As I alluded to earlier in the service, I’ve been doing this for about 28 years and
it’s still a mysterious thing about how a sermon is born. At the beginning of Forrest
Church’s new book, which I’ll be talking a little bit more about next week, he reminded
me of a great old story from our fabled past about the great Reverend James Barr. He
was notorious because he never turned in sermon titles. So the church secretary in the
newsletter one day wrote, “Dr. Barr will be preaching on ‘The Great Mystery.’ What he
will say is a mystery, but I’m sure it will be great.”
Well, this sermon title, “Blank Canvas” is a pun. I’ve been asked each year I’ve been here to do a canvass sermon, and I have no problem in doing so. I’m unabashed in being able and happy to respond to that request, because I like to support the hard work of all of you. It means a lot to me, and I think it is a small thing for the minister to support your idealism. And more, as I noted in the newsletter a couple weeks ago, they did a study among church people in America. They wanted to find out what were some of the reasons that they weren’t coming to church, or temple, or synagogue. One of the things that amazed them in the statistics that came back is that one of the reasons that people did not come to church was that the clergy never talked about money. This was something that was real pressing, a true spiritual issue in people’s lives, and clergy never helped them. It was a surprising discovery.
So as I say, through the years I have been most happy to talk about money. I’ve never shied away from what to me are some of the obvious things to say in the time of canvass. This church really is worth supporting, even sacrificing for. I thought that when I was a layperson, before I ever went to seminary. I will think that when I am retired and I’m sitting in the pew, and I try to be a good lay person somewhere else.
You know, churches are pretty rare beasts if you stop and think about it. They’re a place where art, and music, and silence, and friendship, and faith, (and what I like best, food) all come together and mingle. They create one atmosphere, one place where people can come and bring whoever they are. It’s a place where friendship between generations can happen. Whether you’re 80 years old or eight, friendships happen. Friendships cut across social lines; that happens almost nowhere else in society. As Ruth reminded us, it’s a place where our idealism can be multiplied, made more vast, made more effective.
Yesterday I went by the Schmalz’s house. They are hosting two young Afghan women that they are helping to support. It’s great to see church members there. Then I walked from there in the light snow to here, where over 350 people had gathered for a memorial service for a 50 year old man who died this week on The Hill, leaving a thirteen year old and a ten year old. This family was unchurched, they didn’t have a church, but they had one that day. They had one that day. About open mic on April 4, where kids from Roxbury are going to get together with young adults that meet here on Thursday, and our young people, and they’re going to share their poems, and their stories, and their songs. Where else does this happen? You know, I’m really glad when I hear that church meets your needs. But this is much broader and much more important than that, because it’s where needs meet people who can and are willing to meet those needs. That’s what it’s about. That’s what our blank canvass becomes each and every year; to support and to nurture, to contribute to something so fragile, and I believe so beautiful.
I’m going to talk about beauty the rest of this sermon, because as you know I like to write. And as some of you know, I like to paint. There’s nothing for me quite as clean and beautiful as that empty white space that awaits the first mark. Now Peter de Vries once said, “The only thing I don’t like about writing is the paper work.” But I disagree, I personally like that beautiful, blank, white, shining piece of paper before I have placed anything upon it. To me that is very beautiful. And I love a canvas when it’s raw, and open, and expansive to any dream and to the touch of the brush. All through the years I’ve experienced, each day I wake up and each Sunday when we come together, in just that kind of way. There’s a wide expanse waiting for the brush, waiting for the idea, waiting for the spark, waiting for the moment, to make something new every week, every year.
That’s the way the canvass goes. It’s not about money. Money, as Ruth alluded to, is really a frozen and static form of our labor or someone’s labor. When people work and expend their effort, and sweat, and put the time in, I tell you that becomes holy. That becomes sacred. I don’t worship money, far from it; but I deeply respect the reservoir, the well, out of which it comes. Which is our time, our lives, our effort, and our dreams. The emerging pattern of something like a life, like a yearning and open and free canvas waiting for the first significant line: the first trace of the right color. The emerging pattern of something that is as unique as you, as a community, as a circle of friends, as a long line of pilgrims, an increasing noisy and chaotic wilderness of modernity. Every year the blank canvass gets filled, and I never really know how. It’s magical, but it happens. Then I step back from what has come into life, and I’m a little breathless with awe, admiration and with abundant thanks. It is amazing.
This week as I waited for my subconscious to fill in the mystery of this blank sermon a memory returned to me of a fairly hard time. It was a time of expectation and excitement, but it was a hard time. It was in that first month when I moved here: all three of our kids were in new schools: 7 Chestnut was being renovated all around us: I was trying to get to know you, and all held under the shadow of 9/11 which happened four days before my first sermon with you. One afternoon I was sitting in my office and I was looking at that marvelous portrait of Thomas Starr King, that Unitarian minister who kept California in the Union during the civil war. That portrait is a great source of nurture and reassurance as I look at that young unlined face. He speaks to me; he does.
I remembered a poem that I read that week when I was sore, oppressed, and anxious. It was an amazingly reassuring poem. I went downstairs and Xeroxed it, and it offered such solace and comfort to me. And of course, I lost it. All through the years, all that I had was a glimmering memory. I didn’t even know the title of the poem, or who wrote it. But I wondered that somewhere, in my office, in my impeccable filing system that the Xerox was still hanging around. This week, because I knew this sermon was coming, I looked and looked. The age of miracles in not over yet, because I did find it. (In fact, to tell you the truth, the whole process was so liberating that I have resolved that before another seven years is up, I will file something again.) It was entitled, “Instruction to Painters and Poets,” but I give it to you because whether we’re artists or not, we have a certain thing that we work with. It may not be a brush, and it may not be a pen. What we all work with is time.
Time is our medium. It’s what we apply our artistic impulse to. It’s what we have.
The first thing you have to do
is paint out postmodern painting
And the next thing is to paint yourself
in your true colors
in primary colors
as you seem them
(without whitewash)
paint yourself as you see yourself
without make-up
without masks
Then paint your favorite people and animals
with your brush loaded with light
And be sure you get the perspective right
and don’t fake it
because one false line leads to another
The cadmium yellow leaves
the ochre leaves
the vermillion leaves
of a New England autumn
And paint the ghost light of summer nights
and the light of the midnight sun
which is moon light
And don’t paint out the shadows made by light
So paint all the dark corners too
everywhere in the world
all the hidden places and minds and hearts
which light never reaches
And don’t forget to paint
all those who lived their lives
as bearers of light.
That poem reached to me when I needed it, and it came back to me when I needed it again. Now you might say to me, “Stephen, how lovely and poetic, and maybe a little untrue to the realities of daily life.” “Everyday,” you might say to me, “is not a blank canvas. It’s filled with the past. It’s filled with our environment. It’s filled with our DNA. It’s filled with our history and our circumstances: all of the things that have brought us to this day and place, and this being.” You’re right! You’re absolutely right. Who we are is who we are.
It is the product of a long journey to this day and this breath, scrawled and smudged and irreducibly real and us. I would not deny this truth and your truth. No. And yet I could not preach, and yet I’m not even certain that I could come to church, if I did not believe that there was in fact, at each moment, at each day, at each decision, at each turning point, something fresh, something pure that may be born in us. We are never completely victims of the life painted of our past. No. Or that there is a place small and sacred, a fulcrum point from which we may make a new a decision, a new path, a new turning point: a place to start over new, to make the first mark of a new life. I believe this because I’ve seen it.
One day I was sitting and talking to a young man who just joined our congregation in Columbia, Maryland. He was an accountant. He described to me how he had been a crack addict in Baltimore. One day he woke up and looked up into a bare light bulb swinging over him. He said, “I’m either going to die here, or I’m going to get up and walk down the stairs, and go back to school.” When you hear a story like that, believe me, it turns you around. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen where our freedom and our creativity can come to the fore. Even including the most crushing and pressing circumstances.
When I first knew Liz, she was a social worker working with a woman named Francis Magill. I met her; I went to see her one afternoon to see how Liz and others communicated with her because she had Lou Gehrig’s disease. She had virtually complete paralysis as she lay in her bed, and all she could really do was roll one eye up when you went through the letters of the alphabet and you reached the right letter. Literally letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph she communicated beautifully with the world. I could not help but think of that when I read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. How many people here have read it? An amazing little book, written blink by blink by Jean-Dominique Bauby. He suffered a stroke and “locked-in syndrome” when he was only 43 years old. He wrote this marvelous book through his amazing ability to concentrate. He had to hold in memory everything he wished to say paragraph by paragraph and communicate it letter by letter.
He talked about feeling as though he were locked in a diving bell of deep submersion. But he also said, “Within me, my mind took flight like a butterfly.” Those are the images he lived with, the diving bell and the butterfly. The butterfly was his essential life freedom, his ability to communicate through the blink of one eye, which is all that remained to him. He communicated with wonderfully rich irony and humor and poignancy.
It will be a book that will make you weep, and it will a book that will make you get up the next morning and say, “My God, there is so much before me which I have not yet done, not yet tasted, not yet felt, not yet seen.” He says, “Inside the mind you can visit the woman you love, you can build castles in Spain, you can steel the golden-fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions. Enough rambling, my main task now,” he said, “is to compose the first of these bed ridden travel notes letter by letter. To learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.” He said, “In such a din, when blessed silence returns, I listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head, and to hear them one must be calm. Pay close attention, because their wing beats are barely audible.”
If a life, even one life, can be expressed through the blink of an eye, how can you tell me that your canvas is done? You have only begun to live your life. This is what I believe. This is what I know. To be like Jean-Dominique Bauby who says, “On a table cluttered with empty cups stands a small type writer with a sheet of paper stuck in the roller. Although at the moment the page is utterly blank, I am convinced that some day there will be a message for me. I am waiting.” And so are we all.
That poem that meant so much to me years ago concludes:
And remember that the light is within
if it is anywhere
and you must paint from the inside
Start with purity
with pure white
the pure white of gesso
the pure white of cadmium white
the pure white of flake white
the pure virgin canvas
the pure life we all begin with
But before you strike the first blow
on the virgin canvas
remember its fragility
life’s extreme fragility
and remember its innocence
the inner light of everyone
Let it all come through
And when you’ve finished your painting
stand back astonished
stand back and observe
the life on earth that you’ve created
the lighted life on earth
that you’ve created.
A blank canvas is a holy thing. Each moment, each day, it’s yours.
Amen.
