First Parish Unitarian UniversalistStill Waters
A sermon preached by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 19, 2004
For thousands of years, peoples of different faiths have recited the 23 rd Psalm in their times of need. When faced with fear or anxiety, when feeling troubled or lost in the wilderness, and especially when grieving the death of a loved one, many have turned to these comforting words.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
How powerful are those images!
Who among us has never needed reassurance that we shall not be in want for what we need? Who has never known the feeling of being utterly alone or terribly vulnerable or frightened for our life or livelihood? Needing to know that we are held, if not by the Lord of the Psalms, then by the transforming power of love or the spirit of life, holding us, guiding us, to a safe place or back on a right path?
Imagine you are outdoors, in an open field. It hasn’t rained recently; the grass
and the soil in which it grows are dry. What if you lie down in the grass and gaze up at the sky? Is it daytime, or night, dusk or dawn? Do you see sky and the sun, maybe some clouds—or stars, and planets, the Milky Way perhaps?
Feel the earth solid beneath you, supporting your heels, the backs of your legs and buttocks, your shoulder blades, and the back of your head. Feel your body’s connection to the earth, imagine that connection going deep to the earth’s core.
Sense the fields extending out beside you, far into the distance. See the expanse of the sky, immense above you.
And feel yourself to be one with the earth, and therefore somehow huge, while at the same time so small, so tiny, in the vastness of the universe.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters
He restores my soul.
This past summer I was three days living beside still waters, the Pacific Ocean on the wilderness coast of Washington state. It restored my soul.
We pitched our tent at such a perfect site the first night that we stayed there for all three of our backpacking nights. Being the elder hikers on the beach, we felt we were deserving of the site’s beauty and convenience. It was on a sand and rock point that was storm-strewn with huge bleached driftwood logs, but our tent was nestled under the trees on a pine needle bed, back from the tip of the point, with a wooded hillside rising behind it.
By day from our point, we saw bald eagles, male and female; many pelicans, often flying low over the water in squadrons of ten or twenty, slick cormorants, gulls and many small shore birds. By night, the stars were absolutely incredible, magnificently abundant. You just don’t see stars like that on the East coast, not even in Maine. And we were amazed to see the Milky Way reflected in the ocean out to the horizon.
The Pacific Ocean was, for those few days anyway, just that: pacific, peaceful. The rhythm of the tides, the rhythm of night and day, the rhythm of our bodily needs…it all conspired for a quieting, calming effect.
It’s not the life I lead on an every day basis. Needing to time our hike to arrive at certain cliff-like headlands at low tide so as to pass around them, following park instructions to spade a hole at least 6 inches deep each time I needed to relieve myself, having to walk a long way to get (and then treat with iodine)fresh water from a stream, carrying everything on our backs (even what turned out to be unnecessary )… it’s not a lifestyle that I could sustain in my everyday—Route 128-bound—life, nor would I want to.
But for those few days beside still waters, my soul was restored.
The ocean was especially still at low tide. Some tides were lower than others and then the view from shore seemed almost primordial, especially in the morning fog. The water was rather molten-looking because the shallows were crowded with sea weed and oddly dotted with rocks and boulders. Out a ways, huge rock formations, called “stacks,” jutted way up out of the water like a seascape Stonehenge. I could well imagine the first signs of life rising out of the sea at low tide.
Beside still waters, time didn’t slow down, but I did. I could watch for a very long time the seals that rested on rocks way out in the water. To the naked eye, they were hard to spot, but with binoculars one could see that there were scores of them, dotting the rocks like oversized slugs, some light, some gray, some dark. They hardly moved, but their movements fascinated me. A raised head here. A tail shifts there. One slides into the water. Its head emerges a ways off, then disappears. Another launches itself up and onto a new resting place. They rest like that to conserve energy for surviving the cold water, we were told, but it seemed to me the ultimate in being slothful.
Not too many of us get to be slothful in daily life. Americans may be greedy, as shown by our giant footprint on the environment and the huge portion of the world’s resources we consume, but not too many of us get to be lazy.
For example, do you have a hammock in your backyard? We do. How often does anyone lay out in it? In ours? Rarely. Sometimes I think it’s just there for show!
I have a hunch that humans have always tended to work too many hours. Why else would ancient scriptures command us to “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.” How to make it holy? The Bible gives no instructions, except to not do any work—not you, nor your son or daughter, not your male or female slave, your livestock or the migrant worker in your town. No work. No work! By anyone!
And in case you needed convincing, even God took a break! “And on the seventh day…”
Now, listen to this. In the Biblical creation story, it doesn’t say that God finished all his work and then rested. No, it says in Genesis 2, “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done.”
Did you hear that? “God finished the work he had done.” He only finished what he had done. He hadn’t finished the entire job!
I think the Biblical repetition was intentional, to get our attention. The story says, God finished the work that he had done in the first six days and then rested on the seventh. He didn’t wait until the work was all done! (Good thing, too, because if you believe that creation is ongoing, God would still be working, and be terribly weary by now!) He didn’t postpone his rest until the work was complete.
Well, neither should we. But, many Americans do! Americans have by far the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world. Twenty-six percent of American workers don’t take any vacation at all. Americans work an average of nine full weeks per year more than do European workers. From 1973 to 2000, the average US worker added an additional 199 work hours to his or her annual schedule. (Source: MA Council of Churches, 2004 brochure).
During that same period of time, the number of women working increased, so that more households are headed by, not one, but two of those “average US workers” working those extra hours. Thus, we have a crisis of insufficient downtime hours per household. And, when children are involved, the situation is not family-friendly.
So, if you feel like you are too busy, you probably are, and you aren’t alone. That’s why the Massachusetts Council of Churches has announced its “Take Back Your Time” observance from Labor Day to October 24 th. They declare that “Overwork and a relentless pace of life are detrimental to faith, health, safety, the environment, and personal well-being.” But we knew that, didn’t we?
They go on, “Resist a relentless pace of life for yourself and your children. Take back time from excessive work hours.”
They are recommending that we commit at least one window of time each week between now and October 24th—no duration specified for how long that window should be—for simple, restorative activities. No scheduled activities. No buying or selling. No stress. No intrusive technology. No obligations. No work. No guilt.
This is good, but I think their timing is unfortunate, considering that we are in the closing weeks of the presidential and other important election campaigns, when we as UU citizens in a democracy, it could be argued based on our Fifth Principle (see the back of your order of worship), ought to be using some of our free time educating ourselves and others about the issues, and helping to get out the vote.
Also, this Take Back Your Time observance seems to imply that our excessive work hours are entirely of our own choosing. All we have to do is “say no!” to work? That may be the challenge in some professions, including mine, but it is a fact that for many Americans, it is the current economy, not personal choice, that requires the increased work hours per household. Thus, the situation calls for political and systemic, as well as personal change, and I think we ought to be asking all candidates about that!
Even so, though, as I said earlier, maybe humans have always tended to work too many hours, and so we need a commandment to “honor the Sabbath” and other contemporary reminders to “take back our time.”
And, so, here at the beginning of the school year, the First Parish year and the
Jewish Year, we hear the words of the 23rd Psalm and pause to reflect on how we use our time.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
What commitments do we want to drop, which to keep and which to make, to our selves, our families and friends, this religious community, and the wider public sphere?
What new window of time can we open, to restore our souls? Where are the green pastures, the still waters, to be found in your life?
At the First Parish leadership retreat a week ago yesterday, someone observed about her work as a congregational leader, that when you are doing something you love, even if it adds more responsibility to your life, it gives you energy in return.
And, our new Director of Religious Education, Patsy Hatch Reinertson, also said the same thing well when she observed—in encouraging you to teach a class of delightful UU children or youth this year—“when you teach, you drink as you pour.”
Lie down in green pastures, then. Rest beside still waters. In these or whatever other ways may suit you better, our souls are restored, and then…out of the thickets of confusion or despair in our lives, out of the relentless pace of modern life… the right paths will surely emerge.
Amen, and so may it be!