"When You Paint A Purple Sky: Friends as Spiritual Guides"

Rev. Tony Lorenzen

First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Copyright, © Tony Lorenzen, 2007

Lesson: Proverbs 1:20-22

Gospel: John 14:21-31

Responsive Reading: Wisdom of Solomon 7:23-30

Minister: There is in here a spirit that is beneficent, humane,

steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful,

overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits

that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.

People: For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

because of her pureness she pervades

and penetrates all things.

Minister: For she is a breath of the power of God,

and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;

therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.

People: For she is a reflection of eternal light,

a spotless mirror of the working of God,

and an image of his goodness.

Minister: Although she is but one, she can do all things,

And while remaining in herself, she renews all things;

In every generation she passes into holy souls

And makes them friends of God, and prophets;

People: for God loves nothing so much

as the person who lives with wisdom.

Minister: She is more beautiful than the sun,

and excels every constellation of the stars.

People: Compared with the light she is found to be superior,

for it is succeeded by the night,

but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

"Life is full of meetings and partings, that is the way of it," said Kermit the Frog (or as I prefer to call him, St. Kermit of Sesame) as Bob Cratchit in the Muppet's Christmas Carol. Two and a half years ago during the first week of 2005, I parted with my closest friend. He sat by my side the day I got married. He is my son's godfather. My dear friend and spiritual companion Andy was forty years old when he died of complications related to pneumonia, but all of that was ultimately due to his having Duchenne, or pseudohypertrophic Muscular Dystrophy -- characterized by early childhood onset, generalized weakness, and muscle wasting affecting limb and trunk muscles first, slow progression, and rare survival beyond the late twenties. Andy lived for a good decade longer than his diagnosis would venture.

Like so many who knew him, one of the major connecting cords between Andy and me was our love of the arts. Andy was an artist and his drawings and paintings gave us but a glimpse of his vision. Today my son still calls sunrises and sunsets streaked with pinks and purples "Andy skies."

A decade after I met Andy I met a singer and songwriter from Springfield, MA named Barry Kingston. Barry performed at our Soulful Sundown series this past year here in this chapel. One of Barry's songs is called Purple Sky.

I live each day like it was my last

always a burning sting from my past

I wake from dreams of losing my way

I can't find my way home

Sometimes I can't find my way home

Tomorrow time will change will change what is wrong

I feel a peace from the ocean when it's calm

But I've been lost in a poet's song

But I find my way home

I know I find my way home

My Mama say hey son when you paint a purple sky

My Papa say whoa boy you don't need to know why

And I know when the sun sets on a warm summer night

My painted purple sky won't fade out of sight [1]

Andy reinforced for me constantly that although the world can be full of darkness, it is also full of light and beauty. Artist that he was, his greatest work was his life and he will always inspire me to make my life my greatest work of art.

Sometimes Andy would get me to think about something differently with just a word or one simple question, "What do you think Jesus meant by "the kingdom of God is among you?" Sometimes he would say something like, "CD player, Disc 2, track 1. Play it." And listening would reveal a song or sounds that would get us both reveling and discussing for hours. Sometimes, however, a teacher's greatest lesson is just the example of their life. There was no pity in this friendship, no poor soul in a wheelchair, for he hated that and wouldn't suffer it for a minute. But he did teach me a lot about seeing the world through the eyes of accessibility needs and about not grumbling about my lot in life.

I first met Andy one spring while in college. Looking to supplement my summer income I applied for a job with him as a personal care attendant. After the job interview, I was more than a little apprehensive about changing his catheter, giving him a bath, and getting him dressed in order to make some pocket money. I had no idea on the day he hired me that he would become my closest friend. When the student is ready, as the saying goes, the teacher arrives. All I knew when I first met him was that I was a college guy who had all kinds of anxieties about washing another guy's privates.

Robert Wicks tells us that one of the major roles of the Spiritual Guide is "to help us discover our fears." [2] According to Wicks, the Spiritual Guide helps us to ask ourselves "What is the worst thing that can happen if I face my fears?" [3]

I'm not a coward, but I've never really had the chance or the occasion for real bravery. I've had a couple of minor health problems, a bout of depression, and I once worked in an office of a human rights organization that received a bomb threat. I've held the hands of patients and family members as the patients died in hospice care. None of it seems very scary now, and as they say, if you're not scared, it's not brave.

I've met some people who have had to find the real thing -- courage. Not the Cowardly Lion's gift from the wizard kind, but the real kind. The kind you don't know you have in you until you're face to face with something most of us never have to face and are glad we never have to face it and find out.

I met and served as chauffer for Shen Tong one day at a human rights conference in Boston. Shen Tong was one of the student organizers of the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989. He had to smuggle himself out of the country. I've met Sister Helen Prejean a couple of times, the Catholic nun who works with death row inmates and who works to abolish the death penalty; she's as courageous a soul as can fill a room. My wife's uncle died of brain cancer a few year's back. He went from diagnosis to deathbed in less than a year. He wrote about his experience and that man had guts to spare, I tell you.

Andy Maxfield beats them all though. For most of his forty years he watched himself waste away. He went to the brink a few times before leaving this world. And even though he talked about it with me many times, the anger and agony of being confined to that chair and that bed I can still only imagine. And it was emotional and spiritual as much as physical. In the letter he left to his family and friends at the end he talks about his anger at God, and I can't blame him a bit. Yet, he handled it with a grace many of us can't find to deal with a stubbed toe or a traffic jam.

Many of the fears and anxieties we encounter in our lives according to Wicks are the result of the fact that we are constantly trying to project some image to the world because we want to be seen as a person who is (and Wicks gives a list) "hardworking, helpful, successful, unique, knowing, loyal, nice, powerful, or acceptable" and that we "must hide at all costs our anger, pride, deceit, envy, stinginess, fear, self-indulgence, arrogance, or laziness" [4] -- in short we present to the world and to God a mask that we are perfect. Yet it is our ordinariness that makes us holy. We are good enough as we are. We are acceptable as we are. We don't need to be anyone or anybody or to achieve anything for divine acceptance or for our friend's acceptance (hint: if you do, you need new friends).

Andy was probably the most spiritual person I have ever met. He wasn't more holy than you or me. He just put in his practice time. He was nominally a Christian and in that he had a small c Catholic imagination, but he was really of no religion. Andy had a great BS detector when it came to things of the spirit. Andy took to heart the dictum, "by their fruits, you shall know them." He practiced meditation, and knew his chakras as well as his sacraments. He took communion and kept his meridians healthy. Andy was a ChristBuddhaMohamedKrishnaGreatSpirit kinda guy. Andy believed in kindness, goodness, the wholeness and beauty of creation, yet he also believed that it wasn't what you believed in, but how you lived that mattered. Andy wasn't concerned with what creed you professed, but how you treated others, yourself, the world around you. In the end it all came down to one thing for Andy, God is Love. Another spiritual guide I've met in my journey through life, Mel King, would put it this way, "Love is the question and the answer."

"Spiritual guides ... seek out our true inner charism," writes Robert Wicks. "Our gifts are like sparks that need to be fanned into a flame, not put under a bushel basket." [5] Wicks explains that the spiritual guide helps us with discernment; helps us decipher between things that genuinely call to us and things that get us spiritually riled up or excited for the moment.

Andy Maxfield and I used to take rolls. He would roll. I would walk. One of our favorite destinations was a pond not too far from his apartment where there was a parking lot that gave him access to the shore. His favorite time to go was late afternoon in the fall so he could catch the sunset. The first time he brought me there I was on dinner duty as a care attendant. The most memorable pond roll happened one fall when we had been talking about a decision I was trying to make about whether or not to leave my job in a Catholic high school and take a job in a parish as youth minister. We got to the pond, he rolled into place and I kept talking. He faced himself across the water and said, "Just look."

Andy used to call me "Great Lion of God" after the title character in Taylor Caldwell's novel of the same name. The novel is a fictionalized account of Saint Paul's life and whenever we talked about my calling to be a minister, to leave the Catholic Church, Andy would call me Great Lion of God. Sure no pressure, Andy, St. Paul. I had doubts, he was sure.

Robert Wicks suggests there are three types of spiritual guides: 1. Spiritual directors -- people with whom we meet on a regular basis for strengthening our relationship with God and our spiritual life. 2. People he calls abbas and ammas, from the Aramaic words for fathers and mothers after the early Christian church desert hermits and monastics. These are people we seek when we are already engaged in the spiritual life in a serious way for advice on special points of discernment or to help us with a major question or change in direction. 3. Books and Places -- sacred places and sacred reading can be powerful guides in the spiritual life and many people do not use them as guides.

My friend Andy was a spiritual director. Spiritual directors may also be engaged the way one might see a counselor or therapist on a professional basis. We have been meeting in a sacred place and hearing from sacred readings throughout this sermon series, although sacred reading does not need to be limited to Biblical or Christian sources and a garden, a beach, a mountain path or your favorite coffee house may be as sacred to you as this chapel may be to another.

As for abbas and ammas, the American writer, philosopher and rabbi Chaim Potok gives us many examples in characters from his novels. Two of his works where we find examples of spiritual guides that come into the lives of characters with well established spiritual lives at critical times in order to help them with a time of discernment are the works The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev.

Potok's 1967 work The Chosen is about the friendship between two Jewish boys coming of age in World War II Brooklyn, NY. Danny Saunders is the brilliant son of the local Hasidic rebbe, who raises his son Danny in silence (without speaking to him) to teach him pain and thus compassion, so that Danny will have a heart as well as a brilliant mind. Reuven Malter is the son of yeshiva professor David Malter, who uses the historical critical method in his Talmud study, and when the war ends, becomes a leading Zionist. Due to Hassidic tradition Reuven Malter and his father are more than just friends to Danny, they are spiritual guides. Danny is Reb Saunder's eldest son and thus is set to inherit his father's position as rebbe, but Danny doesn't want to be the rebbe, Danny wants to be a psychologist. Both Reuven and his father encourage Danny to follow his heart, not his inheritance and eventually Reb Saunders understands he must also allow Danny to do the same.

At different times in the novel, both David Malter and Reb Saunders try to explain friendship to the boys. What they say is summed up by Emerson, whose thoughts have helped framed this sermon series, "Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart." [6]

In My Name is Asher Lev (1972), which Potok also sets in the Brooklyn Hasidic community, a young Hasid named Asher Lev discovers at a very young age that he has not only an artist's eye, but an artist's heart as well. The rebbe of the community sees that Asher has the talent to match his desire and finds a spiritual guide for young Asher - a famous Jewish artist named Jacob Kahn. Jacob Kahn, although no longer a keeper of the commandments himself, respects young Asher's desire to live both as a Jew and an artist and teaches him the history and spirituality and technique of the religion of art.

Young Asher Lev grows up and produces two paintings of his mother standing in a Brooklyn apartment window, her arms spread across the cross beam of the panes, her face a study in anguish. She is torn between her loyalty to her son and his art and her husband who works for the rebbe and can't understand their son. When the paintings are finished, Asher's agent Anna Schaefer sees them and states bluntly, "They are crucifixions." Asher accepts the titles Brooklyn Crucifixion I and II given to the paintings by the gallery, having learned from Jacob Kahn that his own religious tradition had no artistic form for the expression of ultimate suffering.

"I do not wish to treat friendships daintily," Emerson wrote, "but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know." [7] It is my hope that this sermon series based on the work of pastoral psychologist Robert Wick has treated friendship with rough courage and encouraged you to examine how you serve as harassers, cheerleaders, prophets and spiritual guides for the friends in your life and to listen to the friendly voices in your life that speak to you in these ways. I truly believe friendship is a sacred and holy calling, not something to be taken lightly, and that you feel called to more deeply engage the friendships in your life.

The most difficult part about friendship is saying good-bye to a friend, as Kermit noted as the beginning of this sermon, life is full of meetings and partings, and today's service will mark a parting for me here in Weston after two years. I'm glad that time has been full of friends.

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[1] Kingston, Barry, "Purple Sky" from the CD Shakin' from the Tree.

[2] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 92.

[3] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 92.

[4] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 93.

[5] Wicks, Robert J., A Circle of Friends, p. 98.

[6] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Friendship" 1841 from The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, Ed. Modern Library/Random House, New York, 2000.

[7] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Friendship" 1841 from The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooks Atkinson, Ed. Modern Library/Random House, New York, 2000.