A Time for Transformation
Sermon by Steve Edington
September 16, 2007
There are many advantages to a long-term ministry, but one of the disadvantages is that at some point I run out of stories from previous stages in my life before arriving here in Nashua. But I think I've got one that's still been on the shelf. Many of you have heard the part about how in the mid-1970s I left the ministry with the American Baptists and spent a year trying to figure out where to go with my life. And you've heard the part about how I spent that year in Madison, Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin preparing for a possible career as a social worker. Part of that preparation included taking a course, and doing a practicum, in family counseling and family systems theory and all that. In the ensuing 30 years I've forgotten far more than whatever I may have learned from that experience. What I mostly did learn was that I didn't want to be a social worker and preferred to stay with the ministry - albeit with a denomination and in a faith tradition that I could serve in good faith and conscience. That's what eventually got me here.
But I did manage to retain one gem of wisdom from that family counseling and practicum course that has stayed with me. I remember something our instructor and supervisor told those of us in her group very early on. She said that when a family or a couple come to see you for the first time, for an initial meeting and interview, they do not expect you to resolve all their concerns and issues in that one fifty minute session. But, she went on to point out, something has to happen in that first encounter that gives at least some measure of hope that things can be different, and can change for the better, for that family or couple. They have to see at least some possibility for a positive transformation of their relationship even if they do not fully see just what such a transformation might involve. They don't need to see that whole road at first, but they have to feel that they're at least on a road that will get them to a better and healthier place in their lives.
The instructor and supervisor's name was Barbara Maloney, a very direct, no-fooling-around Irish woman; She was something like the "super-nanny" you see on that TV program. I've long since lost all contact with her. But that little nugget of insight she offered has stayed with me over my many years in the UU ministry. I keep Ms. Maloney's challenge in front of me: What is it that has to happen when people, when seekers and searchers, come into our midst here for the first time, that will bring them back time and again? We should seriously think on this with our Open House Sunday now two weeks away. And what has to keep happening in the lives of our members and friends that will continue to make us a vital and nurturing liberal religious congregation for then, for us. For those who are just testing out the road, and for those of us who have been traveling it for some time, what needs to happen in order to keep both our individual, and our shared, journeys moving along in a positive and healthy direction?
I guess my involvement with the Kerouac Exhibit over this past summer has me a little fixated on the metaphor of the road, so I'll run with it for a while this morning. I doubt that many of those who come through our doors for the first time to a Sunday service are expecting their lives to be radically transformed in the course of an hour's worship service. They may not even want that. They may just be checking us out for simply the sake of curiosity. But I do feel they need to see some possibility of transformation if they are to come back again. For those of us who've been "on the road" (sorry about that) for a stretch, we too need to feel that we'll have our transforming moments as we move along. So, as we embark upon yet another year in our life as a congregation - a congregation that is far more than an aggregate of individuals - I would like to offer some thoughts, and hopefully some challenges, as to the kinds of transformations we can and should be offering and experiencing.
I give you a line from the writings of Henry Miller to help chart us a course for the next several minutes: Relax, it's a clean one - as most of his lines actually were. Henry Miller: "One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things." Well, what we have here is surely a place - and has been one for over 180 years now. But the destination we offer from this place is that new way of looking at things. Maybe not first time new for many of you, but new in the sense that each time we come to this destination our perspectives, our thoughts, and our ways of being with one another, and being in the world, are renewed.
Most traditional religious communities offer a set of beliefs as a way guiding a person's perspective and thoughts and way of being in the world. I don't disparage that. Some beliefs, of course, are healthier than others, but having a core set of beliefs and values is important. Sometimes I think we err in the opposite direction by playing out Mark Twain's playful quip, "I have my values, and if you don't like them, well I've got some others." But the new way of looking at things we need to be offering from our place and destination, here is a way, a pathway, for determining, and affirming, and living out what is worth believing. Indeed, one of my colleagues in the UU ministry, Rev. Davidson Loehr, at the UU Church in Austin, Texas, says that the two basic faith-related questions for religious liberals today are: What is worth believing? and, Are there deep truths that can sustain one's spiritual quest without supernatural, or otherworldly, underpinnings? To pursue these questions, in both a serious and joyful way, is to engage in an ongoing act or process of transformation.
When we hold up, and offer, a religious community whose very purpose is to pursue such questions as these, then we offer some real hope to those who are on their journeys of spirit and meaning, but who may not be sure as to what road they wish to take in that journey. The destination we offer, then, both for ourselves and for those who come into our midst, is that new way of looking at things.
I'd like to spend some time with those questions that Rev. Loehr poses. I like the order in which he asks them. First, what is worth believing? Not, first off anyway, what is intellectually or rationally defensible, but what is worth believing in. Then comes the second question: Can these beliefs that I find worthy of sustaining and guiding me be held apart from some otherworldly notion of the Supernatural? You can each and all run well with these questions, I'm sure. What I'll do is share with you, as we launch another year together in our congregational life, are some of the "worthy beliefs" I've come to that have proven to be transformative for me. I invite you to do the same.
First, I believe that when it comes to the world and universe around us, in whose web of life our own lives are contained, what we see is what we've got. I do not mean that we can see and know everything there is to see and know in this vast universe we inhabit. There will always be more to see and learn; more mysteries to pursue; more awe and wonder to be experienced. It's just that I believe that this is the only world and universe we have - no other realms of existence are available to us. But the transformative part of this belief for me is its corollary, so to speak. What we have here is enough - enough to give our lives meaning and purpose and deep relatedness if we can fully open ourselves to the lives we've been given and the world we've been given to live them in. This gets me right into my second worthy belief or tenet:
It is how we see, and how we choose to see, that makes the difference and that is transformative for us. While the term "humanist" does not fully cover how I define myself, I'm still enough of a humanist to believe that we human beings are the meaning makers - and that life's many meanings do not come to us from some other-worldly realm. We are the ones who are called to infuse with meaning the world we've been given to live in, and to see beyond its surface manifestations.
My third worthy belief is that life - without having to explain itself - both blesses and wounds us, and we are called to hold fast to it in the face of both. While the Bible is not central to my own formations of faith I continue to be greatly taken by the Genesis myth of Jacob getting into an all night wrestling match with an angel. The story goes that Jacob is traveling at night, trying to get to a destination of his own. He encounters some kind of a being that he can't even see, but who seems to be a man, and they wrestle all night. In the course of their struggle Jacob's hip is wrenched out of joint. They fight until dawn at which point the man, or the angel, or God - depending upon how one reads the story - asks Jacob to let him go. Jacob replies, "I will not let you go until you bless me."
Taking a cue from the late Joseph Campbell that all mythology is really a set of stories about the many and varied aspects of the human condition, our lives are something we more or less stumble upon, not altogether unlike stumbling upon a stranger in the dark. We did not will or plan our lives from some pre-existent state, that is to say. But to really take hold of our lives, however it was that we got them - is to be deeply wounded at times as well as deeply blessed. A life credo that says, "I will not let you go unless you bless me" is, I feel, a belief worth having and living out. It is a way of keeping faith in the midst of both wounding adversity and great joy. A corollary here is that as part of the great chain of life we can be both bearers of joy, and we can also wound. We may be thanked when we are bearers of blessings; and we have to seek forgiveness - as this Rosh Hashanah season reminds us - when we wound others or wound our earth.
My fourth "thing worth believing" is one I'll only touch briefly upon. I believe that this world, with all its sham and folly, with all of it's human imperfections and failings, and with all the just plain lunacy we at times visit upon it - and with all of its unhealed and unreconciled parts - is still worthy of our efforts, small as they may be, to make it a more humane, just, and peaceful place. It is worthy or our efforts, however meager, to transform it. Among other things here in this country we contend with a war into which we were, as I read it, senselessly led; and in which now we struggle to find some kind of a sensible way out.
It's been over 45 years since Joseph Heller published his black humored novel Catch 22. I'm not sure even Mr. Heller could have foreseen a situation where we would invade a country on the basis of a terror threat which that country did not pose, and then use as a rationale for our remaining there the need to fight the terrorism that our own invasion unleashed. It would almost be worth a laugh except for the horrible human death toll, of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, that has resulted from such devastating folly. As despairing as I feel at times over this matter, I do return to that worthy belief that this world, and our lives within it, are worthy of our efforts to transform it.
Fifth, and finally for today, and perhaps as a counter-point to what I've just said, I believe that "We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our being, (and) whether we live or die we are contained within this beauty." These words are not original with me. I first heard them spoken by the late Rev. Deane Starr, who was our District Executive when I first came here in 1988. Deane spoke these words after he had lost his son, Paul, to the AIDS virus. Two years after Paul Starr's death his father, Deane, spoke to his ministerial colleagues, at our annual UU General Assembly, about how he had basically given up hope of ever finding any kind of joy in his life ever again. He felt the best he could hope for was some relief from the pain brought on by his son's death. Then Deane went on to tell about a short boat cruise he took one evening off the west coast of Naples, Florida. Here's how he described it:
"The entire sky, from horizon to horizon, was aglow with color - reds and purples and pinks and golds. Then the colors faded and that indescribable deep, deep indigo of late twilight filled the sky. The boat turned around (and) there on the eastern horizon was a full and glorious moon. With tears streaming down my face, I realized that even though my son's being had been scattered, he remained a part of this awesome beauty." And then Deane expands upon this experience to say, "We can never contain the beauty in which we live and move and have our beings; (and) whether we live or whether we die, we are contained within this beauty."
Remember what I said earlier about how all we need is here in this natural world for us if we will but seek and find it? If, as Jesus put it, we have the "eyes to see and the ears to hear."? The experience Deane Starr describes here bears that out. And even though Deane's own being has now also been scattered like that of his son's, his words remain to bless me, and I hope, all of us. To stay with those words for just another moment, there is an uncontained beauty, a greater web of life, a larger chain of being - some even call it the Presence of the Holy - that holds us in our temporal lives here on earth. Catching a glimpse of that Beauty and feeling that Presence did not remove the reality of the death of Paul Starr for his father. That remained with Deane for the remainder of his life. But it did remind and reassure him that Life with a capital 'L' is bigger than any one of us and that it's beauty and grace ultimately transcend the greatest of human tragedy. I find this worthy of believing.
Nearly 30 years ago I needed a new destination on my own life road, and I looked for it in the academic world. The destination I found, however, was the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. It's a wonderful place, with a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, no less, who was a member there when it was built. What I found in that place, in Henry Miller's words again, was a new way of looking at things. And that proved to be transformative. That new way of looking at things has continued to evolve and has brought me the beliefs I've briefly shared this morning. Those beliefs will continue to evolve as long as my road goes on because I am in a place that continues to offer me new ways of looking at things. And, more to the point, you are here as well and you have that same opportunity. Still even more to the point we must be offering that new way of looking at things to all who come into our midst; to those whose life journeys have brought them to this place that means so much to so many of us. We are called to make this a place of transformation for them, for us, for all whose search leads them here.
I'll close now by adding a sixth belief that under girds the five I've already shared and gives me my set-up for next Sunday. It's just this: "Life is holy and every moment is precious." The line is from Kerouac's On the Road. (You knew I'd slip that in somewhere even if I did manage to off until the end of this!) I've had quite the summer, as I spent a fair amount of it just watching the people who came to the Boott Cotton Mill Museum in Lowell to view the exhibit of the original manuscript of On the Road in the 120 foot taped-together rolls of paper on which Kerouac originally typed it. We were only able to display 36 feet of it at a time given the space the Park Service had to work with, but it still made for an impressive, even stunning, exhibition.
The thing that most fascinated me, once I'd done my own perusals of the manuscript, was watching the people who were coming to see it. It's a secular document - so secular in fact that it took a publisher six years to work up the courage to finally print it. The museum is a completely secular setting. And yet many of those who came into the exhibit room did so with the appearance of pilgrims being on some kind of a holy quest to see a sacred relic. The whole room, in fact, had the feel of being a sacred place. Those who came knew they had arrived at a special destination that gave them a new way of looking at things.
Kerouac's words, as found in that document, that "all of life is holy and every moment is precious" actually take us beyond the usual kinds of distinctions that tend to get drawn between the sacred and the secular. It's all really one world, and we each and all have one precious and holy life to live in it. To consider all of life holy and every moment precious is a choice, a way of looking at things, a lens through which to see the world and our lives in it. It is a perspective that makes the beliefs and affirmations we each and all come to worthy of holding. I'll pick up this thread next Sunday.
For today, let us continue to value and appreciate this destination that continues to accord us new ways of looking at things as we continue on our journey together.
Stephen D. Edington
September 16, 2007
