NOVEL SERMONS: The Gospel
in Literature and Life
7. “All the Living”
Psalm 62
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
August 9,
2009
A
writer by the name of Jostein Gaarder once opined that there are two ways of
becoming wise. One way is to travel
out into the world and see as much of God’s creation as possible.
The other way is to put down roots in one spot and to study everything
that happens there in as much detail as you can.
I am a devotee of the latter and that is one of the reasons I loved this
week’s novel so much, my favorite of the summer so far.
The
novel is called All the Living
about which I read in the “briefly noted book section of The New Yorker several months ago, a first novel by a young woman
writer named C.E. Morgan. She is
going to be a star. Her writing is
exquisite: lovely, imaginative use of language, believable characters, and a
story that completely drew me in.
The
plot is fairly simple. A young woman
named (no surprise…it is not a normal name as no name in novels seems to be)
Aloma comes to live with her boyfriend Orren (short for Orpheus) on his
family’s farm in the backcountry of what seems like
Aloma,
herself orphaned when she was three, is not quite prepared for Orren’s
grieving process or her own uncertain feelings about their relationship.
Morgan digs deep into Aloma’s frustration and discontent to explore how
we go about making important choices in our lives.
Aloma
has one major decision. She can stay
with Orren on the farm, spending most of her days cleaning the old ramshackle
house in which they live and cooking in the kitchen, or she can pursue her dream
of becoming a working pianist, a talent she learned at the settlement school to
which she was sent as a child by an aunt and uncle who no longer could look
after her.
Remaining
on the farm is a difficult option for Aloma.
She knows nothing about farm life, struggles with the daily chores, and
even manages to kill the chickens by giving them wet feed just a few days after
Orren had entrusted her with the task. Orren
spends most of his days worrying about the rain-deprived tobacco crop and how
they are going to make ends meet.
Music
is something Aloma knows she can do, though Orren cannot see the point of it.
The piano represents Aloma’s independence, her confusing and complicated sense
of self, and her playing gets tied up in the story with a young minister by the
name of Bell Johnson. There is a
piano in Orren’s house, but it is beyond affordable repair, so Orren suggests
that if Aloma had to play the piano that she check in at the local church which
is where Aloma meets the Reverend Johnson. Bell
Johnson is a charismatic preacher who stands in stark contrast to the reserved
and distant Orren. He hires Aloma to
play the piano for the church services. As
she gets more and more absorbed in her playing (access to a piano at the church
provides a reason for her to get out of the house every day) and more and more
absorbed in her budding relationship with
I
think I have to spoil the story by telling you how it ends in order for me to be
able to go further in the sermon. But,
no matter, the story is so good and Morgan writes so well that you’ll want to
read it anyway. What I think I most
like about All the Living is
that Morgan gives us a picture of love that is both simple and complicated at
the same time. In other words, real.
Nothing syrupy, sappy, or sentimental.
Real. Lots of bickering and
estrangement in the dance between Orren and Aloma, yet also attachment and
affectionl. Hard as their
relationship has been, toward the end of the summer Orren asks Aloma to stay
there on the farm with him and to help him and
to marry him, and she does. As the
story concludes, we know that it will not be easy for the two of them across the
years. Theirs is what one reviewer
calls “a dissonant love” and that is an apt name for it, but it is love
nonetheless.
I
think what I want to do is to read a few excerpts to you with the morning’s
scripture lesson resting underneath of them, the sentence from the psalm that
says, “For God alone my soul waits in
silence, from God comes my salvation.” I
want to give you a taste of Morgan’s fine writing and, in so doing, open some
things for you to ponder as I have this week.
Morgan, by the way, has a degree in theological studies from
Morgan
uses music to make a point about the essential contribution silence makes to our
lives. As a young girl, Aloma took
piano lessons and her teacher once said to her that “music is found in the silence as well as the sound.
The pauses birth the phrase and funeral it, too, the only thing that give
the intervening life of rising and falling pitch any meaning.
Without silence there is no respite from the cacophony, the endless
chatter and knocking, the clattering pitches.”
Just
as music is comprised of silence as well as sound, so is a life.
Without silence in our lives, we cannot thrive.
Silence is more than the absence of noise.
I know some people, especially those who live by themselves, who complain
of too much silence in their lives and I have great empathy for them.
But that is not silence so much as it is loneliness.
As with music, silence is an intentional and welcomed part of the
composition of our lives. As an
example, Jesus famously and frequently took time apart to re-collect himself, to
pray, to pay attention to his life so that he did not begin to live off-center.
For God alone his soul waited in silence.
With
the fevered pace of life these days and all the technology available to fill the
quiet spaces in our lives, and all the thoughts with their own kind of clatter
that constantly bombard our consciousness, we have to cultivate times of silence
in our lives lest our souls begin to lose their way and then we shall, too.
Can you imagine what a mess a piece of music would be if there was no
rhythm to it, the rhythm produced in part by the rests and silence within the
music as much as by the notes and sounds? So,
too, with our lives. I find it
interesting that in this novel, set in the mid-1980s, there is no mention of the
internet, no allusion to current events, no talk of politics.
I am not advocating a life without those things, of course, but it did
occur to me how insatiable my appetite has become for more and more information
since it is so readily and steadily available and how constantly feeding that
hunger crowds out authentic silence in my life.
Without the proper silence to feed my soul and its yearning for God, I
make wrong turns, unwise decisions, and depression inevitably sets in.
There
is a related line in the book that bears mentioning.
Bell Johnson is preaching to his congregation comprised mostly of farm
families in the midst of a potentially ruinous drought, but also
is speaking by analogy to people experiencing their own existential parchedness.
At one point he says, “What looks like patience tastes like despair.”
That is reminiscent, is it not, of the frequent cry of the psalms and
their “How long, O God, how long?”
How long must we wait for vindication?
How long must we wait for justice to appear on the earth?
How long must we suffer? How
long until light appears in my life? We
get a sense in the story that Aloma is just going through the motions of her
life, stuck between decisions she cannot seem to make and, to her, patience
tastes like despair. Most of us
have known such times in our lives when decisions came hard to us because they
seemed too big to make or they yielded to no solution whose price was not
exorbitant. So, to Aloma and his
congregation and to us whenever we experience patience
tasting like despair, the Reverend Bell Johnson continues. “We grieve and wonder how come the rain won’t fall and we know
there’s an answer to that despair, because that despair is a question; it
ain’t a answer, that’s what we got to remember: God is the answer, the four
gospels is a answer to that despair and to…our spirits…”
“For God alone my soul waits in
silence…”
I
have time for only one other excerpt though there are dozens I would like to
share. This one comes near the end
of the story after Orren had said inexplicably to Aloma one day after one of
their fights, “Let’s get married,” and
Aloma made the decision to stay and to do so.
Not knowing of the feelings that had passed between Aloma and the
Reverend Johnson, though when Bell finds out that there is a man in Aloma’s
life about whom she had not told him he feels hurt and betrayed and dismisses
her from her piano playing job, Orren tells Aloma to call the preacher, since he
had buried Orren’s mother and his brother, and ask him to marry them.
In
a painful passage that brings uncomfortably to mind anything awkward we’ve
ever had to do, Aloma asks and
I got to ask you, Aloma.
What? she said, terrified, for she felt
sure she knew what he would say.
Do you got feelings for that man?
He gripped the steering wheel now with both hands.
I don’t lie to you, she said, genuine
startled.
He shook his head.
You think you’re not lying to me when you don’t say nothing.
But you are.
She could not say anything in return,
because this was true.
Do you got feelings for that man, Orren
said again.
I thought I did, for a while, she said
very quietly.
He nodded and looked out over his hands
through the windshield glass, up the swell of the yard to the house.
She was afraid to follow his gaze, afraid to look anywhere but at his
face.
Well, then how come you married me?
He said this low, as if he were speaking only to himself.
She thought that over for a minute, not
because she wanted to give him a good answer, only one that was no parts lie.
Mostly because I want you.
Like how, like you (want to have sex)
with me?
Good Lord, Orren, she said and laughed
soberly, looking out the side window at the world (toward summer’s end) that
now was turning and reddening with force. The
change there surprised her eyes. She
rubbed her brow with one hand. Then:
God, I guess so, but more.
More what?
More, she sought around for the thing
that was in her head that she’d never fitted words to.
More like…when I have you, when I have you like that even, it’s not
enough and I still want some more of you. When
you say something, I want to hear you say more and when you go someplace, any
place, I want you to come back more than anything…That’s what I mean.
I
love that. In her own halting and
imperfect way, Aloma had fixed in on her desire to discover and to know the
“more-ness” of life, not to settle for any pale imitation of what life or
love can be. For her, the way to
wisdom, which is to say to a life well and deeply lived, the way to the
“more-ness” she seeks, is to put down roots in one spot and to study what
happens there in as much detail as she can, including the peaks and valleys of a
relationship. For others, it may be
that they will have to go out into the wider world.
Either way, it is the “more-ness” of life that has to be served.
Not the more-ness of greed, but of depth.
Not the more-ness of acquisition, but of giving away.
Not the more-ness of holding on, but of letting go. Not
the more-ness of faux freedom that keeps all options forever open, but of the
freedom that comes by committing.
I
suspect that all our desire for the “more-ness” of life is in some profound,
mysterious, and mystical respect our longing to know God in ever deepening ways.
We may or may not know that directly, but it is true nonetheless.
It is how we are made. “For God alone my soul waits in silence, from God comes my
salvation” that we often have defined here as healing and wholeness,
becoming more and more human.
While
not a religious book per se, C.E. Morgan’s All
the Living has had the same effect on me as a parable of Jesus.
It has brought me up short, compelled me to consider my life more
closely, and named again for me the truth that all of our hungers are at their
root a desire to know God more deeply. For
as John Calvin claimed over and over, “The
knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inextricably intertwined.”
We cannot know ourselves without knowing God and we cannot know God
without knowing ourselves.
I
guess I have some work to do this week. Again!
Amen.
Morgan,
C. E., All the Living.
© Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church