"Let Joy Be the Foundation"

MEDITATION

 

There is joy in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,

in the Cannon towel, newly washed,

that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning,

in the outcry from the kettle

that heats my coffee each morning,

in the spoon and the chair

that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning,

in the godhead of the table

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning.

 

All this is God,

right here in my pea-green house each morning

and I mean, though often forget,

to give thanks,

to faint down by the kitchen table

in a prayer of rejoicing

as the holy birds at the kitchen window

peck into their marriage of seeds.

 

So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter of the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

 

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,

dies young.

 

-- Anne Sexton

 

 

 

 

SERMON

 

 

"On the day you were born, the Earth turned, the Moon pulled, the Sun

flared," and you slipped through a portal into time and space.  Through

the mystery of birth we receive the gift of life.  We land and we live,

never knowing why we came when we did.  But we awaken--as the child in

the story did--to the sound of people singing, to the sound of joy.

 

Life is a struggle and a celebration, we all know that.  Many of

us--including me-- tend to dwell more on the struggle than the

celebration.  The challenges of life consume more energy than the

triumphs.  Yet underneath it all--the hardship and the fulfillment, is

joy.  Joy is the foundation of life itself.  Despite its distractions

and contradictions, life is a mysterious and precious gift and somewhere

deep inside we never forget it.  Each of us possesses a grateful and

reverent joy for the experience of life.

 

Life isn’t always easy, it’s true.  In some ways, it never is.  At

dinner recently with a friend, we got to talking about a difficulty that

was troubling one of her young adult daughters--not a life or death

problem, just a life problem.  My friend, who is quite wise and

compassionate, said, "I feel so sorry for her...."  And as she was

groping for a way to complete her thought, I blurted out mine.  "She

doesn’t realize yet," I said, "that nothing ever really works out."  And

then we both looked at each other and laughed, and laughed.

And laughed.

 

Nothing ever really works out: we do die, after all, and the people we

love might leave us first, and the family grudges and misguided careers

never ever completely correct themselves.  And yet somehow it is still

all right.  We laugh anyway.  Joy is the foundation.

 

This joy is the thing that religion once tried to capture and

celebrate.  I fear that religion has become one more thing that doesn’t

really work out, but it hasn’t completely forgotten that life is a gift

to be lived with joy and reverence.  "What does the Eternal ask of you,"

wrote the prophet Micah, "but to live in quiet fellowship with your

God?"

 

What else should religion be if not the call to a life that is congruent

with the gift we have been given?  Isn’t that the yearning that brings

us out of our homes on Sunday mornings to gather together in this

sanctuary?  Despite our irreverent ways and our self-conscious

awkwardness about being in church at all--we doubters and realists want

to give thanks too.  Yes, even we want to live with the awareness and

joy that life is our great gift.

 

We Unitarian Universalists tend to take life seriously.  Just this past

month, we spent each Sunday looking at our church’s history and asking

what lessons we could learn from it.  The lessons were serious too.  We

seek to actualize our vision of religious democracy.

 

We want to evolve and grow in the right direction.  We hope to be

builders of a just and peaceful world, beginning with our own community

and ourselves.

 

Such earnest aspirations need no justification.  They are instinctive

and good.  But they also reflect the deeper and rarely spoken need to

give thanks for the life we have been given by living our lives in that

spirit.

 

Someone joined the church last year and when she was asked why, she

said, "I want to give back."  That is why we are here: To pour out our

hearts and our hopes into a place we have made sacred because we gather

together in it.  And it’s not the place alone, it’s the gathering as

well: our humanity, our need, our flawed and beautiful offerings huddled

together in affirmation of our joy.

 

Joy doesn’t always look like joy.  About a year before he died, my

father ? already very ill and disabled--had a visit from his doctor.  In

response to questions about the quality of his life, my father replied

that except for his illness, his life was good.

 

My mother was present during this interview.  She called me later to

tell me about it because she couldn’t believe what he had said.  By

anyone’s standard, the last years of my father’s life were horrible.

There was no way to make him comfortable, though we did everything we

could.  Joy is not a word I would associate with his condition.

And yet, diminished as he was, he was neither demented nor in denial,

and he meant what he said.  Life was still good.  Even though nothing

ever works out, life is still good.  I offer to you this morning that

affirmation of our faith.  Joy is the foundation.

 

The founders of Unitarianism and Universalism, each had a vision of a

religion beyond dogma and doctrine.  Instead they sought a religion that

would somehow hold on to a direct experience of the gift of life and

remember it and keep it, unadulterated. That is why we have difficulty

defining our faith.  Our original vision concerned itself with what was

beyond definition, beyond words, something not yet tamed by convention

and creed.

 

It still is.

 

This gathering we create each Sunday is our way of giving thanks for

life, even if we do not say so often enough.  Whatever the ways--and

there are many-- in which we differ from one another, there is one way

in which we are all the same.  We are here to give back.

 

What shape our giving takes may vary too.  But what we all share is a

desire to keep this community strong because it symbolizes what life

means to us.  Joy is the foundation.

 

There is something we can do with a strong community of people energized

by joy.  We can live congruent with this gift of life.  We can teach

each other how to grow, how to face challenges, how to work for justice

and peace, even how to die, in gratitude for all that we have received.

 

And we can remember that joy does not always look like joy.  Anne

Sexton, a poet whose own life was filled with struggle, wrote, "There is

joy in all."  And then she named the most ordinary of things that gave

her joy.  A fresh towel, coffee and a spoon, another morning in her

pea-green house when she does not forget "to give thanks."  Thanks for

being alive another day.

 

The impulse towards gratitude may not lead one’s spirit readily to an

organization, even a religious organization, which has its own

distinctive way of being mundane and even joyless at times.  When we

expect so much, it is easy to be disappointed.  All we have here

together is each other.  And yet it is precisely this irreproducible

quality--this singular, human, strange and beautiful thing we create by

coming together that is most worthy of our generosity and our trust.

 

We are here to give back.  Maybe nothing ever really does work out.  And

yet somehow that is all right.  That is the mystery, and it resides here

in our gathering and restores our souls because we know it.  We know

that joy is the foundation.  Now let us live in that joy, with thanks

for that gift.