Youngstown is awesome. The Northside in particular is awesome. Your life as it is today on the cusp of autumn, is full of awesomeness. What do I mean by awesome? The definition of awesome is: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension or fear. It is easy to forget that the circumstances that fill us with fear and dread are often the exact same circumstances that have the ability to conjure awe. We are nearing the time of Rosh Hoshannah, which is the beginning of the Jewish New Year. It is a time of looking back on the year behind, and preparing ourselves for the year ahead. It is a time according to Jewsih tradition of preparation for the Days of Awe, leading to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rosh Hashanah begins with the books being opened: the Book of Judgement, the Book of Life, and a Book for those who live in between. It is this powerful act that I would like to spend this morning engaging – what it means to find our name written down in the Book of Life. In the Jewish tradition as well as the Christian tradition, life and death are not what we commonly think. It is not as clear as the difference between having a pulse or not, or being able to breathe or not. According to these traditions, we can still have a pulse, still breathe, and not find ourselves in the Book of Life.
A surface reading of this dichotomy could be a sense of judgement between the good and the bad, the wicked and the righteous. But I’ll offer you a more nuanced reading. The beginning of the new year challenges us, I think, to evaluate whether we feel aligned with the awesomeness that is present in our life. It is very possible, quite likely, that we don’t. It is very possible that our lives feel flat, habitual, if we’re honest with ourselves, like a big ball of stresses and responsibilities. It is easy to get sidetracked by our own preferences, and the assessing of whether we have achieved our preferences, and we miss the ongoing days of awe that are present year round. It is quite possible that we fail to see the turning of the seasons, because we are trapped in the turning of our own minds. Most of us are like this – this is good news. This doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong, or that we’re negligent. It just means we’re human, and this is what humans do. This kind of folly and distraction is built into the religious calendar. Which is why we so appreciate a reboot, a time to reflect, a time to rediscover awe in the days that we are in.
Youngstown has been described to be my locals and strangers alike as a place that would make them apprehensive or fearful. The Northside in particular is still plagued with a story that is fading, but still in existence, that this is a place that you come if you want to feel apprehensive or fearful. I don’t think they are wrong. But I will adjust this view slightly. I think there is a clarity to Youngstown. The needs are clear. The history is clear. The overwhelming need for fresh vision and energy is clear. The neglect is clear. The revitalization is also stark obvious and clear. Stark clarity is usually accompanied by time for reflection. Here we are in the enviable position of having such clarity with minimal or no effort. We sense viscerally through our senses the clarity of what this place has experienced, and though we don’t know what will be, we sense with immediate clarity that something must happen here.
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In many spiritual or religious traditions vision is at the heart of the day that we are in. Without vision, we obviously cannot accurately see and experience the day we are living. This kind of vision is linked to the imagination, of being able to sense and discern what is here, and not quite here yet. It is a vision worth living into. Spiritual practice then becomes a way to practice living into this vision.
Those who are critical of such a vision can make the mistake that our vision should be limited to what is in front of us, as if what was in front of us was self evident. The wise know that what we see is never self evident, but informed by our own conditioning, our own preferences, our own experiences, our own biases. It is through this realization we come to realize that each of us lacks the vision to see clearly what is in front of us. And through that realization, a larger vision emerges.
I think I am fortunate that Younsgtown fulfills all my preferences, it aligns with my experience and conditioning. It fulfills by biases. I am seeing this is increasingly rare. I appreciate living in a place of such clarity, a place where the heart of what matters is clear and present. I love the people. I even love abandoned houses and buildings. This last part is not something that came naturally to me, but it has grown with a simple practice I do. As I approach an abandoned house or building, I say silently to myself: I love you. I imagine the people who built that structure. I imagine the pride, or at the very least the relief the workers must have felt to be paid to do something with their hands. I imagine people inhabiting the house or building. I imagine it being abandoned, sometimes for decades. I imagine all the children that have been born during that time in this city. I imagine all the people, like me, who have come from elsewhere and see it for the first time. And I ask myself one question: Where is love? And my response comes quickly now: Where it is needed. So I say “I love you,” and then I continue my walk.
This practice changes me and it changes the nature of what I’m seeing. Through practicing a vision that is clearer and deeper than my usual way of seeing, I feel a sense of purpose and meaning. More than this, I feel more whole. When I look at an abandoned building, I see its wholeness. I see it’s past, and I feel the reality of even one person who recognizes its true worth. That’s all it takes. It’s awesome.
We can make the mistake of thinking that we will never be in that place of awesomeness. We can think of our life as one continual preparation, a task, a responsibility, a hardship. This is not inaccurate, but it is not the complete picture. Rosh Hashanah teaches us this. The preparation, the practice, is the fulfillment. We don’t wait to put our name in the Book of Life. We see that it is there already, and we practice living into this truth. We practice the life of someone who is fully alive to the awesomeness, both the daunting fear and grand appreciation of being in the life we are in.
I appreciate Marge Piercy’s poem, “The birthday of the world,” where she widens her vision beyond her own personal resentments and failings, and she looks out to see how we can offer healing to a world plagued by daunting injustice. Since moving to Youngstown, I am becoming more convinced that appreciation is a prerequisite for the work of justice. We need more people with the vision to appreciate their life here in Youngstown, and in the valley, to appreciate its daunting quality and daunting possibility. With such an attitude, the path of justice open by itself. We won’t need to force it. We won’t need to make a big deal of it. It will just be our normal life, a normal expression of our appreciation of being alive in the place that we’re in, and in the time that we’re in. The path of justice is as natural as breathing, as natural as having as a pulse, if we practice being alive to it. If we practice seeing ourselves and our surroundings being written down in the book of life, and not damned by our own or other people’s judgements. The reality of this moment can move us with its awesome power, and that power leads us toward justice.
The Jewish tradition knows this. In this tradition there is utmost concern for the orphans, the elderly, the vulnerable. There is utmost concern for those who society had forgotten or left behind. This concern doesn’t come out of a sense of self righteousness. It comes out of a sense of awesomeness. We become drawn in to people who feel daunted and afraid, and we see these moments as opportunities for utmost appreciation and concern. Where is love? We ask ourselves. We answer: Where it is needed.
We spend our days walking in fields of barley. It is through a practice of transformation that we can see what is in front of us: fields of gold. It was there, waiting for us to see it.
The kind of transformation I speak of is complete. It is a transformation of our heart, of our way of seeing. It is a complete transformation of our living environment and of our living community. This kind of transformation depends on one another – one begets the other. When we transform our usual way of seeing, our living environment is also transformed. When we care for our environment, our heart is transformed. But this can only happen if we begin in awe. It can only happen if we begin by accepting that what is happening if beyond my full knowing. It is beyond my grasp. It is beyond apprehension, beyond even my courage. I always tell people if you feel daunted or in fear of what you’re about to face we’re on our way to where we need to be. We’re on our way toward something that will truly be breathtaking and breath giving. We are on our way into the book of life.
We want to be in the book of life, and we want this book to remain open at the beginning of every new year for each generation. There was a nationwide climate strike, and many of our church members attended one held in Wick Park. We heard people of all ages, different races, different backgrounds, from different parts of town, who saw very clearly the same thing: we are living in the days of awe. We are living in a time of heightened crisis and opportunity. We are on the cusp of transforming common dread into awesomeness. We are making this transformation as a community.
Here at this church we are contributing to this transformation, and we are being transformed as individuals. We are finding the strength and resolve to face our days with awe instead of defeat, to live our lives in the book of life. We are at the beginning of a new year, the beginning of a new chapter, the beginning of clearer sight and vision.
The days of awe are upon us as Autumn approaches. Old life becomes new. The old fertilizes the ground for what may come. We drop away our nagging preoccupations, and we drop in right here, right now, into the life we’re living. We breathe in. We feel our pulse. We look around and whatever we see, we ask ourselves: Where is love? And we respond: Where it is needed. The days like a book are open to us. We just need to look and trust we will find our name there. We will recognize our name. We will recognize our life. We will recognize the names of our neighbors. We will see our names one after another, and we will feel how wonderful and daunting this is. We are in the book of life. We are alive. It’s daunting. It’s awesome. It’s as it should be. We can finally see what is in front of us, surrounding us: gold, pure gold.
