Sermon - Do You Really Want to See Where I Live?

You want to see where I live?

Jesus’ first spoken words in the Gospel of John:  What do you want?  John 1:38

What do you want?

What do you want?

What do you want?

What do you want?

What do you want (pleadingly…)

What do you want (angrily…)

What do you want? (softly…)

Rabbi, where do you live? 

You want to know where I live?  Really?  You really want to know where I live?

Advent is my favorite season, liturgical or otherwise.  You know: the crisp December weather, perhaps that first, beautiful snow…soft and evocative.  It’s an anticipatory season, full of hope and wonder and dark night skies with the great chandelier of stars.  Of course this is only true of the northern hemisphere, but nonetheless, here in the north, such a magnificent season.

  And what it anticipates: the crèche, which Saint Francis wisely introduced so we might have our imaginations stirred by the humility of the birth.  The angels in the night sky, the trusting, fearful shepherds, and the Magi, semi-occult and mysterious, coming on camels with their retinue, astrologers, and merchants in some form of divinizing magic, all coming to see a baby.  It’s all a wonder, and I have several good sermons in me on Advent.

But Bob Thompson did not ask me to preach during Advent.  No, that would have been good, maybe fun.  But no, Bob called and said: Would you come to Lake Street and do a retreat on contemplative prayer and then preach on Sunday.  When, I asked, innocently?   In the heart of Lent.  In the heart of Lent.  I don’t like the heart of Lent. I don’t like Lent.     

Many years ago, I gave up Lent for Lent.

For years, I blithely made my way through the liturgical calendar skipping over these forty days as if they were an unfortunate blip in the year, as if they were somehow out of sync with the other seasons, as if they were not central to the life of the Rabbi who animates the whole cycle, as if these forty days weren’t mirroring the forty days and nights of rain Noah survived in the ark, weren’t mirroring the forty years the Hebrews spent in the desert, weren’t mirroring the forty suns and forty moons Moses spent in the presence of the Holy, weren’t mirroring  those profoundly disturbing moments in the history of these human beings struggling to come to terms with the presence of the divine, as if the forty days and their significance could somehow be dropped, with no effects on the spiritual psyche.

Three years ago, we moved from our home in Marin County to Sonoma County, in Northern California.  I found a community with whom to worship that felt from the get-go like some kind of home for me, and the first day the preacher, a woman in her middle years, came out into the congregation with her notes cribbed on tiny pieces of paper, and she began to preach a spare Gospel, a Gospel at the bone, as if she was wielding a scalpel and demanding we offer our forearms so she could cut away the fat and invite us to live at the bone, at the heart, if you will.  It was Lent, and she wasn’t skipping the season.

And finally, after my sojourn of Lent free years, neither was I.

You need Lent, I think she said, in her presumptiveness.  You need Lent, Bill, though she didn’t know my name, thank God, you need Lent.

And so I did.  I needed to again encounter some deep truths that I would always like to be setting aside, thinking I had accomplished that already, thinking I had moved beyond those, thinking my several years of psychotherapy had snapped me out of:  the truths of Lent. 

You want to know where I live?   Really?  You have some blithe notion, perhaps, that I stayed in the stable, maybe moved upstairs into the inn, and became a protégé of the Magi?  You want to know where I live?

The season’s Latin name was Quadragesima.   Now that’s a season I could get into.  But Lent, from the OE Lenct, meaning March: this is rough.  This is a rough word.  For a rough time.

I think Lent’s truest translation, however, is neither Quadragesima nor Lenct, but desert.

That’s where the post-captivity Jews found themselves, that’s where Moses found himself, that’s where the Rabbi found himself, and, if we are honest, that’s where often we find ourselves, too.  In the desert.  Urban, suburban, rural, fecund or dry, we often find ourselves in the desert. 

The rabbi, right before his short ministry began, went into the desert.  Freely.  For 40 days and 40 nights.  And desert back then meant desert.  This was no Canyon Ranch.  The Gospel writers say he was tempted, with what we might call the expected temptations.  I don’t know, but I suspect it was more complicated than that.

I suspect he was profound lonely, perhaps felt abandoned, no doubt had hallucinations, experienced, as Thomas Merton notes we all will if we persist in praying, the awful dread of God.  The awful dread of God.  It would be unusual if he didn’t psychologically regress, experienced debilitating fear, heard distracting noises and felt disturbing physical sensations, let alone hunger.  Did I already say profound loneliness and abandonment? 

Lent is the desert.  No self-help books, no The Secret of the laws of attraction, no Gospel of Prosperity, no explanatory dogma nor comforting, expiatory rituals, no Just a Closer Walk With Thee, no nothing.  How did we get from O Little Town of Bethlehem to What do you want? to the desert?

Oh, you said you wanted to see where I live.  I understand better now.

For many years I worked in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, often referred as the City’s soft underbelly.  I worked in a day care center taking care of triply diagnosed women and men, all poor, all infected with the AIDS virus, all addicted to the variety of drugs available on the street corners of America’s cities, and most suffering from some debilitating mental illness.  Our center provided most of life’s necessities, save housing.  We worked to form a community there, and we called ourselves, staff and clients alike, members.  In the day room, the heart of the center, we lined the walls, high up where they meet the ceiling, with photographs of all of the members.  There were about 70 at any given time. 

This was at the height of the epidemic, before life-saving prophylactic meds came into use.  Our members were sick when they got to us, and though they grew emotionally and spiritually healthier, they grew weaker, too, and they eventually died while in our care.  Of course, they and we somehow knew this when they arrived.  It was a place of living and dying, in equal portion.  It was an oasis, and it was a desert.

In the facility, we carved out a small room, about six feet by twelve, put cork on the walls, placed a table at the rear of the room on which we kept a flower and a candle. When a member would die, one would die every week, 50 every year, we would take their picture off the upper wall and ritually place it on a cork panel in this small, if you will, chapel.  We created a house of blended religion there, and its true heart was this little room.  After several years, I came to realize the reason the members came to this little oasis/desert called Continuum was they knew that when they died, they would be remembered.  For in their brief stay, in this little clinic, but really, on this planet, they had become known, they had been loved.

 Sometimes, when the work would seem too much, and the efforts so enormous for such scant results, I would, after the staff went home, go down alone in to that chapel, and I’d just cry.  I did not know what else to do; the all of it, as the Irish say, seemed too much to bear.  And I would light a candle and the room would be illuminated by the faces of all of these hundreds of beloveds who reminded me what’s at the bone: the flesh decays, our riches matter not, and our vulnerability is our true strength.  Those were the conventional temptations if I remember the demon so smartly offered the young rabbi in another desert in millennia past.

          You said you wanted to see where I live: this is where I live, right here, this is where I live.

No gold, no incense, not healing-salve of myrrh.  No Alleluias.  No one at Continuum knew Latin, so no Quadragesima either.  Just living at the bone, no power nor riches nor existential beauty, just a group of each others providing comfort and a slight hope and the only essential, love.  All of this arced by the ineffable but palpable presence of the divine.

I started praying again during those years, a daily practice I had abandoned earlier in my adult life.  I learned to get up before the sun and sit in my little space in my study in front of my little icon with the scant light a votive offered, and be.  Just be.  And often, the tears would come.  And so much did I want to avoid those tears, and the knowledge they held, and the implications of their unimpeded flow.  But I had learned, from others, my teacher Thomas Merton, old Jesuit friends, two aged nuns, to learn to sit and be.  In the presence of the One Whose I Am.  About the divine, in fact, I know not much more.  As Doris Grumbach observed, just The One Whose I Am.

This is the desert of Lent.  The place we are called to go and be stripped of our illusions, of our defenses, of our powers and riches and beauties, of the arrogance that leads us to believe we are sufficient unto ourselves.  Lent, unlike the delights of Advent, invites us to live the intentional life, the conscious life.   Lent says Wake up, you’ve been asleep!  Lent happens in the darker places, on darker nights, in darker moods, as we flail about not wanting to be who we are, not wanting to feel our feelings, not wanting to be knowing the truths that we are called to know. 

Our true lives mature in this desert, require this desert to come to the only fruition that matters: that we, in this brief lifetime, become our selves, that is, the reflection of the divine the universe requires of us in order for it to fully exist, in order for the arc of justice to bend, in order for love, the final and only sufficient path, to be realized.

On Tuesday afternoons each week, I leave my office in San Francisco and head over to San Quentin State Penitentiary, where I co-facilitate a men’s group. Most all the men in the group have been convicted of taking a human life.  In common parlance, they are murderers.  The fifteen men in the group have all served their time, and yet some of them, my age, have been in prison for 35 years.  I am no naïf; I am fully aware of who is in prison and why.  And I’m also aware of how slowly that arc towards justice bends.  

Prisoners live in a habitual, brutally ritualized desert; one some would say is their just reward.  It is a unique desert we’ve created for them: violent and dehumanizing, from which there is no physical escape, in which the demon’s temptations are wildly warped, and present. 

I don’t remember when I first went there, nor do I remember being invited, nor do I know why I went.  But I knew I had to go.  When you enter a penitentiary like San Quentin, you encounter the perfection of bureaucracy, its endless mindlessness, its objectification of fear.  AS you proceed, you go through a series of double lock downs and pat downs until you finally reach the prison yard.  The first time I went in, when I reached that open space, I felt somehow free.  I found that so curious, and so calming.

We do what you might expect in a men’s group: we work at becoming men, human beings.  That takes a lot of work for men (and, I might add, for women, too).  The men in the group, I am required to tell you, are wonderful.  While quite complicated, as we all are, they are men who have chosen in the most abject of environments to become their true selves, to give up their many illusions.  Where noise is a constant, these men have a commitment to an interior life the fruits of which are evident upon meeting them.  There are bodhisattvas in the group, their presence teaching me every time I am in their midst.  I go to this group, I finally figured out after a couple of years, to be healed.  I go into this offensive and threatening desert to find out how to be.  Just how to be, how to be me: how to be alive, how to be holy, how to be true.  It happens every week.  Without fail.  In this apparently God-forsaken desert.  From men stripped of every last thing. 

A year ago, after manipulating that bureaucracy, we received permission from the prison officials to bring Thanksgiving dinner to the group.  This may not strike you as a big deal, but the salient fact is that in the time of these men’s incarceration, up to thirty five years, they had not had one home cooked meal.  We gathered a group of prison friends, a couple of the chaplains, one evolved guard, the two women who run the rape trauma center and you’ve probably figured out already these middle-aged women who’ve been running this program for rapists since 1978 were raped themselves when they were young.  More bodhisattvas!  

We invited some of the group’s regular guests, like my friend whose son was murdered.  She comes into the prison to restore her broken heart by falling in love with murderers, but enough of that.  We home-prepared traditional Thanksgiving dishes: turkey, of course, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, pies of several stripe, homemade breads, and, presciently, dozens of non-traditional but nonetheless hotly-coveted chocolate chip cookies.  We had to bring it all in non-metallic containers, and Radha, the woman whose son was murdered, mindfully brought big thermoses so the gravy would be hot, and she even bought a bunch of those quilted pizza carriers so we could keep the turkey and mashed warm, and we brought linens (you have no idea of the impact of linens after thirty five  years of stainless steel) and the finest of plastic-ware, and sparkling apple juice and soulful CD’s, and we had ourselves a Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, the dinner was everything you might imagine, and lots none of us could have.  At the end of the meal, my colleague Jacques suggested we might go around the table, the 30 or so of us present, and say what we were thankful for on this day.  Jacques looked across the table at me, and asked if I would go first.  I said Of course, and mentioned several things that moved me to gratitude: this group, my spouse, Scott, my extended family, my friends, my work.  You know, the usual list of gratitudes we have been blessed with in abundance.  Let alone our security and housing and mobility and power and riches and beauties, if not of the body certainly in our adornments.  We are sated with apparent blessing.  I listed those I could recall.

Next to me was my friend Israel.  Israel is in his early forties, and he’s been in prison for half his life.   He grew up with his father in prison, and his son is, too. Israel’s in prison, too. But he’s also not.  Israel, like the other men in this group, is a changed man, a man who has had a metanoia, a man anyone would be privileged to sit next to.  When I was done with my gratitudes, I passed it to Israel.

Israel sat in silence for a minute, composed himself, and then he said:

I am grateful for one thing.  I am grateful for now.  No, no, now. No, not, no now.  Now.  Now.  I am grateful for now.

I sat next to this man, this human being, and the tears streamed down my cheeks.  I knew that Israel knew in that moment all we are to know.

I forget this.  I get caught, as perhaps do you, in my own stuff, my existential angst, my pain, my fear I am alone.  I cause pain to others, mostly those I love.  I get confused and I forget what I know and have been shown.  And at those desert times, the temptations and illusions seem real, the anesthetics like a true balm.

Sometimes our deserts last forty hours, sometimes forty days, sometimes forty years.  But out of them, by the divine, and by those placed in our lives who bear the divine’s face, we are surely led. Bodhisattvas are everywhere.  All I have to do is open my eyes.  And let go of the illusion that I’m in charge.

Aeschylus observed centuries before Jesus entered the desert:  The one who will learn must suffer.  Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart; and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.  

This is Lent, wisdom-time, this is the demand of the desert, the place Jesus lives.  The past, even a murderous one, is over.  The future has not arrived. We are only alive and available for living now.

What do you want?  You want to see where I live?  Really, you want to see where I live?  Well, I live in some obscure and counterintuitive places. I live in the Tenderloin.  I live at San Quentin State Penitentiary. I live here at Lake Street Church.  But only temporarily.  I meet you here, and then invite you to come with me elsewhere. Into this world.  Into this city.  Into these neighborhoods where my face is often obscured.  Into your hearts, where my voice is the small, still one working to be heard above the din of the street and over the noise of your complicated technology.  Yes, that stiller, smaller voice.  The one that beckons you.  The one that invites you.  The one that leads to tears and to knowing.  Yes, on some days into the desert, but, don’t worry,  to other places as well: primarily into the chambers of your heart where I would tell you all there is to know, really, all there is to love.

And there is only one time for that conversation to be occurring.  That time is Now.  No, no, now.  No, now.  Now.  Now.

William D. Glenn         Lake Street Church     Evanston Illinois           March 2007