Grappling with a Luminous Doom

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church, Alton IL, on Oct. 26, 2008

This autumn, I’ve been trapping squirrels. 

No, not with a bear trap with jaws of death.  With a wire cage fitted with a trap door that leaves them unharmed and ready to get back to their business – it just lets me take ‘em to another part of the world to get on with their lives.  My squirrel relocation project began this year when I’d finally had enough of their digging in our airplane plants and their chewing the leaves off our elephant ears and their nibbling on our nearly-ripe tomatoes just enough to ruin them for everybody else.

The squirrels can be destructive, and I’ve caught a whole bunch of the little critters – maybe a couple of dozen -  by setting up the trap and baiting it with a few pieces of some well-preserved graham crackers I found in the back of our pantry.  It costs me essentially nothing, it gives the squirrels a tasty snack, and it allows the safe and secure relocation of entire squirrel families to a better class of squirrel neighborhood about a mile from us in the heavily-forested bird sanctuary in the city park about a mile from our house.

Now if you happen to be a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and find yourself overly concerned about the physical or emotional distress my relocation project may be causing the squirrels, I sympathize to an extent.  I want you to know that they appear physically unharmed, but I know there could be more damage there than I can see.  Therefore, I have spoken calmly and empathetically to many of the individual squirrels I’ve trapped.  I’ve tried to take the pulse, if you will  - emotionally, if not physically – of my rambunctious charges in the squirrel community.  And in doing so, I’ve noticed a pattern of behavior in this exploding population.

First I’ve noticed, when the door drops closed behind them and they realize they are trapped, they go into something of a frenzy for a few seconds, running in circles to all the corners of the cage a few times trying to find a way out.  When they are pretty sure there’s no opening that they can squeeze through, then they begin to chew – something they do very well – on random pieces of the wire cage to see if that’s the way to set themselves free.  When they tire of chewing on the wire, they sit, take a few very fast breaths, and finish the morsels of graham cracker that are left in the cage while pondering their next move.

Well, actually, this last, “pondering their next move,” is my own projection.  I can’t know what they’re thinking, nor even IF they’re thinking.  I think I see their little brains working, but the main thing I see is that they appear, on the surface, at least, to live life at a far faster pace than I could ever imagine.  Their metabolism is super-high.  They move like the wind. They breathe like hummingbirds.  If their perception of time is anything like it looks, their lives must go by at a blinding speed.  Especially in that cage, time must fly by.  They might even have a sense of their impending demise.  If this entrapment did signal to them their mortality, if they did picture their doom, what would they be thinking?  What would they be doing about it besides acting on their fight-or-flight impulses?

My life, when I take a few moments to breathe and to relax, goes by at a relative snail’s pace.  It’s only when I get anxious, or scared, or when I feel trapped, that my heart rate soars and I lose touch with time.  I don’t often have a sense of doom, or more than a cursory awareness of my own entrapment within the cycles of life and death.  But it is always there somehow, lurking in the shadows, though most mornings I don’t have an immediate sense that my time is up.

When I trap these squirrels, their time is not up, even if they suddenly think it is.  I am not the vehicle of their doom.  I am there, however, to transform their lives in a sense, to relocate them to a better place, to a wonderful home in a fine forest where they can run and play and eat and sleep with their other little squirrel friends.  And right now it’s early enough in the year that they can get to their new digs and set up a new nest before winter hits.

 

For us humans, fall is coming on and harvest is about done in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere.  So this time of year is chock full of holidays that have death as a theme. Because of our parade of costumed revelers a few minutes ago, we might think first of the secular holiday of Halloween, which we’ll celebrate next Friday night in most towns and cities around here. 

There are certainly differing attitudes towards Halloween these days.  On the one hand, Halloween has become the second most popular holiday in America, right behind Christmas in sales and marketing.  I remember a time when Halloween was strictly for kids, but in recent decades more and more of us older folks still act like kids and get dressed up as witches, pirates, or vampires, or maybe a favorite pop culture icon.  God knows how many Obama’s or Bush’s or McCain’s or Palin’s will be at parties in the next week or will show up at your house trick-or-treating this year.  I don’t know how you’d dress up as a hedge fund manager or a loan officer for sub-prime mortgages, but those could be popular costumes this year what with the financial crisis we’re living through.

But there are other attitudes about Halloween out there in our society today, too.  I know some of my neighbors are opposed on religious grounds to celebrating Halloween at all – they liken it to playing with evil, which in their fundamentalist Christian view is to be defeated rather than toyed with.  Other less fundamentalist Protestants remember October 31^st as the day Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenburg, and they celebrate it as Reformation Day, a fact that I admit had escaped me until my new best friend, Bill Vieth, the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church here in Alton, came down on me over lunch one day for not knowing anything about it - he tells me Reformation Day has for hundreds of years been spent praying for unity and remembering the dead.  Which sort of sounds like our Catholic friends who use November 1^st and 2^nd, known as All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, as special days of intercessory prayer for the dearly departed, a tradition which itself is a thousand years old.

And speaking of old, our tradition of Halloween of course coincides with and is based to a large degree on the much older celebration of Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the final harvest of the season.  Ancient pagans lived close to the edge between life and death, and they had to take the prospect of their doom seriously – a failed harvest or the wrong decision on the slaughter of their animals could be disastrous for their families and their communities.  During Samhain, those early people took stock of their stores for the winter months, and decided how much livestock to slaughter for the season.  Death was an ever-present companion on the pathways of life anyway, and many believed that on Samhain, the curtain between the living and the dead grew thinner or vanished completely.  The custom thus developed to don masks or costumes either to ward off evil spirits or to placate them.  Many lit large outdoor fires to drive away the spirits and then threw in the bones of slaughtered livestock for extra power and as a gift to the gods or goddesses – hence, ‘bonefires’ or bonfires.

Down through the centuries, pagan and Christian traditions around harvest time became more and more inseparable and indistinguishable.  As the light waned, individuals and communities sought either to drive away the dark or to revel in its ascendancy, or both.  Many Christians as well as pagans and Wiccans still see Samhain, Halloween, or All Saints’ Day as a time to celebrate the lives of those who have passed on and as a good time to pay their respects to ancestors or elders of the faith, to their family members or friends who have died.

When mystery abounds, we can either be afraid or celebrate.

But enough about the history of religious holidays - we were talking about squirrels and how they might experience a sense of doom when, actually, they’re about to be relocated to a fine forest where they can run and play and eat and sleep with all their other little squirrel friends.  What they know when they find themselves trapped in the cage is that change is upon them and they automatically assume the worst:  oh, woe is me, I’m not going to be able to live like I used to so it must be all bad.”  If that’s the case, maybe they haven’t read the Mary Oliver poem entitled “Sleeping in the Forest”:

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom.  By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

This poem landed in my hands, I think serendipitously, about the time the markets started to crash a few weeks back, when I knew things would be changing in some fundamental ways, but I wasn’t sure how.  I was struck back then, and still now, by a couple of ideas Ms. Oliver presents.  First, I was completely taken with the phrase “grappling with a luminous doom.”  As the Dow fell through the floor, I took it as a signal, I thought it a harbinger of doom, and I was certainly grappling with the possibly painful ramifications for myself and for all those around me.  But grappling with that doom, I couldn’t say I found it especially luminous, which the New Oxford American Dictionary says means “startlingly bright” or “brightly illuminated” – I didn’t find the situation very bright.  A secondary definition of luminous, the Oxford says, is “clear and easy to understand” – yeah, right - this doom I was grappling with was not that, either.  A tertiary definition, however, was “enlightened or inspiring.”  That’s better, I thought:  maybe there’s enough substance in my present picture of this impending doom to offer something inspiring.  Maybe I’m enlightened enough to see it that way.  I hope so. 

But I continue to grapple with this luminous doom that has so many public manifestations:  the markets spiral ever downward with no bottom in sight; a national election looms next week and will spell doom and gloom for one side or the other, maybe even for the country;  the cost of health care soars and too many Americans live without health insurance;  people near and far are being tossed from their homes;  families are going hungry;  the wars continue around the world.  If we don’t have a sense of doom, I wonder why not.

But the second idea of Ms. Oliver’s that grabbed a hold of me is her last line.  After grappling all night with a luminous doom, she says:  By morning / I had vanished at least a dozen times/ into something better.

In other words, Oliver’s fear of doom, at least as expressed in this poem, has been overtaken by her growing awareness that whatever change has come has brought unanticipated improvements over and over and over again, and what she once clung dearly to as the very definition of herself has died and gone only to leave in its place something better.  What that something is, she doesn’t quite say, because she lives in the faith that whatever it is right now, it’s only going to get better.

 

The squirrels are worried; maybe you are, too.  Mary Oliver worries, grappling all night while sleeping in the proverbial forest, and in her poetry she witnesses to her faith that something better awaits.  We will come out as something better, too.  Not that it’s easy, not that it’s ever easy: our grappling will no doubt continue.

What she says may apply to this election.  It may apply to this financial meltdown.  It may apply to whatever difficulties this church may face in the near future, either because of the collapse of the markets or some other unforeseen calamity.  It may apply in your life and in mine. 

Our best is not behind us – it is yet ahead.  As we approach Samhain and Halloween and All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days when the curtain between the living and the dead thins and vanishes, that’s a good thing to remember, and instead of filling us with fear, allows us to celebrate.

 

So may it be.