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Sunday, November 25, 2007
“A Spiral Dance”

Quote:    "The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now to where you have always been, from ignorance to recognition."   —Anthony de Mello

Opening Words

The Self —Adam Zagajewski

It is small and no more visible than a cricket
in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade,
as all dwarves do. It lodges between
granite blocks, between serviceable
truths. It even fits under
a bandage, under adhesive. Neither custom officers
nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between
hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.

Love After Love —Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Readings

Belonging

Each one of us journeys alone to this world and it is our nature to seek out belonging. Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts. Each soul is a different shape. No one feels your life as you do; no on experiences things the way you do. Your life is a totally unique story and only you really know it from within. No one knows what your experience is like. The experience of each of us is opaque and inaccessible to outsiders. Yet no individual is sealed off or hermetically self-enclosed. Though each soul is individual and unique, by its very nature the soul cannot cut itself off from the world. The deepest nature of the soul is relationship. Consequently, it is your soul that longs to belong; it is also your soul that makes all belonging possible. No soul is private or merely mortal. As well as being the vital principle of your individual life, your soul is also ancient and eternal and weaves you into the great tapestry of spirit that connects everything everywhere. There is a lovely balance at the heart of our nature: each of us is utterly unique and yet we live in the most intimate kinship with everyone and everything else. Its more profound intention is the awakening of the Great Belonging which embraces everything. Our hunger to belong is the desire to awaken this hidden affinity. Then we know that we are not outsiders cut off from everything, but rather participants at the heart of creation. Each of us brings something alive in the world that no one else can. There is a profound necessity at the heart of individuality. When your life awakens and you begin to sense the destiny that brought you here, you endeavor to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing and invitation that is always calling you.

In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalized. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbors; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism…. From this perspective, it seems we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.

[John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Yearning to Belong. New York: Harper Collins (1999), pp. xxiii-xxv]

Ida

[Ida’s daughter told me when we first met, “My mother has] the prettiest smile, the most joyous laugh.” So true! She just lit up the world of those who could really see her. Ida was still able to walk with some assistance, but her ability to put words together and to communicate thoughts had been severely compromised [by her dementia]. Within a relatively brief [span of time], her words [could not be] understood at all. Every verbalization was forced out with a strain, syllables mixed around into nonsensical sounds. Yet every attempt [to communicate] was filled with intent and passion. It felt as though whatever was being communicated must be very important to Ida. So, of course, it was important for someone to listen.

Each day I invited Ida to join me for a walk. We walked arm in arm through the nursing units on the second floor, [then through] the administrative offices and back to her unit. All the while Ida talked. Some days I could not understand any of her words and I learned to ask if what she was talking about was good news or bad news so as to respond appropriately throughout our walk. I would say, “Ida, is that OK for you?” She would either respond with shaking her head “Yes” and give me one of her great smiles, or she would look at me as if I had just flown in from Orion. Whatever her response, I followed her lead. We would then proceed down the hallways, [she] talking away and [I] periodically providing joyous responses or empathy and reassurances. Every day Ida was able, [for almost two years], we walked the loop and talked, each of us appreciating our time together, [even though I never] understood [either] the importance of her words [or why our walk and talk seemed important enough to make such a routine.]

Then one day, during one of our walks, Ida stopped, turned fully towards me, held both of my arms and said, “I love you. You treat me like such a person!” She [turned then] and continued [down the hallway, taking up once again our walking conversation in her own largely uninterpretable language of many sounds.]

[Nancy Pearce, Inside Alzheimer’s: How to Hear and Honor Connections with a Person Who Has Dementia. First Forrason Press (2007), pp 7-9.]

Sermon: "A Spiral Dance"                          

I thought this morning I would share with you some of what has been percolating in my mind about the relationship between memory and identity and religious community. The holiday season is upon us and those vivid images of holidays past flow into consciousness in a particularly evocative way this time of year. As we gather with family and friends we have the opportunity to remember how we came to be who we are. The power of memory has been a theme for me this fall. I spent a weekend in the middle of October sharing with my little sister Elizabeth the work of closing our summer place on Cape Cod for the season, a job she has done pretty much alone for a decade or more, since our mother died. We had never, as far as I could remember, been alone together for that long, so I looked forward to that time together. I knew we would have time to talk about our childhoods; I say “childhoods”—plural—because we are five years apart in age, a whole high-school and college cycle apart, and our experiences of being in the same family were consequently very different. Elizabeth got married out of college to Joel and they now have teenage girls, Ellie, who is looking at colleges right now, and Mary who is a tenth-grader. The family has lived in North Carolina, Washington D.C., Wisconsin, Florida and for some time now in Freedom, New Hampshire, never near me and, though we kept in touch, we did little over the years to intentionally evolve an adult relationship. It seems in this we are poster sisters for a culture of distance and disconnection and self-indulgent isolation.

Lately I have been exploring on my Sundays with you answers to the question “What are we practicing as a community of individuals on our personal and congregational spiritual journey?” Last month in a service called “Love and All That Jazz” I talked about Caregiving as a spiritual practice and our responsibility as a community to do what we can, as little or as much as that might be, to support one another in times of need. Today my topic is Remembering, remembering who we are and why we come together here in community. Our work together can build the mutual trust we need in order to surface memories of our experiences over time. Within the relative safety of relationships grown in covenanted communion and informed by our common faith, we can solidify our identity as powerful selves uniquely blessed with gifts for a world that needs us. Here our stories can be fully heard, and in the telling organized and reorganized as a meaningful history. And as we grow together in a congregation like this one, we begin also to discern and record the story of who “We” are and where “We” are going as a people united in faithful companionship and purposeful growth. Church is a place in which we can satisfy the core human longing for Belonging, a place in which we can practice the art of becoming and remaining connected. In the context of the world today, this is a radical practice.  The culture of alienation that surrounds us benefits when we forget the power of our life stories and our connections to one another and become vulnerable to the belief that we are all alone with our gifts and afflictions, as lost, disoriented and unable to communicate as Ida.

I identified with Ida when I read the little story I shared with you. I am negotiating my own—what shall I call it—“forgetting curve”—as I approach the age of qualification as a “senior citizen” and become a person who must develop new ways to prevent or recover with grace from unpredictable lapses in memory. Last week, for just one instance, I actually forgot to write my minister’s letter for Soundings, our congregational newsletter. But my own angst about remembering tasks and appointments and names pales before the challenge increasing numbers of families worldwide face--coping with the progressive dementia of someone they love. November is both National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month and National Family Caregivers Month. There are quite a few families among us here in this congregation who are involved in some way with caring for loved ones whose cognitive functioning, and therefore personal identity and ability to relate to others, has been seriously disrupted by age or disease. Those families, together with all the rest of us, because we are a community that covenants to help, are having to learn the art of retaining our connection to a beloved person whose memory is failing and whose identity may be shifting more rapidly than ours.

The prevalence of dementia in the US increases markedly with age from about 5% among those aged 71–79 to nearly 40% among those over the age of 90. A study published this year in the journal Neuroepidemiology, estimates that there are a total of 3.8 million individuals with dementia and just over 2.5 million with Alzheimer’s disease in the USA today. [Neuroepidemiology 2007;29:125–132]  It is estimated that by the year 2050 the number of people diagnosed with some form of dementia will rise to 13 million as the proportion of older persons in this country continues to increase.

I am sure I am not alone in doubting that the increase in the incidence of cognitive dysfunction among us is all about the change in the proportion of older citizens to younger. I wonder about the impact on the individual of the steady decline of oral culture and the cultivation of memory, and the ascendancy of superficial written and graphic communication over large distances and often between strangers. I wonder about the effect on the human spirit of the crushing quantity of information we all must process daily that is not connected in any way to any real, physical and continuous human relationship. And I worry about the fact that the capacity of governments, of mental and physical health care systems, of neighborhoods and families to provide a safety net for individuals who are no longer able to care adequately for themselves, is shrinking even as that needy population grows. Just as rates of diagnosis of various forms of dementia are going up, the incidence of autism in young people is also on the rise, as is anorexia and other syndromes associated with altered body image, depression and anxiety disorders in young and old alike, and violence and addictive behavior of all kinds. All of these are disorders of the ability connect and relate to an internal self and to others. They therefore share a spiritual dimension. I see this epidemic of disconnection within the self and between individuals as a function of a larger societal and cultural dynamic. The isolation, loneliness, depression and cognitive impairment are symptoms of a deep spiritual malaise that springs from an unmet need to belong, to pursue a life of meaning in the company of caring companions. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, studies have, in fact, found that people who are unmarried and socially isolated are at higher risk. This conclusion was recently corroborated by a study reported in USA Today in which those people in the study group who described themselves as lonely proved to be twice as likely to develop dementia. [Kathleen Fackelmann, USA Today (2/6/2007)].

Last year a bunch of lay leaders came together to think about what it means to be a member of this congregation. One of the outcomes of that process has come off the drawing board and will soon be implemented. I am talking about a new Newcomer Orientation, a small piece of a larger program we are calling the “Pathway to Membership” in which any person, newcomer or old-timer, can choose to engage. The Newcomer Orientation will be morphing from one 2 ½-hour session to three different sessions each offered quarterly. The program will be put in place incrementally, Part I, called Connecting, next month, Part I with Part II, called Learning, in February, and Part I, II and Part III, called Belonging, in April. Each session involves personal sharing, information given and collected in reciprocity, a packet of material to take home, an invitation and a challenge. Each session offers ways to connect, and then deepen the connection, to others in the session and to the spirit and purpose of the congregation as a community. Each session contributes insights about self and community, and the needs and gifts of both, that will help the newcomer determine whether this religious community is where he or she truly belongs, where he or she can remember and tell a past story (become known) and create and live out a future story (engage in intentional spiritual growth) in the supportive company of other seekers. Part III is for those who, having lived among us for a while and having completed Parts I and II of the Orientation, feel they may be ready to “sign the book,” our process for officially joining the congregation. We want those who commit themselves to covenantal relationship in this UU community to experience the act of joining as a life passage of great importance and worthy of celebration.

Religious community is uniquely suited to the work of remembering and reassessing a life and planning necessary repairs and opportunities for growth. As in the past, the first Newcomer Orientation session offers an opportunity for attendees to talk about their lives using a timeline as a tool for remembering those events that have held the most meaning over their lifetime so far. People are often very moved by the stories that emerge in those sessions and fascinated by the thematic similarities. Though the pattern of markers on each person’s timeline is unique, the issues, questions and values embedded in the marked events, against which a person’s identity has been shaped over time, are common and recurrent in all human timelines. We reencounter the same challenges in different eras of our life span. If our timelines were in the shape of a spiral, the same marker could cross several points in time. I have often thought of making a model of my life that captures this reality. Picture this: [lifeline that spirals like this from birth to death, with the same lines cutting through the spiral at different angles, each an event marker that arises out of a recurrent  life issue]. Some of the event markers would be responses to issues like: loss, relationship, commitment, learning, transition, search, teachers, deaths, births, renewal, vocational shifts. Those lines, it occurred to me as I drew this picture in my notebook, are analogous to the base pairs that connect the two spiraling backbones of the DNA double helix. Do you get that? Please excuse the science lesson, but here you have two interspiraling phosphate and sugar backbones. And bonding one backbone to the other, like a zipper, are the four nucleotide base pairs. Strands of DNA and the genetic information they preserve are organized in chromosomes, those little units of replicable genetic information that make us who we physically are, that tell our body’s story. So the analogy I am drawing is this: the helical backbones are the timeline of a human life and the base pairs are the life issues all humans confront. And what I see in the analogy is that the connection of one human being to another through sharing life stories and exploring common issues is as fundamental to the survival and progressive evolution of religious community as the integrity of DNA in the human chromosome is to the survival and growth of the human body.

Life is a spiral dance. It’s about connection and reconnection and being human and needing one another and solitude in balance with community. A spiral dance is also a common ritual with which earth-centered ceremony sometimes close. Have any of you ever participated in one? You begin by holding hands and dancing slowly in a large circle. The leader then drops hands on one side and begins to lead the line into a spiral, moving along the also moving inside edge of the original circle. When the leader gets into the center, she then makes a hairpin turn and beings to spiral back out. In the process each person passes very close, once face-to-face and once back-to-back with every other person in the dance. And the ethic of the dance is to genuinely meet each person you encounter by looking into their eyes as you pass by. The spiral dance is a ritual of connection, of honoring partners in ceremony. When your eyes meet you communicate across the gap “I am part of your story now. We are companions on this human journey we share.”

Nancy, the social worker in the story I read, and Ida, the older woman whose ability to communicate had been severely compromised by Alzheimer’s disease, were dancing a spiral dance as they wound through the nursing home on their daily walks. They were engaging in a ritual practice of connecting emotionally, human being to human being, across the widest possible cognitive gulf. This is the extreme challenge. Most of the time, we will not have to work so hard to meet one another. But even this we can practice here in radical defiance of a growing culture of disconnection and alienation. Even when we are maximally challenged to connect with another, even when memory ceases to be one of the “base pairs” in the zipper that connect us backbone to backbone, we can practice the art of reaching towards one another in such a way as to restore our sense of belonging. Nancy provides some guidelines and a mnemonic for remembering them in her book Inside Alzheimer’s. The mnemonic is “IF LOST.” 

I = Intend a connection. Invest fully in presence to relationship.

F = Free yourself of opinions/judgments/expectations

L = Love the other

O = Open up to being loved back

S = Sit in silence; be willing to communicate without words

T = together be thankful

If lost, intend to make a connection; free yourself of opinions, judgments and expectations; love the other; open up to being loved back; sit in silence if need be; and together be thankful.

My niece Ellie and her dad Joel stayed with us overnight on their way down and back from college visits in Pennsylvania recently. When my sister and I were working together on the Cape in October, she told me how “Bryn Mawr,” my Philadelphia alma mater, had become associated, for her, with a very trying period in our family history. She swore Ellie would never consider Bryn Mawr as an option for college and to make sure of that she was throwing away any catalogues that made their way to the Rhymer home. We talked at length, during our days together, about what was going on for both of us during that time. Joel called one day between the two Bridgeport visits to tell me that, by a strange twist of circumstance, Ellie was at that moment interviewing at Bryn Mawr. Life is a spiral dance indeed. If lost, remember, we share a practice of connection that can span even the greatest of gulfs in human relationship. AMEN.

Closing Words

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

Postlude: “Favorite Things” (New Lyrics for her 69^th birthday celebration)

[To commemorate her 69th birthday (3/8/07), actress/vocalist Julie Andrews made a special appearance at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall for the benefit of the AARP. One of the musical numbers she performed was "My Favorite Things" from the legendary movie "Sound Of Music." Ms. Andrews received a standing ovation from the crowd that lasted over four minutes and repeated encores.]

Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,
Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,
Bundles of magazines tied up in string,
These are a few of my favorite things.

Cadillacs and cataracts, and hearing aids and glasses,
Polident and Fixodent and false teeth in glasses,
Pacemakers, golf carts and porches with swings,
These are a few of my favorite things.

When the pipes leak,
When the bones creak,
When the knees go bad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And then I don't feel so bad.

Hot tea and crumpets and corn pads for bunions,
No spicy hot food or food cooked with onions,
Bathrobes and heating pads and hot meals they bring,
These are a few of my favorite things.
Back pains, confused brains, and no need for sinnin',

Thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinnin',
And we won't mention our short, shrunken frames,
When we remember our favorite things.

When the joints ache,
When the hips break,
When the eyes grow dim,
Then I remember the great life I've had,
And then I don't feel so bad.

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