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The Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport

10 Lyons Plains Rd., Westport, CT 06880 - Ph: (203)227-7205 Sunday Services: 10:00 AM

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Mary Oliver’s Theology – October 4, 2009

September 22, 2010 by Rev. Frank Hall - Minister Emeritus

OPENING WORDS: Going to Walden, Mary Oliver

It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe.  But iin a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit.   It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.


Messenger, Mary Oliver  (recited for children’s poetry presentation)

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird
    equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
    keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
    astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
    and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
    to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
    that we live forever.

Praying, Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.


At the River Clarion (excerpt)

I don’t know who God is exactly

But I’ll tell you this.

I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.  Whenever the water struck the stone it had something to say…

Said the river: I am part of holiness.

And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water…

If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck

He’s also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke…

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.

He’s the forest, He’s the desert…

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least of his intention and His hope…


SERMON: Mary Oliver’s Theology

Mary Oliver’s latest collection of poems, which she titled Evidence, opens with a quotation from Kierkegaard:  “We create ourselves by our choices.”

Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) was an Existentialist – often referred to as the father of Existentialism.  He maintained that the individual has the sole responsibility of giving one’s own life a sense of meaning or purpose; this is accomplished by the passion and sincerity we put into it.

This is the basic notion of all those who call themselves Existentialists, though there isn’t agreement among them on how we can achieve this basic goal or even what constitutes a successful or meaningful or fulfilling life

Existentialists are not theists, in the traditional sense of believing in an all-knowing god who intervenes in a person’s life.

Kierkegaard’s religious quest focused on concrete human subjective experience.  Each of us is constantly engaged in this process of experiencing the world, and out of those personal experiences we choose what to think, what to believe, what to say, what to do.  All of these choices, taken together, determine who we are – we are constantly creating ourselves.

Kierkegaard believed that we can, and must, construct a religious faith system of our own, in the face of ‘an absurd world.’

Mary Oliver’s poetry is a bold and brave declaration of the holiness or the sacredness of life; all we have to do to touch that sacredness is to ‘pay attention,’ and to feel a deep sense of gratitude.

I don’t know if Mary Oliver would call herself an existentialist, but if she did, it would be in the sense that Kierkegaard is a Christian existentialist.

“Years ago I set three ‘rules’ for myself.  Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose.”

“I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered.  I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader’s part in an implicit author-reader pact.”

“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. My poems have all been written – if not finished at least started – somewhere out of doors: inn the fields, on the shore, under the sky.  They are not lectures.”

Christian theologians have a lot to say about sin and salvation; Mary Oliver tackles the issue in lines from Messenger, cited above:

“Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
      keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
      astonished.”

Yes, she’s saying, ‘I am imperfect, as evidenced by my old boots and my torn coat, which are reflections of me – I own them; I own my imperfections, they are ‘me.’  But I’m not going to focus on them…I’m going to keep my mind on what matters…standing still and learning to be astonished.’

Her poetry points to the basic, simple, ordinary things in life and the need to pay attention, and to feel a sense of gratitude.  The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you know are the two words ‘thank you,’ that’s enough.”

She closes the following poem with her ‘key word,’ Gratitude:

The Place I Want to Get Back To

The Place I want to get back to

is where
in the pinewoods
in the moments between
the darkness

and first light
two deer
came walking down the hill
and when they saw me

they said to each other, okay,
this one is okay,
let’s see who she is
and why she is sitting

on the ground, like that,
so quiet, as if
asleep, or in a dream,
but, anyway, harmless;

and so they come
on their slender legs
and gazed upon me
not unlike the way

I go out to the dunes and look
and look and look
into the faces of the flowers;
and then one of them leaned forward

and nuzzled my hand, and what can my life
bring me that could exceed
that brief moment?
For twenty years

I have gone every day to the same woods,
not waiting, exactly, just lingering.
Such gifts, bestowed,
can’t be repeated.

If you want to talk about this
come to visit. I live in the house
near the corner, which I have named
Gratitude.

Mary Oliver’s poems invite us to join her in the ‘quest for wisdom and grace.’  In other words, to carve out a living faith system by paying attention to what’s going on all around us, in the world, and what’s going on inside us, in the depths of the human spirit.

The Greeks had two words for time:  normal, day-to-day time as told by the clock was called chronos; then there’s a special kind of time – the moments in which there are those little epiphanies…when time seems to stop.  Those moments were called Kairos; moments that are not subject to the passing time – special moments, like those I shared with my grandchildren yesterday when I visited them at college.  Alex is a senior and Hannah a sophomore at Hampshire College in Amherst.  We went to their dorms, had lunch together and visited the Unitarian Universalist Church in Northampton – those five hours were speckled with Kairos moments!

 The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Some of her poems touch on the existential struggle – the struggle to be one’s own person, to insist on it.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

When I went to Maine this summer to spread my friend Dick Drinon’s remaining ashes in the ocean he loved, at a spot where he spent Kairos time, I discovered the following poem she titled Prayer:

May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risque.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,

leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,

still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world.

The wisdom revealed in her poems is of the down-to-earth variety.  She makes no attempt to be complicated – there’s no pretense in her poems, just a spirit of generosity and a humility that makes you feel like you could have written that poem, and may wish you had, or even feel badly that you didn’t write it yourself!

Her poems make you want to pay closer attention to the little things in your every day life – to notice the flowers, the birds, the ocean, the night sky, and the faces of loved ones…just to notice as if that moment was a gift, which it is…to accept those everyday gifts with humility and an ever-renewing sense of wonder.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


CLOSING WORDS: With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is so Delicate and Humble

I do not live happily or comfortably
With the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
The news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
Having felt something more wonderful
Than all the electricity of New York City.

Filed Under: Rev. Frank Hall's sermons

  • Minister’s Messages
  • Sermons – Audio
  • Sermons – Video
  • Rev. John T. Morehouse’s sermons
  • From Your Senior Minister: Facing Grace
  • Facing Grace – Rev. John’s blog
  • Rev. Frank Hall, Minister Emeritus – sermons
  • Rev. Frank Hall, Minister Emeritus – Dear Friends
  • Intern Minister’s sermons
  • Guest Minister’s sermons
  • Readings & Poetry
  • Communications from Your Ministers

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