The Greatest Gift
Jan K. Nielsen

We never know where we will find our wisdom.
Last week, I found wisdom in an airport –
or maybe wisdom found me.
I grew up around airports and planes;
my mother, the pilot, often said flying was “in her blood.”
So for me, a plane trip seems almost as routine as a car trip,
except that commercial flights, as we know, have become,
well – a hassle, at best.  
Everyone, it seems, is tense and in a hurry
and people can be less than kind to one another.
In the past, we’ve laughed together
as I’ve shared with you my wild stories of long delays,
cancelled flights
and planes that couldn’t seem to land.

Some of you know that last week I flew to Kansas City
to be with my mother’s family as my cousin,
who is like a sister to me,
buried her husband.  
When I got the call, I knew I had to go;  
Ruthie needed me to lead the service.
So I got myself to the airport
and braced myself
for the typical travails of air travel these days.  
Connections between Hartford
and my cousin’s corner of Missouri aren’t the best,
so I ended up flying to Kansas City,
a three hour drive from the town where I needed to be.
It was a short stay,
but filled with tears, laughter, and stories from long ago.  
After a service on Friday, I was back on the road
before dawn on Saturday to catch my flight home.  
As we said good-bye,
Ruthie and I lingered in the driveway a little longer
than either of us realized.
And then the three hour drive took a little longer
than I had planned.

Though I usually arrive at airports plenty early,
I was running late.   
That’s never good,
but on that day I really needed to get back home.
As I neared the airport,
I had resigned myself to spending Saturday night
in the Kansas City airport.
I also realized I was carrying a load of grief
heavier than I had let myself admit.
Not only had I buried one of my family,
but we here in the congregation
had also shared a week of grief and loss.  

I berated myself for running late,
and prepared for the consequences.  
I assumed the airport people would be pretty tough
and cut me no slack.
I assumed wrong.  
From the time I stepped out of the rental car
to the time I touched ground in Hartford (on time, by the way)
I was treated with nothing but kindness.
People went out of their way to help me with my bags.
A kind and good humored sky cap
got me on a flight I had no right to expect to catch.  
Even the security people joked with me
and helped me with my stuff.  (Unheard of, right?)

No one knew what my week had been like.    
No one knew I had just led a family funeral
or that I would return home to lead more services.  
No one knew I was grieving.
No one even knew I was a minister.
For all the sky cap knew,
I was just another “crazy lady from Connecticut” –
you know the type, always in a hurry, always on the run.
On a hard day, the unwarranted kindness of strangers
was a balm for my hurting soul,
and I was grateful.    
 
“We never know the burden another carries,”
I said just a few Sundays ago.   
Everyone you meet carries a heavy load,
the saying goes, so be kind.  
Simple kindnesses can make all the difference.    
My experiences in Kansas City
reminded me this week
of these words from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“Every human interaction offers you
the chance to make things better or to make things worse.  
To decide to make things better
can cost you bundles of self-interest.  
To decide to make things worse
generally feels a lot more powerful.  
The only problem is
that the power rolls away from you like a rogue wave,
as the person you slammed into finds someone else
to slam into,
and so on, and so on.  
The good news is that you can set off
the same sort of chain reaction with unwarranted kindness.  
Kindness is not a bad religion,
 no matter what name you use for God.”

There is, of course, more than one name for God.
Some of us here call God by many names
and yet, at the same time,
we can find the sacred too large for any name.  
Others in our world claim,
sometimes without a trace of kindness,
that theirs is the one true religion,
and theirs the one true name for God;
still others claim just as adamantly,
and sometimes just as unkindly,
that no religion can be true.

“Truth” is our worship theme for October.
What is truth, and where can we find it?
We live in a world where truth
can be hard either to find or to define.
We’ve come to understand over the past fifty years or so
that what we once thought of as “Truth” with a capital “T”
is neither concrete nor definitive, but instead,
complex, multi-faceted and often relative.
Some of us now think of “truth” with a small “t.”  
We’ve come to understand
that what any one of us claims as our truth
is limited by the scope of our vision
and the range of our experiences.

When it comes to religion and the spiritual life,
we might be tempted to conclude
that there is no abiding truth,
no eternal truth.
Without any central truth,
we might think that religion and the spiritual life
is just about picking and choosing
whatever philosophy or practice
seems to “feel good”
and fit into our lives without too much effort.
This thinking won’t get us very far.
An easy “feel good” approach to the spiritual life
is not the path to the Holy, or to any sort of enlightenment,
or to God,
however we might understand that word.     

Life does offer us abiding, eternal truths
to guide the life of the soul.
We won’t find either those truths or our God, though,
by staying in our heads
and trying to think our way to spiritual truth.  
We have to look to our hearts.
This is not to say that we don’t need to use our minds,
as we make our way along the soul’s journey.  
We do need to think and study, to question and learn.  
The life of the mind, though,
is not the opposite of the life of the heart.
To live deeply and fully the gift of this life,
we need to use both mind and heart.

“The surest path to God is to follow not the logic of our minds
but the logic of our hearts,”
writes the late Forrest Church.
Some of you may know that Forrest died ten days ago
after serving as minister
of the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church
in New York City for 30 years.
Yesterday, the congregation gathered to celebrate
his life at a memorial service.
In his last book entitled,
Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow,
he writes about his own journey with cancer
and the knowledge
that his time here on earth was coming to an end.   

“We are born into a great mystery,” he writes.    
“We die into a great mystery.  
In between –
in that little dash between the dates on our tombstone –
what we know of God we learn from love’s lessons. . . .    
When love dwells in our hearts, we dwell in God’s presence.”

“What we know of God we learn from love’s lessons . . . .
When love dwells in our hearts, we dwell in God’s presence.”
After five decades of living,
I know this to be true.
What I know of God,
I have learned from being in relationships with others.
Relationships can be hard and messy,
joyful and life giving,
but we begin to know God
when we open our hearts to another.   
What I know of God,
I have learned in a long-term marriage
with my wonderful husband and best friend.
What I know of God,
I have learned from our children, from my mother and father,
from friends, teachers, and sometimes complete strangers.
(Sometimes I have even learned about God
from rude and annoying people in airports!)   
And what I know of God,
I have learned from so many of you –
listening to your stories, watching you live with courage.
What I know of God,
I have learned at bedsides and by the side of someone taking a final breath.  
I know this to be true:
“When love dwells in our hearts, we dwell in God’s presence.”
This is my truth.

“ . . . (W)e almost never know
when our last conversation with those dearest to us will be,”
Forrest Church wrote in a letter to his congregation in August.
“Death,” (he continues) may approach silently
on tiny cats' paws
or sweep our loved ones (or us) away like a thief in the night.
Hence, with our loved ones especially,
we should never squander the opportunity
when signing a letter,
before setting the phone back in its cradle,
or, from the kitchen or bedroom
before the front door slams shut,
of writing, speaking or shouting out, ‘I love you.’”

In the past month, I have had the privilege
of leading several memorial services.
It is the most important work I do.
And in the past month,  
I’ve been saying “I love you” to our kids
even more often than before.    
Maybe they find it annoying.  I don’t care.  
I want to make sure I tell the people who matter most
of my love for them.
And that includes all of you – this congregation.  
I have thought to myself again and again over these past weeks
how blessed I am to serve as one of your ministers.  
And so I will end this sermon by saying,
“I love you.”

The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
October 3, 2009