A New Paradigm

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.

Superbowl Sunday

As you all know it is Superbowl Sunday, a fact that might have escaped me had someone not told me last Sunday at lunch. Twenty years ago, when I was teaching a M-W-F class, I made the mistake of assigning work over Superbowl weekend. Students were quick to chide me, except for the one working mother in the course who shot back to all the eighteen-year-olds, “I have a job, children, go to school and I get my homework done, so you can do yours even if is Superbowl Sunday.” What I failed to realize in my utter lack of sympathy for the sports enthusiasts was that football in America isn’t just a pastime. Wednesday I watched an old episode of “Designing Women” that first aired in 1990, where a character on the way to a college football game explains: “In the east, football is a cultural exercise. In the Midwest, it’s cannibalism; in the west it’s a tourist attraction but in the south it’s a religion.”

Given that the New England Patriots are squaring off against the New York Giants, I suspect the religious fervor has spread to the northeast. Though it may seem an exaggeration to compare football with religion there are similarities. Both have organized behaviors, specific rituals, congregants, sacred spaces and objects, feast days (have you noticed the grocery displays this week?), sacrifices (especially if we consider the injuries of players), music and dance (think half-time), and specific clothing and accessories that identify adherents. Football like religion, sports its own zealots. Here in Massachusetts, nary a Giants’ fan would feel safe walking the street tonight with the wrong garb on. I’ve seen the scowls aimed at Keene State students from Connecticut who dare don a cap or jersey with a New York team insignia.

According to the anthropologists John Monoghan and Peter Just, religion offers a way of dealing with difficult conditions, “Providing a set of ideas about how and why the world is put together that allows people to accommodate anxieties and deal with misfortune.”

For the upwards of 163 million Americans expected to tune in to this evening’s game, most of whom probably follow the pro season and college games, football may well offer a world view, or at least a rich combination of morality play combined with ongoing narrative, where in the words of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell: “One of the things we want every fan to feel in the country is hope when the season starts that their team can end up holding that Super Bowl trophy. And one of the stats we’re most proud of in the last nine years we’ve had at least one team go from last to first.”

While Jesus purportedly said, “The last shall be first,” the Superbowl makes it so.

Embedded in the uncertainty, enshrined in the bookmaker’s odds, is the possibility of redemption. On the field is religious drama reprised where the prodigal son returns to favor and the hardworking son cheated of his birthright can be restored. Pain and effort are rewarded but so too fate plays its role. And now that “Tebowing” has entered the common vernacular, football includes prayer.

Consider this headline from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s Catholic Herald: “For Some Faithful, Football is a Religion.” Reporter Gene Horn draws this comparison, a bit playfully he adds:

Football is an obligation … a ritual … like Saturday eve or Sunday Mass.

Biblically speaking, there’s an Exodus. Like the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan, all highways lead to the promised land of Green Bay. All local streets lead to a favorite sports bars for big-screen action. All doors at home lead to the living room or den for three hours of fanatical whoopin’ and hollerin’.

Horn goes on to compare uniforms to vestments, the pre-game pep talk to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the referees to the Pharisees, ticket sales to the offering (and if we consider pro football generates ten billion dollar a year even the otherwise pious might stoop to envy).

On a more serious note, Margaret Wente, of the Canadian newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, writes in a commentary entitled, “College Football Is America’s True Religion,”

[W]hen the legendary college football coach Joe Paterno was fired for overlooking the alleged sexual abuse of young boys by one of his assistant coaches, the Penn State campus erupted in riots. The students weren’t rioting because of outrage that powerful men appear to have turned a blind eye to brutal sexual assaults on children. They were rioting because the board of trustees had turfed out their revered JoePa. The university’s president had been fired too, but nobody cared about that. Thousands stampeded through the downtown area. They tore down light poles and overturned a television news van. “The board started this riot by firing our coach,” one student told The New York Times. “They tarnished a legend.”

College football is the true religion of America. And college football had no greater saint than Joe Paterno, the man who put Penn State on the map and produced a cornucopia of wealth for the region known as Happy Valley. Penn State students and alumni have huge amounts of pride and a substantial part of their identity invested in their football team.…

Both the church and football claim to inculcate the moral values that shape boys into men. And in both cases, the powers at the top decided to protect the brand instead of the kids.

You can tell a lot about a civilization from its monuments. The Greeks built temples to the gods. The Romans constructed roads and aqueducts. The United States built railroads, skyscrapers, majestic post-office buildings and public libraries. Today, it builds temples of worship called football stadiums. This may not be the end of empire, but sometimes it feels that way.

If we step back and unpack the devotion to football, at the collegiate and professional levels of course we discover mammon. According to last week’s segment on “Sixty Minutes,”

“A quarter of the league's revenues—about $2.5 billion, still come from ticket sales with another $2.5 billion coming from licensing fees on everything from footballs and league apparel to shot glasses and ice scrapers. Bud Light is reportedly spending a billion dollars over six years to be the official beer of the NFL.”

But something else is going on. “Under league rules the teams are required to share most of their revenue with each other.” “Sixty Minutes” reporter Steve Kroft asked Commissioner Goodell, “That’s socialism, isn't it?” to which Goodell replied, “It is a form of socialism. And it’s worked quite well for us.” I wonder how many adherents of pro football think of that as they cast aspersions on the president, the Occupiers of Wall Street and anyone else who suggests that a more equitable distribution of resources might lift all Americans.

Beyond the almighty dollar, which has an undeniable following itself, football is obviously more than a generator of revenue and hope, heroes and tribes; it functions as a magnet for community. When the University of Michigan played Notre Dame, 115 thousand fans packed the stadium. Tonight, 163 million American views will congregate around TV sets in homes and sports bars, and ABC news recently reported, “In small towns and big cities alike, high school football is something like a religion in Texas…On any given week, the University Interscholastic League of Texas estimates that there are close to 600 high school games across the Lone Star State, involving nearly 40,000 players — 100,000 if you count the non-varsity game.”

Families sit in the same seats their parents did, not unlike church pews passed down for generations. Football forms the framework for community, identity, belonging. It affords rules and roles that lend clarity amid changing mores. Game time becomes its own strange expression of the Sabbath when cell phones might actually get turned off or at least ignored till half-time. 

All this suggests not that America is going down the tubes, succumbing to ad campaigns for Bud Light and the official licensees for NFL apparel, not even that our adulation of sports superstars means we’ve turned into a nation of vapid couch and stadium potatoes. No, it indicates that humans, not just Americans, still hunger to feel a sense of membership, an affiliation with an organization where even the underdog can win, where the least and last can reach the front of the line. The devotion to football suggests at least to me, an affirmation that the multitudes long for communion—we long for the spirit to be made flesh, for what is holy to be largely in our midst. For the fans and players who assemble in the rain or cold or dark to fulfill a promise, the ancient religious concept of covenant comes to life. 

The exodus reporter Gene Horn spoke of in his lighthearted piece for the Milwaukee Catholic Herald has serious correlation. In the Exodus story, God enlists Moses to free the Hebrew people from the bondage imposed by Pharaoh so the Hebrew people can enter into a covenant with God based on fulfilling responsibilities, not shirking them. As much as many Americans have become conditioned to convenience and easy excuses, as much as customer service all but disappeared, there is something to be said for the teams and fans filling a cold rainy stadium, refusing to renege on their commitment. As annoying as the traffic jams and noise before and after game time are, we can take heart that Americans have not lost our capacity for collective voice. We don’t turn out to vote en masse; we rarely fill the Washington Mall or truly block the streets in response to the pressing social issues of the day. We often appear complacent to our global neighbors; but if we could harness the our devotion to football, if we could transpose our hunger for heroics to the men and women who show up day after day, night after night for shifts mopping the emergency room floor, or cleaning the restrooms of every stadium, if we extend our tribal allegiance from the Patriots to the planet, riling ourselves up over carbon and greenhouse gases as much as players and referees, if we would sanctify time in our week the way do Monday night football, think what could change.

As Unitarian Universalists we alternately despair over the extremes of secularized consumerist values on one end and religious fundamentalism on the other, wondering where is the middle ground for sane spiritually enlightened people seeking harmony and balance. I am the first to admit, as a person with zero interest in football, or any sport, that I have ignored the religious implications; but if I look closely enough to notice the millions who prefer to congregate in a stadium or in front of a TV to vicariously experience the unpredictability of assured struggle rather than to assembling in church to actually participate in it, I can’t help but wonder how that might shape our liberal religious future. We take such pride in our lack of creed, our lack of a central faith narrative, which allows the individual to search singly, but clearly the adherents of football, don’t seek a singular path. Yes, tens of thousands line up to watch the Boston Marathon, but Bud Light isn’t spending a billion to be official brew of long distance running. Football is a team sport that coalesces around the concept of cooperation within a team in order to beat the opponent. For all its stars, football acknowledges the grunts, the interdependent web of players and coaches, owners and fans. 

Think of all the team insignia apparel and accessories. People long to belong. Where is our team apparel? Where in fact, is our brand? What is the core identity to which a believer can adhere? What sustained and common goal unites us not just for a season but for decades? Why is it kids and septuagenarians can recall legendary sports scores, statistics, and team line-ups but few among us can memorize our principles or covenant? 

We needn’t glorify the intense competition or stadium brawls football engenders; nor should we promote tribalism. But we could learn from the enthusiasm and loyalty apparent and try to glean how we might create the sense of purpose and connection fans experience.

Football fans gather this festival day, with special dishes to share and specific rituals to follow, and by midnight tonight, another Superbowl will be over. Either Giant-Nation or  Patriot-land will be exultant and the rest will be left like Job to find meaning in despair. I don’t say this facetiously. For those who genuinely care about football, the Superbowl occasions having to wrestle with disappointment. The outcome of a championship game compels people to make sense of what befalls them. 

When a football team loses, fans feel they’ve lost something too, in a way that fosters a level of connection otherwise unlikely. Two weeks ago I mentioned almost half of the country experiences some level of poverty—but really, who gathers the next day at the well or water cooler to bemoan that? But tomorrow Monday morning quarterbacks everywhere will rehash the game. More energy will be devoted to a single evening of football and multi-million dollar ads than a year’s worth of sermons in church. 

The few of us who won’t be watching can spend the evening pondering what the religion of football has to teach us: about what makes time sacred and why people happily spend money; what incites such fervent dedication, and creates community and identity across such a disparate population. And for all the fans glued to the television, may the incarnation of glory on the field inspire the same zeal for fairness, opportunity and teamwork everywhere else. Nooshi-jon.

Ginger Snap Sunday

This morning, as we welcome our newest members, Tricia, Rick, Oli, Seamus and Ann, we taste the sweetness of community. We celebrate the spice each one brings, distinctive and flavorful. As we know from the world around us, the world that holds us, there is so much that is unsavory, and thus, it is such a blessing to come together, to form beloved community, to make a space within the busyness and complexity of our lives, to enjoy simple gifts. A place where we ought to be, a valley of love and delight, where we can come down right. As Rumi so eloquently puts it:

I don’t need
a companion who is
nasty sad and sour

the one who is
like a grave
dark depressing and bitter

a sweetheart is a mirror
a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else

a companion who is
in love only with the self
has five distinct characters

stone hearted
unsure of every step
lazy and disinterested
keeping a poisonous face

the more this companion waits around
the more bitter everything will get
just like a vinegar
getting more sour with time

enough is said about
sour and bitter faces
a heart filled with desire for
sweetness and tender souls
must not waste itself with unsavory matters (translated by Nader Khalili )

It’s not that we turn our backs on the unsavory, on the suffering of so many, on the challenges of our time; it’s that we enjoy the sweetness, take in the spice. We, for whom joy beckons, owe it to ourselves and each other, not only to taste the sweetness but to savor it. Religious community is one of the ways we do that. Here, we have the perfect blend of spice and sweet. Each of us offers our own distinctive flavor. Variety is the spice of life. Especially in a Unitarian Universalist context. Here, we mix it up: cinnamon and clove, ginger and allspice. Coriander and cumin, star anise and fennel. Each with our own theology or perspective, freshly ground, or well-aged. If we were to ingest any one spice undiluted, it would overpower our taste buds and send our sensibilities reeling. So we blend. We take a pinch of God as all being and mix it with a dash of the earth as divinity itself. We stir in a bit of Jesus as spiritual exemplar and Buddha as guide. We sprinkle in some Christmas carols and Yom Kippur, the Passover story and Unitarian Easter themes; we stir in Universalist themes of hope and redemption with reason and transcendentalist mysticism to balance the simple gifts of care and good cheer. We rattle our bones on Halloween and occasionally indulge in communions of gingersnaps because ritual allows us to embody what we espouse.

If we borrow the idea that something we eat can serve as a metaphor for what comprises us and our ministries, gingersnaps seem an appropriate choice. The spiciness is complemented by the sweetness of molasses and brown sugar, by the creaminess of butter and the binding quality of eggs. The flour gives the gingersnap its gravity; it keeps it from being spicy sweet goo and turns it into wafery goodness.

We bring our individual spice to mix it with the sweetness of religious community, “the delicious cake” of togetherness that combines our unique flavor with the common “desire for sweetness.” Something happens here in our interactions akin to the heat an oven provides that turns batter into cake.

In the writings classes I teach, I use this metaphor to illustrate the difference between raw ingredients heaped in a bowl and a perfectly baked cake. If all we do is place our thoughts, memories, opinions, and beliefs on the counter, we have a bunch of ingredients. If we add passion and take the time to carefully blend the ingredients of our experience and perspective with others, considering proportion, then heat it in the oven of reason, wonder, compassion and critical thought, the ingredients transform from batter to a sumptuous source of nourishment much easier to digest and enjoy.

While chemists can explain the physical chain of events happening in the oven, I prefer the poetic approach: a creative synergy of materials and heat: an alchemy of delight. It is easier to identify than to explain. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, a student asked me about Unitarian Universalism. I had mentioned in passing that I write sermons, so after class he asked what for. I told him and he inquired about our denomination. “It’s a philosophy not a religion, right?”

“No,” I countered. It’s a religion.” And then the poor lad had to suffer through my abbreviated though probably way too long for his taste version of Unitarian Universalism and how the two merged. When I finished the historical summary of two liberal Protestant strands combined into one pluralistic, non-creedal, God-optional faith, he said, “Why would I as an agnostic want to go to church? Why would I be interested in religion? Isn’t it just a philosophy?”

I launched into Part B of what became a lesson in what not to ask a writing teacher cum UU minister. I told the young man I could not speak to why he might want to go to church, but I shared why I do. I recounted the loneliness I felt in a university English department inhabiting the big questions: the meaning of life, the consciousness of mortality, the ubiquity of suffering and undeniable evidence of joy, and in my life, grace. I explained that I found much needed spiritual community within a congregation that I couldn’t find anywhere else. In church, we have the opportunity to worship, to lift up what is worthy, to apprehend awe long enough to savor it not just taste it; to stretch into new postures of compassion and generosity that require a safe loving space in which to do so. In church our voices mingle literally and figuratively. When we sing together and meet together, envision ministries and sort out practicalities, we learn to harmonize. Church invites us to blend our spiciness so that we find the right balance—not pungent, not bitter, not cloying. Forming religious community allows each flavor to maintain its distinctiveness yet form something greater.

This morning I invite you to partake in the communion of gingersnaps not just by taking one and savoring its spicy sweetness, but by offering one to someone seated nearby, and as you pass the gingersnaps, take a moment to share a bit of your spice: your theology or worldview, in a snippet (save the unabridged version for coffee hour so we have time left to have one). Take a moment to identify the sweetness you find here. What is it about First Parish that bakes your cake? That turns the ingredients of your presence, spice, and time into something wonderfully nourishing?
I’ll come around with plates and as you pass them, share the sweet and the spice.
(after the gingersnaps have gone around and people have shared)

a friend a delicious cake
it isn’t worth spending
an hour with anyone else…

As we welcome our newest members and celebrate each person here, let us savor the sweetness of our communal cake. Life produces vinegar right and left: “enough is said/ about sour and bitter faces.”

Let us offer the world our spicy sweetness, the perfect blend of First Parish.

Be ours a religion which, like
sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space:
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living. (Theodore Parker)

Amen.

Of Ducks & Caravans

Come, come whoever you are—wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, ours is no caravan of despair. Come yet again, come.

The words of Rumi, 13th century Sufi, everlasting. Each year we turn and return—we gather again, the caravan circling round to pick up each one as we are—wherever we are in our journey.

We are not all in the same place for over the summer some of us have taken journeys and some of us have been taken by them. For many, it has been a summer marked by transitions—changes of heart, of home, of spiritual, emotional, physical condition.
As the caravan stops, waits for each of us to board, we take note of our fellow travelers—the ease or difficulty with which we climb on—some hopping, some creeping—color radiating from our faces or color drained. Some with our last two chickens, some with jewels.

We each join the caravan because it transports us here—together in our separateness.

Arlene Gay Levine writes:

Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.

Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.

Not so unlike William Blake who bid us to see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, each moment in time is time. Each step is the journey. The journey of a thousand miles begins again with each step. That’s why we never step in the same river twice. The river flows, ever-changing—and we who bob and float and flow, sometimes snag, drift or swirl about in the eddies. We travel the river of life never coming up for air in the same place twice for just as the river changes, we change—we age, we ripen like cheese or wine or pears. And as we know, some of our ripenings toughen our skin and others tenderize us to bruising.

Thus we gather this ingathering Sunday once again, each in our own state of being—our ripeness fragrant or aromatic; some of us thick-rind as the rhino, some of us thin-skinned as the grape under a heel. We gather not just to be renewed but to be noticed in our renewing.

This week I received a few photos taken on Star Island where I spent a week in mid-August—photos of my mother and me laughing, no, cawing wild and exhilarated as crows; photos pixilated with innumerable points of joy—my mother’s sun-drenched face upturned, me banjo in hand. The photos tell of our renewal—not just mine and Taya’s, but an island of people, travelers all. Who gathered as we each “moved through a world of stone and stars” whirling together—alone but collected, separate but connected.

Each experiencing the moment co-created by each other. No moment belonged to any being alone. Every moment held the sound of the surf, the scent of salt air, the heat of the sun. Each mote of stone dust rising from the dirt embedded with particles of light—solar yes, but sacred, too—“nor do I mean anything miraculous,” to quote Mary Oliver,”only the light that can shine out of a life.”

I had never been to Star Island before but once there I understood its allure—the way our separate togetherness formed an invitation to dance at daybreak, to say yes because each note is the song.

And just like here, the song changes—it shimmies and coils, undulates like great undersea grasses swaying from the ocean floor.

At church, people make decisions about all kinds of things—steeples and buildings, budgets and mission, but that is not why we come; that is not what compels us to climb on the caravan—deciding things. No, we gather for something else—we gather to be the note in the song, the duck in the sea.

Donald Babcock writes:

Now we are ready to look at something pretty special.

It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf,

And he cuddles in the swells.

There is a big heaving in the Atlantic.

And he is part of it.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.

And neither do you.

But he realizes it.

And what does he do, I ask you.

He sits down in it.

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity – which it is.

That is religion, and the duck has it.

I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.

But he has religion.

We come like ducks to the ocean to be religion, not to study or parse it, analyze or justify it. To experience it, full-bodied; to make ourselves “part of the boundless, by easing [ourselves] into it—we come just to be where it touches us”—where the fragile and tenacious humanity of another brushes our skin, thick or tender, calloused or bruised, and like the duck, we probably don’t know how large the ocean is. We may ponder, dare to imagine its vastness though we cannot know with our finite bodies its infinite waves—we can rest while it heaves; we can bob and float—and because we lack the poise of ducks, we may overturn. We may churn in the undertow gasping for air, popping back up, scanning the water for a glimpse of the others, “finding repose in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.”
We come together this ingathering Sunday “to repose in the immediate, to make ourselves part of the boundless, to ease into it where it touches us”—here and here and here.

We return to one another, to the river never the same twice, to notice the changes, to feel them in our bodies and in our souls. We gather to witness and be witnessed, to hear and be heard, to behold and be held—whirling with and yet alone.

Come—come whoever you are—wanderer—worshipper—lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. Yet again. Come.


Closing words

Here is the road: the light
comes and goes and returns again.
Be gentle with your fellow travelers
as they move through the world of stone and stars
whirling with you yet every one alone.
The road waits.
Do not ask questions but when it invites you
To dance at daybreak, say yes.
Each step is the journey, a sing note the song.