Scripture: Isaiah 40 and Matthew 5:1-10
Many of you know Janet Legro, a former active member of this congregation, and now pastor of Mt. Olivet United Church of Christ in Dyke. Janet and I and Tina Cox, a Presbyterian pastor serving a church in Gordonsville, get together for a morning cup of coffee on a pretty regular basis, just to talk and stay in touch.
Some weeks ago I was just getting ready to leave Janet’s house when she just happened to ask me if I had thought much about Advent yet, did we have any themes we were thinking about at Sojourners? I mentioned, among other things, that I had been thinking about Jesus saying, “Would that you knew the things that make for peace,” and that I was probably going to play off that theme—“things that make for peace”—in my sermons, and that we were going to ask people to speak to that as we lit the candles on our Advent wreath. She said, “Oh, I have book you might like. It’s called, ‘Things That Make for Peace’. Besides the text it has these haunting drawings of women and children. And it’s by a woman who’s a UCC minister.” Janet said she didn’t know the author, but as it turns out, I did.
The book is written and drawn by Barbara Gerlach. Barbara is the co-pastor of First Congregational Church in Washington, D.C., but I actually met Barbara long before I moved to the Central Atlantic Conference or before I even knew of the existence of Sojourners. Barbara and I were both part of a delegation to Guatemala in 1996. She was a seasoned traveler to Central America and a fluent speaker of Spanish. I was a novice and knew only a few words of Spanish. About half of us spoke Spanish and half did not, so we often paired up to go to dinner or on other occasions for purposes of translation. Barbara was often my personal translator. I knew she was an artist. She often had her sketch pad out. I didn’t know she had done a book. I’ve seen Barbara several times since moving to Virginia, but certainly didn’t expect to see her staring at me off the back cover of a book at Janet Legro’s house. So it turned out that I was much more interested in the book than Janet ever thought I would be when she pulled it off her shelf.
I had to include one of Barbara’s drawings from the book in the bulletin this morning. I was pretty amazed to think of all the things that ended up bringing Janet and Barbara and me together in Janet Legro’s kitchen. I was further amazed that much of what Barbara had to say did in fact dovetail with some of the things I had been thinking about.
The pictures Barbara draws, at least the ones in this book, are not happy pictures. The faces are all of people who have known deep pain. In one of the meditations, she writes: “As an artist I have searched and drawn the faces of survivors in Nagasaki, Vietnam, and South Africa, looking for the secret to their endurance.”” When I met her she was again drawing the faces of survivors because the place we had gone to, an indigenous community in the northern mountains of Guatemala, just a few months before we arrived had had 20 unarmed members of their community killed by Guatemalan army soldiers. Some had been children. A few months later the whole community was still in mourning. There were not too many smiles on the faces of the people, definitely no happy faces. And all of us who were there as visitors had reason to wonder what the secret of their endurance was.
Barbara also writes that “there is a point where the line between the people I draw and myself breaks down. How shaken I was the first time this happened, while drawing a woman whose son had been killed. She stirred such sorrow in me that I gradually could not tell what was hers and what was mine.” I’m not an artist, but I think I understand what she’s talking about. You wouldn’t identify with a person immediately, not to that degree, but as you sit with her and silently try to see her and feel her I can well imagine that that sense of separateness we have with each other begins to wear away. We non-artists may have some similar experiences but they would have to be as a result of that patient mere presence, of simply being quietly but attentively with someone, that we would experience the kind of breaking out of the shell of our individuality that Barbara is describing. I want to hold that thought, just hold it, so I can come back to it later.
Meanwhile, before and since I discovered Barbara’s book, there are some things I’ve been wrestling with. I’ve been thinking about “happiness”, how important it is, whether it’s as important as we think it is, what it is, what place it has in my life. I don’t know why I think about such things, but I do, and I am and have been. Maybe it’s because I’m living in Jefferson country, and Mr. Jefferson himself wrote that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Or maybe it’s just because I’m part of this culture, which seems to my way of reading things to assume that happiness is what we’re in pursuit of. Happiness.
It comes up at Christmas time especially for me, I guess, because there is so much unhappiness that stands out in sharper relief at Christmas. There is unhappiness that is just there in ourselves and our world that stands in mockery of our efforts at good cheer and holiday fun. Or maybe the mockery is the other way. Maybe it’s the artificial cheerfulness of the season that makes mockery of the harsher realities we would prefer not to see.
I was talking to someone recently who had been to some kind of a Christmas celebration where there was a lot of merriment with a “’tis the season to be jolly” kind of feel to it, songs and Santa, bells and laughter. Everyone, she said, had a good time, including her. But afterward she just felt that there was something not right. This is somehow not the right year for frivolity. Or maybe no year is. But then quickly another person who was present said, “But don’t we need to just have a good time sometimes”. And of course we all agreed on that, but it doesn’t make the basic question go away. Is a good time what we really need? Is happiness the norm that we always are trying to return to? Is it what we aspire to?
I’m not of a single mind on all of this. My human reality is that I wish happiness for people I care about. I sometimes imagine God in just that same way. I imagine that God wishes for the people she loves, for all the people she loves, to be happy. That sounds right to me, but it also sounds not quite right. Isn’t happiness, at least the pictures we have often drawn of happiness in our minds, aren’t they illusions that we would be better off without? I don’t want to get hung up too much on words here—what happiness really means. The images we create for ourselves of what happiness is, aren’t they often illusions? Isn’t the saying true that we are in danger of entertaining ourselves to death? Isn’t there something not right about what I would call a pharmaceutical approach to life, that if there is pain we need to find something to take to get rid of it. Some of us do that quite literally through say alcohol or drugs. Some of us find other ways of pain relief, and as in the case of moving from using to abusing substances, the shift from healthy to unhealthy pain relief is not so easy to spot, especially when it’s happening in us, especially when it’s not just a question of what’s good for our bodies but what’s good for our souls.
I turn to the scriptures. “Comfort, comfort my people,” Isaiah says. Yes, I say, we do need comfort. Just about any direction we turn there is a need for comfort. But what will bring real comfort, and what’s just a quick fix? I’m suspicious that my own pursuit of happiness is an illusory source of comfort even for me. I’m more than suspicious, I’m pretty darn sure that my pursuit of happiness is not going to provide comfort for anyone else. “A voice says, ‘cry’, and I say, ‘what shall I cry?’” Cheerful thoughts, reassuring words? Sometimes those are not only ineffective. Sometimes they devalue or degrade the very pain they are meant to relieve. But there is some pain that we ought not to rush to relieve, either in ourselves or in others. There is some pain that needs to be heard and honored.
I think of all the language we use at this time of year about light in darkness. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; the people who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.” “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet in the way of peace.” “The true light was coming into the world. His life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”
In these scriptures, and in much of our language and songs at Christmas, there is this contrast between light and dark. And in our ways of using these scriptural images, I think there is often the assumption that darkness is bad and light is good. There is this contest between the light and the darkness. Our job is to dispel darkness as much or as quickly as we can. Our job is to believe in the light, to bring light, to be light. Darkness is what we’re trying to escape. Darkness is the enemy.
But for me the imagery is a little more complicated than that. As important as it may be to seek the light, and to seek to become children of light, it’s also important to learn not to be afraid of the dark. Sometimes it is not so much the darkness itself that we need to fight against as our denial of the darkness. So I want to say some words on behalf of darkness.
I come back to Barbara Gerlach drawing the faces of people whose pain was deep and not easily relieved. When she talks about the process where gradually their pain worked its way inside her so that she no longer felt so separate from them, she is describing an experience she could not have had unless she was willing to dwell in that place with them, not to run away from it but to honor it by just being there and continuing to be there and not trying to take it away.
I think of what Dick Thomas said last week about listening and how the only real listening we do, certainly the deepest listening we do, comes when we are not afraid to stay in some place of darkness. Part of the training for many ministers is something called clinical pastoral education, which is usually done in a chaplaincy setting such as a hospital. And part of the program is writing up what are called verbatims, recording as nearly as you can remember word for word a conversation you had with some one for whom you were acting as a chaplain—a patient or family member. Then you read these verbatims together in a small group, and you discover things. You discover, for instance, how often when someone starts talking about something that’s a dark subject to the chaplain, how often, how quickly, how effortlessly we can shut ourselves down, turn off the sound, move to some other subject. But what a gift it can be when we are prepared to dwell within the darkness, not to try to escape it, not to look around for the nearest light switch. And when we are prepared not to treat darkness as something to be afraid of or to be avoided at all costs, then it may also become much more than a place of pain. It can also be a place of self-discovery, of connection and communion with another person, of creativity, of renewal, of dreams, of prayer, and of comfort.
Actually in some ways I believe we need the darkness as much as the light, because I believe what we seek is not happiness but wholeness. Otherwise, I cannot make sense out of Jesus saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are the meek…blessed are the merciful…blessed are those who mourn.” Some translations of the Bible have that read: “Happy are the poor in spirit…happy are the meek…happy are those who mourn.” I don’t know near enough to weigh in on the question of whether that’s a good translation. I do know that given the ways we usually think about happiness, it doesn’t describe what Jesus was about. He had something else in mind for us than happy—though if you asked him, “Do you want Peter and Mary Magdalene and Mary and Martha and Thomas and Zaccheus…do you want those people to be happy?”, I’m guessing he just might have said yes, the same way you or I would. Still happiness was not what he had in mind for us, is not what God has in mind for us. What God has in mind and heart for us is wholeness, something much richer than either pain or happiness alone, something much richer than light or darkness alone. The light shines in the darkness. It shines to those and for those who have allowed themselves to dwell, not just to pass through as quickly as possible, but to dwell in a land of deep darkness, who have embraced that place within themselves, who have been willing to share it with others, and thus who have already begun—while waiting for the light, while reaching toward the dawn—have already begun to redeem the darkness. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 9, 2001