By One Elastic Thread to Thin Twigs
©
UU
This clinging to a God
for whom one does
nothing.
A loyalty
without deeds.
Tyrant God.
Cruel God.
Heartless God.
God who permits
the endless outrage we call
History.
Deaf God.
Blind God.
Idiot God.
Scapegoat god. Finally
running out of accusations
we deny Your existence.
I curl in Thy grey
gossamer hammock
that swings by one
elastic thread to thin
twigs that could, that should
break but don’t.
I do nothing. I give You
nothing. Yet You hold me
minute by minute
from falling. —Denise Levertov, ‘Psalm Fragments’
The Sermon:
The word “faith” is uncomfortable for many. Some people tell me they don’t have faith. They think of having faith as being required to assent to a set of beliefs, and they can’t. Sometimes they’ve been wounded by a doctrine’s impossible demands, or its denial of their worth as human beings. Some associate “faith” with the far religious right. For some faith is simply not credible because it doesn’t square with reality. Faith in the justice system evaporates in a trial gone awry. Faith in a God who is both kindly and all-powerful quakes when a child dies.
But I also hear people talk about the attitude they bring to their work and relationships, or a trust that gets them through each day. When they talk about what they hold dearest, where they place their deepest trust, it turns out they do live from faith. Not intellectual assent to beliefs. But experiential, sometimes even gut faith.
Nan Merrill has rewritten the Psalms in contemporary language. She speaks of the divine as creative Love, and without gender. Her Psalm 140 says: “Deliver me, O Giver of Breath and Life, from the fears that beset me; help me confront the inner shadows/ That hold me in bondage….” And then: “I know that You stand beside those who suffer, and You are the Light of those imprisoned in darkness./ Surely You will guide us into the new dawn, that we may live as co-creators with You!”
Not all of us think of the divine as a personal, other “You.” But these words seem to capture the kind of faith that comes, not from intellectual beliefs, but from hope, from the heart—human experience. This seems to me what Paul Tillich is talking about when he says:
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness…. when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual…. when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign in us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted.
I’ve become very curious and respectful about what people have faith in, and about how we live it in our daily lives. It shows up in simple daily encounters. It is what gets us through our darkest, longest nights. We don’t know a person’s faith by what he professes to believe. We know it by how he speaks to a child or responds to being cut off in traffic. We’ll know it by how she does her work and spends her money. Do I live what I say I believe, or do I live from constriction, fear, need? I confess, in the darkest hours of the night it is sometimes the latter—as probably for many of us.
Our deepest faith isn’t necessarily rational. In fact I suspect it usually isn’t. Once, at the end of a nursing home worship service I invited the residents to choose a favorite hymn. You know what they chose? “Jesus Loves Me!” Oh no, I thought, I’ll feel silly singing that old thing. But I saw bodies and faces come alive. Some half asleep while I was talking sang with shining, wide-open eyes. Their voices swelled like a little river and carried me with them, almost in tears. The faith that carried these people through a lot of years somehow found its voice in this remembered childhood song. I have never again disparaged such simple expressions of a person’s faith.
In a former congregation I invited a small group of people to talk together about how their faith informed their work. All spoke of their desire to do something worthy and decent, to embody integrity, to foster human connection. An optician, told to talk customers into more expensive eyewear than they needed, simply quietly did not do it—a small but conscious act of faithful subversion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that we become what we worship, so we’d better watch what we worship. Our faith will out. Essential trust in the goodness of life will make us act differently, than will fear and lack of trust. The world is full of people—we know them (sometimes we are them)—who talk a good faith game, but act from fear, greed, or lust for power. The images of ultimacy we create are powerful. They can sustain; they can crush. They can inspire us to good; they can lure us to evil. But we’re usually attracted to evil by lack of faith—or by misplaced faith in something other than what we claim as holy. In Charmaine Craig’s novel, The Good Men, about the inquisition against the Cathars in medieval France, some of her characters believe they act from high ideals but use them to meet their needs or to accrue power. The Inquisitor thought he worshipped God and Jesus, but it was really his own power he worshipped and his own lust he feared—and in the grip of those idols, he put many to death.
As far as we know we are the only earthly creatures to develop a sense of transcendence. I wonder if we might be earth’s only creatures with a capacity for faith. I wonder if we are evolving toward faith in greater breadth and depth. Maybe some day faith in something more than physical survival, and getting our psychological, emotional, and spiritual way, will lead us to respect the many forms that healthy faith can take.
There may be scientific support for this evolutionary view of faith. We know that connection between spirituality and health has been established and studied. People who believe their physical conditions will improve, it seems, tend to experience improvement—or, at least, to accept peacefully their decline and even death. Dean Hamer, a behavioral geneticist,* suggests that spirituality may have a genetic basis. When I read this, I thought, our genes evolve—so why not our spirits?
But now after all these positive and forward-looking words I need to say something hard. I need to say that faith does not sustain everyone, all the time. I cringe whenever someone says, “God never gives us more than we can handle.” Haven’t we all seen people get more than they can handle? Years ago in a congregation I served, a much-beloved single woman in her thirties killed herself. Family, friends, and congregation were traumatized by her sudden, inexplicable suicide. I was scheduled to preach about faith that Sunday. She was missing for three days before her body was found on Saturday and we knew for sure what had happened. In those three days, I wondered: how could I say anything meaningful about faith to a congregation who by Sunday could be facing the question of whether or why a member had thrown away her life? If she had killed herself, what did it say about her faith, and how might it inform our faith in the goodness and meaning of her life or our own?
On Friday before I went to sit with the family waiting for news, I went for a walk and thought about the unwritten sermon. I knew I wouldn’t write it until we learned her fate, or, if we didn’t, until Saturday night. It was early December. From a tree branch overhanging the road swung an oriole’s abandoned nest, held by those amazing thin but tough threads that orioles weave to keep a home aloft for their chicks. The nest was getting tattered, blowing in the cold wind. I knew that eventually it would be torn away; but I marveled at how it hung on. Then I knew what I needed to say on Sunday.
Sometimes the twig is too thin. Sometimes the thread is not elastic enough. Sooner or later a nest is ripped from the branch by the wind. But usually it does hold until the chicks don’t need it any more. The oriole nest seemed to say what it is to hang on with faith in the face of the terrible, and how, sometimes, in ways we don’t understand, faith gets ripped away from a person. Most of the time, most of the time, the thread holds to the twig. Maybe it is your faith that what you do with your life makes a difference. Maybe it’s that your children or those you love will carry on your values and lessons. Maybe it’s that whatever happens is part of a great plan. Or that whatever happens is just what happens and we must endure it. Or that whatever happens, the people in your life will hold you up with a web of love. Or that there is a greater loving presence that goes through it with us.
I’ve seen people die believing they will join their loved ones. I’ve seen people die peacefully believing that they will cease to exist except as memories in those who love them, or in their deeds. One woman, dying of cancer, showed me the world map on her wall, marked with all the places she and her husband had traveled. She said, “I’m looking forward to this last, great adventure!” I never cease to be amazed at the strength of faith that people bring to their living and their dying. I’m privileged to witness that faith in many forms. And I want to have enough faith to sit in the stark, empty places with those whose faith is not strong enough to hold them, and witness to their struggle to make sense of their living and dying.
The great question is: what do you do with the reality that sometimes faith fails to sustain us? It simply is not true that “God never gives us more than we can handle.” I agree God doesn’t do that! But sometimes people get more than they can handle. Sometimes, their faith in whatever it is that holds it all together doesn’t hold it all together for them. The answer we each find to that dilemma bespeaks the faith that girds and shapes our life.
If anyone seemed to live from an active and grounded faith, it could be Mother Teresa of
The poet Jane Kenyon said that faith was how she lived through bipolar disorder and cancer and the leukemia from which she eventually died, young. She transmuted her experiences into poems that ring with simple truth and deep faith in life. In her final illness she wrote of an ordinary day. Of each small event in it—breakfast, a walk, time with her husband—she says the words: “It might have been otherwise.” Her poem ends: “Some day it will be otherwise.” Whatever you call what is of deepest value and meaning in your life—God, Spirit of Life, the human spirit, Cosmic Force—this is a faith that living is a wonder in the midst of the certainty that it will end.
And so we come back to the words of Denise Levertov, that illuminate the difference between trying to believe in the kind of literal God that finally fails us, and living with faith in the Great Mystery at the Heart of Life:
I curl in Thy grey
gossamer hammock
that swings by one
elastic thread to thin
twigs that could, that should
break but don’t.
I do nothing. I give You
nothing. Yet You hold me
minute by minute
from falling.
The hammock may be as tough and fragile as an oriole’s nest. We are held there by one elastic thread. The twigs to which it holds us are thin; they ought to break. As long as they don’t, we are held—only minute by minute—from falling. It is for us to notice that we are held. It is for us to realize that we do not fall. It is for us to look up into the void and say, even to what we can’t be sure is there to hear or care or acknowledge: “Thank you, thank you. I’ll keep on keeping on. And for now, how wondrous that may I rest here in this hammock a while.”
* Dean Hamer is a behavioral geneticist at the National Institutes of Health and Cancer Research.