Is There a Balm on Beacon Hill? Rev. Roberta Finkelstein March 26, 2006 "No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." With these simple words C.S. Lewis begins his profound and touching meditation on his personal encounter with bereavement, entitled A Grief Observed. Lewis describes a sensation that all of us have experienced, or will experience some day. Nobody is immune from bereavement. At different times and in different cultures grief has been treated differently. The Jewish practice of sitting Shiva, the Catholic wake, the Victorian period of mourning - all of these are cultural practices that allow people time to grieve. Unfortunately, contemporary American culture disallows that luxury of a period of mourning. Get back to normal as soon as possible, don't mess up the office with your tears, and so on. I remember sitting Shiva for my grandfather in 1963. The pace was unhurried. The immediate family was relieved of all household duties. People brought food, prepared it, served it, cleaned up. Our job was to sit on the couch and talk to our visitors - talk about our memories of Grandpa Sam, about our feelings, about the future. I learned more about my grandfather, and my father too, from those conversations, than I had ever known before. It was almost a stream of consciousness conversation – words bringing laughter that bubbled into tears - all with the permission of those who surrounded us. People need safe places to be sad, to be free of deadlines and expectations. A Unitarian Universalist congregation can be such a place. "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I'll suspect that you don't understand." C.S. Lewis again, the consummate Christian apologist, who in his own grief recognized the emptiness of some of the traditional religious responses to death. The Reverend William Sloan Coffin had a similar reaction when his son died in an automobile accident. "For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is 'It is the will of God.' Never do we know enough to say that." He then goes on to talk about the many kinds of consolation he received - some of the worst, he said, from fellow reverends who "proved they knew their Bibles better than the human condition” by quoting all the right biblical passages. But in the end he concludes, "And of course I know, even when pain is deep, that God is good. "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?" Yes, but at least, “My God, My God" and the psalm only begins that way, it doesn't end that way. As the grief that once seemed unbearable begins to turn into bearable sorrow, the truths in the "right" biblical passages are beginning, once again, to take hold. So I shall - so let us all - seek consolation in that love which never dies, and find peace in the dazzling grace that always is." Like C.S. Lewis, we reject the empty consolations of traditional religion. We do not seek solace in the hope of an after-life, or in the protection of a capricious God or in the so-called “right” biblical passages. When we sing that beautiful hymn, we are not singing about a literal balm in a literal place. But still we long for something. Something that we can only get if, like William Sloan Coffin we move past rejection of the orthodox to an affirmation of the consolations of liberal religion. Our consolation, in the long run, is in our own lives, and in the legacy we leave to those we love. Our salvation is in this life, at this time. Our balm is not in Gilead, but in Beacon Hill, where the headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association are located. Or more accurately, our balm is right here in Frederick. Barbara Rhode, author of the 1994 UUA Meditation Manual, In the Simple Morning Light, says this about our ability to comfort each other. "I wasn't flattered when one of my daughters confided that she had thought of me as "The Big There-There" when she was three years old. If I remember correctly, I was in the middle of a phase where I was hoping to reassure myself that I still had a fertile mind as well as a welcoming bosom. Now, years later, I can admit that the role of Big There-There is a necessary part of parenthood not to be disparaged. At times even the most mature of us want someone to dry our eyes, encircle us with welcoming arms, and offer us a cup of hot cocoa. Still, the origin of the word "comfort" means "to make strong". As comforters, we often believe we have to take away the pain, only to discover that we are only able to help those in pain find the sources of their own strength. At times it is our mere presence. "I am here. I see your suffering. I care for you." At times it is a helping hand. "I'll vacuum. I'll wash up those dishes. I'll drive you." At times it is a few words that put things in perspective. We're never quite sure what will truly comfort another, or what special act will comfort us. We go looking for the Big There-There and find instead that the excitement of a new idea lifts us from despair. If we can put aside our fear that we might say or do something to add inadvertently to the suffering of those we would comfort, if we can put aside our fear of our own loss or the pain of our own pity, then love might find its way of bringing strength to the weak and light to those in the shadows." What is it in our faith tradition that allows us to find and offer comfort and consolation? I have planned many memorial services, and I’m always grateful for the fact that I am not professionally obligated to defend God. Some of the most egregiously bad theology that we hear comes, in the defense of God, after hurricanes or tornados or mining accidents. And the absolutely worst theology I have ever heard is coming from the mouth of the reprehensible Rev, Fred Phelps as he and his fanatical followers travel around the country attending the funerals of servicemen and women killed in Iraq, confidently proclaiming that God has brought about those deaths because He is displeased about homosexuality. Is there a balm in Gilead, Fred? One of the great comforts of liberal religion is that we are spared all that bad theology. We don’t have to contort the reality of our experiences of grief and loss to make them fit anybody’s idea of the power or justice or goodness of God. Speaking of theological contortions, let’s look for a few minutes at the greatest story of theological contortion ever written: the book of Job, the story of a blameless man who suffers great tragedy and loss. The text tells us that pain and sorrow is inflicted on Job as the result of a wager. God and Satan and the other heavenly beings are sitting around shooting the breeze one day. Satan, I must explain, is not the devil of later Christian understanding, but the being in charge of patrolling the earth, acting in the heavenly court as accuser or adversary. Anyway God and the other beings get into a conversation about whether Job, a blameless, upright, good man, is good because he has been rewarded with success, or because he is inherently decent and good. In order to settle the argument, all Job’s wealth, his family, his livestock, his health, are taken from him. Then come the infamous Job's comforters - those friends who sit and commiserate with him and attempt to convince him that his bad luck and ill fortune are his own fault, not God's. The term Job's comforters refers to those hapless and not so hapless people who in attempting to comfort the afflicted end up blaming the victim. The people Bill Coffin referred to who always know ‘all the right biblical passages’ better than they know human nature. Job's comforters are not heartless or cruel. They simply cannot live with the idea that their theology is inaccurate or incomplete. If God is good, and if God is omnipotent, then bad things can only happen to people who deserve them. Otherwise the world is just too scary a place to live in. End of discussion. The end of that discussion is where liberal religion begins. Yes, it means acknowledging that we live in a sometimes arbitrary and capricious world. But it goes on to make the bold affirmation that we can live in that world because of our human capacity to endure, to forgive, and to hope anew. According to the study notes in the New Revised Standard Version, the book of Job "does not explain the mystery of suffering or justify the ways of God with human beings, but it does probe the depths of faith in the midst of suffering." So do we. We stand by each other as we probe the depths of faith in suffering - not necessarily faith in Job's God, or any God, but faith in humanity and our ability to continue to choose life with integrity in the face of loss and pain. We are able to do this not only because we are not saddled with a God or a doctrine that we need to defend; but also because we are enriched by the affirmation that our own life experiences are authoritative. All we need to create a theology of life is to take our own experiences of loss and faith seriously, reflect on them, and make them into a theology that meets the needs of real human beings living real lives on this beautiful and imperfect earth. Part of the genius of the Unitarian Universalist memorial service is the opportunity offered to many people to participate. At memorial services perhaps more than at any other time we really are the priesthood of all believers, the inheritors of a great tradition of freedom of choice that calls for each of us not only to make a decision to associate voluntarily with a Unitarian Universalist congregation, but also obliges each of us to attend to the health of that congregation and minister to each other when we are in need. In celebrating the life of a loved one, we re-affirm our faith in life continuing in the face of death and tragedy. We celebrate the capacity of people to endure. We are not a fair-weather faith, we are people of faith who confront pain and failure and find ways to live through it and move out the other side of grief ready to embrace life again. Barbara Rhode concludes her “Big There-There” mediation with these words. "In the great religious division between those who would exclude in order to purify and those who would embrace in order to redeem, we have always been with the embracers." Being with the embracers means that every one of us must learn to put into words our own experiences of redemption. Now I know that redemption is one of those words - traditional religious language that makes some of you itch! But hear me out. We know that to be human is to stray from our own ideals, to fall short of our own goals, to neglect things we wanted to pay attention to, to say things we wish we hadn't. Redemption is the ongoing process of calling ourselves back, trying again, doing better, making more of our lives than we thought we would earlier. Redemption understood that way is the heart of our liberal optimism about human nature - it is not a facile misreading of the human condition but a realistic appraisal of what is, and what can be if we will only let it. One of the dictionary definitions of redemption is “to set free, rescue or ransom and; to restore the honor, worth or reputation of.” That is the definition of redemption that Unitarian Universalists can embrace. We are all about restoring the honor and worth of the human person and the reputation of human life. The dictionary uses the word ‘redeem’ in a sentence: You botched up the last job but you can redeem yourself on this one. Perhaps this is what Job would have said to God when He appeared out of the whirlwind had Job been a Unitarian Universalist! The real question for today is, "What can we say to people who are in pain?" And make no mistake, people in our churches are in pain. The pain doesn’t come just from death and illness. We live under incredible pressure to achieve, to do it all, to have it all. We constantly disappoint ourselves by failing to live up to unreasonable and unhealthy expectations. We need relief from a culture in which there is no time, no room for grief. So, what do we say to people who are in that kind of pain? We tell them that we believe in the capacity of human beings to heal. That as individuals we can, when supported and encouraged, find inner sources of strength that allow us to endure difficult times and emerge from them - not unscathed, but unbowed. We tell them further that we believe in the capacity of human beings to reconcile. That as people inextricably bound in a web of relationships, we can find ways to forgive, to rebuild relationships, to try again. We can tell them that we believe in the capacity of human beings to build communities of hope - redemptive communities that give us all a place to be safe when we need safety, a place to be challenged when we need challenge, and a place to try out our new wings when we are ready to take on the world again. I always conclude memorial services with this prayer by A. Powell Davies. “The love I can no longer give to my beloved, help me, O God, to give to those who need it. Save me from frozenness of heart! Make my compassion deeper, my sympathy wider. Melt away my bitterness and let my sorrow teach me to be gentle. If so much that is precious can so soon be lost, let me cherish what remains; and let me be the nurture of things precious in the lives of others" Let that be our prayer, not just when we are in the depths of grief, but every day as we got out into the world and try to live our faith. Amen.