"Life While We Live It"

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?” asks Emily, a young woman in Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town.

In the play Emily dies in childbirth but is granted a unique experience: the Stage Manager allows her to return from death and live one day of her life with her family. And filled with high hopes for that day, she is disappointed. Just before she returns to her place in the cemetery, she reveals her frustration to the Stage Manager:

Emily: “We don’t have time to look at one another. (She breaks down sobbing.) I didn’t realize. All that was going on and we never noticed…. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?”

The Stage Manager: “No. (pauses) The saints and poets, maybe, they do some.” (Wilder, Our Town, 100)

Poets and artists need to pay attention to this stuff so they will have insights to call the rest of us to attention. Poets/artists must take time to penetrate beneath the surface of things – to rediscover the meaning of love and perceive the impact of reality on personal lives.

You and I typically do not experience such moments unless they are very special times. Yet, as Don Postema observes in his book, Space for God, “We are artists of our own lives. If we are to live with any authenticity, we must join those ‘saints and poets’ who grasp life at its depth.”

Such a challenge for us. Occasionally, when we are blessed with such moments we call them an “epiphany.” An “ah–ha!” It’s that moment when we have a sudden intuitive perception or insight into the meaning of something in our life. It’s a moment of insight or revelation.

The Wise Men had that moment when they realized that the birth of the baby, Jesus, was a “shining forth” or revelation of God to human kind. And Epiphany (some call it “theophany”) has come to be observed in the church on the first Sunday after the first Saturday in January. Epiphany is observed by Christianity around the world from traditional Roman Catholic feasts to Protestant parishes. Some cultures observe it in other forms – the Irish call this day the “Little Christmas or Women’s Christmas.” In France on Epiphany the people eat a kind of cake called a “king cake” with a trinket or a bean hidden inside it. The person who gets the piece of cake with the trinket becomes the king for a day.

The trinket or bean is a symbol in many ways for the moments of epiphany we experience in life. Sometimes those moments come to us when we least expect them, and seemingly out of nowhere.

We live in such demanding times that it becomes normal to live a superficial (Is superficial too judgmental?) life void of moments of grace. We are so busy! We’ve places to go, people to meet, meetings galore. Our families demand time, and lots and lots of energy. We have a list of books to read, exercise classes to attend, and houses begging for attention. We promise to do things for the church or the school or the homeowners association and in frustration call at the last minute and say, “I can’t make it.” You may find that you can ask the questions of meaning, “Why am I doing all of this activity? Where am I going?” or you may find that you can pray while jogging or doing pilates, but the busyness does my prayer and meditation life no good. I confess the busier I am the less I pray. I need those quiet moments for reflection, prayer, and thought – moments for insight and revelation.

We went to Karchner Caverns this week in southern Arizona. Some of you have been there – the Amigos took a trip there a couple of years ago. It’s a “living cave” where the stalactites and stalagmites are still being formed.

There is literally deep silence in the caverns that even with tour groups walking quietly through the enormous caverns you could hear a drop of water from half a football field distance. It was the silence that I loved; and I don’t much like silence. I prefer to have music in the background – it blocks out the tinnitus!

I walked around listening to the information the tour host provided; engaged in brief comments with the folks standing next to me at the stopping points, but mostly tried to soak up the silence, the darkness, and the geological formations. And thought to myself, the folks in the church don’t need me beating on them to take time for your spiritual life in this New Year. You already know your needs. You tend to be so achievement oriented that many of you know your spiritual needs. And when they are not met it’s so easy to get down on yourself, especially when you attempt to do something for your personal health and fail to do it or fail in doing it.

We can do that with spiritual life, with prayer, also. We can think “Oh, I’m not doing it the way I should. Or, I’m not using the right words or phrases or I don’t get any special feeling out of prayer.” Spiritual nurture, prayer takes time… and practice… as does listening.

I have a real appreciation for the writings of Thomas Merton. In one of his essays he observes:

“In the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts… one cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience oneself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they ‘know’ from the beginning never, in fact, come to know anything…. We do not want to be beginners, but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life.” (The Climate of Monastic Prayer, Thomas Merton, p. 52–53)

Does anyone ever realize life while we live it? I invite you this morning during the sacrament of Holy Communion to a moment of silence and reflection. I could urge you to set aside time for journaling or marking your daily calendar with 10 minutes for yourself or even encourage you to do a weekend retreat or read this book or that book, all of which may be helpful for your personal moments of epiphany.

But in the spirit of “we are all beginners” we who are created and recreated by the saving touch of Christ, may we receive the sacrament as an opportunity to see beauty in silent prayer and be alive to all that is around us as creatures of God.

Having just passed through our yearly yuletide orgy of buying and getting, spending and accumulating, perhaps we are ready now for some reflection, for some honesty and confession about the ways we attempt to see our life as we live it.

We have watched the advertisements and have believed some of them… if we can just have a day at the right spa or a massage or even a luxury car we shall have a fulfilled life and/or family.

If we can just buy one more hot new fashion we will look as if we belong.

If we can just make one more trip to the Nordstroms Rack or Saks outlet we shall fill the emptiness in our lives.

And we miss our true epiphany – that our moment of salvation is in the grace of God’s transforming gift to us in Christ.

Let us trust that as we celebrate the sacrament together. Amen.

I have relied on the following resources for this sermon: Space for God, Don Postema, 1997, CRC Publications; Pulpit Resource by William Willimon, January, 2007; Our Town by Thorton Wilder; and Wikipedia on Epiphany (Christian) from the Internet.