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Sources as Resources
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Douglas Taylor
on November 17, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
One of the first weddings I ever performed took place in the Boundary
Waters of Northern Minnesota. I had met the couple while serving my
internship in a suburb of Chicago. When they asked me to officiate at
their service over the summer I was flattered, but I warned them saying
I would not be in the Chicago area over the summer. I would
unfortunately be in upstate New York serving as camp chaplain at
Unirondack, our UU summer youth camp in the Adirondacks. They said, "No
problem, the wedding is not going to be in the Chicago area anyway. We
are going to get married up in the Boundary Waters. We’ll fly you to
Minnesota for this." So I said, "Yes." (Well, first I said, "Wow!" Then
I said, "Yes!")
Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the geography of
Minnesota, so I’ll tell you that the Boundary Waters are an extensive
series of lakes and rivers way up in the northern part of Minnesota.
Camping and canoeing enthusiasts flock to the area every summer. I flew
into Duluth, which is on the western edge of the first of the great
lakes. The Duluth International Airport is considerably smaller than its
name implies. It has four gates. It is an international airport because
it has flights to Canada. So I flew into Duluth and waited in that
little airport for one of the bridesmaids who was also flying in that
afternoon. She rented a car, and we drove two hours north along long
stretches of road to a town called Ely. The next afternoon we all piled
into cars and went another half-hour or so north to a parking lot on the
side of the road. Then we hiked in about a mile to the lake. Waiting for
us at the lake were the ushers who paddled us across the lake in canoes,
two at a time, to the little rocky clearing next to the waterfall. I was
wearing sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. My robe and stole were rolled up
in my back pack along with a water bottle and some trail mix.
A half-hour later when every one was assembled, I had my robe on, and
I had started the ceremony, I wanted to tell them, "be sure you start
your relationship on sure footing. Be careful, this marriage stuff is
dangerous and you need to be certain of one another." I wanted to tell
them, "the journey ahead of you is fraught with peril and hardship so
make sure you really mean it and you’re ready for this." But I looked
out over the lake to the path on the other side leading back to the cars
and I thought, "They all ready know all that." Besides, this was only
the third wedding I had ever done, I didn’t know how to say all that
stuff anyway.
How we start things is very important. Our beginnings have a distinct
impact on who we are and how we grow. In our reading this morning,
Charles Stephen said we like the idea of new beginnings and starting
over, but it is really all continuations. It is human nature to mark out
beginnings and endings to give definition to our experiences. When we
arrive at small landmarks, we pause in our steady tumbling forward to
recognize the passage of time. One of the hymns in our hymnal is
entitled "The Ceaseless Flow of Endless Time." We do indeed find
ourselves in this ceaseless flow, this ever progressing push of time.
Charles Stephen said we find stability in these new beginnings.
Generally speaking, life is a journey without particular beginnings and
endings other than birth and death. It becomes very important to set
aside special times to celebrate the changes, brief moments to pause and
recognize our progress.
This idea that our beginnings and endings are our own arbitrary human
constructions is useful in recognizing that our past does not need to
own us. Transformation and change are possible. However, this idea can
also be unhelpful if we think we can escape our past. If we think of new
beginnings as a break from yesterday, we are bound for trouble. All of
your past is a part of you, all of the good stuff and all of the bad
stuff. And no amount of New Beginnings will make it otherwise. Where you
come from is important.
It seems to me there are three choices as to how we can deal with our
past. We can choose to dwell in it; to either revel in the glory or
wallow in the guilt. Most people recognize this to be unhealthy. All
those wonderful self-help books are filled with this sort of wisdom:
Don’t let guilt consume you. Acknowledge and move on. Don’t rest on your
laurels. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Our second option is to ignore the past. This will allow us to have
fake New Beginnings. We can talk about starting over, and turning over a
new leaf, and having today be the first day of the rest of our life. But
often all this does is allow us to continue to make the same bad
mistakes, or to not capitalize on the gains we’ve made. If we try and
say, "That was the old me, now I’m married, or, now I’m born again, or,
now I’m all better so just forget all that old stuff about me." This is
a fake New Beginning because it ignores the past or pretends it doesn’t
matter.
Our last option, and thus the healthy one, is to learn from the past
and grow. This is where change and transformation are possible, this is
where New Beginnings can take place, this is where we step forward and
say, "All my gifts and all my warts are why I’m deciding to live my life
in this new way from this day forward." I picked up a great quote
recently. It is from an interview with a blind blues musician such as
the kind that was all over the Mississippi delta several decades ago.
And the reporter asked, "Have you been blind all your life?" To which
the musician replied, "Not yet." [editing note: When I checked this
quote, it turns out to be from a blind Big Band pianist named George
Shearing from London.] I like this quote because it is forward looking,
without ignoring the truth of the past.
Where you come from and where you have been and all that you’ve been
through will never leave you. Now, this is true for cultures, countries,
and congregations as well. I remember a friend once complaining about
our national anthem saying it is the only national anthem with rockets
and bombs in the lyrics. I remember at the time agreeing with my friend
and saying, "Aren’t we awful as a country to have this song that
glorifies war as our national anthem. We should change it." But as I was
preparing this sermon, I thought, "Well, at least it is honest." This
country was founded as a result of war. The song says that the
principles of liberty and freedom are worth fighting for and even dying
for. I may not like the song, but at least it is honest about how we
started.
Another example, all three of the great monotheistic religions—
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have a significant amount of violence
in connection with how they began. (There is a whole sermon in that
little sentence, we’ll get to that some day.) I suspect that many of us
have heard lately that Islam is a violent religion. And I suspect that
many of us have also heard the counterpoint saying Islam is basically a
peaceful religion. I don’t know which is true and I tend to think that
both statements are somewhat truth and somewhat false depending on where
you are looking and what you are wanting to see. Certainly there are
passages in the Koran and practices believers do which we can point to
and say, "look, here we see peace" or, "look, here we see violence." And
we can do that with Judaism and with Christianity.
This is not so with Unitarian Universalism. For one thing we don’t
have a sacred book with which to contradict ourselves. But I think we
can fairly say that both Unitarianism and Universalism as they began
here in America, did not have violent beginnings. Now, European
Unitarianism has a few martyrs, but there was not for example a Michael
Servetus movement or following. Instead we have stories about how
radical we are, and how upsetting we are to mainstream religion and
society. The major negative component to crystalize in our beginnings as
Universalists was the focus on one message. If you follow the history of
the Universalist denomination, you’ll notice that when we were no longer
the only church focusing on God’s love, there was a sharp decline in our
membership. As one Universalist minister put it, "Hell became less of a
burning issue." When we found ourselves not to be the only show in town
with that message, it was difficult to expand our message to meet the
changing world. For Unitarians there were character flaws such as
arrogance, elitism, and a cold intellectualism which detests emotional
responses in religious matters. Between you and me, I’ll take those
flaws over violence any day.
We, as a movement, are making efforts to address our communal
character flaws, but they will never not be the flaws we’ve had from our
beginning. In the same way, we will always be known for the social
advancement and justice work recorded in American history, whether or
not we are still working for justice. We will always have the freedom of
individual conscience as our first principle regardless of how much
emphasis we place on community. Who we were when this all started has a
lasting and important impact on who we are now and on who we may
possibly grow to be. When the two traditions merged, we experienced a
balancing that will be a true New Beginning so long as we remember both
traditions and how they started and grew.
I am not suggesting that every Unitarian Universalist today is over
focused on one message and is struggling to be less arrogant, elitist,
and overly-rational. At nearly every formal or semi-formal gathering of
new members or visitors we intentionally go around the circle and invite
everyone to share a little of their journey which brought them to Cedar
Lane. More and more we are hearing that people come here for community
and a humbling respect for the mystery surrounding the major religious
questions.
We don’t ask new people to tell us their name and theological
perspective, their least popular belief, or their favorite
middle-centuries pope. We ask, "Who are you, where did you come from,
and how did you end up here?" One time I sat down and wrote out my most
eloquent response yet to those questions.
"We have, within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us. There are
traces of lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us and
shape who we are and how we see the world. I am a fourth generation
Unitarian Universalist. My personal religious and spiritual history
would be incomplete without saying something about the echoes of the
lives and loves I carry.
"My mother’s mother’s mother, Cora Arvilla Beadle Miller, was one of
the founding members of the Old Stone Universalist Church of Schuylur
Lake, NY. That is the same church where my mother’s mother, Marie
Elizabeth Miller Strong, played the organ and was Superintendent of the
Church School, and where my mother’s father, Ashley Walter Strong, was
Moderator and then President of the New York Convention of Universalists
in the mid 1950's. It is the same church, The Old Stone Universalist
Church, where my mother, Elizabeth May Strong, now a Minister of
Religious Education, grew up and began teaching when she was in eighth
grade.
"We have, within each of us, echoes of memories beyond us; traces of
lives and loves which are not ours, and yet belong to us. My mother’s
mother’s mother was a church builder. May I be so blessed as to be the
same."
What I learned here was that not only must I contend with my own
past, that part of what is behind me which I was there for; but I must
also reconcile all that is a part of me that came before I even showed
up! Thus it is, certainly with nations and congregations. You all
inherit the great wonderfulness and all the blemishes and warts that
this congregations has stood for over the years.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the musical groups Sweet Honey in
the Rock, wrote in the liner notes for the song I Remember, I Believe
that she was struck by a sermon she had heard about the Hebrew tradition
of "remembering" as the basis of faith. "It seemed," she wrote, "to be
saying that practicing history could be the basis of believing. If I
hold within myself the memory of the journey of my people, if I know
that I am evidence of the success of that journey, then I can believe
that I too will be able to move through the challenges I face on the
path I walk with my life." Now I am struck by the thought that occurred
to her after she was struck by a sermon. Practicing history could be the
basis of believing.
In the write up I offered to the Newsletter I had a quote from a
different musician. "The Mississippi is mighty, but it starts in
Minnesota at a place that you could walk across with five steps down."
This is from a song by the Indigo Girls. That river which cuts across
the whole country from top to bottom, is a major landmark on our map and
has featured prominently in our history and in the contemporary lives of
many people. It is a powerful river. And it is a powerful metaphor. It
overflows now and then and floods towns and plains. Each of us is like
that river. We all started in some small way in some remote place and
lead mighty lives now. And I bet that a lot of you have experienced the
analogous flooding in one form or another. You do well to know and
understand the implications of what has gone on upstream. That is your
past. If you can acknowledge the good and bad in your past, you will be
prepared for the challenges coming from upstream. They can serve you and
give you great strength. You will be better suited to be intentional
about what you send downstream, into the beaconing future.
In a world without end,
May it be so.
Office@CedarLane.org
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