A Reflection and Poem for XIII Pentecost, C, Proper 18 St Andrew's Church, Nags Head, NC
September 7, 2019 Thomas E Wilson, Supply Clergy
Fearfully and
Wonderfully Made
From the Book of Common Prayer Psalm 139:14 appointed for today: “I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.”
Today is the Sunday after the Labor Day weekend, so the summer season is officially over and the massive number of visitors will go down, a bit. The people came here because they envy us who live at the edge of the earth with the sea at our feet which gives us here moments of awe and wonder. Many have come to the Outer Banks for Spiritual Healing from busy lives, a few will come to church but most come to worship at nature's throne. Wendell Berry in his Art of the Commonplace, a series of Agrarian Essays, wrote:
We
must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never
entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must
recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful
in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of
humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain
in it.
We also had a hurricane come to town this week and the call went out for visitors to evacuate because what is awesome before a hurricane can be awful during one. We are lucky in that we live here and can re-enter easily, with a lot less driving, into awe and majesty when we have a chance and we clean up and rebuild. Yet, no one has to clean up or rebuild or go far to be in awe; as St. Augustine in his Confessions pointed out:
Men
go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the
circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
I think Augustine is saying that opportunities for humility and reverence are as much more numerous and closer than we think. When I was growing up my life was full of things that I saw and was impressed by. Since I was so self-centered, usually I would just say something like: “That is nice”, and I might stay for a moment to let it soak in, congratulate myself on how much taste I have. I may take a picture or buy a souvenir, but I go on my way unchanged. I tried to remember my first experience of abandoning arrogance and being in awe with a sense of my life was changing because of being in awe.
That experience was when I was walking back and forth holding my newborn daughter and looking at her on her first night home from the hospital. The words of the Psalm for today came back to me from the King James Version: “I will praise thee; for she is fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.”
To be in wonder! Except, I did not attribute anything credit to God. At that time in my life I was on a sort of vacation from God; paying my respects every once in a while, like a good guest is supposed to do, but did not expend any energy in a relationship with God. My energy was going into making MY money which I made from working at MY job, in order to buy MY house where I could live MY life and paying I for MY clothes and food. It was all about ME and MY possessions. It was in that mindset that I was tempted to consider that little daughter as MY daughter to meet MY needs of having someone to make me feel better about myself. She was in danger of becoming one more of MY possessions. If that had happened, the awesome moment of awe and wonder could become the beginning of something awful.
That is what happens when you “Fall in love” with persons, places and things. “Falling in love” is different than loving wonder and awe. “Falling in love” is like a Psychiatric Illness where one projects all sorts of psychic energies onto a person, place or thing as a way of fulfilling one's own desires and easing one's own fears and one must possess that person place or thing in order to give an internal equilibrium or other advantage. Freud defined Psychological projection as a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For instance; if I have a hard time loving myself as I look at all my shortcomings then I will long for someone to love me unconditionally and when I meet a suitable candidate I begin to attribute to her or him the qualities of extreme patience and desperate need to be loved. I want to make him or her dependent on me to make me feel better about myself. The goal of “Falling In Love” is to possess for one's own benefit. Loving wonder and awe, on the other hand, is seeing the person place or thing as a gift from God to be appreciated and cared for, to be honored and not exploited, and finally to see the space between us as “Holy Space” where God's Shalom and Peace is to be honored. It is the difference between Possession and Stewardship. Possession says I want to own it and Stewardship says I want to honor as part of our shared relationship with a power greater than ourselves.
When Jesus tells us the Gospel lesson for today from Luke; “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." He is not talking about the amount of money you give to the church; he is talking about the way we look at the world we live in. In a Universe of Possession, where I am the center of the Universe dominated by a fear of scarcity, everything becomes a commodity to be used or abused for my own benefit. However, on the other hand, in a Universe of Awe and Wonder, where every person, place or thing becomes a a possibility of experiencing God's grace, we are called to walk as if we were living on Holy Ground by caring for the creation from which we all a part.
Thirteen point eight Billion years ago there was a tiny element in the hand of God and God spoke and the element exploded, expanding, constantly expanding into the universe of stars and planets and mountains and oceans and life; developing from the stardust from that explosion of the Big Bang. We are all collections of stardust, connected to each other and to all of God's creation.
We see an example of this in the lesson from the Letter of Paul to Philemon in today's lesson. Philemon had a slave who he possessed, a human being for his own benefit. He called him Onesimus, which in Greek means “Useful”, as an outward and visible sign of Onesimus’ purpose in life; which was to be “useful” to Philemon. However, Onesimus ran away from Philemon, in order to follow Paul in freedom. Paul writes that indeed Onesimus was “Useful” as he helped care for Paul in Paul's imprisonment. Onesimus gave time and energy to Paul out of love not out of obligation to an owner. Paul sends Onesimus back to Philemon with a letter asking Philemon to change the way he treats Onesimus, not as a slave to a master but as a brother in Christ, seeing each other as a gift, walking together on Holy Ground.
Last week my wife, Pat, and I celebrated our 30th Anniversary together. We “fell in” love but we were blessed as we moved from “Falling” in love to living in loving awe and wonder of the Holy Space between, and in, each of us. “Falling” in love always fades with time as it gradually occurs to the people that the projections are just their projections on each other rather than reality and the Prince or Princess move down more than a few notches on the nobility scale. We had to withdraw our mutual projections in order to return to sanity, away from an addiction to an object we worshiped for its imagined benefits and move to commitment to a relationship with a subject of love. It took us a while before we were able to be in awe and wonder of an ordinary human being who is a gift from the gracious God. That does not mean that we don't have more than a few minutes of being annoyed with each other or not approving of each other's actions. Even though I am difficult to live with, and she has her few moments, we continue to ask God's grace to see each other as gifts from a loving God for which we are stewards not owners.
Sometimes unconscious psychological projections are not only of love but of hate and fear as well. It is how we begin to have enemies when we refuse to face our own dark shadows and project them on to someone else, so I could be afraid of them instead of claiming that shadow within myself and bring it to consciousness so I can work on it. I had to learn that the people I projected as enemies had been taken by me as possessions in my psyche that could control my life. The withdrawal of projections of fear and hate are accomplished by the spiritual practice of forgiveness and the commitment to love the enemy, to want the best for them, to see them as fearfully and wonderfully made brothers or sisters, fellow descendants of stardust from the original big bang of creation. I am free to love them; I may still have to have prayerful discussions with God about them, I may not like them, I may not agree with them, I still may, out of self-protection, be careful of my safety around them, but the fear and hate will not rule my life.
In 1964 The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
“I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems, I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. ... I have decided to love.”
My brothers and sisters remember please knowing you are fearfully and wonderfully made to love one another in a universe that is fearfully and wonderfully made. May our prayer be today: “We will thank you because we are marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and we know it well.”
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
Walking, one step in front of another and back again,
bouncing, hold her in fashion of a jerry-rigged womb,
bobbing up and down, his joy for her begins to bloom,
making promises to protect and keep from her all pain.
“Fearfully and wonderfully made”, softly whispering
over and over as kind of mantra reminding them both
that her father would strive to love and keep his oath,
specially in times of patience and approval flickering,
by seeing an image of God, sharing the DNA of stars
exploding in dance responding to first Divine Word,
and he'd pause to awe again when the echo is heard
as his once rationed love is unfurled to heal the scars
that he once so easily inflicted thoughtlessly on others
before he realized that we were all sisters and brothers.
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