I’d like to ask all who are able to please
stand up.
If you can wiggle out of your shoes easily,
go ahead.
Now, sink your heels into the ground, rock
forward onto the rest of your feet and spread your toes.
Really ground your feet on the floor, on the earth beneath us.
Now pull the energy of life up through your
feet, pull it into your ankles, up your shins and the calves of your legs,
through your knees, up your thighs.
As you inhale deeply pull the energy of the
earth up your backside, feel it in the muscles of your buttocks, through
your lower back, up the mid-back, into your upper back and your shoulders.
As you inhale deeply pull the energy through
your groin, into your pelvis, up your abdomen and stomach. Really let your
ribs extent as you inhale and pull that energy up your chest, your
collarbone, feel it joining the energy you pulled up through your
shoulders. Now feel the energy down your arms, through your upper arms,
down through your elbows, into your forearm, through your wrists, and hands,
all the way down to the tips of your thumbs and fingers. Now pull the
energy up through your neck, relax your jaw as you bring it up your face,
feel God’s energy in your cheeks, around your eyes, relax your forehead and
ears. Pull the energy up the back of your skull and around the top of your
head. Take another long, deep breath. As you exhale let the tensions of
your life go. Take another one and release your pent up feelings. And
another one, relax further with this exhale.
Thank you. Go ahead and sit back down.
I asked you to do join me in this exercise
to help all of us remember that we are fully embodied. We don’t live in
just the small, but heavy, space between our ears. When the Holy Spirit
visits, it visits our bodies, the home of our soul. This morning I’m going
to start with the transfiguration, move through it to healing, and from
healing to a meditation on possible Lenten disciplines.
Tracy Chapman has a wonderful song that’s
being played these days on the X. It starts and ends with these words,
If you knew that you would die
today,
If you saw the face of God and Love,
Would you change? Would you change?
How did seeing the face of God change the
disciples who viewed the Transfiguration? Well, beyond the initial fear and
awe, I’m not sure we’re told. Perhaps it made them more inquisitive, more
watchful, more mystified.
It is said that St. Thomas Aquinas died when
he beheld the face of God. St. Thomas, who had spent his entire life
writing about God and the impossibility of truly knowing God, seems to have
concluded his life with an experience of God so profound that it silenced
him. He was pressed by his confidant, Br. Reginald and finally, swearing
Br. Reginald to secrecy for the rest of St. Thomas’ life, told him of his
deep experience of the presence of God in the contemplation of the
Eucharist. Br. Reginald only needed to keep the secret a few days because
St. Thomas again venerated the consecrated host and died.
There are two words I want to spend just a
minute looking at before I continue. One is transfigured and one is
transcendent. Trans means to move from one place to another, from one way
of being to another; transfigured means to move from one appearance to
another. Transcendent means to move beyond the limits of ordinary
experience.
Movement occurs through openings, through
the lumens, through the cervixes and vaginas, through the mouths and noses,
through the very pores of our being.
This brings me to the relationship of
transfiguration and healing. Matthew Fox, in his book Confessions
explains how he decided to tell his story. He writes, “…the Spirit has
worked in my life – as it works in everyone’s life-but many people need
others’ stories to realize spirit in their own” (2). I feel similarly. My
life is so full of God’s work, God’s face, God’s life. It is hard not to
talk only, and ad infinitum, of my life and it is equally impossible not to
talk of it at all.
So, I’m going to tell you two stories of
healing. The first is of a man very dear to me. He was diagnosed with
Multiple Sclerosis when he was 28. He was a deeply faithful man who
believed in prayer and miracles. He tried everything he could think of,
everything that was presented to him as a possible treatment or cure. He
made multiple pilgrimages to multiple holy sites, he took God’s word
seriously and brought along other believers to aid him in receiving God’s
grace. He laughed at the doctors who told him he’d be lucky to live 20
years. He proclaimed he’d live to be 100. But his illness progressed from
walking with braces, to walking with braces and canes, from canes to
crutches and finally to being wheelchair bound. He didn’t loose just
his ability to walk, no person with a severe disability does. He lost his
personhood. People would ask his family what he thought rather than asking
him, as if he couldn’t answer these questions himself.
When I was healing from the seizure I spoke
of in my last sermon, I had a period of prolonged and deep fatigue. I was
also dizzy, not with vertigo, but as if the floor would suddenly list like a
ship on the high seas. At one point my doctor thought I might have M.S. It
was the first time in this ordeal that I was afraid. I knew MS too well.
At the time a dear friend of mine, a
Franciscan brother, was renting the third floor of my house from me. The
night before I went for the MRI, I couldn’t sleep. He stayed up with me.
At one point he asked me to tell him how I felt. I felt totally empty,
forsaken. He responded, “How perfect, Ann-Mary. If you weren’t empty, how
else could God fill you?” I wanted to bop him one but right behind that
anger came the tears I needed to cry and then the comfort of the truth of
his words. My emptiness made me humble enough to receive God.
I knew a little bit about humility and God
at this point. I’d started attending Al-Anon about a year before. I grew
up in alcoholism. It touched every family relationship in some way or
another. Al-Anon is a program for the family and friends of alcoholics and
it was part of my path to a deeper spiritual transformation, of healing. I
joke, when I tell my story in the program, that I had been a closet twelve
stepper for years. In my late 20’s I knew the illness had affected me so I
took a job in a state-run treatment facility hoping to gain a deeper
understanding. One of my favorite parts of the job was that I took people
who were detoxed to open AA meetings. I would always stay. I copped a
“Grapevine”, AA’s monthly magazine, ripped off the back cover with the
twelve steps, and hung them in my closet. I said them every morning when I
got dressed. No one ever mentioned Al-Anon to me in those days or maybe I
just couldn’t hear them. Just reading the steps comforted me, working them
has had a profound influence on my life. Twelve step programs are one of
many ways to open to God.
Al-Anon gave me the tools to reshape my
thinking, to speak the truth about my life, to quit denying reality, to find
that I could, indeed be happy whether the alcoholic was still drinking or
not and all of mine that are still living are still drinking. Being truly
honest and becoming willing once again to align my will with God’s made me
able to accept the love and care my friend extended on that long night
before my MRI. I surrendered my fear to God’s love through my friend that
night. The MRI was inconclusive. I had a single lesion, not multiple ones,
probably a scar from the seizure. Only time would tell if there would be
more. Thanks be to God there aren’t and today I’m as quick as I ever was
and much more alive.
The experience opened me in a new way, a
permanent way, to God. I think I caught a glimpse of God’s face. The
opening came through a wound and it deepened my desire to know God. I would
say unequivocally that God always responds to our willingness but not by
giving us what we want necessarily. Think about your own lives.
Most of us have lived long enough to have experienced an unexpected turn in
the road, a bump in it. I heard a great sermon the other day entitled
“Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall”. The woman preacher spoke of the times her
egg had been broken and there were no ways to put it back together again. I
know we can all relate. The ways that our lives have been broken open, some
in ways we celebrate, some in ways we retreat.
What have you experienced in life that broke
you wide open? One for me it was the birth of my first child. I remember
looking into her face and realizing that my life would never be the same;
that I had been entrusted with tending this child and her soul until she was
old enough to do so herself. My heart became permanently more tender that
day. The deaths of each of my parents and of my young nephew were also
moments of being broken open. I was only 37 when both of my parents were
gone. I remember thinking I was way too young to be the oldest generation,
to take on the responsibility of an elder in my family. You know the
moments, the ones when your spouse says they have found someone else, the
ones when you’ve lost a job, the ones when your last child goes out on her
own and the house is left echoing in its emptiness. I am learning to do as
St. Paul admonishes and to give thanks for everything. I’m not a masochist;
I’ve just been alive long enough to know that these moments of bleeding and
dying are the moments that lead to new and deeper life.
Lent starts on Wednesday. I want to spend a
little bit of time talking about Lenten disciplines. My challenge to us is
that we open ourselves more fully to God this Lent. Lent is the season when
we go from sweet baby Jesus to our Lord and Savior and we get there through
agony. We are not the only ones who experience dark nights and broken
hearts. Jesus did, too. He is the crossroads; in him, on the cross, all
opposites are reconciled. Jesus is the meeting place of dark and light, of
day and night, of feminine and masculine, of God and man. He doesn’t split
it down the middle. He doesn’t produce a life of only light, of endless
day.
Dark and evil are not the same thing though
I think this is sometimes an unwelcome truth. Many of us want to avoid the
darkness, but it is completely necessary. If you don’t believe me, go home,
put a handful of seeds in a bowl, add water and place them under a light,
keep watering them ‘til they sprout. They won’t last long without darkness
and neither will we. Darkness is the place of fruition, of fecundity, we
are each knit together in the relative darkness of a woman’s womb, the earth
swells with new life that comes up out of darkness, Jesus wasn’t resurrected
without dying on the cross of reconciliation and he didn’t give his life
without his own dark night of the soul.
What I propose for Lent is a discipline, any
discipline, that opens us to God. If giving up chocolate really does that
for you, please give up chocolate. But if it doesn’t, how about increasing
your capacity for life instead so that on Easter Sunday you will know the
true meaning of resurrection? I bet every single one of has an “if only”
lurking inside of us. Some creative urge left untapped. Steal away to
Jesus in the days to come and ask yourself what you might hear God urging
you to do, where you might feel God nudging you to do something. Perhaps
your Lenten discipline could be to buy newsprint and charcoal and draw.
Maybe it could be to put words on paper and create poetry, write a story, a
love letter, or a note of forgiveness. Maybe it is time to sing with all
the volume your lungs have to offer or to pick up the musical instrument
that has been in its case since the kids were born. Maybe its time to try a
new recipe, to really taste chocolate, to invite someone you want to get to
know over for coffee, to reconnect with an old friend.
First Methodist offers many ways you might
open yourself to God. There is the Disciple Bible study on Tuesday nights,
the contemplative prayer group on Wednesday nights through Lent. There is
the opportunity to have lunch with John on Mondays. There is the class John
Emerson is teaching, starting with exercise, on Thursday mornings. You
could even mentor a confirmation candidate or attend Adult Sunday school
where you’ll know you have a body ‘cause you won’t be able to keep still
while we listen and watch “Sweet Honey in the Rock”.
You know I’ve found God to be slippery like
the oil we just blessed. Isn’t that wonderful? God can and will enter the
tiniest of fissures if we just create them and invite God in. We don’t have
to wait until we’re cracked wide open from an injury or illness or broken
heart.
Oh, I wanted to tell you about the healing
of that man with MS. I was with him when he died; he didn’t quite make it
to 100 but he did live to be 75. The mechanisms of his central nervous
system were gone. He had a high fever, his blood sugar was off the charts,
his breathing had become panting, and he was in a coma. But despite all of
this, every time somebody told him they loved him, he responded in kind with
the words, “I love you.” After hours of being in this state he slipped for
a moment into utter quiet, his breathing slowed, he quit fidgeting. His
family gathered around his bedside. He did something that surprised us
all. He sat bolt upright in bed, squeezed the hands of those next to him
until his knuckles turned white, and he methodically exhaled three times and
died while he was still sitting up. I had the overpowering impression that
he had seen the dazzling face of God and that his man who hadn’t walked in
years, flew across the finish line.
I invite you today, at the end of the
service, to join us at the altar. I invite you to become permeable to God,
to open just a sliver. I invite you to tell your truth, to state your pain,
your fear, your desire.
Tracy Chapman’s words include
How bad, how good does it need to
get?
How many losses, how much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?
Makes you turn around, makes you try to explain,
Makes you forgive and forget, makes you change?
If you saw the face of God and Love,
If you saw the face of God and Love,
Would you change? Would you change?
God bless us all, in the name of God, Mother
and Father, Sister and Brother, Soul and Spirit. Amen.
