I want to thank you for the opportunity to preach today. I will be drawing
from the myth of Orpheus, a story less ancient than many of our Hebrew texts
but considerably older than those of our Christian ones. It is my great
pleasure to share with you some of what I have recently studied in my
program in Mythology. You are also helping me to meet a requirement to take
what I have learned out into the bigger world. Thank you.
For those of you, who like me just a few months ago, know little to nothing
about Orpheus, let me give a brief synopsis of his myth. Orpheus is a lyric
poet. Throughout the myth he uses his words, accompanied with the music of
his lyre, to charm, persuade and inform. Orpheus looses his beloved,
Euridice, to the underworld just as they were to be joined in marriage. She
was pursued by Aristaeus and, in her fear, ran from him; in the process she
steps on a poisonous snake, dies and takes her place in the underworld.
(Haven’t I preached on poisonous snakes before?) Orpheus, torn by grief,
descends behind her. Orpheus, singing and playing his lyre, begs the gods of
the underworld to let him take his dear one back to life. They are charmed
and agree to his request, but with a condition, on the ascent Orpheus must
not look back. He can not behold his beloved again until they have cleared
the valley, Avernus, separating the underworld from the world of life; if he
does look back Euridice will be lost to him forever. Just inches from his
destination, Orpheus is filled with the longing to ascertain that indeed,
Euridice is following him, and in his moment of longing and doubt, glances
back and looses her. The Orphic moment is this one, the one of doing the
thing he is commanded not to do – looking back. Let’s examine how this
moment of disobedience leads Orpheus to his vocation.
First, Orpheus returns to this world filled with mourning. When he returns
from his trip to the underworld without Euridice, his life is not over and
neither is his suffering. In many ways his darkest days had only just begun.
Orpheus resurfaced and started living life very differently. It was hardly
pleasing to the gods. He returns from the underworld an orphan. The term is
not used here in the way we normally think of it; Orpheus’ parents play no
role in the myth. What marks him as an orphan is a profound loss of
identity. Prior to the moment when Orpheus looked back, neither he, nor
Euridice had their own identities. Orpheus was consumed by his love for
Euridice and his self-driven life revolved around restoring himself to a
former state. In the stories, whether read in Virgil, Ovid or the poetry of
Rilke, Euridice was also freed by Orpheus’ backward glance to finally have
an identity of her own.
In the myth of Orpheus, disobedience is followed by dis-memberment, both
figuratively and literally. He comes back and behaves in ways that are
displeasing to many. He woos young men, again using his gift of words and
music, just as they are coming into their sexuality. The older men are
furious with him because the young men, distracted by sexual pleasure, loose
their interest in being good warriors. Orpheus’ actions, fueled by his
grief, lead to his loss of membership in his community. Orpheus also shuns
women and we all know the wrath of a shunned woman. It is finally the women
in their contempt that literally dismember him. Ah, but here, in the moment
when his life is ended is the moment when he becomes immortal. His head,
ever singing, and his lyre, ever playing, float down the river to the ocean
or are flung to the heavens, depending on the version, where they make music
eternally, his vocation of lyric poetry is thus revealed.
This theme of grief, dismemberment, rememberment and vocation are repeated
in the actions of Plato concerning Orpheus. In another way Orpheus was
orphaned by Plato when Plato banned all poets from the polis, again our poet
looses his membership in the larger community. It is Orpheus’ fate however
to be heard forever and this is revealed when Plato invites him back. Why,
of all the poets, just Orpheus? Because Orpheus was not a mimetic poet.
Before Orpheus, the place of poets was to memorize; they memorized extremely
long poems of oral history and repeated them back to the people so no one
would forget. Orpheus’ poetry and song was slightly, but importantly,
different. He was a spokesperson and a mouthpiece as previous poets but for
something more vital. His work was anamnesis, literally unforgetting. His
calling wasn’t to keep people from forgetting, but to be the vehicle through
which what had been forgotten would be remembered.
In the myth of Orpheus we have a universal story of grief that calls us into
the underworld, a universal act of disobedience that leads to dismemberment,
and finally the universal act of remembering that leads us to vocation.
Let’s look at these themes in our lives today. As an illustration I am going
to braid the rest of my sermon with a story of personal loss for the purpose
of illustrating the themes of loss and grief, disobedience and
dismemberment, and finding vocation. It is my hope that in my story you will
be reminded of your own and together we will be called into all that God has
created in and for us.
So let me start with mourning. It serves to signal that something dear has
been lost. It is a good lens to use for a life review. Recently this
occurred for me when, my nephew, David, only 28 years old at the time, died
of a massive heart attack. He was seven feet tall and had the disease of
tall basketball players, myocarditis that led in a few years time to his
death. I had a profound reaction to David’s death. It was, I must be honest,
not so much a reaction to the loss of David but a shock back into my own
mortality. Flying back to Reno from his memorial service I asked myself how
I could honor his passing. The answer came in another question, Was I
doing my life’s work? The answer was a clear no. Raising my
daughters had been my life’s work but that work was complete and I still had
life, praise God.
As my self-examination continued after my nephew’s death, I found that like
Orpheus I was over identified with the other, not as a separate being, not
as a blessing and a treasure. I had allowed a relationship with a man, more
than one I might add, to protect me from my life’s work and to hide my own
identity. For me the Orphic moment came when I was willing to loose
what I had sacrificed myself for, the man of the hour, to step into being
fully and completely Ann-Mary. Not the one of self-will run riot but the one
fated, the one called by God, the one gifted perfectly for my life’s work. I
had said no, or not now, or did I hear you right, so
many times that when I heard the call yet again I was forced to really look
at God’s creation in me.
We are all called. Most of us are fated with many gifts and all of our
vocations are shaped by relationships to friends, parents, lovers, places
we’ve lived, even the earth and the vastness of the universe. Thomas Berry
in his book, Dream of the Earth, writes, “the law of communion finds
its most elementary expression in the law of gravitation whereby every
physical being in the universe attracts and is attracted to every other
physical being in the universe” (106-107). We are called to communion with
and through our particular and peculiar ways of being. All of us have
unique, God-given work to do in this world and we are all perfectly equipped
to do it.
God grants us free will. Carl Jung noted that without free-will “we view
life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the
human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined
rules” (48). God’s act of creating humans with consciousness gives us
“objective existence and meaning, and man [finds] his indispensable place in
the great process of being” (Jung, 49).
God will not shape us without our participation and the process of consent
becomes one of self-birthing; it is long and arduous; God did the creating
but we do the work of delivering. It takes a lifetime to complete. Living
life from soul is an extremely visceral process. Every time I have said yes
to being God’s creation of Ann-Mary, I have been faced with all the
dichotomies of living. I have been forced to lay aside my fantasies of life
without pain, of life in perfect union with God, of serenity without
disturbance. In every creative moment there is death and destruction. The
two are inseparable. There is no either/or in the process of soulful living;
there is no static equilibrium. There is always both/and; there is only the
chaotic, unpredictable, ever changing reality of perturbable dynamic
equilibrium.
So faced with the sudden death of my nephew I re-enlisted in life but not
the life of my child-like fantasies. I find myself here identifying with St.
Paul. Do you know how scary that is? I realized I have more in common with
the man, St. Paul, that I have loathed for my entire adult Christian life
for his limiting views of women, than I do with the one I have loved, Jesus!
I have to remember that St. Paul did not have the benefit of the canonical
Gospels, or any others. Though he was a contemporary of Jesus, he had not
been his friend, had in fact been a detractor, not a disciple; but Paul did
have a profound, life changing experience that turned his eyes from the
smallness of his life to the life giving gospel of love. As St. Paul
preached in 1Corinthians13:11, “…when I was a child, I talked like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put
childish ways behind me.” I haven’t exactly put them behind me. On gentle
days my childish ways are peeled away and on harsh ones, they are torn like
the flesh of my body as I birthed my first daughter.
Being an adult means seeking the truth and being willing to expose
deception. We are told as Jesus was dying on the cross, he “cried out again
in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At this moment the curtain of the
temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Matthew27:50-51). What did that
tearing do, so reminiscent of the tearing of flesh in childbirth? It exposed
what had been hidden, the inner sanctum. What is stored in the inner
sanctum? The arc of the covenant, the truth, the Word of God. What is the
effect of this exposure? The knowledge of God’s work is not hidden from
anyone anymore. It is not for a group of elite men. It is for all humans,
not just those with a Y chromosome. It is for all that issued forth from God
in that original Creation story.
And God said, “Let there be light”…
And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to
separate water from water”…
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place,
and let dry ground appear.”…
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants
and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to
their various kinds.”…
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to
separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark
seasons and days and years, and let there be lights in the expanse
of the sky to give light on the earth.”…
And God said, “Let the water team with living creatures, and let
birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”…
And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to
their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and
wild animals, each according to its kind.”…
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in
our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the
birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over
all the creatures that move along the ground.”…
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created
him; male and female he created them” (Genesis1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20,
24, 26, 27).
Did you hear the words of the ancient text? “Let us make man in
our image, our likeness” (Genesis1: 26). When the curtain got
torn in two from the top to the bottom it was a symbol to end the oligarchy
– in Jesus’ death the false separation of humans and God is ended, we are
One. In Jesus’ death the tearing of the curtain puts an end to the elitist
notion that only a select few can have access to God. I would go so far as
to say that in Jesus’ death, and that certainly in Jesus’ resurrection, we
are called to one thing – love. That love calls us into adulthood.
The work of childhood is to feed back, to repeat what we have been told
without questioning, without thought. The work of adulthood is to do what
Jesus did – to re-examine. Orpheus fate was to be dis-membered. It was
necessary so that he could be re-membered. Jesus’ fate followed a similar
story line initially. Not the part about loosing a wife to death, or the
underworld, but the part about loosing his life in a way similar to
dismemberment. Jesus’ very commandment to love turned against him, having
what he preached torn to shreds. The order is different, too, first the
dismemberment, then the descent to the underworld. Jesus returned to us
wholly re-membered as the risen Christ. So, too, we are torn apart in grief
and called to acts of remembering so that we can become more fully God’s
creation in us.
Up until now I have concentrated on the personal, the psychological, and the
individual but I want to visit the collective and take a few minutes to
reflect on the ecological perspective, too. Besides the oneness of love for
each other, don’t you think God calls us to love all of God’s creation? In
my reflection on Genesis I included all of God’s calling forths. If we work
backwards through them we will see that our interconnections are not just
through God to each other but to all of creation. It’s like watching a movie
of a supernova exploding, only in reverse. It is another form of re-membering.
Here we are created in God’s image, female and male. Just before making us
God gives us rule over all the previous creation; all that creation is put
into our care – livestock, animals that move on the ground, wild animals;
water creatures and birds of the sky; we are even created of the same stuff
as the lights of the heavens; the vegetation of the land; the water and the
dry land; light and primordial darkness. When the curtain was torn and the
arc revealed to all, certainly we were called to remember what is too vital
to forget: every single piece of creation is of God.
Last Sunday, John Chamberlin visited and brought us news of East Timor.
Think of the marvel of our interconnectedness. John is the pastor of Alum
Rock United Methodist Church in San Jose, California. He was a Peace Corps
volunteer, as our own dear John and Julie were, many years ago. Because of
his connections through the Peace Corps with Indonesia, he started to ask a
lot of questions about East Timor on a visit to Australia. What he heard
deeply disturbed him. He might have asked what one man could do but he
didn’t let that question stop him. John found members of other denominations
to work with, he interacted with members of the United Nation, and he kept
bringing the plight of East Timor to the consciousness of the greater
Methodist Church at annual conference. In 1996, the United Methodist Church
adopted a resolution that supports the “rights of the East Timorese to
self-determination, calling for an end to the oppression and abuse of human
rights” (767). Through John’s efforts and the efforts of other like-minded
individuals there is a continuing effort to aid the people of East Timor.
Their story is not over, all is not well there, but through efforts such as
John’s we will not forget these people, or the millions of others throughout
the world, struggling for the right to live and support themselves on the
land of their birthright.
Next month will mark the 61st anniversary of the United States
dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Mourning calls us to more than a
reflection of our own losses. As Michael Perlman writes in Hiroshima
Forever, “The … mourning … of Hiroshima has to do with the capacity for
deep and enduring sorrow over the losses suffered by others in places
and times that are foreign to us” (6). Reflections on any of our human
atrocities, from Cain murdering Abel to Auschwitz to Hiroshima to East
Timor, to name just a few, reminds us of what the professor for my Orpheus
class, Robert Romanyshyn, says so eloquently, “we must recall what is too
painful to remember and too vital to forget” (class lecture).
However, we don’t need to go as far as East Timor or Hiroshima to find
things which we must not forget. Just last week our friends Isha Echols and
Sher’on Jackson were victims of a hate crime here in Reno. Their little red
truck which they had been preparing for use in their work with children
doing community gardening and art, had it’s windows smashed in and its
contents burned. Hate notes and racial slurs, scribbled on sticky pad
sheets, were affixed to the windows of their other vehicle.
Sisters and Brothers, we cannot afford to suppress the important act of
mourning. I won’t tell you not to be afraid. If grief doesn’t cause you to
quake you’re not alive. Grief will dismember us. It has to be stayed with,
it has to be gone through; the process will work us until we know a new
truth. I ask you to reflect in the days to come on what you have lost. To
look at your own acts of disobedience and what they might reveal to you
about your call, your vocation. I ask you to look at how your actions have
separated you from your community; feel and grieve the dismemberment. What
are you forgetting that is so painful to remember and yet too vital to
forget? Grieve the loss and be healed by the truth. Look closely at God’s
creation – God’s creation in you, in us, in our loved ones, in our enemies,
in animate and inanimate objects that hold in such little esteem as to
completely disregard them. Look closely at God’s creation in this ailing
planet and its place in the solar system and the universe. As the layers of
disbelief and false belief fall away, we will be left with a profound truth.
We, yes you, the one a little uncomfortable in your pew at this moment, and
me, have been singularly gifted to do God’s work. Please join me in saying
“Yes” to God’s call to us. Please join me in saying “Amen.”
