CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.
You’ve seen the signs … “closed for repairs.” Probably most often on a restroom door at a rest stop, right? And it’s the only rest stop for 45 miles – in Vermont, it’s 98 miles, we’re a hardy bunch – and even though your tank is three-quarters full you pull in, and first you pump a few gallons of gas so you don’t feel guilty when you walk into the quick mart and you barrel straight to the restroom, avoiding the gaze of the friendly cashier, feeling ashamed as if you were the only person ever who needed a bathroom on the highway but had to suffer 30 miles to get there.
And so you find the restroom and the sign says, sorry. Out of order. Closed for repairs.
Or the other time you see one of those signs is on the doors of boarded up sidewalk cafes. Except those signs often have a hopeful line underneath the first that speaks to the endearing quality of human optimism in the face of certain failure:
WILL REOPEN SOON.
And that sign is up for a year before reopening as a cannabis dispensary.
I recall once years ago, when I was visiting my sister Annie, who lives in Scotland, seeing such a sign at a darkened restaurant along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. It said, “Closed for repairs,” in neat block letters. But there, underneath, someone had angrily scrawled, “Will reopen soon under responsible management,” with responsible underlined. Must have been written by the wait staff.
The point is, it doesn’t faze us when something is closed for repairs. Things break all the time. We’ve all fixed things, whether it’s a broken window sash or a clogged drain or a mower that won’t start, all things that are in essence closed for repair until we fix them.
But there is at least one thing that breaks and that we need to repair, but closing it would be a mistake, because it must remain in use. And that is the human heart.
The physical human heart—the fist-sized organ that keeps us alive—pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood a day—think of what 2,000 gallons of milk might look like and you wonder how one body could contain it. And in the course of a day, the heart pumps blood through 12,000 miles of blood vessels. That’s two trips from Taunton to California and back. Maybe that is why the heart is the symbol of love. It contains multitudes, in the words of Walt Whitman, and its warmth can travel across the miles in a blink of an eye, like a heart emoji on a Facebook post to your cousin in Tripoli.
The emotional heart is no less robust—even in the most timid heart, love can be a powerful force. Love is what makes people do extraordinary things. Love is what gives us courage. Love is what impels us to reach out across the aisle, reach out to our neighbor. The love we have and the love we share are perhaps our single greatest possession that no one can take away from us, even when our rights to express our love are suppressed or taken away.
And that’s important, because right now we are experiencing a singular moment in the long and tortured story of our nation, a moment we thought we’d never see. While we have been a nation divided for quite some time, following this week’s election, the American tapestry was torn down the middle, and nearly half of our country is living in fear—or, at the very least, living with grave concern.
Let me pause here to insert a cautionary note. This morning’s sermon is not about politics. Here at First Parish, we abide by the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, even though it’s well documented that there are many churches in our nation that do not.
But my first responsibility to this congregation as your pastor is to minister to your spiritual health. And if this congregation were the patient and I were the spiritual diagnostician, and I asked, “Tell me where it hurts,” based on many conversations I’ve had this week I would say the patient’s response might be, it hurts in here. Hell, it hurts all over. Pit in my stomach, voices in my head, but especially my heart is breaking. It’s breaking for all women and girls. It’s breaking for all of our LGBTQI beloveds in our families, among our friends, around the nation, particularly our transgendered siblings. It’s breaking for our younger generations. It’s breaking for this powerlessness I feel. My spirit is low.
And it is all directly attributable to the results of Tuesday’s election and the many dire warnings we have heard for months about what is to come. I know, I know that not everyone is feeling this way. More than half the people who voted are celebrating Tuesday’s outcome, as is their right in a free and fair election. That’s our democratic process. We said all along that we solve our differences at the ballot box.
But still, at least half of this country is hurting, and part of the reason I became a minister is that I am deathly allergic to seeing people in pain. Oddly enough, my job as minister is not to take away the pain, but to deepen it to a level where it can be shared. To bear pain is lonely. To share pain is to survive.
So let’s begin the deepening. This morning in the aftermath of what-the-hell and on the eve of god-knows-what, there are three things I want you to remember.
The first is that, as ever was and ever shall be, you are loved, and no one gets to take that away. No one. No act of Congress, no pretzel-like interpretation of our Constitution, no insurrection. No one.
The second is that, as Parker Palmer said in today’s reading, love is a risky business. We open our hearts to harm and hurt when we dare to love everyone. Because—and this was made abundantly clear this week—not everyone believes everyone should be loved.
The third is that this heart you have may be vulnerable, but because it is, it is also resilient and regenerative. It is, in Palmer’s vernacular, a supple heart, one that breaks open into a greater capacity to love. That is, if it has not hardened into bitterness like carbon into coal.
And that is this morning’s message in a nutshell: Harden not your heart. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to feel scared. It’s okay to feel outraged. It is even okay to feel hopeless. We are human, after all.
Do not, however, allow these emotions to consume you and define you. Don’t let them cause your heart muscle to atrophy and dry up and close off. Don’t descend into bitterness. Engage in the practice of repair. Truth be told, you’re already doing it.
Because when it comes to the heart, the practice of repair occurs all the time. As Palmer said in today’s reading, a heart “broken open” into the largeness of life, into a greater capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy—this happens every day. Because day-to-day life is messy, and the heart is always open for business. It’s a bit like fixing the plane after it’s already up in the air. We are always in flight.
In other words, we’re good at repair. It’s just that at times like these, it is easy to forget that.
As an example, I felt my own heart repairing itself this past Wednesday, the day after the election in spite of myself. We opened the sanctuary for people to stop by for some pastoral care or just to commiserate. In the afternoon, a small group of us gathered in the back on the comfy chairs.
In the hour or so we spent going around the circle, we had more questions than answers. What do we do now? How can we get more people to know our church exists so they can find spiritual shelter and sustenance here? How might our programming change? Should we be hosting conversations between opposite sides of the political divide—to listen better and try to understand each other better?
As I said, we didn’t come up with a lot of answers. We did, however, realize this: If the pandemic reminded us how dearly we crave human connection, this new pandemic-sized event may teach us how vital it is to band together into something stronger and larger than ourselves—something church has always offered, by the way. Perhaps now more than ever before, we need one another.
As the group broke up on Wednesday, people thanked me for making the trip from Vermont to be here instead of on Tuesday, my usual day for office hours.
The funny thing is, as much as those folks may have thought they needed to be with their minister, I think I needed to be with them more. I needed to see and touch others, the only way I could know we’re going to be okay, so that I can be okay, too. As we repair our hearts in flight, sometimes we are carried by each other’s tailwinds. In that conversation I sensed myself opening my heart, dispensing for the moment my need to be the strong one, and let others’ pain and humor and wisdom sink in. The conversation filled my heart, and as I was making the three-hour drive home afterward, I felt my heart expand to hold the many layers of meaning that conversation generated. I felt my supple heart, the one that breaks open and not apart, growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love.
There is a Hasidic tale from the Jewish tradition that beautifully illustrates the idea of seeing the wounded heart as broken, but open:
A disciple asks the rebbe (REB-uh) or rabbi, “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”[1]
The events of this week are going to reverberate for a very long time. At the moment it’s tempting to close off and hunker down. But harden not your heart. Rather, let it break wide open. Listen for voices not normally heard in your circle, and seek to understand. Fill your heart with the many things in our world that haven’t changed. The trees are still the trees. The sky is still the sky. A baby’s laugh is still the sweetest sound ever heard. Curling up with a trashy novel is still comforting. Holding hands still feels warm and reassuring.
And spend time with others. Now is a good time to band together.
Several weeks ago, I preached about our stained-glass windows. This one here to my right, affectionately known as the Civil War Window, is the oldest window in this sanctuary together with the one on my left. The Civil War Window honors Taunton citizens who fought in that war. Those men, like all the women and men who have served in our armed forces, put their lives on the line so that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, government of the people, by the people, and for the people, would not perish from the earth. Right now, it feels like that vision of government is being sorely tested. And it kind of feels like we are in an un-civil war. Maybe the Civil War just never really ended.
I draw your attention to that window because tomorrow is Veterans’ Day, a day for honoring all who have served in our armed forces. This year, and right now, Veterans’ Day coming on the heels of Tuesday’s election feels especially poignant. There will be ceremonies and speeches, a lot of well-deserved thank-yous, and parades. (I know we have some veterans among us this morning; please take a moment at some point to let them know how much you appreciate their service.) Another way to truly honor our veterans and what they sought to protect, and, really, to honor ourselves and our neighbors, is to work toward repairing the heart of our nation. Maybe what has just occurred is a breaking open of our national heart. Maybe, and in spite of all the vitriol and second-guessing swirling about right now, a once-in-a-generation, maybe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has presented itself for a brokenhearted nation to not cut each other off, not to fling the broken shards of a bitter heart at one another, but to open wide the supple heart and try to fill the space with some attempt at a mutual understanding. As Parker Palmer said, “Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.”
The supple heart remains elastic, its capacity to stretch and grow offering up the chance to hold the very thing that threatens to destroy us. Rather than letting the enormity of all that is going on right now crush our spirits, let us instead open up our hearts to unleash an enormity of love-born resolve and receptivity. Again the words of Parker Palmer: “The holiest thing we have to offer the world is a broken-open heart, emptied of fear and vengeance, filled with forgiveness and a willingness to take the risks of love.”
So take down the sign on your heart that says CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. Replace it with the one that says WILL REOPEN SOON. And then don’t wait too long for that grand reopening. There’s love to be born, and work to be done.
May it be so. Blessed be.
[1] Parker writes, “I heard this Hasidic tale from the philosopher and writer Jacob Needleman, who kindly put it in writing for me so that I could recount it correctly.”