Living Ishfully Ever After (Preface)

William (Dufford) Levwood

[These are the opening words, chalice lighting, children's story and meditation, which act as a preface to the sermon Living Ishfully.]

Opening Words

On October 26, 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke these words to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia:

If a person sweeps streets for a living, they should sweep like Raphael painted pictures, like Michelangelo carved marble, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music.

Chalice Lighting

I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row
and pass the bags along,
Who stand in the line and haul in their places,
Who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing,
well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,
are put in museums but you know
they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

(Marge Piercy, reading #567 in our hymnal)

Children's Story

William read Ish, by Peter H. Reynolds. In it, Ramon is a boy who loves to draw. One day he realizes his drawings are not perfect. He crumples it up and throws it away, tries again, crumples it up and throws it away . . . His younger sister retrieves and uncrumples his drawings and tapes them to the wall in her room. When Ramon tells her his drawing of a flower in a vase doesn't look like a vase, his sister tells him she likes it anyway, and the vase looks "vase-ish".

Meditation - Home Cooking

This is a story from Ed Brown, former Chef at Tassejara Zen Center.

"When I first started cooking at Tassajara, I had a problem. I could not get my biscuits to come out right. I'd follow the recipe and try variations ... but nothing worked. I had in my mind the "perfect" biscuit, and these just didn't measure up.

"Growing up I had 'made' two kinds of biscuits: one was from Bisquick and the other from Pillsbury ... I really liked those ... biscuits. Isn't that what biscuits should taste like? Mine just weren't coming out the way they were supposed to.

"It's wonderful and amazing the ideas we get about what biscuits should taste like, or what a life should look like. Compared to what? Canned biscuits from Pillsbury? Leave it to Beaver? ...

"People who ate my biscuits could be extolling their virtues, eating one after another, but for me, [those perfectly good] biscuits were not 'right.'

"Finally one day that shifting-into-place occurred, an awakening: not 'right' compared to what? Oh no! I've been trying to make canned Pillsbury biscuits! Then that exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some (previously hidden) standard: wheaty, flaky, buttery, sunny, earthy, here. Inconceivably delicious, incomparably alive, present, vibrant. In fact, much more satisfying than any memory ...

Those moments - when you realize your life as it is is just fine, thank you - can be so stunning and liberating. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product makes it seem insufficient. The effort to produce a life with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger is bound to fail - and be endlessly frustrating. Then savoring, actually tasting the present moment of experience - how much more complex and multifaceted. How unfathomable ..."

Sermon

Here's a link to the sermon, Living Ishfully.

[Delivered January 15, 2012. William (Dufford) Levwood was, in January 2012, a Master's student at Starr King. Born William Dufford, he and his wife changed their surnames to Levwood when they married.]

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