November 2009
FROM THE PASTOR
Dear Friends,
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
I've been looking out the window a good deal today. It's Monday, the day I usually take off, and the morning after an early brush with winter. The picnic table and the Adirondack chairs were caught outside, like travelers who couldn't find shelter. I'll move them to the garage this week -- but they've been baptized in the first snow and remained frosted this morning. They'll never be the same.
The big, flat oak leaves are finally giving up the green and beginning the turn to reds and golds. The melancholic ache of autumn: the oaks are saving the best for last, like Pablo Picasso or Georgia O'Keefe, as they hang on for dear, dear life.
I used a few lines of Robert Frost to start things off. Not just because of the trees outside, although “nothing gold can stay” certainly ran through my mind when the sun came out and the gold leaves glittered like they belonged to Midas. Frost is the quintessential New England poet, and autumn is the quintessential New England season. The two go together. Peanut butter and jelly.
Truth be told, I don't like Frost all that much. I have a feeling if he was my next door neighbor, I wouldn't be all that happy. He's grumpy and cantankerous and, beneath his simplicity, he's surprisingly difficult to figure out.
Kerry and I sat on Frost's porch a couple of years ago, at the house he lived in up in North Conway . There's a great view of the back of Cannon Mountain and the front of Mount LaFayette -- the north entrance to Franconia Notch. The day we were there, the Notch was experiencing one of those weather-changing-every-five-minutes, going from sun to clouds to rain to drizzle, to sun again. Rinse. And then repeat.
Frost called poetry “a momentary stay against confusion.” That is, for a very brief period of time, a poem gives us -- a good poem -- an insight that scatters a little wisdom dust on us. We see the world differently. It's not wild, strange, and random, the Richard Dawkins god-is-illusion world. Things make sense, maybe not complete sense, but certainly enough to make the world seem, at the very least, magnificent in its complex beauty.
Most times, that's all we need.
I can't help but think that Frost's line also applies to worship. After all, what is Sunday morning but a momentary stay against the confusion of the rest of the week? It's the one chance we have to, if not make complete sense of things, then to at least share our humanness with each other. A very smart young man recently told me that he absolutely believed in God (and I believe him), but he was still working on the details.
When I see him next, I will tell him: we are all working on the details. And while we do, every once and a while, something will happen in worship -- in the silence, in a hymn, in a prayer -- that will be a momentary stay against our confusion. Every once and a while, someone will unexpectedly do something so amazingly kind and wonderful that we'll have a momentary stay against confusion. Every once and a while, when we look at the big, flat gold oak leaves, even knowing they will disappear will be a momentary stay against confusion.
Yes, God is in those details. Certainly Robert Frost would be the first to agree with me. We must settle, I'm afraid, for a less-than-complete set of those details.
The stays against confusion are momentary here on earth.
Peace, and beauty,
Pastor John
