The Gift of Enough

The Rt. Rev. Bishop A. Robert Hirschfeld, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, delivered the Spring Term Convocation in Chapel on March 28.

I am grateful to the Rector, Mrs. Giles, Dean Wynder and the entire Chapel staff for the invitation to be with you all this morning as you return to campus after Spring Break. I am deeply honored to be invited to speak for a few minutes on the theme, “I am enough.” Though I have to say at the outset that I am not an expert on the concept of my own enough-ness. I may be the only one in this room who struggles with accepting my own sufficiency, my enough-ness. And yet, I have come to see that the opposite of scarcity, the opposite of feeling that I just don’t have enough may not be a sense of abundance or lavishness, but just having enough, being enough, enjoying the sufficiency of life. There are words from a traditional Shaker hymn that go:

’Tis a gift to be simple
’Tis a gift to be kind
’Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be.

This sounds so noble, virtuous, decent, and dignified. But here’s the thing. I, for one, rarely live with such simplicity of heart. My heart is cluttered.

I am, generally, not satisfied. In fact, I am a deeply avaricious man — I’m using the word “avaricious” because it’s a good SAT word. It means greedy. I use avaricious because I want to prove to you that I am capable of using such words and thus worthy of your learned respect. Which is what I crave in this life … people’s respect, their admiration, their lofty regard. I am greedy for admiration because, well, much of the time I assume that such esteem is in short supply. It’s a limited resource. If you or others have more than what I feel I have, then I feel a lack. As a result, I can get jealous, covetous is the religious word that we just heard from Walter Brueggemann. And my envy can easily turn to outright resentment.

It’s a sad thing that you are returning this morning to school for a promising Spring Term and find yourselves being welcomed to my pathetic inner life. But here we are.

Last week, I returned from the spring meeting of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church. There were over a hundred of us meeting for the first time since the pandemic started. On the one hand, I was so glad to see colleagues and friends, and to spend time with them and catch up on their lives. But almost as soon as we sat down to begin our sessions, my monkey mind, that tendency to jump from one branch of envy to another, began to rage. My mind was host to these unwelcome thoughts: “How come the Presiding Bishop’s staff and planning committee asked my friends Cathleen and Scott to address us — and not me? How come those bishops are sitting at the head table, and I’ve been assigned this table? What do they think of me? How do I rate here? How can I get higher?”

Now, I am sure that kind of thinking probably never takes place here, among you. I thank you for indulging me.

Jesus has something to say about that kind of comparison mind. He says when you are invited to a feast, don’t take the place of honor so that the host will then ask you to take a lower seat. Instead, take the lower place so that the host will say, “Friend, sit up here.” So here I was sitting at table 23, wondering when it is that the organizers will say, “Hey, Rob, come on up.”

I wonder if anyone here goes through analogous inner torment. I won’t ask for a show of hands because I fear I’ll be the only one. But I remember sitting in seats like these, well not quite like these, when I was waiting to hear from the college I pinned all my hopes and dreams on. I was anxiously hopeful that my acceptance would win me my life’s security and direction and a guarantee of success in life. As it turned out, I did get in, but it got me none of those things. I was still restless, envious, greedy for more attention than I received. And the college did not in itself provide those simple gifts of kindness, companionship, humility. I’m still working on receiving those.

So, at some point last week, I joined those same friends, the same Cathleen and Scott who had been asked to speak to the House. We gathered on a day of Sabbath to make space and time for prayer, silence, sitting in God’s presence. No agenda, really, except to be present to whatever the Spirit might offer — even if it was a time of rest from the talks and table discussions about the state of the world, the state of the planet, and our fragile church.

As we went off to a lakeside cabin and sat in contemplation for several hours, a strange and curious thing happened. As I observed my mind’s erratic clamor — “You don’t have enough. You are not enough. Unlike the bishop of Washington with her stately National Cathedral, or the bishop of New York with his vast Cathedral of St. John the Divine, all I have is my dented and scratched Prius for my cathedral. You don’t belong here; you don’t measure up. Not smart enough. Not published enough, not spiritual enough, not fit enough, not — fill in the blank — enough.”

And then something happened, I began to pay attention to my breathing.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Mysteriously, wonderfully, these words came to me.
“All that I crave.” Breathing in. All that I crave.
And then releasing in my exhale … .
“Has already been given me.”
All that I crave. Has already been given me. I sat repeating that. As I did, the jumpy, anxious mind started to settle and quiet. A stillness of soul descended and filled me. When an envious, competitive, comparing thought came by, I just came back to this sentence. And the breath.
All that I crave, has already been given.

What is true about my craving is that it’s not that I crave being chosen, or honored or elevated. There is a deeper longing and restlessness that lay under all those envies. I already have what I crave — love, presence — because I am created by a loving God who is present.
A word from the Psalm 139:
        “I will thank you because I am fearfully and marvelously made.”

And, of course, there’s the story of Jesus, rising up from the waters of his baptism. Now remember, he’s accomplished absolutely nothing in his life at that point. Thirty years old, and he hasn’t even left home yet. No school. No college. No career except what his father taught him. The phrase, “failure to launch” comes to mind and was probably even running through the gossip mill among his critics. And so he comes out of the Jordan River with these words welling up within him and surrounding him with a love that would satisfy any restless craving: “You are my beloved. My Child. In whom my soul rejoices.” That’s the gift for every one of us, Christian or not. You are of infinite worth, fearfully and marvelously made. All you crave … the love and inner longing that is underneath and behind all our restlessness and desires, all our bouncy thoughts. All our craving finds their satisfaction in that truth, which never fails. Beloved.

Of course, we forget that truth, don’t we? We keep grasping for more. And as a result, our neighbors are injured because of our grasping. Whole groups of people, races, genders, are put down and injured because we insist on taking a place of honor that may not be ours to take. We can fail to see the ampleness of our enough-ness. There is a lot at stake when we fail to breathe in and embrace the fact of our individual splendid sufficiency. Gratuitous insults are thrown. Then maybe a fist. To our horror, even wars are begun. I have come to see that what is at risk in our habitual failure to be at peace within ourselves is the whole balance of our future as a society and the viability of humankind itself. There is a man in Moscow who has banked on the fact that our nation is so divided and compromised by our resentments that we would not know how to respond to his own obscene grasp for more power.

But I am not an expert in geopolitics. I’m just a north country bishop from table 23. Let me leave you with one more story of the need to relish the gift of enough that is coming toward us at every moment. Even today, this moment, and the weeks of this term.

Two days ago, I was in my kitchen working and looking out the window at the bird feeder. The feeders were getting low in birdseed, but a bright crimson cardinal stopped by. He was followed by a more subtly hued female cardinal with a brilliant orange beak and a rose tail. Then came the goldfinches. A pileated woodpecker. I thought, how beautiful. Spring is here. I am so lucky to see this. But, as I said, I am avaricious, greedy. It was not enough. I wanted more. And I did not want it to end.

So, I filled the feeders with black oil sunflower seed. And some thistle seed. Then some special songbird mix. Finally, I hung up some aromatic cherry suet. Nice greasy stuff. More birds! More! Come. In abundance. Never stop!

The next morning, the whole thing was destroyed. Birdfeeders smashed. The post toppled and bent. A bear had its own craving that eclipsed my own. There was no birdseed or suet to be seen anywhere. All that was left as a result of my hankering to amplify and extend the magic was mangled steel and upturned earth. A couple finches sat forlornly on a nearby railing searching for the easy birdseed and perch.

A cautionary tale. And I know you know that I’m not just talking about birds and bears, but something even closer to home…closer than our own desires and wishes, and our own beating, longing hearts. Closer than our breathing.

All that you crave, all that you most deeply crave, Has already been given you. You already have.

It
is
simply
enough.