The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

Good morning. The topic of the sermon today is grief. Yet today, for me, is all about joy.

This duality reminds me a creation myth Judith told not too long ago as a children’s story. As I remember it, in the beginning God created the earth and the people. God gave the people everything they needed to live forever. But the people were not happy, because they had no children. So they went to God and asked to be given children. “But I have given you everything you need,” said God, “and you are immortal.”

“We cannot be happy without children,” said the people.

“But if I give you the joy of children, I must also give you the grief of mortality,” explained God.

“Please, God, we can accept death if only we may have the joy of children.”

Like most parents, God could not deny his people what they needed to be happy. So, since then, the world’s people have experienced both grief and joy.

Many cultures believe that acceptance of this dichotomy is the key to serenity and wisdom. Maybe that’s why joy and fear, love and grief, sometimes are expressed in the same way. C.S. Lewis wrote, in “A Grief Observed,”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times if feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.”

All of us who have lost a loved one, or been in love, have experienced the same butterflies in the stomach, fullness in the throat, tipsy fogginess. Are these emotions generated or expressed in the same region of the brain? I’d guess there’s a neuroscientist among us who knows.

I light the chalice today in recognition of the chiaroscuro of joy and grief that gives depth to the picture of our lives.