What Calls Us

Reading from Souls bold enough to experiment, UU World Fall ‘12 (by Meg Muckenhoupt)

There’s enough room for all 111 children and youth and their religious education teachers to stand side by side at the front of the sanctuary of All Souls New London, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in New London, Connecticut. The space is wide enough for everyone to face the congregation from the stage, a long, low platform framed by a vivid skyscape of the horizon at dawn. The entire congregation participates in the Religious Education Sunday service. Their minister, the Rev. Carolyn Patierno, greets the congregation as souls, and later steps off the stage in the middle of the service to play the flute with a congregational ensemble. The youth hold an energy break,  hoisting a volleyball net and heaving a rainbow-colored beach ball to the seated congregation, which enthusiastically bats the ball about until the youth recapture it.

The entire service would have been impossible in All Souls’s old building, a brick church built on a ledge with almost as many steps as seats in the pews. Built in 1910, that church is long and narrow with a high pulpit and no room to expand. In 2006, the growing congregation moved out of their historic home into a new location: a one-time car dealership on the other side of the church‘s parking lot. At the same time, All Souls opened space in its old building to the New London Homeless Hospitality Center, a daytime shelter.

But All Souls didn’t just allow the Hospitality Center to occupy unused space. The congregation installed showers in their new building so that the homeless guests could bathe.  They decided to engage people’s bodies and invited people into the heart of their space…  

More than 100 guests use the Hospitality Center each day, and at least a dozen come to the church seeking the center … Members of the congregation have an understanding of the problems of homelessness and poverty, and have seen the effect of the recession up close.

The congregation takes pride in being good neighbors, and welcoming the Hospitality Center guests who choose to attend services though none of the guests have joined the congregation permanently. They are a transient community,  and move to wherever they find permanent shelter. The Hospitality Center [pays] a stipend to the church for the space …but the amount has not changed in five years.  Says minister Carolyn Patierno, “What we have gotten back is the feeling we are living out our values.”

  

 All Souls is proud of being a beacon, not a bunker church… but the church doesn’t just look outward.… All Souls adopted new, higher expectations for members.  Members have to pledge, participate, and show up, says Lynn Tavormina, All Souls’ incoming president. You don’t just come when you want to; you come.

At the end of the service, the entire congregation stands and joins hands, and Patierno leads a call and response: Who are we? All Souls! We are! All Souls!  The souls at All Souls know who they are, what they are trying to do, and how they are going to do it: together.

The Rev. Sue Phillips, district executive for the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Clara Barton and Massachusetts Bay districts says, ”Almost any congregation can do what New London has done. And if every New England congregation could do some of what New London has done, we would have [another] Great Awakening in New England. The potential here is enormous.”

Sermon

The Great Awakening refers to periods of religious revival in American history, beginning in the 1730s and 1740s. A second wave occurred in the late 1700s into the mid-1800s and the third wave spanned 1850 to 1910, encompassing the era of Social Gospel. Each of these periods awakened Americans to deeper spiritual connection, shifting focus from church doctrine to a lived experience of faith. The fervency of preachers sought to reach beyond intellect to stir the hearts of parishioners summoning them to a consciousness of grace. The awakenings arose out of particular socio-historical contexts; the Third Great Awakening emerged in a nation riven by civil war.

In 2012, amidst another vitriolic campaign cycle, we close a week that saw the death of a U.S. ambassador, three other diplomats and several civilians in violent uprisings staged at embassies across North Africa and the Middle East in response not just to an ignorant, incendiary, hateful video screed against Islam, but in response to a clash in values that befuddles most Americans who find it difficult if not impossible to understand why our way of life is not welcome everywhere. Many of us find it incomprehensible that a poorly produced cartoon film would ignite lethal protests; but to millions of Muslims the act of desecrating their prophet is as much an anathema as a nation where the rhetoric of defilement and limitless cash anonymously poured into campaigns are protected as free speech. Setting aside critiques of U.S. foreign policy we label anti-American sentiment, let us consider on this sunny Sunday morning what calls us and from that lens perhaps we can better comprehend adherents of a faith—any faith—who treat the sacred as inviolable.

As we know, the dominant cultural strands of materialism, consumerism, competition (why must we be the greatest nation on earth?) don’t lend themselves or us to the dominant religious strands of any Great Awakening. In another article from the current issue of UU World magazine, the Rev, Ana Levy-Lyons asks:

Do we UUs … experience a tension between our religious values and the values of the secular world? It seems clear that there should be tension, enormous tension. Until the world is as it should be, until war and hunger are abolished, until we are living gently on the earth, until power is shared and all voices are heard, we should not be able to fit comfortably into this culture. We should feel this tension in every decision we make: when we shop, when (and if) we watch TV, when we go to work, when we speak to a child. The questions of to what extent and in what ways we should participate in the dominant culture should keep us up at night. If we’re doing it right, it should be hard to be a Unitarian Universalist in this world.

Think about that. When we think of Orthodox Jews or observant Muslims, Sikhs or Seventh Day Adventists we might imagine the challenges they face maintaining demanding dietary practices or donning distinctive head coverings. We might marvel at how Muslims fast during Ramadan, abstaining from water in the scorching August sun or wonder if young Sikh boys resent their turbans. We might casually admire their discipline or devotion or toss it off as outdated and relish the freedom of a religious affiliation that seems to ask nothing more of us than keeping an open mind and the willingness to serve fair-trade coffee.

But what would it mean to be kept up at night questioning the extent of acceptable participation in the dominant culture? What would it mean to devote some portion of our day to genuine mindfulness and study about a foreign policy that presumes that our way of life is both superior and desirable to all? What would it mean to inhabit the personas of millions of people whose faith holds primacy in their hierarchy of values. Not democracy, not liberty, not the pursuit of happiness. What would it mean to don the humility to even imagine that point view, without judgment, pity or scorn?

What would it mean to step back from our own lives and examine our culture from afar? What would we make of the lines of traffic on highways and in superstore aisles juxtaposed with empty sanctuaries, shuttered schools, abandoned houses? What would we face were we to peer into factory feed lots where tens of thousands of sentient beings live lives reminiscent of concentration camps except that these beings are fattened for slaughter by the master race? If our days were organized around five times of prayer, what would our schedule look like? What would change if lunch were preceded by a brief period of consciousness about where our food comes from? How it gets to our plate and whether it gets to someone else’s? How would it change a wedding day to begin it by contemplating the American ritual of buying a dress, often costly, never to be worn again? To say nothing of spending tens of thousands on a two-or-three day party? How would evening be transformed by nightly prayers of moral inventory and self-reflection?

If piety meant religious principles above all else, if commitment to creating heaven on earth, that is to say a commonwealth of equity, justice and peace founded on planetary sustainability were paramount, would it be a conceivable response to a deliberate act of desecration to express outrage? Could we imagine ourselves traveling en masse to offices of legislators who pass draconian funding cuts while doling out tax breaks and subsidies to industries of mass production and destruction? Could we imagine ringing the White House as Bill McKibben and other environmentalists did to try to block the Alberta Tar Sands Pipeline from defiling this swath of earth? In multiple daily prayers would we have time to consider what it means to categorize only certain people as environmentalists as if any humans could detach from the ground of being that makes human life possible? Would less TV, texting or technology-driven convenience leave us more time to prayerfully ponder why it is that we will spend billions to elect politicians eager to hydrofracture shale, remove mountaintops, oil the waters and chastise the military for developing alternative fuels while expecting them to end every speech by commanding God to bless the United States of America? How can God bless what we defile?

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons remind us in her essay drawn from a sermon.

Religious communities have almost always started out countercultural. The early Christian community described in the book of Acts … were so inspired by the teachings of Jesus that they completely broke from their social context. They gave away all their possessions and lived together in spiritual community. Being a Christian was not initially seen as compatible with living a normal life, working a normal job, or even owning land. These early Christians were asserting an alternative vision of how people can live together in service of a larger mission.

Centuries before Jesus, ancient Israelites envisioned a world far more responsive to those burdened by inequity: the poor, the oppressed, the widowed and orphaned, the refugee. Consider how profoundly countercultural it would be in 2012 to reinstate the year of Jubilee. From the book of Leviticus (25:10) “You are to consecrate the fiftieth year, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee for you; you will return everyone to the land he owns and everyone is to return to his family.”

 Just to conceptualize what such a year would mean boggles the mind. Would we start by returning land to Native Americans? Would we make reparations to the descendents of millions of enslaved Africans who toiled and died here? Would we follow by releasing the fifty-five billion animals we call livestock now penned in feed lots? Would we return foreclosed homeowners to the houses? Would we liberate all the bonded laborers employed in this country? Would we seriously consider forgiveness of debt for everyone who has borrowed heavily to pay for health care, food, college, transportation for work if there is work to be found?

Contrast this concept of a jubilee year proscribed in the Hebrew Scriptures as a way to achieve justice with a Forbes Real-Time Billionaire feature that tracks the daily gains and losses for major public holdings of a select group of billionaires. Not their net worth, just public holdings. For instance, Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands, made $590 million on a single stock holding. Forbes updates this information every fifteen minutes from 9:30-4:00, the business hours of the New York Stock Exchange.

Is this worth countering?

And do we have the will to do so?

The Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons observes,

… countercultural vision has reappeared repeatedly in different forms throughout history. The Occupy movement, especially in its actual occupying phase, was a recent [example] of it. Sadly, the trajectory of these movements is almost always one of decline: the commitment fades, the momentum fizzles, the teachings ossify. Over time, people find it too hard to stand so alienated from the lives they once knew. The sacrifices are too great.

She quotes James Luther Adams, one of the leading Unitarian Universalist theologians of the twentieth century who wrote:

 The element of commitment, of change of hearts, of decision so much emphasized in the Gospels, has been neglected by religious liberalism, and that is the prime source of its enfeeblement. We liberals are largely an uncommitted and therefore self-frustrating people. Our first task, then, is to restore to liberalism its own dynamic and its own prophetic genius . . . A holy community must be a militant community with its own explicit faith; and this explicit faith cannot be engendered without disciplines that shape the ethos of the group and that issue in the criticism of the society and of the  religious  community itself.

Discipline, sacrifice, explicit faith. What could be more countercultural in a culture defined by life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Many of the world’s people subscribe to a vision shaped by discipline, sacrifice and explicit faith. We who espouse life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness too often embody our life, our liberty, our pursuit of happiness and the rest be damned while God blesses America.

This morning I invite you to consider what it would mean for this congregation to become religiously countercultural. I invite you to discuss it at social hour. How would such a choice impact what we eat? What we serve? How we worship and where? How would such a choice guide the allocation of resources? The ministries we undertake? The policies we enact?

In New London, a congregation made the bold choice, first to work together to become a congregation of commitment, so as to enable itself to live out the teaching of the Social Gospel, to take seriously the biblical mandates to serve the least among us: those we make least through our silence, our complicity, our inertia.

Last April, I preached a sermon expressing my desire to live with more coherent intention. To live counterculturally in community. This issue of the UU World gives me hope that our denomination won’t collapse into irrelevance—relegating ourselves to rhetoric of goodness without the sacrifice, discipline and explicit faith James Luther Adams called for last century.

I began this new church year last week by asking, “What can we do together to re-connect more deeply with the ground of being to which we all belong?” I see it as another way to frame what it means to become that holy community Adams speaks of, the community envisioned in Leviticus and Acts, and in the Holy Qu’ran. I hear it as call from our sister congregation in New London to spark another Great Awakening and I am listening for our reply. Amen.

Our closing words come from the current issue of the UU World  by way of Om Prakash:

Do not sit alone in the dark while creation sings a three part harmony.

Dance, my friends.

Dance wildly, sing joyfully,

fill your heart with the Beauty of the Beloved

as the Beloved turns your soul to light.