LIVING LIFE SO IT “BECOMES US”
“The world is a beautiful place to be born into,” says the poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, “if you don’t mind happiness not always being so much fun / if you don’t
mind a touch of hell now and then / just when everything is fine … if you don’t mind a
few dead minds in higher places / or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned
faces.” But it’s just a part of the bargain, because, he says: “the world is the best place of
all / for a lot of such things as / making the fun scene / and making the love scene / and
making the sad scene … and walking around / looking at everything / and smelling
flowers … and even thinking / and kissing people … and just generally living it up.” But
“then right in the middle of it / comes the smiling / mortician.”
Ferlinghetti’s poem is like what comes before Easter. There is fun, there is
sadness, and “a touch of hell now and then.” Then comes the “smiling mortician,” Good
Friday – a reminder that life is finite and limited so we must ask ourselves “what do we
do with it?” Among the things we should do with it is remember that the imagery of the
Easter that final comes says that there are ways to rise out of our hells and find in our
lives new meaning.
Doing this requires some effort, though. The rendition of the Easter story that says
it’s about a demi-god dying to save us from our sins doesn’t work for me. The Jesus I
find in the Gospels is a Jesus who wants us to make use of our freedom, to break out of
the “birth-proof safety suits of nondestrucible selfishness,” as it’s put by ee cummings.
The early Christians must have had a sense of this when they chose to relate the events of
the life of Jesus to the seasons of the year. His birth was linked to the winter solstice
when, event though the worst of the winter is still to come, days stop growing shorter and
begin to lengthen again, offering the promise of spring. The story of Christmas is one of
hope – a story of what life can bring. Easter, linked to spring itself, is a story of what can
happen when we seize life instead of death, joy instead of sadness. Christmas offers a
promise and Easter says: “seize it.”
It’s the message in the bunnies and eggs, the flowers and new clothes, symbols of
life coming into being again. And it’s there in stories that have nothing to do with Jesus,
like the one that was always my children’s favorite: The Golden Egg. The Golden Egg
tells the tale of a rabbit who finds an egg that has something moving around inside it.
He’s curious about what it is, but there’s no way of finding out with cracking the shell.
The rabbit can’t bring himself to do it, but he dozes off and while he’s asleep the
duckling who’s inside the egg cracks its way out. The duck’s confused, never having seen
the world outside. But when the rabbit wakes up he takes a liking the duck that was inside
the egg and shows him everything he needs to know about life. The moral: we can’t
depend on others to break our shells. We’ve got to break them ourselves. It may be scary.
We don’t know what we’ll find. But it’s worth the risk.
The risk is feeling comfortable with living into the mystery of the future, that is
living gracefully. I used to have a lot of trouble with that word, especially with the way
it’s used those kind of Christians who believe that grace has to do with God choosing
only a few of us for salvation, whether we deserve it or not. Living gracefully doesn’t
have to do with divine decisions. It has to do with being open to life and its possibilities,
rather than giving in to its frustrations. A lot of people seem to approach life as though
they’re inside of eggs and are afraid of what will happen if they break the shells even
though the shells are of own making. They’re created when we shut ourselves off from
relationships, refuse to be look for opportunities to change our lives, stay trapped in anger
or fear and put down on our own abilities. They are the shells created when we believe
it’s better to accept whatever comfort there is in the womb of isolation, habit or
inactivity.
Adrienne Rich talks about this in her poem “From a Survivor.” It’s about her life
after he husband died:
The pact that we made was an ordinary pact
Of men and women in those days.
I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race.
Luckily or unluckily, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and we were going to share them.
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special.
Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was, even more
Since my feeling for it is clearer.
I know what it could do and could not do.
But it is no longer the body of a god
or anything with power over my life.
Next year it would have been twenty years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, or making,
Which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of varied, amazing movements
each one making possible the next.
Easter says to people, as the dead can’t now do but Rich can: “break free.” Get
out of your egg. Be like the person Denise Levertov describes in her poem: “A Man:”
“Living a life” –
the beauty of deep lines
dug in your cheeks.
The years gather by sevens
to fashion you. They are blind,
but you are not blind.
Their blows resound,
they are deaf, those laboring
daughters of the Fates,
but you are not deaf,
you pick out
your own song from the uproar
line by line,
and at last throw back
your head and sing it.
Graceful living requires singing our songs, know that a God who is God, a Life
that would give us our existence in the first place, loves us, appreciates us, invests our
beings with a dignity and worth that no one can take from us without our acquiescence. I
don’t mean we can’t be hurt by others. We can. But we are all blessed with an inherent
dignity and worth no matter what the specifics of our gifts or the circumstances in which
we find ourselves.
Remembering this is a key to graceful living, as being responsible not only in
terms of our relationships with others, but in terms of our relationships with ourselves. As
cummings once put it: “Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys but no one can ever
be you. There’s the responsibility, the most awesome responsibility on earth. If you can
take it, take it and be. If not, cheer up, and go about other people’s business and do and
undo until you drop.” Don’t you dare! Living through others or trying to satisfy ourselves
through the manipulation of others is in utter contradiction to the message of Easter. It’s
to create around us another kind of shell: the shell of inauthenticity.
But as much as being responsible requires being responsive to ourselves, it has
even more to do with being responsive to the rest of Life. It has to do with taking off our
blinders, developing our senses, loosening our inhibitions, being as spontaneous and open
in our responses to life as are all those baby animals we see in the images of Easter,
including the rabbit and the duckling in The Golden Egg.
Letting go and loosening up may not be easy. Even Jesus had to “descend to hell”
if he were to be able to rise again, but as it was put by a colleague, R.C.A. Moore:
It’s going to come out all right – do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass – they know.
They get along – and we’ll get along, too.
Some days will be rainy you will sit waiting
And the letter you wait for won’t come.
There will be ac-ci-dents.
I know ac-ci-dents are coming:
Smash-ups, signals wrong, washouts, trestles rotten –
Red and yellow ac-ci-dents.
But somehow and somewhere, the end of the run,
The train gets you together again
And the caboose and the green tail lights
Fade down the right-of-way like a new white hope.
I never heard a mockingbird in Kentucky
Spilling out its heart in the morning.
I never saw the snow on Chimborazo,
Sitting there looking like a high, white, Mexican hat.
I never had supper with Abe Lincoln,
Nor got a dish of soup from Joe Hill,
Though I’ve been around
I’ve heard good poets
Before they died in the bughouse.
I know a mandolin player
Working in a barber shop in Indiana
Who thought he had a million dollars.
I know a girl from Des Moines who has beautiful eyes.
I saw her and said to myself:
“The sun rises and the sun sets in those eyes.”
We took away the money for a prize waltz at a Brotherhood dance.
She had eyes; she was as safe as the bridge
Over the Mississippi;
So I married her.
Last summer we took the cushions going west.
Pike’s Peak is a big old stone, believe me.
It’s fastened down; something you can count on.
It’s going to come out all right – do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass – they know.
They get along – and we’ll get along, too.
It’s going to come out all right, even if we have to crack open our shells. That’s
the message of Easter, which is a message it’s important to repeat over and over again, as
we’re doing. As it’s put in a quote often used in a celebration for the birth of a child:
Let us remember that for our children [and for us] no matter what our
experience, and no matter how rough their beginnings, it will never be too
late. We can communicate to them a tenaciousness that sees living as an
experiment in the possible, rather than an exercise in futility. We can let
them know that, no matter what – and without any magic about it –
Cinderella can be Queen, the knight can outwit the dragon and what seems
like an ugly duckling when cracking out of its shell can become a swan.
Not without pain, not without grief and longing, not without hard work
and patience – but, in the end life can turn out all right.
The train can get put together and “the caboose and the green tail lights” can “fade down
the right-of-way like a new white hope.”
Let me close with this Easter admonition, this springtime challenge from
cummings:
you shall above all things be glad and young,
for it you’re young, whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become….
It’s better to:
… learn from one bird how to sing
than teach a thousand stars how not to dance.
Let the life we wear become us – and let us learn not only from birds but from the
whole sweep of creation how to sing and enjoy the life with which we’ve been blessed.
The answer of Easter to Good Friday – to death, to finiteness, to limitations and
frustration is to break out of our shells and live gracefully – to live life so it “becomes
us.”
Comments for MDUUC
By Dr. David Sammons
April 4, 1999