How Can I Keep From Singing?

November 27, 2011Robin Bartlett Barraza

First Parish in Brookline

My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. This is my favorite hymn. It reminds me of my church growing up and singing it and singing it and singing it, and I need it. It’s one of those hymns that I need. Do you have hymns like that? I think I need it because I need a rock to cling to when a storm threatens to shake my inmost calm; the foundations of my faith. And even when I’m at my most despairing, I cannot keep from singing. Or, if I could keep from singing, I will know that I’ve lost something foundational. In fact, it is singing that connects me again and again to that rock I’m clinging to.

The Bible is full of singing—singing in the most trying of times. The psalms are a songbook for Ancient Israel—they are meant to be sung, they are songs of joy and despair and gratitude and lament. Paul and Silas sang while they sat in jail. Jesus was born amidst the song of angels. I don’t know about you, but when I’m suffering and in the depths of despair, I listen to music to see if I can cry it out of me. If I don’t do this, I run the risk of staying numb—of anesthetising myself against my emotional life. And I sing. I sing at the top of my lungs. I sing when I am happy, but I sing more when I am in crisis, and when I grieve.

I cannot keep from singing because my life depends on it. Because this singing is an act of my faith—and faith is something my life also depends on.

I think that your life depends on faith, too, whether you name it that way or not. And I imagine that all of you have something you do that helps you cling to your rock when a storm blows through. You don’t have to sing.

Perhaps you pray, or take long walks in the woods, or go to church, or AA, or surround yourself with your cats, or you meditate, or you drink tea with friends, or you go to therapy, or you find some other way to remember that you are held in love and that you will survive this storm—that your life will be resurrected and recreated from the ashes; that there is more love somewhere. And, in this way, our lives flow on in endless song above these lamentations. Because we have faith.

I was at a UU conference recently in which a young colleague in religious education told me that she didn’t like the word faith. “I don’t have faith,” she said. “Faith is when you believe things that aren’t reasonable; that aren’t provable, or scientific. Faith means checking your brain at the door.”

And I know people in this room may have similar problems with the word “faith”. You may associate the word with “blind faith”—believing things that you can’t see without questioning. You might associate the word “faith” with a tradition of your childhood. You might associate the word faith with an unreasonable belief that a man in the sky with a white flowing beard created the universe and grants entrance to heaven or hell.

It might help to distinguish the word “belief” from the word “faith”. Belief, according to the dictionary, is confidence in the truth of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof. Faith, on the other hand, does not require a belief system, and it must be rigorously tested by doubt. It is the capacity that all human beings have—the capacity, as Sharon Salzburg says, to trust our own deepest experience. Jacques Elul makes this distinction between belief and faith: “Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor’s edge.”

Faith is on the razor’s edge--it requires doubt, the testing of belief, so that we might learn to trust something deeper and bigger than the present moment. Faith “enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again.” It says in Hebrews that “faith is the way of holding onto what we hope for, being certain of what we cannot see.” By that definition, don’t we all have faith? Just the simple act of getting up out of bed in the morning in a world in which we know is broken is an act of faith—an act of trust. We get out of bed with the hope that today could be a better day than tomorrow, though we have no proof that this is true. The simple act of keeping on keeping on is an act of faith. The act of singing in the storm.

And we may have faith as small as a mustard seed at any given time, but it allows us to move mountains nonetheless. Sometimes our mountain is walking up to a boss who has been abusive to us and quitting, without another job to fall back on. Sometimes our mountain is helping our children enjoy Christmas with all of the usual traditions while our heart breaks with grief over the death of a loved one.

Sometimes our mountain is a cancer diagnosis that scares us so badly we aren’t even sure we can go to the hospital for treatment, because that requires us acknowledging the truth of our illness. Sometimes our mountain is saying goodbye to our addictions—one day at a time. We couldn’t do any of these seemingly small but courageous acts without at least a faith the size of a mustard seed.

Sharon Salzburg tells us: “The word we normally translate as faith from the Pali language, the language of the original Buddhist texts, is saddhà, which literally means "to place the heart upon." Saddhà means to give our hearts over to, or place our hearts upon something. We all place our hearts upon something.

Perhaps you place your hearts on the goodness of the earth and humanity, or the trust that all things work toward the good, or that love conquers hate and fear. Perhaps you place your hearts on the power of positive thinking, or in God’s grace, or in the resurrection of souls. Perhaps you place your hearts on the idea that suffering can be overcome by enlightenment.

Or, in the words of Julian of Norwich, perhaps you place your hearts on the idea that “all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.” If you haven’t placed your heart on anything, if you haven’t given your little pink heart a little brown raft to float on in this turbulent, scary world, then you would cease to go on. You would have stayed in bed this morning. You certainly wouldn’t be able to sing these hymns and greet these good people and work for justice and love this world.

This—all of this—requires a deep and abiding faith. It shows me that you keep singing through the storm. That you have a rock you’re clinging to.

Madeline L’Engle tells us: “It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand.” We discover and cling to the core of our faith when we encounter our deepest suffering. Sharon Salzburg reminds us that ‘being alive necessarily means uncertainty and risk, times of going into the unknown.” She reminds us that faith is what helps us confront our fear. It connects us to all of life’s experience; it opens us to a bigger sense of what’s possible, even when our hearts are breaking and the rug has been pulled out from under us. Faith is our song in the night.

When I was a chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital this past summer, I encountered a 43-year-old mother of two who had just been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. She was an Irish Catholic Bostonian through and through, with a rough Boston accent, a feisty spirit and a love for the Kennedys. A self-proclaimed “chaplain hog,” I visited Melissa every day. “Cancer’s not going to kill me,” she said. “I’m not going to be Melissa with cancer. I’m going to just be Melissa. Melissa who kicks cancer’s butt. Can you bless me again, Robin? I don’t care that you aren’t Catholic…I need all the help I can get.” Melissa was understandably filled with fear. She called a chaplain every day to say she was “jonesing for holy water.” “Robin, can you get the priest to bless this water? I need it. Can you get me some oil while you’re down there? Those priests must have some extra oil lying around. Oh, and some saints. I need some saints. I know I’ve cleaned this hospital out of holy water, haven’t I? I’m a chaplain hog. I’m going to be fine. This cancer’s not going to kill me. I’ve got too much fight left in me. I’m not going to die. God’s not ready for me yet.” Melissa needed her deep Catholic sacramental faith to carry her through this time of terror…to be her rock. Perhaps this seems silly to you—this idea that water blessed by a hospital-employed priest could heal inoperable brain cancer. But I don’t think Melissa believed that the holy water was magic. She needed tangible, sensual items to remind her of her inmost calm—an external reflection of the deepest foundations of her faith.

She knew that only her faith could help her overcome her fear of dying—not blind faith, but the faith that she was held in God’s love. She needed it in order to continue to fight—to continue to live. She needed to know that she wasn’t alone in that hospital bed; that there was a force keeping her safe; holding her in comfort. She needed to know that God was watching over her and the doctors that cared for her, healing her.

Perhaps you don’t share Melissa’s belief that viles of holy water will keep you safe from an untimely death, but perhaps you do share the same hope that all will somehow be well. Faith, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones tells us, is the refusal to panic. No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging. It is the calm we can only find in our inmost places—that sometimes buried inner spark—that keeps us moving. What gets us out of bed in the morning when we feel we can’t—the tiny mustard seed that allows us to function on trust in the inherent goodness of creation, not in fear of the brokenness of creation. The force that allows us to move our mountains.

And Unitarian Universalism can provide us with a rock to cling to. Unitarian Universalism can provide the solace of a faith that can be a balm to our suffering, sin-sick souls. Unitarian Universalism can provide us with more than a mustard seed of faith that can help us to move our mountains. But we have to reclaim our theological traditions of our past in order to have a shared faith that quells our fears—good news to preach about from our pulpits. A now-deceased UU minister once quipped that he couldn’t imagine asking for the seven principles to be read to him on his death bed. Wonderful principles to adhere to, all, but they read as what they are—a business resolution of the General Assembly—our annual business meeting. A covenant that our congregations can agree to.

They just don’t have the meat of the psalms of the Hebrew Bible—the comfort of knowing that even though we walk in the valley of death, there is nothing that can shake us, we will not be forsaken, we’re in God’s hand. They don’t have the assurance that chanting na-mu-myō-hō-ren-ge-kyō, taking refuge in the Buddha, does.

I hope that in addition to our seven principles, there is a theological core that we share as Unitarian Universalists that can help us sing through our storms. I hope that we come to church not to seek theological diversity, but because we have a deep need to make meaning of our lives through the lens of a love that holds us all. Universalism assures us that the basis of the universe is love, that we were born in love, and that we will return to love. That we are forgiven and precious children of the universe, caught in an inescapable web of mutuality. If that doesn’t bring comfort to us in times of deep crisis, death and destruction, I don’t know what will.

Do you remember the story about the Tennessee Valley UU congregation? A couple of years ago, there was a gunman who went in to the church during a production of “Annie Junior” and

opened fire on the congregation, killing two people and wounding others. He was apparently making anti-gay and anti-liberal comments before the shooting occurred.

The church snapped into action, people wrestling down the gunman, the DRE escorting all of the children quickly to safety. They vowed to keep the doors of that church open in the days following, saying they would not be brought down by fear. And they had a candlelight vigil that night, praying for the victims, and praying for the gunman. At the vigil, the children from the congregation at the end spontaneously broke into a song from the show they were performing when the gunman opened fire-- “The sun’ll come out tomorrow…bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”

Even in the face of such profound fear and destruction, how could they keep from singing? This is faithful proof that love prevails in heaven and earth. That congregation--despite suffering caused by the terror and violence in their place of sanctuary—came together to say that they were holding out hope for a better day; a world transformed; a tomorrow in which the sun comes out.

May we hear that far off hymn, and may we join in the singing. Amen.