First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
10 July 2005
Come to the River
Are any among you suffering?
Are any cheerful?
Are any among you sick?
These are the questions that James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, asks of early Christian communities that are scattered around Israel. He follows the questions with some simple instructions, to pray, to sing, to call upon church elders to anoint the people with oil. He also invites the community to confess their sins to one another and to God. These lines of scripture have been used throughout the centuries by churches that make a practice of anointing the sick and offering healing rituals. God, we are promised, will raise us up. God will forgive us. God will offer us all healing and reconciliation.
Allow me to repeat the questions, for you now, and to add a few of my own:
Are any among you suffering?
Are any cheerful?
Any any among you sick?
Are any among you lonely?
Are any afraid?
Are any among you cast down?
Are you grieving?
Are any among you feeling overly confident?
Are any feeling nothing at all?
Are any among you feeling regretful?
Is your heart hungry for something, or is your soul thirsty?
If we are honest with ourselves, we undoubtedly answer yes to at least a few of these questions. We can answer them for ourselves, for a loved one or for the world. Even a quick glance at the headlines from this last week or any week would speak volumes about the need for healing in our world, let alone in our individual lives. To make the case that we need healing would be far too easy. I trust I don't need to convince any of you that. What's harder is opening ourselves to the fact that healing happens, and not by medicine or modern science alone. Healing is a gift that happens by the grace of God.
In a few minutes, we will invite you to open yourselves to this gift. For those of you that would like to come forward, Mary or a deacon will be stationed to greet you, to listen to a concern that may be especially on your heart at this time, and to say a special prayer for you, anointing your head with a soothing oil. Before we do that though, I'd like to share with you all a story that I hope will open each of our hearts and minds to the fact that healing happens, and happens especially in community.
This past April, I was invited to join a South Boston artist friend of mine on a business trip to Derry, Northern Ireland. Though I couldn't swing the trip at the time, he assured me there would be future opportunities to join him. In fact, while he was there in April, he signed me up to be an American Board member of a broad based group that will be overseeing his latest public art project, based in Derry, called "the Tonnes, a Meeting of the Waters". Michael is an installation artist who I came to know and love about ten years ago when I began helping him on his annual Words Aids Day installation at the Boston Center for the Arts. In addition to transforming the lives of the troubled youth from South Boston—he employs the kids to help him with almost all of his projects—Michael uses art to transforms large-scale public spaces into places set aside for healing, ritual, prayer and performance. I'll tell you about some of his always-ambitious local installations another time. For now, I'd like to share with you what he is cooking up in Ireland. He already has the Mayor of Derry and city engineers on board for it, along with a long list of local and national arts councils. Please bear with me a moment...this project is a little tricky to explain.
Those of you that know your Irish geography will know that the Foyle is a river which runs from Derry along the Ireland/Northern Ireland border out to where the Lough Foyle meets the Atlantic Ocean at a place that legend calls the Tonnes, or "the meeting of the waters". Michael's vision is to build a floating sculptural installation on a vessel that will travel down these border waters, from Derry to the Tonnes. The vessel itself will be a 110 foot square barge with its middle open the water of the river. Over the opening, he will build a well house, lined with silver tiles that will be burnished in a Celtic key and step pattern. I've seen Michael's tiles before and each one is breathtaking, a work of art in istelf. Passengers will be able to enter the house and walk around the periphery inside on a balcony. The river water will be illuminated, and its moving reflections on the silver tile will create an illusion of being underwater. Michael hopes the image will evoke the feeling of a trip to the Tir na Nog, the Irish otherworld said to lie under the sea. Wait....it gets better.
The 300,000 people who live in the region, while having endured lives of extreme and often violent political and religious and cultural conflict, have one obvious, elemental truth in common—they live in the constant presence of the waters of the River Foyle. Michael and his locally based crew will invite them to animate this public space as a way of connecting to their individual selves, to each other, and to their land and to their home. For several months before the actual sailing of the vessel, hopefully by 2007, people in communities along both sides of the river will be provided with stones engraved with words, poems and prayers they have chosen and written themselves. With these stones, they will build cairns on the piers along the banks of the Foyle. . . . It gets even better.
The vessel will then begin its slow journey to the Tonnes, stopping along the way to pick up the stones from the cairns, laying them out on the outer decks of the barge. At each stop, there will be a reading of the messages on the stones. Finally, when the vessel reaches its destination at the Tonnes, the stones will be dropped overboard into the turbulent tidal waters, where the waters meet. The dreams, wishes, hopes, frustrations and prayers of the locals will sink into the waters and reemerge over the years as they scatter and wash up along the nearby coastlines.
I share this story with you because for me, through this and other of his projects, Michael Dowling, more than virtually anyone else I know, lives both the questions and the commands that our scripture for today puts forward. Michael's invitation to those that live along the river Foyle is a way of asking "Are any among you suffering?" "Are any cheerful?" "Are any among you sick?" His installation will enable them to express themselves in prayer, poetry and song and perhaps for some, even to confess their sins of national or religious pride, of deep seated of hatred towards their neighbors. Undoubtedly, some of what is inscribed on the rocks will be symbols of more individual crises in people lives—words of grief, words of struggle with addiction, words about physical and mental illness, word about loneliness or even employment troubles. Michael's dream is that people will bring their whole selves to the project and that the project will offer a channel of healing. By gathering up these prayer stones from all sides, by sending them down river, by dropping them into the Tonnes, he's creating an opening where new meaning, new relationship and new life can emerge, where new hopes and new dreams can wash up on sometimes hostile shores.
Were I not in this business of healing myself, as a minister and as a Christian, I'd have a hard time imagining such a profound gesture of healing. The fact is though that we don't have to be on the river Foyle to so beautifully enact the words from James's letter. We have and we will do so here and now.
What has amazed me when we have done healing rituals in the past here at First Church is not only the fact that so many of you are so ready to share a word of your own joys and concerns during worship, but the ways we learn to appreciate that we are not alone. When we bring forward our concerns, our prayer stones if you will, we do so individually but as a part of larger community of care and healing. We drop our stones into the precious waters of God's healing, mercy and grace and into the waters of this beloved community. Our prayers may wash up on the shores of one another's lives and with the help of God, we lift our burdens, together. We pray. We sing. We confess to and before one another. Healing can and does happens. Through theact of sharing our whole selves in community, God raises us up. God forgives us. God offers us healing and reconciliation.
Are any among you suffering?
Are any cheerful?
Are any among you sick?
In the words of Kate and Peter's hymn that we sang as our opening, Come, all you thirsty to the river, the forgiving river, the renewing river, this river of life! Come here where the Word runs cool and deep, calm and clear, sweet and wild. Come with the outcasts, crushed and broken, come, you who rage and you who weep. Come because God has called you child. God's own face shines in you reflected, calling us back where we belong. Amen.
© 2005, Daniel Smith