"What Do We Find When All is Lost?"

MEDITATION

The meditation this morning is a poem by Rabbi Harold Schulweis:

We have seen Yitzhak Perlman
Who walks the stage with braces on both legs,
On two crutches.
He takes his seat, unhinges the clasps of his legs,
Tucking one leg back, extending the other,
Laying down the crutches, placing the violin under his chin.
On one occasion one of the violin strings broke.
The audience grew silent but the violinist didn't leave the stage.
He signaled the maestro, and the orchestra began its part.
The violinist played with power and intensity on only three strings.
With three strings, he modulated, changed, and
Recomposed the piece in his head.
He retuned the strings to get different sounds,
Turned them upwards and downward.
The audience screamed delight,
Applauded their appreciation.
Asked later how he had accomplished this feat,
The violinist answered
It is my task to make music with what remains.
A legacy mightier than a concert.
Make music with what remains.
Complete the song left for us to sing,
Transcend the loss,
Play it out with heart, soul, and might
With all remaining strength within us.

SERMON:

Imagine how the little boy in the children’s story must have felt as he struggled for months to make his seed grow into a beautiful flower. As hopeful anticipation diminished, his efforts grew feverish and desperate. Eventually he had to accept that the seed would not grow. So he had nothing to offer the Emperor but an empty pot - evidence of his failure and the object of others’ scorn. But shame, fear and disappointment did not prevent him from telling the truth. The Emperor rewarded him for his honesty and for his courage, and named him his successor.

This Chinese fable teaches the value of telling the truth. But it also offers a more subtle lesson. For only by holding the empty pot - a childhood version of staring into the abyss of nothingness - does the little boy reveal the inner strength he possesses.

He thought all was lost. And so it seemed. There was nothing he could do but hold that truth in his hands. As it turns out, that was all he needed to do.

The question I pose today, "What do we find when all is lost?" has more than one answer. As the Chinese fable reminds us, one of those answers is that we find nothing, an empty pot, with only tears of frustration and despair to show for our work. Hope can be lost. And answers rarely appear as swiftly or retributively as in a children’s story. Sometimes they do not appear at all.

Sometimes we find when all is lost that there is nothing we can do. Acceptance and surrender are the only responses we have left. Out of time, the struggle over, we give ourselves to God or to whatever force or larger cycle will take us back at the end.

If there are answers in that final act, I do not know them. They are not for us to know, perhaps. But as Ping learned as a child, life is full of moments when we think all is lost, but it isn’t. And there is something to learn from that truth; perhaps even to remember at the very end.

The question I pose today, "What do we find when all is lost?" is really more than one question. What do we find when we have lost something we thought was essential, and must call upon our inner strength and reserves? When we feel diminished, how can we trust that we still have what we need?

Rabbi Harold Schulweis vividly describes a scenario in which one of the strings on Yitzhak Perlman’s violin breaks in the middle of a concert. I’m sure there are worse things that can happen, but it must be the kind of anxiety dream musicians have all the time. Of course, they could have stopped, replaced the string, and then continued.

But that was not Perlman’s disposition or his task as he understood it. Instead he finished, playing on only three strings. "It is my task," Perlman explained later, "to make music with what remains."

Given Perlman’s formidable talent, clearly it is easier for him than for the rest of us to turn such a potential disaster into a triumph. Such moments, you may think, are only for those who have stunning genius, confidence, and resourcefulness. But we may have more in common with Perlman than we realize. We all know what it feels like to have only three strings left, preferably not with an audience watching, but the challenge is familiar enough.

Sometimes you can't stop everything and get fixed. Sometimes you can't be fixed. Sometimes you still have to go to work, feed the children, live your life, running on something less than you really need.

You may not have lost everything - but the deficit is nipping at your heels. There’s less of you left, but you work with what you have. And you make what you can of what remains.

What you make may be inspired, brilliant, the best ever - or something less. It may not matter. What does matter, in Rabbi Schulweis' poem, is the "heart, soul and might" that you pour into your effort. "Transcend the loss," he writes.
Know that you are still whole.

What we find when something - if not everything - is lost is the capacity to dignify ourselves with our struggle. This is everyday humanity at our best: coping with life, working with what we have, doing the best we can. We choose all the time, in small and large ways, to play with the three strings we have left, and not walk off the stage. Such challenges show us who we are, what our inner strengths and resources turn out to be, surprising us, perhaps, with what we can do.

Peter J. Gomes, minister of Memorial Church at Harvard University, tells a more sobering story about what people do when all is lost. One of his colleagues, also a university minister, "was captured on the River Kwai during World War II. While in a Japanese prison camp, [this minister] and his fellow British captives were initially very religious, reading their Bibles, praying, singing hymns, witnessing and testifying to their faith. They were hoping and expecting that God would reward them and fortify them for their faith by freeing them or at least mitigating their captivity.

"God didn’t deliver, however, and the men became both disillusioned and angry. They gave up on the outward display of their faith; but after a while, as the men began tending to the needs of their fellows - caring for them, protecting the weaker ones and in some cases dying for one another - they began to discern something of a spirit of God in their midst. They discovered that religion was not what you believed but what you did for others when it seemed that you could do nothing at all. Compassion gave them inner strength, and their inner strength gave them compassion." Gomes asks, "Can it be that inner strength is the capacity not simply to endure, but to give?"

Most of us don’t think about religious faith the way the soldiers at the River Kwai once did. For us, religious faith does not hold assumptions about what God will do for us or what beliefs will save us. We think of religious faith as the way we live our lives. Faith is an attitude of trust that opens us to life.

But even our practical faith can be challenged beyond its limits. Any of us, trapped like the soldiers at the River Kwai, would struggle to hang on, body and soul. Their lesson could be our lesson.

What if circumstances led us to question whether what we did ever made a difference? What if we began to wonder if our trust and hope were simply delusions, and that everything and everyone were indifferent to us? What if we lost our faith? It can happen, even to us. Doubt and despair come to everyone at times. Quite possibly, we can know what faith is only after we have known doubt and despair. For only after all is lost can we know what remains.

What we find when all is lost is that we still possess the ability to give, in life-affirming ways, to others. Even when faith runs out and hope is scarce, we still have what we need. The inner strength to take what remains and make something of it - music, or an act of caring - is in each of us, though we may be diminished by loss, doubt or despair. There is always something left to give. It is an act of faith.

Peter J. Gomes concludes his story about the soldiers at the River Kwai with this exhortation: "As you seek the inner strength that helps you not only to endure but to overcome, do not look for what you can get, but for what you have been given, and what you can give." That is what we find when all is lost: faith in our capacity to give and to receive. Even if all we have is an empty pot. Even if we are not who we used to be. Even if we doubt and despair. We can still make music with what remains.

References used to prepare this sermon include "Storm Center,” an essay by Peter. J. Gomes in Christian Century, May 31, 2003; “Playing with Three Strings,” by Rabbi Harold Schulwies, in Dancing on the Edge of the World, edited by Miriyam Glazer; and “The Empty Pot,” a traditional fable from China.