Sermon by Rev. Russell Daye
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax
September 7, 2007

Freedom of the Heart

Lamentations 1, Philippians 4:4-13

Some years ago I befriended an elderly German woman - I will call her Helga - who was great in years and experience. Occasionally she would invite me for cake, coffee and cognac. Our conversation was always interesting and warm, and I enjoyed her sense of irony; but I always felt as though I wasn't getting to know her at a very deep level. It seemed clear that she was holding back a depth of emotion and a powerful story.

Then one day I visited her not long after her husband of almost 60 years had died. I thought she would speak of her feelings about losing her husband, but instead she shared a story that she could not have told as long as he was still living. You see, Helga and her husband had lived in eastern Germany with their two small children at the outbreak of the Second World War. Her husband was conscripted and sent far from home. She did not even know if he was alive when, in the final stages of the war, the Russian soldiers came. Living on a farm with two small children left Helga in an extremely vulnerable situation when the occupying army took possession of her land and a number of men lodged in her barn. To keep her children safe and to shield them from witnessing what she came to know as inevitable, she would hide them away at night and go out to service the soldiers with her body.

Helga told me few details of this time - of the roughness with which she was treated, of how her land was taken away, of how her family became refugees, of the eventual reunion with her husband, or of their flight to Canada. What she did communicate was a great depth of pain, sorrow, and despair. Over our coffee she wept many tears of pain and bitterness and confusion, but also tears of relief for finally letting out what had been buried in her for a half century. You see, she could never show her wound as long as her husband was alive. He could not know of the things that had happened to her because his rage, his remorse, and his sense of failed responsibility would have broken him.

Helga lived three or four more years. These were years in which she experienced many dark moments as ghosts of the past released themselves from the recesses of her heart; but they were also marked by an unfettered joy that she had been unable to feel previously. During the five decades since her flight from her homeland, she and her husband had been blessed by many things: strong, talented and generous children; a flourishing farm; good neighbours. Helga had appreciated these things but, owning a body and a spirit constricted by unexpressed pain, had been held back from full enjoyment of them. Now the unlocking of Helga's heart had freed her to revel in all the blessings of past and present. The key that had unlocked her was lamentation: the out-pouring of the dark emotions we generally try to hide from ourselves and others.

You may find it strange that a preacher would tell this story on Thanksgiving Sunday, but it is a story for which I am deeply grateful. I am grateful for the beauty of the moment in which Helga began to release her suffering. I am grateful for witnessing the grace and the power of her lamentation and for being trusted with it. I am grateful for what I learned that day: the deep connection between suffering and joy, the connection between the release of sorrow and the capacity to be joyous.

This is a connection wonderfully expressed in Khalil Gibran's poetic work, The Profit:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Do not these words ring true? Is there not something inside you that says 'yes, yes!' when you hear them? Why then do we make for ourselves a false truth that is the antithesis, the very contradiction of this reality? Why then do we live as though the pursuit of happiness by nature demands a flight from sorrow?

This is Thanksgiving Sunday. We are reminded of the imperative to be grateful. God would have us be grateful, not because God needs our gratitude, not because God is an insecure type who will be resentful if we do not feel indebted by the good things she does for us, but because the best way for us to live is in deep gratefulness. Listen to the words of Paul to the Philippians, 'Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.'

What a description of the freedom of the heart! God does not ask for gratitude from us so that we will feel some obligation to him. God does not want thanksgiving from us to underscore his majesty. God wants us to live from a place of gratitude because that is the place of freedom of the heart.

Oh, to dwell in that land! Oh, to live that life! Well, that life awaits us. 'Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.' But if you cannot find your way to rejoicing because of some heaviness in your heart, the way to rejoicing does not lie in burying the heaviness. The way to rejoicing does not lie in denying that burden; rather, the way to rejoicing lies in a lamentation.

This is what the biblical book of Lamentation, sometimes called the Lamentations of Jeremiah, is about. The book was written as the Israelites were returning from exile in Babylon. The people were having to come to terms with their own betrayal of God, with the traumas of war, and with the destruction wrought by conquerors. Some of the leaders were harsh in their stiff-jawed efforts to cleanse the land and nation of foreigners and rebuild. The author of this work sought to give expression to the grief, and guilt, and anger in Israel's collective soul, releasing the people to start anew with freedom of the heart.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the heart-space we are in now that we know we have to rebuild our relationship with the Earth. I think we are collectively realising just how much damage we are doing to the good Earth, whose harvest we celebrate at Thanksgiving. I think this knowledge is weighing heavy on our hearts, constricting them. The danger is that, with constricted hearts and set jaws, we will begin to look about in bitterness for others to scapegoat - the Chinese, the Indians, the multinationals. The danger is that, with hearts too heavy for renewal, we will surrender to our fate.

To free our hearts for the challenge ahead, to free our hearts to reconfigure our relationship to the Earth in love and care, we need to lament what is happening and what we have done. To move into that existential stance of gratitude from which we will make the best decisions, we need to lament. But how do we break the chains of fear and unlock what is in us?

This past summer my family returned to Quebec's Eastern Townships for a month. I started many of my days with a long run on country roads, easing my mind into the familiar beauty of rolling hills rising into the Green Mountains. Falling into and rising out of valley fog. Startling wild turkeys. Watching the fields turn golden. But my deep enjoyment was tempered by what I saw whenever my eyes took in Mount Sutton: big, red-roofed houses creeping further up the side again this year; wilderness pushed back; less space for the eastern cougar. This gave me the same feeling I had had the summer before when I took my boys on their first canoe trip over waters I had know well decades earlier. A sadness descended upon me as I saw how many remote nooks were now occupied, and how the sky was never free of vapour trails. At night our survey of the constellations was continually interrupted by the whizzing of satellites. 'The roads to Zion mourn.'

One night, falling asleep in Sutton, listening to the crickets and tree frogs and feeling the breeze come through the windows, I heard Neil Young's high voice coming up from the stereo downstairs … There is a town in north Ontario, with dream comfort memory to spare, and in my mind I still need a place to go, all my changes were there… Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise, big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us …helpless, helpless, helpless.

I slipped into helplessness, feeling a mixture of great joy for the beauty of God's creation, great gratitude for being in it and fed by it, and deep, deep remorse for what we are doing to it. I felt humbled by my powerlessness in the face of it all. Just for a moment, I found freedom of the heart. Just for a moment, my mind was able to surrender the frenzied analysis of our predicament and to turn instead to mourning. Just for a moment my spirit was able to stop willing a different reality and to accept my deep sadness. After some moments of heartsickness, I slipped into sleep embraced only by gratitude and rested with a lightness of spirit I had not known for a long time. I awoke refreshed and still free for a time- not to deny or meekly accept the despoiling of creation that had so constricted my heart, but with more courage and resolve to act.

As we move to the table of our Lord this morning, I invite you to that heart-space. As we move to the table, let us forget neither crucifixion nor resurrection nor the unbreakable connection between the two. As we share bread with Christ let us place our brokenness on the table. As the wine is offered let us pour out those things that fetter our souls. I invite you to freedom of the heart. I invite you to a life shaped from first breath to last by thanksgiving.