Waiting for the Flood

A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron McEmrys

Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, July 25, 2010

The first thing that happened was my pager went off, just as I sat down to dinner in the hospital cafeteria. I pushed away my tray with a sigh. It was the emergency pager, which never went off with good news.

Seconds later, another message came in, this one over the hospital-wide loudspeaker, “Chaplain to the emergency room, chaplain to the emergency room.”

And so I ran through the mostly empty halls, my tie flying behind me like the tail of a kite. Chaplains don’t get paged to the ER unless something is seriously wrong, and, after a brief pause outside the doors to calm my breath, I went in.

There was an unconscious man on the table, surrounded by doctors and nurses. He was in his mid-fifties, I suppose, with a bushy graying pony-tale and a big belly. Everything about him was big and furry, like a wounded bear. As I stood there, he stopped breathing.

As the staff rushed for a respirator I noticed two children, a girl and a little boy holding each other and staring on in horror, frozen like an old photograph. Their faces were pale and drawn and their eyes shiny in their faces like little black marbles.

They were why I was paged.

They would not leave the room, but they took my hands convulsively and held on.

In a little while the man was moved to another room, a machine pushing air in and out of his lungs. He sounded like Darth Vader.

The children, it turned out, had nobody else. Billy, the man in the bed, had taken them in when their mother, a meth addict, had disappeared a couple years back, and they hadn’t seen her since. He wasn’t even their legal guardian – he just couldn’t bear to see two more kids get lost in the system. So he just took them in like two little birds and they made a home together, a family.

I sat in the room with them all night. Waiting.

As the night ticked oh so slowly by, more and more people started to show up. People from the trailer park, mostly, where it turned out Billy was a kind of resident father, sage and saint. Guys he rode his Harley with, and a surprising number of old girlfriends.

At first everyone was waiting for him to wake up. It was inconceivable that someone like Billy could just stop breathing one day. They peppered anyone in a white coat with questions and directives as a growing number of children played on the floor.

But the night passed so very slowly, and then, for a while, the only sounds in the room came from the machine pushing his lungs and the quiet, solemn birdsong refrain from his foster children, “When will Uncle Billy wake up? When will Uncle Billy wake up?”

I explained to them, as gently as I could, that he probably wasn’t going to wake up ever again – and then there was a true silence, and deep.

The tenor of our waiting changed again; where we once had waited for his eyes to open, we now waited for his heart to stop. And so it became a vigil.

Later still, in the wee hours of the night, someone ordered out from an all-night pizza joint, and as the fifteen or twenty of us that were crammed into that little room ate, the tone of waiting changed again, and the room filled with pepperoni and reminiscence. And slowly but surely, laughter, and music, and the passing of a flask.

And still the machine-rhythm of the respirator beat on and on until the break of dawn, when, just as the orange sun was starting to rise over the Portland skyline, Billy’s heart stopped beating once and for all, and a nurse, after noting the time of death, turned off the respirator.

We prayed then, in a circle around the bed, and in that prayer it seemed we could see Billy in his leathers, with his big belly, bushy grey ponytail and booming laugh, riding his beloved Harley through the air, over the buildings and into the fast-rising light.

And so a long night of waiting was at an end. The children went home with one of Billy’s old flames, who pledged to look after them just as he had, and as I walked slowly back through the long halls as the rising sun slanted through the windows – I gave thanks.

The waiting was the hardest part. Early in the night I had plenty to do, keeping up with the doctors and comforting the children. So did Billy’s friends, as they decorated his room, pestered the staff and tried to keep each other’s spirits up. Even the children played on the floor with a strange kind of energy.

But eventually they ran out of questions and the staff ran out of answers. Everything was organized, Billy’s ponytail retied, his leather jacket laid across his body, the children asleep…and I, I had no words left to say, and nothing but my presence to offer.

And so we waited. Waited for we knew not what, and so torn by wanting to do! There were even times when I thought to myself, “Okay, Billy, this has gone on long enough – either open your eyes right now, or go ahead and die – one or the other. Just do something!” – anything to end the powerlessness of waiting.

But Billy didn’t go one-way or the other until dawn, until he was good and ready and it was finally time. And it was perfect.

So many of us are accustomed to a feeling of control in our lives. We consider, react, reflect, plan, make decisions and choices – and it feels good to live this way, masters in the story of our lives.

But the truth is that we do not have nearly the control we sometimes think we do, and sooner or later even the most brilliant, the most creative, the most capable and determined among us will run out of choices, run out of actions, run out of words and find ourselves with nothing left to do but wait.

We wait to find out if we got that job and every hour the phone doesn’t ring is an eternity. We wait, for a heart-pounding forever, it seems, to see, to hear, to feel how a lover will respond when we say, “I love you” for the very first time. We wait to find out if a baby is coming and then wait much, much longer before we can know for sure that the baby is safe and well. We wait for diagnosis: is it cancer, like my mother had? Will I be okay (The kind of waiting cancer requires deserves a whole sermon in itself)? And, sooner or later, we wait for death; for our own and for so many of the people we love.

Our births and deaths are crowned with waiting, but somehow that doesn’t make all the waiting in between any easier.

In China there is, or was, a city called Fengdu, which was, until very recently, home to over a million people. For more than a thousand years Fengdu has been called the “City of Ghosts” because Taoists believe that the ancient temples above the city are important gateways to the afterlife.

But now the name “City of Ghosts” has taken on a new, and more ominous meaning. Fengdu lies next to the great Yangtze River in the Three Gorges area, and as part of the 3 Gorges Dam project, the biggest hydrological project in history, the city’s million-plus inhabitants have been forced to leave their homes so the entire valley can be flooded and the great City submerged.

It is eerie to see an entire city, complete with streetlights and skyscrapers, standing empty, it’s broken windows looking across the valley like thousands of hollow eyes. It is a City, a great City – but no one lives there anymore, and now the City waits for the waters to erase its memory.

In the documentary film, “Up the Yangtze”, director Yung Chang’s cameras follow one poor family. They have been poor for generations, and refer to themselves as “peasants” without an iota of irony or shame.

When Fengdu was emptied, the Yu family had nowhere to go and no way of making a living away from the only home they had ever known. So they built a little shack on the riverbank and started farming, something they never could have afforded to do before – but now, with the city empty, there’s no one left to tell them to stop or to charge them rent.

So they raise their little crops and go on living.

Every day, they go about their business: planting, plowing, harvesting, and, if there is anything left over after feeding the family – they go to up the hill to the City of Ghosts, where they scavenge what they can and trade or sell their remaining vegetables to the few solitary souls who have refused to leave the city.

In scene after scene we see Father Yu hoeing away on his little patch of land as the endless waters glide by, but he knows full well that it will not last. As the sun sets he stands by the water’s edge with his wife, gazing upriver from whence the flood will come. Everyday is a day of waiting, even as the plowing, sewing and reaping go on and on like a spinning wheel.

The waters do come, of course they do, and the movie ends with Father Yu and his family packing what they can on their backs and climbing up and away from the rising waters, which rise and rise and rise in stop motion until not a trace remains of one family’s little shack, corn fields and lives. It is as if a chapter has been erased.

And here is something remarkable, the root of my fascination with the flooding of the 3 Gorges. How does one go on living, day-by-day; loving and sleeping and working – while knowing all the time that the flood will come?

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him

in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod

of distance in his hand? Who makes his death

out of grey bread, which hardens – or leaves it there

inside his round mouth, jagged as the core

of a sweet apple?.......Murderers are easy

to understand. But this: that one can contain

death, the whole of death, even before

life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart

gently, and not refuse to go on living,

this is inexpressible.[1]

In the end all is impermanence, and a big part of living is figuring out what to do with this information, figuring out how to go on living in a world where all things come to an end.

So much of our culture is built around helping us avoid these simple facts for as long as possible. Endless commercials tell us how we can stay young and beautiful forever and how we can achieve lasting happiness…by buying this, and this and this.... We are told over and over again that we should never have to wait for anything – if we want it, we can and should have it – and not later but now, always now!

We surround ourselves with as much solidity as possible and our nice cars and nice homes (if we are lucky enough to have them) can help to feed the illusion that our lives are likewise solid, well made, predictable and under control.

But the truth is we are always one heartbeat, one diagnosis, one wildfire, one phone call away from the reshuffling of the deck. And when that happens, we want to do something! Take action, pick up the phone, fire off an email, make decisions, arrangements, plans – sometimes we will even do just for the sake of doing – simply because we can’t bear what it feels like when there’s nothing left to do but wait, because sometimes action, any action at all momentarily curtails the anxiety and vulnerability that can feel so unbearable.

Why do we fear waiting so much? I think this has to do in part with the feeling that there is something passive and weak about waiting. And this can certainly be the case. I know I am an occasional expert at using “waiting for…” as my number one reason not to act, even when I know I should. Once I get everything set, once this happens or that, Oh I can’t do that today because I need to wait until X, Y or Z.

This kind of waiting is really just the other side of action-for actions-sake. Just another way to avoid reaching out into scary, risky or uncomfortable places. Some people act to avoid waiting and others use waiting to avoid action. Although these two approaches look quite different, they both remain ways to avoid going into the deep end of the pool.

But waiting doesn’t have to be this way. Just as the Yu family continues to live day-by-day at the water’s edge, and just as Billy’s loved ones kept their nightlong vigil – waiting doesn’t have to be passive.

We can choose a powerful, pro-active, “I am Waiting” from our menu of choices in life. We can experience this as feeling bound up, trapped and netted – or as a kind of energetically powerful stillness. “Oh my gosh, what are you going to do about this?” “I’m Waiting.”

Take a look at the cover of your order of service. The pictogram you see is the Fifth Hexagram of the I-Ching. One of the oldest of the Classical Chinese texts, the I-Ching was first written between 50BCE and 10CE and remains as relevant today as ever.

The Fifth Hexagram is sometimes translated as “Needing” and sometimes as “Waiting”; especially the powerful kind of waiting that comes from genuine need.

As Taoist Master Alfred Huang writes in his commentary, “The ancient ideograph of Xu shows the need for rain. It shows raindrops descending from clouds. The horizontal line at the top symbolizes Heaven and the two lines on the sides show the boundaries of the clouds, inside of which are four raindrops.”

The upper part of the ideograph represents rain within the clouds not yet falling, and the lower part symbolizes an elderly man praying for rain. You can see the curved lines that represent his mustache and beard.

This hexagram reminds us today, just as it has reminded people for over two thousand years that we often have to wait for the things we need. The ideograph shows us that clouds are gathering in the sky, but the rain has yet to fall. This situation requires patience because our personal strength is often not enough. “If one has faith and remains steadfast, one’s needs will be met and one’s future bright.”[2]

Far from giving up, this kind of waiting comes from letting go of our own self-aspiration and personal ego. It’s like floating, you can’t do it until you stop struggling and relax into to the water. Only then can it hold you up. Or, as Joseph Campbell writes, sometimes “we must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

Waiting, like floating, depends upon trust. May you find the wells of trust and faith that are waiting deep inside you. May you dip your cup and drink. May you learn to relish the sweetness of living and loving that comes from also tasting the bitterness of uncertainty and loss. May you learn to act when it is time to act and to wait when it is time to wait. And may you live each day fully, like the farmer on the river who knows the flood will come, but goes on planting his seeds and singing to his children all the same.

Amen.

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[1] Rainer Rilke, from his Fourth Duino Elegy, in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1995) p. 355

[2] The Complete I-Ching: the Definitive Translation, Edited and Translated by Alfred Huang (Inner Traditions: Rochester, VT, 1998) pp 74-80