Elizabeth Schell, Worship Leader
Even in the midst of brightness and vacation, sometimes we get the blues. And sometimes even in the dark of night we get the giggles. Thankfully, our UU community is a space to embrace ALL our feelings.
(after congregation has brought up stones representing their joys & sorrows to build a common wall or cairn in the front of the sanctuary)
Look at all these stones. This pile/wall of our joys and sorrows.
Can you recall the moment of laying down a stone or of watching someone else do it?
Putting that weight down and stepping away.
What joys or blessings, sorrows or woes did your stones hold for you?
Can you imagine what other people’s stones might hold?
Do you think anyone else carried similar stones to you?
What does it feel like to have our joys and sorrows stacked together like this?
We enter this space carrying so much with us.
No wonder it can sometimes be an effort to get here.
Because sometimes it can be so hard to motivate, to muster our resources.
Perhaps because we have a horde of kids to wrangle with and sometimes we wonder,
is it really worth it? Do they appreciate it? What do we all get out of it?
Perhaps because we’re feeling old and tired and bothered by our bodies or the weather and wondering….Will anyone notice if we’re not there?
Perhaps because our partner or other family members go somewhere else or no where at all, but
refuse to make this journey with us, so coming here involves the weekly energy drain of re-affirming
our connection to this space of liberal religion, even if it is not supported by others whom we love
Perhaps we’ve been listening to the news all week….from the NC legislature; from Ferguson, Missouri;
from Palestine, Iraq, and on and on….
and we are just too numb to hear anymore of it.
Or perhaps there’s no one else at home to motivate us, but ourselves.
And getting out of bed, digging ourselves up out of the hole we are presently in …
Is just too much effort.
(singing) I’m sad, so sad, and I’m tired, so tired. And I’m hungry, so hungry, there’s a hole in my soul. And it swallows me up, and pulls me into the darkness. there’s a hole in the center of me. there’s a hole in the center of me.
We want to enter, rejoice, and come in. Know that it will be a joyful day.. But sometimes it really isn’t.
Sometimes that’s an impossible idea. And the hole inside us just can’t fathom it.
Because even though in our best moments
when we know each day is a blessing, that our lives compared to many in the world’s are
fantastically privileged and lush…..
even so, life can seem pretty bleak sometimes.
And it may be because of actual crap going on in our lives –
loss of job ….or family …..or a diagnosis…..
or a forever seeking of acceptance or love or connection that seems perpetually unrequited….
Or it may be because we are yet again in the jaw grip of that crafty monster Depression –
that hateful Creeper that can be inspired by actual events in our lives or
just be forever lingering around any corner, waiting to explode in our face
and pull us down into its unending hole of suffocating darkness.
And it doesn’t need to be in the growing darkness of winter
for the insatiable monster to rear its spiky head;
it doesn’t need to be in the midst of the stresses of family holidays…it can appear anytime.
Even in the sunny summer.
(singing) I’m sad, so sad, and I’m tired, so tired. And I’m hungry, so hungry, there’s a hole in my soul. And it swallows me up, and pulls me into the darkness. there’s a hole in the center of me. there’s a hole in the center of me.
I’m glad we all made the effort to be here today.
That we each did whatever we needed to do to motivate ourselves
(and perhaps others) to BE here.
Because once we’re here…once the music has begun, the fire ignited,
once the hum of this community is in motion….
I hope we can feel something in ourselves melt away a little bit,
feel something of that tightness relax…
I hope that we can, if we need to, feel the permission
to schlump into our bench and sigh the deepest sigh possible;
or reach out to the person next to us and clench their hands,
no words, they’re rubbish sometimes anyway,
just that grasping, clutching for life force.
But some of us may be still perching on the edge of our pew waiting
for something to spark our imagination, feed our hunger,
fill our need for a speck of light in the darkness.
(singing) I’m sad, so sad, and I’m tired, so tired. And I’m hungry, so hungry, there’s a hole in my soul. And it swallows me up, and pulls me into the darkness. there’s a hole in the center of me. there’s a hole in the center of me.
Let us breathe into this space and know its reassuring silence—-[silence]
Let us breathe into this space and know, that here at least
it’s okay to be sad.
It’s okay to be tired. Okay to be hungry.
Sometimes just saying it aloud relieves some of the pressure.
May we all know the comfort and strength of this welcoming and forgiving place,
this place where we can carry our burdens in….
and, if only for an hour, lay them down, lay them bare.
Lyrics to “Sad” by Joe Jencks
from the Brother Sun album, Some Part of the Truth
Chorus Well I’m Sad, so sad And I’m tired, so tired Well I’m hungry, so hungry There’s a hole in my soul And it swallows me up And pulls me into the darkness There’s a hole in the center of me. There’s a hole in the center of me.
Well I’ve never been one to sing about my troubles
I figure most of the world Has enough of their own
But now and then I think That when we sing about our truth
Maybe we light up a pathway For somebody else
Chorus
Sometimes I wonder When the whole world is quiet
When there’s nothing to hear But the sound of my breath
Why there’s so many people With so many hurts
And none of us really knows Quite how to love
Chorus
Now I like to dream Of a time when I’m happy
When I don’t feel the sting of each Pain in my bones
But then I reflect That the day I stop feeling
Is the day that they lay me Flat down in the earth
FURTHER REFLECTION
In the west of Ireland there are stacked stone walls like this everywhere.
It’s how they cleared the stony ground to make it somewhat habitable and grazeable.
The rocks are just stacked like this, no mortar.
Some have been stacked in fields for generations.
The amount of rocks, stacked one upon the other, wall after wall, everywhere….. it’s both impressive
and… heartbreaking. You can’t help but think of the people who had to dig all these rocks up, and
stack them one upon the other. It must have taken forever….and felt overwhelming…. endless…
When you enter the pit of depression it can feel like that…endless, bottomless, no light to see by….
…to find your way home, find your way out. If you’ve been in that place, like I have,
like my husband has, my mom, actually most people I know have visited that place….
when you’ve been in that place, you know what helplessness feels like.
What simultaneous emptiness and utter fullness to the point of drowning feels like.
And it’s…. it’s horrible. It can feel really hopeless.
And sometimes it’s so horrible that it forces us to see pulling the trigger on our lives as an escape.
It’s that bad.
As I prepared for today, the news of comedian actor Robin Williams’ death seemed pitifully ironic.
Anne Sexton, who also committed suicide, ends her poem with
“The joy that isn’t shared…dies young.”
Robin Williams seemed to be an unending overflow of silly voices and humorous commentary.
He more than shared his joy. And yet….
The joy that isn’t shared…. dies young.
But the sorrow that isn’t shared….festers and overwhelms.
This is what Ric Masten, our Unitarian Universalist troubadour poet,
so simply and painfully describes in his poem, “The Garden Pavilion.”
It can be easy to wonder, from the outside,
“why couldn’t that amazingly talented person keep it together?
Why couldn’t they see and embrace their many blessings?”
If a person like Robin Williams, with every potential resource at his fingertips—if he couldn’t
overcome depression, what makes any of us think we can?
Because we can’t. When depression hits. forget it. There’s no fighting back. It’s a losing battle.
What power can we have against the intensity of that engulfing wave of darkness
that takes all light and breath away?
I’m sorry to say that I’m not here to give any of us an answer for conquering depression.
There’s friends and family and other support systems, there’s therapy, there’s medication,
there’s all kinds of things that can help…help us understand it better, fend it off,
and sometimes even endure it and limit its effects. But if you don’t have those things,
or, even if you do, sometimes we can still fall prey. And that’s not our fault.
But I do want to say that coming here, being in community can help.
Being here won’t solve all our problems or take the depression monster away,
but hopefully by being here we can see that we are not alone.
And more importantly, we, any of us who are not presently in the darkness of the pit,
but who have known it, or known someone whose been there, we can be a lifeline, we can be a hand to grasp, a shoulder to cry on, a person to talk to.
I remember something David Ray over there said in a discussion years ago about worship.
He said that he thought it was important to come to worship every opportunity, whether he was
intrigued by the “topic” of the service or not. Because who knew what experience might actually be
transformative for him? But, more importantly, who knew what might be transformative for the
person sitting next to him? And how important it might be for him to be sitting next to them at that
time. This, to me, is one of the best statements of what worship, what this community, is all about.
Sometimes it’s about feeding a need within us. But often it’s about the hunger sitting to the right or
left of us. The desperate hurt soul sitting right there who really needs someone to reach out to them,
to notice that they are not talking to anyone or making eye contact or that they are actually silently
crying.
I’m very excited about the direction our ministers want to take us in this year – Walking Towards
Trouble, as Lisa called it last week, getting out there and really doing justice in our community and
beyond. We need to remember that sometimes the Trouble is sitting right next to us.
Some who are here now, or who might wander in the door at any time, some of us are terribly,
unspeakably broken. Some of us are barely making it. Some of us are clinging to this space of
welcome and it may be the only thing keeping us from sinking into the depths.
We have to keep making sure this community is a place where people can come and let something
go. Those stone walls in Ireland… seeing them everywhere….even though they hold a kind of
sadness and desperation, they also feel like a beacon, like walls and walls of unending hope.
May these stones be a sign, a marker, a cairn laid in the depression forest to mark our way back.
For each of us to know that this community is here – for us when we are hurting.
And that we, here, need to remember to BE here, waiting to notice, to acknowledge, to reach out and
hold the one among us who wanders in, deep in that place of darkness and suffocation.
Once someone’s fallen over the edge, it’s on US to find ways to pull them back. We are responsible
for each other. We have to notice the person standing in the corner by themselves;
notice the person sitting next to us, shaking from fear;
it may mean reaching beyond our comfort zones;
it may mean getting in someone else’s space; it may mean saying or doing something awkward.
And I know that’s easier said than done. I suck at this. Because it’s always safer to stay inside
myself, and I want to give people their space. But really I’m just making excuses. Like the reading
Lisa shared last week. It’s always easier to send money somewhere else, then to actually face
something directly. And this is pretty direct. This is right here.
This is us and anyone else who walks in that door.
We light our chalice when we gather. We who can be big time anti-ritual, anti-spirituality people,
yet we have clung to this most basic of human rituals – lighting a candle. Because we know how
important light is. And light is not just seasonal. It’s all the time. It’s in us. It’s knowledge of
possibility. It’s wonder. It’s hope. And when the darkness within us comes, when possibility and
wonder and hope are all snuffed out and we are drowning….. we need that spark of light all the more.
All we can do is cling to each other and cling to the light.
CLOSING HYMN: “Here We Have Gathered” #360
1. Here we have gathered, gathered side by side.
Circle of kinship, come and step inside!
May all who seek here find a kindly word;
May all who speak here feel they have been heard.
Sing now together, this our hearts’ own song.
2. Here we have gathered, called to celebrate
Days of our lifetime, matters small and great;
We of all ages, women, children, men,
Infants and sages, sharing what we can.
Sing now together this, our hearts’ own song.
3. Life has its battles, sorrows and regret:
But in the shadows, let us not forget:
We who now gather know each other’s pain;
Kindness can heal us; as we give, we gain.
Sing now in friendship, this our hearts’ own song.
BLESSING: “Come, Come” adapted from Rumi by Leslie Takahashi Morris
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving….
we will make a place for you,
we will build a home together.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
We walk together;
Come, yet again come.
(Sing) “Have you seen but a white lily grow – before rude hands have touched it?”
That’s the first line of a song that my voice instructor assigned to me. This song was written in the 1600’s for an English theater group. So the words were written a long time ago and it’s known as a classic solo. The song starts off praising the whiteness of the lily and the new fallen snow – that’s not really a problem. But it ends with praise for the whiteness of the woman he loves – and that just didn’t sit right with me. SO – when my voice teacher encouraged me to work on this song, I told him that I was uncomfortable singing it. He said, “Well I know it has some challenging parts – but I think you can do it and it provides good exercise in variations for voice.” We were obviously not talking about the same kinds of challenges.
I had to do a little talking to myself. “It’s just a song Jane. And he’s the teacher – you are the student. Sing the damn song.”
(Sing) “Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she – so sweet is she.”
Maybe I’ve gotten too sensitive! – Or maybe not. Sometimes I feel like I’m balancing on a tight rope when considering and discussing issues of race and privilege – but even that is a form of privilege; because I have the choice to get up here on this tight rope or not.
As a white person, I don’t have to think about being white. In fact, when this topic comes up some white folks say, “You know, I don’t see why we need to focus on race – I personally don’t think about it. We should move on.” Or those of us submerged in academia may say something like, “Ultimately we humans made up the concept of race as we attempted to increase both our understanding and manipulation of our world. In other words, race is socially constructed. It has no natural, biological reality. We are all a part of the human race with lots of variability within it.” Blah Blah Blah. All that may be true, but as Cornel West states, “Race Matters.”
This group is well read – you know that race still matters greatly today. You probably know that even today, job applicants with white sounding names are 50% more likely to get called back. (And not have to produce their long form birth certificate!) I could go on and on regarding how race still matters in housing opportunities, education, health and wellness, income security, etc. etc. And most of you know this. But it’s not something white folks really have to think about. Those of us who are white are like fish swimming in the water. We are in the middle of a white dominated society, swimming in white privilege and so unless we make a conscious effort, we don’t really know the water is even there.
Here’s a homework assignment for you white folks that are here today. This week – just this week – every time you look at your watch to note the time, also note that you are white. Then think about what your current situation is at that time and place, and consider the implications of your whiteness.
I’ll model this for you. (Look at watch). It’s now _____ o’clock. I’m white. And I’m speaking to you as a Unitarian Universalist minister called to serve in South Georgia. Now believe me, I could spend days considering the implications of my whiteness for that situation.
My sermon topic today is “White in the South: Can I Get a Witness?” I’ve read loads of books and articles on racial identity and privilege. Also, I’ve been studying and exploring this from a personal perspective and the perspective of my southern community for most of my life. So, while I could share data with you, I’m not sure that would be all that meaningful. Instead, I’m going to tell you two stories in the short time I have left.
The first story takes place in fall of 2008. Richard came over to look at my husband’s fender bender and give an estimate. Richard used to work in an auto body shop my family had owned back in the 90’s and now has a small shop in his backyard. Back when Richard worked at my family’s auto body shop, we used to have some heated conversations around race and sexuality issues –with him quoting scripture and sharing what he thought was just the natural and right way of living. Well, on this fall day of 2008, Richard happened to see a presidential campaign sign that I had by my driveway and commented that he saw it. And I thought, “Oh, here we go again.”
Then he said, “I’m with you all the way on that one. We can’t afford the other one.”
And I probably looked shocked and said –“Well, Richard – I’m glad to hear you say that because – you know –they say that a lot of hard working white folks like yourself are just going to vote against their pocketbooks for some reason.”
And he said, “Well, Miss Jane – (he’s from the old school) – he said –“Miss Jane, Ida been right there with’em too. But I’ve changed. You know some of my nieces got into mixed marriages –and I told them that was their decision – but that I didn’t want them comin’ round to my house. You see, I didn’t want my children exposed to that kind of thing ’cause I didn’t believe it was right. But one of them called me this summer – one of Mike’s daughters – and said,‘Uncle Richard, you know I’ve always loved you, and I think you loved me when we were growin’ up. You were like a father to us when daddy died. And I know you didn’t approve of me dating and marrying Joe. But I know you loved me. And I’m callin’ now because I need you. I need you because our little baby just died and I wanted you to come to the funeral home tonight if you could.”
Richard said he went to that funeral home and went up to that casket and saw that beautiful baby lying there and just wept. And he said, “God – you got my attention! I had a month and a half that I could have known and loved this precious little girl. But because I held on to those stupid racist attitudes, that had been ingrained in me from birth, I missed that opportunity. But I’ll never do that again.” Richard said that the next weekend he invited the whole family – with all the children of various marriages that he had not gotten to know – to come to his home – and they shared food and love.
He said, “Miss Jane – I sometimes slip up and something will come out of my mouth like it used to – but I’m really trying.”
And I said, “Richard – you’re recovering – just like me. I’m a recovering racist – and I mess up too – but I keep trying. And if you keep working on it, you will get better – but it takes work. And like any good work – it’s worth it.”
Story # 2 is more personal. It’s a bit of my own story.
I was born in Statesboro, Georgia in 1950. (Go ahead – do the math.) I grew up in the days of Jim Crow laws. But these laws did not affect me in ways that were obvious to me. My white privilege allowed me access to every store, restaurant, and entertainment spot in town. And for the most part, I was pretty naïve about the evils of racism.
Oh, I did notice things – as all children do. I remember when I was 5 or 6, standing in the “Whites Only” line at the Dairy Queen with my dad, waiting to get a cone. I asked my dad why all of the white people were in our line and all of the colored people were in the other line. My father shared this explanation with me. He told me that we were white – and that we stood in our line to get vanilla ice cream, while the colored people stood in the other line to get chocolate ice cream. Well, of course, I immediately told him that I wanted chocolate. And he said, “No, you are white, so you get vanilla. That’s just the way it is and you have to accept it.” Well, I didn’t realize that vanilla was the only flavor served at Dairy Queen. (That was even in the days before dipped cones.) But his unusual answer stuck with me. And it has served as a metaphor for what happened in my life. Indeed, I just accepted the differences and did not question them much.
Yet, I still took notice –like when boxes were being filled at my elementary school with our old worn-out textbooks. I asked what was going to happen to them and was told that they were being taken to the “colored school” for the children to use there. “Separate but equal” was never the case in Statesboro, Georgia.
To be fair to my parents, they never overtly taught me to be a racist. They didn’t have to. Everything in my society, from the Dairy Queen windows on, taught me that white folks and black folks should function in separate social environments. And my society not only taught me that “separate” was right, it also taught me that I was in the superior group.
All I had to do was look at the water fountains. The “whites only” fountains were clean with cool, refrigerated water. Not so for the “colored” fountains. And of course, my Southern Baptist church reinforced these standards.
When I entered Statesboro High School in the fall of 1965, there were 12 new faces, darker faces than I was accustomed to seeing in my schools. And I was afraid of these new folks and I could not understand why they would want to leave “their” school to come to “our” school. But I made it through those years with very little interaction – except with one special girl that I connected with. She and I were both kind of cut-ups, and we’d have a few laughs in the hallway together between classes. And I began to realize that in many ways she was more like me than my white friends –so that put a little crack in my racist armor that was the beginning of a long journey and transformation.
Fast forward to the year 2008! That year I was on the planning committee for my 40th high school class reunion. We had not had one in 30 years. I had volunteered to try to find the addresses of the African American students who were in our class. And as I found some of these folks on the internet and read about the great things they were doing, I thought — I could have KNOWN them. What an opportunity I had missed because of my racism!
So I wrote them a letter, sharing with them some of the background I’ve mentioned to you, thanking the one girl anonymously who helped me to begin my journey, and offering an apology to all of them. I closed the letter with this list of sorrows. * I’m sorry that I did not make an effort to understand why you were coming to Statesboro High School. * I’m sorry that I did not meet you outside of the school to welcome you. * I’m sorry that I was afraid of you and avoided being in places where several of you were gathered together. * I’m sorry that I avoided sitting by you in class. * I’m sorry that I was involved with negative conversations about you and did not speak up when you were put down. * I’m sorry that I didn’t encourage you to join the clubs that I was in or join the flaggette team. * I’m sorry that I didn’t invite you to my 16th birthday party. It would have been a lot more fun with you there. * I’m sorry that I didn’t find ways to get to know you – really know you and understand you individually, rather than seeing you as “one of those black students.” * I’m sorry that I didn’t recognize the remarkable opportunity that I had in that place and time in history to be a part of something special with you. * And I’m sorry – oh SO sorry, that it’s taken me 40 years to say, “I’m sorry.” I hope you can forgive me.
On March 17, 2008, I mailed that letter to those classmates, and I also sent it as an “open letter” which was published in our local paper. I have since met with five of them – who have generously forgiven me, and a couple of them have become email buddies. But you know the one that I thought was my “sort of” friend – the one that I singled out and thanked anonymously in the letter – I didn’t hear from her. Now at first I thought, “Maybe she didn’t get the letter.” And that was a little bit of white privilege too –thinking that surely if she got the letter she would forgive me. That’s what we white people do when we mess up – we just say –“Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I didn’t realize it would be a problem.” And folks that we’ve really hurt, who we’ve cut to the core with our comments or actions or non-actions – are just supposed to say, “That’s okay.”
I think she probably got that letter – because I sent it right where her Mama told me to. But perhaps the pain I caused was too great. The other students said they remembered me as someone who was nice to them. I appreciated that memory – and realized that basically I had been polite as my Mama taught me to be with all folks – but I had not really reached out in any positive way to them.
But with this girl –my “sort of” friend, I was just friendly enough with her for her to perhaps think that I was her real friend. But then of course – that was just when it was convenient –when I wanted to have a good laugh with her and break the tension –and perhaps relieve a little of the guilt that I was already beginning to feel. I realize now I should not expect her forgiveness. I can’t go back and change my actions, but I can actively work to change what I do in the future. And my intention is to be an active antiracist and white ally, and to be a WITNESS to racism and white privilege when I see it.
The subtitle of this sermon is “Can I get a witness?” Because I’m asking you to explore your own privileges – be they the result of race, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or class –and I know you may have some oppression as the result of some of these things –but most of us have great privileges too. As my friend Jesus told us – we need to get the logs out of our own eyes. Then we can see more clearly and be a witness!
Of course, a witness doesn’t just SEE something. A witness attests to it. They call it out. And there ARE ways to do this that can live up to our principles of respect and dignity for all. We don’t have to lay a lot of guilt on folks or belittle their backgrounds. We can witness with love.
But I won’t lie to you. When you witness, when you work as many of us have – actively in anti-oppression work, you will sometimes hurt someone and you will sometimes get hurt. Many of you may be able to attest to that as well.
This is not an easy journey. But you know – if your heart is in the right place, if your heart is in a holy place, you will be blessed with knowing that you are trying to do the right thing.
(Sing) “When our heart is in a holy place, when our heart is in a holy place, We are blessed with love and amazing grace, when our heart is in a holy place.”
Susannah Tuttle, Director of NC Interfaith Power & Light
Listen to Susannah speak about the emerging consciousness in the meeting of science and religion.
Reaching Out in Love by Donna Lisle Burton (read by Jill Preyer)
I love this place that I still call my church,
for all the facets of the care it brings
to an old and ailing woman—I mean
love and food and flowers and greeting cards—
you’d think I mattered here—only one of
six hundreds plus—who could spend so much
time for one?
I think I know; one for one
here. Not six hundred for one but one card,
one phone call, one visitor, one huge tub
of the sweetest strawberries I ever
ate—half a dozen hugs, one at a time—
who wouldn’t fall in love with a place like this
congregation, church; whatever its name.
Remembrance by Sylvie Delaunay
Remember
The sun sets the skies ablaze
Before darkness settles
Remember
Millions of stars dancing
Keep the moon awake with laughter
Remember
A flower pretends to be the sun
In fields bursting of yellow
Remember
A tiny bird can fly so fast
And yet be so still
Remember
A fish lives in the desert
Where it never rains
Remember
Creatures travel thousands of miles
So life can be born
Remember
I am here to remind you
Of life’s mysteries,
Of life’s miracles
And through uncertainties Remember
I am here for you
And
I love you
Starting Over by Joan Weiner
Because I have failed
in so many ways large and small—
so small hardly anyone noticed
so large their weight tilted
my sky for years,
and because I have not cherished
enough of what I’ve passed—
the silvering stream lapping its banks,
the gentleness of the golden leaves
floating from the branch, the tightness
of the infant’s fingers curled around mine
and because my dead have left me
since I could not protect them
from the sweep of time
and now are sailing so far away
I may never recover their rosy cheeks
or angry scowls or restlessly drumming fingers
and because I did not listen fully
to the notes that were played and now have forgotten them
and go tune-less through the world
and because so often I have traveled
as if underwater, oblivious to the air
moving against my skin, the color
of the sky, the pebbles beside the path
I might have pocketed and burnished
and because so much is lost
and, like falling leaves, will only return
in unrecognizable colors or shapes
that do not assuage the grief
and because the mouse found
dead in the driveway this morning,
his pink feet curled tight against his fur,
spoke of all that is gone, all that is beyond rescue, so that I thought at once
of myself, flying blind now,
at the mercy of this burning season,
of the sometimes bitter air,
of the rubble mounting all around me:
Please, if you will let me,
I will hold you so dear
together we will recover everything
The Deadliest Sin by Andy Reed
Redemption calls us to reveal our sins.
Even we, whose language of belief
has no such words:
Atone, repent, forgive, or else … Or else,
Circle the wagons, call the marines,
Harden your heart and thicken your skin.
Obscure, dispute, deny, rebut. Display
Uprighteous rancor—never shame—
That Anger, Envy, Greed and Sloth
Insinuated such transgressions … here?
No, not in this pure soul! Nor yet, we hope,
Lust, Gluttony, or Pride, those other deadly sins,
Or worse, Despair, the deadliest of all….
Validate but hope, reach out in love;
Expunge despair, and sin
will be redeemed.
Toenails by Norris Orbach
Toenails grow until they break
Cut first into woolen socks,
Making toeholes.
Stuck my finger through the sock,
Made a shadow duck on the wall.
Quack- what webbed toenails
Have we here?
A brown downy duck
Stuck thumb-billed through-
I hid under covers,
Safe in my cave.
The woolen ceiling above my head and toes,
Had window holes to peek through
At ducks that feed on fingers
And toenails outside my room.
Transformation by Liz Preyer
She slathers her lips pomegranate red,
with a competent strokes eases on deep set eyes,
and turns, arching back to stare defiantly at the mirror.
Smiling tauntingly she covers her curls with an ebony wig.
Slither of black stockings, smooth as snake skin,
urging on a skirt hardly there.
Wriggling into a shimmering shirt,
bright like salt water fish in an aquarium,
she stares back at her reflection.
An aquamarine bottle sprays lilacs onto arms and wrists.
With a steady, proud flourish, she twists sharply,
strapping the precarious high heels onto her feet.
Tottering towards to the door,
the heat pours from her volcanic body.
She lurches towards my hand,
grabs her Halloween bucket.
Our Firefly Girl by Liz Preyer
That brightly burning, dancing, swirling
woman child we have all loved,
has flown off into the ethers.
Her passionate, bubbling and aching soul
has asked for Respite.
And so we must now honor her request.
Such energy, creativity, her sweetness also masked
deep pain, feelings unspoken.
We gather together, all of us mourning
her abrupt shocking departure from our midst.
But like the flickering beauty and light,
turning on and off, our firefly girl will not be forgotten,
tucked safely into the depths of our hearts.
When you see those magical Fireflies
wafting freely under steamy summer nights,
gently greet that beautiful beloved Serenity.
Tell her we shall all take tender care
of those she loved and had to leave behind.
May she dance now, ever brightly, in Peace.
true love by David Post
there was a time when I was nine
I loved a girl named jean.
there was other who would bother
cause her was was green.
I think I loved her hands the best
her fingers were webbed and short.
and when she spoke, she didn’t speak
she let out with a snort.
so if u think it strange
that I meet her on a log
come with me and u shall see
my beloved is a frog.
–fall 1967
a prayer by David Post
by never forgetting that our father is the heavens
and our mother the earth
and all living things their children
the Darkness of the world cannot diminish the fire from the
solitary flame of our one tiny candle.
–christmas day 1972
the circle by David Post
we stand (sit) here together forming a circle
a border separating what is known from what is not
we look behind and see our paths only too well
we look ahead and see an ocean…not well enough.
we fear….we long….we choose
Death says “sit down, my friend, ur path is long, so long”
but I say “not yet, my friend, my path is long enough for me.”
tho much we do not know this much we do-
we are standing (sitting) here together forming a circle
a link, the link, between what has been and what shall be.
–mainely men 1992
wrapping it up (the gift) by David Post
I ain’t done with life and life ain’t done with me’’
but one day I’ll awaken
as if from a Dream
and it will be over
and looking back I will say
“it was good. all of it.”
–oct. 2012
Chicken Soup by Peter Olevnik
It was a special time at the family home
in South Chicago’s Polish neighborhood.
Grandmother, my mother and her sisters,
absorbed at the downstairs kitchen
coal stove crowded with pots of cooking soup,
sizzling pans of sausages and nearby
trays of rising dough; aromas
wafting through the kitchen’s tangled air.
With a bowl of chicken soup mother handed me,
and her all-purpose admonition, “you can go now,
but remember to be good.”
Soup in hand, I took the steps upstairs
to a hushed crowd of visitors, some aside
in prayer, murmuring, others stilled
in rows of folding chairs.
At one end of the large parlor, under a row
of lace curtained windows a casket rested,
church kneeler placed at its side
for me to see grandfather sound asleep,
dressed in a suit he rarely wore,
large hands jutting beyond the sleeves,
mustache-crowded face.
Forgetting my chicken soup,
I spilled it down his pillow case.
My mother took me aside. “Grandfather died.
He won’t be back,” with tenderness, she said.
“Funeral is tomorrow at the church across the street.”
Her words unleashed a torrent flooding through my mind.
like a door suddenly thrust open: I knew some day I would die.
As quickly opened, the door slammed shut.
The Afternoon Dream of Juan G. by Richard Horvath
He rubs the sleep from his eyes
brews a mug of Cafe Rico, and,
as he has done so many recent mornings,
walks down five flights of stairs,
side-stepping the broken glass,
to the sidewalk on East 4th
to play dominoes with the other viejos
on the over-turned orange crates
from the Big Apple Grocery on Avenue A.
The morning wears on
the sun climbs higher.
his eyes begin to drop toward sleep.
He shuffles to the park on East 7th
and naps on the bench
beneath the oak tree
breathing in the sweet scent of marijuana
wafting over from the bandstand
where the hombres jovenes hang out.
He begins to dream – Russet-feathered chickens
pecking in the dirt
at the rear of a small house
in a semi-tropical land
at the foot of a mountain
in the Cordillera Central.
A young man
lifting 132- pound jute bags of coffee
onto a donkey-drawn cart
bound for the barrio warehouse.
A young woman
carrying a basket of fruit,
the early morning sun
illuminating her face like a ripe plantain,
smiles at him.
They shared fifty years together.
He wakes,
shakes off the afternoon slumber
and returns to an apartment
that has turned to stone
where he feels
the hard fact of absence
whenever he turns to speak to her.
He longs again to see each morning
the early sunlight fall
across her fragile face.
March by Paul Fleisig
Old hemlocks gust-bow
To flaunting white-gowned bradfords
And rose-spangled quince.
Lemon rapiers
Of forsythia thrust at
The birthing cherry.
Yearning dogwoods spy
The willow’s wisps of chartreuse,
Straining, like kite strings.
Vanquished daffodils.
Prostrated casualties
Of the fickle spring.
The radiant sun’s
Blustery resurrection.
When will my last be?
Rebirth by Paul Fleisig
Signs of renascence
Amid the frosted rubble.
Life, but without fruit.
Sentinels, peeking
Through curtains of withered leaves.
A resilient Earth.
What will replace us,
After nuclear winter?
What mutant surprise?
A Poem by Monty Berman
I think that I shall never see
A Society as inspiring as a tree
Unless it’s a UU Society that may in all seasons
Put forth the best of life’s good reasons.
Devastated by Krista Heldenbrand Christensen
The licking flames crawl up the seeming dead.
Charred limbs and ashen leaves: all are consumed.
The forest quivers in communal dread;
The weakest slump, collapse, and are subsumed.
They, steaming, sink into primeval graves,
Evaporating life. Resilient, tall
And straight, the strong withstand the heat which bathes
The forest in regenerative pall.
Then does the drenching rain arrive to smite
The itching flames: it washes fury clean.
A wedge of vacant sky provides the light
That tempts again each hopeful spear of green.
Though scarred impermanence herein abides
It is in such abandon growth resides.
For Cindy by Jake Marx (Read by Jacqueline Larsen)
Lie by my side
In the twilight hours,
In the twilight years,
Our skin soft and pillowy,
Our minds traveling familiar roads.
It is quiet now, we are quiet,
And though the roses
That we planted
For our eyes to see
Have been cut back
To save from October frost,
They will redden our dreams
Come June and time.
We have both lost much,
Have left a dream or two
By the wayside
But there was enough left
To walk on, us two,
So that we find ourselves
Here in bed
In the twilight hours
Sharing words
Hued by the
Fading colors
Of our flower bed.
No Place To Rest by Nick Andrea
If you think you know, you’ll get
crucified, fellow, cause,
that’s the fate of ego, when it
thinks that it’s so.
Truth is like this: demanding
constant sacrifice, ah
of our attach-a-ment , to
knowing cause that’s our vice; for,
like it’s been said, “I
am a mystery, I’ve
always been a mystery, and I’ll
always be a mystery,” Yeah yeah!
Senselessness
to the intellect
we’re instructed not to lean,
on, our, understanding, for it’s
al-so been said, that; “The
wind blows where it pleases. You hear its
sound, but ya just can’t tell,, where it’s
coming from or where it’s going,” No no!
So,
Chi-ld, la-y down, the
one who thinks, “I’ve got it,” and
like the wind find no place to stop, and
think, that you know it. Instead,
Go, ride the wave, of the
never-ending Flow, and
like the Son of Truth, find no
place to rest your ego, forsooth!
Ah………..
And sink back in-to That, the
cloud of unknowing, oh
of-fer-ing, your whole Self
to its promp-a-ting. to-
day’s a good day to die, child, to-
day’s a good day to die, to the
One guiding you, from inside, where the
heart, the heart does fly.
And, do not let yourself be troubled, my love no,
do not let yourself be troubled, at the
ren-der-ing, of the
intellect to be, humbled; cause
you, are guided
you, are guided, you have
always been guided, you have
always been guided, you will
Bob Wilson, Guest Speaker
Our growth is limited if we are unwilling to take risks. Bob Wilson explores the importance of having a supportive community when we are about to step out into the unknown.
Elizabeth Schell, Guest Speaker
What my professor was trying to get across, besides obviously really having enjoyed the opening scene to Jaws, was how the poet’s use of a caesura intensified the focus within the poem. A lovely little poetic device, the “caesura.” It’s basically a complete pause in a line of poetry. Sometimes it just adds a breath to the poem, but it can also signal a significant shift in the feeling or narrative. Caesuras are most dramatic when they fall in the middle of a line and break the rhythm.
Intro: Our second reading is recorded in my memory. If I were Albus Dumbledore, I’d use my wand to thread out the wisps of memory from my mind, and place it in a pensieve for all of us to see. But I’m not, so I’ll just have to share it with you in my own way.
We’re in a basement, windowless classroom at Boston University on a Wednesday afternoon in 1992. The course: Intro to English Poetry. A man who seems too big for the room and his smallish tweed coat is pacing back and forth at the lectern, getting worked up over Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem, “The Rape of the Lock.” With a shock of white leaping hair and sparkly blue eyes, Mark Patrick Hederman, visiting professor, is trying to explain Pope’s perfect use of the poetic caesura. Sonorous!
Professor: Now what Pope does in this stanza is brilliant! And everything in the poetic narrative has built up to this moment, see—even the meter has sped up, all the syllables crowding onto the line and then BAM! a caesura, a big breath, a break in the momentum. All right before the cutting of the hair. It’s brilliant! It’s….. well it’s just like the beginning of the film Jaws…. Have you seen it!? Most fantastic opening sequence in cinema! First there’s the young people partying on the beach.
Then the young man and woman run off from the group. There’s expectation and inhibition. The woman is stripping off her clothes. Will the man catch up with her?
He’s drunk and falls on the beach. The woman leaps into the water, naked. The sun is setting. We see her gracefully swimming through the clear water. Then we are her and we are seeing the water on our body, seeing the light in the sky, the shore, the young man. Then, we are down below, in the deep. Looking up at her, at her danglingly tasty legs. Then we are her, swimming again. Then down below, getting closer to those legs. Then we are her and YANK! the first bite and she is pulled under for the first time. And the sound in the audience is truly audible. A GASP. An intake of breath. Not just because we are shocked by what has just happened. But because we were the woman. And then we were the shark. And then the woman. Then the shark. And now CHOMP! We have eaten ourselves. It is cinematic brilliance, I tell you! And it is just what Pope is trying to do here in this stanza!
SERMON:
What my professor was trying to get across, besides obviously really having enjoyed the opening scene to Jaws, was how the poet’s use of a caesura intensified the focus within the poem. A lovely little poetic device, the “caesura.” It’s basically a complete pause in a line of poetry. Sometimes it just adds a breath to the poem, but it can also signal a significant shift in the feeling or narrative. Caesuras are most dramatic when they fall in the middle of a line and break the rhythm.
In The Rape of the Lock, the poem my professor was lecturing about, the poet’s use of rhythm—and especially the interruption of predictable rhythm – gets across a moment of crisis and transformation. In that space of interrupted rhythm, in that in-between space, something intense happens. A lock of Belinda’s hair is cut off and stolen. It is later humorously put on par with the abduction of Helen of Troy and the horror that follows. A ridiculous exaggeration. But, like all parody, there’s a root of bare truth. In Pope’s time, the early 18th century, women were judged on their “honor” without being given the rights to defend themselves. A woman defending a lock of her hair—; a woman drunk and naked on the beach—women whose agency is in question—is this tragedy or comedy? It’s supposed to be both, and what does that say about us? The caesura is a marker, drawing our attention to a pause, telling us to take the time to think.
In the space of the caesura, this silent in-between space of interrupted rhythm, interrupted predictability, a lot can happen. I like to think of this caesura beyond the realm of poetry and music, but instead within our lives. What is the caesura to us? It’s kind of like an ellipsis, a pause, a break in the flow of thought. A space to soak in, to be awed, to empathize, to be moved. It is in these moments that we may be inspired to reconnect with what is meaningful, with our best intention. In these moments we might be challenged to question ourselves, our passive acceptance of something we know to be wrong or our lack of engagement with others. We might even see glimpses of what some of us might call divine, a space of unknown, a space of communion where we truly observe our 7th principle in action. Within the space of caesura, all things are connected.
Sometimes, it’s a personal moment. Have we knelt down and looked underfoot lately? Have we gone for a walk in the park or the woods with no particular purpose, but to just BE there? Have we unplugged lately? That distraction can be the biggest barrier to all forms of caesura space—keeping us from paying attention to who and what is directly before and around us.
Other times, the caesura space moves beyond ME to WE. This collective caesura is what happens… when the power goes out on a hot summer night and all the neighbors you may or may not know come out on their porches and the conversations and laughter and soft candlelight of each porch creates this kind of gorgeous hush of sound that is usually lost under the electrical hum and the daily routine. A moment of communion instigated by a disruption. Other kinds of collective caesuras might be during a snowstorm or on a stopped elevator and usually bring us closer to the people we are with. Even if they are strangers.
Part of what makes these collective caesuras meaningful is how they break into our ordinary lives and shake us up a bit. We creative humans often design our very own collective caesuras specifically for the purpose of breaking through the familiar to make space for deeper connections. These times include holidays, retreats, weddings, funerals, and family reunions. Many of these events include special rituals, but often it’s the time leading up to and after these highly charged events where there is the most potential for a meaningful caesura between people.
Of course we’re in one of the most traditional forms of scheduled caesuras right now. All of us. Here in this human invention: worship. People all over the world in all kinds of religious traditions do this. It really doesn’t matter the tradition, the speaker, or the topic. The point is the space given for connecting. To each other. To our inner selves. To the outer unknown. And we do that through making Sabbath. At root, we humans created Sabbath in order to build in Caesura, spiritually transformative space, within the routine of our lives. Think of it, this Sunday “thing” we do here, it’s definitely a break in our weekly routine. Because in this place we DO things we don’t do in our everyday lives: We SING! Sometimes we even dance a little. We hold hands. We say words together… out loud… that affirm what we believe, what we intend. We celebrate rites of passage. We warmly—and unconditionally—welcome strangers. And sometimes we just sit in our pews & cry.
But sometimes nothing happens. The service is over & we feel unmoved, unchanged. You can’t force the sacred. You can’t force “aha’s” and sighs. And even though we may crave the caesura space, we’re kind of built to resist it. We keep people at arm’s length emotionally. We rarely go out into nature. Our world and our hearts can become pretty calcified by concrete routine. But we are hungry. We are hungry for that moment when all that is expected goes out the window. The moment when words and expectations are consumed. What is left? The possibility for something new to enter. The possibility of finding the strength to not fill the silence with the thrust of our own arguments, of our certainties, but to instead let the unknown settle and hear what might be within it.
And we need to listen for that possibility. Because sometimes we really need to draw upon some strong communal energy to get thru stuff. Because there are communal caesuras that aren’t just little “happenings” in our everyday or intentional experiences we humans craft. No, there are also these capital “C” caesuras that come to us, whether we want them or not. These are events like September 11th, 2001 and they make a pause that’s very hard to fill—even together. Whether you were in NY on that day or in a neighborhood far far away, regular time stopped for hours, even days on end, as we all watched and waited and mourned. Caesuras can be caused by natural disasters or human enacted violence: Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, a building fire, a bombing, a school shooting. These are not really the kind of caesuras any of us want, but disaster can certainly bring about all kinds of transformation—as people are forced to move beyond themselves as they are ripped from their everyday to reach out to cling to their fellow humans. We are challenged to rethink how we view the world and this “rethinking” may bring us more in line with our values, or it may push us more towards behaviors based on fear. We want these events to be turning points;
we say “Never again,” but our differing reactions to these tragedies can actually make it harder for us to work together or even talk to each other.
Supposedly one of the motivations of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Santa Barbara last month, was the young man’s feeling of rejection by women. In the aftermath of this disturbing revelation, there’s been a groundswell of commentary shared under the Twitter hashtag “Yes All Women.” Women of all ages breaking silences to share their experiences. Though a great deal has changed since the 18th century, women’s experiences reveal that patriarchy and misogyny are alive and well. And that’s pretty loud and clear when you read some of the horrific responses of many men to the “yes all women” tweets. And not just the overtly misogynistic. But just the flat denials of the women’s truth: “You’re just being paranoid.” “Men aren’t after you.” “Men aren’t going to rape you.” “You don’t have to fear every guy you see.” And women know that they don’t have to fear EVERY guy they see. The point is, we are talking past each other and not taking the deep pause for listening. Tweets and talking points aren’t a conversation. Each group entrenches itself against the other and just continues to solidify its position, instead of stopping. Pausing. Breathing. Listening. Making a caesura space. A space where different opposing voices can actually stop and pay attention to each other.
And it’s not just gender issues and gun violence where we need to make space for listening and thinking; it’s every issue that divides people into an “us” and a “them.” Equal marriage, health care, income inequality, race, religion, privilege. Moral Monday versus the North Carolina legislature in a nutshell.
Our congregation’s covenant declares that, “Our life together declares that the future of each depends on the good of all and the future of all depends on the good of each.” That “all,” that “each,” that “everyone” —they include the people we disagree with, the people we can’t stand, the people who hate us.
Personally I think we need to enact our own big fat caesura in our culture right now. A big pressing of the PAUSE button where we LISTEN; where we hear different interpretations and opinions of what true liberty means. That doesn’t mean we have to accept discrimination, gun violence, or anything that is harmful to another. But it does mean that for any progress to really happen, we have to be willing to talk to each other and not vilify each other. Do what the Campaign for Southern Equality has been doing. By performing acts of loving civil disobedience in every town in the south, they are enabling, emboldening really, people to come OUT and talk with each other about what they’ve never talked about; talk about what it means to be IN relationship, to be neighbors, to be fellow citizens in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Big awesome people-enacted Caesura Activism that is.
The NPR story talked about breaks in the rhythm. Musical gaps that seem to be these open spaces that our bodies want to jump into. And that’s fantastic. That’s something we gotta do more of. Boogieing is definitely something that needs to be a part of our day to day. How often do we let our bodies move to the beat the way they desire to? But it’s interesting that what gets our bodies moving is not the rhythm, it’s the gaps in the rhythm. And too much of our daily lives, even our weekly Sabbath, can become too scheduled, predictable. And we need moments that aren’t predictable—by chance or by planning. We need breaks in our rhythm. We need to mix it up, stretch ourselves. We can’t let this precious time with each other be rote. There’s too much at stake.
But even when we hear that gap in the rhythm, that gap that entices our bodies to break out of our cocoons of complacency, it can be really hard. Because our bodies are holding on to so much. All this tension up through our spine. We stay so tightly wound within our bodies because we’re holding on to all this hatred. Of self. Of other. All this internalized violence. And all this feeling of failure. We’ve learned to tune Violence out because that’s what we have to do to survive. We think, “we can’t make a difference.” We think “it is impossible to overcome.” If the horrific caesura of Sandy Hook couldn’t make an impact, what can? Has this become our new normal? We move on because we feel powerless to do anything. But our bodies hold onto it. Obviously the hurting people who enter schools and college campuses, places of worship, malls, and movie theaters…these people who feel the need to arm themselves and go out and destroy life and then themselves—something is causing that. And it’s not just mental illness. Not just the availability of guns. Not just misogyny. Not just racism. All of them, to me, seem interconnected: Hatred of Other. Hatred of Self.
So what can we do about it? Well, we can and should do the things many of us have already been doing—vote our conscience; sign letters and petitions; get out there in the streets and protest. We may not see the change we wish to see in our lifetime. But that doesn’t mean our actions aren’t meaningful, aren’t part of the longterm pressure needed to move things along.
But there is something else we can do. It’s radical, but it’s simple.
We need to be the shark. And we need to be the woman.We need to try to have these different camera angles. We need to try to see through the eyes of the person without privilege and the person with privilege, both sides. And in different situations we are one and in others we are the other. But in every situation we need to try to see from both places, without hatred of self or hatred of other. This can be done silently, in our own heads, trying to think out different point of views. But we also need to really do this work outside of our heads, person to person, and not just on Facebook or Twitter, but actually face to face. Take time for a caesura, a breath, a break in the ongoing me versus you, and find a way to be A “WE.”
We have to be the shark and the woman. The terrorist and the hostage.
The rapist and the victim. The shooter and the child.
Or, less dramatic, but no less problematic: the Republican and the Democrat;
the Christian and the Atheist; the Religious Conservative and the Religious Liberal; the Pro Lifer and the Women’s Lifer advocate; the Politician and the Constituent; the Parent and the Teen.
But we must come towards each other, not seeing each other as ferocious predator or vulnerable prey, but as two equal beings, each seeking sustenance, meaning, acceptance. When we, the shark and the woman, come together, the giant GASP need not be because we’ve eaten one another, one or both of us slaughtered in the altercation. Because instead that gasp is when the two of us sit down together and commune. Break the rhythm of the planned and the expected interaction. Break the rhythm. Break bread. Exchange questions and answers. And listen….
When we allow this kind of caesura space, it is certainly not an easy place to be in. It is a true gap in the rhythm. And it is physically torturous to be in that gap. But if we make it a communal caesura, instead of a poetic-in-our-head caesura, then we can endure it. Then our bodies will want to move together, and we can slowly work towards making things better.
To me, this worship space, this community, is where these gasps and gaps really happen; where we can be energized to go out and make these caesura spaces become reality. Can you feel the entry point? The break in the rhythm that invites us to move? The space where we can experience a kind of happy where we feel like we are a “room without a roof” ? Nothing can hold us back. Not when we are in it together.
May we seek and find and make space for all these caesuras…..
and may we boogie our hearts out in the process.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
It was on an April morning 10 years ago that this congregation gathered to get its first look at this middle-aged seminary graduate who your search committee was proposing be called as your next settled minister. As I had prepared for that service, I learned from the chair of your search committee, Linda Bair, that there was much amusement in the congregation at the rather hifalutin word that I had tossed into the title of my sermon, “This Refulgent Moment.” Oh, boy! What does this guy have in mind?
It was on an April morning 10 years ago that this congregation gathered to get its first look at this middle-aged seminary graduate who your search committee was proposing be called as your next settled minister. As I had prepared for that service, I learned from the chair of your search committee, Linda Bair, that there was much amusement in the congregation at the rather hifalutin word that I had tossed into the title of my sermon, “This Refulgent Moment.” Oh, boy! What does this guy have in mind?
On reflection, it may not have been the best tack. Here I was waltzing out of seminary seeming to flaunt an arcane vocabulary: not a great way to win friends and supporters. But you were kind. You listened with forbearance and decided in the end that I just might work out. And you gave me a vote of confidence for which I have never ceased to be grateful.
Ten years later, though, I want to return to that fancy word. For, in truth, as you might imagine, I had a greater purpose in introducing it to you than simply hoping to impress you. Indeed, to me that word represents a thread that has wound through my ministry with you these 10 years and that guides me still. Even more, I think it points to a center of energy that holds hope for our future as a congregation and for the future of our movement.
So, why refulgent? I think initially I wanted to signal to you some of what most strongly influenced me in my development as a minister. Long before I entered ministry I was drawn to Emerson’s Divinity School Address. I’m not sure I could have told you why in those early days, other than the wonderful lyricism of Emerson’s prose here – the way that he evokes the soul-stirring beauty of the natural world – and how it echoes my own experience.
Like many of you – I have since learned – my first spiritual awakenings took place in the natural world and I am still renewed there continually. It’s certainly part of what drew me to Asheville. How could anyone living here help but be inspired by the glorious world around us?
But it’s worth remembering, as Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson puts it, the opening sentence of Emerson’s address, “In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life” is not, in Richardson’s words, “a casual allusion to the weather or a clearing of the throat. It is the central theological point of the talk.”
Hear him for a minute: These words, Richardson says, are “a description of the religious impulse in human beings. Emerson says that the ‘religious sentiment,’ the religious feeling, is universal and that it derives from or is awakened by the ‘moral sentiment,’ which is the even more fundamental perception that the world has an essential balance and wholeness. The feeling of veneration or reverence that arises from this perception is the basic building block of all religion.”
There is a reason why Emerson’s address was received as scandalous by so many of the Harvard faculty who heard it that day. In many ways, he was contradicting key teachings that they had offered the tender seminarians in the audience who they were sending out into the world.
Recall that Unitarianism emerged in response to the Puritan doctrine that we are each born depraved, stained with sin, and that our only hope in appeasing an angry God is to give ourselves over to what the church declared that Christ taught in the hope that he would enter our lives and save us. Unitarians insisted that God was not so angry and that rather than left to fate, we each have a role in our own salvation in how we lives our lives, and that we can use the minds we were given to sort out our duties in life.
Behind this “reasonable” approach to religion, though, remained some essential doubts about humankind. Yes, we can be clever and kind, but we can also be deceptive and deceived. Jesus’ ministry, they insisted, offered the only sure path to right living, and it was the duty of the ministry to deliver it.
Here is Emerson, though, saying that the source of religion is to be found, not in church, but our individual experience. Here is Emerson, saying, “Go alone, refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination.”
As I said, it’s no wonder that he created a furor among his contemporaries. But what interests me more is that, what I think he and others with similar views at the time were doing was opening the door to a new understanding of what religion is and does that is central to us today.
Religion begins, Emerson suggests and I want to claim, in an experience of the fullness of the world around us, the refulgent – that is, shining, brilliant, resplendent – world that breaks in on us every moment of our lives. And that experience awakens our sense of the wholeness of all things. We today articulate this as the awareness of an interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.
It also evokes in us a sense of gratitude, wonder and awe that feed and affirm an elemental capacity within us that blossoms into love: Love that we are each born with and that, if nurtured, can deepen and grow and fill us to overflowing.
We require no meditator, no influence outside of ourselves to experience this. It is what living gives us, and it is available to us all.
But what am I to do with all of this? What consequences does it have for my life, how does it help me to live with meaning and integrity? These are the questions of religion, the questions that tie us back to that original experience of fullness, of wonder, of joy.
This is that to which we bring our agile minds to bear, where we posit such notions as God, the goddess, the Tao, the unnamed source of eternal mystery, or simply that great moral center within. It is where Jesus found the Kingdom of God, where Siddhartha Gautama located the Buddha nature, where Elijah heard the still, small voice. And there is so much more beyond. The heritage of humankind is to be found in how people have struggled to come to terms with their experience.
But all that history and all those big thoughts are only the prompts for our own explorations. How shall we speak of this? Bring in the poets, the artists, the dancers, the musicians; the theologians, the astronomers, the naturalists, the psychologists! What shall we leave out, or shoe-horn in?
This, it seems to me, is the project of liberal religion: Not to debate the terms of salvation at our deaths, but to learn the disciplines that make for a meaningful life before death: real-living, not going through the motions, never losing sight of that refulgent truth that awakened that spark of awareness of our own worth and that of our fellows and all things.
REFULGENT – STILL! PART 2
Several times a year here our Associate Minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper and I lead a series of classes that we call Beginning Point and Connecting Points for people who are considering joining this community. We walk them through the history of this congregation and Unitarian Universalism, and we talk about some of what goes on here – our classes and small group ministry, our social activities and justice work. But to my mind one of the most important things we do is ask them to take part in facilitated small groups where we invite them to share some of their stories and some of their hopes.
It is a privilege to sit in on some of those conversations, and I have to tell you that if you ever doubt the need for this congregation and this religious movement, you should listen in sometime. For those who come to us from other UU congregations, it is a bit of a homecoming. You should know that these new arrivals are often quite complimentary of the congregation that you’ve created, the way they feel welcomed, and all that you’ve done to make a strong home for liberal religion in the mountains. That’s not to say we don’t stumble sometimes or don’t need to make improvements, but as a rule UUs arriving here are happy to find their tribe among you.
The majority of people who attend our newcomer classes, though, are new to Unitarian Universalism. They may have just moved to the area or may have lived here for years, but something in their lives got them out the door and over to a UU congregation – sometimes the first time they’ve darkened a church door in decades.
By the time they’ve made it to our classes, of course, they’ve done more than just scout us out. They’ve seen enough to be ready to throw their lot in with us. Each person has her or his own story, but among them I find a remarkable consistency. Essentially, they want their lives to be about something. They want to make a difference. Many are quite accomplished, but they want to make deeper connections in their lives, and they’re hoping that we might be a part of that happening.
My colleague Tom Schade, who you heard from earlier, writes a blog that often tweaks us UUs for our foibles and confusions. I was taken with this essay, though, as it seemed to land particularly close to home. In polls here we’ve found consistently that when asked what the most important work of this congregation is, the answer tends to settle, as Tom suggests, on “building religious community.”
Is that bad? Heavens, no! In fact, it’s wonderful. The support that members of this community give to each other is inspiring and makes such a difference in so many of our lives. There are many occasions here where, as Tom puts it, what we do “blossoms into the experience of beloved community.”
But, is that enough? Let me take this occasion of celebrating my 10 years with you as your lead minister to offer you a challenge: What if we answered, “No,” and what might that reply require of us?
I suggest that the place we would begin is by recognizing that, as Tom puts it, naming “religious community” as our main focus is to place our focus on ourselves. The work of caring for each other, of listening, of sharing, of creating a village to help raise our children is crucial work. But as a community, it is crucial mostly for how it prepares us for carrying the hope, the deep grounding we find here forward into the work of creating a better world.
In a sense, our newcomers give us our charge. They tell us what they see in this community, that this is a place where they can make a difference and make deeper connections in their lives. I think that hope resonates with all of us. As individuals we affirm it, and some of us take the time to dive into the task. But as a community we still struggle with making it real.
It’s easy to pack our busy lives so full that we take little time for the slow work that feeds us here, the time we spend with others to create space to listen and open to each other. This listening and sharing is the groundwork for everything else we hope to achieve. So, I want to invite you to find space for this good, slow work, and I will commit to working to create opportunities that work for you and open the conversations that help you grow.
Once in conversation, we can begin asking deeper questions. What do we know about this community where we live? How we might even widen our understanding of who is part of that community? Who are our neighbors, what are the challenges that they and we face, and how might we be agents of change for the better?
Our justice work gives us an entrée into this, but we would be more effective if we were more deeply engaged. One way I am proposing to do that is that we expand how we contribute to the work of justice. Beginning in July we will expand our practice of sharing our offering, as we are this Sunday with The Mountain Learning and Retreat Center, from once a month to every Sunday. All cash and any designated checks that we receive will be dedicated to outreach to the larger community.
Of course, just devoting more money to this work is not enough. If we are to shepherd these resources wisely, we will need to spend more energy getting to know the needs of this community and building relationships with other change agents across our community. Where would you like to connect? What opportunities await us? Help us find out.
We are blessed with a strong congregation here in Asheville, but we know that there are many people who identify with us in this region who live too far away to participate regularly, and many others who would but don’t even know that we exist. There are about a half dozen UU congregations around the country who have responded to this concern with a creative solution that I think could work for us – starting satellite congregations.
These are groups that gather in distant locations that stay connected to a home congregation. Key portions of Sunday worship are sent via the Internet or satellite to create a common experience, and the home congregation provides worship leaders and small group coordinators, as well as administrative assistance, to help the new group get started. It is a system well suited to the mountains, where travel across long distances is challenging.
We’ll be busy enough in the coming year with the capital campaign that I hope you will approve at our annual meeting today. But afterward I invite you to join me in exploring this exciting option for growing liberal religion in the mountains.
Meanwhile, the Internet and social media offer opportunities for us to be in religious community in ways we’ve never considered before. We already know that most people make their first connection with us through our Web site. How might an increased presence in cyberspace deepen and grow our work as a congregation? Let’s think, let’s explore, let’s dream!
REFULGENT, STILL! PART 3
I joined a half dozen of our members on Wednesday at our weekly silent meditation time. We gather here from 8 to 9 a.m., light our chalice and simply sit in silence. People come and go; anyone is welcome.
It took a while for the buzzing in my head to settle down – all the busyness of this congregation and the many plans for this very full life that I’m living right now. In time, though, I found some quiet, and in that quiet I became reconnected to some delicious quality in that time and space. I guess the only way to describe it is to go back to our opening word – a refulgence that filled me and reminded me of the peace we can find in this place.
I stumbled on the Rumi poem that Sharon read earlier some months ago, and immediately I knew I would turn to it to help me close this sermon. Because, you see, I have struggled over how to explain what 10 years of ministry with you has done for me, and Rumi’s poem sums it up.
I’ve never understood this image that some have of religious leaders as people who sit around all the time in some sort of wise, imperturbable Zen state. What are they, crazy? Yeah, sure there are those moments such as I experienced on Wednesday where your feel the currents of the universe flow through your being.
And then there are those moments when you’re itching to get out the door to a meeting on the budget drive, which is coming up short, but you’re on the phone with someone explaining why they were unhappy with your sermon on Sunday, while you’re plotting in your head how to find time to meet with a family to talk about an upcoming memorial service.
It’s not that I didn’t anticipate this kind of juggling act when I came here 10 years ago. It’s just that I didn’t know how it would feel to be in the middle of it. The difference, as Rumi puts it, is between admiring wines and wandering inside the red world.
You can’t know ahead of time how it will fill you when someone you’ve counseled rises out of despair and how it will break your heart when people you serve, people you love and admire, die, and you must be present to gather their loved ones and tell their stories. It is not infrequent that I feel like nothing more than a burnt kabob on such occasions, and yet I am grateful to be with you.
I have learned in so many ways that this work – my work, our work – is not about me, about ourselves as individuals. It is about letting go of ego, letting go of expectation and being present. That presence opens us as nothing else can, opens us to the astonishing fullness of life every moment, to the wonders of our companions on this journey.
What a gift our presence can be to one another! What a rare occasion of meeting, and when we find it, oh, what a blessing! These are the moments of meeting that comprise perhaps the greatest refulgence of all, the brightest, most brilliant events of our lives and the sources of hope that keep us going.
My friends, this time with you has been most refulgent for me, and I pray will continue to be for some time. Let me close by telling you something that I don’t tell you often enough but is always present to me: I love you and am grateful and proud to be your minister.
Rev. Mark Ward
My own memory goes back some 30 years, but this time the genders in the scene that Sharon Olds holds up in her poem are switched. And it’s me and one or another of my daughters at one or another of the homes we occupied during that time….
My own memory goes back some 30 years, but this time the genders in the scene that Sharon Olds holds up in her poem are switched. And it’s me and one or another of my daughters at one or another of the homes we occupied during that time.
Before beginning I set out all the ingredients – soap, shampoo, wash cloth, towel, clean clothes – and then with excruciating care calibrate the temperature of the water that slowly pours into the basin, a la the tree bears – not too hot, not too cold: just right!
And then this carefully choreographed dance that my daughter and I engage in. The hold, just as Sharon describes it, initiated by me, the child gathered in the crook of my arm, as if she always belonged there, and then the slow descent to the dance floor, the welcoming pool of water with satisfying wisps of steam rising off of it.
From the infant at first, a clenching, tensed response to this new environment, eyes wide, apprehensive, focused tightly on my face, but then with a gentle touch, the water’s soothing feel and the soap’s slipperiness, a slow relaxing, a calming of movement, and together we catch the rhythm of this routine.
I remember as a new parent the fear that surrounded me that first time I attempted this feat – visions of all that could go wrong and do damage to the child before me – but, as Sharon Olds says, experience in time teaches us. It teaches us not only how to navigate this task; it teaches that we are good for each other.
This is how we are meant to be: two people linked in love, bonded, but not too tight. And if we are lucky, the formal nature of this interchange – the cleansing of the child – devolves into something deeper, which is play. Whether it’s cooing or splashing or singing or laughing, we connect and find an easiness with each other that opens the way to intimacy.
So, on this Mother’s Day, I’d like to take some time to notice of and celebrate the many ways in the parenting we both give and receive that play opens us to each other and the possibility of deeper connections in our lives.
Now, as we enter this subject I must admit that I am of the generation that was raised under the guidance of Benjamin Spock. Remember him? We baby boomers, now nearing our retirement years, were beneficiaries of the then-scandalous advice of this best-selling pediatrician that parents ignore the rigid rules of child-rearing proclaimed by supposed experts and simply use common sense in rearing their children. Your children want love and affection, he said: give it to them. They want to explore: let them. Talk with them; listen to them; and, yes, play with them.
In his early TV appearances Spock was sure to elicit cries of surprise, and sometimes disapproval, when, presented with a clutch of toddlers, he would fold his six-foot frame and settle on the floor among them. Naysayers fretted: you’re spoiling those kids! And years later, commentators diagnosed the nation’s ills as the result of Spock’s supposed leniency.
Spock himself and anyone who paid attention to what he actually wrote dismissed such rubbish – attending to your child doesn’t mean you don’t also guide and correct her. Your play with him is not the same as what happens in the company of his age mates. It is something else: a unique opportunity to create something that is really more like a moment of communion.
For, as people who study such things tell us, there is something extraordinary that happens when we are at play. Any parent is familiar with the phenomenon when they see their children settle into play, and so are artists or anyone who finds him- or herself deep in a creative endeavor.
There comes a point when we forget about ourselves and whatever our worries may have been and we enter into an expansive state. When we join in play, we enter into that state together – a place where we are fully present as who we are, present to ourselves and each other, and yet not present, so absorbed in the play before us that the world around us vanishes, and there is only the play.
Though we may not frame it this way at the time, it is a place of great spiritual depth – something akin to what the Buddhists call samadhi, a meditative state of selflessness where we feel the borders between us and everything else disappear and experience ourselves connected to a wider world. Our play invites our children into that space, a place without judgment where they and we are worthy and whole, and also bonded with each other.
Of course, as nice as play is, our lives are busy enough that it can be hard to schedule and exhaustion often robs us of the energy to engage. It’s why we need communities like this one where the play of parenting can be shared, and one wonderful avenue is across generations.
It is one of the great joys of grandparenting that it has given me a new outlet for play. From the first peek-a-boos to puzzles or the games of tag in the yard we are weaving webs of intimacy that we each can draw on.
A great Mother’s Day recollection I have is a time when our daughters were growing up, and on my mother’s visits she would put herself at their disposal: “What shall we do?”
The answer was often an elaborate story line with roles assigned based on dress-up clothes they would dig out of a great trunk in our family room. My mother would adopt whatever role she was given and accept the clothes they chose to drape on her together with elaborate hats.
I tap into the same sense of play when my granddaughter touches my arm, shouting, “Tag, you’re it!” and giggles as she dashes away. In that moment, our roles and the generations disappear, and we are in it together. It is more than a lark. It is truly one of those great unitive experiences that reminds me who I am and what I love.
The writer Stephen Nachmanovitch argues that we make a mistake when we downplay the significance of play as something ephemeral or foolish. Creative play, he says, is not the act of manipulating life. It is experiencing life as it is.
This is, after all, how we become: we play – with ideas, with our environment, with each other. We step away for a moment from the world with all its consequences and toy with possibility. And in possibility we find our place.
We reach a place where we are finally determined to take ownership of our lives. “Now I become myself,” says the poet May Sarton, and it often feels that way. Having lived within the tidy or tangled scripts that we cobbled together from our limited experience, we are called to something larger, something greater. Those early scripts, we now see, were inadequate to who we are and what we need, but we had no way of knowing that. And it wasn’t our fault: it was just too big, and there was too much, more than we could possibly fathom at the time.
Somehow, though, within our fearful, clinging selves we can discern something deeper that is both ours and greater than us, a dimension, a capacity that draws us out and links us more widely with others, with all that is.
We find it in the dawning moment, at the edge of perception where an astonishing fullness floods in on us pregnant with possibility.
Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, whose words we sang earlier, evokes a sense of that moment. He places it in a memory of his childhood – sun-kissed mornings when, in his words, “the marvelous” bloomed like flowers within his heart. The tone that runs through the poem I can only call playful, taking in the world around him “with simply joy” where grass and clouds are enough to inspire “fullest wealth of awe.” It is, he says, is not the words his mother speaks: simply her voice that gives “meaning to the stars.”
It reminds me that we mistake sometimes how we touch each other. We wordy, well-reasoned sorts imagine that it is our arguments that carry our weight in the world, when really it is how we make ourselves present and to whom that matters.
Tagore closes this passage, which he wrote toward the end of his life, saying that thoughts of his own approaching death brings him back to that rising bedside curtain, to the new morning, and with it life awakened in fresh surprise of love.
It is in childhood, of course, when we feel that most intensely, before we have constructed our filters and armored ourselves against injury and disappointment. Yet, the fullness of life is no less available, the marvelous is still at hand, and love is every morning a fresh surprise.
And so today we celebrate the mothering that has taught us to care,
to open our sometimes-hesitant hearts to each other,
to make room for the play that welcomes possibility, our own and the world’s,
so that once nurtured in the crook of a loving arm we, too, born from the mystery beyond all knowing might come to move our silky limbs at will and realize the blessing that we were born to be.
Our “Sense of Place” class had its April field trip last week to the North Carolina Arboretum. It couldn’t have been a prettier day for a tour of the gardens and a walk through the woods. We had an eye out especially for those ephemeral spring flowers, and here and there we found a few – yellows, pinks, whites: tiny flowers that pop briefly out of the leaf litter before dying back without a trace before the tall trees overhead leaf out and blanket them in shadow.
Except for these flowers and a few early shrubs, the forest looks inert at this time of year. Last fall’s leaves are drained of color, and things in general have a beaten-down look from the snows and winds and frigid temperatures of winter.
We know, of course, that outside of our sight there is a lot going on. Sap is running in the trees and tiny tendrils everywhere are reaching out as daytime temperatures rise. That’s the thrill of a walk in the woods in this season: each day something new emerges or unfolds. A seemingly dry and colorless landscape is shot through with the electricity of life; out of the ordinary, the blah, the unexceptional, something exceptional, amazing and fresh is entering the world.
And so, with that image before us once again we enter the Easter story, that great tale of death and resurrection that centers the Christian tradition. It’s a story that lives with us as Unitarian Universalists as well by virtue of our historical roots in that tradition, although our practice is to give that tale a different take than Christian churches do.
As Frederick May Eliot, historic Unitarian leader, put it more than a half century ago, “When I go to church on Easter, I expect to be reminded of the elemental truth that in this universe of ours, with all its hesitancies and timidities and tragedies, the tides of life are flowing fresh, manifold and free.”
What speaks to us isn’t the magical story of bodily resurrection at Easter, which has dominated the Christian narrative for the past millennium or so, as much as the need for rebirth. Just like the forest floor in early spring we find times in our lives when we feel beaten down. Circumstances, some of them of our own making, shut us down or cause us to draw in on ourselves. We get quarrelsome and cynical and just stuck.
Easter serves as a reminder that there are stores within us, within the world around us that can lift us out of our funks and offer a way forward. There are those who will say that this is just those UUs again messing with a well-established religious tradition, picking and choosing the parts they like, but leaving the hard parts behind. Curiously, though, thanks to recent scholarship, we’ve learned that our take on the Easter story connects in interesting ways with the perspective of early Christian communities.
Several years ago, Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, one of our seminaries, and a colleague, Rita Nakashima Brock, wrote that in studying early churches they found that for hundreds of years the image of Jesus was very different from what appears in many churches today.
Instead of the crucified Christ whose death was recompense for humanity’s sins, they discovered a figure with welcoming arms inviting followers into a luminous scene that was strongly reminiscent of the Mediterranean landscape where they were situated. Parker and Brock realized they were looking at a vision of paradise, not as a distant heaven, but as the world of those people’s experience that was infused with a brilliant energy.
Paradise, in other words, was not another world; it was a way of looking at this world that had been lost to its people. The purpose of worship and other dimensions of community life, then, was to restore this lost connection to a sense of that sacredness, and it was communities that sought to live by Jesus’ teachings of justice and compassion, rather than dwell on his death, that were offering that path.
Parker and Brock argued that there was a strong parallel to our work as religious communities today, communities that celebrate the beauty and wonder of this world while seeking to cultivate practices of what they call “ethical grace.” They describe this as living in a way that is “attuned to what is beautiful and good, and responsive to legacies of injustice and currents of harm.”
With this view in mind, Easter could offer us the opportunity to praise that which upholds life and to call forth that in us that awakens hope and courage to act in such a way that we might bring such a world into being and learn to live rightly with the Earth and each other.
OK, OK, sure: Sounds great, but often a whole lot easier to say than to do. Again, back to that funk: “praise life, awaken hope, live rightly with the Earth and each other” is just a lot of words unless something connects with us directly. So, here’s where this business of blessing comes in.
As John said earlier, the traditional meaning of blessing is an act of or in the name of God. I’m wary, though, of anyone who presumes to speak or act on behalf of God or any other image of divine authority. For we fragile, fallible sorts, the source of our authority is our own authenticity. We speak for ourselves, and only ourselves. Yet, if we are fully present and true to the best within us, we are capable of conferring on each other gifts that might waken us to the wonders of the world around us, to life abundant, to the ethical grace of our lives together
The author Barbara Brown Taylor, who is also an Episcopal priest and professor of religion, writes that for many people the prospect of conferring a blessing is daunting. Who am I to do such a thing? So, she invites them to begin with something simple – say, a stick lying on the ground.
The first thing to do, she says, is to pay attention. “Did you make the stick?” she asks. “No, you did not. The stick has its own story. If you have the time to figure out what kind of tree it came from, that would be a start to showing the stick some respect. It is only a ‘stick’ in the same way that you are only a ‘human,’ after all. There is more to both of you than that. Is it on the ground because it is old or because if suffered a mishap? Has it been lying there for a long time, or did it just land? Is it fat enough for you to see its growth rings?”
This stick has a history you cannot know. Did a bird once make a nest on it? What was it like to be part of the deep mystery of drawing water up from the ground against the pull of gravity? How was it to launch green leaves from its buds in spring and only to have them drop off and float to the ground in the fall? It has arteries not so very unlike yours and tissues that as you stand there are breaking down, returning to the soil from which it sprang.
What might you say?
“Bless you, stick for being you?”
“Bless you for turning soil and water and sun into wood?”
We only need remember, as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, that “the key to blessing things is that they beat you to it.”
Blessing is ultimately an act of deep appreciation and once you are in the posture of doing it, the act redounds to you. The respect, the care that comes from a blessing speaks to an unplumbed depth within you. It is the place from which the “path to plenitude” that John Donohue spoke of in our reading opens for us.
This also connects us to another way of looking at the Easter story. The scholar John Dominic Crossan has examined much of the historical record around the stories of the Bible, and he notes that as lyrical as the death and resurrection narrative is, there is nothing historical in the finding of the empty tomb.
The most that we know from the record, he said, is this: there was a movement of people organized around a man named Jesus; he was executed by the authorities; but the movement continued and spread. The final point, Crossan argues, is the key one, and how it did so is the subject of one of the final episodes in the Gospel of Luke in the story of the walk to Emmaus.
In it, two disciples are on a road leaving Jerusalem shortly after Jesus death, talking about all that happened. At some point, they are joined by a figure they don’t seem to know, but later identify as Jesus, who tells them to continue his teachings.
Crossan argues that the story is intended not to be historical, but apocryphal: in his words “a metaphoric condensation of the first few years of Christian thought and practice in one parabolic afternoon.”
In essence, he says, Jesus opened a “path of plenitude” for his followers, a blessing that helped them see the world in a new way. This lives on in the gift that Easter gives us, the reminder that death is never the final answer. There are, as Frederick May Eliot put it, “tides of life flowing, fresh, manifold and free” – just look at the green points poking through the soil in your garden – ready to be employed if we can imagine ourselves as agents in bringing the future about.
And for many of us this is perhaps the greatest reach of all. Who am I? Pretty small, let’s face it. Life abundant, living with ethical grace. Wow, yeah! But . . . well, we each have our own reasons for why we think that path is a bigger lift than we’re capable of, but more or less they all fit under that classic Facebook post: “It’s complicated.”
But think about this. Today, you scribbled a few words on a slip of paper, crammed it in a plastic egg and dropped the egg in a basket intending it for one of our children to find and read: a blessing! What was that like? How was it to imagine your words being read, or perhaps read to someone?
How will that child receive it? I don’t know, but I call tell from what I have been told in past years that our children are kind of amazed by this gesture. They may not understand all the words, but they get the gesture.
It is a step or two above blessing of a stick. It is a moment of meeting that communicates abiding care, care that every one of us is in the position to offer each other in many ways. You may not be able to move mountains, but you can communicate abiding care.
And, hey, remember there’s another one of those blessings waiting for you in a colorful plastic egg that our children have secreted somewhere in Sandburg Hall. How will you read that blessing? What will you do with it? How will you let it touch you?
Annie Dillard paints it in stark terms: there’s nobody here but us chickens, nobody else to do all that heroic work that needs doing.
Remember the image from Wendell Berry’s poem that I offered as a meditation: amid our fears and tormented dreams there is within us the capacity to see beyond our outcast state, to make ourselves available to that well of abiding care within us that connects us with each other, a source that, if we will let it, can bathe us like a quiet, summer rain.
It is a weakening and discoloring idea, Annie Dillard says, that “rustic people knew God personally once upon a time – or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – but that it is too late for us.”
No: The absolute, the ineffable, however we might understand that unfolding possibility that moves like electricity in us and all things, is available to everyone in every age. And we who go about our busy lives – knowledgeable and important, fearful and self-aware – we well-meaning folks, who nonetheless sometimes cut corners, who promote and scheme and deceive, we who long to flee misery and escape death – we are all that we have to bring it into being.
Our destination is not clear, but as John Donohue puts it, we can trust the promise of this opening and unfurl ourselves into the grace of beginning.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
How do we learn what it is we must do with our lives? For the figure at the center of our service today it came to him while he was harvesting wheat on his family’s farm one bright autumn day. Only just returned from service in the Civil War as an artilleryman with the Sixth Wisconsin Battery, Jenkin Lloyd Jones didn’t see much future for himself in farming. As he joined his brothers in the field, his head was full of all that he had seen in the war – the folly and the bravery, the terror and the tedium – and he marveled over how, as he was to put it later, the war seemed, “such a wrong way to do the right thing.”
How do we learn what it is we must do with our lives? For the figure at the center of our service today it came to him while he was harvesting wheat on his family’s farm one bright autumn day. Only just returned from service in the Civil War as an artilleryman with the Sixth Wisconsin Battery, Jenkin Lloyd Jones didn’t see much future for himself in farming. As he joined his brothers in the field, his head was full of all that he had seen in the war – the folly and the bravery, the terror and the tedium – and he marveled over how, as he was to put it later, the war seemed, “such a wrong way to do the right thing.”
Then, suddenly, it occurred to him what his path was: he was to be a Unitarian minister. It’s not the kind of epiphany that occurs to most people, but then the members of the Jones family were not most people. They had immigrated to Wisconsin only a couple of decades before, when Jenks, as he was known, was just an infant. Their home had been in Cardiganshire, Wales, which at the time hosted a dozen Welsh Unitarian churches. Nine of Jenks’ uncles were Unitarian ministers, including another Jenkin who had preceded Jenks’ family to Wisconsin, and who, barely a year after they arrived, died of smallpox.
So, the family was not especially surprised by Jenkin’s announcement, even if up to that point Jenkin had never actually attended a Unitarian church.
Oh, it’s true, the family read from the old Welsh Bible, and in this literate household Jenkin had read whatever he could get his hands on. He had also experienced his father at times offer up sermons at nearby churches – not often, since their liberal theology always seemed to get them in trouble, earning them the nickname, “the God-Almighty Joneses.” It would be a decade or more before Unitarian congregations formed there. But the family affirmed the gift they saw in Jenkin and sent him off to seminary without so much as a day of formal education.
Arriving at Meadville Theological School, Jones was the proverbial farm boy: lacking social graces and struggling with the demands of school but earnest, bright, and persevering.
It may have been his unusual origins or his family’s proud heretical heritage – Jones always said that for his family “freedom was a word to conjure by” – but from early on he had a different vision of religion than most seminarians. His idea, as he put it later, was the church would be “a free congress of independent souls,” a place of, in his words, “universal brotherhood” that would “lead in the campaign for more truth rather than to indolently stand guard over some petty fragment of acquired truth.”
It was an attitude that ended up putting this Welsh Wisconsin farm boy at the forefront of what was to become an emerging movement for expansion to the west in a denomination that at the time mostly saw its proper role as offering Biblical instruction from the high pulpits of Boston.
So, no sooner had he graduated from seminary than Jenkin Lloyd Jones enlisted in the role for what was described as Wisconsin missionary. Really, it was a role that Jones created for himself: there had never before been such a position in the Unitarian church and never would be again. But it turned out to be a winner for all involved. For Jones, the position got him back to familiar territory near his family, and for the newly emerging Western Conference of Unitarian churches it got an energetic organizer in the field to drum up interest in fast-growing pioneer towns.
Jones and his new wife, Susan, landed in a vacant parsonage attached to a struggling congregation in Janesville, Wisconsin, where between visits to emergent groups in growing towns he worked to give form to an evolving vision of what the church might become.
For Jones, the church was first off a center of community. So, to bring people together, among his first creations was an adult Sunday school held on Sunday evenings. Unlike the old catechism classes, the lessons were set up to explore topics ranging from the Beatitudes to the natural sciences to great religious teachers, ranging from Socrates to Buddha, Zoroaster, Muhammad and Confucius.
The classes gained a strong following in Janesville, reviving that congregation. So, Jones and his wife managed to package the lessons and send them off to others. Within six months he had a subscription list of 700.
After a few years, Jones’ success led to his being named missionary to the entire Western Conference, which at the time was vaguely defined as stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific coast. His activities, though, were mostly focused in the Midwest and Plains states, reaching from Ohio through Iowa and up north to Minnesota.
It was challenging work that he once described as like that of the woman in a Medieval story who appeared in the marketplace with a can of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, declaring it was her purpose to put out the fires of hell with the water and set fire to paradise with the torch, so that men and women might serve the right regardless of their own selfish interests, whether it be hope for future reward or dread of future punishment.
The schedule that his expanded duties demanded of him was insane. His first year he logged nearly 10,000 miles by train or ox cart, often sleeping in train stations and boarding coaches without enough money for the trip home, hoping for freewill offerings that would give him return fare. He mostly visited distressed or dormant churches, or isolated groups of religious liberals who sought to start churches. But it paid off with him helping to establish many new congregations.
His encouragement and support went a long way to holding struggling congregations together. And nowhere was that support more crucial than in Iowa, where women were emerging as leaders in some small congregations.
Denomination leaders in Boston had no interest in encouraging women to take on the role of clergy, but Jones had been promoting equal rights for women since he first arrived in Janesville. He was delighted to find women eager to step into the pulpit, especially since few male clergy would travel to serve those prairie towns. After arranging for the Western Conference to ordain one of those women – Mary Safford – Jones trumpeted the achievement to the wider conference, and invited other women to join her. At Jones’ urging, Meadville, his alma mater, began admitting women, and soon about half a dozen women joined Safford to minister to those country towns in what became known as the Iowa Sisterhood.
In his travels, Jones gathered allies in his work, a group who together created a magazine to communicate their views that they dubbed, “Unity.” The text Bob that read earlier by William Channing Gannett, probably Jones’ closest colleague, opened the inaugural issue of that magazine. Its forward-looking vision speaks very much to the ethos of that time, naming what he called three essentials of religion:
Freedom, which they said implies respect for the past, but reverence for the future, for the continuing unfolding of truth,
Fellowship, opposing exclusivity in religion, and seeing unities of human experience across traditions,
and Character, the view that morality, how we are to treat one another, is the focus of the religious life.
As a statement, it was none too popular with these men’s colleagues back East, since it lacked any specific reference to Christian teachings. Jones insisted there was no need, since the principles they endorsed embraced the heart of the Christian message. That argument, unfortunately, got him exactly nowhere with his opponents, and in time he found himself increasingly marginalized.
When headquarters in Boston finally got around to starting new churches, they invested their money in buildings in university towns where they could send preachers who were schooled to address this educated clientele. Jones regarded this as elitist nonsense that ignored his own efforts that in the course of a decade had helped found 40 congregations across the Midwest and Plains states.
The downside of Jones strategy, though, was that many of the congregations he helped get started were desperately poor, and lack of support for Jones from headquarters made their continued existence that much more precarious.
In time, increasing conflicts with conference leaders and Jones’ own weariness with travel led him to refocus his work. Now located in Chicago, he turned his gaze to a struggling congregation in town, Fourth Unitarian Church. He gathered the dozen remaining members and it grew rapidly, changing its name to All Souls Church. Again, he was a dynamo in the community: sponsoring weekday lecture series, helping to found the Chicago Peace Society and starting the first Post Office Mission, similar to our Church of the Larger Fellowship today, that mailed sermons and tracts to people in distant places.
Arguably, Jones’ most spectacular success was as general secretary of the group the planned the 1893 World Parliament of Religions. Other more prominent religious leaders captured the headlines in the event that provided the first exposure that many Americans ever had to Asian religions. But it likely could not have come about without Jones as the sparkplug to make all the logistics work.
The glow of the parliament left Jones less inclined than ever to compromise with what seemed to him a hide-bound bureaucracy in Boston and soon after he withdrew All Souls from the American Unitarian Association. He tried building another alliance of liberal religions, but it crashed.
Instead, he turned his attention to creating the Abraham Lincoln Center, a settlement house modelled after Jane Addams’ Hull House. Designed by his nephew, Frank Lloyd Wright, it included apartments for Jones and several teachers, a 900-seat hall, classrooms, a library, gymnasium, art rooms and space for all sorts of gatherings. It proved to be an important gathering center on Chicago’s South Side, where it continues to operate today, one of Jones’ most enduring legacies.
With war on its way, Jones – the avowed pacifist – found himself marginalized even more. He was among the few clergy in America who publicly and urgently opposed it, reminding his hearers of the horrors he himself had experienced a half century before. Many ministers who shared his views, including Unitarians, lost their pulpits, but Jones remained at All Souls.
In 1918, shortly after the U.S entered the war, Jones died, cared for near Madison, just down the road from a chapel his family had built at a summer camp he had created at the site of an old Civil War tower used to make shot for rifles. It is now a state park. The epitaph on his grave at the family cemetery was from a quote of Abraham Lincoln’s, a favorite of Jones’: “He sought to pull up a thistle and plant a flower wherever a flower could grow.”
I guess you can tell that I have some affection for old Jenkin Lloyd Jones – untiring activist, Welsh farm boy, visionary leader. Back when I was a student intern at the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin I impersonated Jones as my closing sermon for that congregation – complete with bushy, white beard and 19th century frock coat.
It seemed a good choice, both because of Jones’ connections to Wisconsin and because the Madison church was another of those building’s was designed by his nephew, Frank. And the connection is not a bad one to raise here too, since our member Bill Moore was deeply influenced by Wright in his design of this building.
As at the Madison church, the natural materials in this structure – wood and stone – give you a sense of place, an organic connection that links us and all things in one world, and the windows from many angles that bring the outside in, that let in the light, uncolored, unaltered that reminds us how widely truth is to be found.
I also I turn to Jenkin Lloyd Jones as I wonder what our future as a congregation might be. News reports are full of speculation about the decline of religion in this country. Churches are closing, denominations are scaling back, polls show fewer and fewer identify with institutionalized religion in any form. Like every religious body, we, too, must make our case – what are we here for: what are we here to be, what are we here to do?
These are questions that your Board of Trustees and I will invite you to be asking and answering this coming year – not because we fear for the future but because we want to be clear, and we want for that clarity to drive our work together. There will be different venues to do this, but when the time comes I hope you will all be part of the conversation.
One of the abiding charms of Jenkin Lloyd Jones was his unstinting hope and optimism, derived simply from a faith in what we humans are capable of achieving, the conviction, in his words that, “salvation lies in the unmarked possibilities of the soul.”
Part of what we exist as a congregation to do is to persuade each other, and sometimes ourselves, of this truth. As Wislawa Szymborska puts it, we are each “coincidence(s) no less unthinkable than any other,” each with our own gifts and our own quirks, and all of them added together have created this incredible confluence of events that is our life. What an astonishing thing, this life, hurtling along on the knife-blade of time. How shall we use it?
Well, here again, Jenkin Lloyd Jones offers some instruction. “Nothing in this world,” he wrote, “stands alone.” Rather, all of us are measured by our expanding sympathies. And so it is by the gesture of opening, of inviting, of embracing that our measure is made, that our hopes are made real, that our destiny is realized, so that at our life’s close we might be left with that one gift that is ours alone, that realizes us better than any other: our amazement.
Where were you when you first felt it, that plaintive tug of alluring, almost painful pleasure? Something that grabbed you like nothing had grabbed you before, that filled you with longing and got your heart pumping like crazy.
Debussy’s “Syrinx,” it seems to me, captures that feeling about as well as any piece of music does – thank you, Bradford. That haunting series of chromatic cascades that begins it invites us out of the conventional world where we live into a seductive place of mystery and possibility.
The piece evokes the Greek myth of the satyr Pan who was smitten by the wood nymph Syrinx and pursued her into the woods. The story goes that Syrinx, wanted nothing to do with Pan’s advances and fled. Eventually, though, she was trapped at the edge of a river and implored her sister wood nymphs to help her escape. They obliged by turning Syrinx into a reed – a waterside plant – so that when Pan reached out to grab her he found himself hugging an armful of rushes.
Defeated, Pan gave such a deep sigh that it resonated through the reeds and created a melody. Pan was intrigued by this sound and so cut some reeds and made the first set of pan pipes. He played them wherever he went and their haunting sound was said to have delighted the gods. Debussy’s piece, which he wrote in 1912, became famous as the first piece for solo flute by a European composer in about 300 years.
Beyond its cleverness as a kind of “just so” story, this myth also offers some illumination for our topic today – an old word we don’t bandy about much these days – idolatry.
Pan is hardly the first to have had a monomania around an alluring figure he chased through the woods. I’d venture that most of us have had the experience at some time in our lives of falling hard for some unobtainable person somewhere. The “chasing” we do may involve direct contact with that person, but more often I think it’s likely to be something like watching his TV show or buying her album.
It’s fun, but in time most of us recognize it as the pleasant little diversion that it was. We move on. Reality sets in. We get our priorities straight, get a life and make a way in the world. For those who can’t let go, they, like Pan, eventually discover an armful of rushes where they had thought to find the object of their affection.
That image on your order of service harkens back to one of the great moments of crisis for the early Hebrews described in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. The story is that while the people are camped at Mt. Sinai, after Moses has delivered the 10 Commandments, God calls Moses back up the mountain for another 40 days to give him further instructions.
After he is gone for some time, the Israelites get nervous and urge Moses’ brother, Aaron, the high priest, “Come, make Gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
So, Aaron directs the people to take off all their gold rings and bring them to him, and from them he crafts the image of a calf. The people declare, “These are your gods,” and Aaron calls for a festival to be held.
Meanwhile, up on the mountain God is enraged. He urges Moses to return to his people, and vows to destroy them all. Moses dissuades God from doing that, but on returning to the camp he angrily smashes tablets he brought down, onto which God had written his covenant with the Israelites, and destroys the golden calf. He rallies supporters to his side who move through the camp killing several thousand people who had reveled before the golden calf.
A grim episode, right? And it’s one regarded among Jewish scholars as the greatest scandal during the Israelites’ passage through the wilderness. There are debates over what the calf really represented, whether this text represents some kind of internecine conflict in later times. And the fact that it is not Aaron, but the people who demanded the calf who suffer, tends to support that take.
Still, it is fascinating to find this event appearing in the text where it does, just a short time after God was said to have pronounced the 10 commandments, an event accompanied, so we are told, with thunder and lightning. Pretty impressive!
And yet, no sooner is Moses out of sight than the people are ready toss these commandments aside, beginning with the first: “you shall have no other gods before me.”
It’s telling that this prohibition against false images for the divine runs across religious traditions. In Islam it is one of the greatest sins a person can perform. This explains why Muslim art permits no images of any living thing, lest believers mistakenly worship it as an image of Allah. And in Buddhism, a famous Zen story warns against mistaking a finger point at the moon for the moon.
A caution against idolatry also led our Puritan forebears to build plain meetinghouses without images, icons, even stained glass. Nothing, they felt, should distract the worshipper from the contemplation of God. And, of course, that takes us to the heart of the question, a puzzle that resides with every religious tradition. How does one come to know the holy?
Texts are written, disciplines are taught, teachers are recognized, prophets are honored. But in the end, religion, if it is to mean anything, must connect with us, must touch some place deep inside. It must evoke from us an affirmation that is life-giving, that lifts us out of our personal worries and awakens us to how deeply we are connected to each other and all life, how blessed we are simply to be.
But, as we’ve already established, there are so many things that can get our blood racing, that can give us, at least for a time, a sensation of fulfillment. How, then, are we to distinguish this feeling of deep connection from other feelings that can lead us to paths that are unfulfilling, even destructive?
One way we can read J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of Middle Earth is as an extended reflection on idolatry. The ring of power that Bilbo chances on in Gollum’s cave, in the passage Bob read earlier, is at the center of the tale, a character in itself really. Created, so the story goes, by a powerful figure in a craven attempt to dominate the world, it seeks to enthrall anyone it comes into contact with to the same vain end. So, in a kind of reversal of the holy grail myth, the point of the journey that the Lord of the Rings books tell is not to find an icon that will bring great spiritual power, but to destroy an evil idol and so release all beings from its curse.
For two decades Chris Hedges, author of our first reading, was a distinguished foreign correspondent for the New York Times, covering wars in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia. He writes, though, that when he returned to New York City at the end of his tours he was exhausted and unsure of where he was headed. The experience of war in all its confusion and depravity had wrung him dry.
Before entering newspaper work Hedges had studied in seminary but in the end concluded that the work wasn’t for him. Returning to the states, though, he found himself revisiting the themes of his religious studies that now put his experience in sharp relief.
And so in one of his books in the years following he used the prism of the 10 commandments, words he first learned growing up the son of a Presbyterian minister, to put his experience into focus and also help find a measure of peace.
I say that Hedges explored all 10 of the commandments, but throughout his book, Losing Moses on the Highway, it is really the first that seems to weigh most heavily on his mind. And I think that’s because, as he sees it, our human inclination at times to hitch our wagons to unworthy stars can loosen whatever other mores may guide us and open the door to some of the worst mischief of which humankind is capable.
Still, this is tricky. Remember that the error, the problem at the heart of idolatry is confusing something of small value with something of large value. This sounds like it ought to be easy to spot, but it isn’t necessarily.
How does one come to know the holy? As Chris Hedges points out, in traditional religious terms the holy is ineffable, hidden. Its mystery, he says, “frustrates and defies us.” We are left with no certainty or security. What do we do?
Well, we seek out comfort, but we find treacherous ground. There is an allure to a way of living that assures us of convenience and ease, complete with pre-packaged judgments and confident trajectories. There are, of course, compromises we make to get there, but we accept them for the security they seem to bring.
It is only when we chafe against them, or find ourselves pricked by their consequences that we learn their limits and the hollowness of the conformity that they demand. In that light, we can see them as the idols they are – images, ideas that we adopted or affirmed to protect and calm ourselves.
As Chris Hedges points out, the fundamental flaw with idols is that they “are always about self-worship.” We’re taking care of number one here, and if the messy world can’t see fit to make that happen, well, I’m going to organize my life to make sure it does.
Really?
Hedges says that one of the chief lessons he learned on his tours through war-torn countries was that the idols we humans create have no mercy. They may, for a time, bring us pleasure; they may bring us consolation, but in the end they simply consume us.
So, how to escape? We begin, he suggests, by exiting the bubble of self-affirmation and self-approval that we live in. We begin listening to the prickling of our conscience, the voice of a deeper wisdom in our hearts, and begin paying attention to and extending ourselves to others with humility and compassion.
There is no point in grandiose gestures, Hedges says. “Only the small, mundane acts of life save us,” he said. “They hold at bay the crippling power of death and despair. They allow us to live, allow us to be human, allow us to affirm others and ourselves.”
How does one come to know the holy? In such acts: in acts of compassion and sacrifice that reach beyond our narrow circle, in acts that affirm the abundance of this world, this life, and don’t feed on the fear of scarcity.
We come to know the holy through love, and love, as Chris Hedges points out, “means living for others.” Many parents, he says, “know this sacrifice, not the temporary sacrifice made to assist another, but the daily sacrifice to create life at the expense of our pleasure, career and dreams.”
“There is drudgery and difficulty in this self-denial,” he says, and yet it is in this self-giving that we create and preserve life: Life on life and ever greater life, and in this life we find a peace that goes with us even as we move through darkness and confront our greatest fears.
You may recall that last fall I introduced you to a chant by Rabbi Shefa Gold that was centered on the Hebrew phrase in a verse from the 23rd Psalm that expresses this sense of abundance, of life on life and ever greater life. The passage usually translated as “my cup runneth over” or “my cup overflows.” This image invites us to imagine the blessings of our lives as an unending flood pouring over us, so great they exceed even our boundless need.
I’d like to invite you to sing it with me again, and in your singing, as you can, unburden yourself of the fears that clutch at you, that might incline you to build idols in your heart. You yourself are enough, and the beauty, the wonder, the joy of this life is so great, and the love you hold is so powerful as to overflow all bounds.
Rev. Mark Ward
I am learning that I need to be careful of the topics I choose for worship, lest I be given lessons I’d just as soon not have. This week is a good example. As I began mulling over how I would address the topic of class this Sunday, I promptly lost my wallet. Actually, it turned out it wasn’t lost – thanks to a reminder from my wife, Debbie, I discovered it eventually in a coat pocket. But for a good hour or so Monday morning I was tearing around frantically, convinced that it was gone. What would I do now?
I am learning that I need to be careful of the topics I choose for worship, lest I be given lessons I’d just as soon not have. This week is a good example.
As I began mulling over how I would address the topic of class this Sunday, I promptly lost my wallet. Actually, it turned out it wasn’t lost – thanks to a reminder from my wife, Debbie, I discovered it eventually in a coat pocket. But for a good hour or so Monday morning I was tearing around frantically, convinced that it was gone. What would I do now?
It took a while to calm down after I found it, but when I did, I reflected on the experience and how I had reacted to it. Why was this such a big deal to me? I don’t carry much cash in my wallet, so I wouldn’t have lost much money, and just about everything in it of any importance can be replaced, even if it is a pain to do so. No, there was something more than that, and the more I thought about it, I realized that it has something to do with class.
Open my wallet and you can learn a good bit about my class status. Prominently displayed is a driver’s license: no big deal, right? A matter of course for most of us here, but a credential that already puts me in an echelon above many other people in Asheville, and as accepted identification gives me access to everything from an airline seat to a bottle of wine.
Then, you’ll find a credit card and debit card, evidence that I have sufficient income and assets to persuade at least a couple of banks to take a chance on giving me credit. Again, not especially uncommon, but a credential that puts me in even more exclusive company.
And then, ah, a health insurance card, evidence that either I or my spouse are employed – probably full-time or nearly – at a company large and bountiful enough to provide this coverage.
And then you’ll find a random collection of cards that round out the picture – from a library card, not especially exclusive, to a triple A membership, a little less common – and then cards for things like Ingles, the Biltmore, the North Carolina Arboretum, 12 Bones, Ultimate Ice Cream, and more.
OK, all this may be interesting at some level. But it doesn’t really address what had been the source of my distress. When I thought about it, I realized that all those things in my wallet speak not only to whatever my class status may be; they also remind me of my privilege. They give me access and entrée that make my way in the world easier, more enjoyable and less stressful. And they command some level of respect among other people.
What’s tricky, of course, is that the respect is tied to the credential, not to me. Without the credential, where would I be, who would I be? If I couldn’t get someone to vouch for me, if I didn’t have some record that I was who I said I was and was deserving of that privilege, what would I do? That’s part of what I found myself thinking about as I mulled over having to replace the contents of my wallet.
These were not the sorts of things I spent must time thinking about when I was growing up. I was raised the oldest son of a psychiatrist, lived in a nice house, took vacations, had my way paid to college, and lived with the expectation that my adult life would follow suit.
And, why not? That was the script that my social circle followed, and an important part of that circle was the Unitarian Universalist church my family attended. This was Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1960s and early ‘70s and the baby boom was booming. The church was growing quickly with many families like ours – young professionals or people associated with the university. It appealed to people looking for alternatives to their childhood churches, and the UU dedication to freedom of belief and religion responsive to reason felt right to them.
This trend was repeated across the association. Indeed, it was the heart of its growth strategy. As early the 1950s Unitarians had made a point of targeting growing suburbs near universities as the most promising sites for new congregations. Princeton was one of a number of the places where that strategy proved right.
Yet as Mark Harris, one of our eminent historians and minister of the UU congregation in Watertown, Massachusetts, points out, as suburban churches grew, urban and rural churches declined and with them the hope of cultivating the kind of diversity in our movement that we said we sought. Congregations still insisted they wanted to appeal to people of all races, classes and ethnicities, but as a rule it was white, middle- to upper-middle-class whites who found a home there.
In his book, Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, Mark notes that the two strains of our movement followed different paths to this place. Our Unitarian forebears succeeded in the theological debates in early 19th century Boston, and for years they occupied many of the high pulpits there that drew the elite. While there were reformers among them, as a rule, Mark says, “Unitarians tended to sacrifice social justice for the need for harmony.”
Leading families of Boston joined Unitarian congregations as did the educated elite. In the 1850s, he says, two-thirds of the wealthiest Bostonians were Unitarian, as were 80% of the faculty at Harvard University and three-quarters of its student body.
After the Civil War, though, their numbers began to decline, so the Unitarians began a campaign to expand. Once again, they targeted the educated elite, seeking to found churches in college towns. They had some success before the program ended at the turn of the century.
Universalism followed a different path. It first took root among farmers and tradespeople in the hill country of northern New England in the early 19th century and then spread mostly to small towns in the Northeast and Midwest. Intellectual rigor mattered, but educational achievement didn’t as much. And this had its roots as much in theology as the social situation of its people. Unlike the Unitarians, who saw religion as a matter of self-culture, Universalists had the goal, as Mark Harris puts it, of drawing the entire human family in “one moral community.”
Both denominations struggled in the early 20th century, and many churches closed. In the post-war boom, it was the Unitarians who put a priority on starting new congregations, and like their forebears a century before they targeted college or university towns. The “fellowship movement,” as it was called, was a huge success, resulting in the founding of dozens of congregations, including this one.
But unlike their predecessors a century before who sought to cultivate congregations of the elite, planners of the fellowship movement projected a vision of their new starts as egalitarian centers, drawing people from many backgrounds and making a religious home for all. In an early report, Lon Ray Call, who led the Unitarian extension work, argued that the faith was “now growing most rapidly among those without college training or any religious background.”
And yet, it is hardly surprising that these congregations started in college towns, led by college faculty or other professionals, attracted people of similar backgrounds. And, again, hardly surprising: they were less welcoming to and generally rarely recruited into membership people of other educational or cultural backgrounds. And so it remains in many of our congregations. A national survey of religious identification 20 years ago found that of all religious identifiers Unitarian Universalists had the highest level of what was called “socioeconomic attainment,” essentially education, employment, income, and property ownership.
Now, on one level this is hardly anything to complain about. That people of means and educational achievement find a home in our congregations is a good thing. But another aspect of that survey is worth taking note of. Of all the religions asked about in the survey, ours was by far the smallest in size. And not only that, but since then our numbers have continued to dwindle. So, the question arises, are we just a boutique religion, a convenient gathering place for some progressive folks of privilege? Is that our vision of ourselves? Are we, as Mark Harris puts it, a faith of the few?
Well, clearly not if we take seriously how we describe ourselves and our aspirations, not if we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; and acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth – to quote just the first three of our seven principles.
We know that the appeal of this religious movement is broader than those demographics would suggest because many people who don’t fit them are coming to us now and have been for many years. The problem is that some have a hard time finding a home here, and we lose when they leave.
Successes in life – wealth, education, professional achievement – are to be celebrated – Ph.D.’s and Priuses are grand things – but they only get us so far. The famous passage in the Book of Mark in the Bible where Jesus declares, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” speaks to this.
The point I take from it is not that there is anything wrong with riches. It is that riches get you only so much, and a couple of things they won’t give you is peace of mind and heart.
My experience losing my wallet was a good reminder of this. As I was scrambling to find it, I was suddenly aware in an almost existential way of how vulnerable I was. I depend on the privileges represented by the cards stuffed in my wallet to ease my way through the world, to expand my options when opportunity presents itself and to shelter me when the storms come. Without it, the world was suddenly a scarier place. And it reminded me of how for so many people, that scarier place is where they live. By dint of luck or circumstance they lack the privileges I carry in my back pocket.
For those of us who carry such privileges, it’s easy to make them a lens through which we view the world. But they give us a distorted picture, one that overlooks how fragile our hold on such things is.
There are those among you, I know, who have first-hand experience of this. Job loss, illness, divorce – you name it – can unhinge your life and with it all the assumptions you held about how you would make your way in the world. But more important, they separate us from each other.
This takes us back to an important gift from our Universalist forebears – the understanding that our hopes, our values, our very identities are realized in relationship, and all that we do to divide the world into sheep and goats only serves to estrange us from ourselves.
Our congregations, then, if they are to be successful, must become places where we are invited to imagine a different way of being, a way of being that begins with our ultimate commonality, the truth of our unity. It can be a hard place to get to, and sometimes we run up against each other’s sharp edges along the way. But we are called from that deep source within us that we name in many ways – hope, love, God – to return and reengage.
The work that this religious movement, this faith calls us to needs all of us – as I say each Sunday, whatever our heritage, whatever our history, whomever we love – if we have our hope of making an impact on the world. And none of us brings a privileged perspective to that work because we are all of us, however we make our way in the world, fragile and fallible beings with our own struggles and our own fears.
In the end, as Annie Dillard reminds us, that will have to do. There is no one of purer heart or cleaner hand who can do this for us, no one who won’t stumble or get their tongues tied with awkward faux pas. We have only the simple balm of humility and gratitude to offer each other in the hope that in our fitful ways we can find healing and a way forward toward the promise of peace.
The path began on packed, dun-colored soil leading into a grove of eucalyptus trees, winding along the edge of a suburban development and then into a narrow ravine. As we hiked, we looked into the trees and occasionally spotted a bit of fluttery motion up in the highest branches.
But it wasn’t until we reached a kind of glen at the center of the grove on the edge of the ravine and sat quietly on the trunk of a fallen tree that we really began to see them. Clustered on branches and flitting lazily between them, hundreds of Monarch butterflies came into view. They were soundless as they dived and soared or simply perched in the cool shade of the massive trees, redolent with their primal perfume.
Debbie and I had spotted the Coronado Butterfly Preserve, just north of Santa Barbara, California, one of the largest wintering sites for Monarchs on the west coast, in our guidebook, but we had no idea what to expect. What we found was somehow both less and more than what we expected.
We had watched those nature specials on TV about the Monarch wintering sites in Mexico where millions of butterflies coat the branches of trees, and experienced butterfly exhibits at museums where dozens of butterflies dance in the air around you and even land on your clothes.
This was nothing like either of those. The butterflies, to be honest, had no interest in us at all, and their numbers were far from overwhelming. And yet, I found I wanted to hold my breath, not quiet believing I was seeing what I saw.
In fact, I think that the fact that this spectacle hadn’t been ginned up for our benefit – other than the town choosing to preserve the space and blaze a trail into it – added to its magic. The human impulse to wonder, we know, is easily tripped. Entertainers across the ages have perfected many ways of making that happen, and we play along. It feels good to experience a “Wow!” every now and then.
But we also learn to calibrate our responses when that impulse is stirred. In the movie theater, the chase scenes and special effects may make our blood race, but in the end we know we’re being manipulated. We’re careful, though, because there is something credulous in our impulse to wonder, something in us that unconsciously wants to believe what we have just seen.
Parents often are surprised to find that a film they remember as heart-warming and fun contains a scene that strikes terror in their child. I, too, have learned to avoid certain kinds of films that I feel are likely to contain images that I would just as soon not have imprinted on my memory.
But in our increasingly visual culture we seem to be going the other way – with more and more graphic and heart-racing images being thrust into our field of view. Some people seek shelter from this assault on the senses, while others increasingly seek it out, finding in the stimulation a way of enlivening the dull routine of day to day. Whatever our response, it takes its toll on our impulse to wonder, something our culture teaches us either to distrust or exploit.
So, into this maelstrom comes Mary Oliver with her musings on a summer day. She begins her poem with these questions – “Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear, and the grasshopper?” These are the questions not of catechism with foreordained answers but of credulous wonder. They are open and opening – they set the mind meandering – and they are specific, at least the last one, because it is addressed with an eye to the grasshopper that Oliver has lured into her hand with a few grains of sugar, the one who – Look at that! – is moving her jaws back and forth, instead of up and down, the way that we do. I wonder why that is. And, huh! It has these enormous and complicated eyes. I wonder what that must be like. And then, those pale legs that so thoroughly wash its face, and wings that, zzt! carry it away.
She says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” but then she goes on to offer a suggestion – strolling through the fields, falling down into grass, lying idly, and paying attention.
Jeffrey Lockwood knows a bit about grasshoppers. A member of a UU congregation in Laramie, Wyoming, he is also an entomologist – expert on insects – at the University of Wyoming. In his book, Grasshopper Dreaming, he notes that grasshoppers are a topic of great interest for the farmers of the west, primarily because they want to kill them. Grasshoppers, after all, can decimate crops.
So, Lockwood tells of a project he undertook shortly after arriving at the University of Wyoming to learn more about how grasshoppers behave.
His strategy was not very different from Mary Oliver’s: he sat in a short-grass prairie not far from Laramie and simply videotaped a particular species of grasshopper – and not just on a summer afternoon, but for hundreds of hours from June through September. As you might imagine, spending that much time with grasshoppers gave him a keen insight into how they spend their time – their behaviors, their interactions. In the scientific paper he wrote afterward, he was able to conclude categorically that the main thing that grasshoppers do each day is – nothing! That’s right – nothing!
For 43 minutes out of every hour, Lockwood found, grasshoppers did not appear to be “doing” anything. They simply sat there – perhaps taking in the scenery, perhaps digesting their food, perhaps in Zen meditation – who knows! In his paper, he called this “resting.
This, of course, makes no sense under our present day theories of ecology. After all, he said, he discovered that the daily mortality rate of these insects was 2%. That means that only about a third of those born in the spring will survive to reproduce as adults. Wait a minute. Isn’t survival supposed to be the prime instinct? What are they doing just sitting around? Shouldn’t they get at it: you know, eating, mating . . . whatever? Time’s a’wastin’! But, no. As Lockwood puts it, “grasshoppers are incredibly blasé about reproduction or feeding.” No big fight for survival. Hey, chill, dude!
Where Lockwood goes with this is not to rewrite Aesop’s fable – maybe the grasshopper had it right over the ant to begin with – but to invite the move to wonder. In looking over the landscape, we humans can become so intoxicated with our ability to define and describe that we can fail to acknowledge how much mystery and randomness surrounds our lives. As he puts it, “unable to manifest humility or reverence, we conquer the void by dint of language and faith.”
Lockwood explains this by pointing to our proclivity to assign names to things. As in Genesis when God invites Adam to name the creatures he has made, we fit what we experience into a framework we create, which enables us to explain it. This certainly has some utility, but we fool ourselves if we miss the circularity of that process and what it leaves out.
Like Meg Barnhouse’s uncle, in our reading, who assigned the hand of Providence to every event, we can tie ourselves into knots when we insist on jamming all that we experience into a box of our own creation. The fact remains that every explanation we make is limited by the information we have and the imagination we can bring to the task – both of which are always finite and incomplete. In the end, most of us learn to hold our conclusions lightly, aware, even expecting that they will be adjusted if not contradicted in time.
I have always felt that Isaac Newton made this point best. “To myself,” he said, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
It occurs to me now that Newton’s observation really is not a lament of all he hasn’t uncovered but a declaration of wonder at the beauty and mystery of the world. Jeff Lockwood, too, finds a great sea of wonder in the resting grasshopper, remembering, as he puts it, that in the great scheme of things, the grasshopper exists for no particular purpose. It just is, he says, “and that’s enough.”
So Mary Oliver would say, and so I found myself saying about the Monarch butterflies tracing loopy flights over my head. The sun at high noon, the stars in dark space, from the hymn we sang earlier: they exist for no purpose. They simply are. The glad joys that heal, the tears in our eyes, the longings we feel, the light of surprise – they exist for no purpose, but to enliven us, to awaken us.
I have been intrigued in the last year or so to follow the emergence of a group that has chosen to promote wonder as one of its founding principles. The Sunday Assembly, which describes itself as “a global movement of wonder and good,” has been gathering what it calls “godless congregations” mostly in Britain and the U.S.
The group was started by a pair of British comedians, and it convenes what they call Sunday “events” that include talks and music that, they say, “celebrate life” and seek to “make the world a better place.” Their motto: live better, help often, wonder more.
The group’s debt to Unitarian Universalism is easy to see – we’ve been using the phrase “celebration of life” to describe worship since the 1950s – though they also offer the twist, at least when its founders are leading, of merging worship with improv together with pop songs. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.
I’m not especially concerned with The Sunday Assembly as a potential competitor – organizing congregations, its founders will discover, is challenging work whatever your grounding. But they do have some interesting ideas and perhaps a few things to teach us, so let a thousand flowers bloom!
Beyond that, though, I appreciate how they are joining us in holding up wonder as a religious value. Thirty years ago, when our association came together to identify the sources of the rich and living tradition from which we arose, we began here: “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
The move to wonder is essentially the first step in our spiritual or religious lives. It is that in us that steps away for a moment from the quotidian details of our daily comings and goings and reaches for a vision of the whole, that opens to us a sense of the larger context in which we live.
And the thing about wonder is that it doesn’t take diligent work to achieve it. In fact, the opposite is usually the case: strolling through a New England meadow on a summer day, or a grove of eucalyptus trees in a California suburb. It’s the kind of thing we don’t always give ourselves permission for – good ants that we are, busily checking things off our lists.
But Mary Oliver doesn’t let us get away easily. Tell me, she says of her romp through the meadow, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Do we have time, maybe, to wander and wonder a little more? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Below are the speeches from some of UUCA’s youth at the February 16 Youth Sunday services.
Olivia Patterson
As humans, and, perhaps more relevantly, as humans living through an age blossoming with industrial science and exploration, we are continuously taught the values of comparison. My generation, born to become accustomed to the mundane normalities of an unprecedented age of technology, have been bombarded, over time, to look first at our surroundings before coming back to congratulate ourselves on matters both pressing and insignificant. Since I was an underclassman of elementary school, teachers, mentors, and other role models have encouraged me to measure my sense of success upon the successes of others. Vices to promote comparison–even healthy comparison–surround us on an hourly basis. It’s impossible not to compare ourselves and our accomplishments to those of others when we live in a time where the tools to find almost all of the information that we could possibly ask for are as accessible as couple clicks on our smartphones to grasp and internalize.
Paralleled with the growing importance our society is continuing to place upon self-love and the growing awareness we have for the consequences that develop due to a lack of it, the reality of just how much comparing we really do between ourselves and others is confusing and overwhelming. In the end, however, like most problems we have to solve, the answers ultimately lie within us. Finding personal satisfaction is so difficult in a society that measures each individual success in a quota or a goal, but when we learn to accept ourselves, both for our strengths and for our shortcomings, we can begin to own the truth that it is not up to others to determine the things that make each of us beautiful, unique, and valuable.
May we light this chalice today as a reminder to strive towards satisfaction with the little things that make each of us special without the nagging voice of a comparison.
Kenzie Himelein-Wachowiak
Way back on the other side of this winter, amidst warm days and back-to-school fervor, before the words “Youth Sunday” had ever left any of our cynically crinkled mouths, I was presented with a challenge that required more insight than I had time for; My governor’s school essay endowed me with significant power: specifically, I was to identify a problem that plagued society, and detail how I would go about correcting it.
The essay was quite open-ended, leaving the array of applicants an opportunity for political rant, contemplative spiritual discussion, or intense analysis of human nature. While I try to allocate a specific slice of my effort towards considering the needs of others, I admit that I can be quite selfish at times. This state of mind can be forgivable, since it is the default setting of being; that is, the only thoughts and feelings you are acutely aware of are your own. Still I am slightly ashamed to admit that I bypassed the most obvious and the most rampant plagues on the population and selected one from the very short list of problems that I am, in my excessively comfortable lifestyle, familiar with.
One snowy morning, I was absent-mindedly flipping through my psychology textbook when I came across an interesting paradox. According to numerous surveys, those who valued happiness tended to be less happy than those who didn’t view it to be important. Though the finding was presented as one of the science’s many conclusions that contradict common sense, as a person who is practically living the concept described, I can’t say I was even remotely surprised. Just flip the words around a bit and I think you’ll see: Those who are the most unhappy, the most dissatisfied with their lives, view the trait they lack as being the most crucial to their actualization. In the end it’s just another vicious cycle of wanting what you don’t have.
The night before it was due, and not without excessive use of the backspace button, I constructed an essay that I hoped would be taken as original rather than trivial. It detailed a looming dissatisfaction that I have noticed not only in myself but in others as well, fueled by a society in which worth is measured by letters on a report card or digits on a paycheck. The feeling of inadequacy that results from such assessment has a way of eating you from the inside out, making you question what not too long ago you thought to be happiness.
To those of you who are still wondering how I proposed to solve this persistent problem: It was really quite simple, and reading back through, I hope not too naive. I am not arrogant enough to assert experience where there is none, and I have been sparing, at best, with the phrase “I understand.” Yet I believe sympathy can be a worthwhile substitute for empathy, and thus the essence of my solution could be summarized in one word: Listen.
I encourage you to listen to the reflections today, intended to address a concern that is common despite its ugliness. General unhappiness is an intricate phenomenon, yet one that can often be at least slightly alleviated not with grandiose or material musings but with genuine connections to oneself, others, or a higher power. I miss the days when smiles would frequent the faces of those close to me, and perhaps it is my discontentedness that actually fuels my capacity for hope, but I am not willing to accept the notion that those days are behind us.
McKenna Sarae
This reading comes from Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World. In this scene, the “Savage” refers to John, who by birth is considered an outsider to both the utopian world of technology and the Reservation where so-called primitive people live. He is having a debate with Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, about his disillusionment with utopian society. He argues that its technological wonders and soulless consumerism are no substitute for individual freedom, human dignity, and personal integrity. Reading follows but cannot be published on our website due to copyright laws.
Molly Horak
“Life isn’t measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” When I first heard this quote, it stuck in my mind. Why is life not measured like this in the first place? Why had it taken me 16 years to realize it? So I promptly went home, searched Pinterest for a crafty idea, and painted a sign that is now hanging above my bed. It’s the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night, and I swear, in the few months that I’ve had it hanging, it has certainly changed my thinking about my life.
Earlier this year, in our YRUU class, we watched a TED talk entitled “Before I die, I want to…” In it, a New Orleans woman turned an abandoned building in her neighborhood into a chalkboard wall, where people would write their dreams and goals for their lives. This poignant video got us thinking, and the next week, when we walked into class, one of the walls in our Jefferson house classroom was turned into a “Before I die…” board. Over time it filled up with dreams large and small, as a tangible reminder of what we should strive for in life.
But while the wall was supposed to be a positive reminder of our life’s ambitions, it quickly began to have a very different connotation to me. Instead of making me feel encouraged about where my life was headed, it made me feel like none of my dreams were attainable. I couldn’t just hop on a plane and travel the world; I was no closer to moving into a perfect house in a big city, or getting a job that I love and starting a family. I began to realize that though my dreams were big, and always will be big, they might not be accessible at this moment.
So then, what do I strive for? Where does my life go now?
I don’t think that we should give up our big dreams because they won’t happen tomorrow. But, I do think smaller, more manageable goals are the way to go. Each day, I try to do three things- make someone laugh, help someone in need, and do something fun for myself. Maybe I’ll talk to a friend that I don’t see any more, or I’ll invite a girl in my class who just moved to America to sit with me at lunch. Some days I succeed, and others I don’t, but I’m constantly trying, and that’s what matters.
I also began to notice the little things that made me happy during the day—the simple, mundane, everyday activities that make me smile. When my favorite song comes on the radio; laughing hysterically with my friends. Acing a test at school when I had been convinced I was going to fail or cooking dinner with my mom. I began to see that while I wasn’t going to drive off in a new Ferrari anytime soon, my life was pretty great.
We live in a materialistic world that equates happiness with success. The bigger your paycheck, the larger your house, the more people think that you have it all. But that’s not necessarily the case. I think that personal happiness comes when you yourself are satisfied with your life, not what other people think is the ideal lifestyle. By appreciating what occurs in my life, I’ve begun to see that while my life may not be perfect, it’s what I’ve got, and I should make it count. I’m grateful for the positives, and I know that the trials I face are only going to make me stronger. I say thank you more, I frown less, and I understand that while it’s not always going to be a walk in the park, I’m going to make sure that I embrace whatever happens with open arms and gratitude. Because life isn’t measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Quincy Kitson
Do you feel like something’s missing from your life? Do you feel sad, blue, or unhappy? Do you feel trapped or caught? Are you dissatisfied with your life? Well, chances are popping a Prozac is not the answer. Instead, I’m here to tell you about the wonderful new discovery that is human interaction. Now while this may seem a little odd coming from a 16 year old that uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Ask fm, Snapchat, Path, and Tumblr, I’m here to give a speech on human interaction. Lol.
Before I begin, I want to dismiss one major idea. As we proceed through life, we become increasingly self-sufficient. This can eventually lead to the idea of “rugged individualism”, which roughly means you think you can go through life and be totally satisfied without the help of others. I’ve come to the conclusion that this idea is #bogus.
Let’s start with the assumption that you’re happier when with your friends. Yes this is true, it’s been proven, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you’re probably happier when you’re with other people. Remember this doesn’t mean you have to always be socializing, it’s also ok to occasionally spend a day binge watching breaking bad. It only means you need to occasionally leave your bedroom and share your happiness with other people. It’s often said that happiness is contagious. Well, it just so turns out that the people that said this may have been on to something. On multiple occasions, scientific studies have shown that there is a correlation between your happiness and your friends happiness. One study by Psychologist James H. Fowler even found a correlation between your happiness, and your friends’ friends’ friends’ happiness. So next time somebody gets onto you for having 900 Facebook friends, you now have an answer.
That brings me to my point about technology. [Mira Skit]. Instances like the one Mira just portrayed, are becoming more and more common as we attempt to “modernize” ourselves. I think it’s important to address this, as it seems to be an intergenerational issue. The other day I was scrolling through my twitter feed when I noticed something by a friend of mine from middle school. It said “The day you reach 10,000 messages with someone is pretty special:) we’ve grown so close these past two months. #younglove #forever”. This is just one of many examples of the sad reality of some teenage relationships. Basing any kind of human relationship off of your connections of a social networking site is no substitute for real communication. I mean, if you chatted every day on Facebook with Anna Long from Taiwan, that wouldn’t make you best friends. So cross off creating a twitter account for yourself from your to do list for satisfaction.
As a final point, it’s important to note that family and friends have a lasting impact on your satisfaction with life. Real sciencey people describe this as “hedonic adaptation” : our tendency to quickly adapt to our changing circumstances. This is why people who win the lottery, for instance, usually find themselves at the same level of satisfaction they had before they won. Basically what happens is, you win the money, you buy some stuff with that money, and in a relatively short time, you’re fairly accustomed to your new life style, and your levels of satisfaction return to normal. Close relationships on the other hand, appear to have lasting impacts on levels of satisfaction for years to come. Instead of quickly returning to their previous levels of satisfaction, people engaged in close relationships tend to remain happier for longer periods of time. Now Federal law requires I list the side effects of this new medication for dissatisfaction called human interaction so I’ll list them for you now. “Side effects may include: being content, happiness, and above all satisfaction.
Larissa Wood
It was one of those cold November days where nobody’s used to the below-freezing chill, or the fact that the sun sets at practically 4 o’clock, and three of my friends sat cuddled before a fire sipping hot cocoa. Yet, somehow amidst the cookies and music, we got to discussing global warming and the ever-impending doom of society. I flicked off every single lamp in the room, and now our little huddle was solely lit by the flickers of the fire.
Our little quartet was made of three UUs and a Southern Baptist—Emma, Kenzie, and her boyfriend Bear. Kenzie leaned back on the couch and said . . .
“Oh, Bear, I’ve been meaning to ask you this—what do you imagine Heaven to be like?”
He leaned back on the couch, taking in the long inhale of a good question. He tasted the air, it was laced with the lingering scent of cookies and wood smoke.
And then he told us about how his heaven would be like Earth but with everyone you never met, but if you had met would have been your best friend. And how everyone you missed would be there, except the people who hadn’t made it there yet, but they would come later, and how there would be plenty of work, because he couldn’t imagine the idea of never having to work—because that would be boring. And I looked at the fire, as it quickly dwindled away; the coal embers wavered like shreds of pastry. I smiled; it was beautiful.
As UUs, I think Emma, Kenzie, and I can all attest that we listened . . . wistfully. We have never had such faith in an afterlife like the one he spoke of. Yet, I know that I also listened with ever-constant skepticism—wondering what work wouldn’t get boring in eternity, and what about all the people he loved who he believed would go to hell.
But, my point is not that he believes some of us may go to hell, or that heaven would get boring, but that this Heaven he spoke of was beautiful and grounding. When he spoke of heaven, he stared off into the fire with a sense of contentment that I have rarely ever seen on Bear’s face. I sipped my hot chocolate, tasting that luminescent happiness of heaven.
One of my friends once said that Atheists wouldn’t be so bad if they could stop condescending religious people as stupid. I’m pretty sure I slapped him, but his blatant generalization, as most stereotypes are, is rooted in a truth. A truth I find very sad. For, ignoring the many flaws my skeptic-raised brain can nit-pick in every religion including our own, faith as a whole has the power to give so much support, hope, guidance, and community to people. There is a reason humanity has created religion after religion. It is not, and will never be, stupid. With all of our critical thinking prowess, perhaps this human species thinks a bit too much about this universe that we are inexplicably dropped into. Spiritual satisfaction is hard to come by.
When one dies, there are always two sets of three letters – one, being RIP. Rest in Peace: in a world of such tension, turmoil, and dissatisfaction, death if anything seems to deserve rest. With peace goes the other three letters. “He was at peace with GOD.” God.
Please don’t cringe. I know how the occasional Unitarian tends to wince at this word, but we really shouldn’t be too avoidant. The word itself is just three letters, right? And yet, dang, those three letters are undeniably the three most powerful scribbles in human history.
But, when we think “at peace with God,” I think that really means at peace with yourself and your morals: to be satisfied with the way you have spent your life, to forgive yourself for your sins (and I don’t mean Biblical sins as much as the regrets of all poor decisions made), and to accept death.
I find that pretty formidable as a 17-year-old high school student that has not really done much with her 17 years. And honestly, writing this speech feels horribly inadequate when half of my friends suffer from recurring depression, and two of my friends have seriously contemplated suicide. Who am I to profess to you, to this wealth of memories, pain, and wisdom, that I know the secret of satisfaction? The idea of that makes me feel sick. I don’t know if I believe satisfaction is possible, furthermore, I don’t know if I believe it is desirable. For, generally speaking satisfaction breeds complacency, and complacency breeds stagnancy. In such a broken world, being satisfied with everything would either be naive or sociopathic. Rather, I think it is spiritual satisfaction, sanity and survival that I stand here striving for. I have no instructional manual for satisfaction; I think that’s something one has to construct for themselves. But personally, I believe that accepting the dichotomy of joy and pain, understanding the lack of definite answers, and finding peace with what is solid is integral to at least part of that manual on satisfaction.
I laugh when I say my best friends, the mountains, and my favorite books are my spiritual rocks. But to me, the fact that they actually exist in such meager perfection is reassuring and humbling. Someone’s rock may be the promise of heaven, and I think it’s important for all of us to respect it. But as much as we need solid rocks of core beliefs as sources of guidance and satisfaction, finding the beauty in transient, temporary, and even painful things is just as important. Heaven cannot be the only place of perfection, and if we only cling to perfect things, there is a danger in regarding everything else as broken. As beautiful as Bear’s heaven was, that moment by the fire, drifting with wood smoke and oncoming twilight, was just as beautiful.
And I think spiritual acceptance and satisfaction comes from knowing that death may await us, but this broken life right here is full of heavens. The taste of hot cocoa is magic. Crying is a reminder of the infinite capability we have to care. The hand of a friend is Godly perfection. The sunshine that comes through those windows may land on faces lined with wrinkles and precancerous freckles, but that sunshine is heaven. And that ought to, it must, be enough.
Emma Himelein-Wachowiak
One of my favorite childhood memories is of picking violets for my Grandmother. The memory is really just a blur, but it’s a pretty blur; one of purple flowers, green grass, and my mom’s smiling face.
I was happy, and she was happy, and my Grandma was going to be very happy. So why does looking back on this memory make me sad? It could be because I miss having that same “carefree” type of relationship with my mom. It could also be because I miss my Grandmother, who I now know saw this beautiful day as one of her last. But maybe it’s just because I miss looking at this reality, one made up of violets, grass, and smiles; and being able to call that “enough”. Maybe I just miss the satisfaction of being a kid.
Childhood is painful to remember because of our societal knowledge that it is temporary. Despite what “Back to the Future” and other brilliant films have taught us, we cannot go back in time. Our spontaneous acts of throwing bread crumbs to ducks, jumping in leaf piles, and flying kites have come and gone; and are now to be filed away in a drawer we call “remembrance”. Childhood is temporary.
Or is it?
Author Patrick Rothtfuss once spoke the following words:
“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
I think what Rothfuss is trying to say through this quote is that maybe, deep down, we’re just all kids who one day decided to be adults. We used to live in the present, -we used to live in the now-, and then one day “the now” was simply not enough. Our futures were hung over our heads like meat being dangled to dogs, and we salivated over their irresistible temptation. School, college, work, family, we had to check them each off our lives as items on a grocery list. Life became a game of chess and we had to contemplate our next move before we even finished the one we were on.
What so many of us fail to realize is that while childhood is temporary, the concept of childhood is not. This philosophy of “spontaneity” has no age limit. We can still throw bread \crumbs to ducks, run through leaf piles, and fly kites in the sky. And yet we can do so much more, because now we have enough coordination to ride our bikes, hike up mountains, and light fires to toast marshmallows in. We have enough patience to sing in the shower, do Sunday morning crossword puzzles, or watch the sunset. We’re loving enough to have relationships, spiritual enough to go to church, and childlike enough to be satisfied with this now that we are so lucky to be given.
Maybe one day Doc will show up in his time machine, (and I’m still counting on that). But until then, it is through spontaneous acts like these that we are truly transported back to that magical realm of violets, grass, smiles, and being a kid.
Kenzie Himelein-Wachowiak
While fighting horrendous writer’s block for this very composition, I stumbled upon a quote by Ernest Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you’ve ever known.” I liked it so much that I turned it into a sub-par T shirt for my dad, but that’s beside the point. Perhaps it’s the way I was raised, in a church that shied away from definitions, but I don’t appreciate endless clichés or glittering generalities. I believe that writing should be a series of insightful, provocative, and entirely true sentences. And if you leave this service today with anything at all, I don’t want it to be that you need to find more friends or give more money to charity, or even that teenagers really are capable of critical thinking. Instead, when you leave today, I want you to pick up your pen and your paper, physical or metaphorical, and I want you to write your own, true story. Here’s mine:
I don’t have the secret to satisfaction. I don’t even have a hint. I care too much what people think of me, I plan extensively for a future that I often doubt I’ll ever succeed in, and sometimes certain things happen that make me feel as though I’m completely unprepared to deal with the frequently monotonous and occasionally heartbreaking occurrences that make up what we in high school like to refer to as “the real world”. By no means am I asserting that these qualities are unique to just me, or my generation, or churchgoers or the impossibly privileged or anything like that. If I have acquired any knowledge through my humble observations of the human race, it’s that we all, no matter how different, share relatively the same hopes, desires, and fears. Perhaps we all strive for satisfaction, for love and security and day-to-day joy, but it’s our fear of failure, of inadequacy, of that looming panic that surrounds the idea of being on our death beds and running through our waning minds everything we SHOULD have done; perhaps it’s that fear that holds us back in the end.
I may not have the secret to satisfaction, but I know what makes me happy. Long hugs, warm trail runs, late night phone conversations, genuine words between friends, making someone smile who hasn’t in a long time. And maybe I’m being naive, but I can almost convince myself that if I witness or I partake in enough of these small, worthwhile things, I can become content.
I assume most of you are familiar with David Foster Wallace, a brilliant man who, judging by the fact that he committed suicide in 2008, never achieved this rare state of satisfaction. I recognize when my own words are becoming inadequate, so I hope you’ll allow me to quote from his most famous work, “This Is Water”, a commencement speech given to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon college.
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”…
Foster Wallace continues, and then concludes with this: “What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water. This is water.”
And while it’s hard for me to follow the painfully true words of a genius, I will leave you with this: to all the fish out there, myself included in this somewhat childish comparison: This is water. It may be murky, it may be nothing or it may be exactly like what you expected it to be, but through it all, you are never, ever alone.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The writer Eric Weiner tells of how one day he found himself doubled over with abdominal pain in a New York City emergency room. As he shivered in his paper gown waiting for the doctor, a nurse arrived to draw some blood. The woman, about his age with features and an accent that seemed to him Caribbean or West African, paused and said quietly, “Have you found your God yet?”
Who is this who darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge?
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak, if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions, or who measured it with a line?
Onto what were its bases sunk?
Who set its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the divine beings shouted for joy? . . .
Have you commanded the day to break, assigned the dawn its place, so that it seizes the corners of the earth and shakes the wicked out of it?
Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been disclosed to you?
Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth?
If you know of these – tell me.
SERMON
The writer Eric Weiner tells of how one day he found himself doubled over with abdominal pain in a New York City emergency room. As he shivered in his paper gown waiting for the doctor, a nurse arrived to draw some blood. The woman, about his age with features and an accent that seemed to him Caribbean or West African, paused and said quietly, “Have you found your God yet?”
Taken aback, he stammered, “Why?” Did she know something he didn’t, he wondered. She didn’t reply but just gave him what seemed like a wise, knowing look and left.
Weiner’s medical episode ended uneventfully – turns out to have been just a severe attack of gas – but the nurse’s question weighed on him. Had he found hisGod . . . yet?It set him wondering. She wasn’t asking whether he had found a God or the God or just plain God, but his God, as it there were one out there for him, waiting.
For a while he put it aside. It wasn’t a question he felt was relevant to his life. God, religion: he had left all that stuff behind in his youth, growing up in a culturally Jewish but not especially religious household. And besides he very much saw himself as a rationalist – someone who looks to science and reason as a guide to living – and he saw little about the notion of God that seemed rational to him.
Still, he wrote, he had to admit that in his experience, while “reason is an excellent tool for solving problems (it) offers little guidance in identifying which problems we should solve and why.” In the words of G.K. Chesterton: reason doesn’t account well for those moments in life that “bewilder the intellect, yet utterly quiet the heart.”
There was something about that nurse’s question that nagged at him, but he had no notion of how to begin to answer it. Searching for a spiritual category where he might plant his flag, he gave up, declaring himself simply a “confusionist” armed with this credo: “We have absolutely no idea what our religious views are. We’re not even sure we have any, but we’re open to the unexpected, and believe – no, hope – there is more to life than meets the eye.”
For Weiner, this puzzlement was the goad for a journey that he recounted in a best-selling book, Man Seeks God. The book tells of Weiner’s travels around the world to learn about and experience eight religious traditions, ranging from Sufism and Buddhism to Franciscan Catholicism and Kabbalah.
Few of us have the resources for such an adventure, but for many of us Weiner’s label of “confusionist” rings a bell, especially when it comes to this notion of God.
I remember when I was around 9 or 10 years old playing with a friend by a stream near my home when he casually asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I didn’t know what to say, but to hide my embarrassment I just mumbled something like, I did, and that ended the conversation.
So, I guess I could date my own history of wrestling with the notion of God from that moment. It wasn’t as if I had never heard of God. In my Unitarian Universalist religious education classes I had encountered God and gods from many cultures in many guises. But I had never instructed on an answer to that bald question: Do you believe in God?
I know now that the stories I heard and the lessons participated in were intended not to deliver received answers on the mind-boggling questions that religion poses – who am I, what matters, where did I and all of this come from – but to encourage my wondering mind to work through them and come to answers that made sense to me, answers that surely would change as I changed and grew, but that were rooted in my own understanding and experience.
That has been true of this religion since the days of its founding in the early 19th century when William Ellery Channing declared that “the great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own.”
And it remains true of us today. When a volunteer teacher in our Spirit Play classes reads a story, he or she will invite the children to comment on it with a reflection that begins with the words, “I wonder . . . .” I wonder how that felt, I wonder what they meant, I wonder why she said that. And you’ll recognize that I’m inviting you as our worship theme for the month to do some wondering of your own.
Looking back on my childhood encounter, though, I see that there was something more than puzzlement behind my confused answer at the streamside: something that I now recognize as shame. Young as I was, I had lived long enough to perceive that at the time in the larger culture there was really only one socially acceptable answer to my friend’s question, and I gave it.
Things have loosened a bit since the early 1960s, but the presumption is still strong, especially here in the South, that when asked, one will respond as I did. So, if nothing else it challenges people like us who find integrity affirming a range of responses, from “yes” to “no” to “Well, tell me what you mean by God,” to broaden the conversation and work to find some clarity for ourselves.
Karen Armstrong begins her book, The Case for God, by declaring, “We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile.” God, she says, is bandied about by so many people in so many settings that we are left with the presumption that the concept of God should be easy. You know, God: Supreme Being, Creator of all Things, infinitely loving, ultimately inscrutable, utterly transcendent, and yet counting every fallen sparrow. Simple!
Wait a minute: did you say simple? With so many imponderables wrapped around it, this tiny word quickly expands beyond our common capacity to make sense of it, and so it becomes a convenient screen on which we humans can project our hopes and fears; our aspirations and ambitions, pinning on attributes, such as pronouns – him, mostly; and motives – smiting these people, blessing those others.
Probably no work offers a more effective caution against this practice than the ancient Book of Job that I quoted earlier. You’ll recall that the book begins with God looking down from on high and praising his good servant Job, while Satan insists the Job is only good because he’s treated well. Test him, Satan says, and you’ll see him curse you.
So, God does, inflicting him with every measure of disease and misfortune. But Job insists that he holds to his faith. Friends arrive, and while they commiserate, they suggest that Job must have done something to deserve all these ills, for God only punishes those who deserve it. This goes on for some time, and Job bemoans his outcast state until the figure of God breaks in with a long soliloquy, part of which you heard.
It is an amazing passage. As the writer Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, God speaks, not apparently because Job has been irresistibly persuasive in arguing why he has been ill-served, but, she says, “because God cannot stand one more minute of his yammering.”
The language in these questions is lyrical – “Where were you when the morning stars sang together? Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?” I can imagine the writers pushing their imaginations to the limit – how to express the inconceivable? how to communicate how infinitely unknowable the ways of the universe are? The question that the book seems set up to answer – why do bad things happen to good people – is blown out of the water, and along with it the neat image of a friendly God who watches over us and finds us parking spots.
Forget that! The wisdom that Job offers us is that suffering happens, and we are left to make of our lives what we can. But, God? Well, back to the drawing board.
Karen Armstrong observes that theology, literally the study of God, “is a very wordy discipline.” People, she says, “have written reams and talked unstoppably about God.” (Speaking from the experience of four years of seminary and 10 years of ministry, I can only say, “Oh, preach it, sister.”) And while much of it is impenetrable and some of it is actually beautiful, it doesn’t necessarily take us much closer to making sense of God, if there is any sense to be made.
Armstrong argues that the trouble began when in our modern age, the Christian church and its scholars took to applying the language of science – which she describes as “logos” – to the study of religion, which she says had been the imaginative realm of what she calls “mythos.”
One unfortunate result of all this, she says, is that it pulled religion out of where it originated, as a rich and metaphorical guide to living, and set it up in the academy as an artifact for arcane study. The old image of scholars counting how many angels can dance on a pin was the product of this way of thinking.
In fact, Karen Armstrong argues, religion holds the most promise not as a place of proof texts, but as “a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.” The notion of God, too, she says, works better when it comes out of the clouds, loses its pronouns and invites us to reflect on what is most deeply real and impinges on us most profoundly.
My colleague Galen Guengerich has argued for describing God as, in his words, “an experience that intimately and extensively connects me to all that is.” And a consequence of this experience, he says, is to invite us to see ourselves as agents of the best there is, call it the divine, call it all that upholds life and love in the universe.
Could that be “your” God? Perhaps, perhaps not. The sense of transcendence that Galen describes is something that all of us experience in one form or another, but there are many ways of framing it that need have nothing to do with God.
Our music today offers a sense of the variety of ways that transcendent appears to us. Joan Osbourne invites us to find the holy in the scrubby stranger on the bus, the other we avert our eyes to avoid. Pete Seeger believed he found all he ever needed in the songs he used to break through the boundaries that keep us human beings apart. And Mendelsohn’s beautiful chorus lifts us up with its bounteous imagery of God as the unsleeping source of compassion that quickens our languishing hearts.
So, in answer to Eric Weiner’s nurse, must we expect that at some time we will hitch our own spiritual wagon to some understanding of God? No, not necessarily, and really that’s not the central question. I think that David Whyte’s poem, which Bob read earlier, comes closer to the point. Called “Self Portrait,” it is, I’m told, something he wrote one night in a period of spiritual crisis while he was looking in the mirror. So, the person to whom he is speaking is one he knows well.
When you let go of the labels, the clever scripts that you’ve cobbled together for when the “religion” question comes up, when you are fully present to yourself: what do you see? To what, to whom do you belong? What is your answer when despair visits you? As the world pushes and prods, wheedles and pleads, how do you find your center?
Are you prepared to give yourself fully to the truth that lives within you? I love the vividness of his imagery – do you know how to melt, holding nothing back, into that fierce heat of living that feels like nothing less than falling toward the center of your longing?
And how will you live day by day with the consequences of all the commitments you have made in your life, the love that both nourishes and tears at your heart, knowing that one day all of it – you and I, too – will be gone?
Oh friends, let us set to wondering. Let us be good company, and let the space we create and hold here be the crucible for our work.
It matters not if there is one God or many Gods or any Gods, when it comes down to it. What matters is that we be witnesses to the beauty and wonder of the world, that we live with integrity and compassion, that we honor that ineffable transcendence in which we and all things participate, the stream that, as Tagore put its, runs through the world, that shouts in joy through the grasses and is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, moving through us this very moment.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
The figure of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War colonel who collected this beautiful spiritual you just heard the choir sing, evokes the kind of story that we Unitarian Universalists like to tell ourselves about our historical engagement with civil rights.
READING
From “Justice and Conscience” by Theodore Parker
“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but a little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure that it bends toward justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.”
SERMON
The figure of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War colonel who collected this beautiful spiritual you just heard the choir sing, evokes the kind of story that we Unitarian Universalists like to tell ourselves about our historical engagement with civil rights.
A crusading abolitionist and Unitarian minister, Higginson made his churches in Newburyport and then Worcester, Massachusetts focal points in the fight for freedom for America’s enslaved blacks. He helped harbor runaway slaves and was a member of the Secret Six in Boston who funded John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Theodore Parker, author of the quote at the center of our service today, was another member of that group.
When war came, Higginson joined as an officer. Then he got word that the Union was looking for a leader of its first regiment of freed slaves, the 1st South Carolina, and even though he had little military experience, he jumped at it. He joined the regiment in November 1862, and it set off for its first engagement the following January. As the regiment was leaving, Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew – another Unitarian – furnished Higginson with a supply of copies of Lincoln’s newly signed Emancipation Proclamation. Higginson later wrote in his memoir, “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” that many in the regiment couldn’t read, but that, in his words, “they all seemed to feel more secure when they held it in their hands.”
The regiment took part in no major battles. Instead, it was assigned to raids to capture supplies, but even then they engaged in some sharp combat and, Higginson reported, acquitted themselves well. It was the first time in the Civil War that blacks had taken part in combat, and their success persuaded the Union to muster more black regiments. Higginson later recalled in his memoir, “it was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.”
You see what I mean? Great story!
And then there’s Theodore Parker, whose words recast by Martin Luther King Jr. became a rallying cry for the Civil Rights movement. In that sermon on justice and conscience, he declared that there is a moral law in the universe as inexorable as physical law and that justice is its demand. It is something, he said, that we feel like a physical tug on our conscience. We may falter, we may quail, we may turn aside, but there it remains. And when we pay attention, in Parker’s words “in (our) cool and personal hours” when we are most ourselves, we cannot help but acknowledge that we “love justice with a firm, unwavering love.” It is, he said, the “natural fealty” of our conscience.
It was both the spirit and the theology of Parker’s words that appealed to Dr. King: justice was not a convenient or conditioned concept. Its demands are woven into who we are and ever have been, and it will out, it will push relentlessly to be realized. In Parker’s words, “things refuse to be mismanaged long.”
Inspiring words, inspiring story. And yet, it turns out that even Theodore Parker had his personal reservations about just what abolition might bring. Toward the end of his life, he wrote “an Anglo-Saxon with common sense does not like the Africanization of America; he wishes the superior race to multiply, rather than the inferior.”
I have been reading Theodore Parker for years, but I only read those words in the last year or so, and I have to say that when I did my heart sank. Really? Even Parker, the radical, arch abolitionist whose 3,000-member congregation in the 1840s was the most integrated Boston had seen, underneath his defiant public stands was privately mired in prejudice?
But let’s be honest, in that time how many weren’t? Even as Thomas Higginson cut across the grain in his defense of African slaves, there was a noblesse oblige to his crusading, and even then he was regarded as a renegade among Unitarians. Both of the churches he served before the war eased him out after just a few years in favor of preachers who were less inclined to rock the boat.
We cast about for figures whose purity makes them idols to emulate and find that they all have dirt on their hands. And that makes it all the easier for us to throw up our hands in defeat. “See, even Parker was a racist. What hope do we have of changing this?” What hope?
It’s a question that resonates in my mind this Martin Luther King Sunday. We have each struggled in our own ways with the pall of what has been called “America’s original sin,” racism that is marbled so deeply into American life that none of us escapes its stain and its wound. And we Unitarian Universalists are not exempt. It has taken us some time to accept that. To see that even nice, liberal-minded folks live amid, benefit from and sometimes inadvertently advance practices that demean and oppress other people.
It is a hard learning. It’s not the way we want to be. And yet, there is a release in coming to terms with it, a chance for us to shift our perspective, to open our eyes to things we previously chose not to see, to shed our hubris and open our hearts.
Many teachers are available to help us in this work. Today I want to tell you about two who have been helpful to me. I begin with a professional colleague, the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed. Mark has told his own story of growing up in Chicago and ultimately entering our ministry as, in his words, an “integration baby.”
His most recent book, Darkening the Doorways, collects stories that answer the puzzling question of why we Unitarian Universalists learn so little of African Americans in our movement. The answer is not that African-Americans have not been among us, but that most of their stories have been lost or never told. And so Mark has made it a practice to seek out and raise up those stories. It was in Mark’s book that I read that dismaying quote from Theodore Parker, a common opinion at the time that may help explain the result of an early encounter.
In October 1860 at their annual meeting Unitarian ministers were joined by an African-American Baptist minister, the Rev. William Jackson. Jackson had been active in the abolitionist movement and likely had come to know Unitarian ministers in that way. But even more he had found himself drawn by the message that he heard from them.
So toward the end of the day, Jackson stood and declared that from what he had heard at that assembly he had been converted to the Unitarian perspective and stood ready to preach it. When he was done, one of the Unitarians, William Potter, rose to say that the ministers should raise money support Jackson and his congregation. A collection was taken that garnered $49, a respectable sum at that time, but there the matter ended. As historical accounts put it, “Mr. Jackson was sent on his way.” That ended his contacts with the Unitarians.
Sad to say, for much of the next 100 years while African-Americans still came, that chilly reception was pretty much the norm for aspiring clergy. Even though as early as the 1840s black candidates were graduating from the Unitarian seminary in Meadville, the trick was finding congregations that might ordain and settle them. And, aside from a few abortive attempts, that didn’t happen. Exceptions included churches in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Harlem, New York, both founded in the early 20th century by determined African-American ministers. Neither one, though, was fully recognized by the denomination, and both closed after a matter of decades.
Universalists also attracted interest from African-Americans, who were among the charter members at congregations in Philadelphia and Gloucester, Massachusetts. But with the exception of a long-standing mission settlement in the Tidewater area of Virginia, Mark reports, the movement’s appeal to African-Americans proved limited.
The story of our denomination’s struggle with race in the 1960s and 70s is a bigger tale than I have time to tell today. Still, Mark Morrison-Reed offers one telling anecdote that opens a window on it. Shortly after our two movements joined in 1961, the denomination embarked on creating a new hymnal intended to represent our radically inclusive faith.
Unfortunately, that hymnal, while innovative and expansive, failed to include, as Mark puts it, “one word or song written by an African American or reflective of that experience.” Our current hymnal, printed in 1993, corrected that omission.
Still, that incident speaks to a blind spot that has haunted us. Deeply and authentically committed as we are to racial justice, we have not always done a good job of living it, of making room for experience beyond our ken. These days, anxiety over how we respond to racial oppression tends to focus on the relative lack of diversity in our congregations. I’ve heard it raised in this congregation.
Mark offers counsel on this point that I find helpful. We are caught in a paradox, he says, because while we say we want diversity, the truth is that emotionally we really don’t want to change. We like our congregations as they are, the people we know, the things we do. Promoting diversity involves welcoming and even seeking out people who are different from us, and that will change our community – perhaps in good, even necessary ways – but change us all the same, and it’s bound to be uncomfortable.
So, why do it? Not to meet some self-appointed authority’s notion of what is morally appropriate for a liberal religious congregation. No, we seek out and welcome diversity because of who and how we understand ourselves to be.
As Mark puts it, this drive is spiritually rooted in an intuition central to our religious identity: that “we are deeply and inextricably connected to one another and all that ever was or shall be. We want one another. We yearn to feel connected – and whole.” And in the end, it’s not about who we hope to bring in our doors. “It’s about healing ourselves.”
So, that brings me to my second teacher – actually not just one teacher but many involved in precisely the sort of work Mark was talking about.
Shortly after moving to Asheville, I was looking for ways to get oriented to this town, and several people encouraged me to consider signing up for a program that would introduce my to a side of this city most people don’t see.
It’s a gathering where people of many different backgrounds and experiences, white and black, talk about their experience with racism and the effect it’s had on their lives. Building Bridges, it’s called, and over each nine-week session participants learn much about how racism works – about the stereotypes we all carry, the privilege that we with white skin live with, the way racism is promoted through institutional practices and how it appears in schools and housing and even the simplest economic transactions.
There are readings and presentations, but the heart of the program is found in small groups, each facilitated by two people, one white and one black, who invite participants to share their own stories, their own struggles.
It is a place where white people like me get to hear for the first time what it’s like to have store clerks follow you around with suspicious eyes, to have landlords lament that they have no openings, to have police officers pull you out of a car and search you for no apparent reason. And it changes you to hear it.
Building Bridges took shape here in the early 1990s. Our member Sue Walton, one of the early organizers, says there was a lot of skepticism, especially among black leaders, that Asheville was ready for this. But one of the African-American ministers offered his church for a starting place. That first night, she says, the organizers were overwhelmed with the turn out, scrambling for space wherever they could find it. They were off and running.
Our member Dawn Klug, a long-time small group facilitator, says the program appealed to her because it taught her Asheville’s unique story around race. “As a white woman, I grew up never talking about race,” she said. “It’s helped me start to learn.”
Jackie Simms heard about Building Bridges while attending this congregation. She and her husband, Fred, had been in Asheville a few years and were feeling isolated, wondering if they had made the right choice. The program, she says, gave her access to people she never would have met, and also a new vocabulary and a constellation of friendly faces that made opening and exploring feel safe. Asked at the time to say something in a service here about her experience, she wrote and delivered this poem:
PREJUDICED – ME? NOT MUCH
A Bele Chere Festival some years ago –
My husband, my daughter, my mother, me –
Genetically sun kissed all.
Having fun, Exploring this possible new home.
Very hot July day, A cool drink – good idea!
Hmm (yummy). A frozen fruit drink,
Small paper parasol in it.
Good drink. Cold, refreshing. Slowly sipped.
The last few sips. The drink gone but enjoyed.
The parasol – pretty. Bright colors, tiny.
I wear it in my hair. No one knows me here.
More to see. More to eat. Tired now. Let’s leave.
Hmm. A single guy – white face, black pants
black shirt, black motorcycle helmet.
Does he have on a black leather jacket, too??
Stay away. Stay away.
A gust of wind. Parasol swept away – toward the guy!
Don’t go near him – Hell’s Angel.
He stoops to reach parasol. Now what??
Parasol inches from his hand! Another gust.
Parasol swept farther. Far away.
He looks at me. . . Kindness in his eyes!
Realization: He wanted to retrieve it for me!
I’m touched. I thank him for his kindness.
His caring – more important than the parasol.
Parasol gone. It’s OK. Caring stays. I hope he knows. . .
He walks forever – chasing parasol.
In his clasp – returned to me. Emotion rises –
Tears fill my eyes.
Prejudiced, me? Wrong, me? Touched, me?
A lesson here. How to live it.
A need for bridges.
You see, I happen to believe that Theodore Parker, flawed and fallible as he may have been, had it right when he is said that there is a moral force for justice that is inherent to our nature, something that works on us and will not let us go. The only error in his great metaphor – the arc that bends toward justice – is that it omits the benders.
Yes, justice is imminent in the world, but agents are needed to bring it into being. I think that he knew that; indeed, he was a great bender himself. But it needs to be said. We cannot wait for justice to happen. We need shoulders brought to the wheel, and they may as well be ours.
I have told you about Building Bridges, a good place to start, and the group’s next session begins next Monday. Check the flyer in Sandburg Hall for details. If you can’t make this one, another starts this fall. And there are other opportunities for good work that you can learn about at our social justice table.
My colleague Rosemary Bray McNatt was right: it is hard work, but in the end if there is no justice, there will be no peace. We can read and applaud all the good and noble thoughts of inspiring leaders, but if we do not bring justice to the world, none of us is safe.
So, I close with her admonition: Nothing that Unitarian Universalists need to do is more important than making justice real – here, where we are.
It usually comes at the end of a list. A list of bad things. Like this: Well, at least one of the kids has been sick since mid-December, I got in a fender bender yesterday, and I just found out that my company is outsourcing my whole department. But it’s all good. Usually followed by a half smile and a rapid change of subject.
It’s all good. It makes me think of the famous scene from the Princess Bride – that word? I do not think it means what you think it means!
It’s all good. I can’t say I don’t appreciate what the phrase is trying to accomplish. I think it comes out of a wish to appear strong and capable – to be “looking on the bright side.” When things are really going badly, we don’t want to be a downer. We don’t want people to think we’re not competent, or that we are falling apart at the seams. We think we want or need privacy.
This glossing over our lived reality may help us hold it together in the short term, but in the long run, we are losing an important opportunity. We lose the opportunity to pull off the mask of attempted perfection and show our true face.
What would it look like, do you think, if we told each other the truth? So often, we know, through conversations with other friends, or through social media that something is “up” with a friend. But we aren’t sure how to broach the subject, and so we say nothing. Perhaps we ask something general, like, “are you ok?” And then our friend says, “I’m fine,” because how do you begin to answer the question when it feels like everything is falling apart around you.
When I worked as a chaplain, a colleague and I developed a shorthand that was very helpful – we’d say “good morning,” or “hey, how has your day been?” and if one of us answered, “oh, I’m fine,” without thinking it through, the other would pause, and say, “Hmm… are you? Or is this, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine?’” Because we had learned that when either of us said quickly, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” we usually weren’t.
Why are we so set on convincing each other that it’s all good? That we’re just fine, really. Is it some kind of competitiveness or one-upmanship? Or is it something else? Perhaps we have an honest wish to not be a “downer,” a need to go unnoticed. But if you are truly self-differentiated, you can say, “things are difficult, but I’m in a strong place.” “All of those things – about my sick kids, my job and the rest of my life – are true, but we are coping.” Or, “you know, this has been a really hard time for me, and I’m having a hard time getting back on my feet.”
This is NOT glossing over the truth, but diving deep and allowing the truth to stand on its own. And when we are not trying to avoid our lived reality, we can more easily move through it.
We might also say ‘it’s all good’ because we aren’t sure the listener has the courage to hear what we have to say. Did my friend ask me how I am as a perfunctory conversational trope? Or did she really want to know the answer? Will he listen as I tell him the truth?
Telling the truth requires us to risk vulnerability.
Hearing the truth requires us to acknowledge that we can’t fix or change another person’s pain.
And neither of these is easy to do.
When we risk vulnerability, we are exposing a soft underbelly that is actually full of possibility, full of depth and potential relationship. I am not suggesting that we bare our souls to every person we meet. The first step is being a good listener – when we allow ourselves to practice, we can model the response we wish to receive.
Try it. Ask a friend how they are, and really mean it. Make eye contact. Pause. And listen.
Remember the Velveteen Rabbit of children’s nursery fame? What is it that made him “real?” Living. Fulfilling his life’s purpose, which for the rabbit, was to inhabit the dreams and imagination of a little boy. In the story, it is called becoming “real.” Brené Brown calls it authenticity. She says, “Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” [1]
My life’s purpose is to risk being present with people, to hold up a mirror, to be available to truly see you when you need to be seen, to hear your story and listen deeply. With that in mind, being real, for me, is accomplished by showing up as fully engaged and fully committed to my ministry as I can be in a given moment—risking the experience of vulnerability with you at the same time I am listening deeply to your lived reality.
In my first sermon here at UUCA, I used a reading that includes my favorite quote, “What you risk reveals what you value.” Some moments the commitment is clear and simple. But sometimes it isn’t easy. It has been especially difficult to stay present these past few months since the second minister call process began. It’s an odd process, to be sure. It is kind of like having a performance evaluation done by 600 people. Well, no, it’s not kind of like that. It is that.
As the process unfolds, there is a fair amount of anxiety in the system – which is related to many different things. Some of you are not sure what the process exactly means. Others of you are so close in the middle of it that you can’t imagine thinking of anything else. There are questions on the table about whether I am a good fit for this congregation and questions about what it means to commit to a second called minister.
And through it all, I am getting an extended object lesson in vulnerability. I have no action to take at this point but to continue to show up and do what I do. To continue my ministry of presence. To continue to risk. To lean into the uncomfortable moments and let the discomfort remind me who I am and why I am here. I am here to witness and honor your moments of discomfort and struggle, to celebrate your joys and to help you dive deeper. And as you dive deeper, I am reminded of my own experience of depth, my own ability to stand firm in the midst of chaos.
I am made real by my engagement in this process.
We each have an opportunity to reflect upon our own life’s purpose. How do you become real? How do you find a way to express your own authentic experience in a fast-moving life? The vulnerability required to do this can feel impossibly daunting, and so you can start small. Start by looking at your own experience and being honest about where you are in it. Do you feel grounded? What are you dodging or avoiding?
This month’s theme is “Capital T Truth.” If we risk sharing our “lower case t truth,” which is whatever happens to be true for us in a given moment, we open the door to finding the capital T Truth. We live in a consumer culture that teaches us that the capital T Truth is an idea or a concept we can learn how to do and once we master it, we are fixed. But this is not accurate. You are true when you allow yourself to be all of who you are. The capital T truth is YOU. Do you have a face you show to the world, and a face you are afraid for anyone to see? The more you are able to peel away the mask and show your true face, the more the two faces begin to be the same face.
It’s NOT all good – is it really OK to say it? The line between being a downer and being honest is, again, about authenticity and self-differentiation. It’s NOT all good, so try something like this, instead, ‘You know, I’ve got to be honest, this is a hard time, but I am doing my best to stay grounded. To remember the things that are good. And to let myself feel how I feel.’
Perhaps the line between honesty and obfuscation can be our engagement in trying to shift what can be shifted. What are your coping mechanisms? How are you getting yourself through? It’s ok to say that you are struggling without being stuck. And sometimes you are stuck.
The Real You is worthy of honor. The real you is capable of being stuck and OK at the same time. The real you is strong and bold and can push forward with the same force and commitment you used to use to avoid the feelings of vulnerability. The real you can handle the capital T Truth. And only you can decide who in your life can hold this truth with you.
What are the consequences of true honesty? “you know, things are pretty difficult these days, but we are coping.”
What would you lose?
The illusion of perfection?
A self-protected place that feels safe but is really quite lonely?
Authenticity requires vulnerability, and “it’s all good” shuts down all possibility of either vulnerability or connection.
Part of the problem is our fixit culture. If you are talking to someone who is going to try to fix your problem and won’t be able to hear your full experience, then of course you won’t want to share what’s true. But what if we interacted in a different way. There is a different paradigm. A paradigm based on connection and honesty instead of fear of exposure
According to Brown, “One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on “going it alone.” Somehow we’ve come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we’re very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It’s as if we’ve divided the world into “those who offer help” and “those who need help.” The truth is that we are both.”[2]
And if we are both offerers of help and needers of help, then the truth is that we can learn from one another. We can sit together in the midst of the capital T Truth
The true cost of honesty is connection. It is the risk of deeper relationship.
Brown “…defines connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.” [3]
I feel this same kind of connective energy in our weekly candle lighting ritual. It is such a beautiful dance. There is a profound power in the silence – in the honoring of our joys and sorrows without speaking them aloud. These profound moments, shared in silence, sometimes with a tear or a smile, the touch of a hand, a pause as the candle is placed in the chalice. These moments are pure and authentic and have a depth to them – it seems as if I can feel the currents of your lives as you come forward and share the light that represents your heart.
And yet, even in those moments of deep connection, we do not know the substance of one another’s lived experience.
Joyce Sidman tells us
“It is time to look into
each other’s faces,
we who glide along the surface,
time to dive down
and feel the currents
of each other’s lives.
Time to speak until the air
holds all of our voices.
Time to weave for each other
a garment of brightness.
To dive down and feel the currents of each other’s lives.
“Do you promise?” The question always catches our granddaughter for a second: then her reply, with a sober expression framing her big brown eyes: “Yes, I promise.”
The request is never anything of particularly great moment – thankfully her life is not yet that complicated – but even a five-year-old recognizes the weight of that question. And she’s never shy about making a similar request of us and expecting a response that is equally as serious. It is a part of our bonding with each other, the testing and trusting that creates intimacy. But it’s also an introduction to something larger and deeper that is within and between us all.
Martin Buber famously declared that we human beings are the “promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing” animal. Promising is not just something we do; it defines and creates us as social beings. And, as Buber’s formula suggests, it can be a challenging thing to negotiate. Not all promises are easy, not all promises are wise, not all promises are kept, and even when promises are broken that doesn’t necessarily end a relationship.
And still, promise-making is at the heart of who we are, of what we do as human beings, and, I want to argue today, something we liberal religious folk can offer up as a source of hope for the world.
Last week I told you that this is a community where you are invited to discover what your heart and mind and soul declare must be true about how the world is and our place within it. We frame that in the first half of our congregation’s mission statement, which I remind us of each Sunday – “we nurture individual search for meaning.”
The second half of that statement reminds us that we do this in community: not simply for our own edification, but with an end in mind, that we work together for “freedom, justice and love.” And it’s important to remember that those words at the end are not tagged on as an afterthought – “hey, join us here and figure yourself out and, oh, if you have the time you might want to help us out in this other work.”
We believe that this other work is integral – no, even more: necessary to any hope we may have of finding integrity and peace, of knowing who we really are. And it’s bound up in a process of promise-making that we call covenant.
This notion of covenant is very old with us and so, as you might gather, has followed some twists and turns along the way. It dates back to the 1550s in Great Britain to a religious reformer named Robert Browne who pushed for a radical shift in church life. Inspired by leaders of the Reformation in Europe, he drew on the image of God’s promise-making in the Bible to argue that churches should be gathered in a similar way. Churches, he said, should be formed based on a covenant among persons.
And instead of agreeing to a common doctrine, he said, people could agree to walk together on the basis of certain religious principles. They could choose their own ministers and teachers, put forth and debate issues to learn the truth and welcome diversity of opinion, even protest and dissent.
This notion took root and crossed the Atlantic with the Puritans and guided the formation of those first congregations in New England. In 1648 this arrangement was codified among the gathered churches in something called the Cambridge Platform, which both described and defined how covenant worked. Essentially, it laid out the practices that congregations followed that reinforced the ties within, among and beyond them through regular worship, meetings and mutual care.
In the years that followed, though, the role of covenant faded in many congregations as disputes over belief began to divide them. More conservative congregations began to set high bars of orthodoxy for people to be admitted into membership, and some congregations – including many that were later to become Unitarian – put aside the old covenants to avoid religious disputes.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that, once again, reformers in our movement called attention to this covenantal tradition and offered it as a way of reestablishing who we were and what we had to offer to the world.
What they discovered is that this notion of covenant addresses a fundamental tension in our movement. In a way, that tension is represented by the two halves of our congregation’s mission. On the one hand, we encourage and defend the right of each person to make up her or his own mind about what is true on religious questions – the search for meaning that we take to be a lifetime’s work. But if the gatherings of our congregations are to be anything more than the fitful herding of cats we must also agree on some principle that unites us.
Historians of our movement went digging into the files of some of our older churches and discovered these old documents with such expansive sentiments as these: Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest of truth is its sacrament and service is its prayer.
Covenants like these do nothing to inhibit the wide ranging explorations that we as individuals or congregations may undertake to learn and come to terms with what is true and right. But they do provide some context for the work and some understanding of the spirit in which this work is done.
So, it’s no surprise that in the mid-1980s when calls came to revise the founding documents of Unitarian Universalism to make them more inclusive, the words that were chosen were framed as a covenant. The language that we proudly point to today, that you will find mounted and framed in the foyer outside this sanctuary, is presented as principles that we as member congregations covenant to affirm and promote. They are not statements of belief; they are promises of how we will behave with each other and in the larger world.
A little over a decade ago a task force was gathered in this congregation to take us to the next step. As a member congregation of the UUA, we agreed to affirm and promote the principles it adopted, but how about with each other? What promises do we need to make to each other to make this safe space for us to be about the often challenging and emotionally risky work of building a spiritual life?
The result of that process was the covenant that we read together last Sunday as we welcomed new members and friends into this community. I invite us to read it together each time we widen the circle of this community both as a way of bringing newcomers into the promises that unite us and of concentrating our attention for a moment on the work we try to do here.
Because the fact is that we all have rough edges that can damage others, and conflict is a fact of life in any gathering of people. We serve ourselves and each other best when we acknowledge that and commit ourselves to finding ways to work through those conflicts or find healing for the injuries we do to each other. It’s tough work and can make for some uncomfortable moments, but our hope is that we will come together again and recommit ourselves to this path.
But, when you think about it, what really leads us to choose this path? The way we usually frame the answer to this question is to say that as individuals with free will we decide that it is in our interest to commit to others and bring a community into being.
Now, that’s fine and there is probably some truth to it, but, to be honest, if that’s all that underlies our commitments to one another, it’s pretty tepid broth. If my decision to enter into covenant with you is based simply on my calculation of how it will benefit me, it won’t take much for that calculation to change. I may decide that I just don’t feel like it any more, and, hey, don’t give me grief, I get to decide what’s in my interest or not. OK, but then this covenant we thought we had really doesn’t stand for much, does it?
So, what else might guide our promise-making? Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, offered a way of thinking about his in a talk she gave to General Assembly about a dozen years ago.
She suggested that the covenants we make are centered in the covenants we inherit. The fact of the matter, she said, is that “we receive who we are before we choose what we will become.” Our very existence, after all, emerged out of a web of relationships that were simply given, and everything that we do or achieve is woven together with persons and forces that ebb and flow throughout on lives. We can elect to drift on obliviously pretending that nothing we do touches anything else, but plainly that’s not the way it is. And thinking this way puts us deeply out of touch with the world before us and the very source of meaning and strength that might awaken and transform us.
When my granddaughter and I trade promises, we are not negotiating contracts to achieve our mutual interests. We are building connections of love and trust that help realize a deeper hope in both our lives.
In her book An American Childhood, Annie Dillard compares the work of writing a book to raising a child, and she could just as easily be talking about the place we move from in shaping our covenants with each other.
“Willpower has very little to do with it,” she says. “If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. . . . There’s nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.”
This is something that I think our liberal religious notion of covenant has to offer the world. We don’t create covenants with each other out of mutual self-interest. We don’t do it for fear that God will hate or condemn us if we don’t. We do it because it’s what we’re here to do. It is how we best realize the hope that we as human beings are for the world.
We are given the opportunity to tap a well in our hearts that is wider and deeper than we can know but that many of us learn to keep sheltered and hidden. We might imagine that the promises we make limit us, but in fact the opposite is true. The promises we make release the latches that make the love that we shelter away available. The testing and trusting we do with each other takes our commitment to greater depth and opens previously unimagined possibilities.
Of course, some of the promises we make are not kept or turn out to have been ill advised. So we take a step back and look for ways to reconnect. As a community we offer consolation, care, and space for healing and renewal. In the end, we remember that, while we may have been wounded, the heart is a muscle that is strengthened by being used.
Opening our hearts to each other, Rebecca Parker points out, prepares us to open our hearts to the world, to make our communities centers of resistance to oppression and injustice. The work can be challenging, but we gain courage from knowing that we are leading from the source of our strength, joined as communities gathered not out of convenience or artifice but out of our understanding of a truth at the center of our being.
It is hard, as Billy Collins puts it, to talk of all the ways we are touched and shaped in this brief snatch of eternity that we are given, where we take the vast outside into us before the lights wink out. It can be frightening, lonely.
We look for travelers to share the way with us, people who will walk along side, who will be there when we knock on their doors, hoist a pack and join us for a bit. In our promises with each other we build a structure that supports us all, that creates a crucible for our striving and searching and a shelter against the storms. Each person who joins our covenant adds a brick to that structure that, it is our hope, in time may help heal the world.
When it comes to spiritual guides, I have admitted to you before, I have a weakness for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes, his webs of prose can be enigmatic, even infuriating. “What on earth are you getting at here?” I want to shout at times. But at other times I am grateful for the graceful beauty, fresh insight, and brilliant extravagance of his writing.
Perhaps nothing that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote has been more frequently quoted than the passage that Bob read from Emerson’s first book, Nature. The image of the “transparent eyeball” taking in “the currents of Universal Being” is striking and unusual. And, apparently some in Emerson’s own circle at the time thought so, too. There is a famous caricature of Emerson drawn by Christopher Cranch, an artist who was part of the Transcendentalist circle, that shows an enormous eye with a kind of pork pie hat on, perched on a small torso, complete with morning coat, striding on long legs over the countryside.
After all, from what we know of Emerson, a sweet, avuncular sort of fellow, it wasn’t the kind of expression that one would expect. In all of Emerson’s writing, outside of his journals, it is really his most personal testimony of his own spirituality.
But, of course, when we consider the project that he had in mind in writing Nature, we can understand why it is there. Nature was in many ways Emerson’s declaration of his own rebirth. With the death of his first wife, Ellen, he had given up his pastorate at Boston’s Second Church (Unitarian) and traveled to Europe to clear his mind and find a way forward in his life.
He was deeply impressed by the art and architecture of ancient cities, and he was intrigued by poets and philosophers who were challenging old ideas about biblical narratives and finding the roots of religion in personal experience. But when he got back home, rather than enlist himself with any particular thinker or school, Emerson took off on his own.
But what did that mean? The pulpit had little appeal, even if he did do supply preaching now and again for most of the rest of his life. Instead, he fashioned a notion of himself as a kind of free-lance scholar – one who would read and think and write – whose work, he later declared would be “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”
In this time of talking heads, we think that we have a pretty good idea of what that meant. We can imagine him appearing on Oprah, writing a blog on the Huffington Post. But, no, there was something more. Even though he had given up the preacher’s robe he still had something of a longing for the preacher’s vocation.
He was interested not merely in “facts” but in, as he later defined the preacher’s work to new graduates at Harvard’s Divinity School, “converting life into truth.” That is, he hoped to persuade his readers that merely by attending deeply to the elements of their experience they might discover insight that would thrill their souls. And that that experience would awaken something great and holy within them, that it would, as the poet Mary Oliver said of Emerson’s hope, “turn all the heavy sails of one’s life to a moral purpose.”
So, it is no surprise that the image that came to Emerson in Nature was that of an eyeball, for the thrust of his urging is always, “Look, Look!” For, in looking we might for a moment erase that boundary between us and the blithe world. We might taste for a moment the erasure, not of the self but of egotism, that preoccupation with self, and become, in his words, “the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”
It’s because of passages like this that some see Emerson here proposing a new form of American mysticism, and that’s not far from the truth. When Emerson gathered a cadre of Unitarian ministers and like-minded folks that became known as the Transcendentalist Club, his goal was to clear the decks of what seemed to him the stodgy theological debates that prevailed at the time over such things as the nature of Christ’s divinity, Original Sin, the meaning of biblical miracles and all that.
In many ways he was speaking to himself as much as graduating students at Harvard’s Divinity School when he urged them to cast aside what he called the “secondary knowledge” they had taken in during their years in seminary.
“Let me admonish you to go alone,” Emerson said, “to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. . . . Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost – cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.”
What exactly he means by “deity” here is unclear. It is given no specific image or essence. It is more like the welcoming sense of warmth and exhilaration that he describes back in his book Nature. “In the presence of nature,” he wrote, “a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says – he is my creature, and (in spite of) all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me.”
If this is mysticism, though, it is mysticism with a twist. Unlike, say, with the Christian or Sufi mystics, who find communion in giving themselves over to the divine, Emerson views the “wild delight” we find as something more like a reunion. In Nature he writes, “the greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and vegetable. I am alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me, and old.
“It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly and doing right. Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.”
Emerson sees nothing especially privileged about this experience. It requires no special study or preparation, no incantations or physical exercises. As Emerson’s biographer Robert Richardson puts it, “Experiences of the kind Emerson here describes have happened to nearly everyone who has ever sat beneath a tree on a fine clear day and looked at the world with a sense of momentary peace and a feeling, however transient, of being at one with it.”
And yet, the question remains, once you have had such an experience, what do you make of it, what do you do with it? For Emerson it is more than a pleasant moment on a sunny day. It is the doorway into a deeper way of living.
In many ways, Emerson opened the modern conversation around something that we have come to call spirituality. Like many people today, Emerson looked at the landscape of leaders and institutions making claims about how the world works and our place in it and what he saw seemed merely rehashed and derivative.
“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” He was not disputing the testimony of Jesus, or Moses, of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Mohammed.
Worthy guides, all. But, in his turn of phrase, why should not our experience also count? Indeed, if our spirituality is to be authentic, how could it not? Critics who see in Emerson’s argument for what he called “self-reliance” a kind of go-it-alone bullishness miss the point. Emerson himself makes the point in his essay by that name, “Self Reliance,” and please excuse the language of his time that uses male gender to make a point that universal to all:
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
The point is not that we have nothing to learn from others or that we can only find wisdom by wandering off on our own. It is that in the end we simply must make sense of it ourselves, and for that work we can trust our own faculties, our own minds and hearts. In this he was less a scholar than a provocateur: take ownership of the vision that living in the world gives you; look and see and act on what you learn.
The religions of the world, today as in Emerson’s day, are full of those who warn us of our fallibility, of our error and our sin, and so would have us distrust what our minds and senses teach, who urge us to give ourselves over to settled doctrine, to a way long trodden by others.
From the title of his first book, we imagine Emerson raising up the natural world as the great source of all inspiration. While I’m sure it’s true that he enjoyed his constitutionals in the brisk air of Concord, what we know about Emerson the man is that, unlike his friend Thoreau, his true home was not so much the woods, as his study. What he received on walking out of doors was literally a breath of fresh air, the vision of a world broader than his mind could ever encompass that put to shame the limited orthodoxies and philosophies that peopled his books.
“Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe. The sun shines today also.”
The words are old and a little high flown, but I find they resonate with me still. I’m a bit more of a nature boy than Emerson was and so the natural imagery definitely connects, but I also recognize the larger point here. It is not that by wandering in the woods you will find your spirituality. It is that we should be wary of facile of theories of the world that are cooked up in closed rooms.
The world in its astonishing beauty and complexity can be trusted and the world will ever surprise us, and we will each engage it with our own genius and on our own terms. It is this perspective that makes Emerson one of the founders of a modern liberal religious sensibility, what has been dubbed the “Spiritual Left,” and to my mind makes him relevant to us today.
Those of you who are new to us know that in some settings communities like ours are lampooned as places where, as they say, “you can believe anything you want.” In fact, the bar is much higher. Joining this community, you are invited to believe what you must, what your heart and mind and soul declare must be true and to engage with this community in sorting out the implications of those convictions.
It’s a process that I’ve abbreviated in this month’s worship theme as “choosing to choose”: taking ownership of what calls to you, whether it be in the woods or the town, and following where it leads you.
We offer this place as a crucible for all of us to work this out, to learn and grow and raise our children in an atmosphere of acceptance and trust where the blithe winds of the world and the brainstorms and controversies of centuries can blow through, where we hope to awaken something great and holy within you that will enable you to turn all the heavy sails of your life to a moral purpose.
I have to say it’s been interesting hearing people’s reactions to this week’s sermon title. “Staying put, huh?” I wouldn’t say the response has been entirely positive. Viewed from one perspective, “staying put” sounds a bit like “being stuck,” a kind of hide-bound view of the world that is stubborn and inflexible. We live in a culture that celebrates change and novelty. So, who would want to “stay put?”
That’s certainly true of us here in Asheville. We are a place on the move. Most of us here are transplants. We pulled up our roots from wherever we were and decided to give Asheville a try. We saw it as a nice place to retire to, or maybe just wanted to be near the natural beauty of this place, the agreeable climate, or the funky vibe.
It’s not for nothing that several years ago a writer surveying what he called the “geography of bliss” identified Asheville as a place where you could find it. Now, I do think it’s a little over the top to describe Asheville as “one of the happiest places” on earth, but people keep coming, and here we are, and, yeah, it’s true, it is pretty good.
This is also true of us as a religious community. Few of us grew up as Unitarian Universalists. At some point in our lives we fell away from whatever tradition we were raised in, if any, and set out looking for something different, something that more clearly matched our view of how the world worked and what matters, and here we are.
Of course, it’s also true that the hunger for change can turn into a kind of mania – skipping from place to place, from relationship to relationship, from religion to religion without really taking time to get to know, or to invest oneself in any of them. This kind of living leaves us scattered, shallow and unfocused, ultimately out of touch with others and even with ourselves as we scurry about frantically.
And the consequences of this way of living can be even deeper. If we’re always on our way to the next thing, we never truly value the things we have. We find ourselves unmoored morally and spiritually, searching for meaning without knowing how to find it.
So, yes, change is important, letting go what no longer serves us, what is destructive, dysfunctional, worn out and oppressive, but in doing so we need to have an eye for that which is life-giving, enriching, generative and hopeful, a way of being that can sustain us and support us for the long run, a place in our lives where we can stay put with integrity and joy.
This topic has been knocking around in my head for a few years, after reading a book by my colleague Michael Schuler on, in his words, “making the good life last.” He begins by disputing the assumption in popular culture that equates “the good life” with material abundance and personal stimulation. Instead of finding personal satisfaction, he says, we become more like what the Buddhists call “hungry ghosts.” We long for happiness and contentment, but we seek them in ways that only dull our cravings and never satisfy us. We compulsively seek out pleasure and prestige, but our discontent remains.
Life that is truly satisfying, Michael argues, is life that is sustainable. That is, it contributes to our own and our community’s wellbeing; it promotes a healthy earth home and fosters enduring relationships; it contributes to the common good and restores our minds and bodies.
But in order to make life sustainable, he says, we must be prepared to shift our priorities, to leave off doing some things and adopt or emphasize others. He boils down the work ahead of us to what he calls four keys of sustainable living: pay attention, exercise patience, practice prudence, and stay put.
Attention, patience, prudence . . . OK. But stay put? Let’s spend some time with this. We can begin with some thoughts from the novelist Wallace Stegner, who observed that in American culture we tend to be divided into what he called “boomers and stickers,” boomers being the folks who pull up stakes and head out to the boomtowns, and stickers being the ones who stick around for a while.
Historically, the boomers who itch for greener pastures tend to be the ones who are celebrated. But, Stegner observed, “neither the country nor the society we build out of it can be healthy if we don’t stop raiding and running. We must learn to be quiet part of the time and acquire the sense not of ownership, but of belonging.”
And belonging, of course, comes from more than just plopping down and calling some place home. It involves taking notice of where we are situated and sending out tendrils to make connections with others.
Michael Schuler points out that in earlier times there was a process of what he calls “entanglement” that came with moving to a new neighborhood. You’d be invited to someone’s porch to learn the local history or chat at leisure over the raking of leaves. Thread by thread you’d come to know each other, with relationships sealed by holiday gifts of brownies or spiced nuts, agreements to take in each other’s mail, or watch each other’s children, so that when sadness or hard times came, help arrived unbidden.
Scott Russell Sanders points out that the word “common” at the heart of community, communion, and communicate grows from two roots, “the first meaning ‘together’ or ‘next to’ and the second having to do with barter or exchange.” So, he says, “embodied in that word is a sense of our shared life as one of giving and receiving.”
He noted that even Ralph Waldo Emerson, our famous Unitarian forebear, while preaching self-reliance, “lived in a village, gave and received help, and delivered his essays as lectures for fellow citizens, whom he hoped to sway.”
Man of the mind though he may have been, Sanders says, you would have found leather buckets hanging by Emerson’s door in Concord, for he belonged to the village fire brigade.
For many of us, there were good reasons for uprooting ourselves from the soil where we were planted, and, as Sharon suggested, it is healthy for all of us to be wary of settling in, to retain a little restlessness so that we never are content to accept the unacceptable. But Emerson’s leather buckets also remind us that at some point we are called us to send out tendrils that can entwine with others, that bring us into a web of community and find there the treasure that our heart seeks.
Feeling entangled with a place also can build deeper connections. When asked what the most important thing was that every person could do to help resolve the environmental crisis, poet Gary Snyder is said to have replied: “stay put.” When we develop a commitment to a particular piece of ground, we can better understand, not just intellectually but almost viscerally, as it were, how we are linked to the land.
Last summer when I was looking for a way of deepening my own understanding of my connections to the Earth, I came upon an adult education class developed by the Northwest Earth Institute called “A Sense of Place.” Currently, Christine Magnarella Ray and I are currently leading about 20 people from this congregation in an eight-month class based on that curriculum. We blend classes discussing readings from the curriculum and discoveries that our class members have made about different natural systems with field trips to places as various as the Cherokee Indian Reservation and Craggy Gardens to center ourselves in this part of the world.
This sense of place is part of what staying put can give us, a deepening appreciation of how we are linked not just to this land but to all life. Among the readings I have turned to for this class is a book called The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell, a biologist at the University of the South. Haskell spent a year visiting almost daily a patch of old-growth forest that is about a meter square in eastern Tennessee and documenting everything he found there.
For his entry at around this date, toward the end of his year, after he has already documented insects, birds, spring flowers, trees, mushrooms and much more, Haskell turns to the most unseen realm of all: the microbial community under the leaf litter.
It is the earthy smells more than the visual clues that tip him off to what is happening in this microscopic scene, he says. With billions of microbes, many still unknown to science, interacting in that tiny spot of forest soil it is only an impressionistic glance, the least precise of his examinations all year. And still, laid out before him is this vast panorama – bacteria and fungi breaking down nutrients of all sorts and interpenetrating the tiny rootlets of plants.
It shows him, Haskell says, that Tennyson’s description of “nature red in tooth and claw” needs to be updated. We apex predators attend to the competition at the top of the food chain, but lower down we come to learn about the sharing and collaboration that hundreds of millions of years of evolution woven into the chain of life.
And that correction translates all the way up the chain to us as well. We are not fronting the world on a lonely crag; we are in community from the moment of our births until the days of our deaths – community that grows and deepens as we extend ourselves to it, as we interpenetrate the world and each other’s lives in ways greater than we can know.
And that carries us back here. One of the great gifts that we give each other in this community is staying put, staying in the game, being “long-haul” people, in Rudy Nemser’s words. It is, as our worship theme this month suggests, “choosing to choose.” That is to say, giving care and intention to the commitments we make, grounding them in something solid, and sticking with them
We enter this place affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person, but only over time do we learn all the wonders that each of us has to offer the other. The gift of community is something that improves with age, as we watch each other’s children grow, share each other’s triumphs, mourn each other’s losses.
For the past 10 years here I have been in a privileged place to watch all that and to see some of the virtue of staying put, the strength that we find when we stay with each other and treasure the depth of relationship and commitment that comes with that practice.
I told you earlier this year that I would make a practice of sharing with you some of the stories of how this congregation has made a difference in people’s lives, and today I’d like to share with you some of the people who have been among our long-haul players. Today I want to tell you about the Unicorns.
You have to go back about 40 years to find the origin story and even then it’s surrounded in some myth. I’m depending on the memories of a few of the originators, hoping I get it right.
It was said to have been a snowy December evening in 1972 when the minister at the time, Tracy Pullman, invited some younger parents to a gathering. The congregation was quite a bit smaller at the time, and Tracy hoped that these folks might form some sort of organization to get young parents like themselves involved.
They liked the idea and began organizing parties. The question came up early as to whether the group should have a title, and they agreed it should. Different iterations were tossed around until someone suggested that they were a kind of corny group of Unitarian Universalists, and so they were dubbed: the Unicorns.
It had, and still has, no official status. It was just a way to get people socializing, and from the start that was what attracted people to the group. They were young parents who got together for parties and picnics as well as “advances,” not retreats, at area YMCA camps and then an annual beach trip that I’m told continues to this day.
As the congregation grew, though, the Unicorns also took on other projects, raising money through bake sales and other ventures. When the time came in the late 1970s to construct the addition that doubled the size of Sandburg Hall and added a suite of offices and religious education classrooms downstairs, it was funding from the Unicorns that paid for schematic drawings of the project. Their initiative also helped bring in a professional fundraiser to raise money in the congregation for its construction.
Over the years the group has grown and shrunk as some members were added and others left. They have been present at the weddings of each other’s children and memorial services of each other’s loved ones and even one of their own.
They include three former congregation presidents, several former trustees, a religious education director, many RE teachers, a long-time treasurer, canvas chairs, search committee members, auction committee chair, social justice chair, a former UUA Board member, one member who arrived as a minister and another who was ordained into ministry by this congregation and later came back to serve it.
Among those still with us are Larry and Lisa Holt, Patsy Keever and Jim Aycock, Pat and Ron Godbolt, Doug and Jean Kean, Bob and Ann Lewis, Patty and Randy Vanderbeek, Clark and Anna Olsen, Chuck Campbell and Sarah York.
Individually their involvement has waxed and waned, but they have stayed put. They have watched ministers and other staff come and go and seen membership numbers rise and fall. They are long-haul people who have been here when we needed them and are with us still.
Walt Whitman, who knew the language of the heart as well as any, captures it best: Will you seek afar off? Surely you come back at last, in things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best – happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place – not for another hour, but this hour.
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
I’ve been a gardener for as long as I can remember. It was a passion I picked up from my father, who, despite a busy career as a psychiatrist, always managed to be cultivating something. Digging in the dirt was a good antidote to the heady work of his day job, as it is for me. His gardens, though, would wax and wane depending on how much time and energy he had to devote to them, and I’ve found that’s true of me, too.
“Perishable, It Said” by Jane Hirshfield
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/236974
SERMON – Part 1
I’ve been a gardener for as long as I can remember. It was a passion I picked up from my father, who, despite a busy career as a psychiatrist, always managed to be cultivating something. Digging in the dirt was a good antidote to the heady work of his day job, as it is for me. His gardens, though, would wax and wane depending on how much time and energy he had to devote to them, and I’ve found that’s true of me, too.
Usually by the end of the summer everything in my garden is growing pretty wild, but then the first frosts of autumn come and shut everything down. I actually enjoy the fall clean-up that follows: unraveling the withered tomato vines from their cages, pulling up the brown stalks of basil or zinnia, and cutting back the spent branches of perennials. All tossed in the compost heap to nourish next year’s crop.
It’s a spiritual discipline of sorts. I knew as I set out those tomato seedlings in May that some five months later I’d be ripping their withered remains out of the ground, hoping in the meantime to get a bounty of delicious fruit. So, there they are, the wise words of Ecclesiastes, coming to life in my back yard – to everything there is a season, a time to sow and a time to reap; a time to live and a time to die.
Still, these philosophical reflections are often interrupted when I discover that in that frost last night that knocked down the tomatoes I inadvertently left some tender plant outside, a fern or something that in the spring we had brought out to the porch from inside, that I had meant to, but forgot to bring inside, and there it is, crumpled and grey.
Shoot! A stab of sadness and guilt. That wasn’t supposed to happen, and if I’d paid any attention to the weather it wouldn’t have happened. I would have brought it inside and the plant would be ensconced happily in our heated home. Instead, it’s finished: more fodder for the compost heap.
It’s always a reminder to me that this business of perishability is serious and often unpredictable stuff. We watch the autumn leaves turn color and fall and wax about the circle of life, but we are less philosophical when the chill winds have our loved ones in their sights, or even ourselves.
Perishable, yes, but not him; perishable, OK, but not yet. There must be some warm, protected place we could go to, something I could do, we could do to stave off that catastrophe. None of us has a “use by” stamp on our foreheads, but with Jane Hirshfield we find ourselves examining the backs of our hands, the bags under our eyes from which our young self views in the mirror the improbable pouches and wrinkles that emerge on our faces.
As time marches on we see the signs of impermanence everywhere we look, and we feel something sinking in the pit of our stomachs, a vanishing we can’t see how to fathom. Some of us withdraw and separate ourselves from the stream around us, whose pace seems to be ever accelerating.
And yet, there is Jane Hirshfield suggesting that we might find in the “perishing perfumes and clashings” of the world around us, a “strange happiness” that comes to us not outside of but from within that world, indeed within ourselves. What might that be about?
WORLDLY WISDOM? By J. Barrie Shepherd
SERMON – Part 2
Our theme groups this month have been wrestling with the notion of authenticity. What do we understand to be our authentic selves? How might we come to know them? And how might that contribute to living with a sense of integrity and peace?
It’s tricky work because really what we are seeking is not to discover what makes us each unique, special people, but to know and feel ourselves fully as we genuinely are. Let me tease out that distinction a little because it’s not obvious in the culture we live in today.
Garrison Keillor sizes the situation up with his description of Lake Woebegon as a place where “all the women are strong all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.” We grow up in a culture that teaches us to link our identity with excellence and achievement. We are celebrated for how we excel and what we achieve.
Growing up we give attention to the good student, the poised dancer, the nimble athlete. Childhood is full of awards and certificates. It is what makes us “special.” As adults, we stake our claim to some vocation or perhaps some characteristic or skill that helps set us apart in some way. She’s a hot-shot lawyer; he’s a terrific cook. It gives us standing.
But the old wisdom warns against this viewpoint.
Here’s the Tao Te Ching:
He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm.
She who rushes ahead doesn’t go far.
He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.
Because, here’s the thing: few of us are so confident in our skills that we want them to define us. Instead, dwelling on what makes us “special” inevitably feeds a secret sense that we’re not good enough. Praised for being special we are haunted with the feeling of just how special we aren’t. A kind of quiet shame pervades our perceptions like a low-lying fog.
These feelings often lead us to a kind of antic behavior, either working to be super achievers or skipping from place to place from job to job from relationship to relationship looking for . . . something. As the poet J. Barrie Shepherd puts it, “scanning, skipping to the end at times, searching for the one, the word, the sentence that an tell me what it’s all about.”
But the author Brene Brown, in one of the TED talks you’ll find referenced among the resources for theme reflection on our Web site, argues that beneath all that activity is something else: a numbness that separates us from ourselves.
We don’t like the feelings of fear and shame that bubble up at the edge of our consciousness and so, in her words, we numb ourselves. When something difficult arises or some conflict emerges, we withdraw. The problem is that we can’t selectively numb our feelings. In her words, when we numb guilt or fear, we also numb happiness and gratitude.
And we do that numbing in different ways. We may pull away, or turn to some sort of addictive behavior. Another way, she says, is to adopt a rigidity that in our minds makes everything that’s uncertain certain. Religion, she says, can be part of that. We move from an inquisitive sense of faith to a dogmatic one. As Brown puts it, “I’m right, you’re wrong. Shut up. That’s it.”
We liberal religious folks like to make this observation about this kind of behavior among conservatives, but the fact is that we can be just as narrow and self-righteous in our own ways. But I think it can help to recognize that response as the voice not of confidence or authority but of shame and of fear, and it doesn’t have to be there.
For, what is authentic about us is not our academic degrees or lack thereof, our artistic gifts or lack thereof, our physical beauty or lack thereof: you get the point. What is authentic in us is that which engages and participates in the blooming, buzzing world around us.
And the way that we gain access to it is we allow ourselves to be seen, not as the reflections of icons or images, but as we truly are. It requires, as Brene Brown puts it, that we be vulnerable: hard to do, but that’s part of why we exist as a religious community, to hold each other in covenant as persons of inherent worth and dignity, offering safe space for healing and exploring, where in time we teach and learn from each other the disciplines of love.
That’s the key to our release from our fears and to coming to know our authentic selves. As Brene Brown puts it, we need to learn to love with our whole hearts and practice gratitude and joy, even when we’re worried and afraid.
It is a place, as poet J. Barrie Shepherd writes, “beyond the unrelenting streaming of words,” where we are attuned to a deeper strain of life, something “without any hope or need for explanation, (that is) moving on, while we stand wordless, gasping in its tumbling wake.”
DROPLETS by C.K. Williams
SERMON – Part 3
A few weeks ago in the middle of the morning while we were both at work Debbie and I each got a disturbing call from the woman who periodically does cleaning at our home. She noticed that some rooms in the house were turned upside down and some things seemed to be missing. We both drove home quickly and discovered that, such enough, we had been robbed: TV, computers, cameras and the like gone, and the backdoor, which likely I had inadvertently left ajar, was wide open.
We did what you do – called the police, inventoried our things and made plans to secure the house and replace what we could. Describing the incident to others, I turned to a bit of gallows humor, saying that I had been planning a service on impermanence and so was now given an object lesson. Philosophically, I would say, oh, it could have been worse, and, after all, it’s just stuff.
And still. Those of you who have been through something like this know that the loss – including in our case some irreplaceable family items – while significant doesn’t compare with the sense of violation that haunts you for some time afterward: The vision of someone ransacking your lovingly appointed space, tearing through drawers and closets, and unceremoniously hauling your stuff away.
It leaves you feeling spiritually damaged – suspicious, wary of others, more protective of your space and loved ones: Yeah, a lesson in impermanence, but at first an experience of grief.
I found it interesting that my personal response to the theft was to sort through my remaining things – clothes, books, household items I hadn’t used in some time – and look for things I could clear out. It fits with an urge I’ve been feeling lately to shed stuff. The less I have, after all, the less I have to worry about someone taking. But more, it echoes the kind of visceral sense I’ve experienced of my own impermanence and the folly of attaching myself to the stuff around me, since I won’t be taking it with me.
That passage I quoted earlier from the Tao ends this way:
He who clings to work will create nothing that endures.
If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.
And perhaps letting go is the answer. I’m not happy having lost the things that we did, but most of them were mere conveniences. They can be replaced or perhaps even done without.
But in the process of this mess I also got a window into a deeper bounty in my life that I don’t attend to often enough with the response of empathy and compassion from our friends and loved ones.
Even when the rain is hard, C.K. Williams observes, it only disturbs one leaf after another on the little tree planted by his friend or lover. Instead, of alarming him, the downpour mingles with his partner’s piano playing into an intensity of feeling so powerful it tames, at least for a moment, that most existential of dreads, the fear of one’s own death, until, transformed into a transient mist, it falters and fades as the music goes on.
What an improbable wonder this fleeting, heart-breaking, soul-stirring life can prove to be!
Debbie and I started planning for our Thanksgiving celebration, coming up the week after next, some months ago. All of our three daughters had announced they would be unavailable for one reason or another, so we mulled over who we might ask join us for a simple meal. In the end, we invited Debbie’s sister, Suzanne, from New Jersey and envisioned a quiet day. Then we received an invitation from Stephen and Susie Jones here to join them and their son, Drew’s family. We loved the idea, and so, the gathering started to grow.
Meanwhile, about a month ago my mother, Cynthia, a member of this congregation living at Brooks Howell Home, fell while transferring to a wheelchair and broke her hip. The surgery to repair it was simple, but her frail health and lack of stamina have impeded her recovery to the point where we are unsure of her future.
In conversation with my sister and three brothers we decided that it made sense for them to visit soon, and, well, Thanksgiving was on the horizon. So, perhaps it made sense for them to come then. Three of them agreed, along with my mother’s youngest sister. We contacted Stephen and Suzie with the news, and they insisted on bringing everybody along. So, what started as plans for a quiet meal has grown to a gathering of 15.
It is an occasion I look forward to, but one also tinged with impermanence. Indeed, Thanksgiving for many of us is a kind of thermometer of change. Each year for various reasons different faces appear at and disappear from the table. So in the gathering before the sweet potatoes are passed there is always a moment to take stock of where we are. This year will be a special moment for many in our gathering.
I’ve long been a fan of the piece the choir sang for you today, Copland’s “The Promise of Living,” but for the past several weeks I’ve come to know it quite a bit better, thanks to Debbie. Diligent new choir member that she is, she has found myriad moments to practice her part – playing it through on our piano at home, or plugging in the MP3 recording Milt supplied so she could practice as we drove in her car. It has become a kind of sound track of our lives, and so it’s on my mind.
The song closes out the first act of Copland’s opera “The Tender Land,” and the lyrics, written by Copland’s one-time partner Horace Everett, constitute a hymn of praise centered on that cycle of change we began with this morning: sowing and planting, and the labor of harvest. But it adds another dimension.
Things vanish all around us. Circumstance brings us down. And still, as Jane Hirshfield puts it, there is a “strange happiness” that rises in our breasts, a happiness centered not in the things we surround ourselves with, things of “perishing perfumes and clashings,” but in something else, in the fragile fallible world we inhabit.
Late in the day that we discovered our robbery, having visited my mother in her declining health, I had a moment where I felt weighed down and exhausted. A church meeting was scheduled to start in a half hour, but I had no energy for it. Impulsively, I turned to the computer and Googled the only thing I could think of at that moment that might bring comfort. A pianist slowly began playing Copland’s distinctive open chords and then the tenors and basses entered, “The promise of living with hope and Thanksgiving is born of our loving, our friends and our labor.”
As in John Updike’s rescue, we have the opportunity to set free an agitated essence of air within us, to release it like a self-flung ball to the lovely, perishing outdoors. There is no avoiding the perishing of so much in our lives – the stuff we treasure, the people we love, even ourselves in the bargain. And yet, there is a promise to our lives that we realize in giving our authentic selves to them. It is, as Copland’s farm family sings, born of our loving, our friends and our labor. And it is enough.
