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| Rev Dr Linda Hart |
Sometimes friends of mine will engage in a game of ‘I never...’ It’s
a simple game where you try to amaze the other players by telling them your
favourite ‘I never....’, that is, when you fill in that blank with something
you’ve never done that might well have been expected by this time in your life.
When playing the game you can be as mundane or as salacious as the
company will bear, though, it’s the most fun when you find the more quirky and
unusual.
By the end of the game typically all the players will come to a consensus
on the most surprising and fun of the contributions. I can contribute
such things as ‘I never have been to Alaska’, or ‘I never have held a snake’ or
‘I never have gone scuba diving.’ These aren’t perhaps the best ones, but
I’ll leave it to your imagination as to whether I’m discrete or wicked that the
really startling ones aren’t included this morning.
One 'I never' that seems increasingly rare for people of my generation and
the following ones is ‘I never have had a tattoo.’ And what’s more until
very recently, I’ve never wanted to have a tattoo. I’m not good with
pain, and there’s never been anything that I felt I had to have emblazoned on
my body. I reckon that if I’m going to go through that pain, it had
better be for something worthwhile. Very worthwhile.
Some friends of mine have gotten tattoos of flaming chalices, an idea I
have considered, but only briefly. One had her appointment on a Sunday
morning, and nearly converted the artist to Unitarianism before it was done.
She noted to me that it was a holy time for her to talk about her faith,
and she wept at times because of the meaning of this indelible mark on her
body: it was a representation of the indelible mark her faith and
practice had made upon her heart, upon her life.
Another friend, after a transformative experience at a week long retreat in
the desert of New Mexico returned home to have a spiral – the simplest form of
labyrinth tattooed on his chest, above his heart. It was for him the
symbol of his journeying into his deepest self and returning again.
Other friends have tattooed words or images that provide a memorial for
something or someone who has died who was beloved. Hearts or stars represent
babies who never made it to birth, or siblings who are missed.
Some people create something beautiful. I’m always tempted to say,
‘only beautiful’ as if beauty or even something that is aesthetically pleasing
isn’t important, as if it doesn’t mean anything at all. It does.
Beauty is its own statement of meaning and value and to create beauty
however it is done isn’t inconsequential.
Like I said, I never have wanted to have a tattoo until pretty recently,
and even having thought about having one, I didn’t do anything else about it.
But then I had a little thought collision. Do you have those
sometimes? When a few things that seem unrelated suddenly bash into each
other and something new sparks and you find yourself somewhere new.
You see, I was thinking about the way that we get marked by what we
believe. I was thinking about how we are forever, indelibly marked by
what we give ourselves to, by what we vow, by the promises that we make in our
deepest hearts. And when I say that we are marked by what we vow, I don’t mean
only things like wedding vows. I mean like the promises that we make in
our own hearts about what our lives mean and how we wish to live them.
David Sedaris tells the story about his mother who on every New Year’s eve
sat with a neverending glass of wine and wrote her resolutions for the year.
She would never tell him or any of her children what she wrote, but she
would sit for hours and write and cross out and rewrite and erase and tear up
the cards that she wrote her resolutions on. After hours of working on
them, she would be satisfied and – apparently – tuck each year away with the
ones from previous years. Years later after she had died he found them.
The date of each resolution was written neatly on the upper left hand
corner, and under it were two words, and ever year the words were the same:
Be good.
Sedaris comments that his own cards are very much the same, but he is
unwilling to be as bold as his mother, so he softens the resolution: ‘Try
to be good.’ Or even ‘Think about trying to be good.’
We are marked by what we vow. ‘Be good.’ And we measure what we
can do and what we have achieved by what is written there: written on our
hearts, written on our arms or chests or hands, written on simple cards.
It is the whispered hopes, the faint dream of what might be, the longing
that calls us to attention.
When I say ‘vow’ I mean this sort of intention and promise, not only, and
perhaps not importantly what is said in the moments of high drama, but that
intensely private moment of commitment, that which is typically unseen by any,
only experienced by one. I believe Emerson when he notes that everyone
will worship something, will follow and live out beliefs and hunches and those
whispering longings no matter if they come to a coherent articulation. We
do, I believe give ourselves over to...over to...
This is where language starts to fail me. We don’t give ourselves to
an idea, at least not to an idea alone, no matter how well reasoned and
constructed it is. We don’t just follow and pledge ourselves to a sweet
feeling, I don’t think, nor only a powerful one. The wedding vow, for
instance, the traditional one reminds us of what this is if we were to listen
instead of reciting it like a childhood rhyme. 'For better and for
worse', a bride say to her beloved. 'In sickness and in health', a groom
says gazing into the eyes of the one holding his hands. Through
everything, through all that life puts before us. I will abide with you,
and you with me.
This is no small thing, no simple statement, and I suspect that if any of
us knew what those words meant before we said them to one another, there might
be some very long pauses. Very long pauses. If any of us knew what
the meaning of our deepest vows were, we might well be struck dumb, unable to
truly take on 'for worse', 'in sickness'. We might be left breathless by
what it means to step forward into what our words call upon us to do and to be.
What we inscribe upon our hearts, what we give ourselves over to is nearly
impossible to name, and I find myself only able to say that I give myself over
to God, and it is the psalm that then resonates: ‘You are present before
me, behind me, and you hold me in the palm of your hand.’ ‘Where can I go
from your spirit, Where can I flee from your presence?’ This vow, this
promise that which is written on my heart is always with me, and with you, too,
whatever yours might be, in darkness and in delight.
What we intend, what we promise, what we vow in the quiet of our own hearts
marks us. And even if at some distant date you relinquish those vows,
even so, you will be forever changed from having made them. Like those
tattoos my friends get. Even if at some point she decide that having
‘Hortense’ in swirly script across the top of her arm, the removal or reshaping
of the image will leave some remnant behind, a scar, a mark, never gone.
That’s the collision. What we inscribe on our bodies is not unlike
what we inscribe on our hearts, and both change us, and guide us even when
we’re not thinking about it, and call us to attention when we’ve forgotten or
ignored or disobeyed what we meant to follow, what we meant to do.
What would you write upon your heart? What would you inscribe across
your heart if you had the chance, if you had the moment? ‘Be good’ might
indeed be enough to shape a life.
Ware, I plan to put ‘choose life’ upon my left wrist, recognising that the
skin on that part of the body is riven with nerve endings and it will hurt more
than having it put in another place. Such a vow is worthy of going
through a bit of a trial, I reckon, and it make sense to me now to do so.
I want it there to remind me when I need it: when I feel lost and
bereft, when the difficulties of life present themselves, when there is a time
to affirm what is good and remember what makes it possible.
I will ask a friend to create the image for me, the words in her careful
calligraphy, and in the week after Christmas of this year, I’ll go and have it
inscribed, as a celebration of five years of sobriety. Choose life,
that’s it for me.
What is it that is inscribed upon your heart? I ask because the more
you know what it is that is written, the easier it is to follow it, the easier
it is to give yourself over, the easier it is to remember and to move from that
very central place.
I will lose one of my favourite and easiest ‘I nevers' in just a few
months. But in doing so, I will once more make that vow that I make each
day. I’ll replace that ‘I never’ with the assurance that I never will
forget. May it be that in these days we know, we remember and we live, boldly
and well.
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