To Live in This World
Sermon Summary from a sermon by Rev. Mike Young
delivered February 27, 2005 at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu

To live in this world
You must be able
do three things:

To love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your life depends on it;

And, when the time comes to
let it go,
to let go.                       
                           -Mary Oliver
                                                 from American Primative

"To love what is mortal . . ."

To be mortal is to be temporary, changing , even ambiguous.

To be mortal is . . . messy, often unpredictable, always in motion, in process.

To love what is mortal is to pay attention to it's everyday-ness, not just living for the high moments. These-the high moments--happen occasionally, but only as you attend to daily ordinariness.

Intimacy is always first of all the sharing of the most poignantly mortal moments of a life shared together.

To love another person AS MORTAL, is to embrace all of that, and all of other person. To love them knowing that they-and you-will change; freeing them to change. For change you both will! And aspiring to less means trying to live somewhere else than in the world.

" . . . to hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it;"

Your life DOES depend on it. To be fully alive is to hold all that wonderful, ordinary messiness up close and personal. To, as Gibran says, "laugh all of your laughter, and to cry all of your tears."

To be fully alive is to hold it against your bones, to let it get under your skin. It is to know that the endless daily rounds of wifery-and that is as much a male as a female role-are as important as the productive tasks of husbandry-also not a gendered role.

It is to know that who you are becoming is intimately wrapped up with, interdependent with, who that other person is also becoming. For there is a vital part of you that come to life as it is reflected in the eyes of the other, and shared bone deep with the other.

"And, when the time comes to let it go, to let go."

At ending times, yes. For that is the way of mortality.

But also, that is the only way that the gifts of love, and mortality, and intimacy are held finally; . . . with an open hand.

You are a part of the interdependent web of all life; which holds you and is held, not in the folded fist of striving, but in the open hand of reciprocity.

Da Capo

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