Sustaining a Spiritual Community
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
August 16, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
In July I spent part of my vacation in Arizona with my three children,
leaving my wife, Leslie, in Maryland to see her clients and to work on
her doctoral dissertation. After a long drive across the high desert to
the South Rim of the Grand Canyon we hiked down into the canyon
through 10 miles of scorching heat. Even my seven-year-old daughter
hiked with us. She carried water and her clothing in a backpack,
while I carried her sleeping bag along with my own. The hike took us
six hours. The heat drained all of us of energy. We each drank a
gallon of water as we walked. Not being in perfect physical condition, after about five miles my back
and my legs ached with pain.
The trail we took is not the main trail on the south rim that most
people hike. Instead we hiked into Havasu Canyon, a tributary of the
Grand Canyon, many miles west of the main tourist view points on
the south rim. Havasupai is the name of an Indian tribe that lives at
the bottom of the canyon. The Havasupai Reservation is one of the
most beautiful and remote areas of the Grand Canyon. The village is
accessible only by foot, horseback, or helicopter. About 12,000
tourists hike into Havasu canyon each year. Indians has inhabited the
village for 700 years. A creek flowing through this canyon makes
extensive farming possible through irrigation. Havasupai translates
into English as "people of the blue green waters." Today the village
consists of about 400 people, along with many dogs and horses. It is
the only remaining place in the United States where the mail is
delivered by pack mules. There are no roads, no autos, only dirt
trails. It is a beautiful and peaceful community.
Beyond the village are the blue-green waterfalls. Spread out along
Havasu Creek over a distance of about 2 miles, the first falls about 60
feet high is a little more than a mile north of the village. The second,
Havasu Falls, is 120 feet high and is a favorite spot for swimming.
The third, Mooney Falls, is 190 feet high. This stretch of canyon is
one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.
All however, was not perfect during our visit to this paradise.
Sunburn was a problem for my kids because I was not aggressive
enough when it came to covering them with sun screen lotion. My
children will tell you about the mosquitoes. I had packed an insect
repellent that claimed it made people invisible to bugs. In spite of
this, my 12-year-old son could count 250 mosquito bites on his
arms. The bites covered his face and neck. My other two children
also had hundreds of bites, causing strangers to ask if they had
chicken pox. The mosquitoes were wary of sucking the blood of a
middle-aged Unitarian minister. I did not receive one bite.
However, the most disturbing event came the second night we
were in the canyon. About 9:30 one of the Havasupai who worked
for the National Park Service awakened me. He told me that the
area around Moony Falls was closed until at least noon the next
day. A man in his forties, had jumped off the top of the 190 foot
falls aiming for the pool of water below. His body was at the
bottom of the falls. They expect it to take all morning to carry it up
from below the falls and take it out by helicopter. Apparently
earlier in the day he had successfully jumped off the 120 feet high
Havasu Falls. He did this although the Indians give every camper a
list of rules to follow as they hike through the village to the campground. One rule says clearly that no
one is to jump or dive into
the creek. The Havasupai also post these rules near the waterfalls.
This tragic death relates directly to the issue I want to explore this
morning. In a talk given at the Unitarian Universalist General
Assembly, Dr. Robert Bellah suggested that as a group we Americans suffer from an excessive interest
in individual self-fulfillment,
to the neglect of our responsibility to live in community. A gentleman's decision to ignore the rules of
the community led to his
death in the Canyon last month. In the same way Bellah is concerned that American individualism may
be destroying much that
is good in our society. In an interview he gave at the University of
California at Berkeley last year, Bellah said:
I worked with [a student] in the School of Public
Health -- this was about ten years ago; his name is
David Buchanan -- and he was doing a study of
drug use among junior high school students. This is
a matter of great concern for public health . . . One
question he asked [junior high students] was "Does
it mean anything to you to be an American?" And
the extraordinary thing about what he found was the
almost complete unanimity of the answer. The
answer was "Yes." "As an American, I can do anything I want." This answer came from people in
depressed parts of east Oakland, some of whom
were not going to live to be twenty years old. It
came from people in the hills [of Oakland] who
were going to go to college and graduate school and
had all the goodies of American society. It really
crossed every line of race, class, and gender.
Bellah goes on to say:
I was asked to review a study of the essays of the
119 winners of something every year called Presidential Scholars. The top one percent of all high
school graduates are asked to write an essay and 119
of them are chosen. The analysis of these essays is
quite interesting. These are people who were telling
you who they were, expressing their deepest convictions. They did not find in these essays that
people
were out for money or fame or what you might call
a vulgar notion of American materialism. What
they were saying, across the board, in almost stereotype language was "I am not a conformist. I am
realizing myself. I am going to be the fullest kind
of person I can be" . . . everyone claimed to be
unique and they claimed it in exactly the same way.
So that's a problem. In this culture, where
conformism is such a negative thing, it's absolutely
conformist to claim you're a nonconformist.
Further on in the same interview Bellah gave another example of
excessive American individualism. He said:
A graduate student we had in the department who
was from Puerto Rico, a native Spanish speaker, has
been doing Teaching Assistant work in Sociology 1,
our big introductory course. The instructor asked
all the students to write a social autobiography.
What he found was that they were all the same. It
didn't matter whether they were black, Chicano,
Asian. They were very much like the Presidential
Scholars. They were all telling you how wonderfully unique they were. They weren't celebrating
any ethnic identity. They were celebrating their
selfhood.
In his talk to Unitarian Universalists Dr. Bellah made the point
repeatedly that Unitarian Universalists place a high value on individualism. I saw this last month when I
was in Arizona. Two days
after leaving the Grand Canyon I gave the Sunday Sermon at the
Prescott Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. The congregation is
made up of many wonderful people several of whom helped with
the last sermon when I visited the area with our Partner Church
minister and his wife.
During my visit I picked up a copy of their monthly newsletter. It
contained a copy of a proposed Amendment to their bylaws. The
Amendment read as follows "A member [of the fellowship] shall
be considered a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
unless that person chooses to join Prescott Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship and adding 'PUUF only' after his or her signature in
the Membership Book." This option said the newsletter, "is in
response to requests from some members who wish to support only
the Fellowship," and not the Unitarian Universalist Association.
This was only a proposed amendment and I do not know whether it
will actually become part of the group's bylaws. It is parochialism,
the attitude of considering one's own local congregation sufficient
and claiming that the larger association is not necessary. Bellah
writes that such parochialism is only the continuation of radical
individualism at the congregational level.
What is wrong with such radical individualism? I suggest that one
purpose of human life is to learn to love each other, to learn to live
together in community. I suggest that individual self fulfillment is
not the purpose of human life. I suggest that individual self fulfilment can be self destructive. Witness
the gentleman who jumped
over the waterfall. However, it can also be destructive to others.
Bellah said in his talk to Unitarian Universalists this past June:
. . . the United States, with its high evaluation of the
individual person, is nonetheless alone among North
Atlantic societies in the percentage of our population who live in poverty and . . . we are dismantling
what was already the weakest welfare state of any
North Atlantic nation. Just when we are moving to
an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the
individual person, our capacity to imagine a social
fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. And this is in no small part due to the fact
that our religious individualism is linked to an economic individualism which . . . ultimately knows
nothing of the sacredness of the individual. If the
only standard is money, then all other distinctions
are undermined.
Bellah fears that the use of new technologies and information
systems are encouraging excessive individualism. Linked by
phones and computers, people live not in communities but in
networks. He writes:
Educated in the highly competitive atmosphere of
excellent universities and graduate schools, such
persons have learned to travel light regarding family, church, locality, even nation. It is here, though
not exclusively here, that we clearly see the process
of individualization . . . an individualization that
convinces people that freedom is the freedom to do
anything they want.
Dr. Bellah suggests that even the recent interest in spirituality is an
example of excessive individualism. In his talk at the UUA General Assembly, he said:
We know that for Americans the word spiritual
often denotes private or personal experience
whereas the word religious denotes 'institutional'
religion.
Bellah is suggesting that when people complain that a church is not
spiritual enough, what they may in fact be saying is that a church is
focused more on maintaining a community, than on encouraging
individual self-fulfillment.
At the end of his talk to Unitarian Universalists, Bellah talked
about what sustains the spiritual community of which he is a part.
Robert Bellah is Episcopalian rituals and sacraments. For him, the
feeling of transcendence, the feeling that he is part of something
larger than himself, comes in the ritual and sacraments of the
Episcopal church such as the communion service. This is why he
found it disturbing that when the survey asked Unitarian Universalists "What is the 'glue' that binds
individual congregations together?" and 61 percent said least important was "common worship elements
and language."
In response to this survey, one of you wrote to me that the survey
does not mean that UUs think worship is unimportant. Instead it is
the diversity and the freedom to explore and experiment with forms
of worship that binds us together.
I believe there is truth to this. Our love of diversity and experimentation is one of the glues that
holds us together. However, I
think that repetition also has value. This is why in my own ministry I try to provide some in worship
continuity from week to week.
I follow a similar order of service most Sundays. I use the same
doxology and we sing "Spirit of Life" most Sundays when I lead
the worship. With Bellah, I believe that common worship elements do provide glue that holds religious
communities together.
At the end of our two days and three nights of camping in the
canyon, we hiked the two miles from the campground to the village. We had originally planned to walk
out. However, the intense
summer heat, the bugs, the sunburn and the aching muscles motivated me to ask about riding horses to
the rim. "Sorry," said the
villager in charge of make reservations for the horses, your daughter is too small and too young to ride
a horse. "Your only option,
other than hiking, is to take the helicopter that flies into the village
each morning at 10:00 a.m. It takes ten minutes to fly to the rim."
Well, I stoically hid my disappointment about not getting to go on
a three-hour horse ride in 110 degree heat, and I signed up the
family for the ten-minute helicopter ride. One village rule is that
the Havasupai always get priority on the helicopter.
When it was finally our turn to fly out, I found the experience of
rising out of the canyon, to be extraordinary. I looked at the terraces, with their buttresses and
pinnacles rising toward the rim.
Great triangular substructures support temple-like pinnacles, which
form the huge amphitheaters that lie between them. Now I know
how a dragonfly might feel if it were to rising from the floor to the
roof inside the National Cathedral.
When I got back to Bethesda, I was greeted with the news of the
tragic deaths at the Capitol building, the tragic bombings in Africa
and the continuing investigation of the President, all depressing
events.
Nevertheless, here at the church I was surprised and pleased to see
how much work had been done on the conversion of the parsonage
into an Education Center and Memorial Garden. Two Saturday
mornings, under the direction of Rich Clark, I joined with many
others in the church in painting the inside of the structure. In this
project many people are giving up their time for the good of the
larger community.
I thought that I would like to bring my old teacher, Robert Bellah
here and show him the work. I would walk with him through the
unfinished building, introducing him to Jack Shaffer and saying:
"Here, community is alive and healthy. Of course there are difficult times when we do not all agree.
Nevertheless, among these
people there is a deep inner commitment to being together, to
working together, to worshiping together. We do believe that in
community we will sustain the wholeness, the unity, and the experience of the spiritual that we seek."
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