Sermon: Wave Running Through All Things

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The Wave Running Through All Things¹

By Tom Reiber

August 12, 2001

e last sermon I preached explored the function of the death penalty and called into question the traditional reading of the crucifixion. We ended the service singing John Lennon's “Imagine.” I was a little worried both about the thrust of the sermon and the line “imagine there's no religion.” I ended up changing it to read “imagine there's no hatred.” The overall response to that service went something like this: “We don't have a problem with new perspectives on the crucifixion, but don't mess with John Lennon's lyrics.” I have to say, this is my kind of church.

In today's sermon I'd like to explore one of the obstacles to spirituality: namely, the modern or scientific worldview. I may be wrong about this, but I get the feeling we're still stuck in the age-old debate between science and religion. When we read Biblical accounts of supernatural events a certain tension creeps in. Many of us have trouble accepting a literal reading of these stories because they don't fit with our modern sensibilities. Even if you're excited by the expanding frontiers of science, the actual integration of those discoveries into our progressively secularized worldview is in its infancy. So we stand on the de-spiritualized side of the science vs. religion chasm; on the other side is a living, mystical spirituality. That's the backdrop to today's sermon.

There's a scene in the movie The Grand Canyon that I never get tired of watching. In it, a woman named Claire is out jogging and decides to cut through an alley. The last time she did that she bumped into a homeless man, so she's a little nervous about running down it again. To appreciate this scene you need to know that this is a difficult time in Claire's life. She recently found an abandoned baby and wants to adopt it. Her husband tries telling her she's just trying to compensate for their teenager who is on the threshold of adulthood. But Claire insists there's a reason she found the baby.

When she hesitates in the vicinity of the alley you know what she's thinking. “Do I give into my fears or face them?” This is the quintessential threshold experience that precedes all spiritual encounters. Do I push on into the unknown or shrink away? She decides to press on. As soon as she does the homeless man rounds the corner heading in her direction. He's mumbling a string of unrelated nonsense. But as he and Claire pass he says very clearly, “Keep the baby.”

Claire stops dead in her tracks, out of breath, blown away by the words of this homeless man. As she stands there, you get the feeling her world has just expanded exponentially. She's had one of those moments that enabled her to glimpse that life is far more complex and interconnected than she had ever allowed herself to see. For a long, profound moment, she reels under the weight of a major shift in her worldview.

Maybe you've had an experience like that or heard of someone who has. I believe that as we open to these spiritual depths, we become more aware, more conscious of signs and symbols. We develop the “eyes to see and ears to hear” that Jesus said one must have to enter the kingdom of God.

As we enter that realm, it becomes clear that these portal experiences aren't limited to the movies. Some of you were here for Isabelle Devenney's funeral. People spoke about her tireless work with the Bridges organization (which brings food and clothes to the homeless) and about her career as a primary school teacher. Afterwards we processed over to the memorial garden where Chuck was to say a few words over Isabelle's ashes. Just then the Bridges vehicles returned from making a run, precisely at that moment. Mourners—or celebrants—had to step out of the way to let the Bridges vehicles pass through their midst. Chuck watched the scene unfold, shrugged and said, “Figures, doesn't it?”

I love that reaction. Too often we don't say, “Of course something like that would happen.” Instead we get scared or we simply scratch our heads in bewilderment. Mostly we bracket these experiences off because they don't fit our view of the world. The alternative is to see the event as a meaningful coincidence, one tied into deeper patterns of meaning that are constantly unfolding before us. Isabelle, the great teacher, was teaching us one last lesson through her death concerning the miraculousness of everyday life. Once we open to the spiritual dimension, these experience cease to be isolated anomalies. Instead they become road signs guiding us on the spiritual path. The spiritual path becomes like a labyrinth, which is one reason labyrinth walking is regaining its lost popularity. As you walk a labyrinth, you see that your path is part of a larger path, part of a meaningful whole. You see that everything is connected, that, as Rilke put it, there is a “wave running through all things.”

Ginger Warden told me of an instance of synchronicity in her life involving a labyrinth. She and a group of women here at Christ Church had created their own labyrinth. Then they invited Diana Beach to come speak on the history of labyrinths as a spiritual practice. Diana gave the group an overview, part of which touched on the myth of the Goddess Diana who at one point turns herself into a deer. Following the talk, the group was sitting around painting the labyrinth when a full-grown female deer walked into the room and across the labyrinth. Ginger said the deer prints are on the labyrinth to this day.

Those kinds of experiences are foundational to the spiritual life. Handled with respect and treated as sacred, they have the potential to teach us about our place in the world and the path God has placed before us. It would be tempting to explore the archetypal dimensions of that one experience, but the point I want to make today is simply that these experiences happen and that they are meaningful. Like sunlight for a plant, these experiences call forth the growth of the soul. One could say that the universe is conspiring to grow us.²

Take, for example, an experience I had a few weeks back while having coffee with my friend Adam. We had just sat down at an outdoor café in the Columbia University neighborhood when Adam asked me about preaching. “What do you see as the goal?” he asked. “What are you trying to accomplish?” I started to say that when you become a minister you take a vow to preach the Gospel, but no sooner had I begun when he leapt up, said, “Excuse me!” and dashed off.

He ran to the corner, where a blind woman was having trouble crossing Broadway. I didn't have to look too hard to figure out the meaning of that experience. Here I was ready to pontificate on the meaning of the Gospel, when my friend leaps up to act it out before my eyes.

The deeper we allow these experiences to take us, the more likely they are to stretch us. We got a taste of that on our recent trip to Nicaragua. One of the purposes of our delegation was to visit communities of homeless kids living in parks and burned out buildings. Alex Bushe, the catalysts behind the trip, said visiting these kids had so affected him he felt he had to go back and bring others.

We met Mirna Sanchez at her office and she and a young seminarian working with her led us to the park. The seminarian led the kids in an icebreaker exercise, asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their hands shot up: “I want to be a baker—a teacher—a lawyer—a dancer.” They were so enthusiastic and hopeful, yet we all knew the chances of their becoming any of those things was extremely remote. One of the young boys Marilyn talked to was named Tony, the name of her son. She said the whole time she was talking to him she kept thinking, “there but for the grace of God goes my Tony.”

From the park Mirna took us to another foco, this one located in a burned out building. A young man showed up who had been stabbed in the side. He was walking around holding his intestines in with his hand. At the same location Squire was talking to a young mother with a beautiful baby. This is what Squire later wrote about the experience:

Of all those we met, the youngest was perhaps just a few weeks old; a beautiful baby boy with large dark eyes set in a mirthful face. Joyful chuckling songs accompanied his obvious interest and delight in all that he looked out upon.

“What's his name,” I asked the mother of this perfect, doomed child.

“Se llama William,” she murmured. The shocking sound of my own name went through me like a wound. I felt my heart stumble, then break into pieces, as finally the tears came.

As you can imagine, the impact of those experiences stretched us to our breaking point. We knew the suffering of the Nicaraguan people was tied to the collusion of our American interests in the region. So it's no surprise that one of us dreamed of killing a baby. Another dreamed of committing a robbery. Still another dreamed dream after dream of volcanoes. The land itself was populated with many volcanoes. On a deeper level, though, the volcanoes symbolized the traumatic sights and stories breaking into our world.

Interpreting these events spiritually, I'd say the meaning of these experiences resides in our having witnessed this suffering and linked it up with names that resonated with us personally. So much of the economic exploitation going on in the world goes on silently, with the exploiters having very little contact with the exploited. This allows us to mystify the human costs incurred by our American lifestyle. But in the scales of economic social justice, we aren't just weighing our national interests against the lives of nameless peasants; we're weighing them against William and Tony, against Mirna and Klemen and Maria and Padre Victor. We are all united by virtue of our common humanity. This is the message of the Gospel: everyone matters.

We sensed the beauty of our common humanity during our visit to the Infant Feeding Center outside Masaya. This was near the end of our trip and served as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. At first the young children who attend preschool there were as nervous as we were. We sized each other up from across opposite sides of the room. Then a young girl of about seven or eight announced she had a poem to share and proceeded to recite it. We stood there awed and captivated by the power of her presence and the beauty of the poem.

Then we broke out the tennis balls and baseballs we had brought and pandemonium erupted. In those few precious moments the suffering of the Nicaraguan people was eclipsed by the bright light of the children's joy. Tears came to my eyes as I watched our delegation playing with the children. Squire must have had about twenty of them hanging off him. His expression was one of pure, radiant joy. “Unless we become like children, we cannot enter into the Kingdom of heaven.”

This morning prior to the service I was standing by the bulletin board with pictures from our trip. Julie was holding Matthew on her hip as we looked at the pictures and reminisced about Nicaragua. At one point Matthew very intentionally reached out and touched the little girl who recited the poem at the Infant Feeding Center. Matthew, whose name means “gift of God,” gave me a gift in that moment. By reaching out and touching that little girl's picture, he affirmed the connections that will forever bind our children with theirs. There is a wave moving through all things. The question is to what extent we will allow ourselves to open to it.

At the end of The Grand Canyon, Claire, her family and a few friends climb out of a van. The camera zooms in on the expressions of each person in the group, revealing various mixtures of awe and wonder. Then the camera angle shifts behind them so you see that they are looking out at the Grand Canyon. You get the feeling that they all sense they are part of the mystery. And standing there with them, we find ourselves on the other side of the chasm, for we sense that we, too, are part of the mystery. We are caught up in the wave moving through all things.

And by the way, Claire kept the baby.

Amen.

¹ The sermon title is a phrase borrowed from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours.

² This notion draws heavily on C. G. Jung's notion of synchronicity. Jung believed these “a-causal meaningful coincidences” arose from patterns in nature. He encouraged people to glean meaning from them as if they were dreams, with the net effect of life becoming like a waking dream. To read more about this, see Robert Aziz' C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity.