blindly, without opening them and examining them first. What might happen if we open and put those boxes to some use first, so that they pass on transformed, changed, maybe even lovingly used? What might happen if we held those boxes for awhile, allowed their contents to age, to mellow, to ripen, so that when we pass them on, the contents become vintage artifacts? Again, each of us will choose what we do with our own sorrows.
Tis the season, to contemplate your gifts, expected and unexpected, and to share and regift as you are called. Tis the season!
Notes:
1 http://www.moneytalksnews.com/8-secrets-being-great-regifter-without-getting-caught/
2 Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”,Thirst, Beacon Press, Boston, 2006)
3 http://www.onbeing.org/program/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/transcript/8051#main_content
4 Joy Harjo “Grace” from In Mad Love and War, 1990, Joy Harjo, Wesleyan University Press.