Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Anne Carson’s prose-poem entitled “The Beauty of the Husband” describing the painful break up of a marriage begins with these words in the mouth of its female narrator:

“A wound gives off its own light surgeons say.

If all the lamps in the house were turned out, you could dress this wound by what shines from it.”

Thus begins a woman’s story of a fractured marriage that wounds her deeply but that sheds an astonishing light in her life. It’s a story of loss and the desire to hold onto beauty though doing so creates suffering.

In the meantime here we are, you and I, doing all we can to hold onto the beauty in our lives and the lives of those we love but to suffer as few wounds as possible. Sure, everyone has to get a scrape or a bruise or a jab some time; everyone gets a bump on the head or stumbles into a wall. But please, God, save us from deep and abiding wounds now or in the future—save us from violence, untimely death, the painful ending of important relationships. Save us from unforgivable betrayals, deep depressions.

Yes, you and I try to insure that we and those we love suffer as little as possible. And who can blame us? But there’s something else we also do. We try to convince ourselves that we did not suffer in the past. We stuff painful memories and the wounds they create down deep in places that may be inaccessible to us for years.

And so, whether we’re talking about the present, the future or the past we human beings want to hold onto beauty but don’t want to go down the road of suffering in the process.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us at all that in Mark’s gospel for today Peter doesn’t want to go down that road either.

In our passage for today, one that many of us could probably recite from memory, Jesus asks the disciples who people believe Jesus is. The disciples answer: “John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets.” Jesus then asks them a more probing question: “Who do you say that I am?” “The Messiah” Peter blurts out, that is, the long awaited one, the one who brings God’s promised reign on earth, ultimate truth, ultimate justice, ultimate beauty.

But then Jesus begins to tell Peter and the others what his messiah-ship will be about. It will not be a kind of bullet proof beauty; it will not be the reign of one who comes in fine robes and walks harmless above us. Instead, Jesus tells them, his messiah-ship will involve suffering and death and a new way of being that will arise from these.

No, Peter says, not that, not that way, not that road.

But Jesus persists, telling them that following him will mean embracing a similar path: losing life in order to save it, letting go of the things we think will save us in order to be saved by something or someone we would not have chosen, we would never have imagined. Or to borrow our poet’s image of the wound: choosing to live a life that will wound us, in the hope that the wounds we receive will bring to our lives a certain kind of life-giving light.

This is happening at St. Paul’s today, here and now, and I’m going to tell you one story about it with the permission of the people involved. It’s a domestic story but not the story of a marriage or partnership that went on the rocks or about the serious illness of one partner and how the other responded. No, it’s a dog story. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear the same theological and spiritual issues that would apply to the most serious of human situations.

Once upon a time Stephen Crippen and Andrew Stone decided to become dog owners. The kind of dog they decided they wanted a Shiba-Inu, a Japanese breed that resembles an impeccably groomed fox with long legs and a curlie-cue tail. And so their dog Stella came to live at their house, Stella, aptly named in that her name means “star,” Stella: elegant and mannered, a wonder of God’s creation.

But as many of us know, God did not create dogs to be alone, without the company of their own kind. So about six months ago Stephen and Andrew decided that it was time to go from being a one-dog family to becoming a two-dog family. They began searching for another Shiba-Inu, this time a male. Before long they’d identified a breeder who had a litter on the way. Two months ago little Hoshi was born.

A few weeks after they got him, Stephen brought both dogs to visit me in my office. Stella, now the older sister and stalwart by comparison, sat on the floor while Hoshi, a plump little bundle of Shiba-Inu energy tore around the room, chewing and playing with everything within reach: computer cords, a small basket, books and folders.

Then a little over a week ago, I got an e-mail from Stephen entitled “Hoshi’s heart.” At a routine visit to the veterinarian it was discovered that Hoshi has a heart murmur. Upon further diagnosis Stephen and Andrew were told that his condition has no remedy and that he is likely to die quite suddenly around the age of three.

Stephen and Andrew were, of course, stunned. They went back to the breeder with the news. The breeder apologized, gave them their money back and then made them an offer. The breeder offered to take the puppy back.

What would they do?

What would we, you and I, do?

What do we do when a choice such as this comes to us?

On the one hand, I suppose, you could make the case, that it’s just a dog, and that the buying of a dog with a heart defect was just a financial transaction gone bad, one that could be set right by returning the puppy and getting another later that would be in tip top condition. But this is not the way Stephen and Andrew saw it.

This is what Stephen said to me and later wrote to me about why they chose to keep Hoshi:

“There was no way we could "return" Hoshi because of his heart problem. He doesn't get banished because he has this "flaw." His heart is part of him, in its own way part of the wonderful experience of being with him, having him in our pack... He's one of us... As painful and heartbreaking as this is for us, it's something that Stella doesn't give us...This problem makes being with Hoshi, and being with both our dogs, more vivid, more immediately powerful, more compelling. It makes us appreciate more deeply the here-and-now experience of having them both with us...”

This small, momentous decision about a canine member of a household for me has freighted within it something about the pursuit of beauty and the acceptance of wounds in our lives and the discovery that light can come from those wounds. This story isn’t just about a dog with a heart problem; it’s about two human beings tasting what it means to be God’s heart in the world: a heart that gives of itself even and especially when wounded, even and especially to the wounded.

When I first read the beginning of that Anne Carson poem I shared with you earlier, I wondered what surgeon or surgeons she could have been referencing about the relationship between wounds and light. This last week I discovered that it was Richard Selzer, a surgeon and writer who said this about wounds and light in a magazine interview:

”For me, the body is a sacred space….I am always touched by the revelation of the human spirit when I look at the body, a wound or a lesion. I can see the spirit of the person - the aura of the spirit - in the wound.

The healthy, robust individual doesn't arouse the tenderness, the empathy, if you will, that the wounded body does. It touches your heart to see someone suffer. The body is the only thing that, the more wounded it is, the more beautiful or holy it becomes.

(When) I wrote an essay called "The Exact Location of the Soul," I was being mischievous. I asked, 'Is (the soul) under the kneecap or in a fold of the baby's neck? Where is it?...now I would look at a body and find where it is wounded. (The soul) is most likely to be there”

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Works Cited or Consulted

Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband

Richard Selzer interview at

http://teenink.com/Past/2000/December/Interviews/RichardSeltzer.html