It was about two years, nearly exactly, that we first experienced the pandemic as a church. I remember when it was Tim Raridon and I in the sanctuary, and the entire world including all of you on computers. In fact all of you are and always have been in the sanctuary. That is true now, and it is true then. All of you are here no matter where you happen to be located physically. You are here in mind and spirit, and that seems to transcend the physical. Technology keeps reminding us of that. The body is temporal but our thoughts and imagination are limitless, and in fact beyond time. You can go back in time and watch videos of me from two years ago, even though I think I’m physically here with all of you. I am here with all of you now, and I’m also in the past, and right now I’m wishing the best for the next generation and the current generation that is still maturing. So I’m also in the future as I imagine that. I think we’re time traveling all the time. Technology has just given us tools to make that more tangible.
It makes me wonder if time is presence, an idea that Heidegger had. The present moment is not divorced from the past or the future. The present is just time itself, flowing – flowing through us, as us. And we can experience that, and it’s wonderful, wonderful to be alive. Love is bigger than anything I can imagine. All of you have taught me that. My ideas about love are too small, too neat, too tidy. Real love I think is not something we ever know, but we can experience it and know it for ourselves. It’s not something to talk too much about, and I don’t think a philosophy is all that helpful. But an ethic, an ethic of love – that doesn’t tell us what love is, but it tells us where to find it. And of course the answer is we find it here. We choose to seek it here. We decide to dare to make love real, manifest, palpable under the conditions of warfare, disease, and mistrust – we dare to discover it here.
Bridge Over Troubled Water is an amazing song. But I didn’t really get it, feel it, until I heard Tim sing it live acapella.
Other artists have covered it, and it’s very powerful, but I didn’t really get it with those other artists for some reason. I’m sure it was there, but I missed it, I never got it. It makes me wonder how many times I’ve missed something precious, beautiful, wonderful. Perhaps I wasn’t able to be present for it, and like time, it passed through, and I never noticed it. But sometimes it sticks, for whatever reason, or it becomes known, felt. I still remember the context when I first heard Tim perform the song. It was in the summertime, and we were honoring those in the Valley who have been lost due to overdose and drug use. I was sitting in the pew where you are now, and listening to stories of those in recovery, hearing their stories of health and well being after struggle. Their willingness to use their experience to benefit others left a deep impact on me, and that’s when I heard Tim perform Bridge Over Troubled Water. And like being in a place I knew like the back of my hand, all of a sudden I was transported somewhere so familiar, but at the same time so fresh.
It was the recognition: this is part of my humanity. Yes, I have this capacity to benefit the weary. Not to wait for someone else, but part of that healing journey is for me, to be part of others’ healing. You might think as a minister that would be obvious, but it’s not. I’m just like you. Just a human like you. And I need a reminder from time to time of what it means to be human, what it means to be truly myself, to rest in being a bridge over troubled water. The image I have of being a bridge is not walking on anyone or anyone walking on me. It’s standing on the banks, peering over and seeing other people on the banks, and wondering/signalling to eachother how we’re going to get across, get through these troubled waters. And no one really knows the answer, but we’re all committed, and it feels humane, it feels human. And if you’re spiritually inclined you could say it feels divine, which is the same as feeling human.
Equality for me comes out of that feeling, the commitment to get together with other committed people who are trying to navigate trouble together. And no one knows the answers, and maybe actually the answers don’t even matter. Maybe the only real answer is the commitment, the willingness, the intention to do what we can figure out to do to help ourselves and help each other.
Even nature understands equality. During this service, a little after 11 am Eastern time is the official moment of the Spring equinox. The vernal or Spring equinox is a time on our earth and in our human lives for equal amount of daylight and equal amount of night. I find this really incredible. As we were sitting here, or playing music, while I’m talking, the earth is shifting to give us the equality of light and the equality of dark. In a sense, we didn’t make this happen, and yet, in a sense we have.
We’ve been on the earth surviving this long, even through active warfare we are here, and we have not disturbed natural processes to the point where this equality of light and dark is no longer a possibility. It is not only possible, it is happening. It is happening right now. Even if we didn’t notice it, it’s happening. It happens with or without our attention. But when we pay attention to it, I think it has the capacity to change us, or more accurately notice how we are being changed.
We have recently begun to lease property on Illinois Ave right before the car dealership on Wick Ave. Gary Davenport and others have been thinking about ways of making this natural space hospitable for people in this neighborhood, something that can be appreciated by us and our neighbors. Land is bound up with being human. How we treat the soil, minerals and animals is bound up with how we treat each other. Being more curious about the earth that surrounds us and supports us makes us more curious about the people who support us.
We become more curious about the peoples who have benefited and relied on this land, and in a healthy way, it humbles us. It shows us we are human, and that is synonymous with dependent, completely dependent. And that dependence is not a curse to be overcome by individual fortitude and independence like some of our predecessors thought. No, it’s something to accept, and relax into. It’s something that can expand us into being more of who we actually are rather than constricting ourselves into narrow ways of being that harm both ourselves and others. We can finally learn to relax into being human, only human.
It’s a little bit of a trick to say that we’re only human. Because by being only human, not in a complacent way, but in a humble way, we become vast, limitless actually. By becoming only human, we allow the vernal equinox to shape us. We allow the promise of equality to be fulfilled. We find ways we can live that promise together, even though no one really knows how.
We commit ourselves anyway, because that commitment, that search, that wondering, that will guide us where we need to be. And where we need to be is not a specific geographic location. It is a state of mind, it is an intention of spirit. We can be in our house in Youngstown, Ohio, or Washington State or the Dominican Republic, with a mind that seeks, truly seeks to benefit those in trouble, including ourselves. A mind that seeks to comfort the weary. We don’t worry too much about trying to calm troubled waters, because we know that there is trouble built in to the fabric of this day. But we also know that there is more than trouble, much, much more. What is this something more? We may not really know, but we yearn to find out, we yearn to understand for ourselves what exists in this world beyond trouble? And before we know it, we are committed. We are committed to finding out for ourselves. We are committed to feeling the sun on our face, and we are committed to enjoy the night as it comes. We are committed to finding living examples of equality, and we are committed to making that real and felt.
Topics: Commitment