Homily for Sunday, June 18
The Rev. Bill Harkins
The Cathedral of St. Philip
2 Pentecost Year B
18 June 2006—Mikell Chapel
In the name of the God of creation who loves us all, Amen.
Good morning and Happy Father’s Day! The images from our texts this morning are full of examples of nature, both in terms of the surprising flourishing that emerges out of dry trees, and seeds that grow in measure disproportionate to that which is expected, from humble origins. As we know, Jesus often used parables as extended metaphors, and today is no exception. To hear our readings for today, both from Ezekiel and Mark, is to enter a world of mystery---the “someone” who scatters the seed “does not know how” it sprouts and grows. Thus we find metaphors of growth, new life, and a surprising and life-giving greening of the world beyond all expectations. What’s more, in the Gospel of Mark Jesus tells us that this mysterious flourishing is precisely what the Kingdom of God is like. This domain grows in mysterious fashion, and its power is independent, ultimately, of our human endeavors. Life emerges, like the Church arising from a small band of disciples, from beyond the limits of human efficacy or understanding. Indeed, this life-giving essence of the kingdom, not bound by the ordinary rules and expectations of our lives, is in stark contrast to our human finitude, expectations, presumptions, and hubris—in contrast, that is, to our tendency to treat life as knowable, predictable, and proscribed…as ultimately within our control.
With father’s day approaching and in light of these scriptural themes, I found myself turning once again to King Lear, my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. It is a play about fathers, of course, and about the limits and vicissitudes of human nature. Yet this is not all. It is a tragedy, yes, but it contains much wisdom about life in families, kindness, despair, control, compassion, and redemption. My favorite part of the play is actually a subplot in which the ageing Earl of Gloucester is, as the wonderful author, essayist and poet Wendell Berry puts it, “recalled from his despair so that he may die in his full humanity.” (1)
As Berry reminds us the old Earl has been blinded in retribution for his loyalty to King Lear. And, like Lear, he is guilty of a kind of operational theology of scarcity: he lives as if life is predictable, ultimately knowable, and within his control. He is, in short, in despair. Moreover, despite his many admirable qualities, the Earl of Gloucester lives as if there is not enough grace to go around, and as such the prevailing paradigm is that his life is primarily informed by that of which he is afraid. The results are predictable. He has falsely accused and alienated his loyal and loving son Edgar. Exiled and sentenced to death, Edgar disguises himself as a drifter, madman, and beggar. Thus disguised to his father, he becomes in fact his father’s guide. Gloucester asks to be lead to the cliffs of Dover, where in his despair he intends to kill himself by throwing himself onto the rocks below. Edgar’s self-appointed task, Berry tells us, is to save his father from despair, and he succeeds, for Gloucester dies eventually “Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief…” (v, iii, 199).(2) He dies, that is, within the appropriate boundaries of human living as God intends.
This is a wonderful and cautionary tale not only for father’s day, but in light of the lectionary texts for today. Edgar does not want his father to give up on life. To do so is, as Wendell Berry puts it, “to pass beyond the possibility of change or redemption.” Put differently and in the language of Ezekiel, Edgar hopes “to make the dry tree flourish.” And so he does not lead his father to the edge of the cliff, but rather only tells him he has done so. Gloucester renounces the world, blesses his ostensibly absent son Edgar, and as Shakespeare directs, “falls forward and swoons.” Upon regaining consciousness Gloucester is led by his son to believe that he has survived the fall. Pretending to be a passer-by who has seen Gloucester fall, Edgar assumes the remarkable and life-giving role of a spiritual guide to his father. In an exchange that will be familiar to many who have tried to help family members in trouble, Gloucester, dismayed to find himself still alive, attempts to refuse help: “Away, and let me die” (IV, vi, 48). And after several lines in which he attempts to persuade his father that he is a stranger, Edgar speaks what are for me the most significant lines of the play: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” (IV, vi, 55). In so doing, Edgar calls his father back from despair and “into the properly subordinated human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible.” (3)
To presume to “understand” human living is to exhaust the infinite possibilities of God’s creation. It is to treat as predictable and mechanical the miracle of the mustard seed and the harvest of grain, the nature of whose sprouting and growing we know not. To reduce life to the scope of our understanding is to give up on it, and to render it beyond the hope of change and redemption. It is to commit the idolatry of legislating the mystery of God out of our lives by pretending to be gods ourselves.
As the father of two sons, I have many memories in relation to which I identify with Gloucester. One in particular has been on my mind of late and bears a resemblance to Shakespeare’s play. For many years I coached basketball and baseball teams on which my sons played. When my older son Justin entered high school, I grieved the end of this shared aspect of our lives. Indeed, most of those memories are filled with joy. They are memories I shall treasure for the rest of my life. One in particular, however, is not so joyful. My son was playing on his high school team and, one night, he missed a fly ball that he ordinarily would have caught with ease. Not only that, but his batting average had begun to suffer. Ordinarily a fearless lead-off batter and an outfielder whose ability to track down fly balls made him a local legend, he was not playing up to what I presumed to be his ability. And, heaven help me, I told him just that. Perhaps this was due in part to my grieving the lost role of “coach” in his life. But for the most part I, like Gloucester, was presuming to exhaustively “know” the world prior to examining all the options—prior to paying attention to the richness of possibilities that might be life-giving. And, what’s worse, I accused my son of not caring about a game in relation to which he was passionate. To do so was not only a betrayal of all that I knew about this young man—who when passionate about something is undyingly, fiercely loyal and gives his all in relation to it— this also blinded me to other realities. Indeed I, like Gloucester, was blind, in despair, and I had engaged in the hubris of presuming to “know” when in fact I did not.
My wife Vicky, who so often “sees” with more clarity, suggested an eye examination which revealed that my son needed glasses. And once he was fitted with contacts he went on to lead his high school team to the state playoffs, garnering many awards along the way. While at Emory College he wrote a paper about this shameful episode in his father’s relationship to him. In so doing, he had the courage to name his feelings in relation to me, and to share them. Like Edgar, he called his father into the life-giving possibilities of new relationship. He loved me enough to say that I had hurt his feelings, and that in presuming to know what in fact I did not know, I had exhausted the possibilities of life-giving love between us. Though we have life, its deepest mystery, like that of the mustard seed, is beyond us. As Wendell Berry reminds us we do not know how we have it, or why. It is not predictable, and though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It is Holy. “To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, not humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.”(4) “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” Indeed.
Gloucester’s suicide attempt is a misguided response to despair, an attempt to gain ultimate control over life—control which he mistakenly believes he once had and has lost. My presumptuous effort to assign meaning to my son’s baseball error was a misguided effort to control what was lost; to bring back the days when my boys were young, I was their coach, and we shared this lovely aspect of the miracle of their presence in my life. I could not. Indeed, part of being a parent is letting go, and grieving the passage of time, the taking leave of our children as they live their own lives. Our prayer must not be that we can go back in time to reclaim what has rightly passed away, but that we will have the grace to live fully into the new lives we are already living. This is the paschal mystery of each moment of our lives. It is, as Ronald Rolheiser suggests, Pentecost—to recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit given to us here, now, in the particularity of new life appropriate to the circumstances in which we now find ourselves living. Later, under the guidance of his son, Gloucester prays a prayer that is as Wendell Berry says, exactly the opposite of his previous one—
You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me;
Let not my worser spirit tempt me again
To die before you please. (IV, vi, 213-215)
In so praying, “…he renounces control over his life. He has given up his life as an understood possession, and has taken it back as miracle and mystery.” And this miraculous, redemptive reclamation—this flourishing back to life as a human being—is acknowledged in Edgar’s response: “Well pray you, father. (IV, vi, 215). Later, King Lear asks Gloucester how a blind man can “see how this world goes.” “I see it feelingly,” Gloucester replies in his restored humanity. As Berry says, to treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it. “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” This is paschal mystery faith. This is Pentecost faith. This is mustard seed faith.
Amen.
(1)Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle, New York, Counterpoint Press, 2000, pp 4-6.
(2)Shakespeare, William, King Lear, The Pelican Shakespeare, Edited by Stephen Orgel, New York, 1999.
(3) Ibid, Life is a Miracle, p. 5.
(4)Ibid, Life is a Miracle, p. 9.
Comments? Contact Bill Harkins at: Bharkins@stphilipscathedral.org