Unitarian
Universalist Church of Loudoun, VA
By
Rev. John T. Morehouse
Nov.
16, 2003
A letter was dropped off at an
outpatient clinic of a large teaching hospital and this is what it said:
“As you pick up that chart today and
scan that green Medicaid card, I hope you will remember what I am about to
say. I spent yesterday with you; I was
there with my mother and my father. We
didn’t know where we were supposed to go or what we were supposed to do, for we
had never needed your services before.
We have never been labeled charity.
“I watched yesterday as my dad became a diagnosis, a chart, a case
number, a charity case labeled “no insurance.”
I saw a weak man stand in line, waiting for hours to be shuffled through
a system of impatient office workers, a burned-out nursing staff and a
budget-scarce facility, being robbed of any dignity and pride he may have
left. I was amazed at how impersonal
your staff was, huffing and blowing when a patient did not present the correct form,
speaking carelessly of patient’s cases in front of passerby…My dad is only a
green card, a file number to clutter your desk on appointment day, a patient
who will ask for directions twice.
“This is what you see, not a man but a case. What you don’t see is a cabinetmaker since the age of 14, a
self-employed man who has a wonderful wife, four grown kids and five
grandchildren, with two more on the way – all of whom think their granddad is
the greatest. This man is everything a
daddy should be- strong, firm and tender; rough around the edges yet respected.
“He’s my dad, the man who raised be through thick and thin, gave me away
as a bride, held my children at their births, stuffed a $100 bill into my hand
when times were tough and comforted me when I cried. Now we are told that cancer will soon take him away.
“You might say that these are words of grieving, lashing out in
helplessness at losing the one I love.
I wouldn’t disagree. Yet, I urge
you to not dismiss what I am saying.
Never lose sight of the people behind the charts. Each chart represents a person with
feelings, a history, a life. You have
the power, with eyes to see, a person who you can touch. Tomorrow it may be your loved one, your
relative, your neighbor who turns into a case number with a green card, a name
marked off as done for that day.
“I pray that you will reward the next person you greet at your station
with a kind word because that person you see is someone’s dad, husband, wife,
mother, son or daughter or simply because he or she is a human being created
and loved by God, just as they are. I
am going to bet you can do this.” (Adapted from a A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul Ed. By Jack Canfield,
1996)
I spend a lot of time in hospitals and other large institutions and I
know that while many do not treat people as this man was treated there are some
who do. This particular letter touched
me so deeply because I have seen it happen both as your minister and as a son
who accompanied his mother in many such settings. It is one reason why when you are in the hospital I am
there. I am there because at a time
when you are most scared and most vulnerable you are at the mercy of a system
that can ignore you as the person that you are. In fact, often my role in a hospital is to act as your ombudism,
to help you and your family navigate the system that sometimes forgets our
humanity.
It was a moving letter for another reason as well. It reminds me that all of us need to be
taken in for repair. That all of us are
sometimes broken, not just broken in body, but sometimes even more painfully,
broken in spirit as well. One of my
best friends, a Lutheran minister in Frederick, calls a church “a hospital for
broken souls”; a place to come to be healed and renewed and challenged, a place
to be repaired. Today I want to talk
about the process of repair; why we do it and how we can do it with dignity,
such as this young woman challenged us in her letter.
Isaac
Luria, a great Jewish theologian of the 16th century tried to make
sense of a world wrought with personal illness and social dis-ease this being
paradoxically the time of the Renaissance and the Inquisition. He imagined the beauty of God’s world
shattering into little pieces because it was too fragmented and delicate to
contain the holiness of God. As a
result, Luria said, humanity lived in a broken world. And in that broken world are broken beings like any of us. Truly,
he wrote, this was the meaning of sin- brokenness. Our world is a world littered with fragments; a marriage that
started well and died, a son who could call but doesn’t, a new job that should
have been great but soon became a living hell, a good day followed by a
nightmare of trouble.
“Still”
the rabbi wrote, “there was a residue of God’s goodness on each of us”. It became our task to repair the world by
“finding those fragments, recognizing the hidden holiness of ordinary deeds and
moments and painstakingly putting the broken world back together again.” Or at the very least, we can polish the
pieces. Five hundred years later, Jewish groups around the world echo his
theology when they speak of…tikkun…truly
‘repairing the world’ (as quoted in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book The Lord is My Shepherd, 2003).
Some
of us come here hurt, needing help. We
are here to be that help to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable”. Many of us know the 23rd
psalm in the Hebrew Bible “Yeah though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”…One line speaks to this sense
of repair more than any other. “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”. The rod is an ancient symbol of boundaries
and sometimes punishment. The psalmist
is suggesting that we are kept in the bounds of life by God’s love. The staff though is the greater comfort, it
is what we lean on. Bringing the world
in for repair is both a process of keeping it together and leaning into the
life we have. Part of why we are here is to not only find meaning in our lives
and spiritual sustenance but to be healed.
Part of why we are here is to practice tikkun to bring the broken world in for repair. By intentionally
being both the rod – the conscience of the world – and the staff the world’s
comfort we can repair the broken world. And in so doing we ourselves are
repaired as well.
Too
often, we see religion as an aside in our lives, something to do on Sunday or
Saturday or Friday evening. But when
you are broken yourself, you find yourself needing help. Religion can be that help. The question is “should it always be up to
us to find that help ourselves?”. I
believe we can do better. In fact, I believe that part of the spiritual journey
is to bring the world in here as much as we can. People who visit often comment on our beautiful clear
windows. I too love these windows that look out onto our world.
They remind me that we are here as a hospital of souls for that world. But we should not be here just for those of
us fortunate enough to find us and walk in the door. These windows also remind us that there is a world that needs to
be brought in as well. Brought in for
repair.
Our religious history is rich in stories of serving the world. So many of our own have been repairers of
our broken world, both as rods of chastisement and prophetic voice when needed
such as; Frances Watkins Harper, the
great African American Abolitionist from Baltimore, the Feminist Charlotte
Perkins who exposed the hidden cycles of domestic violence and others, Marianne
Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, Susan B. Anthony. And others have been staffs to lean on,
Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, Adin Ballou the great
Universalist leader who helped thousands to see a loving God, the list goes on
and on. Why are they important to
us? Because the remind us that to be a
spiritual liberal, to be a person seeking meaning, we must act to help others in finding that
meaning. Dorothy Day, one of my heroes,
after converting to Catholicism, left a successful career as a writer and began
to serve soup to the homeless. When asked
why she did that and why didn’t she just go to church she replied “The spirit
doesn’t grow without the hands helping it along.” So it is with us. You can
come here and be healed and grow and find a spiritual center but what gives
that spiritual center holding power, indeed what makes the center sometimes
even knowable, is that you are helping another, bringing them in for repair.
We already do this repair work all the time. Every time you invite someone to church that you know may be
hurting you are bringing a broken piece in for repair. Every time you reach out to someone in need
with a card, a hug, a meal or a candle lit you are bringing the world in for
repair. But more is possible.
We are proud to welcome our newest members here today. But we are equally proud to open our doors
and our hearts to a group of folks who often cannot find a spiritual home. Recently, our social action committee has
begun a conversation with all of us about what it means to be a welcoming
congregation in every sense of the word.
We will be embarking in the coming months on a mission to intentionally
examine our own attitudes towards gay and lesbian people and hopefully to put
to rest whatever fears we have and welcome them as the fellow spiritual seekers
that they are. But more than that, the welcoming congregation program we are
embarking upon will intentionally invite gays and lesbians into our church
here. This will result in some backlash
from the fearful in our community but we are called to put our faith into
practice and to stand strong. We are
called, I believe, to literally bring those who are hurting and alienated into
our church for repair. I hope all of us
will speak honestly and compassionately about our feelings. I hope we will face our fears and then, I
hope, we will stand together to welcome the world into these walls.
I recall the words of Mother Teresa, “Few of us can do great things but
all of us can do small things with great love.” I hope that as we consider this and other ways we can repair our
world we won’t look at as another demand on our time and money but rather an
opportunity to participate in spiritual growth. With dignity, to return to the letter from the young woman whose
father was dying, we become whole even if our bodies and lives are falling
apart. Repairing the world, makes not
only others whole but helps us grow in holiness. All of us, reminds Robert Bly, must travel “the road of ashes where
we shudder and cry.” All of us are
wounded healers who in the healing are healed.
By repairing the world I return to what Rabbi Luria wrote: “God’s residual is on all of us.” It happens just a little bit at a time but with gentle persistence it happens.
This my people is how the world is
changed. One meal, one shoulder, one
day at a time. We repair the world in
small ways. And even if it doesn’t seem
to be getting any better, it is, in the lives of many not getting any worse.
"Gratitude” suggest Rabbi Harold Kushner “is the fundamental
religious emotion. It is where religion begins in the human heart…It is more
than an obligation, a ritual of politeness.” (Ibid., Kushner) Rather it the
starting point to making your life completes.
And part of gratitude is learning that it is a reciprocal process, we
receive and give, and we are made more wholly holy in that process. (ibid. ,
Kushner).
That give and take, so alien to our consumer mentality, is what makes us
deeper spiritual people. Not “what’s in
it for me” but rather “what of me is in it”.
Repairing our world, as hopeless as that might seem, does make a
difference. Like the boy who when asked
by his father why he was throwing all the star fish into back into the sea
“what difference can that make with so many star fish,” replied as he threw one
back into the waves “it made a difference to that one.” Wouldn’t you want to be on the receiving end
of compassion, repair with dignity? How
simple it is to smile. No matter that
it makes us feel good. So what? Isn’t that the way we were designed? To feel good in helping another even if we
are hurting.
At the end of the day, what really matters is not what was in your
checking account or how big your house was or what you had for dinner, what
really matters is if you gave someone who was
on the edge a reason to come back.
To go on living. What really
matters is that we take the broken pieces wherever we find them and bring them
in for repair. One piece at a
time. Perhaps then we might find
ourselves repaired one day as well. May
our blessing endure and our struggles lessen.
Amen.
.