For many people, it’s the most wonderful time of the year–the beginning of summer and the end of the semester. The traffic patterns in town alter with the season. Grads leave town, vacations begin, milestones of all sorts are marked. What are the turning points pivoting about in your life these days? They happen constantly in our lives, I guess, but sometimes we notice them acutely and they bring us to spiritual attention. Lately I’ve been noticing that sometimes I allow my life to be one big to-do list. May you do that, too, I don’t know. I’m thinking my path to enlightenment might be best enjoyed if I’m well, actually there for my life more, and the old sweet invitation to mindfulness.

Reading the Sufi mystic Hafiz helps. Check out this little excerpt from his poem:

Awake awhile. It does not have to be forever–right now. Just one true moment of love will last for days. Rest all your elaborate plans and tactics for knowing God for they are all just frozen spring buds, far, so far from summer’s divine gold. Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.

Awake awhile sounds like something I could do, as total enlightenment over my lifetime seems daunting, so in this season of milestones and summer, I am working on observing life in and around me. Here are a few things I’ve noticed in my little circle while awake. Diane’s granddaughter Elizabeth graduated from high school. My baby Julianna turned 21.  In the families of my team in the UCG office, baby Nola turned one and there was the first anniversary of when she came home from the hospital at last. Like many of your children, Andy’s baby Remy and Catherine’s baby Ella graduated from preschool and will start kindergarten in the fall. One day recently, and without my permission, someone replaced my face—the one that I’d finally grown accustomed to seeing in the mirror—replaced it with some altered version of my mother’s, the way it looked in her twilight years. And in the space of two or three days, at different times and places, I saw some members of our youth group–Rachel, Nailah, and Olivia, separately, and all very responsibly, driving cars.  The times… they are a-changin’.

I guess they are really spread out over a lifetime, but beginnings and milestones seem to occur really close together. The hope and expectation is that many marks of progress will appear on the door jambs of our existence. The first this, the first that. And I ask you, whether you are young or old, what are some of your “firsts” you are experiencing or remembering in your life journey right now? A fetus’ first perceived movements in the womb are called “quickening,” and my experience has been that life rarely slows down from quickening, no, not at all. No matter our age or the various challenges we face, life lives in beginnings of various stripes, physical and spiritual, one fast-followed by another–learning to breathe, tottering forward and falling back, beginning to taste, to communicate, to learn all we can about the meaning of our own existence and that of others. And along the way, we learn from those who began way before us and those beginning after us, too, if we are but mindful and notice.

The quotation by T.S. Eliot reminds me they are all also endings, too, these beginnings of ours. “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”  The end of pregnancy is birth, or death. The beginning of being a mom or a dad or a caregiver for grandchildren or for a child with special needs or for a mom or a dad or a partner no longer able to be independent or beginning—oneself–to be the one in need of help—all are the end of one kind of connection and the beginning of another. Making the decision not to have children or to end a relationship, having to learn to live with chronic pain, deciding to move or to retire–all endings that lead to another beginning. And then, at the last, for all of us, will happen–the opposite of quickening. The last movement and the last half of the last breath, and then, the beginning of whatever unknown is next. And in between the quickening and the great beginning/ending, we can be awake awhile.

Being awake awhile and marking milestones while making an open space in our souls for what is can sometimes be challenging. In hard times—like if your summer will include sitting in the hospital by someone you love who is dying, or being unemployed or frustrated at work or lonely at home, or exhausted by the struggle with others for various reasons, or even just when we are busy and distracted. And my tendency, when pushed by life’s challenges is to default to my usual spiritual tools for coping with what challenges —chafing against, running away from, or jumping to action. There are times for those responses to serve well, I believe, but my personal spiritual growing edges are not lack of action, but the great need to be awake awhile so that, as Hafiz puts it, the moments of love may begin.

So, in the interest of true confession, let me tell you this—right after I wrote the words I just said to you, Diane was driving us to Elizabeth’s high school graduation. The sermon on being awake in the moment was not finished yet and it was already late in the week. I was certainly not going to “waste time” at a high school graduation where the senior class had 800 students and I knew only one of them. I was going to get important work done. However, I forgot my laptop in the car and so, though I thought it was a mistake, it, of course, wasn’t and so I was actually THERE, instead of spending those two hours writing about being there. And while I was awake awhile at Winter Park High School’s graduation, I saw this ragtag and aging family of ours whom I’ve grown to love so profoundly and from whom I’ve learned so much. I saw so many other families, loud or hurrying, frail grandmas and single parents sitting alone, and the consciously uncomfortable and uptown clothes and the beautiful students courageously facing what it means to graduate. I actually watched everything and heard every speech.

Later on, when I got home from graduation, since I’d been on vacation and had missed church the previous Sunday and it was a milestone marker for our year, I decided to listen to the CDs of the UCG Children’s Sabbath service and the Senior Sunday service. I listened with my eyes closed and my ears and heart open and not while I was driving or cooking or doing something else. And here’s what I heard Clark and Celeste and Jack, little children yet, just at their beginning, say about their lives and about our UCG life together: that being here means we have the chance to show who God is and who we are by how we love and celebrate and laugh and play, and by how we walk with each other and help one another through when there is sadness and loss and death and divorce and things that turn our lives inside out. One of them said simply, “A long time ago, my family adopted me like God adopts all of us. Here I have learned—I have daily chances to help change the world. ”

And in the Senior Sunday CD I heard William and Jonathan and Sebastian, young men now, and wise beyond their years say, each of them in his own way, “I was born in this church.” My heart is touched by that language. For we are, being born in this church. Quickening. Baptism, new member Sundays, Children’s Sabbath, Senior Sunday, prayers, happy birthday every Sunday, having a chance to change the world–moments of love that can last for days just like Hafiz said.

What happened to Simeon in this Luke passage is this–Simeon is an old guy. The story says he’s been hanging out in the Temple for years and years, doing his thing, and longing for the salvation of his people. And the story doesn’t say this, but I think he might have been a little bit hopeless or jaded like he’d been listening to NPR too much, and then he sees this infant Jesus and his parents, and he just knows how it is going to be with him, and so he says, “I’m awake now, for a moment and what I see is this. It is going to be difficult, painful beyond measure—a sword will pierce your soul on his behalf. But blessed are we. Now, let your servant depart in peace—I have hope because I have been awake for this tiny moment—in what I have seen and heard, my eyes have seen the salvation of the people.” Goodness knows we too need that hope in times such as these. Denise Levertov says in this call to worship–we have only begun to know the power that is in us. So much is in bud.”

So, the last thing I’ll share with you is this: that at the graduation there were 23 valedictorians. Yeah, and they were each given barely 2 minutes each to share their graduation wisdom with the gathered community, their families and friends, who by their thousands, listened to their words, leaning forward. Including me, because I was actually there. Afterward, riding home, I wondered what I would say if I only had two minutes to speak at such an event—a beginning and an ending. As you can imagine, this would a challenge for a preacher, only two minutes. I decided I would say, “Spend time outside. Enjoy your life.  And read good poetry every day.  I’d tell the grads that because reading poetry is important for being awake awhile, along with being outside and enjoying life and observing milestones and other markers.  And then I would end with the best awake awhile poem I know. And I hope it will sing now as a prayer in your heart. It is called “Ithaka.”

When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from those who know.

 

Always keep Ithaka fixed in your mind.

To arrive there is your ultimate goal,

But do not hurry the journey at all.

It is better to let it last for long years, and even to anchor at the island when you are old,

rich with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting that Ithaka will offer you riches.

 

Ithaka has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would never have taken the road,

She has nothing more to give you.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not defrauded you.

With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.