“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God” (1 Jn. 4).

We all know regret. It comes over us as we remember a quarrel with a person we love, or recall the pain we felt when a cherished relationship was broken. The poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) married Andrée Schafer a brilliant painter who suffered from epilepsy. In the spring of 1927 the two of them hitchhiked from Seattle down the West Coast sleeping under bridges along the way.[i]

When they arrived in San Francisco the two camped on Mount Tamalpais and immediately knew that this is the place where they wanted to stay. Andrée painted. Kenneth wrote and participated in the 1934 waterfront strike. By the end of the 1930’s they were quarreling, having affairs and then separated. Andrée’s seizures grew more severe and she died in 1940. Elsa Gidlow a mutual friend scattered her ashes in Steep Ravine, on the way to Stinson Beach.

Kenneth Rexroth wrote several poems about Andrée and the watersheds of Mount Tamalpais. Let me read one:

“Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches / Explode their emerald stars, / And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke / Of innumerable buds. / I know that spring again is splendid / As ever, the hidden thrush / As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital - / But these are the forest trails that we walked together, / These paths, ten years together. / We thought the years would last forever, /”

“They are all gone now, the days / We thought would not come for us are here . / Bright trout poised in the current - / The racoon’s track at the water’s edge - / A bittern booming in the distance - / Your ashes scattered on this mountain - / Moving seaward on this stream.”[ii]

In a sense every marriage is an island distant to us. And we do not really know what happened to the Rexroths. But this feeling of beauty, loss and distance, and perhaps regret, lies close to the Gospel of John and the end of Jesus’ life. My sermon today has three parts: the vine, the branches and the fruit.

[i] Tom Killion, “Poetic Histories. The Sleeping Lady: Invention and Appropriation,” Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints (Berkeley, California: Heydey Press, 2009) 94ff.

[ii] Rexroth wrote this poem at about the age of 36. Kenneth Rexroth, “Andrée Rexroth,” The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003) 220.