Online worship service led by Rev. Frank Clarkson, Intern Minister Sophia Lyons and Worship Associate Joanna Fortna. Thanks to pianist Dana Cunningham (https://danacunningham.com/) for the permission to use her lovely music. The text of Rev. Frank’s homily, “Grounded,” is below.
The other night at Vespers Clare shared Anne Lamott’s wisdom that prayer can be divided into three basic categories; that our prayers tend to be one of three words: help, thanks, or wow. And Clare rightly observed that now is a good time to be saying “Help!”
That’s certainly been my prayer lately: Dear God please help us: help those who are sick or are vulnerable, help those who are on the front lines of this crisis, help me to be of use. Help us, O source of life and love and goodness, help us to do our part, to do what’s needed, so we can get through this, together.
For our reading today, I chose Issac Watts’ great old hymn, which is a paraphrase of Psalm 90, because of its assurance that in uncertain and unsettled times, there is, and always has been, a Power that we can lean on, there is a Presence that we can take refuge in:
O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.
One of the challenges of these days is that nobody knows how long this is going to last. And people’s situations are so varied—for some of us this can, so far, seem only a small hardship, and for others it is devastating, either from a health or emotional or financial perspective. Whatever your particular circumstances, our lives have been upended, and the task before us right now is to carry on through this time with as much courage and purpose as we can muster.
Some of you have suddenly become your children’s teachers, and this presents its own challenges, of course. A minister and mom I know posted on her Facebook page the other day: “Just dropped my first home school f-bomb and expelled 1/3 of my students. It is not even 9:30 am.” It’s hard for you parents, I know, and it’s hard for our young people too.
When you were young, did you ever get grounded? Made to stay home as punishment because of something you did? That must be how our teenagers and young adults are feeling right now, grounded. Except they did nothing wrong; they did nothing to deserve this.
And what about you? Aren’t you feeling grounded too? Forced, against your will, to be constrained, stuck, tied down? There may be some hidden gifts is this constraint, but I’m not going to try and convince you of that. Not today. This is hard, and it’s likely to get harder before it gets better.
What I do know is this—that the way to get thought this is not alone, but together. By reaching out, even when we’re not allowed to touch. By letting kindness and care and attention be our guide. By having faith that we are part of a great Love, and by practicing our faith in tangible ways.
This crisis is already showing us how connected we are, in our communities and across the globe. How much we need each other, and how easily we can hurt one another. How fragile it all is, and how strong and resilient we can be, together.
What I want to offer you today is the invitation to see that this being grounded not as a punishment, but as an invitation. An invitation, as the Shaker song puts it, “to come down where we ought to be.” To see being grounded as coming down to earth, as being rooted, in touch with this good earth and in touch with the depths each of us carry inside. When you’re anxious, to be able to say or sing, “When I breathe in, I breathe in peace; when I breathe out, I breathe out love.”
This past Wednesday was a mild and sunny day, and I spent the morning in my little home office in front of my computer. By early afternoon I had a headache and was exhausted. I went outside for a minute, to turn my face to the sun. I felt so tired that I decided to lie down in the grass. It felt good to have that solid ground under my back. And I didn’t mean to, but I fell asleep there, for almost an hour. Until my wife Tracey came out to check on me, and make sure I was still alive. On some deep level I must have needed that rest, that grounding, under the warm sun, in the arms of our mother Earth.
Before the hills in order stood, or earth received its frame,
From everlasting thou art God, to endless years the same.
Several months ago, for some reason, I bought this book, called Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World. I hadn’t even opened it until this week. Maybe now’s the time to read it! This time when we are being forced down to the ground. Where we ought to be.
Thirty years ago, Vaclav Havel, the new president of the Czech Republic addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, a few months after he’d helped the Czechs free themselves from decades of communist oppression. He described what they learned from years of being pushed down. He said:
“The communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks…a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and, above all, enormous human humiliation….
“It has also given us something positive, a special capacity to look from time to time somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and lead a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped that way…
“The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one certainty: consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around… For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.”
My spiritual companions, this is what we have been preparing for, and this is what we know how to do: being part of the salvation of the world by doing the necessary heart work that will determine who we are and how we act. We are being pressed down right now. And the invitation is to see that is from right here, this place of being constrained and limited, this place of being grounded in what is real and true—it is from right here that we can do the work that is ours to do: our own heart-expanding work of being still and listening, as Vaclav Havel says, for our deepest hopes, and listening also for the voice of the Holy, and then following where those hidden voices lead.
If this time of trouble offers any redemption, it will be in how we take on the work of these days, the shared sacrifice we are making, that is helping those serving on the front lines of this crisis, and is helping to save lives. If there is any redemption it will come in remembering that we are all in this together, and that is how we will get though this, together.
May we, pushed down to the ground, keep practicing. Looking inward, and then, outward, and upward. And may this be our prayer:
Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
Be thou our guard while troubles last, and our eternal home.
Amen.