Recently I listened to an interview on my favorite
public radio show, On Being. Krista Tippett interviewed Christian Wiman, a
poet, essayist, and editor of Poetry
Magazine. Wiman grew up in West Texas in a Southern Baptist family. Like
many young people, he left the church and religion when he left home, but
several years later he returned to religion, to God. I was so engaged by the
program, I listened to the unedited ninety-minute interview, then watched his
interview with Bill Moyers. What captivated me most was this exchange with
Krista Tippett who asks:
[If] you think about yourself in church all those
years ago in west Texas, the church you grew up in, which was just given to you
like the air you breathed and then when you're in church now, what's going on
that's different? How is that experience different?
Mr Wiman: Well,
it's utterly different. I think it's a weaker experience now. I mean, I'm just
too conscious. I wish I were able to let myself go in ways that those people
did in my childhood and still do. When I go to my mother's church now, it's one
of those big mega-churches. You know, I don't agree with their theology and I
don't like a lot of the ways that they commercialize their services, but it is
an incredibly diverse church and the people are intensely
involved. They're treating it as if their whole life were at
stake. The churches I go to, liberal Protestant churches, it seems pretty
casual. I wish there were some credible middle ground. I wish there was some
way of harnessing that — the intensity that I felt in my childhood in more
sophisticated ways.
You know how I talk about my inner-tent-revivalist?
Well this is the tent I’ve been talking about and it’s going up now. Somebody
left that barn door open and my inner-revivalist is coming out. Seriously,
there is a deep and vast hunger to marry the intensity of a tent revival with a
sophisticated understanding of spirit, and we, brothers and sisters, can
officiate. But first we must recognize the power of treating church as if our
whole life were at stake.
Now it’s easy to dismiss this part; we don’t labor
under the threat of eternal damnation. But we live in a state of perpetual
disconnection that causes this hunger. Our daily lives are filled with a
thousand choices that either connect or disconnect us from the ground of our
being—choices that don’t even feel like choices anymore. None of us wants to
purchase products made by exploited workers but we figure what’s our choice? So
we buy the smart phone or the cheap underwear, or anything else we can find at
the big-box store, the discount chain or online, and it tears a little each
time we do because even if we rationalize with our minds, the heart center,
that core part of our being where knowing, not just thinking, resides, sighs.
We know even if we ignore it that there’s no clean way to extract oil or
natural gas. Fossil fuels are dirty even if the ads for them are sanitized.
Literally everywhere we turn, we feel trapped by what feels like an inevitable,
inescapable path paved with the bricks of individualism, competition, and fear.
Our political discourse bounces between ridiculous and rancorous; we let the
free market—not our core values—decide and then shrug our shoulders with a
combination of resignation and powerlessness. We don’t know what to tell or
teach our children about yet another fatal shooting in school; and we don’t
know what to say to those same children for whom bullying is a fact of life and
video war games are staple entertainment.
Daily we spiral deeper into disconnect and the
evidence is ubiquitous. Addiction, asthma, autism, depression, PTSD, chronic
fatigue, poverty, income disparity—all on the rise. We all experience the
disconnect whether or not we name it, see it, or believe it. Our bodies, the
heart-center in each of us knows it. Our lives are at stake.
And yet we see an Easter headline like this one from
the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise:
“Worshippers Waning: Local ministers say fewer of the faithful attend Easter
Services.” And why are people not coming to church the way they did in the
past? Because the old paradigm isn’t working.
Last month I read Thomas Bandy’s
book, Kicking Habits: Welcome Relief for
Addicted Churches. According to Bandy, twentieth-century folks went to
church to belong to an institution, to secure status among the right social
set, because neighbors and coworkers asked, “What church do you attend?” People
joined to belong, and then the church set about to inform them of its
structure, both implicit and explicit. Folks got nominated to committees and
boards. They were groomed to maintain the church as an institution and train
the next generation. Though they began as members, writes Bandy, they ended up
as guardians: keepers of the institution. But in this millennium, he contends,
people come to church, if they come at all, seeking something else. Not
institutional belonging, not doctrine, not hierarchy, not committee meetings.
People today seek deeper meaning, a greater sense of relevance and purpose.
Bandy is not the only one reporting this. Every commentator or researcher I
read says the same thing. People hunger to reconnect with the ground of being.
For some that is God, for others, it is just that, the ground of all being,
including theirs.
Bandy distinguishes between declining churches and
thriving churches. Congregations, he asserts, must cross-examine themselves.
Ask not what is important to many but truly essential to all?
In the newspaper article the minister of our sister
congregation in Leominster says, “she tries to make religion and church life
relevant for people in the post-modern age.” But even where there’s a parking
lot, attendance is down on Easter. Why? Because it’s not enough to pepper our
sermons with contemporary cultural references or sing folk songs. We have to
act as if our lives are at stake. We have to address the deep disquieting
discomforting disconnect that truncates our lives, that induces amnesia so that
we forget and worse, deny our inter-being, the interdependency of the web.
People come here seeking concrete ways to re-connect, to mend the torn fabric
of creation, to engage in tikkun olam,
not simply to do for others, but to relearn compassion for ourselves because we
can’t give away what we don’t have.
People come to church not just to find relevance but
to be relevant, which is to say related. Religion—from the Latin word
for refasten. So how do we refasten
ourselves? How do we re-member, re-attach that cleaved part that longs to be
made whole?
We begin by re-connecting as Unitarian Universalists
to a distinct tradition fraught with dissent that arose out of an insistence
that we unite the intensity of religious fervor with our capacity for critical
and compassionate thought. We recall the early martyrs of our movement who
dared to speak against the religious hierarchies and edicts of their day, where
their lives were literally at stake—being burned there. We teach our children
and they more likely teach us what it means to take a stand—to stand with those
who would otherwise go unprotected, unrepresented, whose dignity even the state
would flagrantly defile.
In the nineteenth century, many Unitarian
congregations split over slavery. Wealthy New England industrialists and mill
owners defended it. Nothing is more profitable than slave labor. No doubt some
of our churches have endowments built on those welted backs. The abolitionists
who spoke up often got run out but they did not go silently because long before
a gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh taught two generations
of westerners the term “inter-are,” abolitionists knew about the
interconnectedness of being. And that knowing propelled them to speak against
the willful ignorance of those who cherry-picked the Bible in defense of an
economy based on defilement.
A century later, when Jim Crow still wielded the
lash, a Unitarian minister in Boston named James Reeb heeded Martin Luther
King’s call to join marchers in Selma. Jim Reeb died at thirty-eight leaving
behind his wife and four children when white men gusseted by fear beat him for
the courage of his convictions, probably because to them, pardon the phrase, he
looked like a nigger-lover. He died by the hand of segregationists and for that
he is remembered in Unitarian Universalist circles, but it was not his death
that embodied his sense of connection; it was his years of ministry working to
integrate neighborhoods and churches, and most importantly, the human heart.
Jim Reeb did not duck controversy or dodge danger by eschewing the divisive. He
understood the fearfulness that grips us and how quickly it transmogrifies into
rage.
A decade ago, before any states had passed marriage
equality laws, the church where I had interned, a church that had welcomed and
affirmed me, that loved the music director and his male partner of near twenty
years, fractured around the full impact of what it meant to be a welcoming
congregation. The suggestion to fly a large rainbow flag met with resistance.
What if people in town think we only welcome gays and not other minorities?
What if people reduce us to being “the gay church”? And with equal urgency
others in the congregation countered, but we are the only church that welcomes gay and transgender people.
Religious institutions have rejected, vilified queer folk for centuries.
Consider what it means for people to be welcomed not shunned? We have the power
to do that, they pled.
A while back, during social hour, I overheard Dick
mention people picketing in front of Planned Parenthood so I made an
appointment a couple of weeks ago to meet the outreach coordinator there. The
director of the clinic let me in. I had to ring a buzzer so the director could
check the live video feed to make sure she didn’t let in someone with a weapon.
If I might speak to the women for just a moment, do you remember your first
pelvic exam? I was terrified. The thought of it was creepy and invasive. I
cannot imagine overlaying that late adolescent self-consciousness and fear with
having to be buzzed into a building because someone might burst in and shoot
the doctor. It doesn’t matter that no abortions are performed in Fitchburg. To
the people who carry signs equating abortion with murder, they are content to
willfully ignore the statistics: that nationally, 97% of the health services
Planned Parenthood provides are not related to an abortion—or that abortion is
still legal. It is not that the protesters are evil or even hateful though it
probably feels that way to the young woman terrified because she has missed a
period, or the young man afraid he has contracted or spread an STD, who have finally
summoned the courage to get tested—as they walk through the gauntlet of stares,
signs and disparaging remarks.
As I said before, we live in a world that
perpetually disconnects us. Each day every one of us without wanting to, or
meaning to, or even thinking that we are, engage in processes that diminish
life. The World Health Organization estimates that somewhere between 30-40,000
children die every day of preventable conditions, namely the lack of clean
water and adequate nutrition. Right this minute there are thousands of children
languishing in foster homes. And thousands more abducted, sold into sexual
slavery, splayed on pornographic websites. You don’t need me to list all the
ways we defile the inherent worth and dignity of so many beings. It’s easier to
fixate on abortion as the single most egregious form of defilement than to
reckon with all the forms in which we are complicit.
And yes, I could tell you the story of my great
aunt, or really my father telling me about her, the way she came to him late in
her life, when he became president of the local Planned Parenthood, and
revealed to him what it had been like in the 1920s for her to climb the stairs
of the tenement abortionist when she could not face bringing a third child into
an apartment ravaged by an abusive alcoholic. It was not something she could
discuss with her rabbi or seek solace for from her congregation.
But if one’s religious community is not a safe place
to seek counsel or support or even companionship what does that say about the
nature of religious community—a community intended to bind us together?
At the annual meeting I am asking that the
congregation consider displaying a banner of support that reads: Love
Responsibly. Support Planned Parenthood.
Why opt for something so divisive you might ask? Or
seemingly political? For the same reason abolitionists objected to slavery when
the biggest church donors profited from it. For the same reason Jim Reeb went
down to Selma. For the same reason churches fly rainbow flags or banners
supporting marriage equality.
To be relevant to the people of this congregation
and community, that is to say related. To claim our connection with the
heretical roots of our denomination, the branch that declared errors in the
Trinity, and the branch that declared universal salvation, when both assertions
sometimes resulted in death. Our denomination has been forged out of the
courage to not only withstand the fires of condemnation and misunderstandding,
but to champion conscience, reason, compassion and direct experience when no
one else will.
We have the opportunity, as the church where I
interned had years before, to publicly declare our support for people
historically shunned by religious institutions: to affirm the inherent worth
and dignity of the people a few blocks from here who seek medical services or
work in a health clinic with surveillance cameras because our society hasn’t
found a way to counter the deadliness of fear and ignorance yet.
And yes, if we hang a banner some people will say, “that’s
the abortion church.” But you know that
just gives us the chance to say, “It’s not as simple as that.” Why not help
shape a more thoughtful, compassionate and sophisticated dialogue? Why not
re-connect with our own heretical roots? The etymological root of heresy, by
the way, is choice.
Amid the overwhelming forces of disconnection, we
hunger to reconnect. To restore wholeness cleaved a thousand times a day.
Sisters and brothers, our lives are
at stake. May we make of them a tent. Amen.
