A TIME TO WORK, A TIME TO PLAY

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

12 August 2001

A decade ago, as we were winding up some major business near the end of my first year of ministry, I remember quite vividly a meeting with the Board of Trustees. We’d cut through a fair amount of work, and as we were pausing to take a breath, sipping some soft drinks or water as each of us preferred, someone mentioned how she and her partner were going to France later that month. Another added how he was taking off for Mexico, while still one more chimed in with a description of forthcoming adventures in the South Seas.

The treasurer looked over at me, and said, "James, don’t forget, everyone here, except you of course, is middle class." I’ve never quite forgotten that jest, and even as our financial situation has improved immeasurably over the last ten years, and Jan and I now take nice vacations ourselves, there is something about how we don’t all get to do this, that holds itself in my consciousness.

This doesn’t mean vacations aren’t good. In fact, I want to spend the majority of our shared time talking about just how good they can be. But, here setting the stage as it were, we should always remember when speaking of such things that some among us can do and that some among us cannot, to also hesitate and reflect on what that can mean.

I suggest some things are basic human rights. When reflecting on what those might be, certainly what those might be beyond such things as food and shelter and clothing and education and health care, an appropriate first checking question is can one do it but not another? Whatever excludes a category of people based only upon income should always be looked at closely.

And I suggest being able to take some time away, having some opportunity to rest, to reflect and to renew is deeply important. So as we consider what should be the various foci of our social concern, after the primary categories of food and clothing, shelter, education and health care, I really do believe generous public policies on vacations should be one of those things.

That said this sermon is not about social policy. It is about what we can find when we’re allowed just a little space, that moment to draw a breath and to reflect. Out of such a moment I want to reflect on why I think vacations are so important. Here, I would encourage us to think we’re talking about the possibility of a spiritual practice, of coming to the deep, of finding something precious beyond naming. One of my favorite contemporary spiritual writers is Jane Hirshfield. She comments on the nature of spiritual life.

"In every spiritual tradition, the same truth appears: while it is necessary to undertake specific practices in spiritual life—prayer or meditation, the vows of right behavior and right speech, all the many paths that lead to being awake and aware at the core of our being—such practices do not create anything that was not there from the beginning. They only open the door to what is already present within us."

I suggest that because the spiritual way, and true wisdom is natural, is already present within us and needs only to be noticed, sometimes our best spiritual practices are not contained within our formal religious communities, but are preserved intuitively within our larger culture. I suggest as such, one door to the once and always true, can be a vacation.

Vacation seems to have entered our language in the fourteenth century. It derives ultimately from the Latin, vacare, which means to vacate. In general usage a vacation is a time of respite from something, usually our regular work. This practice is, as I’ve implied, closely associated with that word vacate, which means, "empty."

I find this a rich term, and one well worth our exploring on a Sunday morning. While many of us are deprived of extended time away from our regular lives, whoever we are; should we hope to gain deeper perspectives we all need to find that bit of empty, that moment of respite. Otherwise we find ourselves standing too close, and we lose that precious perspective which allows us the greatest skill in our actions. At bottom this is all about gaining perspective.

All cultures have some sense of a need for respite. Our own culture’s formal structure seems mainly to derive from the ancient near East. Babylonians celebrated a sacred Sabbath of rest and respite on the seventh day. We of European descent learned this practice from the Jewish way and its child Christianity.

This acknowledgement that all need some time of rest has been explored and expanded over the many years. And I really truly believe this has been a worthy enterprise. That moment of renewal, of rest and re-creation is precious and can be powerful. It also opens us to notice that we are a part of the natural. This is terribly important.

As my friend and colleague Marilyn Sewell once shared, we can "profoundly experience the sacred in the ordinary tasks and pleasures of living, if we would but be open to these events as spirit-filled." As we attend we find how truly we naturally live within cycles, we find our being, our birth our maturation our aging and our death within cycles, the rhythms of nature.

I find coming to a true sense of cycles, both natural and psychic; those rhythms of our interior lives, are very important. Here the spirit lives. Here, out of a moment of respite that allows us to simply experience our real lives within the real world, we can find the beginnings of wisdom.

Engaging a natural perspective I think we often start with some lesson about cycles. So, for instance, as I was driving Jan to work this week we found ourselves talking about the heat wave, which seems only now to have broken. It is a tad ironic that over the last week we’ve been caught up in various strategies trying to keep from over heating that would never have happened in our Arizona lives of the prior five years.

There, within the nature of how we were living and what kinds of jobs we had, the six months of summer largely consists of going from a fully air-conditioned home to an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned office. There would be no Phoenix without air-conditioning. Well, not a major metropolitan area, certainly.

In suburban Boston, we’re assured that the heat we’d been experiencing is relatively short-lived, and so major concerns with air-conditioning have never been cost effective. Of course since heat here in general is not about life-and-death, local justification for using such a dirty technology, raises all the deeper environmental challenges to those of us who hope to walk gently upon the planet.

Some among us eschew any form of air-conditioning. Others have full central air. In our personal compromises, at home we have a couple of window units, last week making those couple of rooms particularly interesting to us. We do have air in the car and use it. But neither the church nor Jan’s work at Perkins School for the Blind are air-conditioned spaces.

We just live with it. All is part of the natural cycle of summer life here in New England. Admittedly seasonal cycles are particularly interesting to me, not just noticed because of vacations or other times of respite, but possibly at least in part because so much of my life, as a California native, was so unconcerned with these seasonal cycles. I mean in the San Francisco Bay Area where Jan and I lived the vast majority of our adult lives, there are only two seasons, the wet and the dry, and truthfully neither vastly different than the other.

However, there is one thing we can find in taking a breather, in allowing a moment of respite, is gaining a moment to reflect on our environment and how we fit within it. Here, as we do such a thing, any of us, you or I, I suggest we approach the holy itself. Here, as we take those moments, not unlike this very hour we share together, and give our attention to what is going on around us, we find something mysterious and large and very important.

I didn’t own a heavy overcoat until we moved to Wisconsin for that first ministry now ten years past. There we got our crash course in seasons. Here we began to see the larger picture of our natural lives. Now this has become a regular object of reflection for me. But whether a relatively new experience or something we’ve lived with all of our existence, seasons are great teachers.

There is nothing like living through real seasons, four seasons, to be reminded of our essential animal-ness. That and taking a moment to notice, allowing that time of respite to sink in and give us newer perspectives, can take us right to the heart of the animus mundi, the soul of the world.

One shadow of our extraordinary human success is that many of us, most obviously in the post-industrial west and in a few similar places across the planet, are now largely insulated from the world, from the ravages and dangers, not to mention the glories of our environment. Our physical connections have become subtle. It all can be too easy to miss.

And the missing can be a problem. We are a part of the environment; we fit within the web of natural relationships. It is terribly important at so many levels that we remember this. So, I actually feel particularly blessed that I have been gifted with sensitivity to the seasons, given to me out of our move from lotus-land to places like where we now live, here in eastern Massachusetts, and underscored through my experiences of vacation, of respite from my regular work.

With the heat I am directly and intimately reminded of just how much we, you and I, are a part of nature. We’re not above it. We’re not beyond it. We are a part of it. And that is something very important to remember. I think these insights live at the heart of that powerful beginning to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, that text of our common cultural and spiritual heritage. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

Here we find a litany that includes both the natural cycles and as I’ve alluded to earlier, our psychic cycles: both, the seasons and the rhythms of our own internal lives. Of course there is a tenor in this small book attributed to Solomon that is shadowed and nuanced with the smallness of our individual existence, and how any ultimate satisfaction must be found in coming to the face of God.

Of course in a meeting room like this here, our gathering of the congregation and friends of the First Unitarian Society, it can be quite important to parse out what we might mean in using that ancient, difficult and precious term: God. We have no creedal test. Many of us in this sanctuary simply do not find the term God useful. Many of us do. For me the very ambiguity and complexity of the term makes it worthy for us as we explore that which is most important.

For today, I think we can simply look at the vastness of the cosmos and the smallness of our own individual lives which we can fairly clearly see as we reflect upon natural cycles and how we are born and exist and die within them; to feel some hint of something vast of which we are simply a part. And for me, if it is used for nothing else, as we approach the feelings that tumble out of our hearts as we contemplate that vastness which caries us along within its mysterious rhythms, then we have a legitimate use for that word. God is the great, the mysterious, that which binds all back into itself.

And here’s something important we also notice as we take the moment of respite: we, you and I, are not it. Certainly not it that is in any sense of identifying our egos those bundles of consequences of genes and history that gives each of us our special identity, with the great mysterious. Our precious and important sense of self, the "I" of each of us, is not the great, the mysterious, is not God.

Now, there is a sense in which the absolute and the relative, the divine and creation are identical. The trap along the way to truly knowing that truth, however, is mistaking that identity between the absolute and the relative has anything in particular to do with our egos, necessary captains of our individual ships, but also great deceivers about the true nature of relationship.

That breather which we find in getting away, stepping back for a moment, can lead us to something deeper and beyond our ego-driven parochialism. And that is this: We are part of something bigger, every precious one of us. There is a lesson we find when we attend to the cycles about that relativity, about our own finitude, about how we are, each of us, a rather small part of the cosmic drama.

The moment of seeing this is one of grace. It is worth the price of a vacation, of a time away from the numbing of the familiar. As we find ourselves knocked off the central dais, off the pedestal we’re inclined to put ourselves atop, as great or terrible, as good or insignificant; we are gifted out of that stepping from the center, and instantly, with a deeper view.

My earlier quote from Jane Hirschfield came from an essay she wrote called "Gazing on the Truth." Here I find myself remembering some of the poets Jane quoted in that essay. Particularly the words of that great Sufi mystic Rabi’a. She sang, "O my Lord,/the stars glitter/and the eyes of men are closed./Kings have locked their doors/and each lover is alone with his love./Here, I am alone with You."

Here, as we find our place, as we notice the vastness of the cosmos, we can be closeted with the divine. At the moment we see ourselves naked in the cosmos, small and just a part of it; our hearts can break, and we can find ourselves alone with a "you," or perhaps better as another spiritual guide said, with a "thou" that gives us meaning and joy and a way to live.

A good lesson, I repeat. One that can take us to the necessary humility to find what is also good and precious and holy about us within our finititude, and within our ultimate relatedness. As the fourteenth century Kashmiri poet Lal Ded tells us, "I was passionate,/filled with longing,/I searched/far and wide.//But the day/that the Truthful One/found me,/I was at home."

In taking just a small vacation, in just stepping away from what we think the world is, we discover, we can discover, the world is rather different than we thought. And at that moment we can walk into the truths of relationship. All can be revealed in a small holiday. Isn’t that wonderful?

As we reflect on the cycles and our place within them, we can see something of our essential relationships. Here we can find how we are woven out of each other. Here we can find the deep mystery that our ancestors called God.

In such special time, sacred time, we can find who we are, and begin to walk free in the world. All because we allow ourselves, and maybe each other, there is a social policy issue here as well; to take an unfettered step, to take a breather, to notice the breath, to find who we are, and what it is we were from the first dawning of creation. So, my point: keep your holidays, keep your vacations, keep your Sabbaths, and remember they are the play of the holy.

Amen.