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This weekend marks the beginning of the first Mardi Gras season which the people of New Orleans have observed since losing so much of their city and each other to the vicissitudes of circumstance and the failures of human infrastructure. In years past, this has been a time for the celebration of life, of all of its embodied pleasures, and of the civic pride of a distinctive and world-famous city. This weekend, it is all of that, even as it remains a time of mourning, for a city still in the earliest stages of what is called, so hopefully, ‘recovery’. The people of New Orleans and most especially the more than half of them who are not and cannot be home for Mardi Gras are on my mind as I speak to you today, and I commend them into yours. May they look gently upon me for lifting up both their joy and their bitter grief as I ask you to consider this simple question:

How has your heart known its winter? Has the smoky smell of sorrow come drifting up to you from the cracks and crevices of life? Or has it come rushing in, in earnest, as a river that leapt its banks in a storm? We live in a world of which grief and pain are an indelible part. We live, together, as a part of that world, and that pain, in turn, is a part of us. This morning, we come together to celebrate, but amidst that celebration, there are tears. The seats of this sanctuary cradle bodies and hearts and minds that ache, that mourn, that lament the loss and the suffering that comes from being in the world. We do not, I do not, always point it out so plainly or always admit it so directly, but it is there, always, with voice or without.

We share, as a society, a tendency to speak of grief and pain and depression as obstacles to be overcome. We speak of suffering, in all its forms as demons to be fought and defeated and as illnesses that need to be cleansed from the bodies of our lives. At times, we say to our struggling friends and family and selves that ‘You can beat this thing. You can put it behind you. Hope will conquer despair.’ We may tell ourselves that our pain at the loss of a loved one, our pain at some sense of defeat in our own professional or personal lives, our pain at the hard work of just living--we may say to ourselves that this pain ‘is my problem; this is something I’ve got to get through on my own.’ And the people around us, in our families, our friendships, and our communities may reinforce this message. ‘You’ll get through this; don’t worry, time heals all wounds.’ These words can come from an impulse to help and to heal, to take away another’s suffering, but that can also serve to satisfy the speaker rather than the listener, as we turn our attention to happier thoughts and our backs on those whose sorrows remind us of our own worries and pains. And when we gather in fellowship and in worship, we have a habit of affirming and testifying to the power of love in the face of suffering. In talking and singing and praying about these dimensions of life, we sometimes end up painting a picture of two armies, forever at war. Rebecca Parker addresses this tendency in a book she wrote together with Rita Nakashima Brock called ‘Proverbs of Ashes’. In it, she tells a very personal story which illustrates the danger of this view of joy and grief in constant struggle, with a story from her own life. Rev. Parker writes of a time of severe depression, in which she came to the decision to end her own life. This decision was, she saw in retrospect, encouraged and justified by violent metaphors of hope and despair. She writes that, "Such a view assumes that bad feelings need to be excised, or suppressed by stronger, better feelings. Peace or happiness or even survival are imagined to be accomplished by cutting something out, or dominating some aspect of the self. Viewing the soul this way internalizes violence."

Pitting hope against despair and expecting the one to conquer the other utterly and completely denies the power of pain. It can serve to isolate the bereaved and the depressed, stigmatizing them as casualties in a cosmic war. And as Rebecca Parker points out so bravely, it establishes a pattern of conceptual violence that can lead to physical violence. Our pain is a part of ourselves, just as we are a part of the world. To teach each other and ourselves that we should overcome, cut-out and destroy that pain completely can send a parallel message, suggesting that when that fails, the life which holds that pain can be cut from the world as well.

In her story, Rev. Parker explains that she did not make the decision to live, did not turn away from suicide and choose her life anew because of some triumph of the loveliness of that living over the anguish it had caused her. Her hope did not conquer and destroy her despair. Rather, her feeling expanded, and grew big enough to hold more. As Parker writes, "Pain, sadness and despair were not eliminated and overcome. I embraced them within a larger heart." It was a narrowness of feeling, an inability to sense anything but the suffering that was only a part of her life which brought on Rev. Parker’s despair, and she survived it not by denying that it was a part of her and her life, but by realizing that it was not the only part. Life is more than pain, and the hard work of learning and relearning that lesson leads from spiritual death, back to life.

Parker’s vision of embracing the full range of life’s sorrows and joys reminds me, as so many things do, of an idea from the stories of Kurt Vonnegut. In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, one of the most frequently banned books in the history of American public schools and libraries, Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of a young man/old man/middle-aged man named Billy Pilgrim who has become, as the author puts it, ‘unstuck in time’. Billy jumps backwards and forwards, to and froe, throughout all the stages of his life: one moment he is wandering in a forest in Luxembourg, just after World War II’s Battle of the Bulge, and the next he is experiencing the sensation of his own death, and then his birth, and then his first swimming lesson, and after that he finds himself visiting his septuagenarian mother in a nursing home, and on and on, and so forth.

Billy never knows what moment is to come next: whether he will find himself in a crisis or a celebration, whether he will land randomly in a time of joy or sorrow. Because of this, he lives life with an acute case of stage fright: he never knows when he’ll be next, what he’ll be doing, or what he should say. Of course, in this much, Billy’s existence is just a fantastical exaggeration of the everyday state of human life: much as we might prepare or plan for it, where each new moment will take us is always a mystery.

But unlike the conventional human experience, the character Billy Pilgrim has seen it all before: he knows whom he will love and how he will die, the horrors he will witness and the beauty he will experience. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five and created Billy Pilgrim largely in order to write about his own experience as one of the rare few survivors of the Allied bombing of the city of Dresden, Germany, during the last months of World War II. In the novel, Billy experiences the fiery destruction of that old and beautiful city under the same circumstances that his creator, Kurt Vonnegut, did: as a prisoner of war, cowering in a subterranean meat-locker underneath slaughterhouse number five. Down, under the ground, and later above it, in the ruins of a city melted and burned, Billy is confronted by the depths of war’s horror, by the destruction, overnight, of an entire city and the lives which gave it life. Yet still, he knows, by dint of his condition, that such destruction is not all there is to life. His hopping around in time keeps him aware of the diversity and complexity of his life, of all the depths of sorrow and all the great joys too. Billy can look honestly on the ruin of a city, can keep looking on it throughout his life as he revisits the scene, and still know deeply the wonder of life and its promises, his children, his loves, his strange coincidences. His moments of joy and grief cannot deny each other, for they all exist in Billy, and Billy exists in all of them.

While Billy Pilgrim’s condition is imaginatively fictional, as a character he points the way toward a very real and possible way of life. His story paints a picture of the vastness of all the seconds of a human life, stacked one atop the other, like a tower reaching up toward heaven. In the novel which is his home, it is not Billy alone who is spoken of: a wide and varied cast of characters inhabit the tale, accompanied by anecdotes about the small details and strange coincidences of their lives: this dying man was once a great marathon runner, in twenty years, this young man’s uncle will share a hospital room with the main character. The whole great world is somehow big enough to hold the joys and sorrows of not just one life, but countless lives. In remembering and in deeply knowing the painful and the beautiful together, Billy does only a fragment of what the world does constantly: holding all things, denying none.

There is a lesson in these two very different stories, from Rebecca Parker and Kurt Vonnegut. Though one is fiction and the other not, both are deeply personal, deeply emotional; both voices strain to share their experience and their hope with their world. The lesson I take from both of these writers, both of these Unitarian Universalists, I apply to that problem which I began with, that problem which we share. To make better the world and our lives within it, we must move to allow our pain to coexist with our joy. This will mean cultivating in ourselves an awareness of the fullness and variety of life, in acknowledgement of all that we have lost and all that we yet hold dear. Within this and other communities of which we are a part, this means opening up more public space for the pain which we hold individually and the pain which we hold collectively, inviting grief and sorrow out from behind a curtain of shame. And this will also be an invitation and an exhortation to us to speak of and bear witness to the world with a greater and more engaged honesty. This lesson calls to its recipients to an honesty about life; about its limitations and sorrows, about its wonders and its mysteries, and about its enduring ability to hold all of these things at once. In Dresden, today, they are still rebuilding, even as the process in New Orleans has only just begun. To reconstruct old and beautiful buildings in cities ravaged as these two have been, stone and brick are often salvaged from structures too damaged to stand, in order to reinforce those that can endure. Those worn and weathered building blocks still bear the markings and the memories of the foundations they once formed and of the violence, of humans or of nature, which brought them low. The stones do not forget the loss, just as they do not forget the new part that is theirs to play. They continue as both a record of the devastation and a sign of the wondrous hope that calls out to survive, to rebuild, to live on.

This world in which we live together is nothing if not persistent. Its rains fall, its oceans lap, its sun and moon shine, its worms burrow and its mosses flower on and at and in and through all that ever lives. It does not, will not, cannot deny any part of itself. Nor, if we are to be true to ourselves, each other, and our very earth, can we deny the presence and the power of our pain and of our solace. Therefore, let us remember the generous manner of existence and seek to emulate it. Just as our lives and the world we live them in hold more than we know and appreciate, let us remind ourselves and each other of all the possibilities and limitations of these, our precious lives.