NB: Prior to this sermon, our congregation had explored the Metta Sutra or loving KIndness prayer of Theravada Buddhism in two variations; first saying the prayer in its usual version which is in four parts: May I be well, May those I love be well, may the one I don’t know be well, and the one I dont like be well and then directing all four verses to the self; May I be well, May that I affirm about myself be well, may that I don’t know about myself be well, and that I reject be well…

It is said that a poem can express something that ordinary language cannot, and if you ‘ve ever tried to summarise a poem; to translate a poem out of its first language of metaphor and image, you ‘ll know that you come out with something flat and banal.
It’s as if a poem puts words through a process of transformation, a process that changes them from ordinary to extraordinary.

The poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye begins:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Sadly we know those sensations of crisis, all of us know in different ways, at different degrees of remove maybe but right now all of us know that experience, when the future dissolves in a moment, and is replaced by desolation.

speaking of moments like this can only be achieved by heightened language, and poetry is sometimes the only thing that can answer the demands of a situation of heightened intensity.

You’ll know the famous image of light passing through a prism; it was used as the cover of a Pink-Floyd album in the seventies: https://bhiswadebguha.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/pink-floyd-rainbow-prism-dark-side-of-the-moon-wallpaper.jpg

on one side of a glass there’s a beam of white light and as it passes through the lens or prism, its component colours are separated out, or refracted, and we see the rainbow of colours for what they are, for what light is.

The image actually derives from a much earlier visionary’s work: Goethe’s investigations into optics and the nature of vision lead him to suggest that: “Colour is the deeds and suffering of light”, here is Goethe’s sketch from the early 18oo’s https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e8/de/9f/e8de9f70cd99e55670f4a8274818015d.jpg
That ‘colour is the deeds and suffering of light’ is a metaphysical statement, closer to poetry than science and I think that we could say that poetry is the deeds and suffering of language, words put through a prism of crisis.
Perhaps that’s why Pink Floyd used the image; their album was a record of a period of intense personal pain: as a member of the group went through a breakdown and mentally disintegrated, the lens of his crisis separated Syd Barrett into his constituent colours and all his friends could do was watch. And so many of us relate; perhaps because we share this experience, so many of us have witnessed this kind of disintegration.

I was in a huge crowd of people at a festival once listening to two virtuoso guitarists from Mexico, and they played the just introduction to one of these songs and what happened next still makes the hairs on my arms stand up when I remember it, instead of describing it I’ll just play it because that s what the internet can do these days – this is a recording of the actual event:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpfK9aqRPPI

probably a thousand people, most of them drunk or high or both, singing word perfectly as if they’d rehearsed for months. A secular Hymn bearing witness to all our losses: How I wish – how I wish – I wish you were here.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Kindness is valuable not because it celebrates the kindness of the title, after all we don’t need a poem to tell us that its better to be nice to each other, prose can do that job, the poem describes the prism of suffering and the potential that suffering has to open us to the suffering of others – to the feeling of empathy and the transformative power of pain.

Suffering is never justified, it is not justified by its outcomes, but listening closely to the witness of our pain we can better understand the process by which we can be transformed; if we allow ourselves to be transformed: our hearts breaking, break us open and as light flows in so also may light flow out; we learn kindness in pain and suffering and share insight: insights of compassion and of healing.

Thats why I ‘ve wanted to resist the impulse to short cut out of darkness and winter this epiphany, that’s why I ve wanted to share with you the recognition of heartbreak and complexity, because if we are prepared to bear with it our suffering brings us close to our essence, the essential self, the essence that we share.

I want to direct you back to the 3rd phrase of the metta prayer and recount an incident that occurred to me: when I was struggling to connect with the prayer; nota bene, not when I was finding it easy to access prayer but when it seemed most impossible, that is as ever when it most offers up meaning; anyway I digress I was trying to stay with the meditation of the 3rd phrase inviting us to direct loving kindness ‘to what is unknown in myself’, and I couldn’t do it, and then what came into my mind, or into my heart really, I thought of the unknown God, the inner light, or inner experience of the divine that surpasses understanding, that which we ultimately do not know. I thought of the God which all my inclination shows me is unknown and unknowable, but also I know as within me; within each of us, and prayed for that, wished it would be well.

We know from our own experience the pain of invisibility, of being erased. We know the pain of being denied. And I prayed for God’s pain. It isn’t that I consider that my prayer has any power to relieve God’s suffering, but that was never really the purpose of prayer anyway, remember that line: ’I do not pray like an order as if it was a take away pizza’ but I pray for the suffering of the unknown God…’

Isaiah’s vision opens the perspective to that God which suffers, that ‘I Am’, revealed in Exodus, that which connotes being itself. That “I Am” according to Emmanuel Levinas the philosopher of the holocaust; “The suffering of any ‘I’ immediately becomes becomes God’s suffering, who suffers in this suffering of mine … I do not have to pray for my suffering,” says Levinas, “God, prior to my demand, is already there with me”.

This is a vision of God indivisible from humanity, fully incarnate throughout all humanity, perhaps above all through the suffering of humanity, which realizes itself in the crisis of suffering, its true colours become visible.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

You must see how this could be you;

it is our empathy with the suffering of our neighbour that compels us to take action on our neighbour’s behalf.

That is the power of the image of the suffering God – Because God is present with and present within “that animal which suffers”, our identification with the suffering of another, is sanctified. This theme, proposed by Isaiah, is most powerfully revisited in the 25th chapter of Matthew:

I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Suffering is never justified by its outcomes, but the action which empathy may compel us to take to alleviate suffering, may go some way to redeem it.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.