SERMON: "Conversation in Malibu"
Rev. Paul Beedle
March 9, 2008
Once upon a time, an insurance executive visited an art gallery. Among the paintings he saw was one showing an old man dressed in rags, playing a guitar. It was done mostly in shades of blue. It made an impression on our insurance executive. He went home and wrote about it.
The painting was Pablo Picasso's “The Old Guitarist.” The insurance executive was Wallace Stevens, who, though not known as a poet for most of his life, is remembered as one. Here's some of what he wrote:
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said to him, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.” [1]
Funny thing: the guitar in the painting isn't blue, is it? It's brown, exactly as guitars are – at least, the wooden, unpainted ones. But in the poem, he has a blue guitar.
The other day I heard John Lienhard on the radio talking about the color blue: “...creating the color blue has always been a challenge worthy of ritual. Neolithic cave painters were never able to make it. Medieval book illustrators would grind up precious lapis lazuli to get it. When, in the 18th century, people stumbled across potassium ferric cyanide, they began making the brilliant Prussian Blue paints. Germany discovered aniline dyes in the mid 19th century, then built an industrial nation upon their production. Blue, being precious, holds special, but highly inconsistent places in our many cultures. It is the color of virtue, the color of calm, the color of water, and lastly – the color of sadness.” [2]
“Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
... “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.”
This past week in Malibu, California, at the annual retreat of the Malibu Study Group – a UU ministers' study group to which I belong – my colleague Jay Atkinson [3] likened preaching to playing upon the blue guitar. He wrote: “In speaking from the pulpit, we ministers ... can and often do find ourselves, like Stevens' guitarist, playing a `tune beyond us, yet ourselves.' ... The worship context or the pulpit itself freights the spoken word with a ... significance that lies far beyond the person of the speaker. ... [I]t is a power felt not only by [our listeners] but also by ourselves.” Jay cites the familiar experience of choking up with emotion when delivering a line that, when you wrote it, felt true – otherwise it wouldn't be in the manuscript – but wasn't felt quite so viscerally until you said it out loud, looking into the eyes of folks you care about, whose stories and troubles you know, and in that open-hearted context the depth of a truth dimly felt at writing pierces or fills your heart to bursting. In his poem,Wallace Stevens wrote:
How should you walk in that space...?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
As with truth, so with falsehood. Jay wrote: “Words spoken carelessly or unfaithfully to our tradition can offend or wound those who place their trust in us. [At such times, a] presumption of spiritual safety has been violated and a covenant has been broken ... [: a covenant] to ensure that our congregations are places of spiritual and emotional safety, where people may feel confident in taking the risks of honesty and self-disclosure that are so often necessary to deep religious exploration and growth. ... Ideally communal worship is one of the settings in which such an opening to spiritual growth and transformation may be made.” I think Jay's right about that. The Sunday service is one place we open ourselves. And I notice that it has its limits. Time is one limit. That's the easy one to name and measure. But there's another, fuzzier limit that is set by the diversity of needs and expectations among us on Sunday morning. For each of us, there's a limit of spiritual and emotional safety – usually unstated, in some cases different from week to week – that we want. For each of us, there's a limit to the honesty and self-exposure we're willing to risk. These are different for different people, depending on all sorts of factors, from different life experiences to different degrees of familiarity and comfort with this faith and this congregation. So Sunday morning is one time and place for opening to spiritual growth and transformation. Not the only one.
Jay said: “[Worship] is a setting for reaffirming ultimate values and celebrating the future toward which those values will guide us.” That's true, and I would add, it's a setting for blessing our troubles. Troubles are part of life, we can't avoid them. Nor should we, because we learn from them. But of course, troubles are troubling, and it's hard to learn or do anything we need to do when we're troubled. So we have to have something to do with our troubles in order to shift our spirits, for a time at least, and get on with moving toward that future to which our values guide us. There's an old hymn I grew up with that says: “When through the deep waters I call you to go, the rivers of woe shall not [drown you], for I will be with you, your troubles to bless, and sanctify to you your deepest distress.” That's what we can provide for each other on Sunday morning, at least a little bit. “Life has its battles, sorrows and regret: but in the shadows, let us not forget ... [that] kindness can heal us...” The Sunday service is one setting where we can offer one another that assurance.
Jay wrote: “As the central weekly ritual of the beloved community, gathering for communal worship may be the principal spiritual practice for many [in the congregation].” I have no doubt that Jay's right about that, too. A spiritual practice is an activity that reminds us of ultimate values, to be sure. It is also an activity that slows us down, shifts us, collects us. It is time set aside to set aside the rush of time and enter timelessness, to set aside busy-ness and distraction and enter stillness and focus. The Sunday service is one time when we can do that. It is not the only time. It is a unique occasion for it, when we are all gathered. For many of us, it might be the main spiritual practice in our lives. That's another limit of the Sunday service, and a source of its power. It offers not only the possibility of spiritual growth and transformation, but the assurance of time set aside for stillness and grounding.
Jay continues: “If [worship] is to nurture transformational growth, it must be a setting in which the worshipper's commitment to ultimate meaning and value is both elevated and vulnerably exposed. ... When people open themselves in an exposed way to what they so hunger for, their sensitivities are elevated and they are able to see or hear or feel deeper chords of reality that lie beyond and beneath the words that are actually spoken. [Also,] people are especially vulnerable in such circumstances to whatever might violate that sense of the ideal for which they reach out. ... This does not mean that the pulpit cannot be a place from which to issue challenges...” I agree. The prophetic word is sometimes the focus of worship. Though worship is a time set aside to set aside the rush of time and enter timelessness, we sometimes use its still and sacred space to remember the pain of the world. This morning's prelude captured the feeling and purpose of this:
“I woke up this mornin' and none of the news was good,
And death machines were rollin' `cross the ground where Jesus stood,
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way,
And there was nothin' anyone could do or say,
And I almost listened to him, yeah, I almost lost my mind,
Then I regained my senses again, and looked into my heart to find
That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem.”
And in his poem, Wallace Stevens wrote:
“The earth is not earth but a stone, not the mother that held men as they fell ... but an oppressor ... that grudges them their death, as it grudges the living that they live. To live in war, to live at war, ... to improve the sewers in Jerusalem.”
To recover the earth as mother is a reason for worship, and it makes easier the heavy and lifegiving work of improving Jerusalem's sewers.
“Love does not mean the avoidance of discomfort, either in personal relationship or in the dynamics of worship. It is here that [we] must reach most deeply into the values of our tradition and place the uncomfortable truth, whatever it may be, into the context of some deeper principle of integrity and historical commitment. Only in this more embracing faithfulness to our tradition can truth and love be held together in communion,” Jay wrote. Yes. We gather in communities of faith as ship's companions on the voyage of life, so that in life's storms and uncharted seas we have help to navigate, and when we find no port to be anchored in we may be safe harbor for each other.
All these thoughts about worship, and especially about the relational quality of worship, how we all contribute something to the depth and quality of the experience – for ourselves in how we enter into it, for others in how we comport ourselves during it – and all the limits and longings within us and the different balances of these between us: all this got me thinking about another aspect of our congregational life, our shared ministry of pastoral care, and about friendship as a form of pastoral care. If worship is relational, pastoral care is even more so. If we gather for worship as ship's companions hoping to find an affirmation of shared values and our troubles blessed in community, we form friendships for similar reasons. In the smaller launch of our personal lives, a friend is a companion of whom you can say – as the song goes – “I am the boat, you are the sea, I sail in you, you sail in me.” You might know the saying: “A friend is someone who knows the song of your life and sings it back to you when you have forgotten the words.” Friendship is sacred. As friends, each of us wears a blue guitar. And blue is the hardest color to make. The trust another invests in us as their friend freights our words with significance beyond ourselves. Friendship raises our expectations of one another. And friendship does not mean the avoidance of discomfort. In friendship we can place the uncomfortable truth, whatever it may be, into the context of the deeper principles of integrity and commitment. As friends, we are better able to speak the truth in love to one another. For all these reasons, I say, friendship is the foundation of our shared ministry of pastoral care. Pastoral ministry is not just something the pastor does, it is something we all do together.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said to him, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are. ...
Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.” [4]
May we be a safe harbor for one another, as ship's companions in this gathered faith community, and one to another, as friends. Amen.
[1] from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens
[2] John Lienhard, “Maya Blue” (Engines of Our Ingenuity, No. 2342)
[3] Jay Atkinson, “Pulpits and Blue Guitars: Reflections on Responsibility in Preaching and Worship Leadership.” A paper presented to the Malibu Study Group in March 2008.
[4] from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens