“To Carry Within Us An Orchard”
A sermon by Heather Starr
Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon
Frank Arnold, Host
October 15, 2006
CALL TO WORSHIP
Good morning. It is good to be with you. In this sanctuary, we sit side-by-side with one another, with people we know and people we will come to know. We share our stories with each other. We ask questions of one another. We consider the transcendent mysteries of this world, together. In doing so, we are crafting deeply meaningful and inquisitive spiritual community for ourselves and for those still to come. Let this be our privilege, our joy, and our task. Come, let us worship together.
READING
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
--Li-Young Lee
SERMON "To Carry Within Us An Orchard" Heather Starr
I carry within me a scrapbook, all the time. A collection of images and internal photographs that could never be recreated and put in an actual book. One of these images is of Laura. Laura wearing a long flowing skirt, riding her bicycle, no helmet, her long hair streaming out behind her in the late summer, all orangey and brown and blurring with the precocious turning leaves around us. Laura riding her bicycle towards me on the sidewalk in West Philadelphia, brilliantly smiling, so exuberantly glad to be alive. I remember this moment so clearly – it was hot, still, in Philly, it was muggy, and I was just leaving the Squirrel Hill Community Garden in which I shared a garden plot. I was sweaty from gardening and from the East Coast humidity and dragging myself home carrying carrots and beets, their green tops spilling out of my bag. I rounded the corner and almost bumped into Laura on her bicycle, and she was riding high, her body lifted way up off the bicycle seat, pumping and smiling and like a refreshing cool breeze in the summer heat. We grinned big knowing grins at each other. We were crossing familiar paths as she headed towards the garden and I headed home.
Laura amazed me. She was creative and determined and inspiring, and seemed undaunted by concerns about money or career. She had a business card that in very small print described all the sorts of things that she did—child care, housekeeping, yard work, office organizing, henna handpainting, mobile-creation out of recycled and natural materials. The only words in big print that one couldn’t possibly miss were the important ones to her, and they said, in beautiful green letters: GENEROSITY OF SPIRIT. I remember being so struck by this, and asking her: “Really, Laura, how do you pay the rent with a business card that says Generosity of Spirit?” She was a 21st century sprite, the kind of beautiful dreamer that made dreaming seem like the absolutely most practical thing to be doing to really live life and not be cowed by its demands.
Another thing that Laura taught me about was interconnectedness. Laura worked beside me on the communal plots of herbs and flowers in the community garden, and I’d also see her at our neighborhood food co-op. Then I’d see her mobiles at Shawn and Mike’s craft- and-coffeeshop, and then I’d meet someone who knew her way across town where I went to a small Unitarian Universalist church. And then we had some kind of history together—we were both from Portland, Oregon, and had briefly overlapped in middle school and high school, though we didn’t know each other well. Somehow Laura connected with almost everyone I knew in the various communities I traveled in. She was a web-weaver. When I think of the “six degrees of separation” that supposedly connects each of us to every other person on this planet through only six other people or less, I think of people like Laura who must be responsible for so many of those connections, the connections that reach beyond the familiar communities and across differences and distances that divide many of us from one another.
All of this came into sharp, powerful relief for me when Laura died. She was 26 years old, and some kind of highly unusual gastric problem took her suddenly and inexplicably. The hospital staff, her family and community ruled out an eating disorder, ruled out suicide, and struggled to move from trying to understand what-had-happened to celebrating the beautiful being that had just days before been with us, vibrant and inspiring. The Quaker memorial service for Laura brought together over a hundred people from many different communities to share stories, music, dance, poems, silence and awe. What a mystery it is the way we move through one another’s lives. What a mystery it is the way we come to inspire each other, and the way that we leave.
“O, to take what we love inside,” Li-Young Lee writes,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.”
We are so profoundly effected and informed by one another, and yet our individualistic culture teaches us that we are each separate, distinct beings. There are many days and moments in which I do not feel that separation so clearly, days when I am profoundly effected by the story or experience of another, bowled over by it. And I wouldn’t want it to be otherwise. At the same time, I strive to cultivate and remember to learn how to find the ground, the net of relationship that sustains me when I feel windblown from the constant change and torment of the world. Through my brief interactions with Laura, the two of us in our twenties pulling weeds beside each other in a vibrant community, I know we influenced each other. Some light comes into being as a part of our exchanges that didn’t exist before, some awareness, some connection, some sacred human spark is generated by our interactions. And we are warmed by this spark, this moment when my theology, rooted in Unitarian Universalism, teaches me that the Divine is present: we are energized and emboldened by this human exchange. And then we continue on with our lives, perhaps nodding, perhaps a little lifted or a little shaken, a little soothed.
I wonder what it is that gets us through times of upheaval, despair, and disruptive change. Like many of us, I sometimes tend to balk at the assignments the Universe places before me, as if I could somehow refuse or avoid the hurdle I am suddenly surrounded by. A friend of mine has a mantra she restates on a regular basis: “the only way out is through.” For me one way through is to recognize the orchard of mentors, teachers, peers and friends that I carry within me. Things that seem like seemingly-random memories, crystal-clear images in my mind like Laura on her bicycle in the shimmering late summer heat, are actually roots and branches of memory and meaning that I hold within me, encounters with the vivid and mysterious Spirit of Life.
Here’s another example: I often find myself driving my car and resting my elbow on the windowledge with my hand in just a certain way against my cheek. I catch myself in this position, and I smile knowingly. I think of my father, his body positioned in exactly this way, driving us around on our father-daughter visits when I was a kid. This experience of him is engrained in me, it is part of who I have become and how I am in this world. I am infused with the people I have known, overtime, and ever-so-briefly. I carry within me an orchard.
In the same way, when we gather together as a congregation we hold within and amongst us those people who have been a part of our spiritual lives, our discernments, and those who have made the effort to craft this Fellowship. This congregation has gone through so much change, and is weathering it well. There are people here and in our vivid memories who have been involved with this congregation for every one of its 48 years. Some people have been involved for 20 years, some people for 5 years, some for 5 months. Some are new here today or this fall. Each has a different experience of this congregation, of this community and what is nourishing, what is most important. There are people here coming from other faith backgrounds, people coming from Unitarian Universalist congregations in other cities and towns, people coming here who have not been a part of any church, and may be wary about the idea of church in the first place. All of these people are here, all of these people together form the ever-changing orchard that is this community.
We hold all of these learnings and yearnings together in one sanctuary by talking with one another, by building connections with each other, by weaving a web of community together. We get to know one another and one another’s stories, we ask each other, gently, inquisitively, earnestly: what is your experience of God or not of God? What do you know of the transcendant, the greater-than-you, and where do you find that? How does your experience of that-which-is-greater-than-you serve you in your life, when you read the news, when you walk out your door in the morning?
The teachings of the Buddha remind us that “nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing…[this] is the first mark of existence.” “Yet at the level of personal experience,” Buddhist nun Pema Chodron writes, “we resist this basic fact. It means there’s loss as well as gain.” Every moment, every day, loss as well as gain. We encounter someone, he or she makes us laugh or think or feel sad or angry, and we turn around and in the next minute have another interaction with a different person altogether. Another interaction, another conversation, another e-mail, another phone call, another silent remembering and longing for someone now gone, another wave of memory. From joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom… Moment after moment throughout our day, encounter after encounter, we face these gifts of life: gratitude, frustration, connection, tension, longing. And the challenge common to all these things: letting go, and stepping forward into the next unknown, unpredictable encounter.
Poet Li-Young Lee has a way that he understands this constant “mark of existence.” Lee said: “Most human sounds are made with the outgoing breath. When we breath in, we [usually] feel comfortable, [filled]. Poems, [like conversation, like the sentences we offer each other,] are made with [the outgoing breath,] the dying breath.” Every exhalation is a letting go. I listened to Li-Young Lee in a library in Berkeley tell the story of being taught by his father, a Christian minister, this practice, when he was just a young boy. His father said to him: “Every time you breathe in, say thank you. Every time you breathe out, say goodbye.”
(He was eight years old! This is quite a charge!) What his father was teaching him was to feel gratitude for that moment, that breath, that experience of life, that encounter with the world. Let us learn to hold both feelings close together—gratitude and letting go—as close as the pit of the peach and the fruit around it, as instinctively as breath. This practice itself is one of the tools we can rely on to pull us into the next moment, the next encounter, open, unclinging, ready to accept, relish and receive.
I invite you now to practice this with me for a few minutes. We’ll spend these next few moments in silence, and while we do, notice your breathing. As you breath in, think: thank you. As you breath out, think: goodbye. You might imagine particular people you’ve encountered while you’re doing this; you might imagine aspects of yourself or a loved one that you’re letting go of. Breathe in: thank you. Breathe out: goodbye. Following this time of silence, we’ll engage in conversation together.
Amen, and blessed be.
BENEDICTION
Breathe in “thank you,” and breathe out “goodbye.” May this be a part of our gift to one another today—savoring the interactions that we have as whole and complete unto themselves, as unique and unrepeatable moments that are part of who we each are. May love guide us towards one another, and may love also guide us to let go, to free each other to change, forgive, evolve, and be renewed. May it be so. Go in peace.