August 12, 2007 Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley
Good Morning to all of you!
I am glad you are here, glad for us to be with one another.
I am grateful for whatever it has taken for you to disengage
from the busyness of your life so that you could be here.
Many of us live very hurried lives.
When life is busy and full,
when you have activities, responsibilities, home, family, and jobs,
work can feel continuous,
endless.
And many of you are fully engaged in the life of this congregation.
Church work can occupy your thought.
Sometimes it can seem like there’s no rest.
Or rest is only when we resent it
because of something like accident or illness.
Even at night, there’s rehashing what’s happened,
remembering details of what you have to do,
and planning what’s next.
You do know what I mean, don’t you?
I know all of us don’t have a break in the summer.
Still I hope each of us is finding ways to have rest and renewal.
We haven’t been together for four weeks.
This has been a time of renewal for Bill and me.
Since we were last together, the two of us traveled
with our daughter Sarah to Korea to visit our son Ben
who is teaching English in Seoul.
We had a week in Seoul
and a week with the four of us traveling around Korea.
I’m thankful for the privilege, health and resources to allow such travel
and joyful to have a family vacation with grown children.
Going to another country can really break the cycle
of preoccupation with work,
with going over and over what’s happened
and planning for what’s ahead.
Going to some place you’ve never been, everything is new.
You have to figure out where you are,
what you are going to do, and how to do it.
What an amazing city Seoul is to explore!
The clean, on time, and inexpensive subway system can get you anywhere.
People look fit and neatly dressed.
Parks are full of people of all ages exercising, talking, playing games.
Nowhere have I seen such clean public bathrooms.
Seoul is so big, the sixth largest city in the world.
There are huge apartment buildings, palaces, temples, museums, markets.
All three of us knew of Korean was Annyeong haseyo, Hello;
Jueseyo, Please, and Gamsa Hamnida, Thank you.
Many Korea words looked alike to us.
And our pronunciation is lousy.
English is not widely spoken or understood.
Our son knows a few more words
and with charades and humor he finds his way.
Some of the family are vegetarians
and that’s a hard concept to communicate in Korea.
Ben mimes no meat, no fowl, no fish, no marine products.
People laugh and nod their heads yes
and big steaming bowls of spicy food arrive with fragments of ham,
bits of squid, octopus, or unidentifiable seafood.
Some of the vegetables look like moss and twigs.
It’s an adventure.
We searched for more familiar foods.
But when we returned home, we were looking for Korean restaurants
for bibimbap, mandu kimchi, and red bean paste barley buns.
We want to make black beans the way they do in Korea.
After dark one night we four stopped to look at a temple.
The monk ran out, slipping into his robe.
He welcomed us inside.
We sat with him for close to an hour, talking and laughing.
Many minutes we thought he was talking of pizza when it was visas.
One day on Jeju Islanda we missed the bus to a national park.
Taxis are inexpensive, especially with four of us.
We gave our usual greetings, pointed to the map.
The driver studied it and drove out of town into the country.
He drove up a road, stopped, and we got out of the cab.
Gamsa Hamnida, Gamsa Hamnida, we nodded and smiled.
The driver stayed for a moment, looking out at us.
We waved goodbye.
We walked all around and could find nothing like a park entrance.
At the end of the pavement was a building with a sole inhabitant,
very asleep at a desk in front of a computer.
Our greetings didn’t awaken him.
We called out louder.
We clapped our hands.
We clapped again.
He awoke to the greetings of four unexpected tourists
of a water treatment plant.
We showed him our map
and he indicated — down the road and to the left.
We walked down the road back to the highway, looked left
and as far as the eye could see was nothing.
Hitchhiking is not practiced in Korea, but Korea is relatively crime free.
When a truck came down the highway, I stuck out my thumb.
The truck stopped.
I gave our usual greetings, Hello, Please, Thank you!
Ben pointed to the map and driver said in English, “Get in the car.”
He and his buddy drove us down the road, way down the road,
then way off to the left, up another road.
Koreans are good people, respectful, helpful.
Tipping is offensive.
When we arrived to the park, we offered them apples from our packs,
but they smiled and shook their heads No.
In spite of everything,
You know it’s a beautiful world with many wonderful people.
Being in it and being with them disengages the mind
that wants to think about the past and the future.
There’s more than disengaging the mind from its usual thought.
Bill and I feel so fortunate.
We spent the next two weeks by ourselves
in the Sierras at the cabin of friends.
We were unplugged: no email, cell phones, television, radio.
We have a ritual for our time in the mountains.
There’s quiet sitting and then stretches
before breakfast that Bill makes and we share
out on the deck in the sunshine.
We bring bags of books and spend hours reading and studying.
I cook like I never feel I have time to cook at home.
Though usually it’s hard to find time for yard work,
we enjoy clearing brush that’s a fire hazard from around the cabin.
Mid-afternoons we go for long hikes,
returning for dinner, reading, and quiet.
One day our hike led to a beautiful mountain lake.
The sunlight was shining on the water.
The breeze was making gentle waves and that lovely lapping sound.
I laid back on the rock, the sunshine warming my face
with the deep clear blue sky above.
My body remembered summer afternoons as a child
floating on my back in a pool-
supported, buoyed up, at ease, free, timeless.
I gave my full weight to the rock, let go of thinking,
and surrendered.
The hike led to Cape Horn to a picnic table.
Up against the table was a jar of fresh flowers.
Fixed to the table is a plaque which reads
“It doesn’t matter where you go;
it’s how you get there
and what you do along the way.
Mary Jane King
August 14, 1962 — August 3, 2002.”
Mary Jane King was just shy of forty when she died.
We arrived on the fifth anniversary of her death.
We can guess something about what Mary Jane King
did along the way of her life.
The fresh flowers are telling.
Mary Jane King loved.
The next morning at the cabin the pine trees sway, quivering,
their green needles shimmering with light.
The T shirts and shorts on the clothes line
wave like prayer flags on the wind.
In the pot on the burner cinnamon and apples warm up to one another,
offering their sweet fragrance .
Over the stove hang cast iron skillets.
The breeze through the screen window swings them into each other.
They clang like wind chimes, like cowbells, church bells.
The breath of life fills me, rising and falling.
Everything is so beautiful.
Everything wants to be loved.
The poet Billy Collins says,
“I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,
so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling [in love] again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.”
It is so good to unwind, to become present, to be with.
Now here we are together-
our voices wishing peace to one another.
You are so beautiful.
I feel myself falling in love again.
We make life hard for ourselves.
The Chinese word for being busy is made up of two characters:
heart and killing.
What makes us think
we have to check email one more time before we go to bed at night?
Is it inflated self-importance?
Do we think the world won’t keep going without our help?
Is it self-doubt?
Do we think we haven’t done enough?
Or aren’t worth anything unless we’re always doing?
The Chinese word for leisure
or maybe it’s more like a word for the balance of work and play
is also two characters: open space and sunshine.
What Walt Whitman calls loaf and invite the soul.
Like lilies of the field that spin not.
Just being.
Open space and sunshine, you could call it Sabbath.
The Hebrew Scriptures tell the story
of Moses and the people freed from slavery,
wandering in the wilderness for forty years.
Some say they needed forty years to learn to become a community.
In the wilderness, they received training on living a free, good life.
Among the instructions were:
Work six days and do everything you need to do.
But the seventh day, don’t do any work.
On the seventh day, behold what is good.
Observe the Sabbath day, keep it holy.
We don’t have to wait and do all our unwinding in one clump of time.
Don’t do any work one day of the week.
Don’t do any work one part of each day.
This is hard for all of us.
That’s why the God of the Hebrew people didn’t just suggest it.
God commanded it.
Our rest, our presence, our being is that important.
What is lasting, eternal, infinite dwells in the moment that now is.
It is so good that we are together here.
Let the breath of life fill you.
♦