Imagine this. You are living in a world constituted almost entirely of warmth, water and darkness. Food and shelter are free. Life demands nothing of you. Yet daily you grow, develop and change. As you grow your world slowly becomes smaller and more constrictive. Finally you are too big for your world; it will no longer contain you. When this times comes, not so much as an act of will as by necessity, you break free, entering a dark tunnel and moving toward the light. In a matter of moments you enter a new world and your life changes forever. The world you enter also changes by your entrance into it. Within minutes into your world brightness, dryness and hunger are introduced. As for the world you enter, in quick measure you both subtract from and add to its quotient of suffering and joy.
Whether born in a manger and destined for greatness or born as I was at St. Luke's Hospital in Boise, Idaho. This part of the story barely differs from successful birth to another. Out of the darkness, into the light. Out of the womb, into the world, into the wildness.
In almost every sense human birth is wild. We enter the world untamed. The world we enter is filled with unpredictability. And the odds against us being born in the first place are so crazy, that save in retrospect no thinking person an eon, millennium, even a century ago would risk the untold billions to one odds against the very human being who turned out to be me, who turned out to be you, actually being born in the first place.
Think about it this way. First, we're born wild. To one degree or another our hungers and passions will be tamed. But we come into this world not as perspective model citizens but as primal sense driven creatures. Those who believe that children are born pure and innocent, only to be corrupted by society, either haven't had children of their own or paid absolutely no attention to them whatsoever during their first two years. An infant is all id, a two-year-old is all id and ego, a devastating combination. Of course this makes good practical sense. The world is much less predictable than the womb. For an infant naked selfishness and raw importunity are tantamount to survival. Leading us to this: the life into which we are born is filled with an unimaginable range of possibilities. Even to the most prescient embryo life on earth begins as something completely unexpected. From that day forth it continues to be confoundingly unpredictable.
Seeking to make sense of an irrational tragedy, when one of you comes to me and tries to fix blame on yourselves or others by asking the question, "why did this happen," or "what did I do to deserve this." I almost always respond -- and I don't mean to be brusque, but it is so true -- "nothing." Your loved one did nothing to deserve having a plane fall out of the sky on it's way to Paris. Linda's loved one had nothing to do with walking across a street in Iran and being hit by a truck yesterday. Neither she, nor you did anything to deserve being put in the position to suffer the pain she feels, or you have felt and will feel again, since none of us did anything to be born in the first place. It's crazy that we're even here and able to ask these questions.
Every birth is a wild card, the result of untold billions of consecutive throws of the genetic dice. Not only did our ancestors, all of them somehow manage to live to puberty and couple, but also in each and every instance the single one of the millions sperm that carried what ultimately would be the coding for our genes had to make it to the right one and only egg. We take this for granted. I wager to anyone that would I say that I was going to choose one of several hundred million balls in a lottery to be repeated several million times and every time my number, my own personal number would come up, they would say I was absolutely mad. But in both your lifetime and mine that's precisely what happened. How little we have done to deserve being born in the first place, and how utterly astonishing that we find ourselves in this amazing world, able to wonder what it means.
We're religious creatures. We may not be the only religious creatures, I wouldn't presume to say that, it would be specist, it would be politically incorrect. But we are at least one of those creatures who know they are going to die and therefore question what life means. That we know we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit upon our lives. It also gives a special intensity and poignancy and moment to them. We are given the opportunity and the time to live and to love. The very fact of death gives meaning to our love, for the more we love the more we risk to lose and therefore stand to fear. Love's power comes in part from the courage that is required in giving ourselves to that which is not ours to keep. Our spouse and children, our parents, dear and cherished friends, even life itself. Love's power also comes from the faith that is required to sustain that courage. The faith that life, howsoever limited and mysterious, contains within its margins, often at their very edges, a meaning that is redemptive.
When I was six months old my father was diagnosed as having terminal Cancer. For over a year he had been having severe back pains, which he attributed to stress. He was newly married. He had just finished his first year at Harvard Law School, where he had worked hard enough and did well enough to win early appointment to the Law Review. Ever since returning from China where he had served in the army as an intelligence officer during the Second World War he had been in a great hurry to finish his schooling and establish his career. Back pains seemed to come with the territory. The New England Winter of 1948 was a severe one, with several great blizzards back to back. My parents lived in a little fourth floor walk-up apartment in south Boston, and Dad commuted to Cambridge. Their car was decidedly not designed with Boston in mind. It was a baby blue Desoto convertible which they had driven all over Mexico during their three-month extended honeymoon that summer. Among the car's more distinctive features was it's hood ornament, a shapely nude who lit up when the lights were on. You don't see those anymore (speaking of politically incorrect). In Pueblo, people adorned her with flowers as if she were goddess of a saint.
Boston treated my parent's prize possession less kindly. It survived the harsh winter, but was stolen on the morning of my father's first final exam. Frank and Bethine, my parents, delighted in that car. It was a symbol of their new life together. To have it taken from them was a personal violation. But the year was over. They packed up their things and traveled back to Idaho by train. Such was the backdrop for my arrival on the scene.
My mother, Bethine Clark Church was an only child born to her parents in their maturity, raised very well and certainly doted after. A very strong willed woman. After one such year in Boston, she was not about to suffer another, especially with a baby on the way and so my father, quite wisely, sacrificed his newly won position on the Harvard Law Review and the two of them embarked to the more familiar and gentle climes of Palo Alto, California. My father enrolled for his second year of law school at Stanford. I was born on the twenty-third day of September in 1948. My parents found a little storybook home in Palo Alto. I am told that the sun shone down on my first weeks of life. I don't remember. I know it didn't shine down on my father's life right then. Throughout the fall his back pains got worse, yet, still the cancer was not detected. In February when he went to the hospital for what was originally to be a simple hernia procedure, they told him that he only had three months to live. Had he remained in the east, had he not had the good sense to listen to my strong-willed mother, he almost certainly would have died that winter. As it happened, the Stanford Medical Center was sponsoring a radical experiment in radiation therapy and his cancer was an unusual type, very susceptible to radiation therapy. Every afternoon my father was burned with a mega dose of radium. He would return home and play with his infant son, have a light dinner and then get violently ill, fighting nausea as my mother read to him until, exhausted, he fell asleep.
My mother tells me that the reason she did not marry the first man that proposed to her -- for which I am personally very grateful indeed -- was that she discovered she could not hold his head when he was sick to his stomach. When my father was sick, it was not that way at all. Throughout his illness, she held his head night after night. Meanwhile I was platooned off to a series of great-aunts and old friends and neighbors. According to the pictures, by no means did I languish. My mother says that I was the picture of contentment. Judging from photographs in the family albums, if contentment and baby fat are synonyms that surely was the case. I was one of those rotund little babies that seem happier than they are because simply to look at them makes you laugh. As I grew round and pudgy, my father wasted away. By springtime his six-foot frame carried only one hundred pounds. But he was alive and the Cancer was gone.
This was the third time my dad had been saved by modern medicine. He was rescued at birth by a caesarean following major complications attending his delivery. Later, as a boy, he almost died from a series of acute bronchial infections, only to be saved by the advent of Penicillin. How dicey it is. Not only each life, but the pageant of lives leading to us from the beginning of time until now. Think of how many relatives had to survive, meet and couple, how many accidents, how much good fortune, how much serendipity and grace and luck, each one of us has had all along our wondrous family trees leading from the ur-paramecium to us. In a very real sense, the universe was pregnant with us when it was born.
Doctors did caution my father, given how potent and extensive the radiation had been, that he would probably not live to a full term. They said that he might lose ten or fifteen years off the other end of his life, and that was so. And yet, as he observed later, he'd previously tended to be more cautious, but having so close a brush with death at twenty-three I felt afterwards that life itself is such a chancy proposition that the only way to live it is by taking great chances.
In 1980, my father was defeated in his bid for a fifth term in the U. S. Senate. Three years later, when he was fifty-nine, cancer struck again. He was not destined to beat the odds a second time. In April of 1984, after a brief hard illness he died at home in bed unencumbered by mechanical life supports and with my mother lying by his side. My daughter, Nina, spent many weekends visiting I did too. And Nina's brother, Frank, said to me on the day of my father's funeral in Boise, Idaho, "God is not the only one who lives forever Daddy, love lives forever." I know that he is right.
This has been a special weekend for me, and it's not over. I invite you to consider it a special weekend for you as well. Nina is here with me today, back from Georgetown, where she is a freshman. She spent Friday night with a friend in Philadelphia (who was in a play). She spent Saturday night with a friend in Shelter Island (who is in trouble). And still she made it to church, which is a very, very good thing. Today, she is with her family in New York City. We're going to go bowling this afternoon, and then have dinner together. Neither Nina nor I (and this will not surprise you in at least about me) is a particularly good bowler. And it couldn't matter less.
Trying to keep up with my daughter's travel schedule, I spent Friday evening with my son Frank in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He was the star in the Kalamazoo College fall production, Fuente Orejuna, by Lope DeVega. Let me read you what he said about himself in the playbill. First of all, his name is the longest name in the playbill: Frank Forrester Church V. As you can see, none of us had much imagination when it comes to naming first males.
Frank Forrester Church V: (Commander Gomez). Frank wants only three things, an iguana named Gus, a basset hound named Felix and a one hundred thousand dollar limited edition Audi named Frank's.
He goes on to thank the director of the play. As for the play itself, he did a wonderful, wonderful job, I can't tell you how proud I was of him.
Yesterday afternoon, having been liberated from the Tarmac at Kalamazoo where I spent four unwanted hours (thinking about how precious time is), I had a wonderful brief time with many of our new members you at my home. Then, last night -- in order to make the Boston theme reoccur in the sermon -- I went to Boston to give the Keynote for a benedictory party for Rhys Williams, who after forty years is retiring as Minister from First and Second Church in Boston. First Church, by the way, was the church in which my first ancestor (one not named Frank, but Richard) was a founding member in 1630, and where I served for a brief time as pastor. Rhys was the person most responsible for my ending up in the parish ministry and I was there to speak in his honor. Three hundred fifty other people were there also -- many old friends, so lovely, so meaningful and so fine.
And then I received a devastating call from Michael Larkin, Mark's son. On a trip to Iran with Linda, Mark was hit by a truck in a tiny town and instantly killed. Linda is in Iran waiting for permission to bring his body home. I just can't imagine anything harder, anything more difficult or more painful. On the other hand I can't think of a better death for this man. I can think of no one more adventuresome than Mark Larkin. I think back on what my father taught me, something he learned from his bout with Cancer. We've got to take major risks, and live life to the fullest because the time we are given is short and we never know when the trapdoor will fall. Mark lived his life that way. I remember one of the last times he came back from one of his crazy, magnificent vacations. Mark was down on a little island right off of Antarctica, Campbell Island. He was climbing down to the bottom of the ravine to see the Albatrosses nesting, and fell all the way down and fractured his leg. You may remember him running the Friday noon soup kitchen with his red All Souls T-shirt on waving his crutches, being very gruff, and very funny, but making things so good.
Christine Mayer died this week as well. You remember Christine sitting in her motorized wheelchair in the third pew. She had Lou Gherrig's Disease. It's a terrible disease, the opposite of Alzheimer's. In Alzheimer's your mind goes and your body remains strong for far too long. In Lou Gerrig's disease your mind remains completely sharp and strong as every part of your body falls apart.
Christine wrote this prayer right before she died. She could only write with one finger on her computer. Having conversation with her took a long time, as she would type out the words. Yet I savored them one by one. So often they were very, very funny. As G.K. Chesterson said "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." Christine managed somehow with that terrible burden to take herself lightly. Here is the prayer that she wrote. Just imagine writing this prayer for yourself, right before you are dying.
Thank you lord for the precious gift: that of allowing Christine to pass through and enrich all our lives.
Christine Mayer, Mark Larkin, Donald Dawid off, Frank Forrester Church III.
You've heard people say they're going to do this or that when they get their life back. So what are you going to do when you get your life back? I have only one simple thing to tell you: you're never going to get your life back, not the life that you squander today. I close every service with these words: This is the day we are given, let us rejoice and be glad in it. After a week like this -- but frankly, my friends, after any week that we pay close attention to -- that should be our mantra. For instance, this afternoon is the only afternoon that we know we will be given. We will probably also be given tomorrow afternoon too, and the one after that. We can afford to waste some time between now and when we die. But lets never miss an opportunity to give thanks for the blessed time we are given to love and to share, to learn, to forgive, to recover, to carry on with gratitude.
One thing I have learned in life is that we are far more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. I've also learned this: we are what we love. Sometimes we love things too little for our love to be a meaningful. Other times we love very, very big things, but in too small a way. In either case, ultimately we are what we love. Because of this, we need to get our lives back right now.
Meaning does not emerge from longing what we lack, things we have lost, or will likely never find. It doesn't emerge from longing to be something we will never be or to do something we will never do. Meaning emerges when we embrace what we have. The courage to bare up under pain; the grace to take our successes lightly; the energy to address tasks that await our doing; the meaning to be found in giving ourselves to others; the liberation that follows when we forgive one another; the comfort to be taken in opening our heart to another; the joy to be gained even in the most common endeavor; the simple pleasure in one another's company; the wonder that wells within the simple fact of our shared being. I call this thoughtful wishing. Wishing for what can be ours, what we can do, what we can be, not tomorrow, but today. One more thing. Unlike wishful thoughts, thoughtful wishes always come true. Copyright AllSouls 1999.