To Eat the Stars   
Jan K. Nielsen

“Who’s in charge?”
Not I, life reminded me again last weekend.
My flight into Newark had been delayed,
so I wasn’t too surprised when I got there
to be told that the flight to Hartford also would be delayed.    
But after we finally took off,
I was surprised, just about landing time,
to hear the pilot tell us
that we wouldn’t be landing in Hartford
and that, instead, we would be flying back to Newark.    
Something about a problem with the landing gear,
not a safety issue, but the maintenance crew was in Newark,
not Hartford, so we were turning around and going back.  
The pilot added that he wasn’t sure
just what the plans were to get us back to Hartford.  
Not good news for the spirits of that tired bunch of travelers.  
This was around midnight.  It had been a very long day.
You could feel the tension level double, maybe triple.  
“Who’s in charge here?” demanded one of the passengers.
I thought to myself:  “None of us, that’s for sure.”  
About three and half hours later,
we made it to Hartford,
tired, some of us a little cranky,
but all of us safe and sound.
Our reminder that we were not in control
was only a detour in our journey, a minor inconvenience,
a slightly bizarre, somewhat funny story
-- funny now, not then --
but not a path changing, life altering event.

There have been other times when life has taught me
that I am not in control,
times when life did change, forever,
like when I lost my parents,
and when I lost a baby to a miscarriage.  
Maybe you, too, have known times
when the unexpected happened and,
in an instant,
nearly everything changed.
Life sometimes requires us to make unplanned changes.
A job ends.
We leave behind all that is familiar
and move to a place where we know no one.
Or dear friends move away, and we see them rarely, if ever.    
People get sick in body or spirit
and don’t get well very fast, or at all.    
Someone we love dies.   
“Things shouldn’t be so hard,” writes the poet Kay Ryan.
“Things shouldn’t be so hard.”    

Nothing we do, however smart,
nothing we can buy, however precious,
can insulate us from the fact that there are things in life,
lots of them,
that are beyond our control.
Life will never be predictable, always orderly,
a fixed state of being.  
“Nothing we acquire,” writes Sharon Salzberg,
“. . . will put conditions under our command.
 . . . . No matter how much we want it to be otherwise
the truth is that we are not in control
of the unfolding of our experiences.
Despite our search for stability and prediction,
for the center of our lives to hold firm,
it never does.   
Life is wilder than that – a flow we can’t command or stave off.
We can affect and influence and impact what happens,
but we can’t wake up in the morning
and decide what we will encounter and feel
and be confronted by during the day.”

Right now, in our nation, and in our world,
we are living this truth.
We continue to be bombarded by hard, scary economic news.
There’s no escaping it.
It’s affecting nearly all of us.  
Some of us have lost jobs.  
Worry and anxiety are running high,
and so is fear.  
It was seventy six years ago this week
that Franklin Delano Roosevelt told this country
that “ . . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  
As if the news of lost jobs
and dwindling investments weren’t enough,
some of us face still other challenges in our lives,
challenges that would cause any of us,
at least in private, to feel afraid.  

When life leads us to realize that we are not in control,
fear is our first response.  
Fear is human,
neither wrong nor bad,
but if we let it, fear can get in the way of living.  
“Fear . . . ,” Sharon Salzberg tells us,
“limits our options, strangles creativity,
restricts our vision of what is possible. . . .
Being alive, (she says) necessarily means
uncertainty and risk,
times of going into the unknown.  
If we withdraw from the flow of life, our hearts contract.  
We hold back so much
that we feel separate from our own bodies and minds, separate from other people,
even people we really care about. . . . .
(F)ear shuts us down, arrests the life force.  
To be driven by fear is like dying inside.”    

This is another one of those sermons
to let your thoughts go where they will,
to let my voice drift in and out,
as you look into your soul.
Here, in these days just before the coming of spring,
look out these tall, clear windows
and let the wisdom of the birch trees speak to your soul.  

Think now about your life.  
When has fear held you back,
shut you down, frozen your heart?  
What did you miss?
Where did you not go?
What did you not do?
Whose heart did you not touch?
How much of life did you let go unlived?
What in you died because of fear?

And when was it different?
Think about the times you knew fear,
but you didn’t stop.  
When have you kept on, despite your fear,
and walked through your fears into the light of the new day?  
What made the difference between holding back
and walking forward?  
And what about now?
Is there fear in your heart?
How will you respond?

As long as we are alive, we will know fear.
Fear is part of life,
but we don’t have to let it take over and drive our lives.
We may not have control over all that happens,
and as they say, “Stuff happens,”
or as some would say,
“Compost happens,”
but we can choose how we respond when life brings fear.
Faith, says Sharon Salzberg, is a life affirming response to fear.
Faith can allow us to face our worst fears
without letting our fears drive our lives
and suck the life out of our souls.

“Faith” is one of those words, though,
that can cause us to stumble.  
Maybe we think of “faith”
as something we either have or don’t have,
and if we don’t think we have it,
we might feel like a spiritual failure.
Or maybe when we hear the word
we think of “blind faith,”
as in unthinking acceptance of a rigid doctrine.  
It was these words from Frederick Buechner
that first opened my eyes to a new way of looking at faith.
“Faith is a verb, not a noun,” he says,
“a process, not a possession.”  

In both Latin and Hebrew, the word for faith is a verb,
an action.
The same is true in Pali,
the language of the original Buddhist texts.
“The Pali word usually translated as faith, confidence or trust,” writes Sharon Salzberg,
is “Saddha.  Saddha literally means ‘to place the heart upon.’
To have faith is to offer one’s heart or give over one’s heart.”

To what will you give your heart?
We are in the season of Lent,
those forty days before Easter,
a time in the Christian tradition to look into our souls,
and ask questions of the heart.
To what will you give your heart?
Will you give your heart over to fear?
Or will you give your heart over to life and to love?
Life is uncertain.
When stuff happens and change is upon us
we can either let fear freeze our hearts
or we can open our hearts in faith.

When one door closes, we can choose to lie down frozen in fear
or we can choose to stand up and walk on
with our hearts and eyes wide open to life’s unfolding journey.  
When life calls us to do something new,
something we’ve never done before,
we can hold back in fear
or we can walk on with an open heart.   
The open heart is the way of faith.   
“(Faith),” Sharon Salzberg teaches,
“means feeling our fear
and still remaining in touch with our heart,
so that fear does not define our entire world,
all we can see or do or imagine.”    
The open heart says “yes” to life.   
Remember Mary Oliver’s words:
“ . . . if the doors of my heart ever close,
I am as good as dead.”  

When we say “yes” to life,
when, despite our fears,  we give our hearts to life,
we make room in our hearts for love –
love for others, love for ourselves, love for life itself.
Living with faith
is like working our spiritual muscle, our heart,
so that we have greater capacity for love.
Living with faith, in the words of Sharon Salzberg,  
“gives our capacity for love a chance to flower.”      
A couple of weeks ago, I heard one of my colleagues,
Marilyn Sewell,  
reflect on her years in the ministry
as she prepares to retire in May.  
Listen to her words:  
“In my years of living,
I have discovered something
that comforts me in this leave-taking.  
There is one principle
which holds true in romantic relationships and friendships,
in professional ties,
and sometimes even in the more casual encounters
in this world,
and that principle is this:
where love has blossomed, by accident or intent,
love will stay.  
We lose people for all kind of reasons.  
Sometimes we grow apart from those we love.  
Sometimes we move far away.  
Those we love die.   . . . .
But what we have given,
every kind gesture, every encouraging word,
all of us, the one to the other, will remain.”  

 “Where love has blossomed, by accident or intent, love will stay.”
Those words match my deepest experience.
One thing I know in my bones and in my soul
is that the love I have been given over time
has never died.
I could name names,
and I can see the faces of those who have given love to my life,
and I am sure you can, too.
Take a minute now to see their faces,
to whisper their names in the silence of your heart.
Say thank you and send your love in return.   
Our bodies may die in an instant,
but the love we have given and received will remain.  
I believe that love is stronger than death.
As Scripture teaches, “Love never fails.  Love endures.”

Life gives us a choice.
We can let fear freeze our hearts,
take over our lives and keep us on the sidelines of life.
Or we can live with faith,
with our hearts and eyes open to life.
Living with faith pulls us off the sidelines;
it is active, something we do with our souls.
Each time we choose to live with faith,
we rise up and, in Sharon Salzberg’s words,
“we (leap) directly
into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential.”  

When I want to remind myself
what it means to live with faith,
I carry in my heart a vision.
I turn to the image painted for us by the poet.
I imagine us out under a big night sky.
We look up.
We see the stars in the heavens in all their glory.  
We feel all the love we have ever known,
or ever will know, shining down on us.
And then we whisper “yes.” “Yes.”
We rejoice in this chance to be alive and to love.  
We rejoice in life, in all its sorrow, in all its joy, in all its glory.
And then we eat.
We follow the wisdom of the poet:
“Eat.  Swallow.  Absorb . . . let the heart
Rejoice.
What other need now
Is possible to you but that
Of seeing life as glory?”  

The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
March 8, 2009