Beads of Memory
Jim Burklo, Sermon, Sausalito Presbyterian 5-28-06
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Each bead on the rosary remembered a phrase of the prayer. Each bead a bidding, a bid, a request. From the Hindus to the Muslims to the Christians, the practice of fingering rosary beads has gone around the world, forming one great necklace of prayer in every tongue, strung through every religion.
Our prayers are the beads, and the string is the Christ, who is the universal divinity that binds us together in a circle of spiritual community.
A bead is a memory. The beads on the abacus remembered the last computation, kept a running tab. The beads on the rosary are memories of Mary, of Jesus, of ourselves, of our saintliness and our sinfulness, of our lives and our deaths. The beads we strung on the necklace this morning are memories of all the passions and perils and peccadilloes and perversities and profundities and preciousness that we have brought with us to church this morning. A necklace that as a whole is beautiful even though some of its pieces are not. The necklace is itself a reminder for us to pray, to remember the divine Source of our lives, to remember what really matters, and what does not matter nearly so much. A reminder to reach for all that is hidden in our unconscious and bring it to consciousness, and with intentionality present it to God and let God make something divine out of it.
It’s so easy to forget. Partly because we don’t want to remember a lot of things. Willful forgetfulness can become a habit that puts us to sleep, without us even knowing that we’re dozing through life, running on autopilot. A friend of mine is a theoretical physicist, and when he was in grad school, he fit all the images of the mad scientist. His apartment in Berkeley was a shambles. On the front door, inside, was a big note he had pasted above the door handle. It said, in big letters: JOHN! Do you have your keys? Do you have your bike lock? Did you pack your lunch? Staggeringly brilliant as we all are here in this room, we still need reminders. Wake up calls. Artificial means to bring us back to spiritual consciousness.
A few years ago, Roberta and I went to Hollywood to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. In the middle of the night we went bowling with her friends, a group of starlets, supermodels, and the like. Including one especially colorful fellow, Maurice, who was Josie’s hairdresser. Maurice would scamper up to the line, holding the ball up against his chest, then stop, swing, and release, and – Strike! It was amazing. Between rounds he and I got into a rich discussion. He wanted to talk about religion. He said something that greatly impressed me. “Jeem,” he said, “I see it these way. Zee car is a very, very dangerous thing, so you must study and practice and get a license to drive it. Zee soul, it is also a very, very dangerous thing. Terrible things happen if people do not pay attention to where their souls are going. So religion eez very important. Religion eez zee driver’s license for zee soul!”
So I add this fat bead to our church’s rosary today, to remember Maurice and his wisdom. The wisdom that we so easily forget the power, even the danger, of a soul whose driver has gone to sleep. Time to wake up and remember that we have souls. Remember to pray, to lift all that is below the surface and present it consciously and lovingly before our divine Source.
A bead for a mother, expecting a child. A bead for a grandmother, expecting a grandchild. A bead for a woman grieving the loss of her husband, bereft of him and his love and of meaning and purpose for life. A bead for a man waiting for test results for possible prostate cancer. A bead for a man overwhelmed with loneliness, so pained by it that he can’t reach out for a relationship that would cure his loneliness. A bead for a teenager waiting to hear from the college where she wants to be accepted. A bead for a woman suffering from chronic depression and getting no relief from medication or meditation or anything else. A bead for an immigrant who walked over the border in economic desperation, now frightened by the threat of deportation. A bead for a young man with no high school diploma, whose child is in the sole custody of its mother, a young man who doesn’t want a minimum wage job because over half of his miniscule paycheck would be garnished for child support, leaving him with no way to pay his own rent. A bead for over 2 million Americans in jail, many of them for crimes in which only they were the real victims. A bead for gratitude for a good job and a good home. A bead for joy for a project completed and a victory won. A bead for the satisfaction of creative accomplishment and goals achieved. A bead for appreciation of the good luck of having genes that predispose for a joyful, easy-going temperament, or for having been born into high-functioning, high-achieving families.
Bring all your beads to the Lord. Bring it all to church. Your bids, your beads, your prayers, are so infinitely more valuable than anything you can put in the offering plate. Oh please, please, please bring it all here, all of it, because the necklace isn’t complete unless you do. We’re here to be whole - not perfect, not successful, not brilliant, not outstanding, not accomplished, not excellent. We’re here to be whole. Because the gospel is that wholeness is beautiful, even if some of the pieces of the whole are strange and painful and very embarrassing, and others are supposedly aesthetically acceptable. Oh please, bring us all the pieces, so that our rosary can be complete. Without your chipped beads, your funky beads, your misshapen beads, your odd beads, our necklace will lack the character that makes it idiosyncratically perfect. Your truth is incredibly valuable, whatever it is. Priceless, even if you wish it wasn’t your truth. Bring it all here, share it, tell your truth, I beg you – because sharing your beady truth, clay and pearls and all, makes the magic that our fellowship is all about. Your prayers are the beads, our church is the necklace, and if you don’t have two shekels to rub together or drop in the plate, if you don’t have some incredible artistic gifts to share, if you aren’t into being a brilliant board or committee leader, you still have something worth more than all of that, by far – you have your prayers, not just any prayers, but your prayers, your bids, your bedes, you have the truths of your hearts, worth more than any stock options or Ivy League degrees. Bring us your beads, string them on our necklace, make us whole – without you it isn’t complete - nothing is more valuable than the bids and bedes of your souls.
Etched on my memory is the sight of a statue of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which stands in front of the art museum in Morelia, Michoacan, in Mexico. It is graceful, it is beautiful, it is magnificent as you look at it from afar. Then you approach it, and you see that the whole thing is made out of welded rusted auto and truck parts. It’s a gorgeous work of art made out of what otherwise would be called trash. Which of course is perfect because of who Don Quixote was and still is. The knight of the baleful countenance. The knight who bravely tilted against windmills. The knight who gave it all up for the lovely lady Dulcinea who never gave him the time of day. The classic book, Don Quixote, is a rosary of misadventures and delusions and confusions, but when it is done, even with Don Quixote’s deathbed confession of the errors of his errantry, even then, you realize – it’s all good. The book is unforgettable, and Don Quixote is a hero, no matter what he said about himself, no matter what Cervantes said about him, either. God takes imperfect beads and makes a perfect rosary out of them. That is the gospel.
Let’s string it all together, our stories, our ups, our downs, our failures, foibles, fantasies, victories great and small. String it all together into a rosary of prayer, of memory, a necklace representing the gospel that our whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. Amen!