"Morning, Noon and Night"

Images of the earthquake in Japan give new power to the words of the hymn we just sang together, the first line that walks up and down the vocal range, calling out, We are not our own, Earth forms us. When the first pictures appeared in the online newspapers, my husband looked at the highways buckled and cracked, looked at the ships and cars tossed about like twigs in the stream, and said, We are ants crawling on the surface of this great living planet.

If Earth forms us, it does so in ways dramatic: the planet shifts, the skyscrapers sway in the breeze, and the people of Japan’s coastal cities have twenty minutes to find safer ground before the twelve foot-tall wall of water slams into their island nation. In the emergency recovery crews, in the families reunited, in the response of leaders of nations who stand ready to help we realize we are shaped by so much we cannot control, and again the still-forming Earth changes and changes our lives and our worlds, in an instant.

If Earth forms us, it does so in ways subtle, almost difficult to notice, to attend to, in a society grown accustomed to providing its own electric light in the darkness, making its own gas-powered heat in the cold, producing its own cooling blast of air conditioning sealed inside all those cars idling on the freeway. It’s not that California doesn’t have seasons, I was told, but that the seasons in California are subtle. Even here I seek out the rhythms of the planet’s gradual progression on its pilgrimage around the sun, I see the daylight changing, the springing forward of the clocks this morning, walking from the car up the driveway suddenly the wisteria is coming in along the trellis in clouds of purple trailing glory, there is shade where there was none, there is that wide and gentle sunshine where there was none.

If Earth forms us, Earth does so in ways both dangerous and beautiful. I wonder if the same can be said for those other forces that move us, shape us, form us.

In a poem about eating lobster for the first time, the poet June Robertson Beisch describes a Midwestern woman out for a first date in New York City, who is highly skeptical about the lobster-eating process: the bib, the nutcracker, the mighty claw newly cracked. She writes,

I was from Minnesota, raised on
lakes and brook trout. I, too, was
uncooked and formless, like the creatures

who take on the shape of their environment

Upon the first delicious bite, however, the Minnesota girl begins to change her tune. By the close of the poem and her third taste of lobster, she tells us she is a

real New York girl
who wore skinny black dresses and false eyelashes,

able to handle  myself with any
crustacean

In a few bites and a few lines, the poet takes us from Minnesota to New York, from brook trout to false eyelashes, reminding us of the ways in which we, too, have been formless creatures who take on the shape of their environment.

In the poem it is not obvious if the narrator is speaking with pride or regret of her new form. Certainly it does not appear to be an option to living on this earth and remain forever formless, formless like the squishy parts of aquatic life that so perplex us as land-dwelling creatures: the waving wands of the anenome, the gooey fragility of the jellyfish.
As the environment changes, so do its creatures. The formless take on a new shape to protect their innermost parts: there it is a hard protective shell, here it is a skinny black dress.

It leaves me with the question, what environment is giving form to your life? Or maybe you think of yourself as already cooked, already encased in comfortable shell, already formed, already done with all that growing and changing.

This is how I shape it, writes the author Virginia Woolf, in an autobiographical sketch of her childhood she titled, “Moments of Being,”

This is how I shape it, and how I see myself as a child…

Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small; passing at different rates of speed past the little creature; one must get the feeling that made her press on, the little creature driven on as she was by the growth of her legs and arms, driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, buds swell…no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered.

Breathlessly, she describes the power of an unstoppable life force, one that drives a plant out of the earth, that swells in the buds, that grows in the leaves. The force of living and growing that shaped her without her being able to stop it.

It is almost frightening, I think, the way Woolf talks about being shaped by the power of growth and change she experienced as a child, the way nothing remained stable long the way the little creature was driven on to grow and grow.

What is giving form to your days, what is shaping your life? Can you stop these forces? How do you shape it?

I was thinking this week that I titled our service today, a service about the day-in, day-out qualities of a life of faith, about the forces that shape us, about living with intention, about building a world where service is our prayer, where we pray - we serve – one another as easily as we breathe. At one point I wanted to title it not morning, noon, and night, but rather, upon considering how I really shape my day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But that didn’t roll off the tongue the same way, right?

And a fulfilling life, a life of faith and purpose, is about more than getting from lunch to dinner, isn’t it. Virgina Woolf did not have a church home, but she struggled all her life to describe what was really real, what was beyond what she called the cotton-wool of non-being. She wrote that she was hungry for more, much more, than getting from lunch to dinner. More than getting over it, getting through it, getting by, getting along.

One thing that is giving form to my life right now is the struggle to gather up all the lost and broken bits, the parts of lives worth living that our culture and society seems so determined to devalue, ignore, to throw away.

There are a lot of messages out there – and we they form us, yes we do, and we bring them in here with us– messages that are destructive and life-denying. I don’t even mean the crazies at the fringes when I say this. I mean actual untruths, real honest destructive lies, that are front and center, the ones we eat every morning with our oatmeal, check at noon with our email, the ones we see in the yard as we close the bedroom windows at night.  These are the stories we absorb all the time, hardly noticing it at all, about who is powerful and who is weak; about who is beautiful and who is invisible; about who deserves bread, a roof, dignity, meaningful work, and who does not; about what it means to be a woman or a man; about who to love and what makes a family; about what can be changed and what cannot be changed.

These messages have no single author, they come from no single source, yet they form us. It’s the most frightening thing a parent can learn, as we cling to the grand illusion that we shape the lives of our children: that we can control, forever, the tv they watch, the words they hear and overhear, the society they grow up to support.

In response to this environment our softest inner beings take shape, our hard protective shells are formed and defended. This is the water we swim in and the ground we walk on, morning, noon, and night. It forms us without us being able to stop it, to close our ears or close our eyes or walk away. Frankly, it’s terrifying.

But – and this is good news, friends, this is very good news – but, not this morning. Because this morning, this day, has other things to give us.

This morning has given us the story of pennies for peace, the opportunity to consider all the broken bits of discarded power we have thrown away in our lives, to think about what it would mean to gather them back up like shiny pennies and build something with them.
I heard Catherine talk about this in our time for all ages, talking about the one cent, Lincoln-backed coins we are collecting to give away, but also talking about the chance in our lives to gather up those lost and shiny coins, which are of so little value on their own, we leave them on the street, we don’t even bend down to pick them up –- but this morning she invited us to collect them, all these copper bits, and turn them into something big and important. We take take those tiny bits of discarded power and gather them up and making them into living stones upholding living stones of schools for children who need schools in distant lands. We can gladly show all our neighbors that we are not our own, that we belong to a larger human family.

This morning has given us the chance to declare our commitment to shaping our days with intention, to reclaim time in my life, and shape my own lifetime.  In divinity school I used to draw a tiny hand in the margins of my notebooks, one on which I draw in five fingers, and then on each fingertip write: me, family, friends, work/studies, faith. Every now and then I had to rethink what would fit on that hand; often I would forget, for instance, to start with me, and that would cripple me. Or I would feel pulled to allow my internship work and my studies to take up more than the single digit allowed them, and feel pressured to put family and friends into the same category. Perhaps your hand of commitments would be different. But every now and then I ask myself, how would my husband draw that hand, that shorthand for what is shaping my life? Would he agree that me, family, and friends are the core? I hope he would. But if not, there is some realignment that I need to be working on.

Although no one would say I work with my hands -- I most often work at a computer, typing, on a phone talking, or in a meeting participating – it is true that I use this hand, or this shorthand drawing of a hand, to do my work and shape my lifework.

Like so many of you, I yearn to live a life of intention, where I am aware of my environment and how it is shaping me, how I am being formed, in ways both dangerous and loving. So much of the Earth that forms me is not under my control, and yet with these hands and no others I stake out my claim on my time, my life, my commitments to the larger world.

How will you shape your life, on this new morning, when you sit to table this noon, when you prepare yourself this evening for sleep?

Today I open my hands to the world, I reach out my hand to you in greeting. I look down at my hands to be reminded of who I am and what I love in this world. I bend my hands to the work of equality, of peace-building. I fold my hands together to acknowledge the light, the divine spark, that radiates from all life. With this hand I give life the shape of justice, the shape of love, as surely as the hands of the potter shapes the clay at the wheel. 

And it is with these feet I take one more step away from the forces and people that deny life, that I take one more step toward peace, hope, and love.

May it be so.