We are in the season of pivotal moments—spring, graduation, Memorial Day when we remember those who have died in service of the country, endings and beginnings. Big and small moments mark the times of our lives, touchstones. “I remember that,” we say—“It was the year of the big storm, It started when he graduated and left home. It was right after grandma passed. It was the year nine eleven happened.” Sometimes these events are big and pivotal and sometimes just instances, a glance or conversation, and the changes they invite seem small, but underneath, they whisper a bigger significance and may open us to realities unseen and unexpected.

It was the afternoon of Mother’s Day at the grocery store. The young man bagging my purchases said, “So do you have children?” “Yes,” I responded, “I’m blessed with a fabulous daughter.” “Well, happy Mother’s Day!” his smile reached his bright brown eyes. I said, “Will you see your mother today?” “Yeah, I’m taking her out to eat when I get off work, but I’ve not gotten her anything yet.” “Oh, not to worry,” I said, “I bet just having you was her best gift ever.” He stopped for a long moment, holding the squash and carrots aloft in his hand, a look of wonder on his face. “yeah,” he said sweetly, slowly, sincerely. “I think I am her best gift. I’ve really tried to make her glad she had me.” It made me smile all the rest of the day to think of how beautiful he looked in that moment of seeing that he was beloved, his mother’s son. I breathed a whisper of gratitude that I got to be a witness.

I call these events or realizations, surprising spiritual awarenesses (or SSAs because we are at UCG where everything has its own personal acronym.)—middle of your regular life moments when you experience realities that are beyond, below the surface.
The one that Isaiah describes in the Scripture reading for today is big. It was the year King Uzziah died when he sees something metaphysical—beyond what others were seeing around him. God on a throne, angels around, the hem of the heavenly garment filling the temple with its flowing and its fire and angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of glory.”

4 The house shook and filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and yet my eyes have seen God!” 6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph[b] touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, let your guilt depart. 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

His SSA reminds me of that scene from the Wizard of Oz, when the true identity of the wizard is revealed to the travelers when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal a small man capable of greatness. Isaiah doesn’t have a dog’s help, as far as we know, though many of our SSAs may have included dogs as the harbingers of enlightenment, but Isaiah does see behind the curtain of his own life and of the expected worship routine and the pain of his people and sees the I AM—God– surrounded by smoke and fire and beautiful winged angels. He’s terrified because what he expects to see is God angry, all-powerful, and about to incinerate him like what happens to the Nazis when they start messing with Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, a strange thing happens. In addition to the mystery and the beauty of the angels and the holy, holy, holy, in Isaiah’s vision God asks for help in the doing of justice and the practice of kindness. God inquires, “Who will go for us to do this good work?” and Isaiah says, “Pick me! Pick me!” and then I imagine him going out of the temple and into the brightness of his ordinary day, shaking his head and wondering, “what just happened?”

Echoing Isaiah, the poet Michael Coffeey envisions “God’s Bathrobe,” the train of the holy pink garment floating down and into the world, infusing the mundane and the broken and the poignant and tiny and momentous and ecstatic events of this existence with filaments, threads of mysterious sacredness.

God sat Sunday in her Adirondack deck chair reading
the New York Times and sipping strawberry lemonade
her pink robe flowing down to the ground

the garment hem was fluff and frill
and it spilled holiness down into the sanctuary into the cup
and the nostrils of the singing people

one thread trickled loveliness into a funeral rite
as the mourners looked in the face of death
and heard the story of a life truer than goodness

a torn piece of the robe’s edge flopped onto a war
in southern Sudan and caused heartbeats to skip
and soldiers looked into themselves deeply

one threadbare strand of the divine belt
almost knocked over a polar bear floating
on a loose berg in the warming sea

one silky string wove its way through Jesus’ cross
and tied itself to desert-parched immigrants with swollen tongues
and a woman with ovarian cancer and two young sons

you won’t believe this, but a single hair-thin fiber
floated onto the yacht of a rich man and he gasped
when he saw everything as it really was

the hem fell to and fro across the universe
filling space and time and gaps between the sub-atomic world
with the effervescent presence of the one who is the is

and even in the slight space between lovers in bed
the holiness flows and wakes up the body
to feel beyond the feeling and know beyond the knowing

and even as we monotheize and trinitize
and speculate and doubt even our doubting
the threads of holiness trickle into our lives

and the seraphim keep singing “holy, holy, holy”
and flapping their wings like baby birds
and God says: give it a rest a while

and God takes another sip of her summertime drink
and smiles at the way you are reading this filament now
and hums: It’s a good day to be God

Stories of surprising spiritual awareness happen all through sacred legends of many world religions. The encounters are often life-altering, not always happy, but resulting in enlightenment or healing or a shift in moral direction—Siddhartha under the banyan tree. Mohammed’s vision in the cave of Hira, Paul on the road to Damascus, St Francis with the leper. Big bodacious times, or plain everyday moments you and I experience—that time someone said something, those days alone in the mountains or looking at this art up here made by our children or in the hospital room with the dying or the last time you saw sunrise at the beach. And in nearly every story, big or small, the participant is awed to one degree or another by the mystery, the unexplainable presence of something, someone, an epiphany. I invite you to remember your own little or big encounters, to tell the stories to someone else today. We might not call them SSA’s (surprising spiritual awareness) but you could.

When have you been offered surprising spiritual awareness? Lately? Early in your life but not recently? Feeling not that spiritual generally, weighed down by the pain of the world or your own life, and need a moment? Suggestions—church, sangha, synagogue, mosque, wetlands, with children and olders and oh, the farmer’s market. Surprising spiritual awareness available at the farmer’s market. Regularly. Saturday I was walking along with my bags and trying not to buy a pastry and minding my own business, really. Like, not being present at all, just ruminating about the latest affront to Earth and all humanity being perpetrated, those lost and alone, I was complainy and grumpy when I had this thought, not exactly a voice, but sort of. In an instant: “Show up at the farmer’s market,” it said. “Look where you are. Every now and then, awareness.” I stopped walking and tried to breathe and to show up at the farmer’s market. I felt dizzy with gratitude instantly. We have a farmer’s market. More than one, even. Farmers and growers and artisans and the evidences of hard work and creativity and hope–all partnering up with the miracles of sunshine and rain and soil. There were booths bountiful with delicious healthy foods of reds, yellows, purples, greens, and browns. For an instant, I forgot to be worried about the state of everything else. It was like a free vacation, like a holy thread of the godly bathrobe was blowing in the wind–there was no violence or death or poverty or pain—and just like the old song says, there were friends shaking hands, saying how do you do, they’re really saying, I love you. All colors and kinds of people, happy in the sunshine. A child pulling fat blueberries from a cup, holding one aloft in wonder. A cancer survivor in a ball cap, another in a wheelchair. A farmer talks enthusiastically for a time about the onions, waving their green tops for emphasis. A man with curly hair shuffles to a place by the Indian food with a stool and speaker and keyboard. And oh, when he touches the piano keys, everyone knows–he has the music in him, an accomplished classical pianist. First, my favorite Pachelbel’s Canon rising and falling, and putting chills down my spine and then he plays “To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go,” and others stop to listen. I am witness to their peace and his and mine. I think of those who have run where the brave dare not go. Here and everywhere. I remember the question, “Whom shall I send?”

Surprising spiritual awarenesses have at least two parts: one, the moment of awe, the sudden intake of breath—either stunned or joyful—and followed by an invitation to respond with one’s own participation, even if it is to be present to what is and to notice. As Annie Dillard puts it in our Call to Worship—to witness our generation and times, to watch the weather, so that creation is not playing to an empty house, and to bring ourselves to it, to participate. You or I may not call SSAs God, but there are moments of awe and they invite us to notice, to be enlightened, to participate in the world. What if you are in the midst of centering prayer, or doing tai chi or meditation or taking a meal to someone, or dealing with the diagnosis, or playing with children or catching up on some paperwork or sitting in the twilight, and you were to see beneath, to know you are known, held, and beheld? Rediscover mystery and hope, the inside of you, this summer, the all of you, the brokenness and pain of you and the gifts and grace and life in you, and what it, our hearts respond in gratitude, with interest and car,e with love and assent, with thanksgiving, and even joy? Let us pray: May the holiness flow and awaken us, body and soul, to feel beyond the feeling and to know beyond the knowing. Amen.

Benediction: John O’Donohue
Awaken to the mystery of being here and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from and may you have the courage to speak out for the excluded ones. May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging. May the sore of your grief turn into a well of seamless presence. May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one. Amen.

Isaiah 6:1-8

May 27, 2018

Shelly Wilson