All Shall Be Well
a sermon given by Claire Phillips-Thoryn
at The First Parish in Lincoln
on Sunday, February 4, 2007
Click here to listen to this sermon.
First Reading:
I was very much inspired by the final question Roger and I received last Sunday, that asked “What does it mean to be a community of faith?” That’s a good question to wrestle with and it inspired me to share with you some of my thoughts on faith. Our first reading is an excerpt from Sharon Salzberg’s book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. Sharon Salzberg is a Buddhist meditation teacher, and she runs a Buddhist center in Western Massachusetts.
She writes:
Faith does not require…a deity or a God,…faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have…[Faith] is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experiences.
The Buddha said, “Faith is the beginning of all good things.” No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present-day experience, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself.
A capacity for this type of faith is inherent in every human being. We might not recognize it or know how to nurture it, but we can learn to do both (xiv).
Second Reading:
an excerpt from “Little Gidding” in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
It is very beautiful and very dense, so I will read it twice.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
A few years ago I came upon these words by the Rev. A. Powell Davies. He writes:
We are mistaken to ever imagine that we are secure. We live on a spinning ball, all but the outer crust of which is flame; we live on it subject to all its hazards and always will: these include earthquake and hurricane, tornado and eruption, storm and avalanche, fire and flood. We live our physical lives within our own precarious bodies subject to all the perils of disease, all the dangers of accident. There is nothing we can call our own which may not be taken away.
He wrote these words in a sermon about mastering anxiety. With all the instability and suffering awaiting around every corner, how are we to make it through each day? How do we find the courage, the strength to try again, to wake up every morning, to rise up and move forward? Where do we find the ability to trust in our own deepest experiences, to say softly but firmly:
“…all shall be well and
All will be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
T.S. Eliot quoted these words by Julian of Norwich, a religious woman who lived during the bleakest time of the Middle Ages. She heard Jesus respond to her prayers, and she recorded his words. “All shall be well,” she wrote, as the Bubonic Plague raged around her, as bodies piled up in the streets. “All manner of thing shall be well.” Her life was precarious, the convent cell she lived in was dark and small—yet her faith was bright.
Sharon Salzberg tells us that the ancient Pali word usually translated as “faith” (saddha) in Buddhist scripture literally means “to place the heart upon.” “To have faith is to offer one’s heart or give over one’s heart.”1 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, late professor of comparative religion at Harvard, has this definition of faith: “Faith is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response, a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension.” And, as William Sloan Coffin has said, “faith is not acceptance without proof, but trust without reservation.” All of these things speak to what faith is.
Faith is larger than hope
and faith is different than belief.
Faith is a knowing of the heart.
“And all shall be well and
All will be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
This knowing of the heart, faith, does not require or deny a deity, but it exists outside of belief. Faith is an orientation to oneself and to the larger world, a way of living that allows us to move forward, take another step, even when it seems impossible.
Anne Lamott, a popular writer whose stories often have to do with her son Sam, tells a story from when her best friend Pammy was diagnosed with cancer. She writes,
I’m just trying to stay faithful. I heard this amazing …doctor talking about autistic kids who were so severely withdrawn that if you stood them up, they’d just fall over. They’d make no effort to stand or even to shield their faces when they fell. Then these people working with them discovered that if they ran a rope from one end of the room to the other and stood the kids up so that they were holding on to the rope, the kids would walk across the room. So over the months they kept putting up thinner and thinner pieces of rope, until they were using something practically invisible, like fishing line, and the kids would still walk across the room if they could hold on to it. And then—and this really seems like a brainstorm—the adults cut the fishing line into pieces, into twelve-inch lengths or something, and handed one to each kid. The kids would still walk. What an amazing statement of faith. I told this to Pammy, but she didn’t really respond right away. She went over to where Sam was playing and sat down next to him and said, “Mommy’s a religious fanatic.” She held him in her lap while he played with his toys, and she made him laugh, and then she started to cry.
“We need to get some,” she said…
“Some what?” I asked.
“Some fishing line.”
Some fishing line to walk across a room doesn’t give us the ability to walk. But maybe that fishing line helps us to hold on to our faith in our ability to move forward.
Faith doesn’t mean that we place a blind and unquestioning belief in a thing or a person. Sharon Salzberg is very clear that to have faith does not mean to offer up your heart to just anyone or anything, or even to some great authority figure, without first verifying that this is someone or something that deserves your faith. She explains that there is a difference between blind faith, and verified faith, and that difference is embracing doubts and the ability to question. Ann Lamott has also said that “that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with.”2
We all experience things in life that shake us to our core. Some come slowly, like the long illness of a loved one, and some come suddenly and unexpectedly, like the tragic event at Lincoln-Sudbury High School. During times like these it is hard to know where our faith is. And it is times like these when it is most important to take comfort in one’s community of faith. Salzberg has a story where a dear friend was going through a painful time, and told her he had lost his faith. “It’s okay,” she said. “I have enough faith for the both of us.”3 What does it mean to be a community of faith? It means that we give over our hearts to each other, and when our hearts hurting, we all can hold each other up. It means we respond to each other and to the universe on more than a mundane level; that together we see, we feel, we act in terms of, a transcendent dimension. In each other we find trust without reservation. Faith in community; a community of faith.
“And all shall be well and
All will be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
There may well be some skeptics among us. Emily Dickinson wrote:
"Faith"
is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
This is true. But: even in the prudent use of microscopes and other modern miracles, we still have faith, faith in our doctor to tell us accurately what she is seeing under that microscope. And we have to have faith in our own interpretation of our symptoms just to decide to go to the doctor so that microscope can get some use. As Sharon Salzberg said in our first reading, “Faith does not require…a deity or a God,…faith is not a commodity we either have or don’t have—it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experiences.”
Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. An anchoress of the Middle Ages was like a nun, but took much stricter vows. During their vows, these woman were married to Christ—and removed from the world, in a combination wedding and funeral ceremony. The small cell that she lived in at the convent, about a dozen square feet, was then enclosed—bricked up and walled off, leaving only a small passage for food and communication, and a tiny squint through which to see the high altar of the church. They could never leave.4 Julian was incarcerated, totally dependent, and alone. And yet she wrote that:
“…all shall be well and
All will be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
Rev. Bill Schulz, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and now the Executive Director of Amnesty International, has seen the worst that human beings have done to each other, but he can also speak to the transcendent dimensions that humans can rise to, and how we can find our faith even in the hardest of times. I want to share with you a piece from his recent essay titled “What Torture’s Taught Me.” He writes:
What torture has taught me, what all those brave souls and, yes, even a few of their tormentors, have taught me, is to never give up on the glimmers of grace for not everything is all that it seems. If even survivors of torture can reclaim a sense of life’s bounty, then surely …[we] can too. If the torturer cannot fully break the human spirit, nobody can. For we … know, out of the depths of our faith and the teachings of our tradition and the succor of our community, that the chess master was right.
Chancing upon a great painting in a European gallery of a defeated Faust sitting opposite the devil at a chess table with only a knight and a King on the board and the King in check, the master stopped to stare. The minutes changed to hours and still the master stared. And then finally, “It’s a lie,” he shouted. “The King and the knight have another move! They have another move!” And that’s finally what torture has taught me—that it is not just the King but the knight, not just the Queen but the rook, not just the Bishop but the pawn, not just the wealthy but the pauper, not just the fortunate but the weary, not just the torturer but the tortured, not just the powerful but every single person, every single blessed person, until the day we die, …every single blessed person … has another move. We all have another move.5
We all have another move.
Even as she sat in her living tomb, death and disease at her door, Julian of Norwich dreamed of God’s love, and the beauty of a world beyond this. She had faith that God, through it all, was with her, holding her and helping her through her suffering. She gave an image of God holding the earth, the whole world cupped in God’s hands like a small hazelnut. God couldn’t stop the hurt and suffering that humans inflicted on one another, but God was present in the courage, the strength, the faith that humans gathered up in order to move forward. It may take some fishing line, it may take a friend. But together, as a community of faith, we find the faith to get out of bed in the morning and rise up, singing:
“And all shall be well and
All will be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
_____________________
1. Salzberg, Faith, 12
2. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, pg 256
3. Faith, pg 111
4. April Almaas, “Grace and the 14th Shewing”
5. Bill Schulz, Berry Street Essay 2006. http://www.uuma.org/BerryStreet/Essays/BSE2006.htm