"Angels, Folk Singers & Gurus"

There’s a musician I like, named David Ippolito, though most people know him as the Guitar Man. He plays every Sunday, weather permitting, in Central Park not too far from Strawberry Fields, the tribute to John Lennon established by his wife, Yoko Ono.

I don’t know if you’re like me in this way, but certain places just have a spiritual vibe about them and for me, Strawberry Fields is one of those places. I told a story a few weeks ago about being by the IMAGINE mosaic and watching as a homeless man adorned it with flower petals. Another homeless man came up and offered him a candle, which got incorporated into the work of art. It was really a nice moment.

Now I don’t want to paint too rosey a picture here. The homeless guy who decorates the mosaic has been known to demand money when tourists stop to take a picture, which is about a thousand times a day. "I’m the artist," he yells, and you can see the people looking around like, ‘who said that?’ Then they see him and the hat with a few bills in it and they get the idea.

And it’s true, he is the artist. I wish I had some digital images of what he does with that mosaic. It’s actually really beautiful. Of course his art work is adorning the work of another artist, the one who designed the mosaic itself. And there’s another level still, since the mosaic is a tribute to an artist whose music we often sing here, John Lennon.

So like all things in life, the closer we look and the more attention we give something the more layers we realize are there and the deeper into things we can see. Rilke once wrote, "Don’t be deceived by appearances, in the depths, everything becomes law."

But I got on the subject of Central Park because I wanted to tell you about the Guitar Man, David Ippolito. He shows up on Sunday’s down by one of the lakes, barefoot and shirtless, playing James Taylor and Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and some of his own stuff.

It’s hard to express exactly what goes on there because it’s ultimately of a spiritual or mystical nature. He’s been playing there for thirteen years now and has quite a following. You should see it, there’s about a hundred people gathered there throughout the day, with people hanging out, heading out, new people arriving in an ebb and flow of humanity.

There’s a story about how David started playing there that’s kind of cool. The way he tells it, he used to be a pretty wild guy, living a musician’s life in the City, partying like crazy, being basically out of control. At his lowest point he felt suicidal. And it was around that time that he felt drawn to this particular area in Central Park. So he started going there, playing his guitar and singing.

And something began to happen. He started coming back, and people started coming back, and before long people were waiting for him when he got there. He called his first album the "People on the hill." Lots of times when he’s done with a song and people start clapping he waves off the applause and says, "It’s just us."

When he tells the story about how he started playing in the park he usually gets choked up around the place where he talks about the people on the hill being like his angels, the spiritual beings sent to save him from the shipwreck of his life. He’s grateful that he’s washed up on the shore of the lake and found his niche in the world. And the people on the hill are grateful, too.

I’ve been thinking about angels lately, in part because of the Guitar Man but for a whole bunch of reasons, really. I heard the theologian Walter Wink speak the other night and he was reminding the audience that in Biblical times there was a notion that every church and even every town had an angel. That’s why when you read the book of Revelations the various letters are addressed not to the churches, but to the angel of the churches. Walter has a nice way of working that ancient concept. He talks about the spirit of an institution which is something larger than the sum of its parts. You know that feeling you get about a school or a church or any group of people, there’s a certain vibe the group gives off.

Walter offers that up as one way to think about this ancient Biblical view. But at times you get the feeling he thinks it’s even more than that, and to tell you the truth, I’m beginning to think that myself. We are mysterious beings and the spiritual dimension to life, in both its interior and exterior dimensions, is rich and complex.

My favorite poet Rilke, understood this well. His crowning achievement was a series of ten poems called the Duino Elegies. This is how they begin:

In a time of great national crisis Abraham Lincoln drew on the metaphorical notion of angels as inner aspects of ourselves, challenging citizens to call upon their higher angels. We’ve been exploring our own time of cultural and historical upheaval, so Lincoln’s call is just as relevant today. Rather than giving into fear and simply accepting pre-emptive military strikes and the loss of civil liberties, we need to stand up for true freedom, for Muslims as well as Christians, Iraqis as well as Americans. We need a worldview predicated on a universal declaration of human rights, not a fear-based appeal to military might.

The stakes are very high in the world today. If ever there was a time for us to call on our better angels, it is now. And when we do, we can become angels for one another.

We’re going through a critical time in the life of our church, too, as we explore the possibility of moving into new space. Like any time of crisis, it’s scary and difficult and it’s easy only to see these from our own point of view. But a very important part of the spiritual journey is being able to see things from each other’s perspective, to be angels for each other. I think that’s what we’re called to do now. We need to speak our truth and call it like we see it. But at the same time we need to honor each other, to listen to each other, to be angels for each other.

We heard a couple of Sundays ago how our church has had its share of challenging moments and we’ve got through them to be the very special faith community that we are. After last week’s council meeting I touched base with a few people and I came away from those conversations being very impressed with the caliber of people that make up this church. Everybody’s got his or her idea about what’s best for the church. And yet there’s a very strong sense that ultimately we’ve got to do whatever we do as a church, all of us together, being angels for each other.

In an ultimate sense we’re walking a sacred path and like the great spiritual geniuses before us we need to realize that the path is not new, it’s ancient. In Karen Armstrong’s biography of the Buddha, she makes this observation about his experience of enlightenment. She writes, "If there

The Guitar Man who I was telling you about thinks of the people on the hill as being his angels. He’s even got a song about us all being angels for one another that includes the refrain, "thank God we’re not all crazy on the same day." The idea there is that we’re all only human, doing the best we can, trying to make our way in the world. But when we’re at our best, when we’re tuned into the sacred path, we’re angels for each other.

May we all, at this critical time in the life of our church and in the life of the human species, call on our better angels, keeping to the sacred path, reaching out to the other in compassion and forgiveness, and finding our spiritual home in those depths that Rilke spoke of, the depths of love.