I started writing this sermon last week while I was with the UCG team on spiritual pilgrimage in Ireland. My computer was perched on the window sill facing the mountains in the sweet sitting room of the house where we were staying in County Sligo. A cup of tea steeped nearby.  The rain poured down outside the window. Wrapping my cold fingers around the cup, I remembered again why I love living in a place where in June I do not have to wear a flannel shirt, pullover sweater, heavy jeans, fleece, and a raincoat. Shivering and feeling a little distracted, I looked away from the blinking cursor on the screen, then out at the mist, and then around the room. On the wall to my right, hanging at a somewhat jaunty angle as though sideswiped by a shoulder, was a grainy black and white photo of our hostess’s birth family. Everyone is dressed for Mass and posed carefully on the steps of the parish church, the eight children arranged in ascending rows that begin evenly and shoulder to shoulder on the bottom step but fan out into meandering clumps in the rows above. The parents are smiling in their Sunday best and along with most of the children, are gazing straight into the camera. The eldest children look gaunt-faced and serious; the youngest, winsome and grinning, and one little boy and one little girl are gazing off to the right expectantly as if seeing a vision, their thin faces upturned and edged in light.  It seemed to me to be a picture of what we were about in the spiritual journey—invited to look directly at what is happening around us, right into the camera, as it were, and as well, like the children in the photo, to look beyond that and into whatever mystery lies beneath. So I began to seek for such themes in the meandering time of the trip and to reflect upon my life and yours and the life of the world. Here are the three large themes I noticed and I invite you to ponder these ideas as catalysts for your soul’s wonderings as well.

The first theme I noticed is that we seemed to talk of death a lot while on the pilgrimage. 2016 is the 100^th anniversary of the Easter Uprising that ultimately led to Irish independence, and commemoration was everywhere. And on our own and apart from that, we visited a lot of graves–from the ancient passage tombs of Bru na Boinne to Omey Island’s unexcavated burial mounds to the Creggah churchyard by the O’Donohue family pub. Many of you too are fans of Father John O’Donohue, having met his writings through Sandy Reimer and others whose spirituality has been formed by his insights. We weren’t sure where John’s grave was, so our guide Frankie stopped at the pub in Fanore to ask directions. The barman came out in the twilight and said it wasn’t obvious and wouldn’t he just come along and show us himself—and so he started to run along the narrow roadway back the way we’d come. The tallest Celtic crosses or shining granite markers were not for John, of course. That would not have been his way. I reckoned we could have found it, after all, for it was the only grave with a ragged wooden board with a faded placard, a tiny stone cross, and from pilgrims everywhere, notes, journals, tokens, gifts, and the colored ribbons that often mark Irish holy sites. Live flowers and scrubby bracken grew, planted on the grave. In the growing twilight, like so many who’ve come there before us and will show up after us, we drank in the light and the mountains and the sea in silent thirst, then read his poetry aloud and prayed. And I kept thinking about what he said in one of his last interviews, “if you can keep some kind of little contour of beauty and connection to the land and sea and sky, so that you can glance sideways at it now and again, you can endure great bleakness.” Again there it was–the reminder of the portrait in the sitting room—in the challenge of daily existence, to look with courage at what is and glance sideways at the contour of mystery and beauty to remind us and to help us to endure the bleakness. Life and death, swirling together. Despair and hope, always inviting us.

The second theme was that of questioning, seeking truth, and finding common ground as the pathway to peace. In Dublin everywhere were rainbow flags flying over public buildings and flapping from the windows of row houses. Scrawled in chalk on the side of a building in the country town Doolin was written, “We are Orlando.” In Derry up in Northern Ireland, we wept with our guide as we pondered the long lasting effects of the 30 years of horrific sectarian violence there during the Troubles. We asked questions about the hard work of reconciliation that continues with great hope and progress there and in pockets all over the world. And yet and still, we journeyed, and there was the peace of the Earth, the glory of the sea and the beauty of connection with each other and people around us, AND in the midst of it, Brexit happened to the European Union and Elie Wiesel, the living and vocal witness for the dead of the Holocaust, died in New York, and we spoke of gun laws that have not been changed, and black and brown bodies who continue to be murdered with state sanctioned impunity. We spoke of violence and death, of remembrance and questions and truth-telling, of the tumult of our time, of the uncertainty in our own souls, of what it takes to make a revolution of change and to put back together broken trust after years upon years of repression– in Ireland, in Gainesville, in our families and within ourselves and the hope of how we might make a new future way together. In his book Night, Wiesel quoted his friend, Moshe: “every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself. And I pray to the God within me that he will give me the strength to ask the right questions.”  To ask the right questions of history, of our own time, of God, of ourselves, of each other, of our unjust systems and leaders, and culture is to tear open the space and push the power for change. Remember the dead, ask the right questions.

And the third theme that arose and actually surrounds the other two is what John O’Donohue called Presence. In the Exodus story, Moses comes down from the mountaintop after a cloudy confab with the I AM, empowered with the law–the Ten Commandments on tablets and his inner being so changed by mystery that his face shines with a radiance so bright that the usual view will not do, but in the story he promptly covers it with a veil. It is a remarkable metaphor–no one in the story has trouble gazing on the tablets of the Law. In the story and now, too, the Law is essential, the answers to the questions of how we will make justice begin to form in the legislative process , but in the story, pretty quickly, in anger and fear, Moses himself smashes the tablets and the whole group breaks the laws. In the story, it is radiance, the mystery of the Presence of God, of Life that changes Moses from the inside out. We must have just Law, Laws that protect and invite life for all are essential, but the horrific injustices of our time only will change, I believe, when the Laws are coupled with a change of heart and mind—the realization of presence—the holiness and mystery inherent in the life of the beloved creation, the holiness and mystery inherent in black lives that matter. The heart knowledge that the value of each life is bigger than the pain, the fear, the sides to take, the short term, the majority culture, the lock-step, the binaries, the pat answer—that is when the shining radiance of true humanity can be realized. Laws must be changed, but to my mind, it is also a spiritual task to which our lives are dedicated—we must have a change of heart.

After Ireland, I’m working on my spiritual practice in these three themes. I want to remember the dead, to ask the right questions, and to live in the presence, to look squarely at what is and to gaze behind into what can be. In the midst of this summer, whatever it is bringing for you, I invite you to discover a pause in the busyness to become present to yourself. I invite you to spend moments remembering the dead—your past experiences, those gone before you, the lives and lessons that have helped form your understanding of life, and to remember our collective dead, the injustice that kills people and possibility every hour of every day. May we be unable to relax in the memory of all those faces of the holocausts of the past and those of our present and may it be that the remembrance pushes us to a relentless insistence on justice for all. I invite you to ask the right questions of your own life, in your own situations—questions that will invite you and others in your life to discover deeper meaning given the realities you have right now, in front of you. Some of us are in a place of strength. Some of us are in places of devastation and pain. May we be for ourselves, for one another, and for the world, sources of powerful questions and healing answers. And may we be fully alive in the presence so that whatever of the bleakness we see unfolding in front of us will be informed by the beauty and the mystery of the presence within and between us

I close with the words of John O’Donohue; how could I do otherwise? May this prayer be realized in us:

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 become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.

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 warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one.

Amen.