Pastor Maggie's homily from our August 10th observance of the Feast of St. Clare. You can watch a recording of the homily here.
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Do you ever just have a day where you just bounce around? You start to do a task and you get part way through it and are reminded of something else, so you go do that, and in the middle of it you remember something else, and so you chase that for a while. And then someone calls or texts, and so you respond, and then you forget all about the tasks you've already started. So maybe you check in with the news and, gosh is that depressing most of the time, so you go looking for something to help you emotionally regulate, something you can control, and you remember that you were going to organize the closet, but you need bins, so you go looking for bins online. But what bins are the best kind? And what is the best deal you can find on bins? And then maybe a family member calls you to check in, and when you get off the phone you remember their birthday is coming up and you haven't found a gift. So you go looking for things they might like. And pretty soon you notice that you're hungry, and your body hurts. You notice that it's way past lunch time, and you've been stuck in a chair and your head all morning. Is that just me? Does anyone else ever get to the end of their day and wonder, what did I do all day? Life is so complex and it’s hard sometimes not to be distracted or get swept away by it.
Today we're observing the Feast of St. Clare, one of our patrons. Clare was one of St. Francis's first followers, and, inspired by him, she would go on to establish a religious order, called the Poor Clares, for women who wanted to follow in the way of poverty. I’m aware that we might have some folks in this room who have taken religious vows. Maybe of poverty; maybe of simplicity. Those who haven’t taken official religious vows may still have taken personal vows of simplicity after an encounter with gurus like Marie Kondo, or encounters with a stash of bins for the closet projects we never managed to finish. In those moments we get a clear glimpse of our lives and think, “I can’t keep all of this stuff! How did it all get here in the first place?”
When life gets complex, we yearn for simplicity. This yearning isn’t unique to us in our time; I took a class in seminary about it, actually—a lot of reading of the Greek Stoics and transcendentalist philosophy. I’m sure it was a good time for folks who were into that sort of thing. It turns out that, actually, I was looking for something simpler and more practical. Just as most of us are not looking for comfort in transcendentalist philosophy, most of us are not like Clare. Most of us are not called to abject physical poverty. I believe choosing poverty is a true, divine, sacramental calling, and those who pursue it are called to a unique and valuable solidarity with the poor. We know that living in poverty deeply impacts all parts of a person—body, mind, and spirit—which is why most folks experiencing poverty are also seeking to escape it.
Though we are not called to physical poverty, I think we are all called to another kind of poverty, which, for ease, I’m going to call “spiritual poverty” (though we know a physical/spiritual dichotomy isn’t always a helpful). Spiritual poverty is the sort of things Jesus talks about in the beatitudes when he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It’s not about an inner void or emptiness or shrinking where our spirit should be. Instead, it’s about a sense of our dependence on God; a sense that our entire being is rooted in the foundation that God alone is what we need.
I’m going to say those words again. Spiritual poverty is about a sense of our dependence on God; a sense that our entire being is rooted in the foundation that God alone is what we need. God alone is what we need. When I say these words, I immediately feel my body unclench. I feel the tension that I carry in my shoulders relax. I feel something around my heart loosen. I feel my stomach unknot. Did you feel anything like that?
Our bodies know. Our bodies know that we want to rest in this dependence. Our bodies know that we are part of the creation that God cares for, that God keeps spinning on its axis of love. Our bodies know, but we get busy, get drawn up into the outrages of the moment, and we forget. I want to talk to you about Clare today by talking about how we learn to access this deep knowing; this deep sense of spiritual poverty; this grounding in our dependence on God. I think the way we access it is by learning to befriend grief.
We live in a grief-phobic and death-denying culture. There are few communal rituals to help us process grief. We are encouraged to “move on” from grief as quickly as possible. But we can’t selectively turn off emotions. If we shut ourselves off to any one emotion, we shut ourselves off to all of them. And so it might seem strange to say, but the older I get the more I believe that to live a full life, to be the kind of deeply connected, present, compassionate, joyful person I want to be, I must learn to grieve well.
This has been a nagging thought of mine for a while now, and so for the last 6 weeks or so I’ve been participating in a series of workshops based in the work of psychologist and soul activist, Francis Weller. Most of the rest of what I want to say tonight comes from Weller’s book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. I haven’t finished it yet (because I’m trying not to work ahead) but based on what I’ve read so far, I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.
Weller (and Carl Jung) says that cultures, like individuals, have a shadow side—a side filled with parts deemed unacceptable, parts it is hoping to disown, parts we are hoping to be spared from the discomfort of having to deal with—and, as a result, we have a culture that is riddled with death. Shootings, overdoses, war, not to mention the violence visited upon the more-than-human world. We limp through our lives with the scars of living in this death-dealing society, doing things that numb our pain or cause us to forget it. He says, “Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By so doing, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred (loc 187).”
Weller calls this kind of work becoming an Apprentice of Sorrow. I always imagined my apprenticeship would be in something more like blacksmithing, but here we are. He says this kind of work allows us to discover the profound ways grief can deepen and ripen us, and that it allows us to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. And boy do I like the idea of maturing and ripening, of being able to stay present, and not go off chasing my distracting thoughts, or starting yet another closet organization project, when grief arises. I like the idea of knowing what to do with my grief, instead of running from it.
I think for a lot of us, myself included, we run from grief because we are afraid. We are afraid that what we might discover in our grief is too big and too close for us to handle; or we fear that if we allow the grief in, it will never end. So how do we begin an Apprenticeship of Sorrow? Pulling from the work of our friend John O’Donohue, Weller says we begin with a “reverence of approach”; that, “When we come to our grief with reverence, we find ourselves in right relationship with sorrow, neither too far away nor too close. We have entered into an ongoing conversation with this difficult, holy visitor. Learning we can be with our grief, holding it softly and warmly, is the first task in our apprenticeship. (pg 4)” That is the goal I aspire to. To me, that seems like being on the path to living the kind of connected, deep life I want.
He goes on to offer what he calls the “Gates of Grief”, pathways by which we encounter different kinds of grief, and the medicine each of these gates offers to us and to the world. Ways each grief can offer its own internal healing to us. He also includes some rituals and resources. It’s such a rich book, that, without reading you the whole book, which would be a disservice to you and to Weller, I think this is a good place to stop with his work tonight. I’ve ordered a few extra copies to loan out, so let me know if you’re interested in borrowing one.
For me, this work is the connection between “Why, in these days of war, political upheaval, my worries about those I love, and my own humanness, does my internal life seem so jumbled?” and “Why am I reaching for things I know aren’t going to be helpful instead of resting in God’s enoughness?” For me, this seems to be part of the answer to “How can I more deeply engage the call of Clare to depend so fully on God?”
We are all going to grieve. We are, at some point, going to lose all that we hold dear. Our lives are temporary, and that is part of what makes them so, so precious. And I believe the key to our ability to live into the simplicity of dependence on God, our ability to live into this spiritual poverty that roots us and grounds us in God’s love of us, that lets us rest from our frantic, complex patterns of numbing and forgetting—patterns we learn from a culture that is hiding from its own shadow side—the key in all of that is to learn to grieve well. To learn to see grief not as an enemy, but as a friend who can tell us about what is most important to us. A friend who can awaken us, ripen us, and lead us back to ourselves.
So I want to says these words to you again, and I want you to breathe them in. Let them soak into your mind. We can depend on God. It is safe for our entire being to be rooted in God. Even when everything else is in upheaval, we will discover that God is still there, grounding us. My prayer is that the faithful of God would become courageous in the face of loss, and not run away, and that we would let our pain metabolize into God’s deep love for all things, knowing we are safe depending on God, our inheritance and our hope. May it be so. Amen.
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