Oops! I must have left my "Beach Body" in my other pants....
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 4, 2002
***
Walking back home from the HUB last Thursday, my Inky Mirror tucked securely under my arm, I was suddenly struck while crossing Main Street with a brilliant idea for a sermon. Well, maybe not a whole sermon...really all it was was a clever title, or at least a title that seemed clever to me at the time. I’ve always kinda prided myself in my ability to generate catchy sermon titles, which sometimes seems like half the battle when it comes to writing a sermon. A good title gives you focus as a writer; it gives you a beginning, a place to start, points you in a particular direction, and often hints at a conclusion as well (although I’m always a little cautious about that -- because part of the adventure of the creative process is the possibility of surprise, and that one never really knows in advance WHERE your thoughts will lead you).
In the ordinary course of my writing process, I generally allow these titles to percolate for awhile, mostly because in just about every other church I’ve served I’ve had to announce my sermon titles a month in advance, so that they could be printed in the newsletter or go up on the reader board; but here on Nantucket, folks are accustomed to having things fresh -- straight out of the ocean and on to the plate, so to speak -- and so Thursday’s flash of inspiration becomes Sunday’s fresh and timely message, but hopefully one seasoned with just a dash of timeless insight and wisdom as well.
The title of my sermon this week, by the way, is “Oops! I must have left my ‘Beach Body’ in my other pants....” Sit with it for awhile, Meditate upon it; I promise, it will grow on you. Oops! I must have left my Beach body in my OTHER pants. It just kind of sums up how I feel some mornings as I sit out on my porch drinking a cup of coffee and watching the parade of young people strolling down Fair Street with their towels and their coolers and their swim suits and expensive sunglasses. Oops! I must have left MY beach body in my other pants.
Now don’t get me wrong. As anyone who knows me can readily testify, I am not exactly someone who is obsessed with his appearance. I’m generally pretty content with the body God gave me; I try to keep it in as good a shape as I can, probably indulge it a little more often than I should, but on the whole I’m a lot more concerned with how well it works than I am with how it looks, and (for the time being, at least) it basically seems to be working pretty well. And I don’t really think that it looks that bad either. And frankly, I think that the world would probably be a lot happier place if more people felt like I do.
But I’m not really that interested in talking about “appearances” here this morning. What I really want to talk about is the Beach. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I haven’t really been to the beach all that much since coming to Nantucket, and when I do go, it’s generally because I have to. I’ve done a few weddings out at Brant Point, and last September of course I was at the candlelight vigil at Jetties Beach; I’ve taken Parker out to Surfside so that she could run in the sand, made the obligatory pilgrimage to Great Point to see the lighthouse. But I’ve never really gone to the beach just to BE “at the beach,” and when people discover this peculiar fact about me, they generally treat me as though I were some sort of heretic or lost soul.
Recently I’ve even been beset by a few self-proclaimed “beach evangelists,” who’ve been sending me brief E-mails asking whether I’ve been swimming in the ocean yet, or reminding me that “the beach is the wellspring of the magic of Nantucket.” (Isn’t that a lovely phrase, the way it just rolls off the tongue?) And I don’t mind; it’s not as if I’ve got anything AGAINST the Beach, and I’m sure it probably wouldn’t hurt me much just to take an afternoon off to go sit in the sun on the sand, maybe even jump in the ocean a few times, before heading back home to shower off. Who knows? It might even inspire another sermon title. But when it comes right down to it, I always kinda feel like there are other things in my life right now that are just a little bit more demanding of my attention at any given moment. I know that the beach will always be there waiting for me. And that knowledge, by itself, is enough to take the edge off of any sense of urgency I may feel about actually needing to go there myself.
And besides that, I’m kind of spoiled. My mother’s home on Camano Island, out in Washington State, is only about 30 yards from the beach, so I’ve certainly had plenty of opportunity in my life to spend as much time hanging out there as anyone could possibly want. Moreover, being somewhat fair-skinned and with a family history of melanoma, I generally try to keep out of the sun as much as I can, which means that when I do go to the beach I always feel compelled to slather on tons of sunscreen, which makes me feel greasy (and eventually also leaves me covered in sand), which means a dip in the ocean, which means more sunscreen, and at the end of the day I always seem to come home sunburned anyway.
As I grow older, there seems to be a lot more equipment involved in going to the beach as well: a chair, an umbrella, a cooler...it’s almost as though I have to organize an entire expedition, some sort of Safari, just to enjoy an experience that I’m accustomed to having available to me right outside my front door. Finally, and this is just my own personal preference mind you, but nowadays I find that I actually enjoy the beach much more in the winter than I do in summer. The beach in summer is typically a hot, sandy, sticky, crowded place, but in the winter walking alone along the ocean’s edge, with a bit of a wind over the water whipping up whitecaps, biting briskly at my face and tousling my hair, I just somehow feel a little closer to God. At times it almost feels as though I can actually hear her voice calling to me in the lonely cry of a gull.
For what it’s worth, I probably would have found it difficult to make time to get to the beach this week even if I’d wanted to. As you may have read in Thursday’s paper, in addition to all of the other things that have been happening around the church, we’ve had a clock-maker from Saint Louis here on the Island this past week. Alain Androuais and his son James have been staying with me in the Parsonage, and working up in the tower upgrading the town clock and installing a new, computerized striking mechanism so that now, after nearly a decade of silence, our bell once more chimes the hour, and “rings the 52’s” at seven AM, noon, and nine in the evening. At first I wasn’t really certain how I was going to feel about having a bell ringing in my back yard morning, noon and night, but since I’m generally up by seven anyway, rarely go to bed before nine, and almost never need to be reminded about when it’s time to go to lunch, it’s been a pretty easy adjustment.
The only really unnerving thing about the new clock is the way in which it relentlessly counts down the hours to Sunday morning on a Saturday night; John Donne’s observation that “the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation” notwithstanding, I know perfectly well for whom THAT bell tolls, and it isn’t necessarily for any of you who decide on the spur of the moment, at the eleventh hour, that maybe you’d rather spend the day at the beach.
But Alain and James were very congenial houseguests...self-sufficient, low-maintenance, reliable...kind of like we hope the clock will be from now on. Of course, there was the one night when they were supposed to meet me for dinner around eight, and by eight-thirty they still hadn’t shown up. I was just starting to get a little worried, when a couple of young ladies rapped on my window, asked if I was “Tim,” then informed me that there were two guys locked in the church who wanted me to come let them out.
Apparently someone had wandered by and latched the tower door while they were still inside, so I had to go over and release the captives, and fortunately no one was compelled to rappel out the front window down to Orange Street. I know that getting contractors to complete their jobs in a timely fashion can sometimes be difficult here on Nantucket in the summer, but I’m not really sure that imprisoning them in a Tower until the work is done is necessarily the best solution.
One of the coolest features about this new clock though, once everything comes on-line, is that it is going to be tied-in through a Global Positioning Satellite link to the Royal Naval Observatory in Greenwich, England, so that it can periodically adjust itself to Greenwich Mean Time in order to assure its accuracy. And personally, I find this very comforting. Between the GPS link in the church tower, and the Meridian Line on Fair Street, it kinda feels like I’m always going to be able to know now precisely where I am in the Universe at any given moment. How many other things are there in life that you can be that certain of? To be able to orient yourself accurately in time and space, find your bearings and clearly determine your location and direction...it’s a rare and precious thing, not to be taken lightly.
Of course, there are other times in life when maybe you don’t want to be located so easily and precisely. Monday morning I had a message on my answering machine from the Nantucket County Sheriff, informing me that he has some “papers” to deliver to me; of course, I knew exactly what they were, and wasn’t in any particular hurry to receive them, so for 48 hours I basically played hide-and-seek with Richard Brettschneider while I tried to get ahold of Margaret to find out why she was having me served with a Summons and Complaint after we had already agreed to mediate our divorce. Naturally, he caught up with me just half-an-hour before I was finally able to get through to her, coming out of the church with my robe over my arm after Jaime Greenleaf’s memorial service Wednesday morning. It was actually pretty comic, and as process servers go he was really very decent; as with a lot of things in life, in the end the anticipation of the event turned out to be a lot more exciting than the event itself, and afterwards (even though at first I was pretty annoyed), Margaret and I both had a pretty good laugh at my expense.
But that’s probably enough about my life for one week....
Perhaps if I’d had the good sense to spend a little more time at the beach, I could have dodged the Sheriff for another 48 hours, and spared myself a little longer from the hassle of hiring my own attorney in order to file an answer to her complaint. But it really wouldn’t have changed anything, at least not anything that really mattered. Margaret’s complaints are Legion, as are my own; we’ve been headed in different directions for quite some time now, and the fact that we can both still laugh together about it, despite our mutual disappointment, is probably a good thing. After seventeen years together, you get to know someone pretty well; but the real question isn’t really how well you know the other person, it’s how well you know your own mind.
So even as we both grieve the loss of what might have been, I hope that we will also be able to encourage one another to move forward without anger or bitterness to embrace whatever new and exciting opportunities may await us in the future. Neither one of us really needs to have the last laugh. Maybe I’m just naive, but I honestly believe that if we each win, we both win. Our differences may well have become irreconcilable, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to accommodate one another as we go our separate ways. And yes (for those of you who worry about such things) I’m keeping the dog.
Over the years I’ve heard it said many times that a preacher’s best sermon is often their own life; that who we are and what we do testify far more eloquently to the authenticity of our religious faith than anything that we might happen to say from the pulpit. It’s a much greater challenge than merely “practicing what we preach;” it’s the responsibility of endeavoring to live our own lives in harmony with the same values and principles that we would encourage others to live theirs, all the while knowing that at times we will fall short, at times we will make mistakes, at times we will be disappointed in ourselves, and perhaps disappoint others in the process. Not that I’ve done anything like this recently, of course (at least not that I know of). I’m speaking abstractly now; this is a pulpit, not a confessional.
But if perfection were the only acceptable standard, you would never be able to find anyone to do this job. “Oops! I must have left my flawless ministry in my other robe.” The point is to do your best, in this vocation or in any vocation, in the hope that it will somehow be good enough, to trust the integrity of the process and the worthiness of the goal, and to remain faithful to the continual challenge of aspiring to a higher standard, rather than constantly measuring yourself or others against a standard which none of us will ever achieve.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spoken quite a bit from this pulpit about the “ministry of hospitality,” and the challenge of showing kindness to strangers. I’ve spoken of the Golden Rule, and the difference between “bonding” and “bridging,” and of the Wisdom of Pilgrims, who “forsake the familiar in order to become familiar with that which is ultimately mysterious and unknown, and by doing so hope to discover an essential truth about themselves and their place in the universe.” And today I’d just like to tie all these themes together by pointing out how they correspond to Unitarian-Universalism’s First and Final Principles: an affirmation of “the Inherent Worth and Dignity of every person,” and “Respect for the Interdependent Web of all Existence, of which we are a part.”
These are not new truths, nor do they belong exclusive to us alone. But they are “our” truths, insofar as we are willing to “own” them; insofar as we attempt to live our lives in accordance with them. They locate us in the religious universe, give us a direction that we can follow, orient us toward the things that are ultimately most important. And when John Donne wrote, nearly 400 years ago, that “no man is an island, apart to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” and that “every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” he testified to their timelessness. Our bell still tolls for those “who think it doth,” and though its toll has been intermit here of late, let it ring out loudly from this moment onward, reminding us all of where we are and why we’ve come here, and inviting us occasionally to be “united to God” as well.
***
READING: Meditation XVII, by John Donne
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest.
If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is.
The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee....
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday August 4, 2002
***
Walking back home from the HUB last Thursday, my Inky Mirror tucked securely under my arm, I was suddenly struck while crossing Main Street with a brilliant idea for a sermon. Well, maybe not a whole sermon...really all it was was a clever title, or at least a title that seemed clever to me at the time. I’ve always kinda prided myself in my ability to generate catchy sermon titles, which sometimes seems like half the battle when it comes to writing a sermon. A good title gives you focus as a writer; it gives you a beginning, a place to start, points you in a particular direction, and often hints at a conclusion as well (although I’m always a little cautious about that -- because part of the adventure of the creative process is the possibility of surprise, and that one never really knows in advance WHERE your thoughts will lead you).
In the ordinary course of my writing process, I generally allow these titles to percolate for awhile, mostly because in just about every other church I’ve served I’ve had to announce my sermon titles a month in advance, so that they could be printed in the newsletter or go up on the reader board; but here on Nantucket, folks are accustomed to having things fresh -- straight out of the ocean and on to the plate, so to speak -- and so Thursday’s flash of inspiration becomes Sunday’s fresh and timely message, but hopefully one seasoned with just a dash of timeless insight and wisdom as well.
The title of my sermon this week, by the way, is “Oops! I must have left my ‘Beach Body’ in my other pants....” Sit with it for awhile, Meditate upon it; I promise, it will grow on you. Oops! I must have left my Beach body in my OTHER pants. It just kind of sums up how I feel some mornings as I sit out on my porch drinking a cup of coffee and watching the parade of young people strolling down Fair Street with their towels and their coolers and their swim suits and expensive sunglasses. Oops! I must have left MY beach body in my other pants.
Now don’t get me wrong. As anyone who knows me can readily testify, I am not exactly someone who is obsessed with his appearance. I’m generally pretty content with the body God gave me; I try to keep it in as good a shape as I can, probably indulge it a little more often than I should, but on the whole I’m a lot more concerned with how well it works than I am with how it looks, and (for the time being, at least) it basically seems to be working pretty well. And I don’t really think that it looks that bad either. And frankly, I think that the world would probably be a lot happier place if more people felt like I do.
But I’m not really that interested in talking about “appearances” here this morning. What I really want to talk about is the Beach. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I haven’t really been to the beach all that much since coming to Nantucket, and when I do go, it’s generally because I have to. I’ve done a few weddings out at Brant Point, and last September of course I was at the candlelight vigil at Jetties Beach; I’ve taken Parker out to Surfside so that she could run in the sand, made the obligatory pilgrimage to Great Point to see the lighthouse. But I’ve never really gone to the beach just to BE “at the beach,” and when people discover this peculiar fact about me, they generally treat me as though I were some sort of heretic or lost soul.
Recently I’ve even been beset by a few self-proclaimed “beach evangelists,” who’ve been sending me brief E-mails asking whether I’ve been swimming in the ocean yet, or reminding me that “the beach is the wellspring of the magic of Nantucket.” (Isn’t that a lovely phrase, the way it just rolls off the tongue?) And I don’t mind; it’s not as if I’ve got anything AGAINST the Beach, and I’m sure it probably wouldn’t hurt me much just to take an afternoon off to go sit in the sun on the sand, maybe even jump in the ocean a few times, before heading back home to shower off. Who knows? It might even inspire another sermon title. But when it comes right down to it, I always kinda feel like there are other things in my life right now that are just a little bit more demanding of my attention at any given moment. I know that the beach will always be there waiting for me. And that knowledge, by itself, is enough to take the edge off of any sense of urgency I may feel about actually needing to go there myself.
And besides that, I’m kind of spoiled. My mother’s home on Camano Island, out in Washington State, is only about 30 yards from the beach, so I’ve certainly had plenty of opportunity in my life to spend as much time hanging out there as anyone could possibly want. Moreover, being somewhat fair-skinned and with a family history of melanoma, I generally try to keep out of the sun as much as I can, which means that when I do go to the beach I always feel compelled to slather on tons of sunscreen, which makes me feel greasy (and eventually also leaves me covered in sand), which means a dip in the ocean, which means more sunscreen, and at the end of the day I always seem to come home sunburned anyway.
As I grow older, there seems to be a lot more equipment involved in going to the beach as well: a chair, an umbrella, a cooler...it’s almost as though I have to organize an entire expedition, some sort of Safari, just to enjoy an experience that I’m accustomed to having available to me right outside my front door. Finally, and this is just my own personal preference mind you, but nowadays I find that I actually enjoy the beach much more in the winter than I do in summer. The beach in summer is typically a hot, sandy, sticky, crowded place, but in the winter walking alone along the ocean’s edge, with a bit of a wind over the water whipping up whitecaps, biting briskly at my face and tousling my hair, I just somehow feel a little closer to God. At times it almost feels as though I can actually hear her voice calling to me in the lonely cry of a gull.
For what it’s worth, I probably would have found it difficult to make time to get to the beach this week even if I’d wanted to. As you may have read in Thursday’s paper, in addition to all of the other things that have been happening around the church, we’ve had a clock-maker from Saint Louis here on the Island this past week. Alain Androuais and his son James have been staying with me in the Parsonage, and working up in the tower upgrading the town clock and installing a new, computerized striking mechanism so that now, after nearly a decade of silence, our bell once more chimes the hour, and “rings the 52’s” at seven AM, noon, and nine in the evening. At first I wasn’t really certain how I was going to feel about having a bell ringing in my back yard morning, noon and night, but since I’m generally up by seven anyway, rarely go to bed before nine, and almost never need to be reminded about when it’s time to go to lunch, it’s been a pretty easy adjustment.
The only really unnerving thing about the new clock is the way in which it relentlessly counts down the hours to Sunday morning on a Saturday night; John Donne’s observation that “the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation” notwithstanding, I know perfectly well for whom THAT bell tolls, and it isn’t necessarily for any of you who decide on the spur of the moment, at the eleventh hour, that maybe you’d rather spend the day at the beach.
But Alain and James were very congenial houseguests...self-sufficient, low-maintenance, reliable...kind of like we hope the clock will be from now on. Of course, there was the one night when they were supposed to meet me for dinner around eight, and by eight-thirty they still hadn’t shown up. I was just starting to get a little worried, when a couple of young ladies rapped on my window, asked if I was “Tim,” then informed me that there were two guys locked in the church who wanted me to come let them out.
Apparently someone had wandered by and latched the tower door while they were still inside, so I had to go over and release the captives, and fortunately no one was compelled to rappel out the front window down to Orange Street. I know that getting contractors to complete their jobs in a timely fashion can sometimes be difficult here on Nantucket in the summer, but I’m not really sure that imprisoning them in a Tower until the work is done is necessarily the best solution.
One of the coolest features about this new clock though, once everything comes on-line, is that it is going to be tied-in through a Global Positioning Satellite link to the Royal Naval Observatory in Greenwich, England, so that it can periodically adjust itself to Greenwich Mean Time in order to assure its accuracy. And personally, I find this very comforting. Between the GPS link in the church tower, and the Meridian Line on Fair Street, it kinda feels like I’m always going to be able to know now precisely where I am in the Universe at any given moment. How many other things are there in life that you can be that certain of? To be able to orient yourself accurately in time and space, find your bearings and clearly determine your location and direction...it’s a rare and precious thing, not to be taken lightly.
Of course, there are other times in life when maybe you don’t want to be located so easily and precisely. Monday morning I had a message on my answering machine from the Nantucket County Sheriff, informing me that he has some “papers” to deliver to me; of course, I knew exactly what they were, and wasn’t in any particular hurry to receive them, so for 48 hours I basically played hide-and-seek with Richard Brettschneider while I tried to get ahold of Margaret to find out why she was having me served with a Summons and Complaint after we had already agreed to mediate our divorce. Naturally, he caught up with me just half-an-hour before I was finally able to get through to her, coming out of the church with my robe over my arm after Jaime Greenleaf’s memorial service Wednesday morning. It was actually pretty comic, and as process servers go he was really very decent; as with a lot of things in life, in the end the anticipation of the event turned out to be a lot more exciting than the event itself, and afterwards (even though at first I was pretty annoyed), Margaret and I both had a pretty good laugh at my expense.
But that’s probably enough about my life for one week....
Perhaps if I’d had the good sense to spend a little more time at the beach, I could have dodged the Sheriff for another 48 hours, and spared myself a little longer from the hassle of hiring my own attorney in order to file an answer to her complaint. But it really wouldn’t have changed anything, at least not anything that really mattered. Margaret’s complaints are Legion, as are my own; we’ve been headed in different directions for quite some time now, and the fact that we can both still laugh together about it, despite our mutual disappointment, is probably a good thing. After seventeen years together, you get to know someone pretty well; but the real question isn’t really how well you know the other person, it’s how well you know your own mind.
So even as we both grieve the loss of what might have been, I hope that we will also be able to encourage one another to move forward without anger or bitterness to embrace whatever new and exciting opportunities may await us in the future. Neither one of us really needs to have the last laugh. Maybe I’m just naive, but I honestly believe that if we each win, we both win. Our differences may well have become irreconcilable, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to accommodate one another as we go our separate ways. And yes (for those of you who worry about such things) I’m keeping the dog.
Over the years I’ve heard it said many times that a preacher’s best sermon is often their own life; that who we are and what we do testify far more eloquently to the authenticity of our religious faith than anything that we might happen to say from the pulpit. It’s a much greater challenge than merely “practicing what we preach;” it’s the responsibility of endeavoring to live our own lives in harmony with the same values and principles that we would encourage others to live theirs, all the while knowing that at times we will fall short, at times we will make mistakes, at times we will be disappointed in ourselves, and perhaps disappoint others in the process. Not that I’ve done anything like this recently, of course (at least not that I know of). I’m speaking abstractly now; this is a pulpit, not a confessional.
But if perfection were the only acceptable standard, you would never be able to find anyone to do this job. “Oops! I must have left my flawless ministry in my other robe.” The point is to do your best, in this vocation or in any vocation, in the hope that it will somehow be good enough, to trust the integrity of the process and the worthiness of the goal, and to remain faithful to the continual challenge of aspiring to a higher standard, rather than constantly measuring yourself or others against a standard which none of us will ever achieve.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spoken quite a bit from this pulpit about the “ministry of hospitality,” and the challenge of showing kindness to strangers. I’ve spoken of the Golden Rule, and the difference between “bonding” and “bridging,” and of the Wisdom of Pilgrims, who “forsake the familiar in order to become familiar with that which is ultimately mysterious and unknown, and by doing so hope to discover an essential truth about themselves and their place in the universe.” And today I’d just like to tie all these themes together by pointing out how they correspond to Unitarian-Universalism’s First and Final Principles: an affirmation of “the Inherent Worth and Dignity of every person,” and “Respect for the Interdependent Web of all Existence, of which we are a part.”
These are not new truths, nor do they belong exclusive to us alone. But they are “our” truths, insofar as we are willing to “own” them; insofar as we attempt to live our lives in accordance with them. They locate us in the religious universe, give us a direction that we can follow, orient us toward the things that are ultimately most important. And when John Donne wrote, nearly 400 years ago, that “no man is an island, apart to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” and that “every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” he testified to their timelessness. Our bell still tolls for those “who think it doth,” and though its toll has been intermit here of late, let it ring out loudly from this moment onward, reminding us all of where we are and why we’ve come here, and inviting us occasionally to be “united to God” as well.
***
READING: Meditation XVII, by John Donne
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest.
If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is.
The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee....
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:24 PM
