A Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on September 3, 2024, the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
I found myself thinking this week of the poet Larry Eigner. Born in 1927 in Swampscott, Massachusetts, Eigner was critically palsied by a botched forceps operation at birth and was able to walk only with assistance and navigated the world in a wheelchair. And since he had use only of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, all of his poems were typed on his 1940 Royal manual typewriter only through an intensely physical act that required all of himself. His whole body heaved and poured itself through finger and thumb into the key that pressed the typebar onto the page–the page, incidentally, that took him about five minutes to even wind into the typewriter before he could even begin. He wrote, literally, one letter at a time.
You might expect someone who faced such challenges to write pretty doom and gloom stuff. But Eigner’s poems–written from a single room–are positively ebullient, joyous celebrations of the uncontainably abundant event of being. This is not the poetry of grand statement, or moralist hectoring. There is no pretense to profundity, because Eigner knew that what is, experienced from the “take off your shoes for the place you are standing is holy ground” here I am groundless ground of child-like simplicity, wonder, and awe is utterly miraculous just as it is. No improvements needed. Palsied, crumpled in his wheelchair, with the “same view” day after day, he discovered in the desert of that solitary life a place of springs just by learning how to attend. All eyes and all ears. One stray dog, one car horn, one plane roar at a time.
Every poem is dated–sometimes there are multiple poems on the same day–and each one drifts, swirls, eddies, elegantly across the page like a Japanese calligraphy. A graph, a gesture of world-as-wording, of a heart, soul, body, and mind fully alive and traced in real time. Awake, alert, curious, allowing, seeing and sensing rather than judging, evaluating, comparing. So from that wheelchair wedged into his desk at that window wellspring you get little ditties like this from September 26, 1991:
dirty
leftover newspaper
in the stand window
at the booming intersection
while the sky’s clear blue
with some faint cloud
over all these streets
for the third straight day
Every bush is a burning bush. And so, reminds Eigner, is every dirty leftover newspaper. We tend to hunt for burning bushes in the spectacular, the extraordinary, the mountain top experiences. And there certainly are those, of course. But a preoccupation with the extraordinary, can blind us to the miracle of the ordinary and the everyday. The poet Charles Bernstein wrote this in celebration of Eigner at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in 1993:
Bob Grenier, Brian McInerney and I took him to the Museum of Natural History on his one trip to New York. As we came into the room with some of the largest dinosaurs, Larry pointed straight ahead and said "that's interesting". He wasn't pointing to a dinosaur skeleton, though, but to an old sign posted on the back wall [that read “restrooms”].
Eigner is wheeled in to see the once-in-a-lifetime T-Rex, and what he finds really interesting is the sign on the back wall. Like the child at the aquarium who delights more in the elevator buttons than the humpback whale. In Eigner’s poems, Bernstein writes, we find a “democracy of particulars as against the craving for highlights, for the heightened, that is as much a literary aesthetic as a consumer imperative.”
Eigner’s extraordinary-ordinary teaches us to “come to ourself” like the Prodigal Son and come to our senses to experience the luminosity of every detail, of every “minute particular” as Blake calls them. Taking off the shoes, leaving the flock behind, getting curious, offering ourselves to experience, to our life, to God present and active here-and-now, we get a glimpse that yes, indeed, “Everything that lives is holy.”
Implicit in Eigner’s poetry, and in Moses’ encounter at the Burning Bush, is the simple recognition each person (regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identification), each place, each creature, each tree, plant, weed, each stream and river and ocean, each creepy crawling thing is holy, is in God, worthy of reverence. Sometimes it takes an Eigner pointing out a sign on the back wall behind the flashy T-Rex to wake us up to that reality.
Much of the time, we human beings are stuck in our heads–caught up in preconceptions, requirements, and demands about how this moment should be. We live almost entirely by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (“I’m unlovable. I’ll always be alone”), others (“She never treats me right”), and the world. We live according to conditioned tape-loops inherited from teachers, family, churches, nation, talking heads on t.v that we take as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. But are our stories really true? What if we don’t have to believe everything we think? What if thoughts aren’t even really personal? What if they are like weather that blows in and blows out? What if thoughts are what brains do in the same way that digestive juices are what stomachs do?
The danger of believing our thoughts is painfully obvious in last week’s shooting in Jacksonville. The shooter believed that African-Americans were “life unworthy of life.” EIgner used to say that “responsibility is the ability to respond.” Poetry and discpleship are Love-freshened responsiveness to the stranger as holy other rather than violent reactiveness to an object never encountered except in the prejudiced mind. Think of what would have happened (or not happened!) if Moses had believed that thought in his head that said, “Murderous, Tongue-tied Mo, you’ve got to be kidding me! Do you know how torqued Jethro will be if you leave the flock? Imagine what might happen while you’re off lolly-gagging about with your toes in the sand! Turn aside? Are you kidding me? Keep your eyes on the prize, Mo, and get the flock home to Jethro in time for dinner!” We set our minds on human things (inherited stories and believed thoughts) and not divine things (the miracle of sheer presence here-now), and the results are, in Jesus’ words, “satanic.” We become taskmasters, not just to ourselves, but to those we encounter as well. We fashion petty Egypts out of the milk and honey of just this.
But Moses, like Samuel, like Isaiah, like Mary is called and responds to something other than the voice in his head. He utters those three little words, “Here I am.” Here. I AM. They come to themselves–not who they think they are, how they think they are, but THAT they are at all and rest in and as that presence. The simple, unadorned, fact of their beingness where doomsday thoughts, judgements, prejudices, worries, are lovingly allowed to come and go like so many gnats, dew on the grass, clouds in the sky. Recognized, but not engaged. It’s in that shoeless place of simple presence that compassionate responsiveness is born. Habitual perception, our mechanical conditioning, tells us to look only at the T-Rex, tells us to stay with the flock out of fear of disappointing our always-disappointed father-in-law, tells us to play God and sort the world out at gunpoint according to how much pigment people have in their skin.
That, I think, is the life we have to lose. What will we gain if we just spend our life making Jethro happy, seeing only the T-Rexes, and miss the “That’s interesting” little sign on the back wall, the burning bush dirty leftover newspaper? Denying ourselves and taking up our cross means allowing the loving presence that doesn’t know how to be absent to touch, heal, and transfigure the fragile lineaments of this particular human frame into an instrument of grace for others–all others–without exception. Denying ourselves and taking up our cross doesn’t mean self-flagellation, moping about, or playing the martyr. Those are all just ways, after all, of keeping I, me, mine, self-image on center stage.
Practically speaking, denying ourselves and taking up our cross, means recognizing when we’re caught up, living from believed, fear-based thought—contracted, fixated, and identified—and opening to that place of springs, those waters rising up to eternal life, that experience of the branch that knows itself sourced, supplied, nourished on the ever-present vine’s sap of inexhaustible presence. Rooted in Jesus’ presence rather than in believed thoughts. Are we playing Pharoah and imprisoning ourselves in believed stories about ourselves, others, and the world in some Egypt, or can we take those too-tight shoes off, wander off the beaten path and make the Exodus into the great I AM presence that is always with us, that doesn’t come, or go. Or as Eigner writes on April 17, 1992 from that second story window just two years from the end of his life
shadowy tail
intent squirrel
on the phone wire
head for home
Where, I wonder, did Eigner find home? Where do you? Have you taken off your shoes?
Amen.