Morning Meditation (What The Bats Told Me)

“How we long for morning!” is what coffee sings To us with aromatic melodies. How tissue soft it is; how cat-like it stretches, This colorful ribbon that is worn around the Neck of the day. We remember things: like how to throw a curve ball – Toothy seams touching fingers callused by rawhide. Like a curveball, the day spins away from us, Once it is released, once it is pitched. Morning is the empty glass bottle, all angles And curves that sits with the patience of a garden, Wild with the kind of wanting that we do not Usually carry around in our wallets Like pictures of our family. Desirous as a hairpin that needs to control; Searing as dry ice in its stillness; As insistent as a cell phone. Even the bats above, turning in for the day, know That light has a serrated edge like a quarter With which it tries to grip the slippery dark And push it down. We may doubt everything else about our lives But never how the morning is ours – How we belong to it – How right it is to love the felt part of the day Before it turns on us. M C Biegner 9/2004

Daylight

Shade moving freely, as quiet as oil, I thought it was you for one long moment. It held lust and rage just like you did once, Now it holds surrender the way summer Air holds moisture. It seems we would not be Able to save each other like we thought We could. Our new worlds drawn out in crayon, We drew all the fantasies we would need. We made play, like children. Still, as newborns, We sought relief in cool, shifting shadows. Until daylight wore us down with the strength Of Tidal fingers sculpting a beachhead. Until we peered over the water’s edge And recognized who it was that we were, And to whom we ultimately belonged. M C Biegner 6/28/06

dad, carole king and autumn

The girl opens the front door to her house a crack. The toes of her small bare feet are on the colder metal door frame and her heels rest on the warmer wood floor of the house. It is fall. The leaves have started to change from a duller shade of green to sharper shades of yellow and orange. But it is still early enough in the season that the cold bite of the air is surprising to her cheeks warm and flushed from the prancing and leaping and turning, the grande jete-ing and pirouetting that she had been doing throughout the house just moments before. Her dad’s favorite evening-time music—Carole King’s Tapestry album is playing on the stereo in the living room next to where she stood. Some nights he would push the coffee table to the side of the room and take her fairy princess ballerina hands in his big dad hands and pull her onto their dance floor. She liked to stand on his feet and dance to songs like “I Feel the Earth Move” and “Smackwater Jack.” Sometimes her mom would come in with her brother after dinner was in the oven and she had some time for dancing. Then they would all rock their hips and snap their fingers and all sing along. This particular evening the girl’s mom had taken her little brother and sister for a ride in the car while she did some errands. And the dad wasn’t dancing or even sitting and reading the paper in the living room like he liked to do on Sundays. The girl leans forward on tip toes and peeks her messy pig tailed head out the door a little further. She smells something like burning and sweet and sees her dad sitting on a chair on the front porch smoking a pipe, eyes fixed on something out somewhere in the yard in front of him.

“Daddy, Mrs. Jenson said that smoking is bad for you”

The expression on his face softens to something like amused, but his gaze doesn’t change. “She is right.”

“You just don’t care?” By now the girl has stepped out onto the cement porch, which feels warmer on the bottom of her feet than she would have predicted. She walks over to her dad and leans over, placing her elbows on arm of the chair and rests her head in her hands. Her blue denimed bottom with the flower embroidered on the back pocket sticks out behind her. She is staring intently at the big man who almost looks as if he could have tears in his eyes. He doesn’t move his head, but shifts his eyes slantways to look at his daughter.

“I care. What’s it to ya?” He smirks, teasing.

“Then why do you do it?” She stands up, hands on hips.

“Pipes are different. And I don’t smoke them all the time. I just like to sit on my porch when the seasons are changing and smoke a pipe. One of the little joys of my life.” He says that last sentence with an extra dramatic emphasis and then chuckles. The girl chuckles too.

“It does smell nice. Can I try?”

“No, But I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“When you grow up and have a house and a little girl, then you can sit on your front porch and smoke a pipe and undergo interrogation just like me.”

The girl smiles.

“What’s interrogation mean?”

“Questions.”

“Oh.” She giggles.

“Ya know, this pipe belonged to my father. When I was growing up, my father used to like a good pipe once in a while, too.” There is silence. His eyes are full with almost-tears again. The opening notes of “Way Over Yonder” can be heard from inside the house. The little girl looks down, uncomfortably. They don’t ever talk about grandpa because they don’t want to make dad sad. Grandpa died before her mom and dad even met. “Check this out.” He blows out a few smoke rings.

“How did you do that?” ”Very well.” The little girl rolls her eyes. The dad laughs from his belly, pleased with himself.

“Da-ad.”

“What?”

The girl sighs, defeated. The dad returns to looking out into the yard.

Every fall for the rest of her life, after they have spent an afternoon raking piles of leaves, she will observe her dad having at least one evening like this. Every year she’ll peak out the window and he will be sitting there, blowing smoke rings and staring out into the front yard. She will just know that he is thinking about his dad. And every year she won’t go outside and sit next to him and she wont hold his hand and ask about the grandfather she never knew.

But for now the little girl returns to the house and goes into the living room and decides to continue dancing. The perfect ballet song is playing and she moves slowly and gracefully:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue An everlasting vision of the everchanging view A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Her dad remains in solitude and silence on the porch until dark.  

Easy Planting

There are early mornings when Winter has not released its white knuckled Grip on patches of ground just yet. Still, I make a hole and clear out space in you the way A trowel removes the dark chocolate clay of earth. As I dig down further it is striped with strands of coarse Blonde sand that makes a type of coffee blend That is a luminous tint, it shines almost like ceramic. The secrets of living are always aromatic: The scents of new grasses teased out by breezes, Manicured, manured plots bulging with richness, While nearby rowdy and fragrant hyacinths urge me on The whole time. The gritty feel of you under my fingernails, The damp stains on my knees, The way my finger feels as it slides Down the carved wooden trowel: This is foreplay I tell you. The days of easy planting sustain us far beyond The ways that the hard packed snow of our failures betray us. M C Biegner 5/2006

Nerissa's Easter Sermon

Call to Worship M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because God cannot be contained M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because Jesus lives in you and me now. M: What will you do now? P: Recognize everyone I meet today as Christ in his many distressing disguises. Scripture: Tom Nields-Duffy: Luke 23: 13-49 Gail Tenney Nields: John 20:1-20; John 21: 15-17 Sermon “If You Want to Live, You Gotta Die.” When considering what I wanted to talk about on this Easter Sunday, it occurred to me that people looking for the answer to the question, “Did Jesus really die for our sins, and if so what exactly does that mean?” might not be the same people who would wander into the West Cummington Congregational church today. This is actually my first Easter here, and when I inquired about Easters past, I heard a rumor that Stephen began a sermon with the statement, “It’s a METAPHOR, people!” With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot, for the past six weeks, about resurrection as a metaphor. I’ve been thinking about life, death and rebirth; I’ve been thinking about the phase which Lent symbolizes so beautifully: the period of being planted, when we are still in the darkness of underground, hidden from the world, churning beneath the soil and metamorphosing into some new form: like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a red bud unfurling into a big green leaf. It might occur to you, looking up here at me in all my girthly splendor, that I have another reason for meditating on this topic, but we’ll leave that alone for now. I volunteered to preach the Easter sermon here, in part as a ruse to get my parents to come up for the weekend. As soon as I heard I’d been given the green light, I freaked out. My preparations for writing this sermon consisted of pondering a sentence I heard recently from an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault: “If you want to live, you’ve got to die.” Also renting all four disks of the Complete Beatles Anthology. What, you might ask, do the Beatles have to do with Easter? Being that this is West Cummington, I’m not that afraid of you coming after me for implying that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. I’m pretty sure that none of you burned your Beatles LPs back in 1966 when John Lennon made this infamous declaration. The Beatles, like Jesus, represented leadership to a group who had previously felt unseen and disenfranchised. The Beatles had a new, fresh message, of peace, love and understanding. They lived their lives-or at least their twenties-- for their music, and as George Harrison said towards the end of his life, they gave their nervous systems in service to the cause. One of them died a martyr and another was proclaimed dead, though he apparently rose again, backwards lyrics and mysterious license plates notwithstanding. But the real reason I bring the Beatles up today is because for me, born in the late sixties, they were a powerful example of humans who seemed larger than life and who lived to the fullest, never holding back, and who simply, finally, self-extinguished, like fast burning candles. And yet, they live on, even though their music is no longer in the top ten, even though half of the group is physically dead. Through the vehicle of fame and artistry, they have achieved a kind of immortality. It was easier for me as a young person to understand the Beatle myth than it was for me to understand the Christ story. They were flesh and blood to me, even though they had long stopped making music by the time I got turned on to them. One of my first spiritual experiences came after I learned that George Harrison had introduced the other Beatles to Transcendental Meditation. I took the practice on, though my version of meditating involved sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed and fantasizing about meeting all the Beatles on a desert island. Jesus, on the other hand, was a disembodied and invisible presence on our Presbyterian cross, a pastel drawing in a Sunday School book, a character in a song I didn’t like called “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” We humans, or at least this one, learn best from stories. That’s how I make sense of the world, and given the myriad stories in the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the many Buddhist parables, not to mention Greek Myths and the folk tales of every tradition on earth, I think I am not alone. Jesus himself taught through parable, or as a previous sermonizer in this pulpit suggested, koans. And as we have discussed, those stories sometimes made a lot of sense: like the story of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. But some of them are real head-scratchers: the one about the master of the vineyard who pays all the workers the same wage even though some of the workers worked from sun down to sun up while others worked for a mere hour. The one about the resourceful brides who wouldn’t share their oil with their sleepier and less on-the-ball sisters. The one from Mark about Jesus killing the fig tree just because it wouldn’t bear fruit out of season. For me, these stories begged the question: who is this Jesus and why should I worship him? And yet, funnily enough, as an adolescent I was happy to forgive the Beatles for experimenting with drugs, cheating on their wives, fighting pettily with each other about songwriting credits. That just proved they were human. Jesus was supposed to be the Son of God; some said he actually was God Himself, or at least one third of God. I wasn’t yet focused on the fact that Jesus, too, was fully human. As I grew older, my faith began to change, though my love for the Beatles did not. I began to read wonderful exegeses of the scriptures, heard sermons from different traditions about who Jesus was and what Jesus meant to do. After a very brief dalliance with Campus Crusade for Christ, I rejected the literal in favor of the literary view of Jesus. I read Elaine Pagels and dove into the Gnostic Gospels. I read Wordsworth and Emerson and wrote papers about William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, founders of the Unitarian Church. I had many arguments with fellow Christians in school about the meaning of the resurrection and whether or not we were supposed to take the Gospel as actual history (their view) or as myth and poetry (mine.) “Jesus is a radical socialist Jew!” I shouted. “Jesus came to right the wrongs of a petty, materialistic society! Jesus would weep if he saw the condition of the church today!” I pointed to the scriptures about the Pharisees, those petty pedants who missed the forest for the trees, who worried about plucking grain on the Sabbath and tried to understand God through their intellect. “God can only be known through the heart, and through direct experience!” said I, paraphrasing Emerson. The truth was, I was as guilty as they were in this respect: I was only experiencing God with my intellect. I could point out that the Bible mentioned the need to care for the poor 2000 times and homosexuality only twice. I could point out, to fans of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that Jesus abhorred it when people prayed in the streets. I could point out that the Gospels contradicted each other many times over, so how, therefore, could we take the Bible to be the literal word of God? And so on. But what I was failing to do was what I said I needed to do: see with the heart and not the mind. And more importantly, that I had to die to something if I wanted to live. I experienced the Beatles with my heart. I could also analyze their music and write scholarly papers on why they were the greatest pop band of all time. I could learn their songs note for note and memorize each of their individual discograpies. But in the end, the reason I loved them was wordless: it had to do with the way the music made me feel, especially when I lay in bed alone in my dorm room with the lights out and just listened to “Across the Universe” and “Hey Jude.” Music, like God, is ultimately an emotional experience. It wasn’t until I had a personal crisis myself that I began to experience God in this way, in the way music could reach my heart and align me, wordlessly and lovingly. I was thirty, immersed in a very ambitious music career, striving to be the next Beatles, and very sick with an eating disorder. I had tried everything to get well. I had a wonderful, gentle therapist, a supportive family, an acupuncturist, a meditation practice, about fifty books on the topic, several good friends who had been through what I was going through and a fierce determination to beat what was clearly a kind of addiction. But nothing worked, and as hard as I tried to get well, I kept getting sicker and sicker, more and more desperate and confused. What finally changed me was a kind of death, also known as surrender. I surrendered to my inability to conquer my problem alone; I surrendered to my limits as a human being, and I asked for help from Whomever was out there. I got on my knees and said a prayer, and with that prayer, a presence came; a wordless, loving, clear presence. A calm came over me, and a relationship began. I felt like Helen Keller in the last scene of the Miracle Worker: what had previously been an academic idea suddenly became direct experience. From that moment on, I could see. And what I could see was a God who loved me no matter what, a God I both recognized from the Bible as the loving father of Jesus, and-to my great surprise—as Jesus himself. And the stories in the Bible fell away at that point, seeming more like the scaffolding intending to hold the building in place as it was being built than the building itself, within which I was now dwelling. Actually, not all of the stories fell away. Some in particular remained and took on a vibrancy I had been missing previously. The many stories of Jesus healing hopelessly deformed and mutilated people began to resonate with me. As I felt myself healed, and around me saw others getting well, too, I saw first-hand the power of faith, the way God could enter a life and transform it from hopeless to joyful. And I learned a new definition of sin. In its original definition, sin meant, simply, that which separates us from God. No judgment, no shame-just separation. The absence of presence. From my meditation practice I was learning how elusive presence could be; that even as I sat diligently hour after hour, day after day, it still was like pulling teeth for me to just stay present with my breath, with myself, with that one-pointed concentration. Presence in and of itself began to feel like God, or at least the bridge between God and me. And I was playing with another definition of God. What if God was Reality? What if God was the river that flowed north to south? What if all God wanted from me was to show up and let the river carry me where it would? How would my life be transformed if I took that as my savior? That surrender to what is, and the simultaneous knowledge that no matter how bad things looked in the moment, what would never change was God’s absolute and perfect love for me? Here’s where things can get a bit soupy—I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable when speakers veer off the road of Biblical text and go cross-country with their “woo woo” experiences of God and Jesus, but I have no other way of telling this story. Like Paul, a writer with whom I have many issues, I found Jesus on my own road to Damascus and experienced him close up. Because of this I am forever changed. I was experiencing Jesus the way I experience music-wordless, timeless and the truest communication I’ve ever had. In this new view of my role and God’s role in the way life went, I grew a new perspective on the crucifixion story. For here was Jesus, someone whom I had come to know, not from the pages of the Bible, but in my own life, as a presence, a brother, a loving example of how to stay present with whatever was. As a healer, as a teacher, as a friend. I had a new perspective about the cross. I saw Jesus’s willingness to surrender to humiliation and torture as the ultimate expression of surrendering to What Is, even when What Is is grisly and inhuman and seems to be, at least to the disciples who fled the scene, the absolute worst ending to the story. But what I also know from my own experience is that if you really stay with What Is, no matter how miserable it may be, it will change, and more importantly, you will be changed. Everything dissolves eventually-everything and everyone dies- and everything-including you-is born anew. You wake up, look around you and blink and say, “how did this happen? I seem to have become transformed.” Elaine Pagel’s discussion of the Gospel Of Thomas had a huge impact on me when I was first coming into this new relationship. One of the ideas she posits is that Jesus can be interpreted as a kind of divine Twin (Thomas means Twin). As so, goes the theory, he really is both the Son of God and the Son of Man—and part of his message is to show us that we, too are sons and daughters of both God and human. To use a term coined by our modern day priests, our friends the psychotherapists, we could say that Jesus was the purest example of the Authentic Self we have yet experienced in a person who walked this earth: Jesus had such a clear understanding of reality and human nature, was always able to be himself, with no apology whatsoever, was always able to look straight ahead and walk where he needed to walk, even if that road took him across a lake near Gennesaret or up the hill to Calvary. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her wonderful analysis of the Passion story, shows how all the characters within it represent aspects of our false selves: Judas and his fear and greed and deceitfulness; Peter and his cowardice; Pilate and his ability to see the truth but unwillingness to go with it; the soldiers with their violence; the mob with its cruel taunts, and finally the thieves on either side of Jesus in the Luke version of the story. One thief says, “If you are the Son of God, get off the cross and save us too!” He joins the voices of the mob. The other thief says, “Shut up! This man is innocent, and we are guilty! Yet he dies with us!” He turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember us in the kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus turns to this thief and says, “In truth I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Today. Right now. You are with What Is and that, when we really accept it, is Paradise. And I believe one of the most crucial lessons Jesus taught us, both before his death and through his post resurrection example, is that he is within each of us and always has been. In Matthew 25:45, he says, “As you do to one of the least of these, you do to me.” After his death, he asks his disciple, “Peter do you love me? Then feed my lambs.” Pardon the Beatles pun, but the Jesus I have come to know really is within and without each of us, and I can no longer look at any individual and not see Jesus somewhere lurking within, in his distressing disguise. I still love the Beatles, although they no longer enter my life on a daily basis and teach me how to live. I tried to follow in their footsteps for years and it didn’t work. When I tried to find heaven through a number one hit and the love of a huge audience, this route made me sick, and then sicker. I guess I was a sinner, meaning I was separated from everyone else, trying to be above everyone. When I walk in the footsteps of Jesus, by which I mean when I walk my own path, understanding God through my own heart and raw experience, letting the light of God shine the way, I am well. More importantly, I have company. This is the kind of life everlasting that I believe in today.

Don't Forget The Sadness

Sadness gets mixed into everything we do, like your one tear that fell into our coffee. I think how it was the perfect miscegenation of spirit and earth for nothing is ever pure in this world, but neither is it puritanical: for we will never abdicate control! It is just the meniscus of egg white dropped into a bowl, touching the flour; it is round globes of oil which resist mixing with the opaqueness of cold milk; the separateness of these ingredients is what we overcome, making batter our mouths know is true and so inclines us to earnestly want one more piece of cake. M C Biegner 02/10/2006

Steps

I can feel the ice under my feet as I make my daily walk down Comm. Ave. I didn’t really expect this weather, just expecting a little colder air as the days wore into December. But now my feet hit hard brick and stretches of thinly crusted snow. The slippery wet leaves seem to be gone, which is rather a blessing. There are always those last few weeks of fall when the piles of leaves become dampened down by late rain, and you simply can’t trust your footing. I prefer the ice, even if the soles of my shoes lose all their softness.

I miss the smell of summer, it is so much more complex. The winter air is bracing, but it is just that; clear and cold. It lacks the subtlety of infinite life, of plants, dogs, and people. It even lacks the sounds of warm weather, the conversations, the open patios, the cars cruising by with radios hopping. In winter, I can barely sense the trees, but I know they are bare, as bare as the earth and the sky. As bare as the car windows rolled up tight. As hidden away as the passers by with their scarves wrapping half their faces. You can hear all that life pulled in tight. The winter air quickens my step, makes me feel sharp and awake, but it separates me from the world. I am on my own now to navigate the way, single steps taken on cold brick.

December 5, 2005