Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 3, 2002
Long ago I heard a story about a minister in a more mainstream faith than ours, in which the practice of the congregation was to end their worship service with the Lord's prayer. As many of you will recall, that prayer ends with the words, "…for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen." This minister realized how jaded he was becoming when one Sunday, to his horror, he heard himself end the prayer with, "so what?" instead of "amen": "…for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, so what?"
Although we don't often share that particular prayer together, this story is a good hook on which to hang our own episodes of jadedness. When our living becomes habitual, when we move numbly through our routines, it is almost inevitable that our moment-to-moment response to life begins to slide closer to 'so what?' rather than to 'amen'.
I chose "Ode to my Socks" for our reading this morning because Pablo Neruda's voice is such a lovely wake up call. He sings out praises for objects and events in our lives that are so mundane, so utterly ordinary, that we don't even notice them long enough to think, 'so what?' How many of us gave the slightest thought at all to our socks as we pulled them on this morning, other than to check that they matched?
Let us suppose that our socks were not knitted for us with the loving hands of a sheepherder known to us by name, and let us further suppose that most of us have little of the poetic gift that blossomed so beautifully for Neruda. It really doesn't matter. What his poems point us toward is not the specific pair of socks, now long since gone, and not the poetry itself. His poems point us toward the loving eye, the eye of attention that can turn its gaze on anything at all and find there a luminous thing worthy of praise.
In every person's life there are periodic events that shake us out of our habits and wake us up. Metaphorically these come in two familiar packages: they come to us as peaks, and they come to us as valleys. The peak might be a spiritual experience. It might be the riveting awe that grabs hold of us on a moonless winter night when we see the Milky Way dazzled across the sky. It might be a particular twilight, and although we've seen a thousand sunsets before this we suddenly see this one differently, momentarily losing ourselves in it utterly so that when we come back into awareness we feel changed.
Maybe the peak comes when we are lucky enough to travel out of our normal haunts and into an unfamiliar corner of the world. There we find things so different that we cannot tune them out as routine; every taste of a meal or sip of a new drink, every sound coming from around a corner -- each small thing wakes us up. Or a peak might be the birth of a baby, the plunge into a new job or new home, falling in love, meeting a challenge we've set for ourselves. All of the peak times help to wake us up, because while they last they evoke within us, automatically and without effort, the 'amen!' instead of the 'so what?'
The other way we can be shaken out of our routines and habits is through the valleys of life, although there we awaken in a way we wouldn't choose, through the path of suffering. The valleys are when the patterns are disrupted by crisis, as when someone we love is dying, or when we turn and face our internal despair or depression, or when we have failed ourselves or someone else in a way that matters. All such things put us into the valleys of our living.
It feels different to be in one of the metaphoric valleys of life than on a peak; it feels a lot worse. But the effect it has on us is similar in that both operate equally to shake us out of our habits and make us focus our lives in a new way. Every single one of us knows how it feels to wander in those high and low places. If we could choose, most of us would live all the time on the peaks and never visit the valleys at all. But the truth is, neither peaks nor valleys tend to last very long. What does last, day after day and year after year, is the long plateau of living that is occasionally punctuated by peaks and valleys. And it is here that we slide toward a yawn and a shrug, merely trundling along until the next peak awakens our joy or the next valley shakes us to a standstill.
I have a friend who is dying slowly, and not long ago I walked with him on the beach at Hammonaset and noticed how the nearness of his death shapes the way he sees the world. As his body begins to fail him, he finds himself filled with tenderness and sharp attention toward every smallest detail of every unremarkable day. The sand of the beach is a wonder; his unsteady footsteps marking it are a wonder; the serene lapping of the water is a wonder; the dazzle of the sunlight is a wonder. And this is how many people are, when their death becomes suddenly real for them. It isn't the peaks they hunger for then, but the plateau. They hunger for one more ordinary sunrise, one more light touch from someone beloved, one more simple meal of common food shared with their ordinary, beloved children.
And so the question arises, Isn't it possible when we are not ill or dying to bring to the long plateau of our living the kind of wondrous attention that shows us how luminous our world really is?
In an essay about Pablo Neruda's poetry, Roger Housden writes, "'Ode to My Socks' can change the way you see what is in front of your eyes. Too often, we can divide the world between this humdrum material life and some more abstract domain of meaning and spiritual significance. Neruda says no: this world and that world are one and the same. If you open your eyes and look with wonder, even a pair of socks will dance with the filaments of an invisible light."
Neruda wrote odes to the most improbable things. He wrote an ode to his suit, to the practice of bird-watching, to books, to laziness, to people he loved. He wrote odes to celebrate tomatoes, seagulls, lemons, wine, artichokes. Within the gaze of his attention every object or mundane activity becomes luminous with its own essence, as though suddenly called forward from the vast chorus of life to sing a solo and make us pay attention.
My favorite of all his songs of praise is the "Ode to Salt". Before I read it to you, I ask you to take just a couple of seconds to picture the salt you keep in your house, sitting in its several shakers or its little dish with a spoon or its grocery store carton. Hold that most ordinary of images in your mind as you listen.
This salt in the shaker:
I saw it in the salt mines.
I know you're not going to believe me,
but it sings,
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines sings…
And then on every table
in this world
salt
your nimble substance
sprinkling vivid light
over our food.
Preserver of the ancient holds of ships,
you were a discoverer on the ocean,
the first thing to move into the unknown half-open
paths of the foam.
Dust of the sea, through you
the tongue receives a kiss
from the oceanic night:
taste merges your sea-essence
into every seasoned morsel
and thus the least, tiniest wave
from the saltshaker
teaches us
not only its domestic whiteness,
but the central flavor of the infinite.
This is salt! Imagine what shimmering wonder would be clear to us in each moment of our lives if we were able to cultivate this view for ourselves, this willingness to search out, in every smallest detail, 'the central flavor of the infinite'! It is there, right there, right in front of us, next to us, within us all the time, and how strange and sad and sorry it is that we seem to have to work so hard to see it. And yet, as with every other thing to which we turn our will, this too is really just a matter of practice.
I realized long ago it was a lesson I would have to practice all through my life, perhaps with no real hope of proficiency. I don't take to the lesson naturally. I am an extremist by nature, as many of you have figured out, and I am a great lover of the peaks in life. But I am becoming more and more certain that when I go looking for one of those peaks -- when I go looking for the new or different or non-routine -- I am once again missing the point. What's needed isn't another peak, but the attention that the peak can evoke. We waste our lives in extravagant ways as long as the peaks draw our attention so thoroughly that we miss the glory of the every-day.
There is a story told about the building of one of Europe's great cathedrals. A passerby, seeing all the people at work, asked several of them to explain their particular task. A stonemason explained that he was busy cutting and shaping large blocks to make a wall, smaller blocks for a walkway. A carpenter said he was honing logs for rafters, shaping boards for the doorways. A glassmaker said he was preparing the panes of glass for the windows. A woman, sweeping the floor clear of glass shards, wood chips and masonry dust, when asked what she was doing leaned on her broom and said, "I'm building a cathedral to the glory of Almighty God."
It is that kind of vision that eliminates the hunger for a peak experience. It makes evident within each small gesture of our daily lives the glory of life itself. Sweeping the floor is one of the most ordinary tasks of the human hand; we have been sweeping the floors for centuries. But even this mundane task, this epitome of life on the plateau, holds within its motion the building of the cathedral. The key is in our attention.
Pablo Neruda sings of the onion: "…Star of the poor, fairy godmother wrapped in delicate paper, you rise from the ground eternal, whole, pure like an astral seed…" He sings of the tomato: " …luminary of earth, repeated and fertile star, [the tomato] shows us its convolutions, its canals, the illustrious plenitude and the abundance without pit, without husk, without scales or thorns, the gift of its fiery color and the totality of its coolness." The hummingbird he calls "seed of the sun, feathered flame, …plume of the ancient, submerged heart." The seagull he calls "feathered magnolia…serenade of flight". The chestnut fallen to the ground he names "glistening mahogany, …lineage of firewood and flour, oval instrument that holds in its structure unblemished delight and edible rose."
The key to this vision, the way to cultivate this generous eye that sees the luminous wonder in every smallest thing, is contained in all of these lines. The key is moment by moment. It isn't a grand transformation that makes of us enlightened beings. It isn't endless bliss, that allows us to float through our lives in unearthly bedazzlement. It is the willingness to greet each moment with a question instead of an assumption: 'What do you bring?' instead of 'I know all about this.'
The Buddha never taught that if we meditated very hard or for very long stretches, we would suddenly crack our dim selves open and be enlightened. He said, "The mind will be filled with mindfulness moment by moment, the way a bucket becomes filled with water drop by drop." The task is not the huge one of being alert and awake through a lifetime. It is the small, manageable one of being alert and awake in the next moment, and so adding a drop to our bucket.
In his poem, "Too Many Names", Neruda writes,
"…we have barely
disembarked into life,
…we've only just now been born,
let's not fill our mouths
with so many uncertain names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I intend to confuse things,
to unite them, make them new-born,
intermingle them, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the unity of the ocean,
a generous wholeness,
a fragrance alive and crackling.
AMEN.