When Fear Cramps Your Heart

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, November 15, 2009

after a reading of Mountain of names  by Angela Sorby:

I’m bad with names, so as I push forty,

I forgive myself for hiking lower Rainier

 

past lots of biggish, greyish birds

 

that I can’t describe more precisely.

Tit for tat: the birds don’t know

my species name, either. Homo sapiens,

nor my “common” moniker, Angela,

which means “messenger from God,”

nor are they aware of my medicinal uses,

spelled out on my organ donor card.

 

It’s a spring day, dizzy with ignorance.

 

The ash in this meadow’s volcanic (I guess)

except for the one-tenth of one percent

that used to be my grandmother.

We scattered her here with no marker,

and field guides don’t list her new name,

 

now that she’s crossed over

from the humanities to the sciences.

Is ash a mineral?

Is death implicit in the periodic table

If I could coin a word for this meadow,

part grandmother, part volcano, I’d keep mum.

The mountain’s most itself when darkness

veils its glacier, the way key messages

 

transmit themselves,

 

sans messenger.

 

 

When Fear Cramps Your Heart

The first panicked reports out of Fort Hood, Texas, after the November 5^th shootings were that several gunmen had attacked unarmed service personnel on the base.  Details remained sketchy as reports continued to trickle in, but within several hours after the event it had become apparent that only one shooter was involved (should we say ‘one unauthorized shooter’?) - which is certainly scary enough, but not anything like the fears that would have been unleashed by finding out that one of our most heavily fortified military bases inside our own borders was vulnerable to a coordinated terrorist attack.

My own fears that day were made more immediate by the fact that my nephew and his new wife recently bought a house at Fort Hood – when you hear breaking news reported near your loved ones, it has a way of focusing your attention.  I was aware that my nephew is presently deployed in Iraq so he was safe (whatever that means in Iraq), but I wasn’t sure where his wife would be – on base buying groceries when the bullets started flying?  The worst goes through one’s mind, of course – fear lurks just below the surface, especially in these post-9/11, global-war-on-terror times.

My nephew is okay;  so is his wife.  Others not so much:  thirteen people killed by the gunman;  thirty others wounded, some critically;  the perpetrator paralyzed;  a nation shaken to see such graphic evidence that its armed forces personnel are not immune to a psychological break nor immune to an attack from one of their own.

The news can be scary, but there are other things to be afraid of, too.  A couple of weeks ago, a man came to the door here at church right about the time the worship service was beginning.  I’m told he was banging on the foyer door, which was answered by an alert teacher.  The man seemed on edge somehow, asked for help, said he needed money immediately.  When told we don’t keep any money in the building, he became more agitated.  Another person joined the teacher and together our two church members convinced the man to leave.  On their way back inside, the two church members locked the doors behind themselves in case the man might return in a more aggressive frame of mind.  Yes, scary.

Lately, in these hard economic times, we have a lot of people who come to our doors asking for help, on Sundays and every other day of the week.  Most are low-key, even polite, simply seeking help.  Some are under more pressure, though, from social stresses, psychological issues, drug addiction.  Few give us any real trouble at all or give us cause to fear for our own safety.  Some, on the other hand…

I wonder if we would worry so much if we didn’t live in the times we do.  Would it ever have occurred to us that brutal behavior toward churches is possible if we hadn’t seen other churches have to deal with violent acts recently?  Summer a year ago, the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church of Knoxville was rocked by an intruder who entered the church during a children’s performance on the afternoon of July 27, 2008, and shot several people, killing two and traumatizing the children who were witnesses.  Then in March this year, perhaps further afield theologically but much closer to home geographically, a man walked up the aisle during a Sunday morning worship service at the First Baptist Church over in Maryville and shot Pastor Fred Winters dead on the chancel.

If we didn’t think these things were possible, if we didn’t know these things had already happened, we might not conjure reasons we ought to be scared.  But these scary things are possible in this life.  Bad things do happen to good people.  And we are scared, at least on some level:  too often living overtly in fear or with fear covertly driving the things we do and the way we behave toward each other and our neighbors.

Now, it’s not only armed attack that we have to be afraid of.  I’ve heard of plenty of other things that bring out the fear in people, and rightly so:

It’s scary that so many of us have lost jobs recently.  This is not a good market in which to begin a job search, and the fear of financial trouble and ruin is real, to say nothing of the attendant loss of identity or independence. 

It’s scary that so many of us have struggled lately with health issues – colds, flu, surgeries, and hospitalizations.

It’s scary that so many of us have heard words like ‘cancer’ in our diagnoses recently.  I know from the experience of those closest to me that when one hears such a thing, the adrenal glands hit high alert, the heart rate spikes, and you get ready to run in any direction just to get away.

So we have some anxieties, some for good reason.  There’s a lot to be afraid of out there, and in here.  But is giving in to your fears any way to live?  And isn’t there anything else we can do?  Isn’t there any way to approach life that will give us freedom to move rather than paralyzing us?

 

In the face of the news, in the face of the economy, in the face of our diagnoses, in the face of our fears, I offer you a poem today.  It’s entitled “First Lesson”, by the poet Philip Booth.

“Lie back, daughter, let your head / be tipped back in the cup of my hand. / Gently, and I will hold you. Spread / your arms wide, lie out on the stream / and look high at the gulls. A dead- / man’s float is face down. You will dive / and swim soon enough where this tidewater / ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe / me, when you tire on your long thrash / to your island, lie up, and survive. / As you float now, where I held you / and let go, remember when fear / cramps your heart what I told you: / lie gently and wide to the light-year / stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.”

“First Lesson.”  A first lesson in – what?  Swimming?  Teaching?  Living?

If this is my first lesson, I’m left with a lot of questions.  Who is this father?  How come he thinks he knows so much?  Where could he have learned all the things he’s passing along to his daughter?  And why should she listen?  Has her father’s life been so exemplary that she will naturally want to take heed?

What does he envision for his daughter?  Surely he imagines there will be joys in her life, like the pleasure of seeing the seasons come and go.  But joy and pleasure come with a cost:  likely she will see loved ones grow old, get sick, die.  Hopefully she will at one point or another feel herself wrapped in the arms of love and be uplifted by life, but her heart will likely be broken when things don’t work out the way she expects. 

The daughter may be a person who by accident of birth is less privileged, one who is forced to face exclusion and oppression.  Or she may be a child whose health is not good from her first moment, a child who faces suffering with every breath she takes.  Nevertheless, here’s this father telling her ‘lie back, the sea will hold you.’  Is this supposed to make the daughter less afraid?  What does this father know that the daughter doesn’t?  that I don’t?  that we don’t?

Let’s pick our way down through the text together and look at some of the images and see what else we can see in the poem when we look closely.  The poet, in the voice of the father, begins, “Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back in the cup of my hand.”  Tip your head back – that’s a pretty open and vulnerable position to put yourself in.  While I’m doing that, it seems like it would be hard to tip my head back and feel withdrawn.  When you tip your head back, you’re open to the whatever’s out there, vulnerable to the universe and whatever it throws at you.  Not an attitude of safety, but an attitude of trust.

“Gently, and I will hold you.  Spread your arms wide” – more openness – “lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls.”  Take in what’s going on around you, be aware of and open to your surroundings.

“A dead-man’s float is face-down.”  If a dead man floats face-down, this implies that living involves looking up. 

“You will dive and swim soon enough” – the daughter’s not quite ready to go yet, has a little more to learn before she can set herself free.

“You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea.  Daughter, believe me, when you tire on your long thrash” - a long thrash sounds like it’s not gonna be easy, it’s gonna be a hard way to go.

“your long thrash to your island” – on your journey to become yourself.

“lie up, and survive.”  To survive here seems to be about more than physical life, more than simply living.  It is about depth, breadth, wholeness, salvation if you will.

“As you float now, where I held you and let go” – now’s she’s on her own, cut loose from physical dependence on another.

“remember when fear cramps your heart” – when fear squeezes in and closes your heart off, rendering it inefficient and ineffective and unable to keep you fully alive.

“remember when fear cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars” – with your head tipped back, you can see the cosmos, and you can see that those light-year stars are far, far away, [which is where I will be going, which is where I came from, as did you.]

“lie back” – look up, let go.  Our human tendency is to try to hold ourselves up, to always grope for solid footing on solid ground.  But this father is telling his daughter that’s not the way to survive:  don’t count on finding a place to stand.  And certainly don’t count on you being the agent of your own survival.  Let yourself go.

“lie back, and the sea will hold you.” – If you trust enough to open up and lie back and look up and let go, it’s going to be okay.  “All will be well;  all will be well;  all manner of things will be well.”

 

The poem’s last assertion, “The sea will hold you,” is a faith statement, which by its very nature is neither provable by science nor disprovable by argumentativeness.  This faith statement is offered to you as a gift, which you can choose to accept or not.

Are there things to be afraid of?  Surely there are.  Will fear cramp her heart - and yours?  Absolutely.  The text of the poem doesn’t say “if fear cramps your heart,” it says “when fear cramps your heart.”  When fear cramps your heart.  When, not if. 

But if the father is admitting to his daughter that being alive means she will be afraid, he’s also telling her something much more important:  this father is telling his daughter that she needn’t be defined by such a thing as fear.

Nor should we be defined by fear.  The universe offers no guarantees that we will never be afraid, nor that we will never have good reason to be afraid.  But it does offer the assurance that if we lie back, if we open ourselves up instead of shutting ourselves down, if instead of clinging we let go, we will be borne up by things we cannot understand, held up by a sea that makes no rational sense, lifted up by a love that we cannot explain or prove, but is there, is there, is there.

So may it be.