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This summer, we began to hatch something for this fall, and were in the process of choosing a book, based on input from all of you. Then we learned of the all-Rochester read, coordinated by Writers and Books and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. We looked at the title and the theme, and decided to jump in. So if you read the book The Shawl and liked it, you can thank me. If you read it and didn’t like it, blame the NEA. It appears that nearly 100 of you have read the book, or will, and that many have joined in small group discussion over the course of this past week. In fact, some of you may be visiting Third Church this morning because of this discussion – and if so, we welcome you warmly. I must be honest – some of you who read The Shawl did not like it whatsoever – and you’ve told me that – whether the themes, content or writing. Some of you had mixed experiences, and given the hard nature of the content, that’s understandable. I must admit that I took a bit of a leap of faith on this one – agreeing to preach on the themes before reading the book. Some of you might wonder how that’s any different from any other Sunday, and you may have a point. My primary critic was even a little worried how this might go. But I must also confess that after having taken that leap, it has paid off for me personally, spiritually, and perhaps for us. A brief summary is in order. The Shawl is actually a short story and a novella, written by the accomplished writer Cynthia Ozick. The short story, “The Shawl,” is set in a concentration camp, and tells the horrific and heart-breaking story of the death of Magda, the 15-month old daughter of Rosa. Magda had been concealed by her mother in a worn shawl, and when Stella, the 14-year old niece, takes the shawl because she is cold, the baby is discovered and killed. “Rosa” is the longer story that follows 30 years later. It tells the story of Rosa as she has emigrated to the United States, first to Brooklyn and then to Miami, and how she copes with, or doesn’t cope with, the unimaginable tragedy. The niece Stella remains present in the story, as does the memory of Magda in Rosa’s vivid imagination. Finally, a bit of humane comic relief appears in the person of Persky, a would-be gentleman caller. That’s enough of a summary. You can read the book in a few short hours, and know that those hours will be intense ones. One thing does need to be said before considering themes, and that is the context itself. The Holocaust. A topic, and event, that would seem as incomprehensible and impenetrable as it is tragic. It remains so. But just as our Jewish friends remind us never to forget the Holocaust, Ozick’s work creates a deep resonance even for us 21st century American Protestant Christians. We cannot ignore that context, but we are not constrained by it either. We must learn more, as Americans, as people of faith, as part of a race prone to forget its history. And by so doing, we will explore even more deeply our own link to the human story. And The Shawl does that in quite a profound way, through Rosa’s tale especially, but through Magda, who never speaks, through Stella, who we experience long distance, through Persky, with his fire-red toupee. It is never easy, and it is never straightforward, like life itself, but it seems truthful. Ozick’s tale is as true as any’s who have experienced grief, and sought to persevere through it. In discussions over this past week, we discussed epic tragedies through which we have lived – the Vietnam War, September 11. We also discussed more personal tragedy – the death of a loved one, a personal battle with cancer. Throughout, it seems to me, Ozick invites us to live with many profound questions, which we explore every day in the living of our days, and which we, as a church, explore in community. There is the issue of home – physical home and emotional and spiritual home. We know when we are home, do we not, and we know when we are wandering and lost. Rosa longed for her pre-war home, Warsaw. She idealized it, romanticized it. She refused residence in post-war Israel, and never felt at home in Brooklyn or Miami. And yet that was where she was, physically, and so she had to cope. Have you lived, physically, in a place that was not home to you? Have you been, emotionally, spiritually, in a place that was not home to you? There is the issue of human capacity. The extraordinary human capacity for resilience and the extraordinary human capacity for evil. Each comes in ways large and small. The ability to live with unspeakable hardship and the ability to live day by day in the face of smaller setbacks. And the ability of our race to perpetrate events like the Holocaust, and our ability to perpetrate smaller deaths – dismissing a person's story, ignoring one who is reaching out. There is the issue of story itself. A social scientist wanted to do research on Rosa, but it seems that he didn’t really want to hear her story. When she tried to tell it, she was dismissed as a lunatic, a crazy old women. I don’t think she was. What we want, what we need, is to tell our story, and for someone to hear it. When our story is told, and heard, it means that our life is taken seriously, and has meaning. When it is not, it does not, and healing is so much harder to experience. Because finally, that was the issue we discussed most energetically, and most meaningfully: grief, and coping, and dealing with loss, and healing, and hope. Some readers expressed a frustration for Rosa to just get over it. We discussed moving on, moving past, moving through, moving beyond. At one point, Rosa herself acknowledged a dynamic of “before-during-after,” and knew somehow that she was locked in the “during,” which seeking to reclaim the “before.” Yet it is in the “after” that we live. Doing what I do, I often talk with people experiencing grief, or loss. A job. A relationship. An illness. A loved one’s death. There are never any easy answers. How do we grieve? How do we cope? I believe we do it not by forgetting. How could we forget one who has meant so much to us? How could we forget a relationship that had meaning, or a powerful event? Wounds can heal, but in the healing, they leave scars, and the scars allow us to move to the next phase of life while never forgetting the event that caused them to happen in the first place. To live in the “before,” or “during,” is to prevent the scar from forming to do its job. To live only in the “after,” though, without remembering from time to time, also diminishes our full human experience that we are given to live. Rosa’s eccentric, dysfunctional behavior – destroying her store, fantasizing about her daughter, clinging to the shawl, searching for a pair of lost underwear – may have been extreme, but it was surely in response to a most extreme experience. She came to the “after” place only as she was able to live beyond her own self – her confined apartment, her confined experience. Community for her came in the form of a flirtatious older man or a long distance phone call. Community for us comes in many ways. Families, friends. Perhaps in a counseling, therapeutic relationship. We’ve conceived of one primary community as this place, the church. The issue of faith lurks here always in the shadows. Rosa rejects Judaism in this story, both its form and its content. She is disdainful of God and those who practice belief in God. The same is not true for Cynthia Ozick, throughout her writing, as much as I’ve encountered. It is a central question, for us gathered here. It would be unfair to overlay a Christian perspective on all of this, unfair to Judaism and unfair to this work of literary art. But it would be appropriate to consider a Christian response. Through its biblical history and its contemporary history, Judaism has understood and claimed God’s presence in the midst of suffering, as have we. And more than that, Judaism, and Christianity, have conceived, have imagined, have hoped for, an alternate reality. God – who we Christians know through Jesus – is the source of all hope and the author of that new reality. This is not easy or casual hope, and it does not make grief disappear or allow us to forget life’s hardships. In the powerful words of Psalm 51, we experience one who has experienced transgression, unnamed tragedy, so much so that they imagine their bones having been crushed by God. And yet they seek God out, seek God’s truth, seek God’s presence, seek God’s hope. Isn’t that what we do? Isn’t that the kind of healing we seek, the kind of hope after which we thirst? The kind of hope about which we sing in the psalms, in our lives, in our hymns? Thomas Dorsey wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” following the death of his wife and new-born son. Georgia Harkness – the fist woman to teach theology in an American seminary – wrote “Hope of the World” following a self-described “dark night of the soul,” years of serious illness and depression. Cynthia Ozick’s Rosa wrote wildly evocative letters to a long-dead daughter. Acts of imagination all. The prophet Joel wrote that old ones shall dream dreams and young ones shall see visions. The prophet Isaiah wrote that a new thing was springing forth. John of Patmos, in the book of Revelation, wrote of a new heaven and new earth, the river of life, where God will wipe every tear from every eye and death will be no more. Acts of imagination all. It is to the hope of imagination and the imagination of hope that we are called. Was there hope in The Shawl? We debated and discussed, discussed and debated. Yes. Perhaps. Barely. More than barely. Hope in Rosa’s letter-writing. Hope in Rosa’s resilience. Hope in her marching through life, insisting that her story be heard even when she was dismissed as a lunatic. Hope in her accepting Persky’s friendship. Hope in her very survival. The hope to which we are all called, and called to nurture in a broken and fearful world, a world God loves and is seeking, ever, to heal and make whole. Amen.
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