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Get Grounded

By Charles Rush

September 27, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 7.5Mb) ]

st week, I was watching Vivie Guida during the children's sermon [slide #2] and I got to thinking about the way that community really works and how the blessing falls down the generations.

I knew her great grandmother for whom she is named, Vivian Wadmond. [slide 3] By the time that I knew her Vivian had not only retired, she had retired from her retirement, and was mostly just involved with her family. I saw a picture of her when she was young. She was a classic from that era. She must have been in her thirties and the picture looked like it was from the early 60's. She had one of those great looking evening dresses, was smoking and holding a Martini. This was the era when women could still wear fur and not have to worry that someone would spit on them. She was quite a socialite and looking at that photograph brought back a whole era in an instant.

Vivien was also community builder and that is what she did. She was very involved at Overlook hospital not only helping them to raise money, but she also organized volunteers to staff a lounge so that family members would have a place to go and re-group, get something to eat and drink, while they were at the hospital. And she was involved at the church as well in a variety of different ways over the years. That was that generation. [Slide 4] This is Vivie with her grandmother Marin

Right around the time that she Vivien died, her granddaughter started coming back to church, Meredith [slide 5]. Meredith was all grown up. I remember her wedding to Andrew Guida. They had a couple boys, rambunctious boys, and Meredith migrated back to a pew, like most mother's with that muted cry of ‘help me with these boys'. Pretty quickly she started volunteering with the homeless, coordinating meals and volunteers. I would see her every once in a while out of the corner of my eye checking on something in the kitchen.

She would have that blonde hair pulled up in a bun, as casual as her grandmother was formal, but her grandmother wore her hair up in a bun from time to time as well. It was just a kind of sober blessing to think that the Spirit of Vivien was being carried on through the generations- different style, different accents, but the same spirit of service.

I'm sitting there watching Vivie in church thinking about the way things come full circle. She has her blanky doll, named for a woman that she will never really know, but the funny thing is that somehow through everything that we do here as a community of faith, through everything she does with her grandparents, Marin and Chuck Mixon, everything that she does with her family, I'm certain that the spirit of her great grandmother Vivien will bless her too. That is what we do.

St. Paul would write to Timothy and say, ‘that faith that I first saw in your grandmother, and then in your mother, I can see in you'.

I was at the opening of the Cornerstone School a couple weeks ago, so much good energy, all those parents out front taking pictures on the first day of nursery school. All that nervousness about whether everything will go well or not. I'd been so focused on just getting the paperwork turned in for the Fire Department and the State that I'd kind of forgotten about this spiritual dimension that is really why we do what we do.

You know how these things go- Out of the corner of my eye, I see my granddaughter coming into school with her Mom holding her hand. In an instant, I remembered her father, Ian, making that same trip at 3, carrying a big load of blanky that he had to part with for the first time in his life.

And then comes [slide 6] Sequoia Pilgrim, Barry and Kyla's daughter, Frank and Penny Bolden's granddaughter… and they are in the same class. Right after her, Sara Bolden, Ian's daughter, and Frank and Penny's granddaughter, aged 4. [Slides 7,8,9,10, 11]

I get a cup of coffee and here comes Lyla Weckesser, Olaf and Suzanne's daughter [slide 12] and Sally Weggland's granddaughter, aged 3 and change.

Finally, I see Rex Fisk, almost 4, [slide 13]the son of Donna and Brandon Fisk, granddaughter of Stephanie Fisk. This is starting to look like a movement.

And suddenly it occurred to me that 13 short years from now, Frank Bolden, Chuck Mixon, Sally Weggland, Stephanie Fisk and I could all be standing with the Police Chief- trying to sort our what happened at a weekend party [slide 14]… and let me say right now, it was Rex's fault. I'm sure those Fisk boys have some lead role here. I can smell it.

We'll have a few other families rolling it over for three generations shortly too. The Rosoff's, the Buntings, and we join a bunch of other families that are already into three generations of involvement, the Bland's, the Noonan's, the Hales, the Flannery's, the Ross', the Radutzky's, the Baker's. And I know there are many others that I could mention.

That first day of school, I came in here for a moment to pray, not any particular words. I just had this image of Frank and Penny, Chuck and Marin, Sally and Layne, Stephanie, Kate- all of us joining our Spirits together, blessing the next generation and the generation after that with the best of what we know and have lived, purging some of the worst we have know or inherited- wow, it was just a very healing, hopeful, grounding image. It is a privilege to know you, to be in spiritual communion with you, and to raise our families together.

This is really what the Church does on its best days. We channel the blessing and pass it on from one generation to the next. And if you could actually envision it, see it, you would witness this long tradition going back over decades, centuries, millennia. About some things, you don't have to re-invent the wheel. We come to this place to remember what God has taught us about love, compassion, accepting one another, learning the life of forgiveness, turning again to the way of reconciliation, how to be ambassadors of peace. We keep this teaching alive when we worship together and if you could zoom out, not only the breadth of our connection around the world, but also our connection down through the generations, what a profound vision it would be.

I was in Italy this summer and I went to mass in Sienna. The church there is 800 years old and it is built on the foundations of an older church. The floor has inlaid marble over all of it, rather like waves when you walk on it because it was a main church on the pilgrimage route, so literally tens of millions of Christians have worn the stone floor into grooves, each coming to pray in this place.

The Mass is in Italian, of course, but I'm always surprised how much I get out of it, even though I only know a few phrases in Italian. I recognize all of the Lord's Prayer, most all of the reading of scripture, most of the Eucharistic prayers. We've all been shaped by the same worship over a long period of time. Sunday morning they run the tourists out of the Cathedral in Sienna, so it returns briefly to a place of prayer. That Sunday, there happened to be a family christening a baby. The father was so proud that he was walking around thanking everyone who was there, a surprising number of people from Sienna, but he was also greeting people he had never met, Christians who had come to worship literally from all corners of the earth and thanking them for their prayers and good wishes for his son.

After the Mass was over, everyone shuffled outside, through those massive inlaid doors. Kate and I were walking down the road towards the Roman gate, the Porta Roma, and you just try to imagine the pilgrims making this exact same walk, day after day, week after week, year after year just like we were making that walk… just about 289,810 groups like ours, invoking God's blessing, pledging ourselves to live out of the higher part of what we know to be true… And that is not quite half way back to the beginning of our faith. It is no wonder there are grooves even in the marble flooring.

Sometimes when I am at those ancient Cathedrals in Europe, watching a wedding or a funeral or a concert, I try to envision the long march of history as a kind of continuous procession of the Mass. It is an exercise in humility as you place yourself in that teeming cortege across twenty centuries and well it should. There is a fairly sturdy tradition behind us with plenty of resources that structure us to access and actualize the higher spiritual reasons for which we live.

We know that we will need them because we are sending our children into a future that is largely unchartered, where the unknowns exceed what we know in most of the critical areas that matter. In perspective, we are not that different from Abraham and Sarah, when they first discerned God telling them ‘Get you to a land that I will show you?' And where would that be? How will we know when we get there? Like them, we send our children out by faith, with hope that we will figure it out when we actually get to the challenge.

How the world is changing… you couldn't help but reflect on that at the celebration of the 400th year of the founding of New York. At the time it was discovered, Amsterdam was the financial capital of the world. 150 years later, London was the financial capital. 100 years after that New York was the capital. Who could have ever imagined from the Old World of Europe that this would be the future?

And neither can we. In the time since I began speaking this morning, 67 children were born in the U.S.. 224 were born in China. 395 were born in India. And… 694,000 songs were downloaded illegally around the world.[i]

Last year, the United States graduated 1.3 million students from college. India had 3.1 million graduates and 100% of the Indian graduates speak English. In fact, it is estimated that by the year 2020, the country in the world with the most English speakers will be… China.

When I was 21, all of my papers at college were written on a typewriter, a machine you can only find today at an antique store. If you are 21 right now, it is estimated that you have watched 20,000 hours of Television already, spent 10,000 hours playing video games, spent 10,000 hours on the phone and you have sent and received 250,000 emails, IM's, or tweets. Over half of you have actually created some content for the internet; today over 70% of American 4 year olds have used a computer.

It is hard to remember that the first internet message was sent in 1992. Today the number sent exceeds the total population of the world. MySpace, founded in 2003, has enough users to be the 5th largest country in the world.

In 2005, 1 out of 8 people that got married, actually met on-line. I would venture that number to be more than double in our area. It is certainly more than double for the couples married here.

We know we are living through a revolution of information. I toured the library of one of the colleges at Cambridge University. In 1500 you had to have 500 books in order to start a college, and they could be on any subject, as it was a huge feat to find 500 in the whole countryside of England.

It is estimated today that if you read the New York Times for a single week, you have ingested more sheer information than someone who lived a life time in the 18th century. It is also estimated that the sum total of human knowledge has doubled every 20 years from 1900-1980. From there it has doubled closer to every decade and it has been suggested that the actual doubling of technical knowledge is closer to every couple years in the near future.

Indeed, if we stay on track, we may actually develop a supercomputer whose ability exceeds a human mind before these pre-schoolers get to middle school.

Something like half of the jobs that are most in demand for this year did not actually exist prior to 2004. So as one person put it, ‘we are preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies we haven't yet invented, to solve problems we are not actually aware exist.'

We live in an era of complexity and exponential growth that will rapidly pull the whole world into one inner-connected neighborhood, for better and for worse.

I was at the beach this summer with the New Yorker for a little relaxing reading and the author was in Vermont trying to find out why all of the bats are dying in the caves of northern Vermont. It is one of those mysteries like the collapse of the bee population in the United States a few years ago that has the best scientists scratching their heads for understanding because the simple collapse of a single species actually can portend catastrophic implications. No one entirely understands it but the reigning hypothesis is that some lethal contagion was indirectly transmitted from another continent via international air traffic. I'm picturing an innocent Vermont farmer vacationing on the island of Borneo… The truth is, we just never thought about this, because, we were back in the old order, thinking like the old country. It is true that these articles usually turn out to be a lot less apocalyptic than originally presented but there are more and more of them precisely because our rate and concentration of growth outstrips our scientific and social imagination.

We send our children out by faith to address a future world that we do not yet understand and they will deal with social issues we are presently not able to see. We have to trust that the Spirit of God will rest upon them in the future, in the words of Joel, that they will ‘dream dreams of a better world', that they will ‘see visions' when they get there and intuit what to do.

Our job is to equip them with character: we teach them the value of seeking understanding in a world of complexity; we can model what it means to be a neighbor in a multi-cultural, pluralistic world; we can exercise their capacity for compassion with our neighbors far away, all of us citizens of one planet; we can develop in them the skill of reconciliation in a world of ever more pushy self-interested parties; we can lift up for them the importance of being humane as we are surrounded by impersonal forces; we can illustrate how peace will increasingly be related to imaginative justice; we can support them, surrounding them in a mature community of love. All of this we know from our tradition, and we have been handing it on from one generation to the next now for 733, 547 days in a row.

My brothers and sisters, you stand in a great tradition, a profound tradition. Through it, let the blessing of God fill your life with the indwelling of the Spirit. Bless those around you with the grace and love that you have in our heart. Bless our children down the generation with the best of what we have known. Lift them with the gift of creativity that they might dream new dream and see new visions.

That faith that I first saw in your grandmother, and then in your mother, and now I am sure dwells within you. Rekindle that light, through the laying on of hands for God does not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control. Amen.

[i] From the video series “Did You Know” that has a couple versions 2.0, 3.0. They are produced by www.ShiftHappens.com. I am presuming that they are largely accurate.