Here is a poem from a collection entitled God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant. It’s called “God Woke Up.” It offers a different perspective on some more traditional images of “God”.
God Woke Up
And He was groggy
so He got a nice cup of coffee
and went to sit
under an apple tree.
He sat there
drinking His coffee,
listening to the birds,
when all of a sudden
it hit Him.
He was happy.
God was happy!
And He wished there
was just someone to see it.
He’d gotten such a bad rap
all these years
for being [ticked] off
all the time.
And He really wasn’t.
Maybe a little cranky.
But here He was,
happy!
The birds were singing
and he was at peace.
Buddha told Him it
could be this way,
but He’d never really
believed it until now.
Life really was easier
sitting under a tree.
Remember your favorite vinyl record album? Mishandling or playing a song over and over caused a scratch or a deepening of the groove. So when the lightweight needle tried to sweep over the grooved surface, the diamond point of the stylus would get caught in the whirlpool of sound, and a snippet would repeat over and over and over again until you had to get up and --using whatever deft technique you had developed—moved the needle to the next track in the song.
This image may not make any sense to anyone under 50, but now you know the source of the expression “she sounds like a broken record.”
Well, I feel a little like a broken record this morning because I know that what I want to say to you this morning is something I need to say over and over and over again to myself. Or have someone say to me. Now that June is here, it is going to be a while before you hear from me again.
I know we all just went through a long process to affirm my ministry at First Church in Boston and it might seem logical that now I will just be here all the time. But come summer--July and August--I will be away from you on unpaid study leave and vacation. I will miss you. And I will be back.
Until then, until I can be with you again, forgive my sounding like a broken record and permit me to offer you a message that bears repeating: take time out.
I mentioned this sermon theme to one of our children who responded: that’s a terrible idea. “Time Outs” are just another way to say, “Go to your room, young lady!” or go stand in the corner and be quite. Time Outs may suggest that someone has been “bad” and needs to be punished.
Used well, however, a time out can be a very positive exercise. Think about the time outs we see professional sports teams employ during the peak intensity of game play.
At some critical moment, perhaps when things aren’t going well, or it’s clear that an important challenge has just arisen, a coach or player calls for a time out.
This kind of a time out is a break, a breather, a time for a coach to approach the player to review or revise their strategy for success. I have no idea what they really say to one another out there on the mound or the field or the court, but I like to think that the coach is reminding the skillful player of what he or she already knows and is capable of:
[Imaginary Coach]: “Remember how during practice you worked on getting centered, clearing your mind, focusing on just this pitch, just this swing, just this free throw? OK,” my fantasy coach continues, “now is the time to shake off all the bad throws. Worry doesn’t change anything.
Stop judging yourself. Ease up on the criticism. Quiet all the noise outside in the stands. Ignore the commentators sitting high above or on the sidelines. Forget about all the Monday morning quarterbacks. You are in the game right now. Remember your practice and bring it bear right now in this moment. You can do it, kid!”
“Right, coach!” the player responds and heads back out into the game renewed. Spirited. Reminded of who he is at his best, he goes out to be his best.
OK. So it’s not always the same for kids in a time out. The parent-coach hopes to have the maturity and compassion and patience and presence of mind to realize that a child is over-tired, hungry or bouncing around after too much sugar intake. Or she knows that SHE’s over tired, hungry or bouncing off some emotional wall and it would be best if they were separated for a little while.
Either way, calling for a time out can be a way to review or revise a strategy for getting to bed time with as few tears and shouting as possible. In the best scenario, a parent-coach gets it together enough to remember what matters. What really matters. And after a little time out, she is able to sit lovingly with a child to remind them both of who they are at their best: people who love one another more than anything else in the world. And that no one is bad. Indeed, they are good and they are loved.
We all need time out. To remember what matters. And who we are at our best.
We all need time apart if we are to have a space in which to listen for that still, small voice within. Some solitude to remember or discover who we are, and to allow that self to feel loved, not judged; forgiven, not full of regret; accepted, not shamed.
With grace, one can emerge from that time out blessed with a deep knowledge that you are a child of God, a child of ultimate good, and that you are lovable and you are loved—whoever you love. And always will be.
Summer is, to my mind, nature’s wise way of calling to us: TIME OUT! Take time to rest, or to review or revise your strategies for living your life, for re-discovering and being your best self.
Take time out to revisit your commitments, to examine your practices and your habits. Take time out to gain a new perspective, to shift your point of view—if just to see what life or a problem or work or a relationship looks like from there.
The Bible is interesting to me for a variety of reasons. One of them is that it is filled with different versions, different perspectives of the same story or the same character.
Most of us are familiar with the basic Genesis story--an ancient, pre-scientific way of explaining the beginning of the world. A story in which God creates the world in 6 days and, on the seventh day, takes time out to rest.
There is a less well-known story told about creation. One in which God was not all alone out their in the void, thinking up zebras and glow-in-the-dark plankton and sequoia trees…In the book of Proverbs, the creation is briefly recounted in the feminine voice of Wisdom, Sophia, the female master builder and perhaps muse who was there before the beginning:
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills,
I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.”
I love that ending: “Rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
Summer is coming. It is time to take time out to notice and delight and rejoice in this inhabited world. I can think of no better way to re-affirm one’s commitment to preserve and protect the quiet and wild and beautiful places of creation that to take time out and outside.
So I leave you to June with some summer thoughts by critic and journalist Marya Mannes:
“Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow,
The faucet leak, and learn to leave them so.
Feel how the breezes play about your hair
And sunlight settles on your breathing skin.
What else can matter but the drifting glance
On dragonfly or sudden shadow there
Of swans aloft and the whiffle of their wings
On air to other ponds? Nothing but this:
To see, to wonder, to receive, to feel
What lies in the circle of your singleness.”
I hope you can take time out to go out and to rest. To rejoice and delight in creation, remembering that you are a part of this delightful creation.
This summer, take time out to be in touch with your self and your center and know who you are and that you are—in all your brilliance and complexity and shadows and flaws and inconsistencies—like the creation, Good.
It may be, as the Buddha said, a little easier sitting under a tree. Whether you can go far out to the fields or the hills or waters, or stroll in the Public Garden or ride a ferry around the Boston Harbor Islands, promise yourself that no matter how busy you are this summer, you will take time out to remember, to honor and to accept who you are. Delight in the re-discovery that you are good. And rejoice in this creation, for you are loved and you are blessed.
Blessed Be. AMEN.
