Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

To Kneel and Kiss the Ground
by Reverend Carolyn Price

I’d like to begin with two readings:

"The answer is not in the feverish pursuit of centrifugal activities which only lead in the end to fragmentation … life today is leading toward the state that William James describes so well in the German word, "Zerrissenheit – torn-to-pieces-hood . One cannot live perpetually in "Zerrissenheit." One will be shattered into a thousand pieces. .. "

And the second reading:

"We have to slow down. Nothing will change for the better until we do. We need time to think, to learn, to get to know each other (and ourselves). We are losing these great human capacities in the speed of modern life, and it is killing us. Archbishiop Desmond Tutu describes our fragmentation and isolation as ‘a radical brokenness in all of existence’."

I would have thought that both those readings were written recently. The first reading, with that wonderful word zerrisenheit, is from the classic Gift From The Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published in 1955, 50 years ago. The second reading was written just two years ago by Margaret Wheatley, activist for organizational and social change.

It is a busy and fast paced world in which we live today. Some have gone so far as to say that America, and most of us in it, are addicted to speed, are focused on how much we can accomplish in how short an amount of time. This is, as both these wise writers noted, no way to live.

I want to begin by saying how fortunate we are to be here in Santa Paula. Here, the rhythm of life moves slower. Here, each week I walk down Main Street and am amazed that cars almost always stop for people in crosswalks – even in those not controlled by signal lights. In Santa Barbara, and in most towns, this is not so. Cars, or more accurately the people driving the cars, have taken it upon themselves to turn the laws upside down, and to use the massive weight and power of automobiles to force their right of way over people. That is not so here, and I am grateful.

This congregation is fortunate in another way as well. They say that you can tell a lot about a people by their habits with food. And it is observations about food that lead me to believe that many of you have not succumbed fully to the fast-lane living that so characterizes our country. I say this because when we have shared food, at our Christmas pageant dinner or at potlucks after church, I have seen real food on our table – home cooked, not picked up in a bag. Ken Stock’s desserts, Margaret Broughton’s guacamole, Ruth Ricards chile, Carol Hardison’s cookies and more.

There is a movement which began in Italy and is sweeping around the world – it is called SLOW food, and it’s purpose is to preserve the art of home cooking, with fresh and real ingredients, as well as the art of being in community over food, where the pressures of a speed-driven world are held at steady bay at the door. I see that movement here, where we still take the time to prepare food and to sit still with one another. I want to acknowledge all of you and this town for what I perceive as a commitment to being counter-cultural.

I love the words that we heard this morning before the mediation, from the Persian poet Rumi, who beseeches us:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Waking each day is a ritual that is easy to take for granted, and to pass by without notice. But like so many of the religious people of the world, as we heard about in today’s Story, the Sufi mystic Rumi understood that the way we start a day is to a good degree the way we live our day. Here in the west it was Thoreau who said : "to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts." How we begin the day speaks about our relationship to time – that temporal manifestation of life – in which we live and move and have our being. A morning can be an occasion to get out of bed and commence the tasks of the day, in particular, as Rumi suggested, if we want to avoid our deepest selves, where perhaps we are empty or frightened. Or a morning can be it can be a time of high wonder and praise. Or so many things in-between. But whether we intend it or not, how we begin the day says something about how we think and what we believe to be true.

Rumi was a Sufi, a religious leader in the Islamic tradition who was also a mystic. He saw time in ways that many of us do not see time. For him it was the sacred container given him by god in which to live life. And every minute, every single moment was an opportunity to find the path back to god, back to wholeness.

Rumi lived an intensely religious life. He was devoted to the pursuit of union with the holy, and time was his vessel. Most of us cannot live such mystical lives, or do not think we can. And increasingly in our busy world, it is not easy to choose the slow path, the reflective way. But part of our work as religious individuals, and as a movement, is to counter the culture around us, especially when it is harmful.

The hymn we sung this morning says "for all life is a gift…" This way of seeing life as a gift is theological, having to do with the framework of the world and an ultimate understanding of life. In the Judeo-Christian trajectory, in which our tradition took root, creation theology is the branch of theology which understands life as a gift. It was Matthew Fox, Episcopalian priest and scholar, who offered this new view of human nature and possibility. Fox had been a Catholic priest, but was asked to step down because his views on god and life diverged from the doctrine of his day.

In a radical new exegesis (or study and analysis) of Genesis and the creation narratives of the bible, Fox developed a counter-theology. Instead of original sin, he spoke of "original blessing". In this view, creation is a gift from god, and all life is blessed, sanctified by the greatest power of all. Fox used the text of Genesis: "God saw everything that he had made, and it was good. Indeed, it was very good" as the foundation of his work. He declared that because the world, and all of life, was granted this original blessing, there was nothing that man or woman could ever do, including what is known as ‘the fall of man’ in the Garden of Eden, that could alter or abolish this original and lasting blessing. Nothing. Can you see why he was asked to leave the Catholic Church?

Most of the world’s wisdom traditions support a world view of original blessing. Certainly the first religions – those earth based traditions that honored all life, and the earth, and the cycles of life. The Hindu people, the oldest so-called major world religion, understand that God is within every atom, every planet, and every living being. All creation, they say, is Brahman, is holy, is God.This view is fundamental to Buddhism and to Taoism. It was one of the main tenets setting the first Unitarians in this country apart from the crowd. And though they did not speak of god, but of the inherent worth of the human being, this was a vital thread in the humanist perspective that characterized Unitarian Universalism for more than half a century.

Realize that this view of humanity as born in goodness runs in stark defiance to the doctrine of original sin that to this day dominates many mainstream churches. As I have said before, it is the business of our church to be counter-cultural.

"For all life is a gift …" We all know that not everything in life that happens to us is wanted, or remotely close to a gift we would choose for ourselves. And that is part of a theology of time as well. It was Albert Schweitzer who said, "We must all become familiar with the thought of death if we want to grow …When we (do this), we accept each week, each day, as a gift."

And here, ma aseh sh hayah, I can tell you of my own experience. My first pregnancy was one my husband and I had waited for for years. We were thrilled when we found out that I was pregnant, and it was twins. But four months into the pregnancy I lost one of the babies. And at that time I was diagnosed with a serious illness, one that threatened the remaining baby.

I had to see a specialist in high risk pregnancy. I spent months in bed, and was hospitalized twice. My doctor did not let me forget that I could lose that baby at any time, with absolutely no warning, and that there was nothing I could do to prevent this. As time passed, I was grateful for every day I awoke with that baby still alive. I learned to begin each day in thanksgiving. For most people the high point in a pregnancy comes when the baby is born and they say, here’s your baby. It’s a boy or here’s your baby; it’s a girl. But I delivered a month too early and the entire Neonatal intensive care team was in the delivery room. For me the high point came when I heard, Here’s your baby. She’s fine. She’s fine.

For two years following my daughter’s birth I remained ill. Though not life threatening, this illness taught me something; that each day I could get up and care for my baby, my home, and engage my friends and family in some small way was a gift, pure and simple, and quite beyond measure. And the morning came when finally I understood that I well again, and all of life to me was as a new place, fresh and full of possibility. As the Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has said, "one of the most sublime moments we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick." I imagine many of you have had these moments.

It is not always easy though to remember what we learn during those difficult times. Sooner or later we slip into seeing our days as mundane, as one moment following the next, with no tug of gratitude or joy to start the day. The rush of work, of errands, of houses, of children or elderly parents (or both) to care for, the bills, the volunteer jobs we take on – at some point it all converges and life becomes a list of things to be done again, rather than a container for the sacred, the greatest gift we will ever be given – our lives. Our culture of course supports this. But, again, one of the purposes of religion is to challenge the culture, and to support those forces that are counter-cultural. This hour at church each Sunday is not enough. But it may be a beginning.

The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos refers to chronological or sequential time, time that can be measured by the clock and calendar. It is orderly, rhythmic, and predictable. It is what most modern people typically understand as time. Kairos time, on the other hand, is radically different. The word does not translate well into English. Kairos is time that is not measured by the clock, a time rich in potential and meaning, a time when profound change becomes possible. I first learned about it from Madeline L’engle, who in her books speaks of the "time outside of time". Chronos, chronological time, in quantitative. In the morning, getting down a textbook, or making a list of tasks for the day ahead would be chronos. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative. In the morning taking down a flute, and losing yourself for a time while offering music to the sky, is kairos time. (Mariana, flute)

In religious language kairos is "God’s time."

To be in god’s time is paradoxical, like so many great truths. In order to live well, we must do as Schweitzer understood, see death, and fully grasp that our own lives and those of all we love will someday and forever end. And we must store this knowing away, tuck it tightly into the memory of the heart. But God’s time, kairos, is not finally found in the valley of the shadow of death, but in the simple light of our daily lives. It does not take much, and yet it takes everything we have. Listen to one way it happens:

To be in god’s time is to, moment by moment, be completely alive. It is to yield to a blossoming inside ourselves that leaves who we thought we were somewhere far behind. It is to join for one unbelievable and totally true moment with the amazing and indefinable energy that gave birth to the cosmos. It is to know life, with all its pain and loss, and then to forget what we know in exchange for the simple gift of a peach, and to become, if only for a moment, the fruit, the shade, the orchard, the sweet impossible blossom.

Theology is nothing, if it does not effect how we live our lives. As the nineteen century Universalist minister Hosea Ballou put it, "There is one inevitable criterion …. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it." Can we then reduce a theology of time as sacred, borne out of original blessing, to the way we live our lives? I hope so, for this is the business of the church.

In the morning and at night, we can turn inward for quiet and reflection. In the rush of mid-day we can engage in the Buddhist practice of returning to the breath, feeling the gentle and grounding pull of the earth pulsing beneath our feet. We can refuse the ripping tide of zerrisenheit, in small and big ways, and counter a culture of speed. We can claim a day of rest, and prepare a home cooked meal, to share with family and friends. We can stop for pedestrians, even in the thick of the city, and consider what it is to walk in a driven world. We can accept the simple gift of being alive.

In the morning, tomorrow, or later today when we arise from a nap, we can take down an instrument. We can let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

© Carolyn Price, 2005.

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