Shooting the Albatross
Opening Words
Religion is beauty which rises above all ugliness, it’s a protest and a dream.
Religion is the candle of life lit from the rays of the sun of love.
Religion is a broken heart with an unquenched spirit.
Religion is laughter coming through tears.
Religion is the cherishing of values felt to be most vital to life and blessedness.
Religion is a perfect dream trying to get itself built in an imperfect planet.
Religion is an unanswered prayer answering itself.
Religion is someone without money going out to purchase the universe.
Religion is the quest for the largest and fullest satisfaction of felt need.
Religion is a mother’s kiss and a father’s benediction.
Religion is someone on the summit of a mountain wondering why they are there.
Religion is giving the best that we have to the best that we know.
Hymn
No. 213 “There’s a Wideness In Your Mercy”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Children’s Story
“Alonzo Ames Miner: Use Common Sense”
by Denise D. Tracy, from Living In The Wind
Alonzo’s father was a farmer. On their farm they raised crops, cows, and Morgan horses. Alonzo knew how to hoe weeds between the corn, and pick mustard which helped fertilize the corn; he knew how to pick corn and how to turn it into fodder for cattle feed.
He knew how to take the cows out to pasture, calling “cowbush, cowbush” and how to bring them in again in the evening. He also knew how to milk the cows. He was so good at milking that the barn cats would line up at the end of the stall and he would direct a stream of milk into each cat’s mouth. Afterwards they would lick their lips and walk slowly away, waving their tails with pleasure.
But Alonzo loved the Morgan horses more than anything. They were chestnut brown, large and handsome. He considered the horses his personal friends. He was a good rider, light in the saddle with gentle hands. The horses responded well to his touch.
His father had told him if he was ever thrown to always stay with his horse, never to let his horse get away.
One day Alonzo was riding and the horse did throw him. Remembering his father’s words, he held onto the bridle and was dragged on the ground for a long distance. He was badly hurt and bruised and had broken bones. It took many months for him to be able to walk again, and all his life he was to have pain from these injuries.
The fall from the horse changed Alonzo’s life. He could no longer hope to be a farmer which required that he be physically healthy. So instead he studied hard and became a Universalist minister. He became a minister at the Universalist Church in Methuen and Lowell, Massachusetts, and in Boston. He was an excellent pastor and preacher.
Often he preached on common sense. He told the story of the horse whose bridle he held onto because he had been told not to let his horse out of his sight.
“That rule was good for me to know, but if I had used my common sense, I wouldn’t have been hurt so badly.” But then he would think to himself, “If l had used my common sense, I’d have been a farmer, and not a Universalist minister.” Alonzo realized that rules ought to be adaptable, and that using common sense was the means to adapt a rule to fit the situation.
And no matter where Alonzo preached or who he pastored to, at the end of the day he always loved to go into the stable and feed the horses a carrot or brush their coats to shine! Horses were still his friend.
Often he preached on common sense. He told the story of the horse whose bridle he held onto because he had been told not to let his horse out of his sight.
Reading
from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Coleridge
“God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!
Why look’st thou so?” – With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ’em woe;
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow!
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!
Ah, well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes;
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
O happy living thing! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware;
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Sermon
“Shooting the Albatross”
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
The way I hear the poem, this guy shoots a bird. He feels awful about it – I mean really awful, then later he feels better. And that’s the end of it. But there must be more to it, or why on earth would English teachers keep assigning Coleridge and poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
The poem presents us with a problem: when we do something bad and feel terrible about it, how can we, in the end, accept ourselves once again? It’s not my job to understand Coleridge – that’s the job of those English teachers. But it is my job, and everybody’s job, to understand the universal religious problem of feeling bad about something you’ve done and then coming to terms with it.
“With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross. And I had done a hellish thing.” The sailor shoots the bird, the albatross. We don’t know why; maybe he himself doesn’t quite know why, either. But he soon recognizes his mistake, his “hellish thing,” just as any of us might privately acknowledge a slip-up, a lapse, an injustice, a serious wrong-doing.
When the Cosby Show first appeared on television, one of my children claimed he was to watch it for homework as an example of “realistic fiction.” At the dinner table, during a rare moment when the kids weren’t trying to bounce grapes off each others’ noses, we talked about whether or not the show actually was realistic. I said, “no.”
“They throw us a few realistic bones, Theo’s room’s a mess, the children insult each other, but I still don’t think the program shows family life as it is. Rudy doesn’t ever leave her toys in the living room, fighting has a witty, loving, tongue-in-cheek quality, and – the thing that strikes me most – the parents are never busy doing anything.” The kids fought me on this one. They said, “The Cosby Show is realistic Mom; it’s just that we don’t measure up.
“Why don’t you just accept the fact that, as a family, sometimes we do it wrong? There will always be elbows on the table, an unbrushed dog, experimental string pulleys or something crisscrossing the dining room at neck-level. There will always be days when we’re out of milk, when one of us is furious, when one of us is too busy for anybody’s good. The Cosbys are, realistically, the right kind of family. Accept it, Mom, we’re not.”
I want my family to feel happy and loved and cared for. And when they don’t seem happy or loved or well cared for or perfect (and of course they don’t always), I feel I’ve shot the albatross.
People shoot the albatross in different ways. Sometimes it’s the smallest things: forgetting an anniversary, over-reacting to a demanding co-worker, or letting the finance charges pile up. Or we are horrified about our drinking, our marriage, our self-indulgence, our children, our house, or a serious misjudgment or injustice or unkindness or betrayal. Somebody seems to say, “I needed you and you weren’t there,” or “You hurt me,” or “You let me down.” There are periods in a lifetime when we must say, along with the ancient mariner, “I have done a hellish thing.”
The mariner faced his failure all too thoroughly. By the third stanza the dead albatross literally hung around his neck, and he is
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
“The soul in agony.” The Universalist, Hosea Ballou, said, “It is as much the nature of sin to torment the mind as it is the nature of fire to burn our flesh.” Universal salvation is okay; it’s okay if there’s no Hell, because we will sufficiently torment ourselves over our sins as they occur in this life. Indeed, we are quite capable of subjecting our own souls to agony. Guilt can do that, and probably should. But not forever.
We expect more of ourselves, I think, than we should, and that makes our albatrosses heavier, the agonies of the soul greater, the heart drier and dustier, the wicked whispers louder. Right off the bat I can think of three expectations for life that nearly all of us have and almost none of us can attain.
First, for example, we expect our inner conflicts to resolve themselves eventually. We make a final decision or take some action – the ambiguous business deal, the gossip session, the child’s punishment – then we vow to put the whole thing behind us now that it’s “resolved.” Lo and behold, little bits of an internal vocal minority keep bubbling back up.
I believe that it is more realistic to strive simply for relative peace amidst the various aspects of ourselves than it is to expect a static, complete, mental and emotional solution to a complex human dilemma. Reconciliation is an on-going process; there is not perfect tranquility. Don’t expect it.
The second thing I believe might occasionally reduce the weight of the albatross – and I know it’s obvious – is to remove the expectation that we should be able to make “right” decisions. Many of us go on believing, despite repeated evidence to the contrary, that all problems have a right solution; it’s just a question of figuring it out.
We go over it and over it, the pros and cons of finally putting Dad in a nursing home, or of arranging to work more closely with the very attractive person in the office down the hall, or of giving our tax refund to the family Disney World fund instead of to the Friends of the UUA. The fact is, as you will remember, in most cases there are many ways to do things, and no choice is altogether right or wrong. Don’t expect to always make the right decisions.
A third way of lightening that albatross load – again, obvious – is to jettison the notion that we ought to be able to cope with it all. Some problems will never be resolved. Some will never go away. A mother may always wonder about the baby she relinquished to adoptive parents. A retired man may always wonder if he handled that difficult Saturday night back in high school in the best way. That pest of a nephew may hang around for the rest of your natural life. That’s all there is to it; problems are part of being human as are the ancient mariner’s agonies.
We left the mariner in despair. How does he snap out of it? It may seem odd, but he begins to watch the water-snakes. He begins to watch them, “blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! No tongue their beauty might declare.” The ancient mariner embraces the world – beginning humbly with sea-snakes – but he embraces the world, nonetheless. “A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.”
The mariner was smart to embrace the world around him. Albert Einstein says that’s exactly what a person should do. “We experience ourselves,” says Einstein, “our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. . . .Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” Even the Principles of our own Unitarian Universalist Association recommend that we give attention to the “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. “
I think the mariner, Einstein, and the UUA are on to something. Within the universe we do have bonds; life to life, creature to creature, person to person. We are never so broken that we need feel “alone on the sea.” There is a gentleness to creation, when only we bother to notice nature, or the night sky, or the people around us in a room. When we’ve shot the albatross, there is a way out of the agony that follows. To finally accept ourselves as a part of life on this planet, none of it perfect; to feel a common sympathy for ourselves as part of the human condition; and to accept it all, finally, and be free.
You may have seen the Yom Kippur liturgical chant that the Rev. Mark Belletini adapted:
All vows, all promises we have made to ourselves, all commitments to unswerving thought, opinion and behavior are now cancelled, nullified and made as naught.
Now are we free to reexamine all our desires and all the roads
we have chosen to walk; for all vows, all promises we have made to ourselves, all commitments to unswerving behavior,
thought, or opinion are now cancelled, nullified, made as naught.
Now we are free to cling no more to convictions based on inner vows or laziness or apathy; for now all vows, all promises we have made to ourselves, all commitments to unswerving opinion, behavior or thought are now cancelled, nullified and made as naught.
Blessed are Thou, eternal, center of the world, and light within our hearts!
We are free to start again, in peace.
The message I share with you today is a gentle, reassuring one. That is not to say that any one of us isn’t due for one that prods, or kicks hard, or wrestles with us, or makes us uneasy. But for today, if we’ve done our best to be loving and decent, I believe we may loosen the albatross and appreciate the divinity that is ever within.
Spirit of Life
When all is quiet and we are small
And the night is dark,
May we hear the tender breathing of all who lie awake with us.
That together we may gather strength to live with love, and
kindness and confidence.
“The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.”
Amen
Meditation
A Litany of Atonement
by the Rev. Robert Eller-Isaacs
For remaining silent, when a single voice would have made a
difference,
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
For each time that our fears have made us rigid and inaccessible,
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
For each time our greed has blinded us to the needs of others
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
For the selfishness that sets us apart and alone,
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
For falling short of the admonitions of the spirit,
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
For these and for so many acts, both evident and subtle, which have
fueled the illusion of separateness,
We forgive ourselves and each other; we begin again in love.
Hymn
No. 323 “Break Not the Circle”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Benediction
Here and Now
by Emily Curie
The place to begin is here.
The time to begin is now.
I unwrap the layers of my public self
And settle in the calm.
Awake, my song
and sing to me
of treasured times
in memory
of healthy hopes:
the world made one
a restful sleep when day is done
of broken hearts mended
of long grudges ended
the lonely befriended
And let it begin with me.
The place to begin is here.
The time to begin is now.
Questions for Discussion
- Think of one or two recent instances when you have been
troubled by self-recrimination, when you have shot the albatross.
Did your guilt and regret eventually serve you positively? - Is it psychologically and spiritually helpful to realize that some
problems will never be completely resolved and that reconciliation
often is an ongoing process – resulting in a “relative peace”? - Rev. Jane Rzepka says that when she is facing personal regrets
and problems, it helps to “embrace the world” around her, and thus
feel more bound up with the rest of life. Is this thought helpful to
you? What are some simple, everyday ways you might enhance your
“connectedness” with creation and with persons around you? Is there one thing you can do now to strengthen your relationship
with life around you?
- Our Religion - July 1, 2015
- Do you believe in God? - December 1, 2014
- The Glove in the Subway - May 1, 2014
