Worship: Readings to Accompany Lessons from a Hamster (Real and Imagined)

One of the most fun parts of putting together a church service is selecting the readings. Since my early twenties I've considered poetry my preferred form of prayer. I love the opportunity to share my favorite inspirational writings with the congregation. The hard part is recalling, finding and selecting the most appropriate readings.

Here are the readings I actually used to accompany my sermon on January 11.

For the opening words, a selection from the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jelulludin Rumi (Coleman Barks' translation, of course):

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain, both. We are
the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

The story for the children was The Old Woman Who Named Things by Cynthia Rylant. I know the adults enjoyed it; I hope the kids did too. Alice said, "Good job reading the story without crying, Mama!" It's a tear-jerker.

The first reading was a favorite poem by Ellen Bass. I had a strong internal debate about whether or not to use this piece, but I decided it would help to set the theme of parenting mindfully.

There are times in life
when one does the right thing

the thing one will not regret,
when the child wakes crying “mama”, late
as you are about to close your book and sleep
and she will not be comforted back to her crib,
she points you out of her room, into yours,
you tell her, “I was just reading here in bed,”
she says, “read a book,” you explain it’s not a children’s book
but you sit with her anyway, she lays her head on your breast,
one-handed, you hold your small book, silently read,
resting it on the bed to turn pages
and she, thumb in mouth, closes her eyes, drifts,
not asleep—when you look down at her, her lids open,
and once you try to carry her back
but she cries, so you return to your bed again and book,
and the way a warmer air will replace a cooler with a slight
shift of wind, or swimming, entering a mild current, you
enter this pleasure, the quiet book, your daughter in your lap,
an articulate person now, able to converse, yet still
her cry is for you, her comfort in you,
it is your breast she lays her head upon,
you are lovers, asking nothing but this bodily presence.
She hovers between sleep, you read your book,
you give yourself this hour, sweet and quiet beyond flowers
beyond lilies of the valley and lilacs even, the smell of her breath,
the warm damp between her head and your breast. Past midnight
she blinks her eyes, wiggles toward a familiar position,
utters one word, “sleeping.” You carry her swiftly into her crib,
cover her, close the door halfway, and it is this sense of rightness,
that something has been healed, something
you will never know, will never have to know.

The second reading was two more contemporary poems--a short one by W.S. Merwin and a longer piece by Mary Oliver. I first read the Mary Oliver poem in the Unitarian Universalist Association publication The World. I'm not sure if it is collected in any of Oliver's books.

Separation
W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


Starlings in Winter
Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
But with stars in their black feathers,
They spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
They swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

For my closing words, I used a wonderful little piece I found among the readings in Singing the Living Tradition, the UUA hymnal:

Hold on to what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.

Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.

Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.

Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.

I believe the author is Nancy Wood.

Now for the writings that didn't make it into the service. My friend Karen reviewed the sermon and was reminded of one of my absolute favorite lines from the poet Adrienne Rich. I've used this as a mantra for years; there is no explanation for why it did not come to my mind as I prepared this service: "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors." If that does not describe my sangha, which has been affectionately known as "the crybaby karate school," nothing does.

I did not want to rely too heavily on Mary Oliver, although I do believe her canon may form a Book of Common Prayer for many of us these days. From her collection Thirst, memorializing her partner of forty years:

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to live, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers: type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

And finally, though I loved the closing words I chose, I wish I had remembered this quote from Alice with essentially the same sentiment:

You have to let your life go on
Even when it doesn’t make you happy.
Even when it’s hard.
Even when it’s not what you expected.

Publications: Raising a Strong Voiced Girl

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Sermon: Lessons from a Hamster: Teaching and Learning About Grief and Loss

Sermon delivered at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, January 11, 2009

When we received the email concerning the death of Blossom the Hamster, we snickered. The person who sent us this email is the nicest person I know. She was my daughter’s first baby-sitter and first pre-school teacher. She’s cared for my kid, she’s cared for my friends’ kids, she’s cared for most of your kids. She’s a gifted educator and a great parent, but above all, she’s nice. So when Blossom bit the dust, she sent a death announcement to all the pre-school parents encouraging us to talk with our children about their special Blossom memories. It was a very nice email.

Needless to say, my partner Liz and I are something other than nice. I’d say we fall somewhere between snarky and truly evil, but maybe just a little more on the evil end of the scale. We lived in New York City for a long time and we could blame it on that, but I think it’s really just our nature. We’re dark. So when we got the email late at night after Alice had already toddled off to bed, we snickered, we mocked the solemnity of the notification, and then, because we are tired, multi-tasking modern parents, we promptly forgot about Blossom and her tragic demise.

This apparently was not the universal response of the pre-school parents. For example, another mom who is herself extremely nice— if not quite exactly as nice as the pre-school teacher— happens to work as a grief counselor with children. So she and her son sat down and discussed their Blossom memories and discovered they would be best memorialized in an art project/sympathy poster for the pre-school. Evan must have done the artistic scribbles and multi-media while his mom wrote a warm remembrance of Blossom in bold letters.

Generally speaking I think it’s really cool that Alice taught herself to read at four years old. Not because it makes her some kind of kid-genius, but because I have loved to read since I was a tiny person and it gives us something in common. It’s really quite amazing after the tedious toddler years to have an activity we both enjoy equally. “Let’s have a cuddle-read!” I’ll say enthusiastically, and she’ll dive into some volume of Little House on the Prairie while I devour a good murder mystery. She’s warm and she smells good and we can sit under an afghan for a whole afternoon. Nothing comes without a price, however, and I discovered just one of the pitfalls of early reading when we opened the door of the pre-school to be greeted by the memorial installation. With greater accusation than you would think a person under three feet tall could muster, Alice turned on me: “Blossom DIED?”

In the end, the death of Blossom was not a particularly devastating loss for Alice. Perhaps they didn’t have such wonderful memories after all; maybe Al just wasn’t at a place in her development to really process the event. Maybe Liz and I are not completely insensitive twits, maybe our parental radar told us that this was not a crucial moment. But the Blossom adventure did tip me off to the fact that, as with every other thing Alice has learned in her short little life, I would be called upon to hold the space wherein she could discover loss and grief.

Along this parenting journey there have been things Alice has taught herself, like the aforementioned reading and also charming the wits out of most adults. There are the things I continue to try to teach her, like using utensils for eating. And then there are the things we’re learning together, like how to honor and survive the loss of someone you have loved. We’ve gotten a lot of practice this year.

Our family lost two loved ones, one anticipated and one a sucker punch of the worst kind. When my grandma began her final decline last winter I really, truly believed I was ready. She had been careening towards—while steadfastly refusing— her death for ten years, ever since she looked into the casket at my grandfather’s funeral and wailed, “That was my whole life!” They met on the sidewalks of New York when she was 12 years old. Since his death, she endured a decade of physical and mental decline and surrender to the anger and depression that darkened her entire life. I had been missing my stylish, acerbic, energetic grandmother for a long time. Our visits dwindled to obligatory biennial bedside hours when she would noticeably brighten at Alice’s presence, and if we were lucky we might get a glimpse of her old sarcastic self with a well timed one liner. But she was not really living, and her pain and fear and illness were increasing steadily, and we all wanted to see her released from the physical suffering and confusion. So when the news came that she had passed, I thought I felt relief, I thought I felt sadness, I thought I was okay.

I didn’t forget to tell Alice that Grandma Dottie had died. She asked me if Grandma Dottie was in heaven now—all that Little House in the Prairie has given her a fairly complete Calvinist vocabulary. I told her that Bobbi—my mother—probably believed that Dottie had gone to heaven to be with God, and that that belief gave Bobbi comfort. I don’t know if that was developmentally appropriate—I didn’t have time to call Cindy and ask when we teach these things in R.E.. Unfortunately, I did forget to ask myself what I believed about where Grandma Dottie had gone, and worse, I forgot to ask myself what would give me comfort.

To give myself a break here, I could explain that no one in my family was talking about these things either. My mother sighed heavily and added “funeral planning” to her perpetual “To Do” list. She scheduled the burial on a day she felt would be most “convenient” for people, as if the ceremonies of grief were an imposition on our busy lives. There are reasons for this, and I’ve spent enough hours in therapy to recognize Denial when he stops by. But this was the context within which I forgot to leave a space for grieving.

So the real teaching and learning happened a couple of days later when I tried to undertake a simple gardening task—screening a bucket of compost—and came completely unhinged. There was crying, swearing and throwing things; there was broken lumber in the driveway and swathes of dirt in the garage. There was Liz leading my wide-eyed girl away from me and saying in a steady voice, “Mama is feeling really sad and angry about Grandma Dottie dying. Let’s give her a little space.” And a little while later I calmed down, and Alice gave me an extra big hug to help me feel better. So we all learned that day and in the days that followed that people feel really sad and angry when the people we love die, and that it’s good to give them space some of the time, and sometimes to give them extra hugs.

Several years ago, when my grandmother first moved to the nursing home, my mom and sister worked like dogs to clean up her house and, for a while, rented it out. But in the end the house was sold, and razed and something emblematic of our era of conspicuous consumption was erected in the place of my grandparents’ modesty and thrift. Theirs was the only family ever to live in that tiny, tidy 1940s ranch house. I have not visited the spot previously known as my grandparent’s house; I don’t know if I ever will. My mind knows, but my heart does not really understand, that my daughter will never wrap her small hand around the worn red knob on their clattering screen door— a knob placed a good foot below the standard level, so that a very small person might be able to let herself into the kitchen to get some Oreos, or a handful of Hershey’s kisses from her grandfather’s pocket.

It’s that “never-again”-ness that dealt the body blow when we lost our friend Janice in August. At 52 she moved from diagnosis of an aggressive form of ovarian cancer to death in the space of three weeks. This was not a friend in the ordinary sense of the word, someone with whom I might hang out or talk on the phone or share confidences. Instead, this was a member of my sangha, my martial arts community, which I spoke of at length in my summer sermon. This was a friend like a family member, a beloved one of a beloved whole.

Janice loved and kept chickens, and in the days leading up to and following her death, I saw our little sangha as a scratching brood of hens after the hawk has struck down one of their own. We pulled our chicken heads down into our necks and looked up at the dangerous sky, and around at our sisters, and knew that any one could be taken at any time. We felt very small. Grief blew a hole into each of us—you could almost see the doors of our hearts swinging on their hinges and opening to the the wide air beyond. We were crazy with unbelieving and each of us stumbled in turn. I heard the speech of the women I most admire broken with choking sobs. I saw my teacher kneeling and bending her body to place her forehead to the ground, literally bowed with grief. What we had to offer one another was so little in the face of so much pain: Breath. Presence. Compassion. Love. It felt inadequate to hold the enormity of our loss, but it did hold. We bowed, but we did not break.

One of the hardest things , for me, about being a parent, is the sense that the buck stops with me—that I am the safety net, the provider of stability, the grown up. Before I became a mom, I had occasion to look around during a medical emergency involving my spouse and wonder who was going to take care of her. It was an embarrassingly long few moments later that I realized it would be me. It wasn’t a lack of love but a lack of confidence, and an incredulity that this is what adulthood amounts to: acting as if you know what you’re doing, and then finding yourself in charge.

A hierarchical community such as a martial arts school provides people to look up to. It’s part of the system. Seeing my teachers bowed but not broken told me what Alice could see and learn from my grief—that the grown ups could be very deeply wounded but remain whole. That we could be sad and we would all still be safe. Alice danced into the charged room where I collected the email updates about Janice’s rapidly declining condition and read only the relevant words to Liz, not being able to read entire messages aloud: “Cancer.” “More serious than we thought.” “Hospice.” Alice was near when the early morning call came that Janice had died. Alice was alone with me when a joyous song of celebration came over the stereo speakers and I got knocked over by one of those memories that is carried by music—a visceral relocation to a moment I shared with Janice many years ago: hearing that song, being delighted to be together, and looking into her sparkly eyes.

When Janice died, we didn’t wait for a convenient time to grieve. We started right away. My sadness was dark and heavy and I trudged through ordinary life. A day after Janice’s death Alice asked, “Is anything fun going to happen today?” and I truly thought, “No, nothing fun will ever happen again.” But it wasn’t true. On the very day of Janice’s death, when we went to gather with friends and view her body as was her wish, we dropped Alice with a wonderful family from this UU community, who folded her into their multiple child household where she had, by all reports, tons of fun.

Alice was five. She had fun every day, even when when it was hard for her moms to keep up. At the supermarket a few days later Alice sighed and took a deep breath to get her thoughts organized. “I know that we’re all really sad because Janice died,” she said, working very hard to be clear. “But could we just pretend that that’s not what’s happening?” I saw my old friend Denial, and I understood him better than I ever had. He had a job to do, and that was to make sure we all kept having some fun.

In an email update, Janice’s partner told us, “We know that death is not the enemy.” Janice went to her death without regret. She loved her life and in her death she was celebrated by hundreds who loved her and learned from her. This lesson is incredible to me, and to say it is a gift seems too little. It is a precious treasure and in all my sadness, I feel so lucky to have walked a little while with this woman whose life and death radiated with presence. I had the same realization watching Janice’s partner and friends bear the horror of losing her that I did when I birthed Alice. The insight was this: as unbelievable as it seemed, we had the the tools to handle it. Our sangha practice is about being present, it’s about being kind to ourselves and one another. It’s why Janice had an incredibly wonderful life and a peaceful death. It’s how her friends came to bear the unbearable task of letting her go.

After twenty years in a Buddhist influenced art, it still surprises me that I have any skill at being present. I was raised by someone who schedules funerals to cause the least disruption to everyone’s calendar. And I am so imperfect as a parent. Sometimes this parenting gig feels like an endless round of forgiving myself for falling short of my best self. I want to give my girl every tool for having a wonderful life, and I believe that being present, living mindfully, is one of the great secrets. So when the sound of Miriam Mikaba singing knocked me over with sadness, I told Alice why. “I am thinking of Janice, and I am so sad that I will never see her face again.” And Alice said to me with all the bright kindness of her enormous heart, “Mama! Tell me what she looked like. I will draw you a picture.”

As I was writing the first draft of this sermon this fall, I received a death announcement for the Guinea Pig Broccoli Niblet. Broccoli Niblet was the adoptive pet of two successive families with whom my household is very close, so her death affected a number of children I love. I was relieved to learn that Broccoli had not suffered, that she had an easy death, and that she was put to rest in a bucolic spot near the swing set. When I told Alice the news she said, “There’s a lot of getting sick and dying going on around here.” Isn’t that the truth. We were glad to have it said plainly and to know our feelings on the matter. And I sat right down to write a condolence note.