A Reflection/Poem for XVII Sunday after Pentecost September 15, 2024
St Luke's & St. Anne's, Roper and Grace Plymouth, NC Thomas E Wilson Guest Preacher
Proverbs 1:20-33 Psalm 19 James 3:1-12 Mark 8:27-38
Attention, Attention Must be Paid
Last Sunday I went to attend the Second Sunday of the new Priest at the church in Hertford. I had done some fill-ins, a couple times a month, for that church for a year until they called a new Rector. I called the new Rector and welcomed him and then asked permission to visit the church and him on his 2nd Sunday, and take him out to lunch after the service.
He is different than I am, but I was not there to grade his performance, I was there to welcome him as the new minister to some people that I had grown fond of. I was there to share support and wisdom; wisdom without support is meaningless. It was his church and not mine. He was their Pastor now and I wasn't. So, part of why I was there was to trust their choice and to be able to leave; to leave the church alone so the new relationship could grow. Part of me did not want to go since I had accepted the invitation to fill in a couple days after my wife's funeral and I needed to do something to help fill the emptiness I had inside my heart. I was reminded of a quote from Therapist Marion Woodman whose books we had read when my wife and I had been doing dream work, She wrote: “It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone”. Woodward also wrote “How we see ourselves determines what happens to us in our lives. If we do not respect and love ourselves that will carry over into our relationships and others will not respect us.”
I was reflecting on what a ministry of any church is, and I was also reading about Edith Hamilton, a scholar who translated and re-introduced ancient Greek and Roman Stories and myths into the last century and into common understandings of ourselves.I spend a lot of my life looking at ancient texts of my faith and try to translate them into 21st Century American mindset. Robert Kennedy trying to make sense of his brothers deaths, was so enamored by Hamilton's books that he carried a copy of one of her books wherever he went. In a speech he gave, he said: “"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago––to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world." In one speech he quoted Aeschylus from memory: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor in Colorado wrote about her wisdom about how to leave: “The truth is that we can only hold handfuls of life at a time and room must be made for what enters next. Maybe to live a human life is to lose everything while also gaining everything.”
In the Hebrew Testament lesson for
today, the Spirit of Wisdom is like a mother who comes to the market
place to warn her children of the need to hold onto the Divine
Wisdom. “ For waywardness kills the simple,/and the complacency of
fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure/
and
will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”
I am reminded of when I went off to college and my parents individually would set me down from time to time as the day to leave for college was drawing near, and they passed on their wisdom about how it was to leave what you knew and enter into an unknown future. Wisdom comes at the time of need when our old homes and our lives are changing.
In Mark's Gospel for today, Jesus is letting his disciples know that he will be leaving them, so that they will be able to live deeply into a new future with the Holy Spirit. Peter wants to hold tightly on to the present and desperately on to the past. Peter is rebuked because Jesus is speaking that the deepest wisdom is that he (and we) are called to give your (and our) life away in love.
This last week ,we remembered the events of terrorist attacks on 9/11; the death of so may innocent people. We keep trying to make sense in days after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech honoring British victims that he ended with the final lines of The Bridge of San Luis Rey:, a novel written by Thornton Wilder in 1927 about the collapse of a bridge where five characters fell to their death. In the novel, the bridge is a metaphor for the path each of us take between life and death.
But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning.
This week, Deacon Joanna Seibert wrote about reflecting on Thornton Wilder's The Bridge Of San Luis Re. “Love is all we have to contribute to this life that will be lasting. Love is all we will carry with us into the life of the resurrection. Love is the bridge between these two territories.”
Decades ago, when I was so much younger I was acted in a play, “Death of a Salesman” written by Arthur Miller and I played the character of Willy Loman. In his introduction to the play, Christopher Bigsby wrote
Death of a Salesman had its origins in a short story Miller wrote at the age of seventeen (approximately the age of the young Biff Loman), when he worked, briefly, for his father’s
company. It told of an aging salesman who sells nothing, is abused by the buyers, and borrows his subway fare from the young narrator. In a note scrawled on the manuscript Miller
records that the real salesman had thrown himself under a subway train. Years later, at the time of the play’s Broadway opening, Miller’s mother found the story abandoned in a drawer.
But, as Miller has noted, Death of a Salesman also traced its roots closer to home. Willy Loman was kin to Miller’s salesman uncle, Manny Newman, a man who was ‘‘a competitor, at all times, in all things, and at every moment. My brother and I,’’ Miller explains in his autobiography, ‘‘he saw running neck and neck with his two sons in some race that never stopped in his mind.’’ The Newman household was one in which you ‘‘dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason. . . . It was a house . . .
trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow.’’
The part in the play; it was haunting because I was in my own life almost running in a race that never stopped in my mind. The play ends with a warning about such people running those kinds of races :
"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."
In your life, in your family, in your neighborhood; is there someone for whom “Attention must be paid.”?
Today, my hope is that each of us will remember the wisdom that was shared in our lives and how we are able to hear that love that comes with the wisdom.
Attention, Attention Must be Paid
Decades ago, I played the character, Willy Loman;
a week on a stage, and for some years in my life,
I'd often find myself in his shoes and in his strife;
of course long before becoming a small theologian.
Today, usually I can try to find paying attention
to a wisdom, a power, much greater than myself,
speaking to me to pick up some books on a shelf.
to use as a path of prayer to a deeper dimension.
Or, to turn to friends in whom I'd have some trust,
to listen with the ear of a loving heart, and to speak
after thinking deeply, maybe from translated Greek,
a small peace might come from what we discussed.
It is what happens. when some attention is paid
and I
am not alone while the fear begins to fade
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