MAKING TORTILLAS A May Day Sermon
James Ishmael Ford
2 May 2005

Jeff Foxworthy is probably best known for his one-liner jokes that conclude “you might be a red neck.” Turns out he’s also contributed a few hints at who might be a New Englander. For instance, his “If you’re proud that your region makes the national news 96 nights each year because Mt. Washington is the coldest spot in the nation, and Boston gets more snow than any other major city in the U.S., you might” be a New Englander. I have to admit I’ve not adapted well to New England winters. I’m married to someone who actually likes four seasons. But I can’t comprehend why. I find anything over two seasons an unnecessary extravagance. This year I started complaining about the winter somewhere in October. I was gratified, if noting it was somewhat belated, that at least for the last month or so, the native-born here also started grousing, at least a little. As for me, until recently I began to think some awful Norse Ragnarok end-times were happening, fearing the winter wouldn’t actually ever end. But, at the same time I found myself never quite losing a seed of hope that the spring would come. And then, one day I noticed the winter had ended.

The time people of European decent often mark this shift is May Day. And I suggest May Day is a particularly appropriate holy day for us as Unitarian Universalists. I suggest it speaks to something deep and basic about who we are and how we approach matters, religious and otherwise. I want to explore how our way is promethean, how we’re willing to steal fire from the gods themselves. And that fire is hope. I want to touch on our essential optimism. We’re confident as UUs, sometimes foolishly so (and that can’t be ignored), but usually not. In our ordinary humanness and our essential sense of possibility we can find something of enormous value. Finally, I’ll conclude by turning to the image of the Tortilleras, those who make miracles of food with their hands. I hope you’ll take it as sort of a spiritual riddle. Three points, four depending on how one counts.

First, the winter does end. Like a miracle. Henry David Thoreau in his masterwork, Walden, observes “As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.” I count among my teachers those of hardy New England stock, who when I’m in danger of losing hope, know and remind me the winter does pass. Certainly at this season I look around and within and discover hope birthing everywhere, the most welcome child of our dreaming.

No wonder people have been celebrating this particular time just about forever. At least those people who truly understand winter have always marked this moment as sacred territory. Margot Adler, a really wonderful Unitarian Universalist thinker notes in her essay, “May Day Made Me a Pagan,” that this season, called Beltane by western Europeans “most probably comes from the name of the Celtic god Belenos and a Celtic word for ‘fire.’ According to mythology, this was the time when the Druids celebrated the beginning of summer by lighting fires on sacred hills.”

People made a great deal of this turning of the winter into spring and summer. As I said, I understand why. There is something visceral in this time, an opportunity, a gentle turning of the mind and heart - and sometimes not so gentle. In fact there has been an undercurrent of warring where various traditions have tried to co-opt this magical marker of our lives. Christian Europe certainly was aware of the power of this season. In the Catholic tradition the month of May has become “Mary Month” and on May Day statues of Mary are crowned with a wreath of flowers as the “Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.”

Secular forces have made claims on this time, too. The First International in Paris in 1889 declared May 1st as its Labor Day holiday, particularly marking the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886. Countering this both Canada & the US declared May 1st “Law Day” and shifted their own less socialist Labor Day on the first Monday in September. And now here we are, Unitarian Universalists, sort of the magpies of the western spiritual traditions; for the most part quite happy to have this time include all of the above – pagan celebrations, the crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven, Labor Day, maybe even Law Day – all moments trembling with possibility, tottering at the edge of some new possibility.

Second point; if we’re not just looking for novelty, not just rejecting the past; but in fact opening ourselves to possibility itself, we are, I really feel, taking the ordinary and finding it sacred. This was really well said by Mary Catherine & Gregory Bateson in their wonderful book, Angels Fear.

“The old beliefs are wearing thin and there is a groping for new. It is not a matter, you see, of being a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Jew. We do not yet have another answer to the old problems. We know only a little bit about the direction in which the changes are taking place, but nothing about where the changes will end up. We have to have in mind not an orthodoxy but a wide and compassionate recognition of the storm of ideas in which we all are living and in which we must make our nests – find spiritual rest – as best we can.”

That’s my pitch for today. And why I think May Day is the perfect time to notice how possibility lurks in our hearts. To be open this way, is to be open to that path of serendipity, where new things, new life may birth out of the ordinary.

As you might know I was one of six of us from FUSN who just spent two days down in upstate New York at a place called the Garrison Institute, a retreat center housed in a former Franciscan monastery across the Hudson from West Point. It wasn’t a retreat, however, rather a conference. It was the first national gathering of the Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Fellowship. About a hundred and forty-five UUs from everywhere on the continent were there.

The first presenter was Jeff Wilson, a historian, who told us about the cross cultural and religious influences between Unitarians, Universalists and Unitarian Universalists and Buddhists for a remarkably long time. For instance it turns out Manjiro Nakahama, a teenaged Japanese Buddhist fisherman in the early nineteenth century was shipwrecked, then rescued by a New England whaler, came here to New England, became a Unitarian – or, the thesis was that he in fact was a hybrid Unitarian-Buddhist, eventually made a fortune in the Gold Rush, and returned a rich man to Japan where he became the central figure in an intellectual and spiritual revolution that brought down the old order and established a reformist government which would usher Japan into the modern era. If you’re open to possibility, one can have no idea where it might lead.

And that’s the third point; we don’t know what will come of our being open. We don’t know what will happen because we Unitarian Universalists, in our joyful eclectic style, are open to the messages of our pagan ancestors, of our Jewish and Christian ancestors, of our ancestors who struggled on both sides of the great economic and political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We just know this is our nest. And we’re open to what new might birth out of that nest.

Its here optimism becomes a spiritual discipline. We need some caution. Optimism isn’t always warranted. Things can and do go bad. And we all die. So some caution, some common sense, is appropriate. But, we UUs, when we’re on our game and give ourselves the chance of being open to something new; are like the man who was condemned to death by the king and who said if you’ll spare me for three years I can teach your horse to talk. You know the story. After he’s granted the reprieve and is set to work a friend asks “What are you going to do?” and is told, “I don’t know. But in three years, the king may die, I may die, or who knows, maybe the horse will learn to talk.” Or, not unlike for that boy slowly starving to death on an atoll – until a ship he could barely comprehend as a ship, it was so alien, came along and collected him and his companions up and took them to a New World leading to possibilities that no one could have imagined.

Now here we are today – we’ve celebrated some wonderful things – one, our capital campaign seemed at times to me a rather unlikely enterprise. But here we are, celebrating its success. And, of course, we’ve received our new members. There’s hope birthing. There’s new and untried territory. And today a bunch of us are joined in that great walk to end hunger. Who knows what will come of these moments we’re sharing together? But, in general, we have a body sense that all will be okay. We need to notice our bodies as they yearn for joy, as they feel hope. That hope is something precious.

For me this comes about through our willingness to be ordinary and to start with what is, even if it’s a great piling of one thing after another, like the layers of May Day. Our miracle comes about when we are willing to be vulnerable, to notice, to be as well as to act. So, for me, the whole thing can be summarized in a poem by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. It requires another shift, a willingness to take a lesson about turning out of winter and finding hope in the spring from a poem about Mexican women making tortillas. But you’re a flexible crowd. I hope you’re willing to let it be a spiritual riddle – a hint at who we are and what we might become.

“My body remembers/what it means to love slowly,/what it means to start from scratch:/to soak the maiz,/scatter bonedust in the limewater,/and let the seeds soften overnight.//Sunrise is the best time/for grinding masa,/cornmeal rolling out/on the metate like a flannel sheet.//Smell of wet corn, lard, fresh/morning love and the light/sound of clapping.//Pressed between the palms,/clap-clap/thin yellow moons - /clap-clap

still moist, heavy still/from last night’s soaking/clap-clap/slowly start finding their shape/clap-clap.//My body remembers/the feel of the griddle,/beads of grease sizzling/under the skin, a cry gathering/like an air bubble in the belly/of the unleavened cake. Smell/of baked tortillas all over the house,/all over the hands still/hot from clapping, cooking./Tortilleras, we are called,/grinders of maiz, makers, bakers,/slow lovers of women./The secret is starting from scratch.”

Let us not forget all the ingredients of our lives. They are the secret hope waiting to be born in our hearts.
Knowing all that: happy May Day.

Amen.