Tēnā koutou te whanau o Auckland Unitarian Tēnā koutou nga manuhiri,
Nau mai haere mai Haere mai ki tenei whare karakia o te Atua
Tēnā koutou, tēnā Tatou, katoa.
Welcome to this space made sacred over the last 116 years by Auckland Unitarians.
To our guests and visitors we invite you to come sit by our fire and let us share stories.
Let us hear your tales of far off lands, wanderer, and we will tell you of our travels.
Share your experience of the holy with us, worshipper, and we will tell you of that which we find divine.
Come and stay, lover of leaving, for ours is no caravan of despair, but of hope.
We would hear your stories of grief and sorrow as readily as those of joy and laughter,
for there is a time and a place and a hearing for all the stories of this world.
Stories are the breath and word of the spirit of life, that power that we name love.
Come, for our fire is warm and we have seats for all. Come, again and yet again,
come speak to us of what fills your heart, what engages your mind, what resides in your soul.
Come also to morning tea, it is our sacrament of hospitality. It won't be complete without you.
Come, let us worship together.
For my opening words I want to share with you two poems that capture our theme of the day.
The first is familiar to anyone
who has watched Four Weddings and a Funeral: WH Auden's poem entitled "Funeral Blues."
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: 'I was wrong'
The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
The second poem is less familiar but it captures the journey through grief that Auden describes
so profoundly. It is entitled, "The Five Stages of Grief" by Linda Pastan
The night I lost you someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief. Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed. Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast– you sat there. I passed
you the paper–you hid behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar. I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself. But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes and bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope flashed on and off
in defective neon. Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air. Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it. After a year I am still climbing,
though my feet slip on your stone face.
The treeline has long since disappeared;
green is a color I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters, a special headline:
Acceptance, its name in lights.
I struggle on, waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf, all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck. Acceptance. I finally
reach it. But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you.
I light the chalice this morning with these words from Kate Walker:
We open our hearts to love, yet sometimes find pain.
We open our hearts to connection, yet sometimes find loss.
We yearn for simplicity, yet sometimes find complexity.
May the light and warmth of this flame Heal our hearts, find connection
and embrace life in all its simplicity and complexity,
with love, with trust; with compassion.
In Adult Religious Education this year we are exploring how to face death in order to live.
Not surprisingly we have spent considerable time on the subject of grieving. One of the more
helpful resources we considered was a lecture entitled "Loss: The Litmus Test of a Religious Faith"
given in 1985 by John H. Nichols to bunch of Unitarians. He begins by telling of a colleague interviewing
for a new ministry. "The search committee, having read all of his best credentials, had
one concern. They said, 'You seem to speak a great deal about grief. Now, we are a youngish
congregation. We have, perhaps, four to five funerals a year, and we wonder if you have
an interest in the younger members of the congregation. In fact, to be perfectly frank,
we wonder if you haven't styled for yourself a geriatric ministry.'" Nichols goes on
to observe that this perception of the significance of grief is not limited to the young.
"An older member of my own congregation said to me once, 'You speak too much about grief.
I want to hear something uplifting on Sunday mornings. Why is it necessary to be so depressing?'"
If you feel the same about grief, and you would not be alone, I hope you will find to
your surprise that talking about grief this morning might give you a lift rather than
bring you down. You can let me know at morning tea if I have succeeded.
Like most ministers I feel most in touch with my calling when dealing with grief.
When we share grieving with our people we are facing the most moving religious issues anyone can confront.
I agree with Nichols when he argues that "a religion that cannot talk about
grief with credibility … cannot find credibility on any other subject."
Normally we associate grief with death. Certainly, there is that. I have no idea how many funerals
I have conducted. There have been a lot, but I do remember one year where I did fifty of them.
As you might imagine that was an emotionally difficult year. However, if we imagine that
we only grieve when a spouse, parent, child; close friend dies, we are not paying attention.
Grief is the experience of sadness which comes with any loss. If it were not for these, the
greater losses would be more difficult to bear.
The reward I get from preparing for our Adult RE sessions is the ample opportunity to reflect
on loss and its companion, grief, in my own life. My very first memory of life is the day my father
was struck down by polio. I was three. I can still see him trying to help me fly a kite
in our front yard and falling down repeatedly. It was a loss I could not fully comprehend
and was left scared and confused. From then on, my life was shaped by loss after loss.
We moved a lot. From Kindergarten through Year 9 I went to five schools in three different states.
By the time I was 21 my mother determined I had lived in 21 different domiciles.
Each was an occasion of loss of friends, security and a sense of my self in the world.
Each required a rebuilding of my life and finding my place. While these were small losses compared with
those I would experience later, they went a long way in preparing me to grieve the big losses.
They didn't make grief any easier but they gave me hope that I would survive the loss.
Looking back, I feel like my life has been painted on a canvas of grief. The canvas shaped,
coloured, altered and textured my life as surely as an artist's brush. Without loss
my life would look quite different. Different, but not necessarily better. Isn't that true
for all of us? Nichols points out that "people grieve when they clearly cease to have the
protections of childhood. They grieve when they go away from home for the first time.
They grieve when they have to give up their first love. They grieve when they suffer a
serious illness or injury. They grieve when they leave each stage of life for another.
People grieve when they change jobs or homes; when they leave one beloved and comfortable
community for another. For a teenager the end of an infatuation or friendship can bring
on a grief as profound and as serious as the grief which may follow the death of a grandparent.
If we minimize the grief of the young or the old, or our own grief, for whatever reason
it may occur, then we do not contribute to their strengthening and growing or to our own."
The Sufi mystic Rumi invites us to be as a "guest house" and welcome each new arrival,
even if it be a crowd of sorrows. Invite them in, Rumi says. Meet them at the door
laughing, treat each guest honourably. They may be clearing you out for some new delight.
Grief is not a welcome guest at most doors. Grief is the companion of love, to be sure,
but a hard companion. In her book Companion through the Darkness Stephanie Ericsson muses,
"Grief is a tidal wave that overtakes you, smashes you up into its darkness, where you tumble
and crash against unidentifiable surfaces, only to be thrown out on an unknown beach, bruised, reshaped."
Others experience it as a tear in the fabric of our accustomed lives that we must eventually
attempt to gather the threads of what remains to reweave a new pattern of daily life.
Treating each guest honourably, to welcome them, to invite them in is no simple task.
It is hard work. Perhaps the hardest work we will ever do. As difficult as the path
through grief is, it is the only path that exists. It reminds me of the children's
story of going on a bear hunt. In the story the child is faced with a series of obstacles.
At each one the story's refrain is, "Can't go over it. Can't go under it. Can't go
around it. Gotta go through it." "Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently
sweep your house empty of its furniture," invite them in.
But an openness to showing hospitality to our sorrows has not always been encouraged
by those in the helping professions or even those close to us. Someone else's grief
can make us very uncomfortable. Grief used to be called melancholia. It was considered
a disease by psychiatrists. The standard text on pastoral counselling that I studied in seminary was
Howard Clinebell's Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling, published in 1966. It considered
the subject of grief under the heading, "Counseling in the Crisis of Bereavement", to which
only five pages out of hundreds were devoted.
Three years later Elizabeth Kubler-Ross ushered in a new era in our understanding of grief,
with her book On Death and Dying. She opened the flood gates on research and comment on
all aspects of grief with her description of its five stages. Fortunately by the time
I went to seminary I had her work to supplement Clinebell's textbook in my study of pastoral counselling.
All this research does not suggest loss is a gift, especially when it is the death of
a loved one. Far from it. Even when death comes at the end of a long and rewarding life,
even when we see it coming, even when we know it is not a tragedy, the loss is stark.
Even when my mother died not knowing who I was after years of dementia, the grief was palpable.
From that experience I can relate to Stephen Dobyns' poem Prague.
The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had
a good life, I'd punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life?
Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo
and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann
in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking
of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much
is needed for all those unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?
Nor does the research say grief can or should be "gotten over", though people are told to get over their losses.
Michael Lee West expressed her feelings (in a southern dialect) about such messages vividly in American Pie:
"I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heart broke.
When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't
know grief from garlic grits. There's some things a body ain't meant to get over. No
I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it
never really goes away. [A death in the family] is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your
front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy.
You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy;
some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall."
Beyond the research are the reflections of the bereaved.
Holly Tanguay offers these thoughts in a sermon a year after the death of her husband:
"Loss connects us to our deepest needs: the need for shared pleasures, for touch,
for love and for meaning in our lives. Even as we yearn backwards for the treasures we
once had, grief reminds us to treasure life now and drink of it deeply.
"Any new grief also connects us to every other loss we carry. Some of those losses
may have been well mourned and stand ready to welcome a new loved one into the company
of cherished memories. Others may have left wounds not fully healed by time. The pain
of those can be newly intensified. Still others may have been sealed up without healing
at all, leaving us unaware of buried suffering that was never comforted.
"As we struggle to cope with a new tear in the fabric of our accustomed lives there
are perils and opportunities. Some of the time we must just "soldier on," cope with
settling the estate, paying the bills, mowing the lawn and caring for others and ourselves
as best we can. But, if we only soldier on, only stay positive because that is what
our loved one would want, only keep chin up and eyes on horizon, we will miss the chance
to hold and comfort ourselves, the chance to grow through our grief, developing deeper
compassion for ourselves and others, renewing our awareness of how sacred each life is,
including our own."
I have come to understand that in a world that has trouble welcoming sorrows, the church,
at its best, is a beloved community where it is safe to grieve. Safe because we welcome
as an honoured guest the sorrows at our door. Safe because we will accept that everyone
grieves, but each in their own way. Safe because we won't hurry the grieving to finish up.
Safe because we will remain present to those living with sorrow, even to our own discomfort.
Safe because we know healthy grieving leads to new life, new possibilities, even if the
bereaved can't yet see that far. Safe because we know that life gives us more than it takes away.
Amen.
For the meditation I invite you to reflect on Gordon B McKeeman's words about our
ministry in this place in the face of grief. Ministry is all that we do—Together
Ministry is that quality of being in community that affirms human dignity—
beckons forth hidden possibilities, invites us into deeper, more constant, reverent relationships,
and carries forward our heritage of hope and liberation.
Ministry is what we do together as we celebrate triumphs of our human spirit,
Miracles of birth and life, Wonders of devotion and sacrifice.
Ministry is what we do together—with one another—
in terror and torment—in grief, in misery and pain,
enabling us in the presence of death to say yes to life.
We who minister speak and live the best we know with full knowledge
that it is never quite enough… And yet are reassured
by lostness found, fragments reunited,
wounds healed, and joy shared.
Ministry is what we all do—together.
My closing words are by Robert Weston:-
I will lift up my voice and sing; Whatever may befall me,
I will still follow the light which kindles song.
I will listen to the music Arising out of grief and joy alike,
I will not deny my voice to the song. For in the depth of winter, song,
Like a bud peeping through the dry crust of earth,
Brings back memory, And creates anew the hope and anticipation of spring;
Out of a world that seems barren of hope,
Sing decries beauty in the shapes of leafless trees,
Lifts our eyes to distant mountain peaks which, Even if we see them not,
Remind us that they are there, waiting, And still calling to us to come up higher.
Out of the destruction of dear hopes, Out of the agony of heartbreak,
Song rises once more to whisper to us That even this is but the stage setting for
a new beginning, And that we shall yet take the pieces of our hearts
And put them together in a pattern
Of deeper, truer lights and shades. I will lift up my voice in song,
For in singing I myself am renewed, And the darkness of night is touched
By the promise of a new dawn, For light shall come again. Go in peace.
For more infomation >> 'Somebody's Not Telling Me The Truth Which Means I'm Wasting My Time,' Dr. Phil Tells Guests - Duration: 3:59. 
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