Thursday, May 31, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
"Collector of Moments" by Mark Harris - May 27, 2007
“Collector of Moments” by Mark Harris
First Parish of Watertown - May 27, 2007
(Sermon will be given in a revised version at the ordination of Ron Hersom in Albuquerque, New Mexico on June 10, 2007)
Opening Words from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
Reading - “The Chambered Nautilus” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft steps its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
Sermon - Collector of Moments
Someone asked me for help this year, and I said yes. I think the other clergy in town either dismissed the plea because the caller was not one of theirs, or they felt they were too busy to bother. But I said yes. It turned out that the caller was about my age, although upon meeting her she seemed much older; worn by life. She clearly had difficulty ambulating. I soon learned that the health department in our community was taking her to court to make her clean up her property. Neighbors had complained about the debris which cluttered her lawn. The inside of her house was just as cluttered as the outside. Piles and piles of papers and books. Boxes and bags made the doors and windows seemingly bulge with artifacts. It turned out that saying yes was not really much help. Sure we could make a small dent in the piles of wood and furniture, windows and rakes, and even the ten or so old bicycles in various stages of rusty disrepair. The trash collectors would take some. But there was so much more that she might need, she said. And the idea of hiring a dumpster to simply clean it up was out of the question. I didn’t gain much satisfaction from speaking with her social worker, or with the town health department who really wanted to evict her. It is not a story that will have a happy ending. The parishioners of ours who helped were merely putting their fingers in a large dike that soon would burst.
The person I was trying to help is a hoarder. Without dwelling on the psychosis of this problem, I want to ask the more basic question of what hoarding represents. It means we keep everything. Some people do put a kind of environmental spin on this problem that these people are saving everything for another use, and therefore are not creating increased trash problems, although it often turns out that their property becomes a kind of dump. Perhaps the more pertinent issue is that hoarders keep everything because they cannot decipher between what is useful or important now or in the near future, and what will never be useful. They cannot discern what to keep, and what to throw away. Some people say yes to everything that passes before their eyes. If the minister says yes to everyone who asks for help, it shows no power of discernment. Does a minister always help because he or she should help? This may have been an instance where my help was no help at all. Its a “New England disease,” the inability to throw anything away. You never know when you might need this bolt, this screw, this door, or that old crib that sits in the basement. So we save everything. The annual church rummage sale is always an interesting exercise in junk management. Someone how we are all able to clean out our basements on an annual basis, year after year. Then it seems even after we have given all that we have collected to the church, we go back and buy up everyone else’s junk so that we have have enough to unload it again next year. Some people think of it as a kind of recycling, but it is also scary to contemplate how much stuff each of us has.
Hoarding is a metaphor for what we each must cope with in our lives today. It reminds us of what kind of society we live in, and how difficult it is for each of us to not to overwhelmed but to be able to lift up what is important and meaningful in our lives, and name it and celebrate it. This is what churches and ministers are called to do. Martin Buber, the great theologian tells the story of some students who were shirking their study of the Talmud by playing checkers, when the rabbi walked in on them. They tried to return to their books, but the rabbi smiled letting them know that they should not be embarrassed. The rabbi also taught that truth should be discerned wherever they find it, and so he asked if they knew the three rules of the game. They thought they knew what they were doing, but were afraid of appearing too bold in front of the rabbi. So the rabbi rehearsed the rules of checkers. “First, one must not make two moves at once. Second, one may move only forward, not backward. And third, when you reach the back row, you may move wherever you like. This is what the Torah teaches, and then he walked out.” At first the students were perplexed, but then they discerned the truth from this teaching. We are always moving all over the place, and we clutter up our lives with schedules and things, but wisdom comes from making one move at a time. We should also be clear about who we are and what we want and never look back with regret or longing for what was or might have been; wisdom comes from moving forward. Finally, we become truly free when we reach the last row, and become servants of others. Wisdom comes in the freedom to pass on all that you have and are so that life and love may continue for those who follow.
Most of us would agree that a wedding is a major event in the life of a person. It is a ceremony that symbolizes a lifetime commitment to another person. I recently had the wonderful experience of conducting a wedding for a 25 year old woman whom I dedicated as an infant 24 years ago. Even more significant is that I also conducted the wedding for her parents, and welcomed them as members into the first church I served. The parents had not seen me since I left town. I was moved, especially by the husband’s response because it was clear that upon hearing my voice he was reliving that initial commitment he had made so long ago. Although the hair was whiter and the waist wider, I felt like I was able to give them the gift of meaning and renewal by reliving the moment that had launched them on what turned out to be a long, loving, but, like any marriage, not easy journey. After the rehearsal dinner, the big guy who had been in the welding business all these years turned to me, and said, “give me a hug.” Contrast this, if you will with what weddings have often come to represent. Newsweek magazine recently reported that weddings are no longer meaningful events, but instead are shopping extravaganzas. The meaning is found in the purchase of disconnected items all to make for a more opulent event, but none of the individual purchases add up to any unified significance. The article concluded that the ordeal of buying and planning was so demanding that the effort alone must make it mean something.
What this means in today’s culture is that we, like the hoarders, have a hard time discerning where meaning is to be found. One solution is to make the narration of the everyday meaningful. This was portrayed in Jim Carrey’s movie The Truman Show where Truman is unaware that his entire life is a hugely popular 24-hour-a-day TV series. In this real-time documentary, every moment of Truman's existence is captured by concealed cameras and telecast to a giant global audience. This is like the narration of the details of our lives over the phone, or their depiction on YouTube. Perhaps we feel like if we narrate everything there will be something of meaning in there, but of course, it simply becomes harder to discern. The other solution is to make everything important and everyone champions. I noticed this when my older son was growing up and he received a trophy simply for participating in soccer and baseball year after year while I remembered never receiving a trophy in my entire athletic career. While it is important to affirm our children, one wonders if they will lose the capacity to make judgments about what is important and worthy of making note of. The other day my neighbor was going to see his granddaughter in a school musical rendition of the Three Little Pigs. He filmed it, and then after filming it he made five copies for every member of the family. The next thing would be selling copies to every single parent. Perhaps this was a singularly important event in first grade, but it made we wonder if there is a tendency among us to make a trophy moment out of everything, because we are unable to pick out where meaning really lies. Yet if we are always champions and every drawing our child makes is another Picasso in the making then we have failed to discern the significance or beauty or achievement of anybody or anything.
More than a century and half ago Unitarians and Universalists began to have grave moral concerns about slavery. Most of our congregations today occasionally give voice to the words of one of our abolitionist forebears, James Russell Lowell in the hymn that has been revised to say, “Once to every soul and nation, comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.” Now I am not suggesting that DVDs of the Three Little Pigs is a mortal sin, but I am saying that churches and ministers play a role in society in helpful us all to discern the true from the false, good religion from bad religion, and cultural influences that are are going to heal or destroy our hearts and souls. It has become popular these days, perhaps in response to a fear of fundamentalism, to see religion being bashed in popular books. One would believe that everything evil in the world emanates from religion and its dogmatic truths. While we Unitarian Universalists have occasionally been guilty of religion bashing, we should also acknowledge that we will always need religion. This is precisely because it is that part of life where we try to make sense of ourselves and the world in which we live. If there is meaning to be discovered, it must be found in religious explorations. Thus if people are hoarding, if people are narrating, if people are filming without editing, making moral choices without discernment or critical faculty, then there is a gigantic hole for us to fill. This is the challenge of the church and its ministry. We are called to celebrate in story and worship, in symbolic rites and ceremony, life’s important events and thus, its fundamental meaning.
Ministers and churches are products of their cultures, but by their very being they are called to help people make choices within that culture so that their lives becomes a deeper celebration of all that is sacred. When our friends from England were visiting here, they used to complain all the time about the number of choices in the supermarkets. They were overwhelmed with the 18 different kinds of everything from tomato sauce to toothpaste. Once limited by what was available we all know that we can eat food from everywhere at any time. As is true of every other product on the market we can have what we want when we want it. Now many of us are asking about the moral implications of this. In her new book Barbara Kingsolver describes how her family tried eating only local and fresh produce for a year. What moral choices do we make? What about plastic bags that seemingly reproduce in the thousands? It may be wonderful to have strawberries in January, but what are the environmental costs? Are we killing ourselves and our planet to have everything all the time? What if we had to wait to pick them off the bushes in July as we do every summer in Maine? Think too of the religious implications if we have this one moment in time with those delicious red berries, then it became a kind of transcendent moment when we can celebrate that amazing taste. We sit with our berries, and we savor them. The church and its ministry is calling us to serve the source of life itself, and so we make deeply reflective, morally challenging decisions about food and cars and other possessions because we want to heal our planet, and ourselves and we want to be able to pay attention to what makes us feel good and healthy and free of encumbrances that heretofore have made it exceedingly hard to find meaning at all.
The Chambered Nautilus by Unitarian poet Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of the great nature poems of the nineteenth century. The mollusk as it develops and learns from life spirals into a larger and larger shell. Holmes writes, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free. . . “ The sea creature’s development is a metaphor for our soul. The church marks those moments of spiral or of significance in each of our lives, and it is up to the ministry to call forth the meaning of those moments in each child dedication, coming of age, marriage, and memorial. If the culture urges us to hoard moments by rushing on to whatever is next, or hoard things by buying the latest or the best, the ministry of the church must be present, gently reminding the soul to take time to remember this moment, live deeply into this moment, experience its full joy or grief, and then perhaps ritualize its significance with a ceremony of recognition. The ministry must be collectors of moments, and observers and celebrators of all of life’s significant spirals, thus marking our days with the meaning found in our relationships with each other in community. We not only pay attention to those moments, but we must be able to transition through them, even if we are made frail or wrecked, like the nautilus. The nautilus closes off its old chambers, and spirals again. We become larger selves, as we learn to grow to become more closely aligned with that life force which calls us to move forward into greater loving, becoming more aware of the sacredness of all life.
Finally, there must be a vision of who we yet hope to be. In the checker game if we manage to play so that we are making one move at a time, and we are moving forward, how do we achieve freedom? Holmes’ poem is frequently used for memorial services as a metaphor for growing a soul, or expanding our horizons until we enter the freedom of the afterlife, where any good ghost hunter would say we are free to move just about anywhere. Most of us who play checkers love that final stage of the game because we get to say to our opponents, “king me.” They then have to place another checker on top of the one who has reached the other side, signifying that this piece is now different, somehow transformed to move everywhere. Today we will close with the words of Wendell Berry, who in “The Larger Circle” reminds us as the living generation that we must collect the meaning of the past, find what is most vital in it, and hand on the meaning we have found to those who follow. Our hands are joined in the larger circle of life and community, and we must collect its meaning in the experiences we have with each other. It is difficult to construct that new spiral of meaning as we move toward freedom, but as the church and its ministry we must listen intently for those moments of the joy of togetherness, of the pain of separation, and collect them for expression - here is the love we hold in this moment together. It is only a tiny fragment of all the love the universe possess, but we remind people that the universe was created from it, and we each have it, and together we can hand that spark, that fragment on to another. And that is enough.
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers, whose hands are joined in a dance.
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no one hears it
Except in fragments.
First Parish of Watertown - May 27, 2007
(Sermon will be given in a revised version at the ordination of Ron Hersom in Albuquerque, New Mexico on June 10, 2007)
Opening Words from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
Reading - “The Chambered Nautilus” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft steps its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
Sermon - Collector of Moments
Someone asked me for help this year, and I said yes. I think the other clergy in town either dismissed the plea because the caller was not one of theirs, or they felt they were too busy to bother. But I said yes. It turned out that the caller was about my age, although upon meeting her she seemed much older; worn by life. She clearly had difficulty ambulating. I soon learned that the health department in our community was taking her to court to make her clean up her property. Neighbors had complained about the debris which cluttered her lawn. The inside of her house was just as cluttered as the outside. Piles and piles of papers and books. Boxes and bags made the doors and windows seemingly bulge with artifacts. It turned out that saying yes was not really much help. Sure we could make a small dent in the piles of wood and furniture, windows and rakes, and even the ten or so old bicycles in various stages of rusty disrepair. The trash collectors would take some. But there was so much more that she might need, she said. And the idea of hiring a dumpster to simply clean it up was out of the question. I didn’t gain much satisfaction from speaking with her social worker, or with the town health department who really wanted to evict her. It is not a story that will have a happy ending. The parishioners of ours who helped were merely putting their fingers in a large dike that soon would burst.
The person I was trying to help is a hoarder. Without dwelling on the psychosis of this problem, I want to ask the more basic question of what hoarding represents. It means we keep everything. Some people do put a kind of environmental spin on this problem that these people are saving everything for another use, and therefore are not creating increased trash problems, although it often turns out that their property becomes a kind of dump. Perhaps the more pertinent issue is that hoarders keep everything because they cannot decipher between what is useful or important now or in the near future, and what will never be useful. They cannot discern what to keep, and what to throw away. Some people say yes to everything that passes before their eyes. If the minister says yes to everyone who asks for help, it shows no power of discernment. Does a minister always help because he or she should help? This may have been an instance where my help was no help at all. Its a “New England disease,” the inability to throw anything away. You never know when you might need this bolt, this screw, this door, or that old crib that sits in the basement. So we save everything. The annual church rummage sale is always an interesting exercise in junk management. Someone how we are all able to clean out our basements on an annual basis, year after year. Then it seems even after we have given all that we have collected to the church, we go back and buy up everyone else’s junk so that we have have enough to unload it again next year. Some people think of it as a kind of recycling, but it is also scary to contemplate how much stuff each of us has.
Hoarding is a metaphor for what we each must cope with in our lives today. It reminds us of what kind of society we live in, and how difficult it is for each of us to not to overwhelmed but to be able to lift up what is important and meaningful in our lives, and name it and celebrate it. This is what churches and ministers are called to do. Martin Buber, the great theologian tells the story of some students who were shirking their study of the Talmud by playing checkers, when the rabbi walked in on them. They tried to return to their books, but the rabbi smiled letting them know that they should not be embarrassed. The rabbi also taught that truth should be discerned wherever they find it, and so he asked if they knew the three rules of the game. They thought they knew what they were doing, but were afraid of appearing too bold in front of the rabbi. So the rabbi rehearsed the rules of checkers. “First, one must not make two moves at once. Second, one may move only forward, not backward. And third, when you reach the back row, you may move wherever you like. This is what the Torah teaches, and then he walked out.” At first the students were perplexed, but then they discerned the truth from this teaching. We are always moving all over the place, and we clutter up our lives with schedules and things, but wisdom comes from making one move at a time. We should also be clear about who we are and what we want and never look back with regret or longing for what was or might have been; wisdom comes from moving forward. Finally, we become truly free when we reach the last row, and become servants of others. Wisdom comes in the freedom to pass on all that you have and are so that life and love may continue for those who follow.
Most of us would agree that a wedding is a major event in the life of a person. It is a ceremony that symbolizes a lifetime commitment to another person. I recently had the wonderful experience of conducting a wedding for a 25 year old woman whom I dedicated as an infant 24 years ago. Even more significant is that I also conducted the wedding for her parents, and welcomed them as members into the first church I served. The parents had not seen me since I left town. I was moved, especially by the husband’s response because it was clear that upon hearing my voice he was reliving that initial commitment he had made so long ago. Although the hair was whiter and the waist wider, I felt like I was able to give them the gift of meaning and renewal by reliving the moment that had launched them on what turned out to be a long, loving, but, like any marriage, not easy journey. After the rehearsal dinner, the big guy who had been in the welding business all these years turned to me, and said, “give me a hug.” Contrast this, if you will with what weddings have often come to represent. Newsweek magazine recently reported that weddings are no longer meaningful events, but instead are shopping extravaganzas. The meaning is found in the purchase of disconnected items all to make for a more opulent event, but none of the individual purchases add up to any unified significance. The article concluded that the ordeal of buying and planning was so demanding that the effort alone must make it mean something.
What this means in today’s culture is that we, like the hoarders, have a hard time discerning where meaning is to be found. One solution is to make the narration of the everyday meaningful. This was portrayed in Jim Carrey’s movie The Truman Show where Truman is unaware that his entire life is a hugely popular 24-hour-a-day TV series. In this real-time documentary, every moment of Truman's existence is captured by concealed cameras and telecast to a giant global audience. This is like the narration of the details of our lives over the phone, or their depiction on YouTube. Perhaps we feel like if we narrate everything there will be something of meaning in there, but of course, it simply becomes harder to discern. The other solution is to make everything important and everyone champions. I noticed this when my older son was growing up and he received a trophy simply for participating in soccer and baseball year after year while I remembered never receiving a trophy in my entire athletic career. While it is important to affirm our children, one wonders if they will lose the capacity to make judgments about what is important and worthy of making note of. The other day my neighbor was going to see his granddaughter in a school musical rendition of the Three Little Pigs. He filmed it, and then after filming it he made five copies for every member of the family. The next thing would be selling copies to every single parent. Perhaps this was a singularly important event in first grade, but it made we wonder if there is a tendency among us to make a trophy moment out of everything, because we are unable to pick out where meaning really lies. Yet if we are always champions and every drawing our child makes is another Picasso in the making then we have failed to discern the significance or beauty or achievement of anybody or anything.
More than a century and half ago Unitarians and Universalists began to have grave moral concerns about slavery. Most of our congregations today occasionally give voice to the words of one of our abolitionist forebears, James Russell Lowell in the hymn that has been revised to say, “Once to every soul and nation, comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.” Now I am not suggesting that DVDs of the Three Little Pigs is a mortal sin, but I am saying that churches and ministers play a role in society in helpful us all to discern the true from the false, good religion from bad religion, and cultural influences that are are going to heal or destroy our hearts and souls. It has become popular these days, perhaps in response to a fear of fundamentalism, to see religion being bashed in popular books. One would believe that everything evil in the world emanates from religion and its dogmatic truths. While we Unitarian Universalists have occasionally been guilty of religion bashing, we should also acknowledge that we will always need religion. This is precisely because it is that part of life where we try to make sense of ourselves and the world in which we live. If there is meaning to be discovered, it must be found in religious explorations. Thus if people are hoarding, if people are narrating, if people are filming without editing, making moral choices without discernment or critical faculty, then there is a gigantic hole for us to fill. This is the challenge of the church and its ministry. We are called to celebrate in story and worship, in symbolic rites and ceremony, life’s important events and thus, its fundamental meaning.
Ministers and churches are products of their cultures, but by their very being they are called to help people make choices within that culture so that their lives becomes a deeper celebration of all that is sacred. When our friends from England were visiting here, they used to complain all the time about the number of choices in the supermarkets. They were overwhelmed with the 18 different kinds of everything from tomato sauce to toothpaste. Once limited by what was available we all know that we can eat food from everywhere at any time. As is true of every other product on the market we can have what we want when we want it. Now many of us are asking about the moral implications of this. In her new book Barbara Kingsolver describes how her family tried eating only local and fresh produce for a year. What moral choices do we make? What about plastic bags that seemingly reproduce in the thousands? It may be wonderful to have strawberries in January, but what are the environmental costs? Are we killing ourselves and our planet to have everything all the time? What if we had to wait to pick them off the bushes in July as we do every summer in Maine? Think too of the religious implications if we have this one moment in time with those delicious red berries, then it became a kind of transcendent moment when we can celebrate that amazing taste. We sit with our berries, and we savor them. The church and its ministry is calling us to serve the source of life itself, and so we make deeply reflective, morally challenging decisions about food and cars and other possessions because we want to heal our planet, and ourselves and we want to be able to pay attention to what makes us feel good and healthy and free of encumbrances that heretofore have made it exceedingly hard to find meaning at all.
The Chambered Nautilus by Unitarian poet Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of the great nature poems of the nineteenth century. The mollusk as it develops and learns from life spirals into a larger and larger shell. Holmes writes, “Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free. . . “ The sea creature’s development is a metaphor for our soul. The church marks those moments of spiral or of significance in each of our lives, and it is up to the ministry to call forth the meaning of those moments in each child dedication, coming of age, marriage, and memorial. If the culture urges us to hoard moments by rushing on to whatever is next, or hoard things by buying the latest or the best, the ministry of the church must be present, gently reminding the soul to take time to remember this moment, live deeply into this moment, experience its full joy or grief, and then perhaps ritualize its significance with a ceremony of recognition. The ministry must be collectors of moments, and observers and celebrators of all of life’s significant spirals, thus marking our days with the meaning found in our relationships with each other in community. We not only pay attention to those moments, but we must be able to transition through them, even if we are made frail or wrecked, like the nautilus. The nautilus closes off its old chambers, and spirals again. We become larger selves, as we learn to grow to become more closely aligned with that life force which calls us to move forward into greater loving, becoming more aware of the sacredness of all life.
Finally, there must be a vision of who we yet hope to be. In the checker game if we manage to play so that we are making one move at a time, and we are moving forward, how do we achieve freedom? Holmes’ poem is frequently used for memorial services as a metaphor for growing a soul, or expanding our horizons until we enter the freedom of the afterlife, where any good ghost hunter would say we are free to move just about anywhere. Most of us who play checkers love that final stage of the game because we get to say to our opponents, “king me.” They then have to place another checker on top of the one who has reached the other side, signifying that this piece is now different, somehow transformed to move everywhere. Today we will close with the words of Wendell Berry, who in “The Larger Circle” reminds us as the living generation that we must collect the meaning of the past, find what is most vital in it, and hand on the meaning we have found to those who follow. Our hands are joined in the larger circle of life and community, and we must collect its meaning in the experiences we have with each other. It is difficult to construct that new spiral of meaning as we move toward freedom, but as the church and its ministry we must listen intently for those moments of the joy of togetherness, of the pain of separation, and collect them for expression - here is the love we hold in this moment together. It is only a tiny fragment of all the love the universe possess, but we remind people that the universe was created from it, and we each have it, and together we can hand that spark, that fragment on to another. And that is enough.
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,
And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other’s arms
And the larger circle of lovers, whose hands are joined in a dance.
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no one hears it
Except in fragments.
"Love and Help" by Mark Harris, May 13, 2007
“Love and Help” Mark W. Harris
May 13, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - “Spring” by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her ---
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
Reading - “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” by Anne Bradstreet
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow are sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These O protect from stepdame's injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy dear love's sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
Sermon - “Love and Help” - Mark W. Harris
Many springs ago I saw a black bear darting across the road near my childhood home. Perhaps she had just woken from a long winter’s nap. She was sleek and quick. Perhaps she was a mother in pursuit of her cubs running to protect that which was hers, that which makes her love the world, offspring of her perfect love. This has been a disturbing year for human offspring in the news. There were the Amish school girls shot and killed last fall . Now so far away. Locally there was the young girl who suffered from a mood disorder who died of a drug overdose administered by her parents, who were subsequently accused of murder. There was the murder of the young high school student in Sudbury by the boy with Asperger’s syndrome. There is the ongoing violence in Boston, especially marked by the young girl paralyzed by a bullet forgiving the man who shot her. Finally, only weeks ago there were the murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech by a college student, a child on the boundary of adulthood who seemingly never received the help he needed for his mental illness. News stories rush by, and we quickly let them pass through our minds and hearts, and then gird ourselves up for the next. At the time of the Amish school girl killings, we heard a great deal about how forgiving the community was. Then with Virginia Tech, the politicians rushed to tells us we cannot make sense of such violence, and that we must have faith that grief will be expressed, healing will occur, and we can move on, but we should not speak of our predilection for violence or of gun control. This is somehow unfair, almost like saying we shouldn’t equate smoking with lung cancer. One Globe columnist pointed out that this is insane to continually uphold violence as a national pastime with our passion for guns, while saying this madman violated our gentle innocence.
Thursday night Andrea and I were watching the 11:00 o’clock news which had given us the usual litany of enticing headlines including blips about a local boy who was killed in Iraq, and the possibility that the President might shift his views on the war. I think the young man was from Rockland. He was a Marine, out on foot patrol. Shot in the head and killed. He is going to be buried this week on his birthday. I could feel my stomach turn upside down, as the newscaster recited her lines. The young Marine’s mother was clearly distraught, that her baby was coming home in a box, and yet she kept repeating that this was what he always wanted to do. Defend his country, be a soldier, be a Marine. He died a hero, she said. Many of us know that Mother’s Day was first conceived of a Mother’s Day for Peace, because of all those mothers who had lost their children to war. It was Julia Ward Howe, a Mother and an active Unitarian, who proclaimed, “Arise, all women who have hearts . . . From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm.” Now in another town in our Commonwealth, a mother prepares to bury her son, a victim of war. All those years of giving, and giving. We hear the echoes of I would do anything for my children to help them grow, give them good values, find their place in their world. But it was what he wanted to do, and she loved him so.
There was a young man who reached his maturity at about the same time as West Side Story was making a name for itself as a broadway hit. It was a story that made us aware of gang warfare, and even the role of gangs in giving young man a sense of self-esteem and power and family for many who did not have any of those things. They sang: “Here come the Jets
Like a bat out of hell. Someone gets in our way, Someone don't feel so well! Here come the Jets:
Little world, step aside! Better go underground, Better run, better hide!” This young man I spoke of, drove a fast Ford convertible. It had sleek, clean lines with foam dice hanging from his mirror. It was even used for Sunday drag racing, a chance to prove he had the fastest car of all. He hung with a fast crowd. They drank and drove around, high school buddies. Sometimes they drove to other towns.
In those other towns there were more young men. They were always trying to prove they were the fastest or the toughest in front of their friends. It was a territory kind of thing. They invaded someone else’s turf. What started it all? That was hard to say. Who can remember? Did he shoot the winning shot in the basketball game or date the wrong girl, or just look contrary? Whatever the case, they came after the young man one night. Those toughs from the other turf. He had a tip they were going to track him down, and they had chains to beat him with. Could it be true? How could he escape their wrath? He was poised to go out. He always went out; no one would intimidate him. But she said, No. Don’t be stupid, Don't get yourself killed. You haven’t always listened to me, but, now, you must. What would it be like to lose a child? To lose a child to violence and misbegotten pride. Stop this madness , she said, and then she cried and cried. She was near hysteria begging him not to go. He often did not listen to her wisdom about what to eat or what to wear or how much sleep to get, or when to come home, but she loved him so. And this night for once, he stayed home.
She did not have to endure his hard death, which followed upon his hard birth from so many years before. She had taught him not to hurt others. Today we might say don’t be a bully, but sometimes the bully is created by a bully culture. We beat them up in other ways. We stigmatize and judge and single out the other, when the other is often in us. It was June, and the hot sizzling summer was before them all. Graduation time was near. Families celebrating 12 years of tests and grades, friendships and romances, projects and games, triumphs and disappointments. He had been celebrating too much. Drunken high school parties which miraculously did not result in car crashes and tragedy in the midst of celebration. Somehow this young man made it home one night, even though he could barely stand. His friends had driven him and then abandoned him to an expanse of lawn before the front door. He could not even traverse that, but had a sibling to help him perambulate. His mother looked out the window, and noticed one son, and said why is he helping that old drunk across the lawn, and her spouse responded, that’s no old drunk, that is your son. That figure we despise and denigrate can be our flesh and blood.
Who is that person you ask? You were never perfect, or even able to get many things right. She asked you to pick up, and far too often you failed to listen. You said you would do jobs for her, but more often than not, the jobs failed to get done. What about that trash and that shoveling? Do what you promise, she taught, do the right thing. You said you would do all the math problems, but only managed to get one done. You said you would be home at 10, but it soon became 11 and then 12. Oh sure, she threatened consequences, and sometimes even punished. You cannot go to that party. What, I’d sooner die. But you didn’t go. And you didn’t die. You may have been that old drunk for one night. And even suffered a punishment. She still took you in. She still accepted you. If you had a learning problem, or suffered some from depression, or addiction, she tried to listen in whatever way she could, and always, she still took you in, She tried to get others to understand, when mostly they couldn’t or even failed to try. She didn’t always know the best way to understand you, but even that did not matter, she loved you so.
Anne Bradstreet came to America on the Arbella, and became the first great poet of our land. In her humility and self-understanding she wrote to her children about “the many faults that well you know I have.” Mothers and fathers often become obsessed with their faults these days. We are guilty if we work outside the home too much, and guilty if we do not. We try to get help, but may not really know what will work, and others may not either. We worry that we are not around, and do not know what to do when we are. We worry about medications and diets and exercise, and just figuring our how to understand each other on a basic level. And it is all very hard. Anne Bradstreet knew that long past in our history, and we each know it in turn. May Sarton, asks what is the saving word from so deep in the past? She thinks of those who have lost their children and then borne them again. Lost them to all they dreamed they would be, but never are, and learn to celebrate, as best we can, sometimes in pain and exhaustion, that when they are born again from the schools that did not work out, or the marriages that did not work out, or the careers that did not work out. She may not have been a genius, or forged the perfect marriage, or all she wanted to do was see that bread was on the table, and no one got into trouble.
There is a knot, Anne Bradstreet says, that makes us one. We are forever tied to our mothers, and so they, like her, say, “if any worth or virtue were in me, let that live freshly in thy memory.” May Sarton says we remember this deep primal spirit that sprung us into life as strength and endurance. She kept us going. She had strength. She tried to protect and help. The boy in Sudbury was doing well in his old school, but the town said he could not stay. It came down to money. What if there were help for those who struggle with learning, with mental health issues? There was another boy who was not doing very well in school. He was falling into some bad behavior patterns because of the crowd that he ran with. His fate in life, or so it seemed in retrospect, hung in the balance. He would continue to do poorly, if he remained with those who fought and taunted and didn’t care. And moreover, they had no one to help him discover the tools he could implement to help them care. Then one day she went to the head of the school, and said this class is not working for him. My son is going to fail if you leave him in this environment with no help. He needs people to show him the right way to do things. He needs someone to care. You write him off for not trying, but he is struggling with the environment, himself, and failure will lead to more failure. She stood up for him, when he needed it the most.
Love and help is the name for a Unitarian Universalist Scouting curriculum. Children learn the importance of love for others, and helping others. Trying to preach about motherhood is like trying to wrestle crocodiles, I suppose. How do we get a handle on something that is our life blood and our meaning for how we understand the world, and wrestle with every day. Mothers give us everything they have mostly, and some are better at it than others. Violence and loss of life is a grievous pain to all mothers, just as it is for fathers. We join with a call for peace, even as we remember those who died wanting to be warriors. More often than not, I would guess, mothers want us to see their children for who they they are. They want us to not deny the faults that we all have, or the imperfections we all have. We all struggle with coming to accept who we are, and Mothers show us the way by loving us regardless. Finally, mothers, more often than not, are our advocates. They want us to find our way in the world, and to be happy.
I asked my wife to read this sermon; for reassurance, because its Mother’s Day; and for her fine editorial skills. And so she did. She made very few changes; but one consistent one. All through this sermon, I had written of human life, of ending violence, of acceptance, of affirmation and then concluded, mothers love us “anyway.” Andrea changed that every time. She changed it to Mother’s love us. Period. There is no anyway, no qualifier. We are loved for who we are, for the fact that we exist - not in spite of anything. Just know you have been love, exactly as you.
We are blessed because our mothers have given us the start we had, the roots we carry, and the wings to fly with. And for that we give thanks to the primal spirit of life who gives us the innate strength and endurance to carry on, and the laughter to celebrate that we are loved.
Closing Words - from Letters from Maine - 6 - by May Sarton
“When a woman feels alone, when the room
Is full of daemons,” the Nootka tribe
Tells us, “the Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night?” Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past,
From as deep as the ancient root of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal Spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with the survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.
May 13, 2007 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words - “Spring” by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her ---
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
Reading - “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” by Anne Bradstreet
All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow are sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel'st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These O protect from stepdame's injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy dear love's sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
Sermon - “Love and Help” - Mark W. Harris
Many springs ago I saw a black bear darting across the road near my childhood home. Perhaps she had just woken from a long winter’s nap. She was sleek and quick. Perhaps she was a mother in pursuit of her cubs running to protect that which was hers, that which makes her love the world, offspring of her perfect love. This has been a disturbing year for human offspring in the news. There were the Amish school girls shot and killed last fall . Now so far away. Locally there was the young girl who suffered from a mood disorder who died of a drug overdose administered by her parents, who were subsequently accused of murder. There was the murder of the young high school student in Sudbury by the boy with Asperger’s syndrome. There is the ongoing violence in Boston, especially marked by the young girl paralyzed by a bullet forgiving the man who shot her. Finally, only weeks ago there were the murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech by a college student, a child on the boundary of adulthood who seemingly never received the help he needed for his mental illness. News stories rush by, and we quickly let them pass through our minds and hearts, and then gird ourselves up for the next. At the time of the Amish school girl killings, we heard a great deal about how forgiving the community was. Then with Virginia Tech, the politicians rushed to tells us we cannot make sense of such violence, and that we must have faith that grief will be expressed, healing will occur, and we can move on, but we should not speak of our predilection for violence or of gun control. This is somehow unfair, almost like saying we shouldn’t equate smoking with lung cancer. One Globe columnist pointed out that this is insane to continually uphold violence as a national pastime with our passion for guns, while saying this madman violated our gentle innocence.
Thursday night Andrea and I were watching the 11:00 o’clock news which had given us the usual litany of enticing headlines including blips about a local boy who was killed in Iraq, and the possibility that the President might shift his views on the war. I think the young man was from Rockland. He was a Marine, out on foot patrol. Shot in the head and killed. He is going to be buried this week on his birthday. I could feel my stomach turn upside down, as the newscaster recited her lines. The young Marine’s mother was clearly distraught, that her baby was coming home in a box, and yet she kept repeating that this was what he always wanted to do. Defend his country, be a soldier, be a Marine. He died a hero, she said. Many of us know that Mother’s Day was first conceived of a Mother’s Day for Peace, because of all those mothers who had lost their children to war. It was Julia Ward Howe, a Mother and an active Unitarian, who proclaimed, “Arise, all women who have hearts . . . From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm.” Now in another town in our Commonwealth, a mother prepares to bury her son, a victim of war. All those years of giving, and giving. We hear the echoes of I would do anything for my children to help them grow, give them good values, find their place in their world. But it was what he wanted to do, and she loved him so.
There was a young man who reached his maturity at about the same time as West Side Story was making a name for itself as a broadway hit. It was a story that made us aware of gang warfare, and even the role of gangs in giving young man a sense of self-esteem and power and family for many who did not have any of those things. They sang: “Here come the Jets
Like a bat out of hell. Someone gets in our way, Someone don't feel so well! Here come the Jets:
Little world, step aside! Better go underground, Better run, better hide!” This young man I spoke of, drove a fast Ford convertible. It had sleek, clean lines with foam dice hanging from his mirror. It was even used for Sunday drag racing, a chance to prove he had the fastest car of all. He hung with a fast crowd. They drank and drove around, high school buddies. Sometimes they drove to other towns.
In those other towns there were more young men. They were always trying to prove they were the fastest or the toughest in front of their friends. It was a territory kind of thing. They invaded someone else’s turf. What started it all? That was hard to say. Who can remember? Did he shoot the winning shot in the basketball game or date the wrong girl, or just look contrary? Whatever the case, they came after the young man one night. Those toughs from the other turf. He had a tip they were going to track him down, and they had chains to beat him with. Could it be true? How could he escape their wrath? He was poised to go out. He always went out; no one would intimidate him. But she said, No. Don’t be stupid, Don't get yourself killed. You haven’t always listened to me, but, now, you must. What would it be like to lose a child? To lose a child to violence and misbegotten pride. Stop this madness , she said, and then she cried and cried. She was near hysteria begging him not to go. He often did not listen to her wisdom about what to eat or what to wear or how much sleep to get, or when to come home, but she loved him so. And this night for once, he stayed home.
She did not have to endure his hard death, which followed upon his hard birth from so many years before. She had taught him not to hurt others. Today we might say don’t be a bully, but sometimes the bully is created by a bully culture. We beat them up in other ways. We stigmatize and judge and single out the other, when the other is often in us. It was June, and the hot sizzling summer was before them all. Graduation time was near. Families celebrating 12 years of tests and grades, friendships and romances, projects and games, triumphs and disappointments. He had been celebrating too much. Drunken high school parties which miraculously did not result in car crashes and tragedy in the midst of celebration. Somehow this young man made it home one night, even though he could barely stand. His friends had driven him and then abandoned him to an expanse of lawn before the front door. He could not even traverse that, but had a sibling to help him perambulate. His mother looked out the window, and noticed one son, and said why is he helping that old drunk across the lawn, and her spouse responded, that’s no old drunk, that is your son. That figure we despise and denigrate can be our flesh and blood.
Who is that person you ask? You were never perfect, or even able to get many things right. She asked you to pick up, and far too often you failed to listen. You said you would do jobs for her, but more often than not, the jobs failed to get done. What about that trash and that shoveling? Do what you promise, she taught, do the right thing. You said you would do all the math problems, but only managed to get one done. You said you would be home at 10, but it soon became 11 and then 12. Oh sure, she threatened consequences, and sometimes even punished. You cannot go to that party. What, I’d sooner die. But you didn’t go. And you didn’t die. You may have been that old drunk for one night. And even suffered a punishment. She still took you in. She still accepted you. If you had a learning problem, or suffered some from depression, or addiction, she tried to listen in whatever way she could, and always, she still took you in, She tried to get others to understand, when mostly they couldn’t or even failed to try. She didn’t always know the best way to understand you, but even that did not matter, she loved you so.
Anne Bradstreet came to America on the Arbella, and became the first great poet of our land. In her humility and self-understanding she wrote to her children about “the many faults that well you know I have.” Mothers and fathers often become obsessed with their faults these days. We are guilty if we work outside the home too much, and guilty if we do not. We try to get help, but may not really know what will work, and others may not either. We worry that we are not around, and do not know what to do when we are. We worry about medications and diets and exercise, and just figuring our how to understand each other on a basic level. And it is all very hard. Anne Bradstreet knew that long past in our history, and we each know it in turn. May Sarton, asks what is the saving word from so deep in the past? She thinks of those who have lost their children and then borne them again. Lost them to all they dreamed they would be, but never are, and learn to celebrate, as best we can, sometimes in pain and exhaustion, that when they are born again from the schools that did not work out, or the marriages that did not work out, or the careers that did not work out. She may not have been a genius, or forged the perfect marriage, or all she wanted to do was see that bread was on the table, and no one got into trouble.
There is a knot, Anne Bradstreet says, that makes us one. We are forever tied to our mothers, and so they, like her, say, “if any worth or virtue were in me, let that live freshly in thy memory.” May Sarton says we remember this deep primal spirit that sprung us into life as strength and endurance. She kept us going. She had strength. She tried to protect and help. The boy in Sudbury was doing well in his old school, but the town said he could not stay. It came down to money. What if there were help for those who struggle with learning, with mental health issues? There was another boy who was not doing very well in school. He was falling into some bad behavior patterns because of the crowd that he ran with. His fate in life, or so it seemed in retrospect, hung in the balance. He would continue to do poorly, if he remained with those who fought and taunted and didn’t care. And moreover, they had no one to help him discover the tools he could implement to help them care. Then one day she went to the head of the school, and said this class is not working for him. My son is going to fail if you leave him in this environment with no help. He needs people to show him the right way to do things. He needs someone to care. You write him off for not trying, but he is struggling with the environment, himself, and failure will lead to more failure. She stood up for him, when he needed it the most.
Love and help is the name for a Unitarian Universalist Scouting curriculum. Children learn the importance of love for others, and helping others. Trying to preach about motherhood is like trying to wrestle crocodiles, I suppose. How do we get a handle on something that is our life blood and our meaning for how we understand the world, and wrestle with every day. Mothers give us everything they have mostly, and some are better at it than others. Violence and loss of life is a grievous pain to all mothers, just as it is for fathers. We join with a call for peace, even as we remember those who died wanting to be warriors. More often than not, I would guess, mothers want us to see their children for who they they are. They want us to not deny the faults that we all have, or the imperfections we all have. We all struggle with coming to accept who we are, and Mothers show us the way by loving us regardless. Finally, mothers, more often than not, are our advocates. They want us to find our way in the world, and to be happy.
I asked my wife to read this sermon; for reassurance, because its Mother’s Day; and for her fine editorial skills. And so she did. She made very few changes; but one consistent one. All through this sermon, I had written of human life, of ending violence, of acceptance, of affirmation and then concluded, mothers love us “anyway.” Andrea changed that every time. She changed it to Mother’s love us. Period. There is no anyway, no qualifier. We are loved for who we are, for the fact that we exist - not in spite of anything. Just know you have been love, exactly as you.
We are blessed because our mothers have given us the start we had, the roots we carry, and the wings to fly with. And for that we give thanks to the primal spirit of life who gives us the innate strength and endurance to carry on, and the laughter to celebrate that we are loved.
Closing Words - from Letters from Maine - 6 - by May Sarton
“When a woman feels alone, when the room
Is full of daemons,” the Nootka tribe
Tells us, “the Old Woman will be there.”
She has come to me over three thousand miles
And what does she have to tell me, troubled
“by phantoms in the night?” Is she really here?
What is the saving word from so deep in the past,
From as deep as the ancient root of the redwood,
From as deep as the primal bed of the ocean,
From as deep as a woman’s heart sprung open
Again through a hard birth or a hard death?
Here under the shock of love, I am open
To you, Primal Spirit, one with rock and wave,
One with the survivors of flood and fire,
Who have rebuilt their homes a million times,
Who have lost their children and borne them again.
The words I hear are strength, laughter, endurance.
Old woman I meet you deep inside myself.
There in the rootbed of fertility,
World without end, as the legend tells it.
Under the words you are my silence.
"Creeping Creedalism" by Mark W. Harris - May 6, 2007
Sermon - “Creeping Creedalism”
Rev. Mark W. Harris - First Parish of Watertown - May 6, 2007
Reading
from Philip Hewett, “Why Unitarian?” from Unitarians in Canada
Most Unitarians have little doubt that they have something distinctively
different to offer. They often, however, find it surprisingly difficult to
say precisely what it is. Sometimes they have succumbed to the ever-lurking
temptation that leads holders of a minority point of view to explain it in
terms laid down by the majority. What this has produced in practice is a
catalogue of rejections or reinterpretations of traditional beliefs, giving
Unitarianism an essentially negative appearance. “A Unitarian', Somerset
Maugham once wrote, 'very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else
believes." On closer inspection, what everyone else believes turns out to
be the general consensus among professed Christians. It is true that many
doctrines regarded as essential by most Christians are not accepted by
Unitarians, but no movement based solely upon negations could have survived
so doggedly, often in face of considerable social and even political
pressures.
The real reason why it is so difficult to define Unitarianism in a few words
is that its distinguishing characteristics are not to be found in the realm
of beliefs and doctrines at all. These are only the symptoms of something
that lies far deeper. Unitarianism represents a wholly different approach to
the question of authority in religion, by which an individual's beliefs and
lifestyle are to be justified. Within traditional Christianity this
authority is found in the Bible, or in the Church, or in the recorded
sayings of the founding fathers. Unitarians find it in the reason and
conscience of the individual. The Reformation principle of the right of
private judgment in matters of religion is thus pressed to its ultimate
limit, and this is far more significant than any differences that may exist
on specific points of belief and practice. 'Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind', wrote Emerson, himself at one time a
Unitarian minister.
Such a demand for personal integrity carries with it far-reaching
consequences. The person who takes it seriously will not accept religion at
second hand. It has to be forged anew in the fires of one's own thought and
experience. Help from others in this formidable undertaking may be gladly
accepted, but one reserves the final responsibility to oneself. Given the
variety of human thought and experiences, it is not to be expected that a
complete consensus will emerge among those committing themselves to such an
enterprise. 'Unity in diversity' has therefore become a key phrase
expressing one aspect of Unitarianism. The unity is to be found in the
process; the diversity in the product.
The attractiveness of such a form of religion for some people is quite
obvious. Almost equally obvious are the problems it raises. The person who
makes a responsible attempt to put Unitarianism into practice has to live
within the continuing tension between conflicting forces that are by no
means easy to reconcile.. . .
One such tension is the perennial one between individuality and community. . .
A second closely related tension is between freedom and order. Without an effective recognition of the claims of each, freedom degenerates into irresponsible license and order into authoritarianism. . .A third tension under which Unitarians have to live is that between tolerance on the one hand and conviction on the other. Tolerance, like
freedom and individuality, has been one of the traditional Unitarian virtues: However, tolerance comes most easily when nothing really matters, when a person has no vital and compelling beliefs about anything. Where
there are strong and definite beliefs, it becomes notoriously more difficult
to tolerate opposing beliefs, particularly in religion. . . A fourth type of tension experienced by Unitarians is that between
rationalism and romanticism. Rationalism laid its emphasis upon the
intellect, and upon social action as a political process. Romanticism laid
its emphasis upon the feelings, and upon social action as interpersonal
encounter. . . In many ways these tensions are the same as those
experienced in the political arena by people attempting responsibly to make
democracy work. In fact, Unitarianism has been called the expression of the
democratic spirit in religion.
Sermon - “Creeping Creedalism”
This morning we had a responsive reading. I once heard second hand that there is a member of this congregation who does not like to have responsive readings as part of the worship service. In our speculations as to why this is so, we might think they do not like rote elements of worship because they remind them of some orthodox past, or perhaps they simply do not like tangential elements and want the spoken words to be mainly sermonic, feeling the rest is just filler. While these might be legitimate concerns for some people, I heard that in this person’s case the reason was that they did not like having words put in their mouth. Don’t tell me what to say. For some of us, especially those who were brought up in some orthodox faith, this concern may arise from a childhood faith where we learned to recite a creed. As a child I remember, the preacher instructing us to turn to the front of the hymnal where the “Apostle’s Creed” from the Protestant Reformed Tradition was pasted in. We began, “I believe in God the father almighty maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son.” The memory fades, but then returns, “He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” That phrase always stopped me in my tracks. As an athlete and sports fan the idea of “The quick” made it seem like Jesus was some superscout or something. But it was really about anyone who was still moving at all, the living.
I never liked reciting a creed stating my beliefs. I didn’t mind the words being put in my mouth. It was what they said. While my mind seemed suited to memorizing Bible verses and the like, and I impressed someone recently by reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory, the ideas expressed in the creed were too irrational for my young, inquiring mind. While they were the generally accepted beliefs for all Christians, the idea of a virgin mother, a dead man rising, and somebody literally sitting on the right hand of God went too far beyond any science fiction I was reading. It turned out that I was the ideal Unitarian Universalist before I knew that our liberal faith existed. I felt like one of our founders William Ellery Channing who as a child sat in the pews of the Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island. He heard the preacher talk one Sunday about God’s wrath at humanity for being so sinful. God was so angry with us that he was going to rain down fire and brimstone, and bring about the end of the world. Young William was terrified, but then after the service, he saw his father shake the minister’s hand as though nothing discomforting had been said at all. It was a sort of “Good Morning Reverend, It is a lovely day.” That very afternoon there was a terrible thunderstorm, and the boy thought the dreadful news he had heard predicted that morning was coming true. He hid under the bed in abject fear.
But it was just a storm, which quickly passed. Was it all a lie just to put fear in the hearts of children? From that day forth, William decided he would never follow a faith that put false fears in his heart. He wanted to teach people that God was a spirit of love, who filled human hearts with the desire to understand how good they are naturally, and how much better they can be if they follow their own hearts in search of truth. As an adult Channing became a Unitarian minister, and the spiritual founder of our faith in America. Among his sermons was one called Spiritual Freedom, which is now excerpted in our hymnal, #592. In part he writes, “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith: which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come; which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.” Faith needed to be an active, searching journey for new and deeper truths rather than merely a rote acceptance of someone else’s beliefs, especially ones that filled your heart with fear or guilt. Following the Protestant revolt of Luther to its logical extreme, some people began to truly believe that the priesthood of all believers means that each one of us must have the freedom to follow truth wherever it takes us. We cannot be tied to the dogmas of the past. And so we liberals of today resonate with the words of Emerson when he writes in Nature, “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Reciting creeds means religion through their eyes, tradition and history. Like Emerson, we want the freedom to discover our own truths. The sun shines also today. Thus Unitarians and Universalists have always rejected the idea of reciting a creed stating our beliefs. The implication is that we might not agree with everything it said, or it might change in the future as new truths are revealed to us. Even though Universalists often had professions of faith, they nearly always carried what was referred to as a liberty clause, an “out” for those who did not want their freedom of belief to be infringed upon. This freedom has been one of the exciting things about Unitarian Universalism for many of us, and we wonder how those who follow more orthodox faiths can blithely mouth beliefs or a creed when it clearly violates the integrity of their hearts and minds. But this freedom also has its limits. Newcomers may hear that we have no common faith that binds us together, and interpret that to mean you can believe anything you want. This desire to have something to hang our religious hats on has, I believe, led to the recent popularity of the Principles and Purposes, a covenant of shared assumptions about our religious perspective which include the integrity and worth of each person, the democratic process, world community and the interdependent web. These principles are supported by a pluralistic smorgasbord of sources including direct experience, Judaism, Christianity and humanism among others. Some people have wondered that while most any kind person would agree with the principles, and the sources includes everything under the sun, where is the distinctiveness of viewpoint and the religious bond that goes beyond freedom? These principles and purposes underscore the lack of theological unity in Unitarian, even as the universal in Universalism and its sources has no boundary. Where do we find the unity in our diversity?
I understand the frustration of trying to describe a free, non-creedal faith to others. A year or so ago our UUA President was trying to encourage members to develop elevator speeches, or how you would describe Unitarian Universalism to a stranger on a elevator ride of a minute or two with a quick synopsis of, “this is what it is.” Now if you rode our First Parish elevator you would probably have time to read an entire introduction to our faith, but they were thinking of something a little quicker. For many people who wanted a very descriptive statement of our faith the Principles were a good substitute for a faith statement. This has even reached the extreme of a poster published by the UUA that is intended for use in our church schools. It lists the seven principles in simpler language, such as “each and every person is important,” rather that “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” But then emblazoned across the top are the words, “We Believe.”
This was not the intent of the Principles, but it does underscore the religious craving to articulate what our faith is all about. This has been a frustration thought out our history. We have more commonly been able to state what we don’t believe in - such as no Trinity, or no Baptism, or even for some no God. Leaving beliefs up to each person seems too onerous for many, and it may be one of the reason we have remained a small movement. There have been times in our history when we have tried to avoid theological fights by stating what we hold in common. The principles have the words “we covenant” at the beginning, and so there is some understanding that we all agree on these ideas, and the same may be said of affirmations or covenants that congregations such as ours recite every Sunday. We can agree that love is the spirit of this church, but what if it said God or Jesus or even We believe. Would it then be a faith statement that would fall into the category of creed? It was Luther who once said,”Forced worships stinks in God’s nostrils.” While that metaphor may not work for us anymore, it does graphically reminds us that binding the spirit with defined beliefs is not what most religious liberals want.
Why then does the UUA publish a We Believe poster for kids? Throughout much of its history Unitarian Universalism has been a faith made up of come outers from other religious denominations. While most of us are converts from other faiths, it also means that historically we have done a poor job of keeping our children in the UU fold. This puts us in sharp contrast to every other religious group around the globe. They depend on their children as the primary membership in the next generation. Our Unitarian Universalist children have used their freedom to make the free choice of going some place else or no where at all. So perhaps we want to make stronger statements of faith to keep our kids. But I also think it is a sign of the times. Religion in general has taken a rightward turn, and liberal mainstream Christian groups have been in decline. Furthermore, many of our new UUs are former Catholics, and so the idea of stating we believe does not have the kind of restrictive implications that it may have had a generation ago.
As a kid growing up, I remember watching Dragnet's Sgt. Joe Friday on TV. This character frequently implored female informants to provide, "Just the facts, ma'am." I think one issue for parents is that they want their children to learn something substantive. So the Principles becomes a kind of simple fact like statement that you can hold up and say, “this is it.” I’ve got it. Perhaps the adults feel they lack this in their own faith, and think the Principles can be a substitute for all their questions. Unfortunately there is not much “I got it” there, except some good general principles to start with. Hopefully anyone on a faith journey would go much deeper than these principles. This is where one or more of the sources of faith come in. Whether it is direct experience such as communing with the spirit, or a profound experience of aspects of Christianity or Buddhism or Islam, we want your faith to take you on a deeper personal journey. These Principles are what a people of free faith can agree on, but your freedom challenges you not to simply say I accept them all or they are all good, but rather to use these principles as your guide, and certain sources as your foundation to find a deeper faith, so that you are empowered to live it in the world.
Some Unitarian Universalists are concerned that the Principles have represented a kind of creeping creedalism for some, because they hunger for a faith statement to define what Unitarian Universalism is, but I am going to tell you today that this is a faith that simply cannot be defined, and if you want a definitive, cogent, static statement of faith, then this is not the religion for you. We live in a culture that is focused on product. Sometimes our denominational officials think our faith is a product that we need to sell to the public. This is a difficult issue because we need to grow in order to survive and thrive. But our faith should grow based on the beauty and depth of the religion - its freedom and openness and its depth of compassion and action - rather than what kind of product we can market. If it is a great faith, and we get that message out there, then it will grow. I think it is a great faith for three very simple reasons that have to do with this problem of not being able to define ourselves.
Unitarian Universalists believe in process not product. We believe that faith is something that we continually discover throughout our lives, and that the truth we find only leads to greater discoveries. We believe in reason and knowledge and understanding one another in newer and deeper ways. Human beings and the world we live in are always changing , always growing, always seeking new creative ways to express ourselves and live in the world. We cannot stop and define process. Long ago Unitarian Francis David discovered in Transylvania that you cannot stop the free search for truth. “Semper Reformanda,” he said, or the Reformation continues. So he evolved personally from Catholic to Lutheran to Calvinist to Unitarian. We believe in wonder and mystery and openness to the future, and not “this is how it is, and will forever be.” Process not product.
Many of you have heard me say it before, but we believe in deeds not creeds. Anyone can state their beliefs in God or the afterlife, or being saved by Jesus, but what is the point of stating a faith if it has little or no relevance to how you live in the world. We are a faith based on ethics, not beliefs. If you are truly saved by Jesus , then show me how to love your enemies, or help the samaritan who was knocked into the ditch, or how to feed the hungry or set free the captives. When my Historical Dictionary was published, my editor noted how many biographies of famous people were there. He was not saying that it was full of celebrities that would help us attract others, but rather that that the faith was defined not by a set of beliefs, but rather by the large number of people who lived their faith in noble and farsighted ways in the field of education and reform trying to make the world a better place. It is a truly democratic expression of faith. We believe that all deserve a place, and all deserve a voice, and all are worthy, and we will fight with our lives to see that this is enacted in the world. Deeds not creeds.
Finally, we believe in Love. God is love. Love is the doctrine of this church. Love is the spirit of this church. I always have liked the old Christian hymn that says, they will know we are Christians by our love. That says much of it. Belief in God or the afterlife does not matter so much, as long as you are a living expression of love for others, and love for our good earth. We believe in relationships not rules. If someone breaks the rules, we don’t simply say, punish. We ask what were the circumstances? Was it fair? The person not the institution. Channing once said, “Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.” Your faith is embodied by the love you express in who you aspire to be, and in how those aspirations are lived day after day. Deeds is what you do in the world. Love is who you are as a person, as expressed in all ways. Philip Hewett, the minister who I shared a reading from today once said, “The bond of unity in a church is not shared belief but a shared worship.” Worship literally means - worth -ship, that we are reverencing what is of ultimate worth to us. Love is a way of being in the world, a reverence for life, as Albert Schweitzer once said. Our Unitarian Universalist worship then is our shared act of celebration expressing our love. This your place not to say I believe in God or Jesus, but a place to express your love. Our love comes forth in what we value - peace, the earth, human character, children, integrity, responsibility. As one of our recent Wayside Pulpits said, and Charlotte Fitts-Sprague quoted in her credo last week. Church is the place where we practice what it means to be human. In our Creedless way we believe in process; we believe in deeds; we believe in love.
Closing Words - from Steve Crump
That which is worthy of doing, create with your hands.
That which is worthy of repeating, speak with a clear voice.
That which is worthy of remembering, hold in your heart.
And that which is worthy of living, go and live it now.
Rev. Mark W. Harris - First Parish of Watertown - May 6, 2007
Reading
from Philip Hewett, “Why Unitarian?” from Unitarians in Canada
Most Unitarians have little doubt that they have something distinctively
different to offer. They often, however, find it surprisingly difficult to
say precisely what it is. Sometimes they have succumbed to the ever-lurking
temptation that leads holders of a minority point of view to explain it in
terms laid down by the majority. What this has produced in practice is a
catalogue of rejections or reinterpretations of traditional beliefs, giving
Unitarianism an essentially negative appearance. “A Unitarian', Somerset
Maugham once wrote, 'very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else
believes." On closer inspection, what everyone else believes turns out to
be the general consensus among professed Christians. It is true that many
doctrines regarded as essential by most Christians are not accepted by
Unitarians, but no movement based solely upon negations could have survived
so doggedly, often in face of considerable social and even political
pressures.
The real reason why it is so difficult to define Unitarianism in a few words
is that its distinguishing characteristics are not to be found in the realm
of beliefs and doctrines at all. These are only the symptoms of something
that lies far deeper. Unitarianism represents a wholly different approach to
the question of authority in religion, by which an individual's beliefs and
lifestyle are to be justified. Within traditional Christianity this
authority is found in the Bible, or in the Church, or in the recorded
sayings of the founding fathers. Unitarians find it in the reason and
conscience of the individual. The Reformation principle of the right of
private judgment in matters of religion is thus pressed to its ultimate
limit, and this is far more significant than any differences that may exist
on specific points of belief and practice. 'Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind', wrote Emerson, himself at one time a
Unitarian minister.
Such a demand for personal integrity carries with it far-reaching
consequences. The person who takes it seriously will not accept religion at
second hand. It has to be forged anew in the fires of one's own thought and
experience. Help from others in this formidable undertaking may be gladly
accepted, but one reserves the final responsibility to oneself. Given the
variety of human thought and experiences, it is not to be expected that a
complete consensus will emerge among those committing themselves to such an
enterprise. 'Unity in diversity' has therefore become a key phrase
expressing one aspect of Unitarianism. The unity is to be found in the
process; the diversity in the product.
The attractiveness of such a form of religion for some people is quite
obvious. Almost equally obvious are the problems it raises. The person who
makes a responsible attempt to put Unitarianism into practice has to live
within the continuing tension between conflicting forces that are by no
means easy to reconcile.. . .
One such tension is the perennial one between individuality and community. . .
A second closely related tension is between freedom and order. Without an effective recognition of the claims of each, freedom degenerates into irresponsible license and order into authoritarianism. . .A third tension under which Unitarians have to live is that between tolerance on the one hand and conviction on the other. Tolerance, like
freedom and individuality, has been one of the traditional Unitarian virtues: However, tolerance comes most easily when nothing really matters, when a person has no vital and compelling beliefs about anything. Where
there are strong and definite beliefs, it becomes notoriously more difficult
to tolerate opposing beliefs, particularly in religion. . . A fourth type of tension experienced by Unitarians is that between
rationalism and romanticism. Rationalism laid its emphasis upon the
intellect, and upon social action as a political process. Romanticism laid
its emphasis upon the feelings, and upon social action as interpersonal
encounter. . . In many ways these tensions are the same as those
experienced in the political arena by people attempting responsibly to make
democracy work. In fact, Unitarianism has been called the expression of the
democratic spirit in religion.
Sermon - “Creeping Creedalism”
This morning we had a responsive reading. I once heard second hand that there is a member of this congregation who does not like to have responsive readings as part of the worship service. In our speculations as to why this is so, we might think they do not like rote elements of worship because they remind them of some orthodox past, or perhaps they simply do not like tangential elements and want the spoken words to be mainly sermonic, feeling the rest is just filler. While these might be legitimate concerns for some people, I heard that in this person’s case the reason was that they did not like having words put in their mouth. Don’t tell me what to say. For some of us, especially those who were brought up in some orthodox faith, this concern may arise from a childhood faith where we learned to recite a creed. As a child I remember, the preacher instructing us to turn to the front of the hymnal where the “Apostle’s Creed” from the Protestant Reformed Tradition was pasted in. We began, “I believe in God the father almighty maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son.” The memory fades, but then returns, “He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” That phrase always stopped me in my tracks. As an athlete and sports fan the idea of “The quick” made it seem like Jesus was some superscout or something. But it was really about anyone who was still moving at all, the living.
I never liked reciting a creed stating my beliefs. I didn’t mind the words being put in my mouth. It was what they said. While my mind seemed suited to memorizing Bible verses and the like, and I impressed someone recently by reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory, the ideas expressed in the creed were too irrational for my young, inquiring mind. While they were the generally accepted beliefs for all Christians, the idea of a virgin mother, a dead man rising, and somebody literally sitting on the right hand of God went too far beyond any science fiction I was reading. It turned out that I was the ideal Unitarian Universalist before I knew that our liberal faith existed. I felt like one of our founders William Ellery Channing who as a child sat in the pews of the Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island. He heard the preacher talk one Sunday about God’s wrath at humanity for being so sinful. God was so angry with us that he was going to rain down fire and brimstone, and bring about the end of the world. Young William was terrified, but then after the service, he saw his father shake the minister’s hand as though nothing discomforting had been said at all. It was a sort of “Good Morning Reverend, It is a lovely day.” That very afternoon there was a terrible thunderstorm, and the boy thought the dreadful news he had heard predicted that morning was coming true. He hid under the bed in abject fear.
But it was just a storm, which quickly passed. Was it all a lie just to put fear in the hearts of children? From that day forth, William decided he would never follow a faith that put false fears in his heart. He wanted to teach people that God was a spirit of love, who filled human hearts with the desire to understand how good they are naturally, and how much better they can be if they follow their own hearts in search of truth. As an adult Channing became a Unitarian minister, and the spiritual founder of our faith in America. Among his sermons was one called Spiritual Freedom, which is now excerpted in our hymnal, #592. In part he writes, “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith: which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come; which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.” Faith needed to be an active, searching journey for new and deeper truths rather than merely a rote acceptance of someone else’s beliefs, especially ones that filled your heart with fear or guilt. Following the Protestant revolt of Luther to its logical extreme, some people began to truly believe that the priesthood of all believers means that each one of us must have the freedom to follow truth wherever it takes us. We cannot be tied to the dogmas of the past. And so we liberals of today resonate with the words of Emerson when he writes in Nature, “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Reciting creeds means religion through their eyes, tradition and history. Like Emerson, we want the freedom to discover our own truths. The sun shines also today. Thus Unitarians and Universalists have always rejected the idea of reciting a creed stating our beliefs. The implication is that we might not agree with everything it said, or it might change in the future as new truths are revealed to us. Even though Universalists often had professions of faith, they nearly always carried what was referred to as a liberty clause, an “out” for those who did not want their freedom of belief to be infringed upon. This freedom has been one of the exciting things about Unitarian Universalism for many of us, and we wonder how those who follow more orthodox faiths can blithely mouth beliefs or a creed when it clearly violates the integrity of their hearts and minds. But this freedom also has its limits. Newcomers may hear that we have no common faith that binds us together, and interpret that to mean you can believe anything you want. This desire to have something to hang our religious hats on has, I believe, led to the recent popularity of the Principles and Purposes, a covenant of shared assumptions about our religious perspective which include the integrity and worth of each person, the democratic process, world community and the interdependent web. These principles are supported by a pluralistic smorgasbord of sources including direct experience, Judaism, Christianity and humanism among others. Some people have wondered that while most any kind person would agree with the principles, and the sources includes everything under the sun, where is the distinctiveness of viewpoint and the religious bond that goes beyond freedom? These principles and purposes underscore the lack of theological unity in Unitarian, even as the universal in Universalism and its sources has no boundary. Where do we find the unity in our diversity?
I understand the frustration of trying to describe a free, non-creedal faith to others. A year or so ago our UUA President was trying to encourage members to develop elevator speeches, or how you would describe Unitarian Universalism to a stranger on a elevator ride of a minute or two with a quick synopsis of, “this is what it is.” Now if you rode our First Parish elevator you would probably have time to read an entire introduction to our faith, but they were thinking of something a little quicker. For many people who wanted a very descriptive statement of our faith the Principles were a good substitute for a faith statement. This has even reached the extreme of a poster published by the UUA that is intended for use in our church schools. It lists the seven principles in simpler language, such as “each and every person is important,” rather that “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” But then emblazoned across the top are the words, “We Believe.”
This was not the intent of the Principles, but it does underscore the religious craving to articulate what our faith is all about. This has been a frustration thought out our history. We have more commonly been able to state what we don’t believe in - such as no Trinity, or no Baptism, or even for some no God. Leaving beliefs up to each person seems too onerous for many, and it may be one of the reason we have remained a small movement. There have been times in our history when we have tried to avoid theological fights by stating what we hold in common. The principles have the words “we covenant” at the beginning, and so there is some understanding that we all agree on these ideas, and the same may be said of affirmations or covenants that congregations such as ours recite every Sunday. We can agree that love is the spirit of this church, but what if it said God or Jesus or even We believe. Would it then be a faith statement that would fall into the category of creed? It was Luther who once said,”Forced worships stinks in God’s nostrils.” While that metaphor may not work for us anymore, it does graphically reminds us that binding the spirit with defined beliefs is not what most religious liberals want.
Why then does the UUA publish a We Believe poster for kids? Throughout much of its history Unitarian Universalism has been a faith made up of come outers from other religious denominations. While most of us are converts from other faiths, it also means that historically we have done a poor job of keeping our children in the UU fold. This puts us in sharp contrast to every other religious group around the globe. They depend on their children as the primary membership in the next generation. Our Unitarian Universalist children have used their freedom to make the free choice of going some place else or no where at all. So perhaps we want to make stronger statements of faith to keep our kids. But I also think it is a sign of the times. Religion in general has taken a rightward turn, and liberal mainstream Christian groups have been in decline. Furthermore, many of our new UUs are former Catholics, and so the idea of stating we believe does not have the kind of restrictive implications that it may have had a generation ago.
As a kid growing up, I remember watching Dragnet's Sgt. Joe Friday on TV. This character frequently implored female informants to provide, "Just the facts, ma'am." I think one issue for parents is that they want their children to learn something substantive. So the Principles becomes a kind of simple fact like statement that you can hold up and say, “this is it.” I’ve got it. Perhaps the adults feel they lack this in their own faith, and think the Principles can be a substitute for all their questions. Unfortunately there is not much “I got it” there, except some good general principles to start with. Hopefully anyone on a faith journey would go much deeper than these principles. This is where one or more of the sources of faith come in. Whether it is direct experience such as communing with the spirit, or a profound experience of aspects of Christianity or Buddhism or Islam, we want your faith to take you on a deeper personal journey. These Principles are what a people of free faith can agree on, but your freedom challenges you not to simply say I accept them all or they are all good, but rather to use these principles as your guide, and certain sources as your foundation to find a deeper faith, so that you are empowered to live it in the world.
Some Unitarian Universalists are concerned that the Principles have represented a kind of creeping creedalism for some, because they hunger for a faith statement to define what Unitarian Universalism is, but I am going to tell you today that this is a faith that simply cannot be defined, and if you want a definitive, cogent, static statement of faith, then this is not the religion for you. We live in a culture that is focused on product. Sometimes our denominational officials think our faith is a product that we need to sell to the public. This is a difficult issue because we need to grow in order to survive and thrive. But our faith should grow based on the beauty and depth of the religion - its freedom and openness and its depth of compassion and action - rather than what kind of product we can market. If it is a great faith, and we get that message out there, then it will grow. I think it is a great faith for three very simple reasons that have to do with this problem of not being able to define ourselves.
Unitarian Universalists believe in process not product. We believe that faith is something that we continually discover throughout our lives, and that the truth we find only leads to greater discoveries. We believe in reason and knowledge and understanding one another in newer and deeper ways. Human beings and the world we live in are always changing , always growing, always seeking new creative ways to express ourselves and live in the world. We cannot stop and define process. Long ago Unitarian Francis David discovered in Transylvania that you cannot stop the free search for truth. “Semper Reformanda,” he said, or the Reformation continues. So he evolved personally from Catholic to Lutheran to Calvinist to Unitarian. We believe in wonder and mystery and openness to the future, and not “this is how it is, and will forever be.” Process not product.
Many of you have heard me say it before, but we believe in deeds not creeds. Anyone can state their beliefs in God or the afterlife, or being saved by Jesus, but what is the point of stating a faith if it has little or no relevance to how you live in the world. We are a faith based on ethics, not beliefs. If you are truly saved by Jesus , then show me how to love your enemies, or help the samaritan who was knocked into the ditch, or how to feed the hungry or set free the captives. When my Historical Dictionary was published, my editor noted how many biographies of famous people were there. He was not saying that it was full of celebrities that would help us attract others, but rather that that the faith was defined not by a set of beliefs, but rather by the large number of people who lived their faith in noble and farsighted ways in the field of education and reform trying to make the world a better place. It is a truly democratic expression of faith. We believe that all deserve a place, and all deserve a voice, and all are worthy, and we will fight with our lives to see that this is enacted in the world. Deeds not creeds.
Finally, we believe in Love. God is love. Love is the doctrine of this church. Love is the spirit of this church. I always have liked the old Christian hymn that says, they will know we are Christians by our love. That says much of it. Belief in God or the afterlife does not matter so much, as long as you are a living expression of love for others, and love for our good earth. We believe in relationships not rules. If someone breaks the rules, we don’t simply say, punish. We ask what were the circumstances? Was it fair? The person not the institution. Channing once said, “Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.” Your faith is embodied by the love you express in who you aspire to be, and in how those aspirations are lived day after day. Deeds is what you do in the world. Love is who you are as a person, as expressed in all ways. Philip Hewett, the minister who I shared a reading from today once said, “The bond of unity in a church is not shared belief but a shared worship.” Worship literally means - worth -ship, that we are reverencing what is of ultimate worth to us. Love is a way of being in the world, a reverence for life, as Albert Schweitzer once said. Our Unitarian Universalist worship then is our shared act of celebration expressing our love. This your place not to say I believe in God or Jesus, but a place to express your love. Our love comes forth in what we value - peace, the earth, human character, children, integrity, responsibility. As one of our recent Wayside Pulpits said, and Charlotte Fitts-Sprague quoted in her credo last week. Church is the place where we practice what it means to be human. In our Creedless way we believe in process; we believe in deeds; we believe in love.
Closing Words - from Steve Crump
That which is worthy of doing, create with your hands.
That which is worthy of repeating, speak with a clear voice.
That which is worthy of remembering, hold in your heart.
And that which is worthy of living, go and live it now.