Rebar for the Family Foundation
When I was young, I was scared of my basement. In part it was piled up with the resulting debris of my father never getting rid of anything, so it was full of deferred projects, potentials which awaited "somedays" which would never come.
So that alone was scary.
But more than that it was the craggy rocky walls of the basement with what seemed like dark tunnels which housed I was sure millions of spiders and other shadowy beasts.
It was quite a sight.
But as I grew older I came to appreciate those walls. I learned that the house which held my childhood was a hundred and fifty year old farmhouse. And those craggy stones which made the walls of the basement were the foundation which had held that house in place, upright and strong for more than a century and a half.
And even more those were the stones which the farmers who moved to that hilly, wintry, challenging land dug up so that they could grow their crops and make their lives.
After I learned that, I loved looking at the stones, placed with such care and intention, connecting the house down into the land, weaving it in time.
I had the privilege later in life to become a modern builder of houses. I worked for a dear friend almost a brother who taught me heating, plumbing, electricity, framing and the digging and laying and pouring of foundations.
We were a two person complete building team, and I dearly loved showing up and pouring sweat and love and toil into a project. We build, rebuilt and remodeled houses first in Massachusetts and then here in California.
And in the very first project I worked for him on, we got to build a foundation. It was for a house which was downhill from the main road, and at such a steep angle that we couldn't get any heavy digging equipment down to prepare the hole for the foundation.
And so I dug it by hand. Days and days of shovel and pickaxe, digging deep into the earth. Like those farmers I unearthed stones of all sizes, but unlike them I didn't save them to help create the foundation, but threw them down the hill. The largest and most inconvenient stones we simply took a jackhammer to.
And then once the hole was finally ready, we built plywood forms and prepared to pour the cement. And that is when we brought in the magical ingredient, the Rebar. This is long cylindrical pieces of steel which are laid into foundations to help them stay solid and strong.
As we poured gallons and gallons of cement we laid Rebar all throughout the foundation, layer after layer so that the foundation would hold.
It is the Rebar which is the core of the foundation.
It matters what is at our core. It matters what holds us and what holds us up.
It matters what we lay as the foundation of our beings.
Especially now, as life gets crazier and crazier, as we press ever further and faster, we are stretched, some of us almost to breaking.
As many of you know, my wife Lauren has been in the throws of a very difficult first trimester of pregnancy. We are elated at the prospects of another little person, but she has been extremely sick, and so I took on more and more, cleaning, child care, more and more.
Like many of you, we run a pretty tight ship in our family, both of us work, and there is barely any wiggle room. Certainly no room to lose one of the adult contributors.
So it was tense time, especially a month or so ago, and it came to a head one afternoon when I had just run out for a specific flavor of vitamin water and was only able to find two bottles of this just right flavor in three supermarkets and returned to share the vitamin water with Lauren and feed the baby and get him to bed and one of the two bottles of the right flavor of vitamin water fell to the floor and burst open and spilled all over the floor.
And something inside me broke. And I cried out something unfit for the pulpit.
My cry filled the room, and I saw immediately the overblown nature of the reaction. I knew I was off kilter.
And from his high chair my teacher and son, reached out his hands to me.
He is the one who consistently remembers to pray before every meal.
Two ministers at the table and it is the two year old who reaches out his hands and gets us to say grace whenever we forget.
And there as I was crying over spilt vitamin water, he reached out his hands and invited me to pray.
And it reached through my haze and my stress and I walked over to him and took his tiny hands and I prayed.
I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like,
"Precious and powerful Source of All, be with me in this hard time. Remind us all that we are held, that we are connected and whole and good. In this hard time, remind us to reach out, to take time and be gentle with ourselves. Be our strength as right now we feel weak, and breathe joy into these times. We pray for health and strength for Lauren, for the tiny new baby and for Benjamin and for me. We pray that we may know wisdom and peace and love. Amen"
And he let go of my hands and repeated, "Aaaaaamen!"
And that prayer made all the difference. My body and my being both felt different, even right after.
That night I called my mother, I reached out and asked for help.
And she came and helped, and Lauren has gotten better and better. And we returned to sanity.
But that prayer made it possible. That prayer reminded me, regrounded me, reconnected me to my truth and my practice. That prayer held me.
Prayer, spiritual practice is the rebar in the foundation of my being. It is one of the cornerstones in the health and thriving of my family.
So often as hard times come my way, I have a natural tendency to hunker down, put down my shoulder and try to plow through hard times. To do it myself. I have bought in, in part to the illusion of independence. That somehow I should be able to do it alone.
But that has never been true.
We are here to connect, here to reach out and be known. We are here to hold and be held in the wider embrace of community.
And partly that is the point of religious community. Partly that is the strength which being woven in common purpose and vision brings to your life.
It makes a difference to have circles of people to come and connect with.
A friend of one of our families with young children has joked that they are going to wait until they are pregnant with their next child before they come and join the church, so that they can have people bring them meals.
When we have new babies born to families in the church we organize folks to bring meals to the blissful and sleep deprived family.
And that is funny, but not in the least bit trivial.
Especially now, as so many of us are living farther and farther away from our extended families, it matters that we are held in a caring circle of love and support. It matters that hundreds of people are thinking about you and holding you in love.
It matters that we are known.
But you can get that at a good co-op, some of your better moms groups.
There is still something more that comes from being woven, from being involved in this spiritual home.
In this day and age coming to church, being actively engaged in religious community is a counter cultural claim to beauty and truth and purpose.
In a world which is trying at every turn to keep you isolated and alone, in a world which pours billions of dollars into convincing you that consumption can cure you, choosing to give time and heart and passion to the lofty goals of loving community, spiritual growth and integrity, joy and service, is no small thing.
This year we are blessed to have the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, as our Lawrence Lecturer. He will becoming on Nov. 6th and speaking on how practice can help sustain us in hard times. I commend all of his work, but I have an especially close relationship to his first book, A Path With Heart.
In it, he speaks to the powerful forces of delusion and denial at work in our wider society. He writes,
"Contemporary society fosters our mental tendency to deny or suppress our awareness of reality. Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any difficulty or discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death, and loss, and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature...
In a society that almost demands life at double time, speed and addictions numb us from our own experience. In such a society it is almost impossible to settle into our bodies or stay connected to our hearts, let alone with one another or the earth where we live."
Most of us are rushing to keep up. Not just families with young children. I have seen some of you "retire" and many of you seem just as busy as I imagine you were before, maybe even more.
It is ever more precious and rare the moments of focus, of pure attention.
For me this is the gift of prayer, of meditation, of spiritual practice, this pure and focused attention. This is the gift of worship. That here in these moments we are focused, connected.
Wherever you minds may wander, whatever internal dialogue you may be engaged in, still we are here connected in this moment with the invitation to remember our fullness, to taste again the potential of our lives lived awake, to give ourselves over to what truly matters, to stretch and reach past the limits of our own narrow internal focus and feel the fresh air and sun on the face of our spirits, to know again that we are one.
And this is so rare.
As we strive to multitask, to fill every moment.
With so many of our phones now doubling as computers, we can always be working, always be connected be writing and responding, always be available.
Often at the park with Ben I find myself one of so many parents half watching children play, also checking email, making phone calls.
Just last week I was lifting weights at the Y, really pushing it with my pecs, counting the reps, thinking about the next set, also thinking about this sermon coming up, and also listening to a podcast of a zen master talking about attention and presence and single mindedness, and I had to put down the weights and just laugh at myself.
But this is the quality of our minds so often.
We are engaged with two or three thought processes, performing two or three tasks.
This is the world we are bringing kids into, three to five hundred text messages a day, available at the drop of a hat to shift attention. Listening in shorter and shorter sound bytes. Learning busyness and split attention by watching us all.
And so it is ever more important that along with the mounting paces of communication and connection, along with the racing and rushing, that we cultivate peace.
Peace of mind, peace of being.
Presence of mind, presence of being.
I am not saying to do away with the texting. We most likely can not do away with the texting.
Most of us will not choose to get off the grid or raise our kids with no connection to these rushing and racing forces, but we can cultivate the opposite.
We can bless our families with full attention, with prayerful mind and heart.
This is the strength, the Rebar upon which we can build.
Which can hold us, and guide us, and remind us to reach out, to reconnect, to remember.
Especially when we are up against the wall, when times seem too much to hold or to bear.
The poet Lynn Park writes,
Take time to pray,
It is the sweet oil that eases the hinge into the garden
So that the doorway can swing open more easily.
You can always go there.
Consider yourself blessed.
These stones that break your bones
Will build the altar of your love.
Your home is the garden.
Carry its odor, hidden in you, into the city.
Suddenly your enemies will buy seed packets
And fall to their knees to plant flowers
In the dirt by the road.
They'll call you Friend
And honor your passing among them.
When asked, "Who was that?" they will say,
"Oh, that one has been beloved by us
Since before time began."
This from people who would have trampled over you
To maintain their advantage.
Give everything away except your garden,
Your worry, your fear, your small mindedness.
Your garden can never be taken from you.
May we be people of the garden.
May we build whole selves of presence and joy.
May we build families of love and open heart.
May we and all beings awake.
Amen
Rebar for the Family Foundation from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.
Copyright © 2010, Rev. Chris Holton Jablonski, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
