One Time, One Meeting
Text: Psalm 137
How do we stay connected in this increasingly complicated world? As we started reopening the church, I find it more challenging to accommodate our various needs. I now have to think how to facilitate both online participants and in-person participants. I feel like octopus using all of my hands and feet at the same time while leading worship or communicating throughout the week. I thought I am pretty good at doing multitasking. But I wish I can focus on only one thing and forget all the other things.
How do we stay present in this increasingly uncertain world? I thought I’ve learned enough how to live in the present moment. Turns out, it doesn’t get easier. I admit that I continue to struggle to be in the here and now. I often find myself living in the past or in the future. That is, I regret things that already happened in the past or worry about things that have not happened yet. Either way, I am disconnected from myself and from what really matters in my life. Can you relate or is it just me?
I wish somebody could provide a clear picture of what the world will look like in five years from now or at least what’s going to happen in 2022. We long for certainty and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is where our certainty comes from. What is the source of our certainty?
Priya Parker in her book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, talks about uniqueness as one of the ingredients that make any gatherings meaningful. For example, what makes your Thanksgiving dinner different from any other dinners? It’s not probably what you eat or how you set up, but who is present at the table that makes your Thanksgiving dinner memorable. Your birthday comes every year, but how is it different from any other years? What makes it uniquely yours, that you can’t find anywhere else.
Likewise, our church anniversary comes every year. So, what makes this year’s celebration different from all the others? Although 100 is a significant number, it’s not strong enough to make the celebration uniquely ours. Other churches are also celebrating their 100th anniversary. So, what is our story? How can we honour who we are as a church in a way that celebrates the spirit of Fort Garry United? I’m confident to say that our anniversary service will be specifically, uniquely, and authentically ours. But it takes everyone for our celebration to be meaningful. So, I’d like to ask all of us as we prepare for the big event, ‘who or what must be lifted up, and how are you going to participate in that lifting up?’
It’s not just about our celebration or any gatherings. It’s about how we participate in any given moment. Priya Parker once visited a teahouse in Kyoto, Japan, where she participated in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. The tea master there told Parker of a phrase the sixteenth-century Japanese tea master taught his students to keep in the front of their minds as they conduct the ceremony: Ichi-go ichi-e. It roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” She explained further: “We could meet again, but you have to praise this moment because in one year, we’ll have a new experience, and we will be different people and will be bringing new experiences with us, because we are also changed.”
The principle of ichi-go ichi-e can guide us to welcome each gathering as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. With a great care and sincerity, we can greet and savour each moment as if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occasion because it is. Such attitude helps us reframe our relationship to any given moment. No matter how much we love them, no one or nothing in the world is permanent, and the nature of impermanence requires us of respect and reverence. “All gifts are temporary.” (Doug Saunders) No matter how much we want to cling to certainty, no circumstance is certain – it can change in any second. And that is precisely the reason why we must devote ourselves to the present moment because it’s the only chance in a lifetime.
Yes, it’s true that our world keeps changing perhaps faster than we can handle. Life as we once knew is no longer a given. But the real issue we mut face is our ego-centric mindset or self-centred behaviours that keep us from participating in the present moment. If we treat any given moment as God’s gift, we can begin to hear how each moment is calling us – calling us to be present and calling us to respond with what we can.
During the pandemic, I find myself going back to songs of lamentation in the Psalms, like the Psalm we heard today, over and over again. Perhaps that’s because deep in my heart I know that the pain and suffering I experience is not uniquely mine. My experience is part of the collective sorrow. Throughout human history, there have been times of collective pain and suffering. But in terms of how people responded, we have two totally different stories - one extreme or the other. One way to deal with our pain is to deny its existence or blame someone else for it. Then, we end up ignoring what God in each moment is calling us to do or be. Or we may choose to pay attention to our pain. We can try to listen to what it’s trying to tell us. We can take good care of it, and befriend it, knowing that its part of the collective sorrow that doesn’t need fixing but witnessing.
“By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” This is a psalm for the long haul where there is no easy solution or promising future. Their temple has been destroyed, and they have been forcibly removed from home by the Babylonian imperial policies of relocation. They now have to find a way to live with their loss – the loss of their home, community, and environment. How did they respond to their pain? Not by denial or blame, but by singing the song of lamentation together, by naming and honouring their grief. This was how they sustained their hope generation to generation. Their collective pain was not meant to be fixed but meant to be witnessed by each other and by God. And that was good enough.
Last week, I received a very nice phone call from Hedy Schroeder. Hedy is the mother of my friend, Lori, who was in the same class with me for Clinical Pastoral Education program at St. Boniface Hospital two years ago. I shared my Easter sermon with Lori, and she forwarded it to her mom who was in the personal care home. Hedy has been receiving our weekly letter since April 2020. One time Lori went to visit her mom when the restriction lifted. Upon seeing a pile of my letters, she asked her about them. Hedy said, “Oh, those have been my lifeline.” That made my day! The reason Hedy called me last week was to say how much she was thankful for me. And then we talked about family and faith. What I learned from the phone call was how Hedy chose to spend her time to lift my spirit up, and by doing so, lifting her spirit up. In a world of uncertainty, we can choose to participate in each moment as if it’s once-in-a-lifetime occasion. And we can be certain that God is present in each moment just like God was there in the line when I was talking to Hedy. God was working through Hedy to affirm me. And God was working through me to give the gift of accompaniment to Hedy.