"Coming and Going"

Though the relentless, accelerating cycle of day and night robs the exhausted lamp lighter of his sleep, the little prince can see one advantage to life on his tiny planet. There are one thousand, four hundred and forty sunsets a year. And for the little prince, who loves the sunset, this is a very appealing feature. But the lamp lighter is too busy to be able to enjoy the sunset or anything else in life.

Most of us are just as driven as the poor lamp lighter. A round of activity orders our days and makes it difficult to enjoy even the simple pleasures of life. Sunsets are for vacations, precious days or weeks set aside to restore ourselves before returning to our routines.

The rest of the year, we are pressed for time, preoccupied with work and commitments and worries. We forget about sunsets. And not just sunsets: we fail to notice all the little events that punctuate our days and connect them to the larger rhythms of life. We don't have time to take in all the comings and goings, beginnings and endings, hello's and good-bye's; all the ways in which we remember how fleeting and irretrievable every moment truly is. And that's too bad, because our comings and goings demarcate the past and the future, illuminate the present, and point to something eternal, all at the same time.

Comings and goings are powerful emotional thresholds. In Sharon Olds's poem, "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb," she watches her son depart for his first time away from home. She tallies up everything he has become so far in life, and everything she has given him as a mother, recognizing that "whatever he needs, he has or doesn't have by now." What he has is his to "call on," what "he does not have, he can lack." Of course, that's all anyone can do - but from a mother's perspective, the line between what a child has and does not have is critical and poignant, tapping into her evaluation of herself and how well she has protected and provided for her young. Anxious yet also resigned, she concludes, "Everything that's been placed in him will come out, now, the contents of a trunk unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light." She lets him go.

A child going off to summer camp is an event that parents often meet with mixed feelings. There is the anxiety, the hesitation about trusting the universe with one's young. And there is also the joy of finally having some time to oneself. We are ambivalent about such separations, which only makes them more powerful. They are deep because they mean more than one thing.

An emotional mix like this also lends itself to spiritual interpretation. Every separation in life is a foreshadowing of death. Every good-bye carries with it the slight fear that this good-bye could be, for some totally random or unpredictable reason, the last one. Because sometimes it is.

That awareness throws us into the realm of spiritual reflection. What we find there is the possibility that each hello and each good-bye have something to teach us about the meaning of attachment and loss, time and eternity. There is much to gain from approaching our comings and goings with awareness and intentionality.

How to do that is simple. Be sure to say hello and good-bye. And when you say it, pay attention to what you are doing.

It's a simple spiritual discipline, though it is not necessarily easy. How do you greet your family in the morning? The people in your office, or at school? I'm not suggesting we come up with some new, intense way of saying "good morning" that frightens everyone and sends them scurrying away in shock. In fact, they might not notice anything different at all. It is we who are doing something different. We are greeting the other people in our world. We are remembering that they are alive and so are we, and that this is another new day.

In that hello is every possibility of what might happen; the bigger the hello, the greater the potential. Meeting someone for the first time? Pay close attention to how you feel, right then and there, about the hello you hear.

Every Sunday, greeters stand at the entrances to the courtyard of our church, ready to welcome whoever comes in. That simple act is how many of our visitors form their first impression of what kind of community we are. Think how different that experience would be if no one were there to greet them. There are other ways to say hello in a church as well. Ushers stand at the door before the service. I stand there after. What people have to say when they're coming through the door - any door, not just our door - often means a lot, even if it is just a casual remark.

I don't mean to make you all self-consciously tongue-tied. But I do try to listen. The things we say when we are coming or going say a lot about what is going on inside. If you want to know what is going on, pay attention to the hello and the good-bye.

Pay attention, but remember that our hello's and good-bye's are powerful because they are symbolic. They do not always mean very much by themselves. Many of us realize that the last time we were with someone, we may not have spoken the perfect good-bye. It is often that way.

My mother did not kiss my father goodnight the night he died. She could not account for her lapse. She agonized about it. They kissed each other goodnight every night, for fifty-eight years of marriage. Except the last night.

But at that point, night and day made little difference to my father. My mother was often exhausted herself. She went to bed not knowing that he was so close to death.

She realizes now that what matters is the fifty-eight years, the cumulative effect of all those good nights, the seamless way their lives blended together, until good-bye was almost impossible. There is a way in which two people cannot be separated, even by death. Though there is great loss, the ones we love are never really gone. I think my parents never did say good-bye to each other because this is how it was for them.

The little prince loves the sunset. He'd like to live somewhere he can see the sunset one thousand four hundred and forty times a year. "You know," the little prince says, "one loves the sunset, when one is so sad …" When we are sad, we feel sadness in anything coming to an end, even in a sunset. And good-byes always have a little sadness in them, even when they are small partings, uneventful by themselves.

But as the lamp lighter in The Little Prince knew all too well, every sunset is followed by a sunrise. The cycles of life always carry us from good-bye back to hello. No one is sad forever.

My mother still grieves, but she has also opened a new chapter of her life. When I call her at night, she is not at home. It seems that out of the rather small population of men in her retirement community, two of them are competing to keep her company.

To live in the spiritual dimension of coming and going is to appreciate the many layers of meaning each hello and each good-bye can carry with it. But it is also to trust in the completeness of the motion, to know that beginning and ending, hello and good-bye, belong to an eternal pattern of life that also carries every one of us along with it. The wholeness of life will always bring us full circle. Wherever we are right now, whether we are coming or going, we know that we will always make it safely back to where we need to be.

References for this sermon include The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and the poem "The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb," by Sharon Olds.