Falling With Grace

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
October 23, 2005

First Reading:
a Zen parable

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted.

 

Second Reading:
from Learning to Fall by Philip Simmons

My earliest memory: I’m standing alone at the top of the stairs, looking down, scared. I call for my mother, but she doesn’t come. I grip the banister and look down: I have never done this on my own before. It’s the first conscious decision of my life. On some level I must know that by doing this I’m becoming something new: I am becoming an “I”. The memory ends here: my hand gripping the rail above my head, on foot launched into space.

 

Forty years later, encroaching baldness has made it easier to see the scars I gained from that adventure. Still, I don’t regret it. One has to start somewhere. Is not falling, as much as climbing, our birthright? …

 

We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. The fall from youthful ideals, the waning of physical strength, the failure of a cherished hope, the loss of our near and dear, the fall into injury or sickness, and late or soon, the fall to our certain ends. We have no choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the means.

 

Perhaps, however, we do have some say in the manner of our falling. That is, perhaps we have a say in matters of style. As kids, we all played the game of leaping from a diving board or dock, and before hitting the water striking some outrageous or goofy pose: it comes to no more than this. But, I’d like to think that learning to fall is more than merely a matter of posing, more than opportunity to play it for laughs. In fact, I would have it that in the way of our falling we have the opportunity to express our essential humanity.

Sermon:

Imagine that you are 35 years old and already you have a good job as a professor, you have a strong union with your partner and good relationships with your two children, you have the resources to build a small cottage in New Hampshire and a lust for life that had already taken you up the twenty highest peaks of the White Mountains. Philip Simmons had all those things. He was as happy and successful as a 35 year old man can be when, after he began losing strength and balance, he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was told he had two to five years to live, and that it would be a very difficult two to five years as his body would inevitably deteriorate. He would lose each of his faculties from walking to using his arms, from playing the piano to talking. Philip lived ten years after his diagnosis, and he became an inspiration to those who knew him how he learned to cherish what beauty remained in his life.

Philip lived here in the Chicago area. He was a popular professor at Lake Forest College. And he was active in his congregation, the North Shore Unitarian Church. He came to a radical acceptance of what life offered him and lived courageously in a way that helped many others. When he gave lectures or sermons, he learned that many people, whether they were Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or Muslim, all felt that he got at the source of wisdom of their own faith traditions. He begins by approaching life not as a problem to be solved but instead a mystery to be lived. None of us can avoid falling into the knowledge of pain, grief and loss. We can seek to deny it, live as if it is not there, but Simmons finds that embracing one’s own losses does not lead to a diminishing of life but instead to a magnification of it.

 

Autumn is a spiritually challenging season. Now is the time to notice the trees still burning with color. They are living testimonies that beauty must be cherished in the present. Soon the bright colors will be gone. Only bare branches will stand as reminders of what has been. And the trees will remain barren for a season.

 

Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “In Blackwater Woods”:

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light,

are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,

the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes, to let it go, to let it go.

 

To love, to hold, to let go. These are sacred acts. The most difficult for me is to let go. I wonder if it is the same for the trees. Just as surely as the leaves will drop from the deciduous trees in our midst, so too shall our expectations be thwarted, our pretensions laid bare, and our confidence rattled.

 

To think that deciduous trees display these magnificent colors only when the weather turns rough…it is when life gets hard, and the trees no longer keep their leaves rich with chlorophyll that they ignite in a splash of radiant colors, each glowing leaf a footstep of God soon to be dropped by the tree that knows it is time to let go.

 

If only we human beings typically responded with similar acceptance when life offers up challenges. If only we could naturally let go of what we have dearly cherished and held and then let go when the time comes to let go just as the trees drop their leaves, with trust and faith that one day their denuded branches will return to a fullness of life. If only we could accept that nothing is permanent. But we are human beings, mortals who come across such wisdom usually only after we have struggled with the pain of loss and have grasped with futile repetition for what cannot be ours.

 

We often deal with loss by reminding ourselves of what we still have. Simmons discovered a different approach, one both more helpful and more difficult. One that emerges from a paradox: we deal most fruitfully with loss by accepting the fact that we will one day lose everything. “When we learn to fall, we learn that only by letting go of our grip on all that we ordinarily find most precious—our achievements, our plans, our loved ones, our very selves—can we find, ultimately, the most profound freedom. In the act of letting go of our lives, we return more fully to them.”

 

Our lives are shaped not so much by the losses we incur but how we learn how to cope with them, and the effectiveness of our coping mechanisms have to do with how we do or don’t honestly let go. What have you lost? What grief do you bear? What pain is still poignant? Whether the loss is a dear friend, one’s health, a marriage, a parent or a child, the falling into sorrow inevitably occurs, but that falling need not define us.

 

Simmons teaches us that our own mortality can be our best guide to being more fully alive. There exists a way through loss to a wholeness and depth never imagined by those who haven’t ever sought it. As he says, “Life is a terminal condition. Those of us with terminal illnesses simply have been blessed—and I mean blessed—with having the facts of our own mortality held constantly before us. But, we all bear the burdens of the flesh. And, all of us at certain times in our lives, in the face of failure, loss, illness, and finally, our certain ends, find ourselves asking: Why get up this morning? And, given what I’m facing, what work is there for me to do in this world that can possibly make a difference?”

 

Consider the Zen parable of the man hanging from the vine with tigers above and below suddenly seeing a strawberry. I appreciate what Simmons has learned: If spiritual growth is what you seek, don’t ask for more strawberries, ask for more tigers. The threat of the tigers, the leap from the cliff, are what give the strawberry its savor.  They cannot be avoided, and the strawberry can’t be enjoyed without them. No tigers, no sweetness. In falling we somehow gain what means most. In falling we are given back our lives even as we lose them. Our most poignant losses provide an entrance into the mystery of falling.

 

The metaphor of falling figures centrally in the biblical narrative, where falling is understood as embracing sin and separating from grace. Many of us have heard the constant refrain, “falling from grace” as if every life echoes that primordial fall of Adam and Eve. The history of theology overflows with interpretations that suggest if your life has become a shambles then you must have fallen from grace. Certainly, Calvin and the Puritans that came to the New World believed if prosperity smiled upon you, you were of the elect. If misfortune came your way, then you likely are not. This is not only bad theology it is a perversion of the teachings of Jesus. The faulty theology emerges from viewing the act of falling as disconnecting from grace.

 

Consider other figures of speech that use the metaphor of falling: He fell on his face. She fell for a joke. We fell for each other. I have fallen in love. What is it we are falling from in each of these falls? As Simmons notes, “we fall from ego, we fall from our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our precious selves. We fall from ambition, we fall from grasping, we fall, at least temporarily, from reason. And what do we fall into? We fall into passion, into terror, into unreasoning joy. We fall into humility, into compassion, into emptiness, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others whom we realize are likewise falling. We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred, into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.”

 

I don’t believe there is only one way to fall. And that can be difficult for people who love one another and share a loss. There’s perhaps nothing harder in life than losing a child. The odds that the parents will stay together are very low. This is because we human beings have greatly varying ways of dealing with grief. Learning to fall in life includes learning how to be with others who fall in different ways than our own. Our community here at Unity Temple provides ample opportunity. When someone loses a loved one, we not only provide care, but that individual teaches us one specific way of dealing with profound loss. In community, we not only provide support to those who grieve, but we, when in our own grief, provide a different kind of support: that of modeling our distinctive way of falling. That’s one reason our community is so important.

 

The nature of falling with grace comes with a radical acceptance of human nature. Philip Simmons writes, “We know we’re truly grown up when we stop trying to fix people. About all we can really do for people is love them and treat them with kindness. That goes for ourselves, too. That goes for ourselves, especially. I’ve given up on self-improvement. Fact is my character is pretty much set, and even if I were in perfect health, I would have to accept the following truths: my desk will always be messy; I will never stop being bothered by other people’s errors of grammar; I don’t find badly done children’s school concerts “cute”; I pick my nose; I notice beautiful women; I can’t stand laziness, whether physical, moral, or intellectual; I cry during sappy father-and-son moments in movies; I will drop almost anything to watch my daughter comb her hair. For better or worse, these things are beyond fixing. Accepting ourselves means accepting the whole package, the whole sour and sweet, lovely and larcenous mess that we are.”

 

The first real fall I experienced was eight years ago in New England. I can remember it as if it were yesterday. One night, I was gazing at the silhouette of one of the first trees to lose its foliage. Beyond the bare branches, five geese flew by, also silhouetted against the twilight sky. I was transfixed by the exquisite moment. The foliage was all gone, but there was left yet presence of God. It suddenly became clear. The loss of what we cling to, if we pay attention, gives way to an unexpected clarity. Every autumn, I am left speechless with the insight that with the passing of autumn comes penetrating clarity as the trees one by one give themselves to winter.

 

Over the past week, I watched a tree not far from my home get stripped of color. And in the coming weeks, the rest, one by one, shall lose their leaves. What is passing in your own lives? What moments are fleeting that are now gone? In the last two days, the tree across the street has erupted into a flaming color of orange. Burning bushes abound among us.

 

Soon the trees among us will be bare, having lost something beautiful and precious. Yet the bare trees will serve as memories through which we see the beauty of our present world. For lovely moments, past and present, used as a lens to see more clearly, bring into focus the abundance of life among us.

 

Philip Simmons closes his lovely book with what he saw and felt as he waited for his ride outside the hospital entrance. “Sitting in my wheelchair in the sun, I watched people come and go. I saw people missing large pieces of their bodies, I saw people wheeled in unconscious, I saw people walking briskly while talking on cell phones, I saw families walking in bunches, shoulders bent beneath the weight of worry. An elderly couple, tiny, elegantly dressed, and fragile as dried leaves, tottered toward the curb. Each held a four-point cane in one hand, and with their free hands they held on to each other, as though bracing against a wind that might at any moment carry them off. On another day, I might have been downcast to be part of such a scene, but now I sensed its rightness and beauty, and I felt strangely buoyant. Facing our own private calamities, we nonetheless seemed fellow travelers, carried along on the same living stream. Somehow, astonishingly, in the midst of our carnage, we had become immortal.”

 

When our lives fall apart -- and they will for all of us at some time or other -- when one day we find ourselves in free fall from all that we’ve known, the last thing that will help is dwelling on shame and sin. When falling into pain, grief or loss, the fall need not be from grace. With attention, it can be a falling to grace or a falling with grace.

 

May it be so. Blessed be. Amen.

© Copyright 2005 Rev. Alan Taylor, All Rights Reserved.