Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, January 30, 2022.
Do you know how something can just come into your mind—a song, a line from a poem, an image? Who knows where these things come from—but I’m learning to pay attention to them, to see them as gifts. Well, earlier this week, the gift that showed up was the image of a circle. That simple round shape just came to mind. Wondering about this, I remembered that the circle is a symbol of wholeness, and that seemed interesting. Not long after, the words that are our reading today, they presented themselves. First Rainer Maria Rilke’s image of an expanding circle of awareness and being:
“I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world…”
And then, Wendell Berry’s words about our human connections being like a dance:
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance…
Like I said, the circle is a universal symbol for wholeness, and you see it everywhere: it’s the shape of those beautiful rose windows in churches and cathedrals, it’s often the shape of different kinds of sacred geometry, like the mandala; the yin/yang is a circle. When we gather in person, we often pull our chairs into a circle; when we look up in the sky, we seen the sun and the moon, these circles that watch over us by day and by night.
Listen to what Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man, said about this:
“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round… The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours…Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of humans is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”
Back in the fall of 2007, I was serving as the assistant minister over in North Andover. It was my third year in ministry, and was wondering if I was supposed to stay there for a while, or look for a congregation to serve as the primary minister. I don’t exactly remember the conversations we were having at home in those days, fifteen years ago, but I must have been rather stressed, and carrying on about these things. Because one day, it was November 26, 2007, our daughter Emma said something to me that was so wise and profound and funny that I wrote it down, and the date too! She was twelve at the time, and this is what she said:
"You're like a watermelon stuck in a box. You want to go round, but you're stuck in a square.”
We must have been looking at pictures of things that gardeners do, like putting a form around a fruit so that as it grows it takes the shape of that form. In Emma’s mind, I was hemmed in, “like a watermelon stuck in a box. You want to go round, but you’re stuck in a square.”
In reality, I had probably hemmed myself in. Isn’t that often the case? Those boxes that hold us back, how often do we build them for ourselves?
But at a deeper level, don’t we all really want to go round? Isn’t this what we are made for? To live into the fullness of life, to live into the wholeness of who we were born to be?
So today I want to invite you to remember the circles of connection and being that you are a part of. And invite you to imagine other ways you might be wanting to break out of a box and go round.
Rumi said, “Open your hands, if you want to be held.” Picture the beautiful human act of stretching out your arms to welcome another into your embrace. Or reaching out your hands, and offering them to others, at the start of a circle dance. Of remember how, in non-covid times, we gather at coffee hour around those little tables, with hot beverages, and good things to eat, and lovely connection and conversation between us.
Think about other ways we gather in circles: a family around a table eating a meal, children sitting on a rug, gathered for story time or sharing, the way we circle around a grave, with the grieving family, to return a loved one’s body to the earth.
And as Black Elk reminded us, the cycle of life is a circle. “The seasons, they go ‘round and ‘round, in a circle game,” Joni Michell sang.
An essential part of being human is entering into connections with others. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who died just over a week ago, came up with a new word to describe out interdependence, that Bets Robertson shared with me. He wrote,
“I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word 'togetherness,' but I finally came up with the word ‘interbeing.’ The verb ‘to be’ can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. ‘To be’ is always to ‘inter-be.’… We inter-are with one another and with all life.”
Even in this time of separation, when we see each other in these rectangular boxes, isn’t it kind of like we’re gathered in a circle? We’re looking at each other—we can see one another’s faces, which is why it feels good, right? And it’s also vulnerable, to gather in a circle. Because there’s no place to hide!
Sometimes we want and need to hide, and I’m always touched when someone who’s new to the church tells me that they just want to sit in the back by themselves for a while. I tell them that our gathering for worship a good place for that; that this community is one where that kind of inner work is honored, that this is a good place to touch and feel what is in your heart. That our sanctuary is a good and safe place for that. And we have tissues in every pew!
But we aren’t meant to spend our lives hiding. We are here to live into the fullness of our lives, as best we can. Robert Bly wrote a book about this, called A Little Book on the Human Shadow, and he says, “When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as a 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: ‘Can’t you be still’ or ‘It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.’”
Robert Bly is talking about how we learn, from an early age, to put away the parts of ourselves that others don’t like or approve of, And to some degree, we have to do this to grow up and get along in society. But the invitation, as we grow up, is to live into the parts of ourselves that we have hidden away. To reclaim as much as we can of that 360-degree personality that we came into this world with. This process of looking into our shadow and bringing out what we find there can seem scary at first, but it is also life-giving.
Rainer Maria Rilke is a good guide for this shadow work. Hear again his poem of inner exploration:
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
Or worship theme next month is “The Way of Vocation,” and this listening for the callings that are our own, this living into who we were each born to be, this is what the way of vocation is all about. And I’m really looking forward to our engagement with that.
Back in 2007, when our daughter Emma noticed that I was kind of stuck, “Like a watermelon stuck in a box.” At that same time, you in this church were coming out of a challenging period. You were looking for a new minister, which can an uncertain and nerve-wracking process for a congregation. Maybe, back in those days, some of you were feeling stuck too.
And look at what’s happened, and all that’s unfolded for us since then. It’s a good reminder, isn’t it, that when you’re feeling stuck, that you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or what opportunity might be just over the horizon?
My spiritual companions, in these days, please remember you are made to go round. The Power of the world works in circles, and there is, in us, a deep desire to live into our wholeness. We are here to reach into our depths, and see what we’ve hidden in there, and then, to bring it out, and into our lives, to be enriched by and to share that goodness and wholeness.
We are here to reach out our hands, and invite others into the circle of our embrace. To live our lives in growing orbits. To stretch and grow; to cast the circle wider still. To join in the dance of life, that sacred and subtle and never-ending cycle of interconnection; carried along by the music of the spheres, and by the Spirit; living and loving, holding on, and letting go. For as long as we are here,
Amen.