This sermon was preached the week following guest preacher Tabitha Isner’s sermon that began with her singing and asking, “Church. What’s it good for?”
Please leave your story of terror and fascination here, if you care to share. Thanks for coming by Views from the Edge.
Fifteen days from today I officially retire.
The new pastor has been appointed to the office that has provided definition, boundaries, routines, anchors, and the vocational sense of purpose and meaning that come from a job and being part of a team.
I’m saying to myself what poor Alice said to herself in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“‘But it’s no use now,‘ thought poor Alice, `to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!…for it might end, you know,‘ said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle.‘”
Whenever retirement happens, it raises big questions – scary questions. About whether and how we will manage to live on reduced income, for instance, but, more profoundly, about what one’s life will be without the roles that have partially defined us. Who are we without the roles? What gives life meaning? Why are we here? For what do we exist? Existential questions.
There are moments when the pending retirement – the next chapter to which I’m looking forward – feels like jumping off a cliff into an abyss. I n those moments, the question becomes whether there is life over the cliff. Is what feels like a leap into oblivion a leap into nothingness, or is it a leap onto a trampoline we didn’t know was there before we leaped? Don’t know. Haven’t done it. As my dear retired friend in the memory care center said last Friday about my pending retirement, “You’re going to love it and you’re going to hate it. But eventually,” she assured me, “You’re going to love it!”
Worries about finances and can quickly turn me into Alice, plunging down the rabbit hole. Anxiety. Fear. But money isn’t really what’s unsettling.
Walking Barclay along the lovely wooded paths of the Jonathan Association yesterday, I remembered seeing a mole several years ago while walking our dogsMaggie and Sebastian (since deceased). The blind little mole seemed to be waddling aimlessly along the side of a dark tunnel. It was alone and kind of putzing along, oblivious to our presence, going who-knows-where for who-know-what reason. Fear feels like that. I sometimes feel like that. But the real fear underneath it all is death. For death is the obliteration of the self as we have come to know ourselves (the masks, the roles, the social networks, the reasons for living that come from outside ourselves).
Retirement is not death. It’s a precursor to death, but it is not the end of life. It’s a new chapter, a chance to finally BE and do what we want to be: the one and only person we have always been.
Aging doesn’t stop. It keeps going. Health is not forever. It declines. So, in part, the questions for me are what we want to do, what we “should” do (i.e., service to others and making a difference in this world), and what we can do to age gracefully, meaningfully, and joyfully.
In the year ahead my vocation will take the form of writing. Addressing the deeper questions. The existential questions. The faith questions. What Chaim Potok once called “the 4:00 in the morning questions”. But even more, I pray, retirement will bring a greater appreciation and enjoyment of the wonder of it all. As William Sloan Coffin put it at the end of his book Credo, I want to live “less intentionally and more attentionally.”
So, in 15 days I turn the keys over to Dean, a wonderfully gifted colleague in ministry, confident that Shepherd of the Hill won’t skip a beat, and that Shepherd of the Hill, Dean, Kay and I are each and all in the good Hands of the unseen Trampoline just over the cliff.
We do not get to see God face-to-face. None of us does. But we do see God’s back.
When Moses makes the request to see God, the Book of Exodus writer puts it this way:
But, God said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
We see God [YHWH – the Breath – “I am Who I am”/ “I will be Who I will be”] from the cleft in the rock. Rudolf Otto said it differently. We experience the Divine as the mysterium tremendum et fasciinans, Latin for the fearful and fascinating mystery.
Rudolf Otto is best known for his work The Idea of the Holy, first published in German in 1917, translated into English 1923, in which he analyzes the human experience that underlies all religion. He calls this experience the “numinous,” (from the Greek work “pneuma” (i.e. spirit), which has three components.
First and always, it is mysterium.- beyond human grasp, control, or knowing. It is, he says, Wholly Other. It elicits a tremble. It is powerful beyond human power, experienced as an overwhelming power, the likes of which we glimpse in the terrifying explosion of an hydrogen bomb. We experience it as mysterium tremendum. At the same time, the numinous evokes a fascination the way a magnet draws iron to itself. Something in us knows we belong to it. The “it”, according to Otto, is the divine mystery’s mercifulness and graciousness.
We can only come at it through the back door, by hints and suggestions and stories that suggest its presence in daily life.
Consider, for instance, Steve Shoemaker’s verse posted earlier on Views from the Edge.
Driving Blind
The highway is straight
and smooth, only one lane
in each direction…
no barrier in the center,
no guard rails on the sides…
nighttime, no white lines
mark the edges of the road…
no streetlights…
all that can be seen
is the oval puddle of light
from the headlights
of my speeding car.
I jerk awake as I feel
the left tires bounce
on the shoulder of the road…
I have crossed
the wrong lane…I know
my wife is beside me, but
I cannot open my eyes…
I cry out, but her seat belt
holds her too tightly
for her to reach the wheel…
my eyes open for one second,
then all is dark again…
I cannot stay awake…
I whimper and shudder.
The terror remains
even after I realize
we are in our own bed
and I have been dreaming.
A reader responds to the posting:
I’ve been there. Only in my dreams I’m in the back seat of a speeding driverless car and can’t get to the front, not even to press the brake.
Another reader, Carolyn, a dear friend since kindergarten, writes:
Try having something similar happen when you are awake with your eyes open! A big contributor to my retirement at the time I retired.
Carolyn goes on to describe her problem with double-vision – seeing two on-coming cars and four lanes when there were two, having to decide which was real and which was a product of her double-vision. A near accident on a winding road in Gulf Mills, a road with which I am well familiar, helped her make the decision to retire.
Mysterium tremendous et facinans.
I’m retiring. Two more sermons at Shepherd of the Hill and I’m done. Any misgivings I might have had about the decision to retire were quickly set aside by watching the YouTube video of Tabitha Isner’s sermon the Sunday I was out of town. So alive, so young, so wise, so full of energy and creativity! It reminded me what my mother kept telling my father about the need to retire. He was getting stale.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Then, I’m thinking of my father when a phone call comes from San Francisco asking if I am the son of the Chaplain on Saipan during World War II.
I am. He’s doing research for the past three years on the 330th Army Air Corps based on Saipan. Googling my father’s name – Kenneth Campbell Stewart – up popped the Views from the Edge post about the Cincinnati cop who threatened to arrest me for hitch-hiking on the Interstate at 3:00 A.M. before he learned I was the son of his chaplain on Saipan, “Red Stewart”. I was like a chicken waiting for its head to get cut off before mercy struck.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
I know very little about that chapter of my father’s life. I’ve always wondered. The caller wants to hear any stories and see any pictures or papers I might have. I dig back through the briefcase containing the packed away photos. The caller sends photos of Dad preaching from an ammunitions box on the freshly-cut cane fields following the invasion of Saipan. I shudder and wonder how he could preached the gospel from a Bible on a cartridge box.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
The next day I serve as a chauffeur for a an aging friend going shopping for a recliner for his ailing wife now in memory care at a retirement facility. I provide the wheels. He does the shopping for the right chair that will help his wife recline and rise to a near standing position at the push of a button. We come back to visit with her in the memory care center. She greets us both warmly, as she always has. I tell her I’m retiring. She responds: “You’re going to love it; and you’re going to hate it.”
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Life does both things. It makes us tremble; and it draws us to itself. The Mystery beyond all controlling inspires both trembling and ultimate attraction.
We’re all driving blind. We are all, like Moses, peering out from the cleft in the rock. We do not get to see God face-to-face. We see God’s glory from the back, and that’s good enough for me.
For a poem to sing
must it be in a song?:
Is a melody needed
beyond a mere drone?
Can the words on a page
create true harmony?
Are duets possible
realistically?
I cannot write
a round, a round.
A canon cannot
make one sound.
Each syllable makes just one note:
no melisma in poet’s throat…
to find one’s voice
amid the cacophony
of post-industrial, technological
society (with advertisements
POPPING UP everywhere)
is difficult enough without
hoping to be the J.S. Bach
of modern literature
One line at a time,
No need for a rhyme:
One chirp from a bird
is worth being heard.
Go to a concert for
polyphony.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 19, 2014
The highway is straight
and smooth, only one lane
in each direction…
no barrier in the center,
no guard rails on the sides…
nighttime, no white lines
mark the edges of the road…
no streetlights…
all that can be seen
is the oval puddle of light
from the headlights
of my speeding car.
I jerk awake as I feel
the left tires bounce
on the shoulder of the road…
I have crossed
the wrong lane…I know
my wife is beside me, but
I cannot open my eyes…
I cry out, but her seat belt
holds her too tightly
for her to reach the wheel…
my eyes open for one second,
then all is dark again…
I cannot stay awake…
I whimper and shudder.
The terror remains
even after I realize
we are in our own bed
and I have been dreaming.
– Steve Shoemaker, October 17, 2014
This came to our attention this morning. As the proud father of a gay son and as a pastor now free to officiate at same-sex weddings, this Comedy Central video had me doubled over. Enjoy.
the decision to retire November 7, this sermon by guest preacher Tabitha Isner last Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill convinced me my time is up. Wonderful sermon.
The football guys wear yoga pants,
The B-ball boys show skin and tats,
We each comb out our beard,
Or grow mustaches weird,
So women know we’re such cool cats.
– Steve Shoemaker, October 16, 2014
“How can we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?” Psalm 137:4
This is not our city
This is not our land
These are not our people
Those are not our words
Your songs are not our songs
Your food is not ours
These clothes do not fit us
Those trees have strange shapes
This water has an odd taste
This dirt is not good soil
Our families are far away
Is God still with us
– Steve Shoemaker, October 15, 2014
It may have been the National
Cathedral–it was some great pile
of stones, some high Episcopal
Church where little me was the pale
imitation of a real Priest
for the day. I could not find pants,
or robe, and that was just the least
fatal of my embarrassments.
I did not have the words to say
for Mass, for Holy Communion —
my mind had left to go and play
in some old grade school reunion.
“Just take this bread,” I said, “and eat.
Remember Jesus–have a treat!”
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 14, 2014
Views from the Edge 