Stand Still
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, April 6, 2008
at The First Parish in Lincoln
To listen to this sermon click here.
“Oh brother I can’t, I can’t get through
I’ve been trying hard to reach you, cause I don’t know what to do”
– from “Talk” by Coldplay
READINGS:
The readings this morning are a single verse from 1st Samuel and a poem by David Wagoner called “Lost.” The poem is based on an old Native American teaching story from the Pacific Northwest. It’s about what to do if you are lost in the forest. Mr. Wagoner, who is an award-winning poet and novelist, has taken the story and turned it into this poem. So what do you do if you are lost in the forest?...
Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
– From Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems
And here is that single verse from 1 Samuel 12:16:
“Now then, stand still and see this great thing the Lord is about to do before your eyes!”
There are so many pivotal lines in David Wagoner’s poem, “Lost,”
that you know, even after hearing it once, that it’s about more than being lost in the woods.
It’s about how to find and take your place in the world –
how to take your place in the world in such a way that it doesn’t kill you.
And the poem says that to do that, you need to learn to notice the details in whatever is around you,
to see the difference between this tree and that one,
this way of spending your time and that way.
You need to learn how to pay a particular and fierce kind of attention.
You need to be willing to enter into a real conversation with whoever or whatever is around you,
whether it be friend or stranger, forest or city, home or far from home;
and if you do this, if you will learn to pay attention in this focused way,
you will never be lost.
You will always know who you are.
There is no way to overstate how valuable that centered sense of self is in the world today.
It’s easy to feel lost these days, no matter what age you are.
In her column in the Times last week, Gail Collins said it well:
it’s nearly impossible to give proper attention to everything that’s going on around us.
“You start fretting about the collapse of the housing market,
then you wander off into melting glaciers”
and then there’s the latest news from Iraq, and who our next president will be,
“and,” she says, “before you know it the day is over.”
And she didn’t add in the foreground: job, family, school, friends, errands, sports, and all the rest.
The world we live in seems tailor-made to promote attention deficit disorder.
Which is why the teaching story that inspired David Wagoner’s poem is so right on point.
In the original story, the Native American elders are responding to a very practical question
from a young boy or girl: “What do I do when I’m lost in the forest?”
In the Pacific Northwest, where the story comes from, that was a life or death question.
The forests there are thick with redwoods, cedar, hemlock and fir.
If you wander just a few hundred yards in without paying attention,
you can lose sight of all four cardinal directions –
the trees are 150 feet high; their trunks are so wide you can’t see around them.
So if you lose your sense of direction, what do you do?
The elders’ answer is:
“Stand still.”
“Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.”
Think about any time you have ventured into unfamiliar territory –
into a strange city, or into a wilderness area that is new to you;
in either place, you are meeting a powerful stranger.
Surroundings that are entirely other than yourself.
The question is: will you have a real conversation with this powerful stranger, or not?
You may want to narrow your aim and quicken your pace
so as to get through the experience as quickly as possible, and if you do,
you may not get lost, but you won’t learn anything new.
If you choose instead to stand still, listen, and pay attention to the details,
what is in front of you, beside you, behind you...?
then you begin to have a real conversation – and your surroundings become less strange.
The forest answers, “I have made this place around you.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.”
You learn to see what they see – the difference between those two trees, those two branches.
What makes them stand apart?
You learn to pay that kind of attention.
Because if you don’t, the forest can kill you without another thought.
But if you do, it will take care of you.
It will provide shelter, medicines, and food.
To take your place in the world, you must ask permission to know it and to be known,
to stand still, pay attention to the details,
and have a real conversation with who and what’s around you.
And if you will do this, you will never be lost.
I think that the highest goal of a good church, a good school, or any good business
is to help us pay that kind of attention to what really matters,
to help people navigate difficult situations and keep their sense of direction.
And just as the elders knew that their children had something valuable to learn from the birds,
from Raven and Wren – how to see the differences between this tree and that one,
so we, in a good church, know that our understandings don’t run in just one direction.
Our children and youth have things to learn from us – and we have things to learn from them.
When I get together for dinner with our ninth graders,
I ask one of them each time to bring some music they really like,
and over the years they have brought everything from oldies and rap to Bach and Mozart.
These days they often burn a CD with a mix of their favorites and bring it in for everyone to hear.
One of the mixes this winter included a track by the British rock band, Coldplay.
Even if you’ve never heard of Coldplay, you’ve definitely heard some of their music –
it’s ubiquitous in the background of television commercials
and on the radio.
The song I want us to pay some attention to this morning is called “Talk.”
The lyrics are in this morning’s Order of Service,
and I’m going to let the band sing the first few lines:
Oh brother I can't, I can't get through
I've been trying hard to reach you, cause I don't know what to do
Oh brother I can't believe it's true
I'm so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you
Oh I wanna talk to you
Skip down to the first break and you’ll see that the song goes on to ask:
Are you lost or incomplete?
Do you feel like a puzzle, you can’t find your missing piece?
“Talk” is a song about feeling lost and ignored and scared about the future – not knowing what to do.
It’s about a broken connection: “Oh brother I can’t, I can’t get through.”
Why can’t he or she get through? It could be a brother or a friend who has died.
It could be a good friend you just haven’t been able to reach.
But the message is, “Let’s talk.”
If you take time to read all the lyrics (just Google Coldplay and Talk),
you’ll see that the song is also about taking your place in the world,
and about the dream of wanting to do something that’s never been done.
Faith and doubt live side-by-side in this song:
there is the sense of feeling lost and scared and needing to talk,
and there is believing that great things are possible.
We’ve all been there.
We have all, at some time in life, felt lost or incomplete.
And it’s never easy to come out from behind yourself – to have a real conversation.
What do I do when I’m lost in the forest? – when I can’t get through?
“Stand still,” the elders say.
“The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.”
The elders understood these two things:
that we need to listen, to pay attention, to know the forest as well as the birds do;
and we need to know that there is something more at work in every situation,
a power that is both in us and beyond us and all around us.
“You must let it find you.”
And if you do, you will know that great things are possible.
That’s what Samuel, one of the great elders in the Hebrew bible, meant when he said to his people,
“Stand still – and see this great thing the Lord is about to do before your eyes!”
Amen.
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