Thursday, June 22, 2017

Echoes Reflection and Poem for 25 June, 2017





A Reflection for VII Pentecost (proper 7 A)             All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC 
June 25, 2017                                                               Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Genesis 21:8-21                Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17       Romans 6:1b-11                Matthew 10:24-39
Echoes
What if there isn’t enough for both of us?
I am the one I worry about, you not so much,
As long as I get all what I could possibly want
Living in universe of scarcity not full of sacred.

I will not waste my time to worry so much
I know what I know and that is all there is
Enemies need to be kept out of arms reach.
What if I possibly only want what I receive?

Living into the unknown of all that there is
Visioning universe full of sacred not scarcity
Enemies will be kept within our arms reach.
What You give, is more than enough for us.

Let me give you a poetry lesson, one that I learned from Cathy Smith Bowers who was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina 2010-2012. She was leading some workshops during my Dream Group Leader training. One of the ways she suggested trying to enter into the labyrinth of a dream or an experience was to use poetry as a way to encounter it on a spiritual level. Most of us use the fear of failure and incurring disapproval of others when/if we would attempt poetry as a way to not even try. But the good news of getting older is that there is an awareness of how much time we waste judging others or really worrying about people judging us. My encounter with using poetry resulted in my final paper for the course about how I started to use poetry to better fully encounter the spiritual themes within Biblical stories and life and its meaning for me.

We usually approach stories and events superficially as we examine them with our conscious mind and try to make sense of them by using our senses of sound, sight, touch and taste. This information is integrated with the aid of what we have learned through education or memory experience, e.g. “This reminds me of something I read for a class in school”, or “This reminds me of something I went through a few years back.” We may then connect it to feelings we have had about that thing of which we are reminded. To more fully examine and understand stories and events, we must enter into prayer and ask God where is the Divine Energy, what is the deeper meaning, and how am I invited to respond to live in faith? I make it a habit to let myself be open to the stories and then prayerfully let the spirit lead me into a poem which will then be the basis of my sermon or reflection. To paraphrase John Wesley, the Bible stories are not there to recount details of events in the past, but they are there to lead us into the heart of God.

The structure of the poem which I started for this week is the Pantoum form. The creation of a poem in this form starts with meditation on an event, a story, or dream, then noting a number of thoughts that first come to mind. For each line of the poem, write one simple thought no more than eight words long. The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and third lines of each stanza serve as the first and fourth line of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first. So, if you have six sentences, the poem length is 12 lines, seven is fourteen lines, eight is 16, and so on. This sets a structure of echoes which can change meaning when repeated with changes in punctuation or word order so that alternative meanings can be expanded within the same thought, keeping a dynamic tension between the echoes. If I am open, the echoes are between my conscious response, awareness, of the event or story and  the entrance to the unconscious, the numinous, the dwelling place of the spirit.

The story that elicited this poem is the story of the relationships between Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Hagar’s son Ishmael.  As you may remember, God had promised a son to Abraham and Sarah and the child had not yet come.  Out of Sarah’s fear about God leaving her out of the promise, she arranges for a Plan B - for her Egyptian maid to get pregnant by Abram and for the birth to take place on Sarah’s lap so that Sarah can claim the child as hers. As Hagar starts to fill out with her pregnancy, Sarah’s insecurity grows and she gets jealous of what she sees as the taunting by Hagar. Hagar runs away into the wilderness, far from all this hatred. But God sends an angel to comfort and rescue Hagar and urges her to return, for God has great plans for the son who is in her womb. She returns to deliver the child, and Abraham is genuinely fond of Ishmael. A number of years later on, as last week’s story related, Sarah gets pregnant and when Isaac is born, Sarah’s insecurities get reignited as she sees Ishmael making fun of his little half-brother. She gives Abraham an ultimatum that he needs to get rid of these perceived enemies, Ishmael and his mother. Again God intervenes and creates a new home for them in Paran.

The story for today, like the poem, has two parts - the human sound and the divine echo. The first part is about the insecurities of Sarah and the Hebrew people who see themselves surrounded by enemies, a reality that still holds true centuries later when this mythic legend is reduced to written form and thousands of years later in today’s Middle East. The majority view is found in Sarah’s vision that she can have no peace as long as the enemies, who she sees as competitors for her husband’s limited love, live among them - just like we do when we decide that our enemies need to be destroyed because we think there are not enough resources to go around and we want to keep all to ourselves - this family, this house, this church, this town, this country are not big enough for both of us. We see this kind of thinking in our nation today with all the hatred and fear generated by all sides of the political and social and racial divides calling for the violence which infects us.

But the poem and the story echo alternative ways of dealing with competition. The echo of the numinous responds that God is the one who loves both sides, calling us to remember that, in God’s view of the creation, there is more than enough to go around. What we have to do is change our vision and habits of fear and insecurity to see the sacred holy ground between our enemy and ourselves which we are called to share. Part of our transformation into who we were created to be - Holy People, Saints - is to change our lives so that we can echo in a different, more compassionate way the fear and insecurity we feel, hearing instead the word of courage to live in God’s vision of our deeper connection to each other.

So your assignment this week is to go home and contemplate someone you have a rough time being around, someone who in your weakest moment you see as an enemy. Think about this person; of whom do they remind you and why? Write down at least six of the simple thoughts you come up with as they occur to you. Don’t bother with rhyme or meter. Put those thoughts in four line stanzas and then ask God to help you hear the spiritual echoes to each of your thoughts. Write the echoes which God is calling us to live into, ending where the first line is echoed in a different way by the last line. Then make that your prayer.

May I suggest that on Wednesday the 28th at 6:00 PM, the eve of the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, two enemies who heard the echo of God in their lives to bring them together, you accept an invitation to attend an alternative service where we will bless your exercise in poetic prayer if you wish. But even if you don’t, come and we can join for a time of sacred space where we search to hear a new alternative echo for the brokenness of the world around and within us.    

Echoes

1        What if there isn’t enough for both of us?
2        I am the one I worry about, you not so much
3        As long as I get all what I could possibly want
4        Living in universe of scarcity not full of sacred.

2        I will not waste my time to worry so much
5        I know what I know and that is all there is
6        Enemies need to be kept out of arms reach.
3        What if I possibly only want what I receive?

5        Living into the unknown of all that there is
4        Visioning universe full of sacred not scarcity 

6        Enemies will be kept within our arms reach.
1        What You give, is more than enough for us.

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