"The Shock of the Familiar"

Reading

This Is How We Are Called
by Kimberley Beyer-Nelson.

In the hours before the birds
stream airborne
with chiming voice,
a silent breath rests in the pines,
and upholds the surface of the lake
as if it were a fragile bubble
in the very hand of God.

And I think,
this is how we are called.

To cup our hands and hold
this peace,
even when the sirens begin,
even when sorrow cries out, old and gnarled,
even when words grow fangs and rend.

Cupped hands
gently open,
supporting peace
like the golden hollow of a singing bowl,
like the towering rim of mountains
cradling
this slumbering and mist-draped valley.

This is how we are called.

Sermon

One Sunday morning over ten years ago, a silver magazine arrived with the paper. The cover, as I recall, contained only text, no images. When I leaned over, picked it up, and opened the cover, I found the inside articles, images, and even the advertisements were printed upside down, and backwards – as if the pages were to be turned from back to front.

The headline on the front of the magazine, read upside down or not was: the Shock of the Familiar. In its opening essay, the late American architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote, “these are dreamy times for design…[for] There has never been more stuff, and stuff must have a shape, an appearance, a boundary... The shapes … explode, mutate and multiply…” without universal code of rules to follow. The explosion of design gives a plasticity to the material world that is either the stuff of dreams – or nightmares.

The rest of the magazine was about unleashing that potential of design, art, creativity, form -- in ways both subtle and profound. It was about noticing in the gentle curve of a bus stop shelter a note of comfort as well as function, of how the plump squat shape of a soap dispenser calls to mind lathering up in the shade of a lemon arbor, rather than readying oneself for a surgical scrubbing down.

So it was that the design of the magazine itself was a puzzle, only to be discovered when you opened it up and were stopped, briefly, by the unexpected redesign of something familiar. It as easy to fix as righting the paper – except now of course the cover was upside down. Every time the magazine was put down on the table, the same quirk reminded me: this object was put together with intention, design, thoughtfulness. It drew attention to itself, it was puzzling and delightful. It must mean something. What did it mean?

I read recently that children and adults will consistently report that a French fry packaged in a fast food wrapper, nestled in red cardboard or pocketed in a paper sleeve, tastes better than one presented without its wrapping. This is not news to gourmet diners or chefs, who regularly devote attention to not only the food itself, but how it is garnished and presented. For how it is designed. What does that mean?

This is a time of year when my attention is drawn, again and again, to how things are presented, packaged, and repackaged. Down on the Third Street Promenade here in Santa Monica, when the sunset over the ocean slowly fades, the bright LED lights of holiday decorations pop on. It looks like a scene from a movie: a towering ten-foot evergreen decked in ornaments and glass, its neighbor the brave menorah, plugged in and gleaming, and the outlines of the still-green plants along the shop windows outlined in more lights. The eerily clean sidewalks. The store windows lit up with cozy displays. What does it mean?

Bill McKibben, a journalist and environmental activist, has written that our American culture, throughout the years, has designed and redesigned the Christmas that we need. In his slim book, Hundred Dollar Holiday, he writes about the intentional repackaging of pagan solstice rituals into acceptably Christ-centered festivities in medieval Europe; how Christmas stowed away with the Puritans, who were deeply suspicious of its excesses, and was declared illegal in early colonial households. Still, in the dark winters in this country the Christmas celebration survived and thrived, particularly in the cities where, McKibben writes, the tradition included gangs of street toughs knocking on the doors of the wealthy to demand presents. In this version, Christmas was the one day when the roles of master and servant were reversed, perhaps doing much to preserve the inequalities of the other 364 days of the year. In the mid 1900s, a series of leading business owners, poets, and authors, reacting to the public Christmas, recast the holiday as a private one, centered on generating magic and wonder for children, as well as selling ornaments and toys. This, too, was an act of design and redesign, of adapting and changing traditions in light of new fashions, codes of conduct, ways of being.

In his quest to call attention to the packaging and repackaging of Christmas, McKibben writes that he has been accused of decidedly grinch-like behavior. The reference is from Dr. Seuss’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story of a grumpy Seussian character who attempts to end Christmas by stealing all the toys, presents, trees, and lights from his neighbors in Whoville. And so the Grinch packs up all the presents! The ribbons! The wrappings!
The tags! And the tinsel! The trimmings! And trappings!

And he waits for the sound he is longing to hear – the sound of Christmas not coming, the sound of despair, and it doesn’t come. Instead, on that Christmas morning,

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small
[starts] singing! Without any presents at all!

In this redesign of Christmas, what survives is not the private celebration of stockings and lights, but the public joining of hands, the shared song.

What if we could design our world around that? What if that was the meaning of the bus shelter and the soap, the tree and the lights, the shops and the sunset? “Today,” writes Herbert Muschamp, “the most powerful laws governing design are dictated by the marketplace. Catch the eye. Stimulate desire. Move the merchandise. [but] Design…reaches into the psyche as well as the pocketbook.”

What is it about Christmas thats reaches into your psyche, your soul? What every time we read the world, at this time of year like no other, we found still more reasons to join our hands together to do the work of peace, what if that were the great puzzle that drew our attention toward itself again and again?

John Paul Lederach has spent a lifetime negotiating conflict resolution around the world. He writes about the inherent paradox of trying to learn peace-building, trying to design the summit, the talk, the negotiation that can turn enemies into friends, by saying that “the wellspring, the source that gives life, is not found in the supporting scaffolding, the detailed knowledge of substance and process, nor the paraphanalia that accompanies any professional endeavor…The wellspring lives in our moral imagination…[it lives in] the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.”

These are dreamy days, indeed, when we knuckle down to the difficult work of developing within ourselves, within our children and youth, in covenant with one another, just such a capacity, a capacity of moral imagination that allows us to look at the real challenges of this world and imagine creating, imagine giving birth to that which does not yet exist.

The poet Kimberly Breyer Nelson writes,

In the hours before the birds
stream airborne
with chiming voice,
a silent breath rests in the pines,
and upholds the surface of the lake
as if it were a fragile bubble
in the very hand of God.

She writes,

…this is how we are called.

To cup our hands and hold
this peace,
even when the sirens begin,
even when sorrow cries out, old and gnarled,
even when words grow fangs and rend.

Cupped hands
gently open,
supporting peace
like the golden hollow of a singing bowl,
like the towering rim of mountains
cradling
this slumbering and mist-draped valley.

This is how we are called.

Perhaps the meaning is there, if only we could read it in this form, hear in the silence of the pines and see it in stillness of the lake. Perhaps it is the stories of enemies who do finally sit down with one another, who take from the real challenges of this world that capacity to imagine something that does not yet exist. Some of these stories of peace and heartbreak are shared by Father Gregory Boyle in his recent book, Tatoos on the Heart. Father Gregory will be speaking at this church in April, speaking about the power of boundless compassion and what he has learned from over twenty years of working with gang members in Los Angeles. In this story, he writes about visiting a young man named Omar after Mass at Central Juvenile Hall.

Hey G, Omar says, Can I ask ya a question?
Sure, mijo, I say, Anything.
How many homies have you buried… you know, killed because of gangbanging?
Seventy-five, son.
Damn, G, seventy-five? He shakes his head in disbelief, his voice a bare hush now. I mean, damn…when’s it gonna end?
I reach down to Omar and go to shake his hand. We connect and I pull him to his feet. I hold his hand with both of mine and zero in on his eyes.
Mijo, it will end, I say, the minute… you decide.
The moistening of his eyes surprises me. He grabs my hands in his.
Well, he says, then, I decide.

And Father Gregory writes, quoting Robert Frost, “How many things have to happen to you, before something occurs to you?” He writes, Change is waiting for us. What is decisive is deciding.

My spiritual friends, it comes back to this. It comes back to us. To your breath, your spirit, your heartbeat. To your hands, the hands that tend children and elders, that bear loads of groceries, that hold the phone to hear the good news, that balance the spoon that feeds the sick – your hands as the nest that is sheltering peace for you and for all of us, like golden hollow of a singing bowl, like the towering rim of mountains cradling this slumbering and mist-draped valley.

May it be so.