On Sunday I preached on the theme of death—or perhaps more precisely how it is we live knowing the reality that we’ll all die someday.

Since Sunday I’m thinking about two deaths around me and still reflecting on what they mean. On Tuesday morning I was privileged to be present at the death of a beloved member who died after living with cancer for a number of months. It was, as we might say, a good death, on their terms and surrounded by family and closest friends. But that’s not always the case. On Wednesday a person living in a tent on the street just outside the church office was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose. That death brought home the reality of so many people living on the streets and the real lives that it is so easy to lose sight of. It is all too easy for me to lose sight of all the very human reality of so many people living on the streets.

It is the focus on death that has made me think a lot about impermanence. Rev. Alison preached on Buddhism earlier this month and the gifts that tradition offers us. Change is always a part of life. And perhaps it is just the nature of the times we are in that so much seems in flux. There is just so much that is unknown and so unpredictable. Is the spiritual task to settle into that? To be present with what is here before us in this present moment?

What I keep learning over and over again is that call to be in here and how and to bear witness to the life around us. This week the daylight savings time change has felt disruptive. This spring one where we lose an hour especially so. At first I found myself kind of cranky about it all. But with a couple days to let the change sink in now I have come to see the longer time of light later in the day as a gift. And it has been the best kind of gift—unexpected. Wherever we find ourselves may we do what we can to stay in that present moment. And in that moment may we get whatever it is we need.

Here’s a poem by Maya Stein that has recently come my way.

in praise of i don’t know

By Maya Stein

Mostly, what washes up at the beach isn’t whole, though our eyes are peeled for the perfect form of, say, a perfume bottle, or an old coin, or a message from the dead. Instead, what reveals itself as the tide pulls back is a sea of uncertainty, cryptic shards with the vaguest clues whose answers are scattered in places likely too far from here. We will never retrieve them, not in the way our mind craves assembly. But look how, against the late season light, a filmy beauty descends, nearly silencing the clamor of what pulls at our sleeves to solve. What if we could let ourselves rest for a little while in this halo of I don’t know, feel its soft touch against our urgent skin. What if the thing in our hands, and every fractured remainder, is its own answer. What if leaning into the wobbly shapes of our lives is another kind of sweetness and gold.

Blessings,

Tom

Rev. Thomas Disrud he/him
Associate Minister
First Unitarian Church of Portland
tdisrud@firstunitarianportland.org
www.firstunitarianportland.org