"Live With Passion"
Rev. Judith Blanchard
May 20, 2007
One of my daily meditation practices comes from a Roman Catholic sister named Joan Chittister. She is part of a Benedictine community in Erie, Pennsylvania, and they publish a monthly practice called The Monastic Way, edited by Sister Joan. Each month has a theme -- sometimes biblical, sometimes from poetry or philosophy -- and there is simply a one-paragraph meditation for each day of the month around the theme. The themes are far from exclusively Catholic or doctrinaire. As Sister Joan observed, if the monastic life teaches us anything, it teaches us to seek God, to find God everywhere. The monastic learns that God speaks to the heart in many tongues. This year’s Monastic Way looks at the insights of great writers. For the month of May, Joan Chittister chose a quote from the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot: "Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things." So it is to Sister Joan that I give credit for my sermon title and musings this morning.
Passions, great passions? I am struck by how much the Bible seems ambivalent about passion. It was hard to find a biblical reading for this morning. So I chose the passage from the first letter of John on love. Both the psalmist and New Testament writers knew that the heart can be driven by both Godly passions and also be what they call unclean passions, like jealousy, envy, hatred, greed, etc. But I wonder if in our 21st century, the problem is not too many passions, but an insipid lack of passion, a numbness that keeps us uncommitted to anything?
I am just back from the annual conference of my national chaplains’ organization. One of the most powerful speakers of that conference was an unimposing Tibetan Buddhist monk, the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. The title of his talk was "Spiritual Perspectives on Living and Dying Well." The Dzogchen gave us, mostly Westerners, a history of how the Indian prince Siddhartha became Buddha through his search to transcend the three curses of humanity: old age, sickness, and death. These were things that he had been shielded from in his rearing in a golden palace, and therefore had no experience with. So Siddhartha begins with experience, not knowledge. What he discovers is impermanence and the fear of death, which causes much anguish long before we die. However, Rinpoche noted, death doesn’t happen at the end of life, but all the time. We are all always dying. That is the lesson of impermanence.
It seems like a painful lesson, one that certainly has driven many to defeat, despair, and even suicide. The beauty of Rinpoche’s presentation was his incorporation of humor and hope. He quoted Woody Allen, "I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens!" And Art Buchwald: "Dying is easy. Parking is hard." The bad news of impermanence, said Rinpoche, is that everything is subject to change. The good news is that even suffering can change.
So if we all are always living and dying, how do we live well? Dying well is predicated on living well. I submit that living well is dependent on our discovering our passions. Rinpoche asked us a provocative question: "If you had a limited time to live -- you knew you had only a month or maybe six months to live -- what would you want to accomplish? What would you want to stop doing?"
Surely our passions must begin with compassion, for ourselves and for others. Life is our school. Love is the teacher. Death is graduation. This is the heart of what we heard in Rumi’s poem, "Love is the Master": "Love is the One who masters all things; I am mastered totally by Love. By my passion of love for Love I have ground sweet as sugar." Rumi’s images of human life are of straw blown before a furious wind, of a cat in a sack swung around, of falling into a furious river, of mill wheels turning day and night. But the poem is an uplifting one I think rather than a depressing one, because of its focus on love, the transforming power of love.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own passions, what gives my life meaning in the midst of impermanence, change and death. My first passion is for being with my patients. Patients and their families are my teachers about passionate living and dying well. Yesterday I was with a woman who is 94 years old. Margaret came to Maine Medical Center because she had passed out while reading to the elderly! She definitely doesn’t see herself as old as she goes out to read to an 85-year-old friend who is blind. "I read to her Jane Austin’s Emma," she confides. "Sometimes she nods off, but she seems to enjoy it." I thought I would be bringing her one of our prayer shawls, but sitting on her bed table was a beautiful, mottled blue, mohair shawl she is knitting for someone else. A social worker and world traveler earlier in her life, Margaret asks me how she might start a knitting group with the elderly patients on Maine Med’s psychiatric floor. It is obvious that the secret to her long and productive life is a passion for people, for service, for exploration.
It’s amazing to me how much I learn about my patients’ passions through the obituaries. I was with Joan Olmstead and her family on Thursday when she was brought into the emergency room. I had known Joan, husband Gar, and sons Howard and Bill from previous admissions, but this one would be her last. This heart attack had claimed her life and left her husband of 62 years in despair. It was only as we talked about their meeting while throwing rice at his sister Edith’s wedding, their passion for travel around the States and Bermuda, and about her love of her granddaughters, one of whom had written her college entrance essay on deciding to become a nurse after visiting her Nana in the hospital, that the living and dying seemed remotely tolerable.
But her obituary yesterday shed more light on the passions of Joan’s life: summers in Maine when she would take a train from her home in Pennsylvania, picking blueberries and climbing the rocky shore, exploring Moosehead Lake and going horseback riding with her mother. The obituary continues: "Among Joan’s passions were picnics, day trips, family pets, all types of music (with a focus on classical), and the ritual after-grocery lunches which included her brother, John. Of greatest pride was witnessing and celebrating her granddaughters’ achievements in sports, music, dance, and academics; and to watch them grow and become ’lovely young ladies.’ Joan was an active member of [her church, taught Sunday School, and participated in] the Red Hats local chapter ’The Red Chili Peppers.’ She enjoyed life to its fullest and was a loving inspiration."
Yes, my patients are my teachers about passion. Like Joan, another of my passions is my grandchildren. Having spent Mother’s Day out in Arizona with some of them, I feel like I have drunk from a fountain of wonder and delight. A book that I have shared with all of my nieces and now my granddaughter, Mira, is "Miss Rumphius" by our Maine author and artist, Barbara Cooney. Miss Rumphius is known as the Lupine Lady to all of her neighbors. The story tells of how as a little girl named Alice, Miss Rumphius lives by the sea and visits her grandfather’s woodcarving workshop. She sits on her grandfather’s knee and is told about faraway places and vows that when she grows old she too will go to faraway places and live by the sea. But her grandfather challenges her: "You must also do something to make the world more beautiful." Those three things were the passions of Miss Rumphius’ life.
The book chronicles her travels around the world and coming to a house by the sea, but it takes her a while to discover how to make the world more beautiful. In her garden among the rocky Maine soil, she plants a few seeds, and the next summer, as she is recuperating from back problems, she delights in the blues and purples and rose colors of lupines. She vows to plant more lupine seeds, but her health prevents her. The next year while stronger and able to take walks, she discovers that the wind has seeded her lupines along neighboring hillsides. Thus, Miss Rumphius becomes the Johnny Appleseed of lupines, ordering five bushels of lupine seed and scattering them by the handfuls along highways and down country lanes. And of course the wind continues to scatter them even farther abroad. As an old, white-haired, woman, Miss Rumphius, instructs her niece and her friends that they too must do something to make the world more beautiful. She sows not only the seeds of lupine but also the seeds of passion.
Her story reminds me of a quote from Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: "Concerning acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth -- that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too." When we follow our passions, God blesses the yield, for our own satisfaction and for the gracing of the world. It is that cooperation with the will of God that makes for the most productivity. As Rumi said in his poem, "God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection." Living and dying well is about choosing those actions that are consonant with the love of God. "What does the Lord require of you," asks the prophet Micah, "but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
Another passion of mine is prayer. It is what sustains me in the best of times and in the worst of times. I have shared with you some of the breath prayers I say before entering a patient’s room, and the prayer of Saint Therese that I memorized on my Habitat for Humanity Walk last Good Friday. Another one that I treasure is by Rabbi Jack Reimer. It speaks to me of that need to align our passions with the will of God, for that cooperation between creature and Creator that will be the resurrection of our world.
We cannot merely pray to God to end war;
For the world was made in such a way
That we must find our own path of peace
If we could only find it within ourselves and our neighbors.
We cannot merely pray to God to root out prejudice;
For we already have eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only judge them rightly.
We cannot merely pray to God to end starvation;
For we already have the resources
With which to feed the entire world
If we would only use them wisely.
We cannot merely pray to God to end despair;
For we already have the power
To clear away slums and to give hope
If we would only use our power justly.
We cannot merely pray to God to end disease;
For we already have great minds
With which to search out cures and healings
If we would only use them constructively.
Therefore we pray instead
For strength, determination, and will power,
To do instead of merely to pray;
To become instead of merely to wish;
That our world may be safe,
And that our lives may be blessed.
Amen.
So what are the passions that fuel your life? If you had only a limited time left, what would you want to accomplish? What have you done in your life to change one thing that needed changing? When we can identify these things, when we move to those acts of initiative, of creation, of passion, God does move too.
Rinpoche, in his quiet Tibetan way, showed me the value of humor, so I think I will close with Sister Joan Chittister’s one paragraph meditation for May 31st.
"Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton died and were taken before the throne of God.
’Well,’ God said to Al Gore, ’What do you want to say?’
Gore replied, ’I want to say that I think I won that election but it was not your will that I should serve.’
And God said, ’That’s a good answer, come in and sit in the chair to my right.’
Then God said to Bill Clinton, ’What would you like to say for yourself?’
And Bill said, ’Well, God, I know I’ve sinned but I repented and, bad as I was, I never held a grudge.’
And God said, ’That’s a good answer, Bill. Come in and sit in the chair to my left.’
Then, Hillary stepped forward.
’Now, Hillary, what do you want to say?’ God asked.
And Hillary answered, ’Well, God, what I want to say is that I think you’re sitting in my chair.’
That’s passion."
May we be granted insight to identify our passions and live fully into them, for it is in living well that we die well. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Judith H. Blanchard