Reading from The Hungering Dark, by Frederick Buechner

My wife and I were buying groceries one day... and over a shelf of breakfast cereal and cake mix I said, "Don't forget the cream". She said, "All right, but don't you forget you're trying to lose weight", and I said, "Oh, well, you only live once." And then it happened, this thing that broke for a moment through my deafness. The store was nearly empty so that a woman at the checkout counter had no trouble hearing us. It was a hot, muggy afternoon, and she had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of Life Savers and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said, "Oh well, you only live once", she broke into the conversation, and what she said was, "Don't you think once is enough?" That was it.

...In our semideafness and semiblindness, in our killing of time, our boredom, our thirst for the dream of tomorow and our neglect of the miracle of today -- to the degree that this or something like this is our life, once is certainly enough. But in another way, a thousand lives do not seem enough, not when we are really alive, and I wonder if there is any particular confusion about when we are really alive. …We are alive when… we stop once in a while and just let ourselves be something, be who we are. When by unclenching our fists, we give life a chance to do something with us. When we take the little piece of time that we have in this world and pay attention to what it is telling us, not just to what it is telling us about the beauty of the sun as it sets, God knows, but to what it is telling us about all the wildness and strangeness and pain of things, the tears of things,...as well as the joy of things....

We are really alive when we manage somehow to love -- when we love the mystery and beauty and terror that loom vast just beneath the air we move through, when we begin to hear a voice not just in the setting sun but in the earthquake, in the silence, in the agonies of men and women as well as in their gladness. We are really alive when we love each other, when we look at each other and think, "Grace and peace be with you, brother and friend, [sister and friend']." When there is such life as this, once is not nearly enough.

On The Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 16, 2003

I chose this sermon as the one to revisit today because the title seemed to me so appropriate: 'On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows'. I didn't make it up -- it's a phrase I cribbed from someone else, though I can't remember who said it or in what context. But it seems very appropriate for this morning, or for any of the mornings we've awakened to over quite a long time now.

We have been living together through weeks and months that feel, much of the time, as though we're on a brink, a precipice. Calm certainties and mundane patterns of life seem a long time ago. Now, each day's headlines jar us into a state of high alert. Will today be the day the all-out war starts in Iraq? Will it be the day some city of ours comes under new attack? Will there be a bomb, a germ, a radioactive poison? Are my children safe? Should I worry about the next round of civil liberties that might be curtailed? What will our world look like in a year? In five years, or ten?

We are intensely aware that we live on the eve of uncertain tomorrows. It's a hard time in which to keep our balance, our center. And yet these are the times in which the ability to stay grounded and sane matters most of all. The uncertainty and fearfulness all around us may not dissipate for a long, long time. It may not really be a case of girding ourselves for a stretch of uncertainty, but rather training ourselves for a new way of being in the world, a new way of living.

We may have many more months, even years in which we wake each day knowing that anything might happen, that we don't know where we're going as a nation, that we're not sure about safety or stability or much else we can count on.

In uncertain times, how do we wake to our days with a sense of peace and sustenance intact? Is there a way? It seems to me that we can learn a lot by just reminding ourselves that when we look through a smaller, more intimate lens, we know what gives us balance. Because we have all had, or know we will have, the awakening to uncertain tomorrows on the individual level. We have earthquakes visit our lives -- a car accident, the death of a spouse, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden disability. These are the traumas of an individual life, smaller in scope but not in how they impact my own personal world. I'm thinking that what gets us through those things might be the same stuff that gets us through the more global wrenching.

My friend and colleague Barbara Merritt tells a story about how hard it was to work one day when a small pick-up truck, parked illegally under the church window, began to scream. Barbara writes, "When I say 'screaming', I am not just referring to the irritating noise that an alarm siren makes, over and over again. No, this car also talked in a harsh, machine-generated nasal voice. After two short blasts of an ear-piercing siren, it then announced to a city block (and I quote), 'I've been tampered with! I've been tampered with!'....This process repeated itself about five times a minute..."

This was really just the beginning of a pretty long and funny story; but what grabbed me was that odd, irritating shriek, "I've been tampered with!" Who, after all, has not been tampered with? All of us on the road get bumped, jostled and dented or worse -- and there are times when we want nothing as much as we want to fall apart and wail about the tampering. And yet we also know about -- or perhaps know intimately -- people who have been on the receiving end of much worse than tampering, and yet who don't wail about it -- or at least not very often.

They're the ones who have had more than what seems a fair share of adversity; and yet they seem to keep on in their lives, and maintain an element of gentleness and generosity, even of equanimity. And most of us take turns being 'this kind' and 'that kind' of person: sometimes we flail and gnash our teeth and whine at the world about how we've been tampered with and how unfair it is. And other times, through the batterings we take on life's road, we actually come out stronger, deeper, feeling more whole and blessed despite the damage we've sustained. Sometimes we find that the very damage itself allows us to be kinder, or more present and real, or simply of more use to other people in our lives.

What is that about? What is the quality that moves us from the cry "I've been tampered with!" to some deeper quality of living, out of which we can give more to those around us than if we'd never been bumped or damaged? One word for it is grace. That's a large idea in a small word, a sometimes problematic word, since grace is a religious concept. Like all religious words, it's a vehicle for a big idea that can be defined in lots of different ways.

The Benedictine Prioress Joan Chittister says, "Grace is that which shows you more than you saw before and makes you more than you thought you could be". Ann Ulanov, a psychotherapist and writer, says, "Grace is whatever happens to you because of which you come out better. So you get funny graces -- it doesn't come packaged in cotton and candles -- but it's something that allows you to see that everything there is in life is right here, this moment. And if you can take it, you're connected right to the center of things."

I like the notion of grace not as some ethereal light descending on us, but as something that deepens us and makes us better, however unexpected its package. So grace might not be comfortable. Grace might be in the mix even if in the end things don't seem to turn out our way, and even when there's no silver lining to speak of. This notion of grace doesn't promise we won't be tampered with, as we go through our lives. It says only that there are surprises: that the movement into a deeper self, or into a resonant insight that changes our lives, can come to us unexpectedly: not despite of but because of the hard times.

William Sloan Coffin tells story of his youth, when he was fired up with the certainty that he was called by God to be a fantastic preacher, reformer, a man of God. So he set out to reform the world, and he started out by trying to talk a professional gambler out of his chosen profession, seeing that it was so sinful.

The gambler listened patiently for a while, and then asked, "You're gonna be a preacher, right?" and Coffin said 'yes'. "So you believe in grace, right?", and Coffin said that yes, he certainly did. So the gambler said, "Well we're the same! You believe in grace and I believe in gambling: that means we both believe in somethin' for nothin'!" And Coffin concludes by saying, "All I could do was salute and walk off to ponder his wisdom. What did we do for all we have, all the somethin' for nothin' in our lives?.

When we're struggling with uncertain or frightening times, one way that we pull ourselves back to our strength is through a conscious remembrance of all the "somethin' for nothin'" that saturates our lives. We do remember every once in a while, when we're caught breathless by a sunset or a child's laugh or a dazzling snowfall or the first buds of spring -- we remember, for just a minute before we forget again, how precious and miraculous life is, even in the midst of uncertainty.

If we could remember more often, remember the giftedness of life at all the turning points, grace might drape over us like a robe even during our hardest times. It would comfort us because we'd keep a balance in our vision. We'd remember that life is a gift that came unbidden and without the promise of being trouble-free. We'd be buoyed up and grateful for the entirety, even when living through some painful chapters.

But we don't see the everyday grace very often or very consistently. That's why it's so common, and so human, to cry out in the hard times, the times when life is tampering with us, "Why me? what did I do to deserve this?" But we accept the extraordinary bounty of every day with open hands, often with ungrateful hearts and unconscious minds. In the good times we rarely think to cry out, "Why me? What ever did I do to deserve this rich and varied and incredible life?"

But there's another kind of grace that seems to me just as important as the gifts and abundance each day gives us. It's grace that we create for one another, a grace that lives in the charged, intimate space between people, sometimes even between strangers. This is a giftedness that we make through every gesture of care and generosity, through our willingness to be present to one another in painful times.

It's a grace that is put out in the world through every choice that moves us toward rather than away from connection, every act of will that extends some kind of accompaniment to another person. That's the sort of grace we need desperately in these tense and fearful times.

In his book, "How Can I Help?", Ram Dass writes, "What do we really have to offer, what do we really have to give? Everything, it turns out. Everything. If within each of us is that essence of Being which is in all things -- call it God, Life, Energy, Consciousness -- then as open to all that as we are in ourselves, so we have it to share with one another… When all else fails, when we've done what we can, we still have this essential reassurance to offer one another...We are not separate; we are not alone."

"Essential reassurance": that's what we have to give each other, and that's what I think will pull us through these days as whole, strong, sustaining people. It's what we've always had to give each other, in a time of crisis or bereavement: this touch of compassion, of reassurance.

It's a strange idea, to think of ourselves as grace incarnate, as a gift to one another. And yet it's so clear that this is what we are. When we are afraid, it isn't going to be plastic sheeting and duct tape that will make us feel safe again, for heaven's sake! And it isn't a vast arsenal or the national guard at the airports or a new department of homeland security. It is each other. It is knowing we've got a place to rest, a place of refuge, in the company of those who are also afraid, but who will guard hope with us, take action with us, think through our choices with us.

UU poet Lynn Unger writes,
By what are you saved? And how?
Saved like a bit of string,
tucked away in a drawer?
Saved like a child rushed from
a burning building, already
singed and coughing smoke?
Or are you salvaged
like a car part -- the one good door
when the rest is wrecked?

[You should] believe me when I say
you are neither salvaged nor saved,
but salved, anointed by gentle hands
where you are most tender.
Haven't you seen
the way snow curls down
like a fresh sheet, how it
covers everything, makes everything
beautiful, without exception?

There are different kinds of grace. Some may be God-given, some found in the depths of our own souls and strength, some nestled in the secret heart of life itself. And then there's human grace. The grace that we make from within ourselves, the grace that we give to one another, is not the power to save or to salvage, but to salve.

We know nothing about what our future will bring to us. None of us knows when calamity might strike us, when the next bad thing will happen to again turn our world upside down. We live every day of our lives on the eve of uncertain tomorrows. The grace that we make for one another -- the grace of companionship, of accompaniment -- does not make those tomorrows any more certain, or give us any impossible guarantee that we can move through them undamaged. But it allows us to know, at least, that when we step forward into the uncertainty, we don't go alone. AMEN