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A Faith That Sustains
A Sermon Given
by the Reverend Susan Archer
on April 14, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
READING: "I Never Got What I Wanted" (adapted) Jason Lehman
It was spring,
But it was summer I wanted,
The warm days,
And the great outdoors.
It was summer,
But it was fall I wanted,
The colorful leaves,
And the cool dry air.
It was fall,
But it was winter I wanted,
The beautiful snow,
And the joy of the holiday season.
It was winter,
But it was spring I wanted,
The warmth,,
And the blossoming of nature.
I was a child,
But it was adulthood I wanted,
The freedom,
And the respect.
I was 20,
But it was 30 I wanted,
To be mature,
And sophisticated.
I was middle-aged,
But it was 20 I wanted,
The youth,
And the free spirit.
I was retired,
But it was middle age I wanted,
The presence of mind,
Without limitations.
My life was over,
But I never got what I wanted.
(Jason Lehman)
A Faith That Sustains
Have you ever heard someone say of us, Unitarian Universalists, "Why, they are the ones who can believe anything they want!" Or, even worse, "Oh, they don't believe in anything."
Of course, we know it is not that we don't have beliefs, but it is that we don't all necessarily have the same beliefs, and that each specific belief is not a criterion for either our membership or our salvation.
But some go further in asking how is it that we can live in this world without faith, without assurances about our future. What sustains us in the hard times of living and of dying? In these instances I always take a deep breath before I proclaim that we do indeed have a faith, a deep faith, one that sustains many through the difficult, the tough, and the tender times of our lives.
This morning I would like to take a few moments to lift up three of the pillars of our faith. There are probably others we could talk about, but for this morning I will lift up three qualities or aspects of our religion in which Unitarian Universalists can find both daily sustenance in our ordinary living, and sustenance in the especially challenging extraordinary moments and periods of living that come to all people. I lift them up not only for us adults as we continue on our own life's journey, but also as pillars of our ministry to children and youth.
I. Community
The first pillar of our faith that I want to lift up this morning has to do with our religious communities and what they bring to us. These are some of my favorite words, from Starhawk (adapted):
Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to be a circle of healing.
A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free . . .
In my own experience of religious community I think back to when the classroom wing of our church in Lincroft, NJ burned down in 1986. There were many things that were lost. But in the days post-fire, of all that was shoveled out into the dumpster, I think what I felt as the greatest loss was our button collection. I remember one of the members unearthing the metal canister from a charred cabinet. In it the buttons remained, albeit covered with a thick coat of soot - the interestingly gnarled metal lumps, the beads,the carved wood, the big and little designs of every color and shape-buttons contributed over many years from many sources. I still have images of children and teachers coming to get the button can- for craft projects or just for play - to make designs or pictures, all the remnants to be recombined back into the box for another day. I still have images of adults coming to contribute their buttons, sometimes with stories of where they had come from.
When we found the button can for a moment I had been hopeful. Maybe we could save them! In reality there was no way to wash the thick soot from all those wondrous pieces.
I did have to wonder why I was so touched by the loss of those buttons. It surely had something to do with meaning across ages, across generations, continuity, and an ever-ending collection because it was continuously replenished. How many hands had been laid on them, the wise hands of grandmothers mending clothing of long ago, and the small hands of little ones, some of whom are by now grown up? The buttons contributed to this collection were never bought, always brought, were never too many, but always enough. The meaning of these buttons for me had something to do with stability, solidity, memories, and hope. It was hard to let them go.
It was a few days later, Sunday morning, when we, the adults and children of the congregation, gathered in the sanctuary, smoke damaged, without electricity or heat, to mourn our loss. But more than mourning, we also celebrated what could not be taken from us. As we sang together, it was clear that the building was gone, but the religious community remained. We had something that could not be taken from us. We would sustain one another. Our collective faith could not be destroyed. We had our roots still. We would always be able to count on them. The buttons were merely the symbols I happened to use for something much greater.
I most certainly see that kind of rich community here at Cedar Lane. . . Your rich history and pregnant future, your mutual support of elders and young ones, and all who come in between. And I would also lift up here how important participation in such trustworthy communities is to children, both to their personal development, and to their growing to be adults who understand themselves to be citizens of a world community. (There have been studies that verify such correlations.)
II The Past
Second, I look to the past.
Even though we may be asked, "Unitarians? Aren't they one of those new cults?" (I have heard conversation about such comments in at least two instances this week, here at Cedar Lane.) We know that we can look back to those Puritans who landed in Plymouth in 1620 for the beginnings of our history on this continent. We know that we can look back a century earlier for our roots in Europe.
When Unitarian historian, Earl Morse Wilbur, began his historical tracing of the roots of Unitarianism, he began with three identifying values: freedom, reason, and tolerance. Throughout our best moments these elements have been wrapped in an adventurous spirit of search plus the powerful loving embrace for all of humankind that has been handed down from our Universalist forebears. In many ways, we UUs have an especially valuable and relevant faith to offer to this culture. Today we are living in a society that desperately wants control and predictability, but is likely to find none. Our evolved UU theology, which has the capacity to embrace both ambiguity and new ways of thinking, is especially relevant.
And . . . We are standing on the shoulders of those who have come before! Even though cultural paradigms are changing, our tradition continues to serve us well, because our tradition comes from people, people who might not have had the exact same challenges as we, but nonetheless found ways to stand up to the social, cultural, and political challenges they found within their own times. As one of our hymns proclaims:
Honored days and names we reckon, days of comrades gone before, lives that speak and deeds that beckon, from the dreaming of the night, to the labors of the day, shines their everlasting light, guiding us upon our way. (Singing the Living Tradition, "Rank by Rank")
"Lives that speak and deeds that beckon." Ours is a faith that throughout our history has spoken through our brave and generous living.
A friend of mine once said that we UUs are saved by congruency. . . not by a belief, not by a ritual or a rite, not by a prayer, although all of these might be a part of our life. Instead our salvation comes from a congruency of our vision, our values, and our actions, the way we live. In seminary studies of soteriology -- "what saves" -- I never heard a professor speak of "salvation by congruency!" But, the more I think about it, the more I believe my friend is on to something! I do feel "saved" by "congruency!" And it is, I think, this "congruency in the lives of some of our UU forbears that inspires and fortifies us in this time.
As I look back I think of Judith Sargent Murray, a female using a pen name back at the turn of the eighteenth century to make comments on the social ills of the day. And Theodore Parker, firebrand, abolitionist preacher; John Dewey, reformer of our educational system; James Reeb who lost his life at Selma; and very many more, well known and not, living and long dead.
May we and our children know the stories of salvation, UU-style salvation, in which real people have developed vision from values and then have acted in accord with the vision they claim.
May we be guided by Lives that speak and deeds that beckon.
May we all support one another in knowing the stories of our faith and the depth of our tradition.
III Standing Still in the Present
The third pillar, standing beside our rich and inspiring history, and our bedrock solid local communities of faith, is our commitment to focusing on the present. It follows from the second pillar, in which our history and tradition inspires and sustains us, that we can muster the courage, the tenacity, the openness to examine and experience the depth of our daily, moment by moment experience. We who have seen such brave seekers of truth in our past can build on the inspiration of our forebears to stand still in the moment to look, really look, to live, really live, to pay attention to the moment, the here, the now. This is not always easy to do. This may be one of the biggest challenges for us in these times. The pace of our lives sometimes gets out of hand and is driven by goals, sometimes not set by us. I have a hard time with this pillar. A friend once gave me a saying to place on the wall beside my desk: "If I always do tomorrow's work today, I will have the last day of my life free." This is not a healthy way to live and we may miss the depth of life.
I like this attitude better!
Walt Whitman, "On Miracles:"
... I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, ...
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
. . .
Walt Whitman knew how to stand still and be open to each moment and its gifts.
Sophia Fahs followed in Whitman's tradition, in forging a new philosophy of how we practice the religious education of our young:
Instead of helping children . . . to think about'religious things,' we need to learn how to help children to think about ordinary things until insights and feelings are found which have a religious quality. . . The religious way is the deep way, the way with a growing perspective and an expanding view. It is the way that dips into the heart of things, into personal feelings, yearnings and [even] hostilities that so often must be buried and despised and left misunderstood. . . . It is the enlarged and deepening experiences that bring the growing insights and that create the sustaining ambition 'to find life and to find it abundantly' that really count most.
The philosophy Fahs proposes for the education of our children applies equally to us adults as we make our way through this business of living our lives. And it applies not only to the joyfully wondrous as Fahs has implied. It can be applied equally well to the tough and the tender moments. I think of these words, written by a physician, shortly after completing a surgery.
Says he: "I recall myself standing by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy,clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. In order to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut that little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth young woman that I have made, who are they who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks.
"Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks.
"Yes," I reply.
She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles.
"I like it fine," he says.
All at once I know who he is. I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, the husband bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I so close that I can see how the young man twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. And, I remember that the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath and let the wonder in."
To be in the presence of such holy sustains. And the holy is all about us if we look
May we support one another in a faith that has open eyes to the moments in which we are living, may we not arrive at the end of our lives without this, for then we might also say, as in this morning's reading,"But I never got what I wanted."
So, when I think about the pillars of our faith, I see the religious community.
Then I think about a rich and complicated tradition passed to us from others who walked their lives with eyes wide open, matching their actions with their values and visions.
And, I think about people who take life as it comes to them, who are able to center themselves where they are without wishing for what was once, about people who will not eclipse the living of their lives with the hoping for a life they do not have, who can rejoice daily in the miracles that so delighted Walt Whitman; and also grieve together the sorrows that come our way. We do not need to have a dogma to have a faith. We UUs do have a faith that can sustain us through the tough and the tender, that gives us roots and wings. The sustenance is real. Ours is a faith that sustains>.
May we open our eyes and hearts to what is real, may we open our hands and minds to one another, may we laugh and cry together, may we love one another.
Amen.
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