The Promise of the Present

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 25 October 2009

Our reading this morning is from the poet, Denise Levertov.  It’s called “Variation on a Theme by Rilke.”

A certain day became a presence to me.

There it was, confronting me,

a sky, air, light, a beam.

And before it started to descend from the height of noon,

it leaned over and struck my shoulder as if with the flat of a sword,

granting me honor and task.

The day’s blow rang out, metallic.

Or it was I, a bell awakened?

And what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew:  I can.

Well, some of you may remember that back in January of 2007 The Washington Post ran a little experiment.  The newspaper invited the world-renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, to play his violin in the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station during the morning rush hour commute.  They wanted to know if the beauty of Bell’s playing, if anyone would notice, if anyone would pay attention to this great musician.  So, at a few minutes to eight, on a Friday morning in January, Joshua Bell, posing as a street musician, with his Nationals cap and his blue jeans, opened up his violin case on the subway station floor and threw in a few bucks to prime the pump and he began to play.  He played a piece by Bach which I understand is one of the most difficult and beautiful of the violin repertoire.  And he played with great feeling.  If you’ve ever seen Joshua Bell play the violin, he literally dances when he plays, digging into the chords, sawing away at the strings.  He really feels the music.  So there he was, playing in the Metro station, and you’ve probably been there yourself before in rush hour.  What do you think happened?  Well, it was a good six minutes into his piece before anyone stopped to listen to his playing.  In fact, during the 45 minutes that he played that morning, only seven people paused for more than a minute to listen to his music.  Another 27 tossed a few spare coins into his violin case for a total take of 32 bucks.  I hope we fare better with our pledge drive this morning.  [Laughter]  And meanwhile, 1,070 Washingtonians walked by, barely noticing.  You can see it for yourself.  It was all captured on hidden camera and it’s up on You Tube now, but I warn you, it’s enough to make you cry, watching so many people walk right by such beauty.

This is exactly the kind of little news item that pundits and preachers like to pounce upon and mine for its dire meaning about our society and our culture.  And I guess it would be easy for me as a preacher to read more into this little experiment than I guess is probably really there.  But I’m going to go ahead and do that anyway. [Laughter]  Because for me, it does illustrate a familiar and a tragic stumbling block in our spiritual lives.  We all want, I believe, a deeper sense of connection and meaning in our lives.  We want more joy and more delight.  We want a more intimate relationship with the holy.  But one thing keeps getting in our way.  And that is that too many of us have this idea that God is going to come to us like he came to Moses, up on some remote mountain top in the desert.  We have this sense that we’ve got to go away somewhere, to Rome or to Sedona, to be close to the holy.  Or we think that God is only present with us during the 50-minute period here on Sunday mornings, as if God were our therapist, right?  It’s as if there’s this myth that spirituality only happens in certain places, in certain times, set apart from our daily lives.

But the truth is that God is like a world-renowned musician, serenading us under our very noses, in the midst of our daily lives, if only we had the eyes to see and the ears to listen. If only we would attune our senses and pay attention, then we could be present to the holy that is all around us.  We could hear the spirit’s song, echoing in the Metro platform or on the city streets or softly accompanying an intimate conversation with a friend.  Then we could appreciate the presence of the holy everywhere, in an interaction with a stranger, in a struggle for justice, in the changing of the fall colors.  On and on, the spirit serenades us and all we need to do is pay attention, to be present to the presence of the holy. 

Annie Dillard writes, “We are here to witness to creation, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature, so that creation need not play to an empty house,” like Joshua Bell did.  The promise of the present is that if we really show up for each moment, show up with all our senses alert, then our lives can be suffused with grace and with beauty, even in the midst of our pain.  Even in the midst of our pain.

I want to tell you a story, something that happened to me this summer that made me want to preach this sermon to you today.  And it’s not a mountaintop experience, it’s just something that happened to me in my daily life but this had a powerful significance for me.  This summer, I flew to Boston for the wedding of a friend of mine and when I landed in Logan Airport, it was a beautiful, bright, sunny day, gorgeous day.  And so, instead of taking the subway from the airport to downtown, I took the Logan water taxi.  Who knew there was a water taxi at Logan Airport?  Has anyone ever taken the water taxi at Logan?  It’s a boat ride from the airport across Boston Harbor to downtown.  I really recommend it. 

The water taxi dropped me off at a dock in South Boston, right next to the brand new federal courthouse that they’ve built there on the waterfront in Boston.  And because it was lunchtime, and because one of the things that I’m really good at being present to is my own appetite, I noticed that there was a fish shanty right there on the dock, right next to the dock.  And I checked it out and I could see that the fish was really fresh and good.  It was a simple place, just like a little shack.  So I went in and I ordered a fish fry.  And I saw the guy reach into his cooler and take out a piece of cod that he had caught that morning, and he dredged it through the flour and he dropped it into the fryer.  A few minutes later, it came out and I squeezed my lemon on it, and it was the best mouthful of food I had had in a long, long time.  But this isn’t a story about my fish fry, or maybe it’s in part about my fish fry.  What happened was, I sat down next to a woman who was also there eating.  We happened to strike up a conversation.  She had a thick, Italian-American, Boston accent; I knew she was a local.  At first we were just talking about the food and the weather, and then she began to tell me a remarkable story. 

In a very matter-of-fact tone of voice, she explained to me that she had spent the entire morning in the federal courthouse that was right next door, attending the trial for the man who had murdered her sister.  In fact, that very morning, the accused had been put on the stand and the prosecutor had recounted for the courtroom the details of the gruesome incident.  The woman explained to me that, since her sister had died, she hadn’t left her house much; she was scared and she was depressed.  She was worried about her mother who had seen her daughter murdered and who could barely leave the house now.  And she had just walked out of the courtroom, again scared and sad at having gone through the whole story again.  But there was something about the day, something about the sunshine, something about being by the water, something about that little fish shack there, that made her go up and order a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell.  And after she told me about her morning, she started talking to me about her oysters.  She couldn’t stop talking about her oysters.  She said, “These are the best oysters I’ve ever had.”  She said, “They’re so fresh, I wanted to eat the shell.”  [Laughter]  She went on and on about the oysters.  Her family kept calling her on her cell phone to see how she was doing and to see where she was because she hadn’t come home and she said [in a Boston accent]  “I’m at the wharf, eatin’ my oysters.” [Laughter] 

After awhile she finished her oysters and we said goodbye.  And I wanted to tell the woman before she left that she was a hero for me, a hero because of the simple fact that in the midst of her pain and despair, she was able to notice a moment of beauty.  In the midst of her suffering, she was able to be present to the beauty of the world, to be seduced by it, to savor it, to find grace, if only for a moment or two, and to share it with me.  To find grace, if only for a few moments, in something as simple as a blue sky and an oyster on a half-shell.  This is what I mean about being present to the presence of grace in our lives.  Beauty and grace abound, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to listen.  If only we are present to the present.  Even in the midst of our pain and despair, especially in the midst of our pain and despair, we need to keep ourselves open to these redemptive moments of beauty and grace.  For the restoration of the soul lies not in recrimination over the past or in anxiety about the future, but in resting in the grace of the present.  Let me say that again:  The restoration of our soul lies not in recrimination over the past or anxiety about the future, but in the beauty and grace of the present.

Henry David Thoreau called this “the gospel of the present moment.”  And he admonished us to study not only the Gospel According to Luke, and the Gospel According to Matthew, but “the gospel according to now,” he said, not because there was anything wrong with the gospels of other times and other places, but he was trying to make the point that, unless we make the gospel our own, unless we experience it in our own lives, then it will not have meaning to us.  So come to know the gospel according to now, he said.  Someone just pointed out to me something that’s obvious, that the word for “gift” and the word for “now” are the same word:  present.  The present is literally a gift to us.  In fact, if you think about it, it’s the only gift we ever really have.  For the past is already a memory and the future is not yet, and may never be, ours.  All we have is the present; all we have in any moment is now.  And it’s enough.

Like all gifts, we can choose to take it or leave it.  What I’m asking you to do today is to choose to receive this gift, to choose to receive the gift that is your life by being present, by being attentive to the present, by being attentive to the details and the richness of our lives, by being alert, noticing the beauty and the pain that surround us, for it is in the midst of that beauty and that pain that the world calls to you.  God, grace, whatever you call it, it is like a world-renowned musician, serenading us in a Metro platform, right in the middle of our morning commute, right when we’re at our grumpiest and our least-caffeinated, right when we’re most distracted by what lies ahead.  We can choose to walk by or we can choose to stop and to listen, but only one of those choices leads to life and life abundant.  Let us choose life.

Amen.