Lamenting the Winter of our Lives

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Rev. Jonalu Johnstone and Rev. Erin Walter
March 5, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Spring has almost sprung, but first we take time for the spiritual practice of lamentation. Interim ministers Rev. Jonalu Johnstone and Rev. Erin Walter will co-lead this service on grief and healing.

Chalice Lighting

This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.

Call to Worship

AFTER THE GOOD NEWS
Nancy McDonald Ladd What if worship was just the public expression of the deep relational intimacy that has already busted us wide open with love for one another. What would it feel like if liberal religion acknowledged the broken hearts of it’s own people such that every sanctuary and every celebration of life could also authentically honor the liminal spaces of our own inadequacy and the tightrope we all walk between death and life. In the spirit of those questions, these invitations to our own fullness and authenticity, come let us worship together.

Affirming Our Mission

Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.

Meditation Reading

ALL SOULS
by May Sarton

Did someone say that there would be an end,
An end, Oh, an end, to love and mourning?
Such voices speak when sleep and waking blend,
The cold bleak voices of the early morning
When all the birds are dumb in dark November –

Remember and forget, forget, remember.
After the false night, warm true voices, wake!
Voice of the dead that touches the cold living,
Through the pale sunlight once more gravely speak.
Tell me again, while the last leaves are falling:
“Dear child, what has been once so interwoven
Cannot be raveled, nor the gift ungiven.”

Now the dead move through all of us still glowing,
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
Are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited –
Only the strands grow richer with each loss
And memory makes kings and queens of us.

Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
We who find shelter in the warmth within,
Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
As the lost human voices speak through us and blend
Our complex love, our mourning without end.

Sermon

HOMILY: “GRIEF” – Jonalu Johnstone

We humans have a need to grieve. It’s part of our bigger need to note and commemorate the changes of our lives, so we can make meaning of them. As Unitarian minister Max Coots, of beloved memory, put it:

When seasons come, as seasons do, old and known, but somehow new,
When lives are born or people die,
When something sacred’s sensed in soil or sky,
Mark the time.
Respond with thought or prayer or smile or grief,
Let nothing living slip between the fingers of the mind,
For all of these are holy things we will not, cannot, find again.

Here’s the thing, though. We have been through a time for the last three years, when our rhythms of marking occasions have been sidetracked. Weddings and memorial services, if done at all were small, or virtual. Graduations, birthdays, holidays slipped by barely acknowledged. We have been separated from people and activities. Stuff abruptly ended, maybe to return and maybe not. Seasons have come and gone, and we have been unable to mark them in the ways we are used to. In missing all of this, our losses have piled up, heaping higher and higher, weighing on our hearts and stirring up grief we don’t even know the source of.

And many of us have the even deeper burden of deaths of loved ones – whether by COVID, or other causes – that have felt more complicated, or maybe less real than they might have. And we have felt acute pain with continued revelations of the on-going racism and other forms of oppression that resist eradication in our American culture. Plus, this congregation has had some special losses – saying goodbye to a beloved senior minister and mourning the death of a cherished staff member.

Our initial reaction to the idea of loss is often to push it aside and refuse to acknowledge its truth. We’ve coped pretty well through all this, we think. Then, the other day someone asked if I knew people who had died from COVIO. And, I do. I do. I don’t like to look at that. I know people who have died. I know people who have long-haul COVIO. I did not have a chance to walk the stage at General Assembly to acknowledge my retirement. I missed ritual occasions with family. So much that has happened that never got the full attention or processing it needs.

How do we deal with what we have already experienced so that we can move into the future – whatever it may be, whenever it comes – more seamlessly, more enthusiastically, more confidently, more hopefully, more whole?

Nothing lasts forever. Every loss brings up the same emotions as death does – denial, anger, sadness, guilt, fear. Every leaving is really a small death that gives us practice for mortality.

Those stages of death aren’t really stages at all. They’re more like waves, waves that come crashing over us. Sometimes, we can see them coming, and other times, they arrive unbidden when we hear a particular song or smell pine or cinnamon, a scent carrying us off to another time, another dimension. The wave crashes over our head and slowly ebbs away.

Most of us don’t like to deal with the reality of mortality, to take the time to say goodbye, to cry and rage against the dying of the light. We’d rather deny that things will really change.

Problem is, that’s not so easy for our bodies, where we live. They know we have experienced loss. They know we need healing, healing we can only achieve through grief, through mourning.

HOMILY ON HEALING AND LAMENT – Rev. Erin J. Walter

“It’s not so easy for our bodies.” I’ll never forget, when I served as a hospital chaplain in Oakland, California, in 2015, a colleague fainted while on patient rounds. Her knees locked and she fell right over.

We cannot be present to so much grief – or healing – if we lock it inside.

After the fainting, I made a choice to think of my body as a channel. I imagine a river of starlight, carrying the grief and pain I encounter in ministry and justice work – up and out, to the Awe..,inspiring All that will not buckle under the weight of the world. This practice that serves me in grief also serves me in joy. When I dance or sing, I also imagine sending love and good energy out through that channel, to wherever it is needed.

“Loosen, loosen, baby You don’t have to carry, the weight of the world in your muscles and bones, let go, let go, let go.”

Jonalu and I sang this Aly Halpert song with our colleagues at the SW UU Ministers Retreat this week, hoping to release some of what we’ve all been carrying, like a collective channel.

This week it hit me hard – realizing we’re marking three years since COVID hit and so much changed. I have been listening to the playlists my friends and I started making in March 2020 and letting myself feel it. I may never get over knowing that when my aunt died of COVIO, her daughter, my cousin -just three days apart in age from me- could only sit in her car in the hospital parking lot and weep, not allowed to be by her mother’s side. It was this way for millions of grieving people.

In the memoir “What My Bones Know,” by Malaysian-born New Yorker Stephanie Foo writes of her decades-long quest to heal from complex trauma – an abusive childhood, racism and more. Even as she finds healing, she writes, “It’s ok to have some things you never get over.”

Is there something you fear you might never get over? What do we do with pain like that?

We can loosen. We can name it together, let it go to The All. We can lament.

Today, Rev. Jonalu and I want to spend time on lamentation, one of many spiritual practices handed down over centuries – a written way of channeling grief to the divine, dating back to the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem, 589 to 587 BCE, after which people used lament-writing to grapple with the emotional and spiritual devastation. The long aftermath, like where we are now, three years after the first COVIO isolation. You’ll find laments not just in the biblical chapter of Lamentations but in the Psalms as well.

The practice of lament writing is regaining popularity, including among Black leaders in Unitarian Universalism. The late beloved Mathew P. Taylor wrote a piece called Lamentations in the book BLUU Notes: An Anthology of Love, Justice, and Liberation.

An excerpt from Taylor:

Lamentations
Are a way to be seen
And held
And heard
For once
So that the weeping
The stories behind the tears
Are not silenced

UU Rev. Darrick Jackson often preaches about the lamentation practice. When he taught it to me and to other seminarians at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, it felt like a lifeline.

This form of prayer has simple, specific parts.

1. You address your complaint, to someone, something, and name the complaint. You might try on a new of different name for the divine, especially to express your frustration at them – God, Goddess, or like Rev. Theresa Nina Soto has said, Our friend. God, my heart is sick over loved ones I may never see again.

1. You confess your trust — your faith, even though it be uncertain – and petition for a solution. Hold nothing back. Do not minimize your complaints or beg for small favors, as Rev. Jackson taught. Go big as you cry out and drop to your knees. The universe can handle it. Spirit of life and love, I am trusting you to take the cancer, the depression, the violence. Take it. Not one more neighbor or friend.

Then, and this is important, express confidence that your prayer has been heard and end your lament with gratitude. Thank you for hearing this plea and for the truth that we are not alone. Amen.

That’s it. No promise to fix it. Beware those who promise to fix it. Just the sacred power of naming, trusting the universe to be what Buddhist teacher Thict Nhat Hahn described as the compassionate listener.

The beauty of lamentations is that they create space for both uncensored wailing – and the act of fidelity. Those who lament only do so because, underneath it all, we have a faith that a God of mercy, a universal love, will hear our prayers. And lamentation is counter to white supremacy culture, because it requires humility – not to pretend we have the answers.

TRANSITION TO SPIRITUAL PRACTICES:

So, today, in acknowledgment of the many griefs, both individual and collective, that are known to this congregation – before we move on to things like a new search committee, a new minister, a new chapter – as your interim ministers, we want to offer us all spiritual practices of release. We invite you to think about any pain you may be holding and lift it up to the Spirit of Life, or out to this community, so you don’t have to hold it alone. So your knees don’t buckle. Yes, there are some things we may not get over, but healing is possible. Together, we can loosen.

During a time of contemplative music, we invite you to move about the sanctuary, choosing if you will to light a candle, burn a paper, drop a stone in water. Let something go. We also have a station for lament writing. You may take a paper, with fill-in-the-blanks to make it simpler, and write your own lamentation.

If you need more time, take the paper home with you and pray or meditate on it. Keep it for yourself, or share what you write with a friend, a group, your ministers. In our shared grieving, may we find some loosening, some healing.

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