A week last Tuesday Sue and I had an appointment at Sale Registrars. We had gone to register our upcoming wedding. As we waited to be interviewed, first of all together and then individually, we noticed a young couple with a small child and new born baby. It was a blissful joy to be close to this family with this beautiful life, full of potential. in their hands. As we waited another couple came in with their own new born. I wondered what these two young lives would become. It was a beautiful feeling. I was first to be interviewed. I did not do a great job if I am honest, for some reason I couldn’t remember Sue’s house number, but I was passed. As I came out. and Sue went in for her interview, I noticed two older women sitting where one of the young couples had sat previously. The atmosphere had changed, they were there for a very different reason. They were there to register the death of one of the women’s husbands. The other woman was there to support her friend.
At one point the woman, who had lost her husband turned to me to ask if I was there to register our wedding, I made a slightly jokey comment about it and she smiled, although as she did I could see the tears in her eyes. The image has stayed with me ever since. Sue came out a little later with news of when we would be able to collect the Blue forms giving us permission to marry at Dunham Road. Sue said that it would be one year, exactly to the day, when I proposed to her by the Sea of Galilee.
As we left we talked about what we had just been a part of. We had seen the examples of three of the most significant experiences of human life, birth, marriage and death. Something we are both involved in creating services for. These are the three major occasions when loved ones gather together. There, in a seemingly ordinary building, in a small town in England, we witnessed most of life within us and around us. It certainly made me pause, in deep reverence for life itself. What a crazy ride this life is. The beauty, the joy, the anticipation, the mystery and the deep broken hearted grief all come together in a local government building. Yes plain old ordinary things and yet so deep and meaningful.
I’ve been thinking about the new babies I saw that day and the smiling woman with tears in her eyes. I have been thinking about the potential in the babies and the life the woman’s husband must have led. It got me thinking about the child blessing services I conduct. I call them blessings because in my understanding I am blessings these new lives in the hope that they themselves will become a blessing to life itself. All this brought to mind a wonderful poem that can be found by clicking on the following link The Dash by Linda Ellis
"The Dash" is a bit of a folksy poem, but its message is deep, powerful and meaning filled. The dash is the line between our date of birth and of death. The dash appears short and even thin and yet it can be deep and meaning filled. What matters the most is how we live "The Dash"
Sue and myself are going away for a couple of nights. One reason is a mini break from the hustle and bustle of our lives. The other though is to spend time together to create our wedding service. We are taking time together to reflect on the ritual we would like to create to share with the people we love. It means so much to both of us. In many ways the service is more important than anything else. It will speak of our lives before we reached this point, what our relationship means to both of us and what we are committing to as we move forward together. We are both in the second half of our lives. Even if we are blessed with good health we have past the half way point of our dashes. So we want the ritual to be deep and meaning filled and a threshold that leads to our new lives together.
As I have looked back at the day at the register office and forward to what is to come my mind has been dominated by thoughts about rituals, particularly rites of passage. The three major ones are marked legally at the Sale town hall, but the actual rituals take place elsewhere. These three primary rituals and rites are things that Sue and myself spend a lot of our adult lives involved in. They make up a large part of our professional lives, but they are not the only rituals that we engage in. All life is made up of ritual. Our dashes are held together by all kinds of rituals, although I am not sure we always notice this.
Everything we do in life can be done ritually and thus can become meaning filled. Even the most simple basic task can be enriched if we live reverently. If we live with reverence for life itself. If we see life as a deeply sacred thing. If we bless it with our true presence. It is not just marrying, burying or birthing that are enriched by ritual, even standing, sitting, walking, nay breathing can be done meaningfully, ritually. There is nothing more deeply ritualistic than deep listening. The real beauty of life lays in the ordinary, in observing and experiencing the meaning of life in the ordinary. By so doing the great moments are created.
Ronald L. Grimes captures this near perfectly in “Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life”
"Ritual practice is the activity of cultivating extraordinary ordinariness. It is necessary, because human activity has a kind of entropy about it; life, like love, runs down. Things get tiresome and difficult. Body and soul cry out for something different, hence the impetus to ritualize. But if the ritually extraordinary becomes a goal or is severed from ordinariness, it loses its capacity to transform, which, after all, is what rites of passage are supposed to do."
The wedding is going to be a deeply special day, for a multitude of reasons; it is made special by the moments in our dashes and so many other people’s dashes; it is the "specialness" of the lives we have created that will make the day so exceptional. That ritual will be made meaningful by the rituals that we live by in the ordinariness of our days and the days that will follow, however long we are blessed with.
All this reminded me of beautiful piece of wisdom from Forrest Church’s masterpiece “Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow”, written while he was dying of oesophageal cancer. He asked "knowing that we will die, what should we do?" To which he answered "we should live, we should laugh, and we should love." He then recalled a lesson he learnt from his children, about living. One day, when they were young, he was walking them to school, on a busy New York street. Suddenly a car swerved round a corner and almost killed them all. Forrest was incensed by this, but he remembers, "my kids just laughed, romping blithely down the sidewalk, jumping from tree to tree as they always did, trying to touch the leaves." The kids were celebrating, nay singing the joy of living, and they "had the right idea. Why didn't I think to jump and touch the leaves?"
Forrest believed that it was living, loving and laughing that took real courage, they required heart, while dying didn’t really take much courage at all, in his eyes that just came naturally. Something he was experiencing as he wrote these words.
Now to really live Forrest suggested a simple little mantra:" Want what you have. Do what you can. Be who you are." He didn’t suggest that this would be easy but it is the only way to live and in so doing we will live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for by the love we leave behind.
Perhaps somewhere in that little mantra is an answer as to how we bring deep meaning to the ordinariness of our lives. Perhaps this is what we need to ritualise. To want the things that make up our lives and not wish for something else and in so doing we might just begin to be who we truly are, instead of wishing we were someone else. In so doing we can do the things that we are able to do and thus bring deep meaning to the little bit of the dash that we are living right now.
This is the gift of life, the beautiful gift of being alive in this ordinary moment, a moment that can become deep and meaningful, not only for ourselves but for those we get to share our lives with. For we never know how long we’ve got left how close we are to the end of the line, the last part of dash. Nor do we know how close those we love are to the end of theirs.
I'm going to end with a wonderful poem by one of the greats of the last few decades, Mary Oliver. Her dash came to an end a year ago last week.
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
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 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?
This is a story from the native American, Comanche tradition, “She-Who-Sits-Alone”.
A terrible time once befell the Comanche people. It was a time of drought. The land was dying and the people were dying too. In their despair, they called upon the Great Spirit.
“Great Spirt,” they implored, “our land is dying and our people are dying. How have we angered you? Bring an end to this drought and save your people, for soon there will be nothing left alive.”
And so they prayed, and they danced. They waited, and they prayed. But no rain came. And the little ones and the old ones suffered, and no one knew how to end the suffering.
But there was one small girl who had not yet died of hunger. Her name was She-Who-Sits-Alone. Sitting alone, she watched her people pray and dance, and she held her beloved doll in her arms. The doll was her ultimate companion, her second self, dressed in its warrior clothing, with a bone belt and beaded leggings, and bearing the feathers of the blue jay on its head.
She-Who-sits-Alone watched, with her doll, as the elders went to the top of the mountain to receive the wisdom of the great Spirit. Several times did the sun rise above the mountain, and several times did the light fade behind the mountain’s bulk before they returned. On the mountain top, the people gathered round to hear the message of the Great Spirit, and this is what the Great Spirit said to them:
“For many generations, the people have taken from the earth whatever they needed and wanted, but they have given nothing back to the earth. Now the earth is in distress, and the people must make a sacrifice. They must bring to the fire of sacrifice their most treasured possessions. The ashes of the sacrifice must be scattered to the four winds. When this has been done, the rains will come and the earth will live again”
The people gave thanks and then returned to their teepees to search out their most treasured possessions.
“surely the Great Spirit does not want my bow,” said the archer. “Nor could the Great Spirit possibly desire my treasured blanket,” said the mother.
“I know that the Great spirit could not be asking for my herbs,” said the medicine man.
And so it continued. Everyone had a reason not to give the Great Spirit their greatest treasure.
Meanwhile, She-Who-Sits-alone took her warrior doll into her arms, held it tight and whispered, “It is you the Great Spirit desires. I know what I must do.”
So that night, when everyone slept, She-who-sits-alone threw off her sleeping blanket and climbed to the top of the mountain, carrying her warrior doll in one hand, and a lighted stick from the campfire in the other. When she reached the mountain top, she spoke to the Great Spirit.
“Great Spirit,” she said, “here is my warrior doll, the gift of my mother and my father before they died, and my most treasured possession. Please accept it,” As she kindled the fire, she wept, and she remembered her parents and grandparents and friends who had died of hunger, and she thrust her doll into the flames.
Soon the fire died down. She gathered the cooling ashes and cast them to the four winds. Exhausted, she lay down on the mountain top and fell asleep.
When the rising sun kissed her awake the next morning, she looked around, dazed. There, where she had offered her sacrifice, lay a shinning feather of the blue jay. And as she knelt to look more closely, the first drops of rain caressed her face.
From then on, She-Who-Sits-alone was given a new name by her grateful people. she became known as One-Who-Loved-Her –People.
Today marks the beginning of Lent. Lent reminds us that there are journeys we all have to make in life; physical journeys, spiritual journeys. Some journeys we can share with others, but other journeys lead us into the wilderness alone.
The New Testament accounts tell us that Jesus was baptized in the river Jordon. At that very moment the heavens opened and he heard God accepting him as “my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
You would have thought that this would have been a moment to savour and enjoy; a moment to soak up this incredible realisation; a moment of total bliss and happiness, but it wasn’t. Instead what happens is that he is led “by the spirit” into the wilderness to be tested. There is no time to rest on his laurels and enjoy this moment of connection and wholeness. For some reason Jesus had to immediately live out his calling, rather than sit around and enjoy his moment of blessing.
This journey that was forced on him was not a pleasant jaunt through the Cheshire countryside, like I have begun to enjoy in my time living in Altrincham, it was not a saunter through Dunham Park. It was in no sense a picnic or walk in the park. Instead he spent forty days enduring extreme deprivation and confrontations and endured a great deal of self examination. The Biblical accounts describe him being tested by the devil, by temptation. He suffered greatly and he struggled with this suffering and he suffered alone. His solitary struggle to remain true to his covenant and his calling echoed those of his ancestors who had spent forty years in the wilderness establishing a religious community after they had escaped the Pharaoh and Egypt.
Jesus and his struggles are a great metaphor for our common human experience. Entering into a time of wilderness is something that every person’s soul must journey through. At some point we all have to leave our childhoods behind and enter into adulthood. We cannot live in our childish Eden forever, we are all cast out into the wilderness at one point or another. We gain knowledge of life and when we do, this hurts. So what do we do? Well we discover the resources that we need in order to live, or we flounder.
I have experienced this sense of being cast into the wilderness many times in my life. Sometimes I have risen to the challenge and overcome the obstacles, sometimes alone and at other times with friends. On other occasions I have not. I have run away and I have hidden from whatever life has thrown at me, thus destroying my “self worth”.
During the last few years I have generally risen to the occasion, less and less do I run from life. This is what faith, the religious life, has given me above anything else. It has given me the strength to be who I am and to live with honesty and integrity. I can look the world in the eye today and say, this is who I am. I do not hide in shame, I speak my truth in love. I no longer need someone else to define who I am. That is the power of faith!
The journey into the wilderness reminds us that we are alone and yet we are not alone. Neither are we where we have been or where we are going to. The time in the wilderness is a time of danger and possibility, a time of risk and a time of promise. While we wander in the wilderness the spirit may well descend like a dove and lift us up on its wings of hope and then drive us down into the depths of despair. It may affirm us with gifts of grace and then challenge us to change. In all the great religious traditions of both the east and the west this journey into the wilderness represents a time when we both pursue and resist the Holy. I love the following poem “A Journey” by Edward
Field
When he got up that
morning everything was different:
He enjoyed the bright
spring day
But he did not realise
it exactly, he just enjoyed it.
And walking down the
street to the railroad station
Past magnolia trees
with dying flowers like old socks
It was a long time
since he had breathed so simply.
Tears filled his eyes
and it felt good
but he held them back
Because men didn’t walk
around crying in that town.
Waiting on the platform
at the station
The fear came over him
of something terrible about to happen:
The train was late and
he recited the alphabet to keep hold.
And in its time it came
screeching in
And as it went on
making its usual stops,
People coming and
going, telephone poles passing,
He hid his head behind
a newspaper
No longer able to hold
back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational
weavings of the seat fabrics.
He didn’t do anything
violent as he had imagined.
He cried for a long
time, but when he finally quieted down
A place in him that had
been closed like a fist was open,
And at the end of the
ride he stood up and got off that train:
And through the streets
and in all the places he lived in later on
He walked, himself at
last, a man among men,
With such radiance that
everyone looked up and wondered.
The poem portrays that sense of letting go of something at the end of the journey and how this is often a struggle, to open up the clenched fist. How even at the end of something when we are about to release these pent up emotions, we can often still be afraid of how vulnerable and exposed we can appear to others. I love and identify strongly with the man hiding behind his newspaper before he is able to allow the tears to roll from his eyes.
“He hid his head behind a newspaper
No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabrics.
He didn’t do anything violent as he had imagined.
He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down
A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,”
Powerful imagery
In the story “She-Who-Sits Alone” has to go up the mountain top to let go of her doll. The rain fall, like tears on her face, only comes at the end of her journey. Jesus, of course, often went away from his people to commune openly and honestly with his father.
I have had similar experiences myself. I often go away on my own, either in the countryside or sometimes in the chapel to have those private moments, and I live alone. I do sometimes experience them while walking in a busy bustling street, but it rarely feels appropriate; I am still haunted with the age old saying “boys don’t cry” One of my demons.
This time in the wilderness is meant to be seen as one of purity, that is why one element of Lent is this idea of fasting, of giving something up. It is of course worth noting that virtually every religious tradition throughout human history has a period of fasting. There is value in this cleansing purifying commitment. It’s not just about food though, that is symbolic.
This time in the wilderness is not only a time of purity of letting go of things it is also a time of self sacrifice. Lent has a double meaning, it is about purification of the self and self sacrifice, universal religious principles. In the story “She-Who-Sits-Alone” is prepared to give up her doll her most prised possession, given to her by her now dead parents. She calls this doll her second self. She gives up this doll as she wanders into the wilderness and to the top of the mountain and sacrifices it. She falls asleep and when she awakens she finds the feather of a Blue Jay, just like the one that had sat on her dolls head. The rains soon follow, falling on her face, like tears, which save her people. From that day she becomes known as One-Who-Loved-Her –People. It is important to realise that she does not give her life, only her prized possession, this is because she loves her people more than her doll, her other self. Her people are more important to her than herself identity.
Most of us though cannot do what “She-Who-Sits-Alone” achieved. We are unwilling to let go of those things that we believe define and protect us, remember her doll was her id and it was her warrior too. Most of us are more like the archer, the woman, or the medicine man, unwilling to give up our blanket or bow or herbs, we are human. We believe these possessions identify and protect us.
Jesus, the great example, is difficult for us to live up to. He endured many tests during his time in the desert and was offered many temptations, but he resisted each time. I do not always resist these temptations, but I no longer beat myself up about my imperfections.
I do not think that Lent is asking us to be perfect; it’s a mistake to view it that way. That said it can be interpreted this way and there are real dangers in this. Trying to be perfect can create a paralysing fear that leads us to flee life and stops people doing the simple things they are more than capable of.
I love this line from the song “Purity” by New Model Army.
“Purity is a virtue, purity is an angel, purity is for madmen who make fools of us all...so forgive yourself my friend all this will soon be over what happened here tonight is nothing at all”
This constant gnawing need for perfection, to transcend our humanity does us no good, in fact it can paralysing...I firmly believe in the mantra “progress, not perfection”...progress is tangible...where as perfection is something that seems way beyond my means.
Like everyone I will keep wandering off into the wilderness and experience the pain of battling with my demons. I will give what I am able to give to others too, but I won’t do it perfectly...I do not know what perfection is. That said I will do what I am able to do and perhaps that’s the real message of Lent, to give or give up what you can.
