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May 27, 2007
“Let All the Dreamers Wake the Nation”

OPENING WORDS:                    

For our opening words I offer this poem written by my poet father on Memorial Day, 1964, the spring after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In it he remembers the bugler who played Taps at Kennedy’s funeral, how in his grief he momentarily lost the tension in his embouchure and cracked the bugle’s note. In honor of my father, today, who served in WWII as a communications officer on a tug in the English Channel, I read his poem, read also at his own memorial service in 1993.

The Bugler, Whoever He Is (Memorial Day, 1964)

The bugler, whoever he is, has privilege
In blowing Taps, after the lights go out,
After the marching and the memory work,
To greet the midshipman, destined for the wars
And vexed in spirit for the nation’s good,
Who listens in the dark for the sound of Taps;
And the accent of the messenger of peace
Arises from the silence like a tower,
Out of the ordered violence of the day,
And soars to silence in its purity.

The bugler, whoever he is, has privilege
In blowing Taps, to reach beyond himself,
To hail for all the death of each day’s life
And name the final work of every soldier,
With promise in the dark of rest on rest;
The sound of Taps, arising in the silence,
Breeds a deeper silence for the dead,
Damned in their first begetters, now forgiven;
Brings to the living, listening in the dark,
A final word of praise and the end of praise.

The bugler, whoever he is, has privilege
In blowing Taps: the meager man, bespectacled,
Addressed himself to duty with decorum
For all the world at a President’s funeral,
Addressed himself to a period for grief,
Stirred in the listeners half a memory
Of the messenger of peace; and the bugler’s lip
That moment lost the accustomed discipline
Of Taps, trembling for humanity,
And checked the angelic soaring of the sound.

The bugler, whoever he is, has privilege
Not to reproach himself; perhaps the angel,
When he rises to his task on the final day
And ponders the ugly brawl of history,
Will also pause to recall the dignity,
The astounding courage of the harassed creature
Man, and crack on the note that ends the world;
Perhaps he will finish sweetly, like that other,
At another judgment, who had privilege
In blowing Taps, to rise above perfection.

--John Alexander Allen

This Memorial Day, 2007,
we remember our war in Iraq,
hearing right now in that far off place,
the explosion of bombs, the cries of the wounded,
the sobs of mourning,
the deepening terror and hopelessness
of meaningless loss and political chaos.

We remember that we are a leader nation in a world
Which defaults to violence
When disagreement sets nations at odds.
Iraq is but one among many in which children die
Because humans have not yet learned
to speak to one another the language of peace.

We remember these countries,
Also at war, hearing the cries of their people:
In Pakistan, in Darfur, in Chad-Sudan,
In Yemen, in South Thailand,
In Israel and Palestine,
In Somalia and Lebanon,
In Afghanistan.
We remember, too, soldiers of other wars
Our fathers and grandfathers into many “greats,”
Long-ago brothers and husbands
Lost on history’s distant battlegrounds.
And, finally, we remember the little wars:
In regions and neighborhoods, within families
and in human hearts divided.

For those who have lost their lives this year
In Iraq—American soldiers and civilians
and Iraqi men, Iraqi women, Iraqi children—
we pray from grieving and outraged hearts
that their families may find peace and comfort and hope.
May those deaths hold meaning for those who have loved the dead.
And the many whose healing wounds,
Both physical and mental,
have changed the course of their young lives,
May those lives be nevertheless full and vital,
with the ample support of a grateful government
and the welcome of compassionate and open-hearted people.

We pray the world will learn the ways of peace
Before another human is maimed or dies this way.

AMEN

SERMON: “Let All the Dreamers Wake the Nation”

Lately, when you have asked me, “So how are you doing?” I have been replying “Well, I’ve been here nearly nine months. I am about ready to have this baby!” Moms who remember what it was like for them at the end of their pregnancy will resonate, I know. After a while, I hear, you just want to see this child’s face and get back to your normal shape and activities. I am sure others among you remember the end of the first season of any new job—you are bone tired! You will never be quite as tired again. AND no wonder, something remarkable has been born to which you have been lending your energy. You have been changed and the group you have joined has been changed. A renaissance has occurred. Something new brought into the world. This sermon closes out the preaching season for me. It has been a full and good nine months. Thank you for making me a place among you for this good work and play together.

Last May, when the search process was complete and the search committee had chosen me as your Candidate for Associate Minister, I preached about the Master Story that describes my trajectory through my life towards you. I told you the true, though perhaps not entirely factual, story of how a sister I never met—a sister with Down Syndrome who died alone in an institution after heart surgery when I was only three months old—how she birthed a vision for my life and sent me on the long journey towards manifesting that vision. The Latin word for “send” is mittere with principle parts misi, missus. This is the root of the word “mission.” Jessica Ann wrote the first chapter of my Master Story and in it she named my mission and sent me forth with my work orders toward the vision of my distant destination.  I didn’t know for many years just what that mission was, but I lived it nevertheless. My mission has been to open hearts, first and on-going my own heart and then, with slowly increasing facility, the hearts of others. For twenty-two years as an open-heart intensive care nurse I rescued Jessica and myself from the legacy of a difficult and largely unarticulated family story. And for the last eight years I have been preparing myself for a different kind of cardiac caring as a Unitarian Universalist minister. Last May I walked down this aisle into my Vision, a vision of a future ministry I had been straining to imagine since I was a teenager. I want to thank you. Thank you, for welcoming me and making me a place among you as we go about the work of ministry we share. Never once this year have I doubted that this is the place I am supposed to be. This is the place and you are the people. When I looked around this space for the first time last spring, I saw these great arching beams as ribs, the protective structure within which a great heart beats, the strong heart of a people, including myself among you, anticipating the upheaval change brings with longing and with fear. With both. With longing. And with deep fear.

Recently a new colleague sent a group of us fellow newbies a little email story about a first year experience that made us all “LOL” with recognition. “Once Thomas Merton met a Zen novice,” she quoted, “who had just finished his first year of living in a monastery. Merton asked the novice what he had learned during the course of his novitiate, half expecting to hear of encounters with enlightenment, discoveries of the spirit, perhaps even altered states of consciousness. But the novice replied that during his first year in the contemplative life he had simply learned to open doors and to close doors.” Beneath the end-on-end meetings, the writing riffs, the service preparation, the counseling and visiting, the community work, the planning and tracking—beneath all the mistakes and successes and gaffs and confusion; beneath the inspired utterances, lame excuses and extreme clarity—beneath all that, the slow essential basic learning of ministry has been going on here, where my spirit meets my bone. I have been learning to open doors and to close doors. The basics: knocking, meeting, welcoming, greeting, staying calm; drawing helpful boundaries, knowing how long to stay, when to leave; remembering not to leave the door open when it should be closed, remembering not to slam it behind me, sometimes, as I leave. It has taken patience and compassion for myself and for you, and courage, lots of courage, every day.

You know what complicates this work for me? Jane Strong, your enneagram expert, knew this immediately about me after her very first experience of me in the pulpit. “She’s an enneagram Type One.” “And I said, “Oh no, not a ONE! That’s the one type I’ve been trying to avoid being every time in the past I have worked with the enneagram! With what dismay I stand before you and accept today that she is probably right. I knew Type One as The Perfectionist, whose underlying fear of being inherently inadequate drives her to be so consistently high functioning as to be beyond criticism and condemnation. You would not believe how hard I can be on myself as I am learning a new role, a new set of skills, a new way of life, balancing my needs with yours in our ministry together. Nothing you have said to me, when I have hurt your feelings, made you angry, disappointed or betrayed you—and I know I have—can touch the harshness with which I criticize myself. No praise you might sing of my work—and you surely have—can silence that voice which routinely whispers in my ear, “you can do even better than that.” And I know there are many of you who suffer in just this way yourselves. You don’t have to be an enneagram Type One to drive yourself and everyone else crazy in this particular way.

Last Sunday I, along with many of you, was so moved by the interaction in this space of two men in their mid-eighties: the architect of this building, Victor Lundy, and the minister of this congregation at the time the building went up in the early sixties, Arnold Westwood. They spoke, along with Frank, of the symbolism that unites the signature shapes of this edifice and the principles shared by the worshippers who gather here week after week. They spoke of enfolding, lifting wings, of two hands not quite touching, of the encompassing of nature, of the life journey from childhood “under the wings” back to the earth as ash in the memorial garden. Victor admitted that he had been for forty-six years so focused on the roofline he designed, that he hadn’t thought much about the human element at the foundation till he saw us all sitting here, filling the sanctuary seats, the interconnected circle of generations—past, present and yet to come—Sarah’s changing, naming, history-telling circle, this dance we are dancing together as a community of faith. It is easier for most of us to notice and appreciate foremost the soaring, reaching, climbing, achieving aspect of this architecture. We’ve had eons of practice in patriarchy with that; it’s made Type Ones of nations.

I’ve never heard another person here mention this, but when I look up, what I see is Jacob’s ladder. See it?—between the wings, the hands—“every round goes higher, higher,” “steep and rugged…climbing on.” You can see it most clearly as it is reflected in the glass above the organ. See? Up to Heaven, enlightenment, perfection. One rung at a time. Sarah’s circle is the other side of the equation. Together Jacob’s ladder and Sarah’s circle balance our first and second principles. They are the “I” and the “We.” Individual and collective. Axial and horizontal. Aspiration and Inspiration. Freedom and Responsibility. Achieving the balance between them is a core work of religion.

Do you remember the story of Jacob’s ladder? Having tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright, Jacob flees his father’s house, headed for his mother’s brother’s home. He rests “at a certain place” that night and uses one of the stones he finds there as a pillow. No ordinary stone, I imagine. He dreams of a ladder that reaches from the earth up to heaven and on it angels are climbing up and climbing down. And from above God speaks to him and blesses him and his descendants [Genesis 28: 11-19]. This is the same Jacob that later in his story wrestles with an angel and receives a new name, the name of the nation he would wake and lead, Israel. Jacob needed his angels. They got his attention, gave him the tools to do his work, a ladder to heaven, God’s voice, a powerful naming and a covenant in service of his people’s prosperity. The messages his visions conveyed were not for him alone. They were for him as leader of his people. Jacob’s ladder and Sarah’s circle are two sides of a coin, two facing pages of a hymnal, the same tune with two sets of complementary words. Our own individual spiritual pursuit is tied to the story of a people. The angels we meet remind us of that.

By the time the 11:00 service last Sunday had ended, the sun had come out and the foyer and aisle were flooded with light. Frank, as he had at the previous service, encouraged Arnold and Victor to walk out down the aisle first, before us, and they did, arm in arm, as we and the choir watched from our privileged perspective down here. It was so moving what we saw, what most people in the room could not have seen. Two elderly geniuses of our history walking together “into the light” as if into that liminal space between life and death in which all we were, all we are, and all we will be, every person, every future possibility, becomes present and visible in the Now. And I felt everyone here: your grandmothers and grandfathers, the founders and dreamers, those who have journeyed in and out of the making of this place. I have never felt so fully present to a sense of the purposefulness of events. It was as if I could see it in that slow celebratory walk in the fine light of wisdom and art: this was meant to be. And I am meant to be following in these footsteps. These are the interpreters of my vision. This is what angels look like.

Angels work in that liminal space in which important choices are made or affirmed out of the stew of all possibility. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that as my “first-year” pregnancy verges on full-term, something pretty extraordinary and inexplicable happened to me last Wednesday while I was sitting on my porch making notes for this sermon, trying to imagine how I would preach today about both Memorial Day and Mission-Vision. What happened Wednesday is part of a story that had been unfolding for exactly one full year to the day. On May 23^rd, 2006, a man named Christopher S. Riley wrote my father a letter and sent it to Hollins College in Virginia, where Dad had taught and where I grew up. Well, Professor John Alexander Allen having been gone from earth for thirteen years by then, the letter, over the course of a couple of months, made its way to me. Mr. Riley, I read, who had had a brief correspondence with my Dad in the mid-eighties, wanted to pass on to him a wooden carving he had made. “The small statue has been with me on my porch for plus or minus 20 years,” he wrote, “and now that I am 80, maybe I should pass it on. It’s primitive, but I think it belongs with you or your work.” It was a carving of the angel Gabriel, he said, inspired by Dad’s poem “The Bugler,” which Dad wrote, as I mentioned when I read it for our Opening Words, on Memorial Day 1964, the spring after President Kennedy was killed. Here I was, newly arrived in Connecticut, and a stranger who lived less than two hours away in North Granby seemed to be welcoming me in my father’s name and invoking Gabriel, God’s messenger. All this only a few weeks before I officially began a new career as a minister in my call to this congregation. How could that be happenstance, I thought? I called Mr. Riley right away, of course, but despite several attempts since then, we had not managed to meet in person.

So, I am sitting on my porch last Wednesday, May 23^rd 2007, when the mailman hands me the letters and says “Back in a minute, I have a box for you.” Moments later I am pulling out of the box my Dad, my call to ministry, my faith, a message for me, a sermon for you—I am pulling out this incredible carving of Gabriel, blowing his trumpet on Judgment Day. In a note he placed in the top of the box, Mr. Riley explains some things about the carving. He had made the piece out of joist-end scrap of pinewood from a local mill. Gabriel is spelled out in Hebrew, Cyrilic and Roman letters on the base. The halo incorporates a cross and the Star of David, yin and yang, and the symbols for chi and for water. He drew my attention to a tear on Gabriel’s cheek. In his free hand the angel holds a rose and a chain, the rose representing beauty and the chain power, work and accomplishment, but also enslavement. The way the wings enfold the angel’s body recalls for the artist the words from the Kaddish: “O God, full of compassion…Grant perfect rest beneath the sheltering wings of Thy presence.”    

On the scroll at Gabriel’s back, the message he bears, the artist carved the words with which my Dad closed his poem: “…perhaps the angel,/ When he rises to his task on the final day/ And ponders the ugly brawl of history,/ Will also pause to recall the dignity,/ The astounding courage of the harassed creature/ Man, and crack on the note that ends the world;/ Perhaps he will finish sweetly, like that other,/ at another judgment, who had privilege/ in blowing Taps, to rise above perfection.” Mr. Riley wrote, in closing, “My style has always been very primitive real. This was not a philosophical decision, but resignation to my limited abilities in spite of a blind love for what I do. This all troubled me until I read your father’s words—‘To rise above perfection.’”

Aha. What is it that rises above perfection? Human dignity, acceptance of the beauty of what we can accomplish despite our limitations, human courage in the face of the idiocy of our times, compassion for our collective suffering, faith in the message of angels among us. Those angels remind us: You are not alone. You have a people and a purpose beyond your own striving, a purpose that reaches back to the limits of human memory and forward to the limits of human vision. And all who have ever lived and loved life are with you in your striving—your fathers and grandmothers, sisters and brothers, Sarah and Jacob, your children and their children, the architect and the minister, the woodcarver and the preacher on her porch. All of them walk with you in this bright morning light. The primitive real is that we do the best we can to climb the ladder and dance the dance, to bring both chain and rose out of the reluctant block of wood, to write the sermon, to survive the explosion or the death of a child, to forgive the assassin, to end the war, to love our country and this beautiful world we are given so briefly to enjoy and protect.

At their best, I read, enneagram Type Ones become in time and health extraordinarily wise and discerning. By accepting what is, they transform idealism into a transcendental realism, knowing the best action to take in each moment. Humane, inspiring, and hopeful, they can discern the truth and live creatively and compassionately within its boundaries. (Enneagram Type one: The Reformer) This is the message Gabriel brought to me on Wednesday, from my Dad, through a living angel, the man who made this sculpture. And you, my friends, have been given a message too, also through living angels, also through artists: this precious place and this changing community of gifts has a duty to the future that we draw forward from the past and it is we, collectively, who shape that vision and articulate the mission that will take us there. This is a task worth your full commitment: your time, your multiple talents, your passion and imagination, your financial resources. What better way to wake a nation than to raise the voice of the power we have been given in this church? And now, let us set our lips not for Taps but for Reveille. Wake up. Sing choirs of angels. Wake up. We have had too much of Taps. AMEN.

And now, finally, my commentary on the war in Iraq this Memorial Day, you will find as the quote on the front of your order of service this morning. The passage is from the 8^th chapter of the Book of Daniel, verses 15 and 16, in which Daniel is about to learn that the vision he has experienced pertains to the relationship between great political powers in conflict and the specter of apocalypse:

15: When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I sought to understand it; and behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man.
16: And I heard a man's voice between the banks of the U'lai, and it called,

"Gabriel, make this man understand the vision."

This is our closing prayer:
GABRIEL, MAKE THIS MAN UNDERSTAND THE VISION.

Let the river run
Let all the dreamers wake the nation.
Come, the new Jerusalem.

Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
Peace, Peace, Peace.

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