|
||||
| ||||
|
|
|
Tambourine Rattle in Cedar Lane April 17, 2005 Denise (Denny) Davidoff Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland We had the official annual canvass at the Westport church last weekend, April 8 through 10. This is Jerry’s and my pledge card. It tells us that our 2004-5 pledge was $2200. We were asked to increase it by ten percent next year. (When we get home, I will deliver the card into the hands of the canvass chair. I told her I needed it as a prop for this morning.) The theme our Canvass Committee chose is “Connect!”. Connect congregant to congregant, congregant to ministers, congregation to community, congregation to the wider UU movement. I was reminded of Marge Piercy’s poem, The Seven of Pentacles: Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time, not always for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes. So between church on April 3 and church on April 10, after I had attended the canvasser training to learn how to turn on other people, Jerry and I sat down to figure out our pledge. Having received our completed tax forms from the accountant, we studied our retirement finances. We wished, again, that the Dow Jones performance was better, steadier, less dicey. We wondered nervously, again, if this would be the year one or both of us would become ill and expensively dependent. We fretted about Jerry’s soaring prescription medication costs and the fact of their not being covered by an insurance plan. We pondered arthritic plagued life without Bextra, as we had done before about Vioxx. We monitored the level and quality of our church activity. We wished the Sunday worship reached us at a deeper level. We reminded each other about our love of Unitarian Universalism and all it has meant to us. And then we decided and filled out the card. This pledging process doesn’t happen once a year for the Davidoffs. Before we go to the General Assembly in June, we will think about our contribution to the Living Tradition Fund, the collection at the annual Service of the Living Tradition which honors our ministers. In October, we will be asked to decide how much to pledge to support the work of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. (I chair the CLF Board.) How much money can we put to the effort of growing a church without walls, more and more a cyber church, serving isolated Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists in every state in the Union as well as 26 other countries? In November, I will be given a pledge card at the Meadville Lombard Theological School board meeting and we will decide how much to pledge to support theological education and the training of new ministers to serve our movement. In December, a letter will come to remind us its time for our annual pledge to Friends of the UUA, money that goes directly into the UUA’s operating budget. Jerry and I gave away a little over 11 percent of our 2004 income—some years we do even better—and well over half of what we give goes to keeping Unitarian Universalism alive. For me, Annie Dillard says it all: There is no one but us. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. So when the poignant pleas come in from Save the Children and Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and ACLU, and Yale Law School, from Habitat for Humanity and the United Negro College Fund and Amnesty International, we swallow hard and wish we had the unlimited resources of Melinda and Bill Gates and we remember, with some sadness, that there are just 150,000 adult Unitarian Universalists who can be reached because the UUA WORLD magazine has addresses from the member congregations. That’s the sum total of people we can find to ask to keep our faith movement alive and vital and useful and effective with their pledges and their money. There is no one but us. The late Peter Fleck, in the title essay of his book, The Blessings of Imperfection, wrote: “Well, let’s be frank and admit that the church has its aggravations. The eternal and oh-so-necessary concern about finances, the annually recurring problems of balancing a budget, of finding money for repainting the vestibule, repairing the boiler and tuning the organ, the ongoing criticism of the minister’s sermons, which are too liberal for some and too orthodox for others, too pedantic for some and too colloquial for others, the endless committee meetings about the Sunday School curriculum and the propriety of social action, the persistent shortage of tenors in the choir. Who wants it? Who needs it? “The answer,” Fleck tells us, “to this question is that we...want it, because we need it. The answer is that the church..., in spite of its shortcomings, the imperfection that characterizes everything made by humans, is better... than no church.” We Unitarian Universalists hold dear the first principle in the UUA Bylaws: recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Many of us harbor the notion that none of us are really free while others are oppressed. We are aware of our privilege as educated Americans living in the most robust economy in the world. Even in a seeming recession that has lowered the value of our stocks and threatened our job security, and increased the price of a gallon of gasoline for our guzzling cars, our economy is robust beyond the imagination of the people we think of as our religious family—Unitarians in Transylvania or in the Khasi Hills of northeastern India, Universalists in the Philippines. Our lives, the largesse we take for granted, the technology and books and food and medicine and shelter, even the indoor plumbing we deeply believe we are entitled to, are beyond their imagination. Friends, if we are to live the lives of faithful Unitarian Universalists, perhaps we must do more, give more, and be more, person by person, congregation by congregation. There is no one but us. There is no one but us. There never has been... |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
Church |
