The Integrity of the Flame
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, January 9, 2022
So much of any year is flammable…
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
So much of this past year has been flammable, so much to burn and release. To talk of fire these days is challenging. There’s beauty in the flame that burns in our chalice. There’s beauty in the candles we light to share our joys and sorrows. But we know that fire destroys as well, and has destroyed in terrifying ways over the past year, even here, up north in Canada, where we are supposed to be spared the conflagrations of dry forests and deserts.
Maybe that’s the message. Everything we are, everything we touch, has its qualities of creation and destruction. I’m thinking of the Hindu goddess Kali, who is also Durga. As Durga, she is the mother protector who maintains the balance of the universe. With her many arms she comes riding on a tiger. She’s the first deity to offer help to spiritual seekers.
But in her other form, she is Kali the destroyer, wearing a necklace of skulls. She is the master of change, time and death. All aspects of the goddess who is both Kali and Durga are necessary to human existence. Without time, without the cosmos, there is no life. Without death there is no life.
Fire has its own integrity, its own wholeness, truth and honesty. It can purify wounds as easily as it can destroy us, if we are not careful or respectful. Maybe that’s what each new year calls us to do: to find the balance, to rediscover our own integrity, and to become more mindful of what it is that sustains us and gives us life, what it is that enables us to begin again with intention.
Long ago in the mid-19th century, Unitarian and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson preached to a small group of divinity school students at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The students were graduating and were about to become Unitarian ministers.
Emerson admonished them to be human, to allow themselves to be vulnerable with the people they were about to serve in Unitarian churches around the Boston area. He told a story of sitting in the pews of the First Parish of Concord, a place where I once served as a religious educator. He sat in the balcony, where I have sat. He looked out at the beauty of the falling snow while the preacher, poor Rev. Barzilai Frost, droned on and on.
“The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral,” Emerson writes, “and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. … This man had ploughed, and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history.”
“The true preacher,” Emerson told those students, “can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire of thought.”
I’ve been thinking about this all week. About life passed through the fire of thought. About living through a year — well, actually two years — of a pandemic, a span of time that has in some ways brought me closer to this community than I had ever expected. We have been through so much together. We have been fortunate not to lose a single member to Covid, at least not directly.
Yet all of us have been profoundly touched in one way or another by loss this past year. We have known friends or family who have died, or we have known friends of friends who have suffered terrible loss. We have seen whole communities devastated, especially communities of colour. We have seen the suffering of those without shelter. We have witnessed the overwork and exhaustion of some of the most precious resources in our society, our health care workers and those working in essential services.
It’s hard not to think about loss as I look back over this year. We have lost seven pillars of our community: Jane Atkinson, Fiona Clark, Rev. Charles Eddis, Mary and Bob Basset, May Kersten, and, most recently, Marion Blake.
I can tell you that I have not always felt as though I have done my best. There were phone calls and visits I wish I had made, but time ran out, other things took precedence. And yes, I can blame the pandemic for that. But even a legitimate excuse doesn’t lessen the heartache, the longing for the final conversations, the final goodbyes, or just the opportunity to ask, “How’s your spirit?” and to be blessed by the variety of answers.
These days, serving this community is really what keeps me going. The creativity and the constant adjustments and adaptations have fed me. I know change is hard. I go kicking and screaming with each transition, and then I settle and I’m grateful for what emerges. Otherwise, I wake in sadness because the world is what it is right now. Humanity is what it is right now. I know I can’t delude myself into thinking the we can quickly fix all that’s wrong — if not this year, then in a few years. I chafe at the limitations that this pandemic has placed on us all. I want the freedom I have lost. I’m willing to do whatever is required to bring us to a place of safety and good health.
I am tired of not being able to travel to see family, of having to question whether it is OK to visit my grandchildren. I’m tired of living in fear. It’s exhausting feeling responsible on one hand and irrationally fearful on the other. There is so much of this year that I would like to treat as flammable, so much that I would like to burn and forget.
And still… There is so much I cherish from this past year. The neighbours and friends who reached out to help, this community and its determination to keep going, the many people whom I have only met on screen, whom I may never meet in the flesh. I will probably never know how tall you are, but what does that matter? We have met in a way that we could never have met before.
I know how privileged I am. I don’t live alone, and I look out each day at the beauty of the snow on mountains. There has been an abundance of food and even good neighbours who come for walks or visit when it is legal, and yet the funk still settles around me. I can only imagine how it must settle around everyone else, as we imagine making it through the days, weeks, months and year ahead.
“Emerson,” I could say, “I mean, Ralph, dear, I seem to have run out of truth to share. Is it enough to name my own sadness and my own struggles? Is it OK if I repeat the same refrain over and over: I need you, we need each other; we can search for truth in nature, in God, in the cosmos, but in the end what matters is what we find right here, in our hearts, in our efforts to create something everlasting”?
I know that hope is not easily found. Feeling whole is not always possible. Feelings of defeat and cynicism are strong right now. I fight those feelings every day. But I do find hope in the ritual of coming together, of using the power of flame, of fire, of creation and destruction to begin again for the new year.