Membership and Meaning

Hear the sermon

“In our experiment in religious community we are saying:
|begin with acceptance, begin with the openness which is a form of love,
begin with the love that lets others be who they are—
then personal growth is more likely to follow and truth—
living, relevant, personal truth—is likely to follow, too.”
- Roy D. Phillips 

Over the years, I have spoken to you many times about the meaning of membership in our church, and, frankly, I’m not sure that I have much that is new to say on the subject.  So this morning I want to take a somewhat different and more personal tack, and talk about the meaning which comes from membership.  Perhaps what I have to say will be self-evident and resonate with you.  I rather hope so.

What I know about this topic mostly comes from my experience of being part of a family, of growing up in a small town in Maine, of being a lifelong Unitarian Universalist and of ministering to a variety of Unitarian Universalist churches over the past thirty-one years, and, more recently, of my participation in the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council, my work as the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Ambassador to the Transylvanian (now “Hungarian”) Unitarian Church in Romania, and, more particularly, of my relationship with our congregation’s Unitarian partner church in Ujszekely in Transylvania.

My knowledge is, therefore, less theoretical than experiential.  It is less about definitions and concepts than it is about matters of the heart: about love and about the mysterious sense that the journey of our lives actually has had a direction, even though that direction is sometimes hard to chart.

During my most recent visit in Transylvania, Borika Jakab, whom many of you will remember from her visit here in 2005, or from your visits to Ujszekely (Borika is the wife of the minister, for those who may not know), and I were speaking about the problems of many of the people in the congregation there and of friends and colleagues of Borika and her husband Zsolt.  It was obvious that there are many problems there, and at one point we agreed that there was no such thing as a perfect family.  Mental health issues, addiction, marital problems, wayward children, abuse, and disappointments of all stripes are the common currency of family life no matter where you live.  There is no such thing as a perfect family, neither here nor in far-off Romania.

And yet, we also know that much of the meaning that we take from life comes from that primary familial relationship.  It is the first place where we begin to form our identity and from which we may gather a sense of purpose in life.  If we are lucky, those initial familial relationships are sound enough that we gain a mostly positive sense of membership and the meanings that it can bring.  The family is the first place where we “belong,” the first place where we are made aware of the benefits of belonging.  It is where we begin to understand who we are, and who we are in relation to the world.

My strongest sense of belonging after my family came from my upbringing in a small town on the coast of Maine.  There was little question that I “belonged” in Castine, Maine.  My grandfather was the physician in the little hospital which he and my grandmother, a registered nurse, had established there.  My mother was a teacher in the local elementary school.

On her side of our family, our roots go back at least eight generations in that place.

Castine is situated on a peninsula.  You have to want to go there.  It was, in addition to being a beautiful place, a relatively secure and self-contained little world in which to grow up.  It was from there that I learned that one’s understanding of one’s place in the world, of one’s identity, and of one’s participation in a larger whole, can bring rich rewards in the form of knowing who we are and can perhaps even help to give us a sense of why we are.

I grew up in the Unitarian, and after the 1961 merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America, the Unitarian Universalist church.  It was literally a stone’s throw from my house.  I attended Sunday School there until the eighth grade, when I left town to attend boarding school in another part of the state.  I attended church there with my parents and my paternal grandparents.

It was there that I first explored the great questions of life, death, and in between.  Even sex was a not-taboo subject!  It was there that I first considered entering the ministry.  Little did I know that my membership there would provide me with a lifetime of meaning and identity and an even deeper sense of belonging, with experiences I could not even have imagined at the time, and with relationships and friendships that have been profoundly impactful on my life.  (If you have children here, you should consider this possibly lifelong benefit for them of having a church connection.)

After a typically dissolute youth and graduation from college and graduate school at the University of Maine, I finally decided to follow my early inclination and curiosity and enter into theological studies at Harvard Divinity School.  In both of those places, Maine and Harvard,  I had a strong sense of belonging and membership.  I made friends who helped to give my life meaning by helping me to understand more deeply who I am in relation to the world and taught me things I could not otherwise have known, things which have brought beauty and solace and joy to me life.  I was with people who shared common goals and a common outlook on life.  Even in my darker moments, I always knew that I was not alone or isolated, but that I was surrounded by people who cared about and supported and loved me.

In 1982, in a little prairie town in southwestern Minnesota, I embarked upon my ministerial career.  I could not have chosen a more spectacular place to serve my first church.  Hanska, Minnesota sits in an ocean of corn.  On a little hill (called Mt. Pisquah after the mountain on which Moses stood to gaze into the Promised Land into which he would never enter—an amazing metaphor for life!) stands the Nora Unitarian Universalist Church.  It is a beautiful setting, if perhaps a bit isolated.  Founded by Norwegian immigrants, it is about as opposite to our usual UU demographics as you can get.  Most of the members were farmers.  Most had never attended college.  Some still spoke Norwegian.

Of course, I bumbled through my three years in Hanska, totally embraced by that small and loving congregation in spite of all I didn’t know.  Those people taught me much about why one ought to belong to a church.  I watched as they supported one another through heartbreaking loss and occasional tragedy.  I watched as they worked and had fun together.  I watched as they struggled with family issues and with an economy that was not kind to farmers in the early 1980’s.  I simply cannot imagine my life without that experience and without those people.  A piece of my heart will always belong there.  No matter what self-doubts I may have had about my ability to become a minister, they put their confidence in me.  I owe them much.

After that early experience in Hanska, I served five other churches before coming to Newburyport.  I spent six years in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in a larger congregation in a very different kind of place, a declining manufacturing town, and in a church with roots in the Universalist side of our tradition.  Though not the happiest period in my life, still I was embraced by the congregation there, and, though I was having some second thoughts at that time about remaining in the ministry, I continued to learn from the experience of belonging to a community striving to provide a spiritual home for themselves in challenging times and to make a difference in an often troubled world.

As in Hanska, there were profound and tragic events from which I continued to learn about the vicissitudes of life, its joys and its sorrows, and to count my blessings, to grow, and to learn more about myself.  Again, those people taught me things I could not have known about life had I not been a part of their community, and which I hope helped to make me a kinder and more compassionate person.  I received far more from them than I ever gave.

After a two year hiatus from ministry, during which I returned to the community of my childhood, I re-entered the ministry as an interim in the Rockland, Maine UU church, followed by a year as a circuit riding interim in three small congregations in the Oxford Hills region of western Maine.  In all of these congregations I met people who taught me important lessons about life and death, people who remain dear to me though I no longer see them, and whom I shall never forget, people who made me feel that I belonged in their midst.

Through all these changes, my identity and membership as a Unitarian Universalist was part of the glue that kept my life together and gave me a sense that I had a place in the world.  My many relationships across the Unitarian Universalist universe are actually a perpetual surprise and joy and even a mystery to me.  It is hard, when you are so deeply involved in something over so many years, not to feel how empty your life would be without that amazing web of relationships and experiences, relationships and experiences which have of course been enriched tremendously during my increasingly lengthy tenure as your minister!

In 1995, after coming here to the First Religious Society, which had already established a partner church relationship with the church in Ujszekely under my predecessor  Bert Steeves, I began to get involved in the work of international partnership.  This work has led not only to now fifteen trips to visit our partners in Transylvania and even a trip to visit our Unitarian brothers and sisters in northeastern India, but it has given me a more global and I trust less parochial view of the world in which I live.  It has given me a much deeper sense of our Unitarian Universalist faith and the ways that it can help sustain very different kinds of people in very different kinds of places.  That work has profoundly deepened and enriched my own spirituality and, I dare to hope, at least a few of yours as well, either by direct experience or if only by hearing about it second hand.  In short, this work has changed my life.

I sometimes say that I have a second family in Transylvania, and it is true.  Not in my wildest dreams growing up in a small town in Maine during the Cold War could I have imagined such a possibility, and yet, it has been one of the most meaningful blessings of membership and belonging of the many that I have received in my life.

In short, I cannot imagine my life at all without those friendships and experiences, and without all the meanings that membership–in my family, my community, and particularly in a Unitarian Universalist church–have brought to my life.  Whatever it may mean to become a member of a church, it is clear to me that membership in all its forms can bring incredible meaning to our lives.  What that meaning is will vary from person to person, but I can almost guarantee that it will be there if you make the effort and commitment to become part of a striving religious community like ours.

That, at least, is my hope, for each and every one of us, on this day of new member recognition, and in all of the days of belonging still to come.  Amen. 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

 Reading: on membership, by the Rev. Donna Morrison-Reed

Engagement

April 21, 2013

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy,
the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.”
- Goethe

 

The events of this past week were yet another reminder, if we still needed one, of why community is so important.  So many selfless acts of generosity, courage, and heroism were performed in the aftermath of the terrible bombings at the Boston marathon.  In spite of the horror and, for some, the complete devastation of Monday’s events, the human spirit shone through in so many glorious ways that at least a little of the raw edge of a senseless and cowardly act of violence was softened and made less horrific than it might otherwise have been.

But why must it take an act like this to bring us together in such profound and meaningful ways?  Why do we not always show each other the kind of care and concern that was so vividly demonstrated on Monday and in the days following?  Why do we not recognize how vulnerable we are each and every day, how mortal, how superficial are our differences, and reach out to one another as if our lives depended upon it, which, of course, they do?

I don’t know the answer to those questions.  As one who believes in and is committed to building a beloved community in good times as well as bad, I can only guess that many folks believe that they are invulnerable, that they are immortal, until something like the bombings in Boston wakes them up and makes them understand otherwise.

Many people feel no need to belong to an intentional community such as a church.  Often it is only when a tragedy occurs, or a death in the family, or a rite of passage such as a marriage or child dedication, that they turn to the church for solace and sustenance or, just as important, for a place in which to share their joy.

It’s great that we are here for them.  That is certainly part of our mission.  But it would be even better if they recognized the ongoing benefits of belonging to a living, breathing community of people, a community of people who travel what Amiel calls “the dark journey” with us, and who, as Garrison Keillor writes so poignantly, “love us, and are glad to see our faces.”  As one of my ministerial mentors, John Cummins, once wrote,

The greatest rewards are long term ones.  You cannot plumb the depths of our principles nor discover all our common values nor explore all the possibilities for growth in one year or five.  And, of course, the greatest rewards go to those who give as well as take.

The fact is we could use their ongoing presence and support, because an institution like ours cannot continue to exist without the care and support and commitment of many dedicated people.  We cannot be there at hard times like these unless there are those who are willing to sacrifice and to labor on our behalf.

I have seen what this kind of belonging can mean for people at difficult times in their lives.  While nothing can completely take away the pain of losing a child, or the devastation of a teenager’s death in a car accident, or the hurt of a loved one dying too soon, a caring and comforting community can certainly help.  Not only at extreme times, such as the events of last week, but in those times that inevitably come to all of us: illness, disappointment, sadness, and, of course, the death that naturally comes to each of us, and to each of those we love, in time.

I’m grateful to our friend John Mercer for my sermon title this morning.  Engagement, thought of in the marriageable sort of way, means a much more serious kind of commitment than simply dating.  Engagement, in that more serious way of deeper commitment, is something that our church could always use more of.  How do we get more of us fully engaged in this enterprise of the church, specifically, of our church, the First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist, in Newburyport?

My late colleague, Peter Raible, once wrote, 

When we give ourselves significantly to others and to causes, we open our existence and we unclog the arteries of being.  Existence turned inward toward the self is ever a death warrant: while existence turned outward toward the world enlarges us and gives meaning and purpose to our life.

This, theoretically, is why we choose to make a deeper commitment to those we love, when we become engaged and when we marry.  We recognize at some level that we cannot live for ourselves alone, that there is much to be gained in giving up some independence in order to gain the benefits of interdependence.  Self-centeredness is such a dead end.  It is such a lonely place to inhabit.  When we make a deeper commitment to the ones we love, or even just to the ones we live with, we often find that we are happier and more fulfilled than we were before.  Not only do we gain the support of others, but we also learn important lessons about ourselves, and we come to see that we are not alone in either our distress or our good fortune.

This week, John sent me a lovely silhouette of a young man on one knee proposing to his lady love, a kind of prompt for this morning’s sermon.  Of course, nowadays that silhouette could contain any number of combinations of young men and young women!  People of whatever gender proposing their love to—people of whatever gender.  Thank God we are coming to recognize that commitment is the most important factor in a relationship, not some imagined “right” or “natural” juxtaposition of the sexes, which, as we know, offers absolutely no guarantee of a successful or sacred union.  I celebrate true commitment however and whenever it is made!  And we all should.

One of our greatest challenges as a congregation is, how do we move our friends and members to that deeper kind of commitment and support, from a kind of tentative, “dating” relationship, to a deeper and more serious form of “engagement”?  Because, as Goethe wrote in the quotation I have included on your orders of service, “Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.”

There is a tremendous potential here.  We have so many wonderful and interesting and talented people of all ages.  What would it mean if we could come to know each other even better?  What if we truly came to know each other’s stories, which, in a small way, we have been trying to do with our Journeys of Faith program?

Julie Parker Amery and I have just finished leading together, for a third time, a religious education program called “Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography.”  All I can say about that is that it is amazing the things we don’t know about those who come to church here.  What if we could come to know you better and to connect more of you in your shared interests and passions?  What if more people knew about your triumphs and struggles, your skills and talents?  Imagine what we might accomplish!

One remarkable event during this church year was the community-wide effort to build a playground at KelleherPark.  It’s simply amazing what we can do when we take the step into that deeper kind of commitment, when we join our hearts and minds and hands together, when we are fully engaged in a project or process.  I’m especially proud of all that members of this congregation have done to make this project a reality.  I believe that those of us who have been involved have come to know one another more intimately and meaningfully as a result.  And I hope that this will translate into an even deeper commitment to our church community.

How do we get more of us involved in projects like this, both within our church and beyond, in the larger community?  This has been a question that many of us have been asking for a long time.  How do we grow, not just numerically, but spiritually, and in terms of our bonds to one another, and of our commitment to this wonderful place that so many of us love and support so generously?  As I once read in a column in the newsletter of the First Parish in Cambridge, “It is commitment to our relationships that offers constancy and the sense of belonging that turn a building (whether a house or a meetinghouse) into a home, or a group of people into a community.”

This May, at our Annual Meeting, you will have an opportunity to decide if we are ready to take the bold step of adding a person to our staff whose job it would be to make this dream of deeper engagement a reality.  The Parish Board has accepted the recommendation of the task force formed to consider how to fill the huge shoes of our retiring Business Administrator,  John Mercer, to break John’s job into two positions: an Office Administrator whose primary responsibility is to oversee the financial well-being and business affairs of our church, and a Director of Community Engagement, whose responsibilities would include communications and volunteer coordination and fostering connections, among others.  You will have an opportunity to learn more about this proposed position and the task force recommendation in the next few weeks, leading up to the Annual Meeting on May 19.  You can also find information about it on the church website.

The bottom line is that even though we just completed our most successful pledge canvass ever—bless you, Brent Mitchell, and all who have contributed!—we are still short the money we will need to fund this new position.  This is the challenge that we face.

So many times over recent years your staff has heard wonderful ideas for programs and endeavors that would help us to grow in all the ways that I have been speaking about.  But the reality is that there simply is not the staffing or the time to do most of the things which would really take us to the next level of engagement and that would allow us to become the more deeply spiritual and active community presence that I believe so many of us long for us to be.

The rewards of a deeper kind of engagement in our church may not be self-evident to everyone, but I believe that they are the kind of rewards which will help us to weather the storm of terrible events like those of the week just past, and which will ultimately bear the mark of the eternal: as the late Jacob Trapp reminds us, those rewards are: 

The giving we have invested in others; the love we have expressed in deeds; the kindness we have shown; the work we have done because we loved it; the light we have shown that others might not stumble; the evil that we turned into good—because we saw that none of us lives apart, but that we are all indeed “members of one another.”

As I wrote to you earlier this week, at times like these, it is especially good to be together.  In the stress and strife of our busy days, we sometimes forget why it is that we are here, and what it is we are trying to accomplish.  Let us give thought to those things as we leave here this morning.

In closing, a poem to remind us that no evil and despicable act can break our spirit or turn us from our goal of building a beloved community of memory and hope, that life and love and good will ultimately triumph over all.  The poem is entitled “First days of spring—the sky,” by Ryokan:

First days of spring—the sky
is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.
Everything’s turning green.
Carrying my monk’s bowl, I walk to the village
to beg for my daily meal.
The children spot me at the temple gate
and happily crowd around,
dragging to my arms till I stop.
I put my bowl on a white rock,
hang my bag on a branch.
First we braid grasses and pay tug-of-war,
then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball in the air:
I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.
Time is forgotten, the hours fly.
People passing by point at me and laugh:
“Why are you acting like such a fool?”
I nod my head and don’t answer.
I could say something, but why?
Do you want to know what’s in my heart?
From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: from the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland, Texas, by Timothy Jensen

Practicing Resurrection

March 31, 2013 

“Practice Resurrection.”
- Wendell Berry, from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

“Life springs eternal.”  Those words of an early ministerial mentor of mine, Tracy Pullman, always return to me at Easter time.  Tracy wrote, “No matter how encrusted our lives may become, no matter how beaten into conventional molds and practices, no matter how indifferent to the spiritual demands of life at its best, yet within everyone, we have faith to believe, there dwells the spirit and the power to lay hold on new energies, to define new visions and to exhibit greater strength.”

We are surrounded by resurrection.  And I’m not just speaking about the annual rite of spring’s rebirth which is about to unfold in all of its green splendor.  We are surrounded by resurrection!  All around us we see examples of it.  New life out of old.  Pain and sorrow overcome.  Failure surmounted.  Health restored.  Hope renewed.  Love reborn.

And all of this in spite of death.  We know about death.  We have all experienced loss, or will.  No one is exempt.  But the miracle is that even in the face of death, our spirit rises to overcome it, even as St. Paul affirmed, “Where, O death, is your victory?   Where, O death, is your sting?”

Somehow, even in the face of our deepest grief, we find the strength to go on.  “I thought I was wounded to the core,” wrote poet Denise Levertov, “but I was only bruised.”  We go on, because we are only bruised, not wounded to the core.  We go on, because new life always beckons, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts open to understand.

Death, it turns out, is part of life.  It is a necessary part of nature’s yearly round.  My colleague Philip Hewitt writes,

The conventional Easter parable points to the life resurgent in nature, the “annual resurrection.”  Yet this triumph of life does not banish death.  It embraces death.  Much of last year’s carnival of green, which celebrated the triumph of spring, now lies in death and decay as the sustenance of the new and vigorous life which repeats the cycle.  Nature is immortal, but her individual members are not.  And it is only when we lose our craving for self-sufficiency, for an individual existence in isolation from, or even in opposition to, the great whole of which we are a part, that we have really absorbed the lesson of the parable.  Then we cease to live for ourselves alone, and begin to understand what it can mean to die and come again to life.

We are surrounded by resurrection!  Another colleague, Earl Holt, writes, 

The possibility of transformation and renewal exists; it is in all of us.  All around us are people whose lives, in ways large and small, have been transformed and renewed; those who have overcome the loss of what was most precious to them in the world, those who have won a battle with alcohol or other drugs, those who have transcended the temptation to despair when life was at its darkest.  Resurrection is not a long ago, unique, unlikely event, but is potentially present in all human life. . . .  Easter is the promise that we can be reborn; it is the promise of new life.

Belief in this kind of resurrection provides the possibility of living a different kind of life.  It is a belief in a resurrection within life.  It is a way of reorienting ourselves toward life and possibility, rather than toward fear, toward hope and joy, instead of despair.

But, you say, death is real.  Death is final.  And what of an afterlife?

“The idea has been a common antidote to death,” writes BostonGlobe columnist and former Catholic priest, James Carroll. 

You know that human beings have invoked the notion of “God” here, Carroll writes, as if the only way to make sense of death is to imagine being magically plucked from it.  No loss.  No grief.  “God” solves the human problem just by removing it.  But what if the human triumph over death consists simply in the knowledge of it?  What if the “other world” for which you long exists already in the contemplation of mortality, an interior world out of which this train of thought is coming?

This is heady stuff, but, you say, it lacks the assurance for which we long.  Is there life after death?  What would it look like if there were?  I personally can’t imagine it.  It’s this life that I want, and I want it more abundantly, in spite of all its trials and tribulation, in spite even of death.

For of one thing I am certain: this life offers moments of surpassing beauty, moments when “the triumph song of life” sings in our hearts.  I have experienced those moments, and they are real, as real as anything has ever been.  This life contains all that we love.  Would we, even in the face of the inevitability of loss, even in the face of life’s inescapable sadness and tragedy, even in the face of death itself, wish that it had never been?  And is it not this ecstasy and agony of life which binds us together as human beings?  We can’t have one without the other.  Whatever comes after this life, we have had these moments.  We have known something of love or we would not be here.

I am a realist.  I know that for some, the picture I am painting is not enough.  Not everyone is able to overcome despair and sadness, loss and grief.  Far be it from me to stand in judgment about that.  To me that reality is a call to try to be more kind, to try to help ease the way of those who travel “the dark journey” with us, to try to offer more hope and courage along the way.

Practicing resurrection is not easy.  Like anything valuable, it must become a discipline.  We have to work at it.  There will be days when we fail.  But as my late colleague ForrestChurch once wrote, “As long as we have the power to give others hope, confidence, and faith, we will surely live again and again.  This too is a way to practice resurrection.”

The psychologist Eric Fromm once wrote, 

Let us proclaim the reality of resurrection—not the resurrection which is a creation of another reality beyond this life—but a resurrection which is the transformation of this reality in the direction of greater aliveness.  People and society are resurrected every moment in the act of hope and of faith in the here and now—every act of love, of awareness, of compassion is resurrection—every act of sloth, of greed, of selfishness is death of the spirit.  Every moment life confronts us with the alternatives of death or resurrection—to live is to choose, and in choosing we give our answer.  Our answer lies not in what we say or think, but in what we are and how we act.  Let us proclaim, let us choose, let us live the reality of resurrection!

We need repeatedly to be brought to new life.  “I thought I was wounded to the core, but I was only bruised,” wrote Levertov.  Let us live in the possibility of that knowledge, and not only in the possibility of an afterlife of which we can know nothing.

In the ancient Christian church, it was standard to greet fellow Christians with the salutation, “He is risen; he is risen indeed!”  Personally, I prefer to imagine a day when all of us can proclaim, “We are risen; we are risen indeed!”  If we practice resurrection, I believe that day will eventually come, for each and every one of us.

In closing, a prayer by the late Unitarian minister, Vivian Pomeroy: 

Oh God of Life, you renew the face of the earth and quicken all things; we bless you for this lovely time; we praise you for all the beauty it brings to our eyes and for all the cheer it gives to our hearts.  Forbid that we be sullen when the trees break forth into singing; forbid that we be unmoved when the great tide is flowing again.  Make us eager not only to be good but also happier, knowing that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit.  May we not defraud ourselves of the fleeting day, but drink here and now of the sweetness of life.

So may it be.  Amen.

 - The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

                  

Communion as Invitation to Love

March 28, 2013
Maundy Thursday

“I give you a new commandment: that you love one another.”
- John 13: 34

One of the most profound religious experiences I have had in recent years has been my participation in several communion services at our UnitarianPartnerChurch in Ujszekely in the Transylvanian region of Romania.  Two years ago at Easter time I was in Transylvania and had the privilege of sharing in the celebration of Easter communion with my colleague Zsolt Jakab.  Though I had previously conducted a yearly Maundy Thursday communion service during my ministry to the MurrayUniversalistChurch in Attleboro, there is something very special about the manner in which our Transylvanian Unitarian brothers and sisters participate in this ancient ritual.

Transylvanian Unitarians celebrate communion four times a year: at harvest time, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost.  These services are by far the most popular religious services among them.  Communion Sundays are among the few times during the year when a majority of the congregation is present at church services.  Those who are unable to attend because of age or infirmity are brought communion in their homes following the service in the church.  These home visits to deliver communion have been some of the most moving religious experiences I have ever had.  To see the tears start in the eyes of an elderly parishioner no longer able to get to church is a reminder of the power of both religious symbolism and religious community.

Let me be clear: there is nothing supernatural about communion in the Transylvanian practice of communion.  If there is magic, it is in the moment when the minister, looking deeply into the eyes of each communicant, delivers the communion bread and wine and blesses him or her by saying, “Isten aldja meg”: God bless you.  As my Transylvanian Unitarian colleagues Csaba Todor and Kinga Reka Szekely have written, 

We do not believe that the bread is the real body of Jesus.  Nor do we believe that the wine is the blood of Jesus.  There is no metaphysical meaning in the wine and the bread.  There is no theological speculation.  The bread and the wine symbolize the substance of our life now and the possibilities for the future.  The focus of communion is on the people who are here for communion.  We believe in a community of people who are alive, and community with a world of faith beyond physical reality.

Communion for the Transylvanian Unitarians is about remembrance of Jesus, who is venerated not as a deity but as a nearly perfect human role model; about gratitude for all the gifts of life, but in particular for the gift of community; about making a clean start, unencumbered by all the ways that we have missed the mark; and, especially, about love: the love of God for us and us for God, as well as our love for one another as human beings.  As Csaba and Kinga explain, 

Communion is a sacred moment when we look at ourselves in the light of God’s radiant love.  People who believe they were born with a divine spark in their hearts know that human life is a short but wonderful opportunity to experience love and connectedness.  In order to do this we need moments of depth.  We need to stand in silence for a moment, to look in the mirror of our consciences and in the mirror of our partner’s eyes. . . .  Communion is an opportunity—an invitation—to focus our lives on love.  The love we can give, the love we can receive.

In delivering the communion, some old-world rules apply: first the men line up, in order of age, the oldest first down to the youngest participants.  As the women sing together, the men come forward to receive the bread; the women follow, oldest to youngest, as the men sing.   Then the action is repeated as first the men and then the women come forward to receive the wine from a common chalice.

When I have participated, I have distributed the bread while Zsolt shared the cup, thus saving one of the trips to the communion table.

Either way, the experience is one that every member takes with deep seriousness.

I have always been impressed by how willingly I am accepted as a minister at occasions like this.  No one seems to question who this strange interloper is, or what business he has participating in this most intimate of religious celebrations, and most are pleasantly surprised and even amazed when I speak the words of the blessing to them in their native Hungarian language.

Imre Gellerd, a Unitarian minister who took his own life after repeated harassment and imprisonment under the formerly Communist government of Romania, and one who is considered almost a saint for his steadfastness in the face of oppression, once wrote that, “As far as the Lord’s Supper is concerned, the Unitarian position seems to be the closest to the early Christian principles.  Jesus clearly said: ‘Do this in memory of me.’”  Dr. Gellert wrote that “The Lord’s Supper is the liturgy through which we remember Jesus’ life and death, and we receive encouragement to follow his example. . . .  Repenting our mistakes and our sins, we must promise that in the future we will endeavor to better preserve the purity of our hearts, and to live a life worthy of God and ourselves. . . .  It is a communion with the divine and with our neighbors: a communion of ourselves with our highest values.”

These are ideas and ideals to which I find it easy to give my assent, and I hope that you will too as we join in this ancient ritual this afternoon.  Though we will partake in a somewhat different manner than our Transylvanian friends in the communion celebration, I hope that you will think of our faraway brothers and sisters in faith and consider the profound meaning that this invitation to love holds for them, and might come to hold for us, also.  As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

May it be so for each of us.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

All We Know About Jesus

March 24, 2013 

“. . . All that remains for me is to present in a nutshell
what we know about the historical Jesus, Jesus the Jew.”
- Geza Vermes 

Back in the day when I attended the Unitarian Sunday School in my hometown in Castine, Maine, Jesus was a much more central figure in our religious education programs and affections than he is today.  In books like Jesus the Carpenter’s Son and Who Do Men Say I Am?, the old Beacon Series religious education curriculum presented Jesus very much in the light of modern historical and literary criticism of the Bible: a human Jesus, one meant to inspire not by his supposed supernatural powers, but by his prophetic imperative and by serving as a human role model for the very best that each of us can aspire to be.  A historical Jesus, as opposed to the Christ of faith.

Perhaps this reflected the more mono-cultural and mono-religious context of the 1940s and 1950s, when Unitarians more closely reflected the prevailing Christian culture, and awareness of other non-Christian faiths—including even Judaism—was less pronounced.  “Church Across the Street”—the precursor to our “Neighboring Faiths” program, was, as its title suggests, a curriculum about visiting other Christian “churches.”  “Neighboring Faiths”, its successor, accepts the reality of the many non-Christian and new religions which now practice among us, and includes visits to synagogues, temples, and mosques as well as churches.

Be all of that as it may, I grew up with both a fascination about Jesus and a strong sense of his moral leadership for our faith.  Of course, there were other more contemporary religious role models of whom I was aware and to whom I turned: Gandhi, certainly, but also Martin Luther King, Jr., then at the height of his activities and power.  In Sunday School we also did learn about other great historical religious figures: the Buddha and Mohammed, as well as Moses and the Hebrew prophets.  But Jesus stood above them all, again reflecting our Protestant Christian roots and, to some extent, the remnants of our Christian chauvinism.

Unitarians were among the first to extoll the virtues of studying world religions—what was then known as “comparative religion,” “comparative” because everything was to be compared to Christianity.  Christianity was still for a long time considered just a cut above the rest.  James Freeman Clarke, a Transcendentalist and later a professor of the new field of comparative religion at Harvard, wrote one of the first books on the subject, entitled Ten Great Religions.  While it mostly succeeded at offering an objective view of other faith traditions, the book and its author could not escape from the conviction that Christianity somehow represented the culmination, the zenith if you will, of religious faith.

Perhaps this accounts for the centrality of Jesus in Unitarian Universalist religious education during my childhood.  Whatever the case may be, I imbibed without hardly knowing it New Testament passages like the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the turning over the tables in the Temple.  I knew the rough outlines of the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life and death.  I liked Jesus, and I suppose that to some extent I believed that I should try to live a life as closely approximating his as I could.

And I wondered about all the claims made for Jesus.  I enjoyed speculating about those claims, and while I remained very much a humanist in respect to them—that is, a believer in the full humanity of Jesus as opposed to his unique divinity—it nevertheless led me to consider the ways in which Jesus—and indeed any of us—might come to be not just a “son or daughter of God” but, in a very real sense, might become “godlike.”  Jesus fanned his “spark of the divine” into full flame, but any of us, I believe, contain the same potential as he.

I maintained this fascination with Jesus through the years, and was excited to have the opportunity to pursue my interest in an intentional way in classes I took after entering Divinity School.  The so-called “quest for the historic Jesus” became one of my favorite subjects, both formally and informally.  To this day I enjoy reading books about Jesus and the continuing scholarly pursuit of historical knowledge about him.  The most recent of these books that I have read is a brief one which I commend to you: Searching for the Real Jesus by Geza Vermes.

Before I turn to an examination of some of Vermes’ conclusions, I can’t resist relating a humorous incident that took place during the infamous “Senior Exams” which used to be a requirement for graduation at Harvard Divinity School.  These consisted of a week of intensive exams covering every aspect of the Divinity School curriculum: Old and New Testament studies, World Religions, theology, ethics, and so on.  My colleague Stephen Kendrick, now minister of the First Church in Boston, decided to play a joke on all of us nervous test-takers on the first day by producing a bogus senior exam, which he passed out before the real one had arrived.  I’ll never forget one of the questions on Stephen’s fake exam: “Should the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ be, once and for all, abandoned; or should funds be raised and another expedition sent out?  If so, where would you send the expedition and what should they take as supplies?  If not, what else should New Testament Scholars do with their time?”

Needless to say, not everyone at the exams that day saw the humor in this, but I have always believed that one of the marks of a healthy and mature faith is its ability, at least occasionally, to laugh at itself.

But back to “the real Jesus.”  Vermes’ most important contribution to the ongoing study of the historical Jesus has been his uncompromising loyalty to the Jewishness of Jesus, as reflected in his landmark work, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels.  A Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College in the University of Oxford, Vermes believes that the only way to a true understanding of the historical Jesus is to understand him as a Jew within the Jewish culture and religion of his time.

In Vermes’ view, Jesus was an innovator within Judaism and not the founder of a new religion.  Indeed, in his brief life Jesus didn’t even have time to start a new religion.  Christianity came later, and is much more accurately described as having been founded by St. Paul.  Like James Carroll in the morning’s reading, Vermes is well aware of the roots of anti-Semitism in the Christian view that Jesus was somehow opposed to Judaism and that Jews were ultimately responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.  Vermes has spent his academic career countering this view and in making the case that Jesus can only be understood in the context of his Jewishness.  Amazingly, his view is still met with consternation by many believing Christians.

Writing in an essay entitled “The Changing Faces of Jesus,” Vermes writes that, 

Today the Jewishness of Jesus is axiomatic whereas in 1973 the title of my book, Jesus the Jew, still shocked conservative Christians.  To accept that Jesus was a Jew means not only that he was born into the Jewish people, but that his religion, his culture, his psychology, and his mode of thinking and teaching were all Jewish.  Over the last 50 years, Christian and Jewish scholars have worked together and a significant dialogue has developed between enlightened Christians and Jews.

And what are the fruits of that dialogue and of Vermes’ scholarship?  Not so very many, though perhaps a more accurate understanding of the Jesus of history is continuing to evolve thanks to Vermes placing him squarely within his cultural and religious milieu.  A quick summary of Vermes’ conclusions goes as follows (for the full detail, read the book):

“What is known about Jesus?  Very little. . . .  One fact is clearly established: he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea between 26 and 36 CE.”  He was “a Galilean.”  Little is known about his childhood. 

“Do we know anything regarding his family and his social circumstances?  He was poor and [apparently] unmarried.  He lived for 30 years in the townlet of Nazareth with his parents, Joseph and Mary, his four brothers and at least two sisters.”  (This latter fact, confirmed in the Gospels, always comes as a surprise to those Christians who have never actually read the New Testament.)  It seems pretty obvious that Mary wasn’t a virgin.  Jesus had a “tense relationship” with his family, including his mother Mary, whose later role in the Church has nothing to do with the texts of the New Testament.  The family apparently even discouraged Jesus from accomplishing his mission.

“What was Jesus’ education like?  He was a builder or a carpenter, but his vocabulary and the images he employs make one think rather of a countryman.”  Jesus, writes Vermes, “was a simple and modest man.  He was a prophet in the tradition of the prophets Elijah and Elisha of the Bible.”  Like them, Jesus “was endowed with outstanding charismatic power.”  He was a healer, an exorcist, and a wonder worker, none of which made him extraordinary in the Jewish culture of his day.

“When did Jesus start to preach?  The beginning of his public career coincided with the ministry of John the Baptist, which is dated by Luke to the 15^th year of the reign of Tiberius, in 29 CE.”  In other words, his public ministry was extremely short.

“Who formed the audience of Jesus?”  Along with his chosen 12 apostles and 70 disciples, “. . .He delivered his message in the streets, in various places, on the shore of a lake.”  He apparently encountered “much success.”

“What was Jesus’ message?  Jesus was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the arrival of the Kingdom of God in the near future, as it were tomorrow.  Hence he demanded a total devotion to the cause of God, a renunciation by the faithful of all material possessions and even the abandonment of their families.”  His message, “. . . which was directed towards Jews alone, was centered on the Law of Moses, which he aimed to renew internally by insisting on its spiritual significance.”

“Do we know why Jesus died?  Jesus was arrested on the eve of Passover by the Jewish authorities, and was subsequently delivered to the Romans and was crucified.”  Vermes continues, 

The only event that can explain his arrest by the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem is the upheaval he caused when he attacked the merchants of the Temple.  This happened in the midst of the preparations for Passover with a surcharged atmosphere of the city which was under Roman occupation.  Although he was not a political rebel, he incited trouble during a revolutionary period.  The provocative attitude he displayed before the priestly authorities . . . did not help the situation.

As Vermes puts it succinctly in several places, “. . . Jesus died on the Roman cross because he did the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  His death was ultimately at the hands of the Roman authorities and not of the Jews. 

“How can the resurrection be explained?”  As Vermes writes in another essay, “Crucified, dead, and buried, Jesus rose in the hearts of his disciples who loved him, and so he lived on.”

And finally, “Did Jesus think that he was of divine nature?”  Vermes believes that the deification of Jesus “was progressive,” beginning with his being called a “Son of God,” a phrase “synonymous with ‘Son of Israel’ or ‘a Jew very close to God.’”  It was the later Christian Church which proclaimed Jesus to be synonymous with God.  As the Rev. Dr. Roger Booth writes, “The change from Jewish stress in God-serving behavior to Gentile pre-occupation with qualifying beliefs about the person (status) of Jesus arose after his death.”

So how might the “real” Jesus be summed up?  Vermes writes, 

He was not meek and mild.  He could be impatient and angry. He displayed the strength, iron character and fearlessness of his prophetic predecessors.  He loved children, welcomed women, and felt pity for the sick and miserable.  He sought the company of the pariahs of Jewish society.

As Richard Gilbert wrote so movingly in the morning’s reading” 

Obscured by centuries of violence,
Clouded by countless creeds,
Dissected by a thousand scholars,
Preached from a million pulpits,
Mouthed by a billion lips,
Crucified by willful distortion
And innocent ignorance.
I hope he’ll be remembered
In simple, unadorned humanity.

And that is all pretty much all we know about Jesus, for now at least.  Amen. 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: from an interview with James Carroll in the winter 2000-2001 Bostonia magazine about his book, The Cross and the Sword; a poem by Richard Gilbert from his sermon, “What Have They Done to Me? An Interpretation of Jesus 1995.”

Reaching In, Reaching Out

Hear the sermon
March 3, 2013

 

“I am confident that we have the resources
to make our dreams come true and to become
the people we long to be in the community we long to serve.”
- from my stewardship letter 

One of the many things they fail to teach you in divinity school is just how much fundraising is necessary to maintain an institution such as the First Religious Society in Newburyport.  Yes, there were a few classes on practical church matters.  (I particularly remember a class on the uses of lamination, but that is a subject for another day.  I’ll just leave you guessing for now.)  One could take classes on all sorts of fascinating and esoteric religious stuff . . . (I kid you not: that was one of the classes offered at Harvard Divinity School during my time there).  But I learned little about the more mundane aspects of church life.

For the most part, one learns the really important lessons about ministry and church while on the job.  Within the first few weeks in my first church, there was a death in the congregation.  Though I had assiduously collected readings and prayers and other appropriate materials while still a seminary student, I had never actually conducted a funeral or memorial service for a real person.  Fortunately, an older member of the congregation, a Norwegian bachelor farmer named Alvin Shelley, agreed to accompany me to the funeral home to meet with the family and to help me manage the peculiarities of a funeral in that particular church.

Every church has peculiarities, you know, but perhaps that, too, is a subject for another day.  Suffice it to say that much of the most important information about ministry and what used to be known before gender- awareness as “churchmanship” must be learned by doing.

You’ve already heard an eloquent pitch from this year’s snake oil sales–I mean stewardship chair, Brent Mitchell, so this morning I want to speak to you, not so much about the need, which as always is great, and which Brent has already done so brilliantly, as about the reasons why church remains important to me, in spite of all the reasons not to care, or just as significant, not to care enough.  So this is not, as ministers like to joke, “the sermon on the (a)mount,” but rather a sermon about what really matters.

I want to begin by speaking about the “reaching in” part of this year’s stewardship theme of “Reaching Out by Reaching In.”  Not just reaching in to your pockets, though that is essential, but about the importance of having an inner, spiritual life, and resources not just for the good times, but for the bad.  For whether you know it now or not, the bad times eventually come to us all.  Sickness and disappointment and death come to us all.

No one goes to Divinity School to learn about fundraising, after all.  We go because the big religious questions, the whys and the wherefores, the whats and the hows and the what ifs, simply will not leave us alone.  Sometimes I get so caught up in the day to day operations of an institution with a $600,000.00 budget and with eight salaried employees and a multitude of volunteers that I almost forget about those big questions that got me here in the first place.  But in my better moments they continue to call to me: questions like “why am I here?” and “what should I do with my life?”  Questions like “is there a unifying power in the universe?” and “what happens to us after we die?” and “why do we die in the first place?”

There are sub-questions to the big questions, and sub-questions to the sub-questions.  How should we treat others?  What is the right thing to do in a given situation?  These are ethical questions which demand an ethical framework if they are to be answered satisfactorily.  How do we attain that framework?

There are also questions about the efficacy of community: why belong to one (let alone support one)?  What do we gain from intentionally joining together with other people, some of whom we may not even like or agree with, whether to spend time in quiet meditation, or to join forces with others who are trying to make a positive difference in a troubled and troubling world, or simply for companionship along the way?

What is the “spiritual”?  What does it really mean when people say they are “spiritual, but not religious”?  Can one really be spiritual in isolation?  What kind of spirituality is it that cares only about itself?  What is it that we hunger for, that material things can never give us, try as we do to buy our salvation, our health and wholeness, with things, and still more things?

Is it worthwhile, does it improve our spiritual health, to spend time in silence, in meditation, in listening for our own “still, small voice,” our own true selves, those selves, as Thomas Merton once put it, that “we are really meant to be”?  Does prayer work?  Is it good to take time to reflect on our lives, and to express our gratitude for the gifts that we have received?

Is it enough to live unto ourselves alone?  Is there some higher mandate?  Do I have a responsibility to those who are less fortunate, less well-off, less gifted than myself?  Is the Golden Rule conditional, or absolute?

What about our children?  Is it important to give them an ethical and spiritual framework for navigating the dangerous shoals of a complex and, much as we would like to protect them from it, a sometimes cruel world?  Is it important to give them inner resources of strength and self-esteem and even of silence in order to weather the inevitable difficulties we all encounter on the road to responsible adulthood?  Is it important to teach them that there is an alternative to material culture and to constant self-serving and self-gratification?  That it is important to give back something of themselves and something of their treasure to something beyond themselves?

Is it important to teach our children and ourselves about the importance of generosity, both of our spiritual and of our worldly goods?  That what is important is not what we keep, but, as Thoreau famously suggested, what we are able finally to give away or let go of?

I always ask myself these questions when I am asked to support the church with my hard-earned treasure and with my limited time.  It’s about reaching in, you see, not just to my pocketbook, but to that inner, true self which is always demanding that I do better, that I be better, that I be more generous than I think I can be.  The religious life is not, after all, just about feeding me, about seeing to my spiritual needs and desires, but about what my inner resources allow me to do for others who, as the poet Amiel put it, “travel the dark journey” with me.  It’s about caring for others as I hope, in my time of need, they will care for me.

It is amazing what we can accomplish when we join our inner resources of time, talent, and treasure together.  Now I am getting to the reaching out part.  There seems to be a real hunger in our congregation to reach out and to make a difference in the wider community, to bring our liberal religious values to bear on problems beyond these doors.  There also seems to be a sense that perhaps we can’t do that if we also serve ourselves, if we give support to our own particular and peculiar community, that there simply isn’t enough to go around.

But I believe that the two things go together, that, indeed, they are in- separable.  I hope I have said enough about the real meaning and purpose of our reaching in, that it is to create a strong community, even a beloved community, to provide a framework for ourselves and our children, to create a place of spiritual solace and ethical striving, to at least give the lie to the idea that we cannot do both, reach in and reach out, and to suggest that in fact the one is not actually possible without the other.

Most of us need to be taught to be generous, whether to give of ourselves or of our worldly treasure.  Where in contemporary society does one learn this lesson?  Is it really surprising that two of the most popular contemporary magazines are entitled Self and Us?  Where are the magazines dedicated to The Other or to Them?  How do we learn to be good people, people who care, people who reach out to others they may not even know?  Where in our revenge- and violence-plagued world do we go to learn a different way, the way of forgiveness and understanding and healing and trust?

I still believe that faith communities—those that have not become completely politicized or dogmatized–have an important role to play in making a more generous people and building a fairer world.  I’m really not sure that altruism is an innate trait, but rather I believe that it must be learned and experienced in order for its value to be internalized.  Only in an intentional community where the higher values are lived and spoken of and practiced does the merely possible become the tried and true.

So to come full circle: what I am trying to say is that it is only by reaching in that we can reach out.  Thus, as our stewardship theme has it, we reach out by reaching in.  I was never very good with syllogisms, but you get the idea.  Just as with financial saving, the more you have put in beforehand, the more you can take out.  And the greatest lesson is that there is always more of whatever we are reaching in for if we are willing to set our priorities straight and to do the necessary work.  We can all do more and give more, and we must.  The only thing standing in the way of our dreams is ourselves.  As I said in my stewardship message to you, “I am confident that we have the resources to make our dreams come true and to become the people we long to be in the community we long to serve.”  I can only hope that you will come to share that confidence.  Let us at least make a start.

Amen. 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Fate and Destiny

February 17, 2013 

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined. . . .”
- Romans 8: 29

Philosophy has never been my strong suit, theology, either, so I apologize in advance for the fact that I am not a particularly systematic thinker, nor perhaps a very logical one, and, in fact, I may even be more than a little lazy when it comes to producing a well-reasoned argument.  I have always been reassured and comforted by Emerson’s remark that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”  I hope it’s true.

That being said, I have long been fascinated by the subject of this morning’s sermon, and a part of me wishes that my mind was at least a little bit consistent in order to help sort it out and make more sense of it.

Is there such a thing as fate or destiny?  What’s the difference, or is there any?  Both fate and destiny seem to imply the intervention of a higher power: God, or gods, or something supernatural.  Do we believe that?  What about free will?  Do we have any? Is the idea of destiny compatible with free will?

The doctrine of Predestination—the idea that our course in life is pre-determined before we are even born—was a cornerstone of the Calvinist theology that we left behind when the liberal Unitarians and the conservative Congregationalists went their separate ways.  Predestination didn’t sit well with Enlightenment rationalism, or with the revolutionary tenor of the times (the times being the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries) or with new notions about human freedom and self-determination and the so-called “rights of man.”

The Calvinist doctrine of Predestination had finally led to what has come to be known as “the Puritan dilemma.”  Calvin said that only a small percentage of us were numbered among God’s elect, and that there was absolutely nothing we could do to change that reality.  Salvation was a free gift of God; there was no way to earn it: thus the famous theological battles over faith versus works.

Worse yet, for our Puritan ancestors, there was no way that one could know for sure if he or she were among the elect.  Thus the dilemma.  Living a good life might offer some small confidence, and some small hope, but even saintliness was no final guarantee.  Sounds pretty arbitrary, and it was.  And our Unitarian ancestors didn’t like it at all.  God, if there was one, could not possibly be so unreasonable.

Those early Unitarians believed that we were not the puppets or victims of fate, but its masters.  In other words, they believed that we create our own destinies.  We are free to work out our own salvation.  As we sang in one of our hymns a couple of weeks ago,

Creative Love, our thanks we give,
That we are in the making still.

As long as we are up and taking nourishment, there is always hope.  We can change the way we are.  We can redirect our lives.  We can become the better people we long to be.  We can continue to work out our salvation, even if, as Nietzsche wrote, we must always do so with “fear and trembling.”

Well, maybe those early Unitarians and Universalists were a little more confident about human nature than they should have been.  But better an optimistic view of our chances than a pessimistic and hopeless one.

Wikipedia distinguishes “fate” and “destiny” as follows: fate is “a power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events.  Fate defines events as ordered or ‘inevitable’ and unavoidable.”  Destiny, on the other hand, “is used with regard to the finality of events as they have worked themselves out; and to that same sense of ‘destination,’ projected into the future to become the flow of events as they will work themselves out.”

For a strong idea of the fatalistic view of life, I commend to you the novels of the English novelist Thomas Hardy, especially Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure.  But I caution that it’s not a cheery view of the world.  Jude’s ineffectualness in the face of his “fate” had me almost pulling my hair out the first time I read the novel.

I confess, though, that there have been times in my life when for better and worse I have felt “fated” to a certain course of events, and times when I have sensed a kind of inevitable direction for my life which one might correctly call a sense of destiny.  Other times, my life has felt, as Shakespeare puts it, more like a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Which is real?

The latter feeling, even if true, does not strike me as a very constructive way to live my life.  The former, even if false, at least gives me the opportunity to live my life as if it has meaning, and that seems a more productive way to go about it.  That may well be the best we can hope for.

The Catholics actually had a more enlightened view of things than did Calvin.  Calvin didn’t really believe in free will.  But in traditional Catholic theology, free will is understood as being compatible with God’s foreknowledge of future events.  Don’t ask me how this works.  But in the Catholic view we can work cooperatively with God to shape the course of our lives.  It’s up to us to respond to God’s free offer of grace, but at least there is the possibility to respond.  Thus, in the Catholic view, works are important: how we live our lives, our actions, our commitments, will help to determine whether we are among the saved or not.  In the meantime, by the way, our good lives can make a positive difference in the here and now.

(Of course there is that question of having the right set of beliefs, but let’s leave that aside for now.)

For Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, the possibility of salvation is there for everyone.  Each of us, as it says in our Unitarian Universalist “Purposes and Principles,” has “inherent worth and dignity.”  What we do with that worth and dignity is up to us, of course.  This strikes me as more like the Catholic view of things than the Calvinist.

Salvation is one of those theological concepts which is difficult if not impossible to define.  I prefer words like “wholeness” or “health” or “harmony.”  For me, salvation doesn’t have anything to do with a place such as heaven, much as I like the idea.

Those of us of sound mind and body have the opportunity to work toward lives which are more and more characterized by these qualities of wholeness, health, and harmony.  I still believe that.  I believe that that is the purpose of religion.

But we also know more and more about other forms of determinism than the supernatural, such as biological determinism and environmental determinism, which may adversely affect our ability to make the kind of changes that lead to more healthy, whole, and harmonious lives.  Many people, maybe most people, in the world simply don’t have the luxury to even think about these questions.  For them, self-determination may be only a dream, and the notion of “fate” may actually be comforting for that reason.

So how much freedom do we really have?  As a person who prefers order to chaos, and control to the feeling of helplessness, I often wish that there were an overarching plan.  And, as I mentioned earlier, I sometimes feel as if there is.  However, I remain mostly skeptical.

For the most part, I tend toward the conviction that destiny is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Think of persons who have had a strong sense of personal destiny—Churchill once famously said something to the effect that while all of us are “worms,” he felt that he was a “glow worm.”  Horatio Lord Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, also had a strong sense of personal destiny.  That both turned out to be more or less right about their future prospects, I believe, speaks more to the fact that each of them, through hard work, education, and ambition, through trial and error, failure as well as success, put himself in position to fulfill his sense of destiny.  Yes, there was luck involved at innumerable places along the way; though as I like to think, serendipity is usually not as serendipitous as it at first appears to be.  And, of course, there was privileged opportunity.  But that they made the best of their chances, no one can deny.

Hitler also had a sense of destiny, except that it didn’t work out as he had planned.  Perhaps he misread the signs.  More likely, as I am trying to suggest, his own actions led to the destiny that he fulfilled, and ultimately deserved.

Not everyone, as I hinted, has the opportunity to fulfill a great destiny.  Perhaps that is a blessing in disguise.  Things don’t always turn out so well for greatly destined people.  But simply because one does have the opportunity does nothing, in my mind, to prove that their destiny is the result of intervention by a higher power.

I guess I am more of a believer in free will than I am even comfortable admitting to myself.  I believe we can affect the course of our lives, and, indeed, that we must.  It’s up to us, much as I might wish that there was a higher power directing the show.  Freedom, as has been famously said, is not free.  It requires hard work and constant vigilance, and that goes for personal freedom as well as the other kinds.

And who is to say that there aren’t other kinds of powers in our lives—role models, perhaps, the immortality of influence of those we have loved and lost, higher values, hopes and dreams which transcend what we imagine to be our abilities and possibilities, leading us on to greater, to greatest things—powers which in fact do direct our course, and lead us, if not to some predetermined “destiny,” than at least to a destiny which we can fulfill because we are able to envision it.

I have always been an admirer of Browning’s Bishop Blougram in his poem “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”  In the passage I read from this morning, the Bishop argues,

What have we gained then by our unbelief,
But a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt.
We call the chess-board white,–we call it black.

To me it means that there will always be doubt.  But we can still choose to live our lives faithfully, which in this context means to me to live our lives as if there is an inherent meaning, an inherent purpose, while also exercising our free will to work toward the destiny we desire to achieve.  In other words, I can choose to live a life of faith diversified by doubt rather than its opposite.  I am not merely a victim of some “fickle finger of fate,” I can live my life in the direction of a fate of my own choosing.

Even for Churchill, things didn’t turn out completely as he hoped, and the reason for that had more to do with the kind of person he was and the kind of decisions he made than with the whims of some superior power or “fate” by which he was helplessly directed to his “destiny.”

For me, a sense of destiny is only important in so far as it leads me on in the direction of my highest aspirations.  Things good and bad happen, not always for any discernible purpose; what we make of our good or ill “fate” is what ultimately matters in this life.  If we merely acquiesce, we get what we deserve.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

No matter how dark the path may sometimes appear, no matter how difficult the way, no matter how oppressive the weight of fate may sometimes feel, we are so often surprised by the meaning that is there, as Bishop Blougram so beautifully puts it, in 

                                      . . . a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripedes,–
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as Nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

Take hands and dance there . . .

Amen.

 - The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

 Reading: from “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” by Robert Browning

The Beloved Community Re-considered

 February 3, 2013 

“The core of the faith is the Spirit, the Beloved Community,
the work of grace, the atoning deed, and the saving power of the loyal life.”
- Josiah Royce 

Recently, a parishioner forwarded me a thought-provoking opinion column from The New York Times which has caused me to reconsider and reaffirm an ideal which I have preached about many times, and which I mention on most Sundays during the church year.  That ideal is the idea of a “beloved community.”

Is the beloved community only a dream, or is there actually something to it?  Is it something toward which we only strive, but never quite achieve, or is it something that we really experience, even if only imperfectly or fleetingly?

The article in the Times is entitled “The Myth of Universal Love.”  In it, as you might deduct, author Stephen T. Asma argues that the idea of “universal love” is a myth.  “All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources, or moral duties—and only conjectural assumption can make them appear so,” Asma writes.  He continues, 

(For many of us, family members are more entitled than friends, and friends more entitled than acquaintances, and acquaintances more than strangers, and so on.)  It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption.

Is it?

While I find it difficult to argue with Asma’s logic here, there is something about it which troubles me.  It is even more troubling when he says, “I submit that care or empathy is a very limited resource.”  Asma says that “the feeling of care” is “not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need.  The nightly news would render you literally exhausted.”

Well, it does.  But even though Asma’s argument about the limitations of empathy is difficult to dispute and would give me an easy out, I am still reluctant to take it.  Who says we shouldn’t be exhausted?  Perhaps our exhaustion is what is demanded of us in order to make a better world.  Asma concludes his article by saying, 

A recent Niagara of longitudinal happiness studies all confirm that the most important element in a good life . . . is close family and friendship ties—ties that bind.  These are not digital Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway strangers, but robust proximate relationships that you can count on one or two hands—and these bonds are created and sustained by the very finite resource of emotional care that I’ve outlined.  As Graham Greene reminds us, “one can’t love humanity, one can only love people.”

While there is much that I can agree with here—you can imagine how I resonated with the reference to the inadequacies of Facebook “friending” —and while I totally agree with Asma’s premise about “close family and friendship ties” being “the most important element[s] in a good life”—I’m still not convinced that his overall thesis holds.  And here’s why.

In some ways it feels a lot like the conversation about scarcity and abundance that we have every year at stewardship time.  Some of us just feel that there is never enough, and our pledges reflect that.  Others believe that there is always more—and we act on it.  In the stewardship argument, I always come down on the side of abundance.  There is always more, if we choose to give it.  I actually feel the same way about empathy and love.

While I enjoyed Graham Greene’s novels at a certain period of my life, and have read almost all of them at one time or another, I’m not sure that I would turn to him for an opinion about the limits of empathy.  His worldview was, to say the least, dark and pessimistic.  And though he may have said that “one can’t love humanity, one can only love people,” that doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Otherwise, how explain all the prophets and the saints, the Gandhis and the Mother Theresas and the Martin Luther King, Jrs.?  Did they not love humanity?

In fact, I believe that one can love humanity.  Otherwise how explain those epiphanic moments when one senses the oneness of all, when an encounter with a perfect stranger can evoke a sense of connectedness which literally brings tears to the eyes?

And if universal love is only a myth, well, that’s a pretty devastating knock against one of the central tenets of our particular faith.  For Universalism does claim that everyone is worthy, that everyone is deserving of love and dignity, not just in theory, but in practice, not just those we know, but everyone everywhere.  It’s an ideal, yes, but it is an ideal that we are expected to at least try to embody and live out in our day-to-day lives.

Look, I’d be among the first to admit that compassion fatigue is a real danger, having experienced it myself on many occasions.  But I believe that it is our duty—sorry for using that oh-so-Victorian word—to keep trying to live up to the ideal.  If not us, than who?

The problem with Asma’s argument, for me, as sensible as it seems on the surface, is that it would allow us to basically let the world go to hell in a hand-basket.  I’ve got mine—whatever is mine, be it resources or family or friends—and that’s all I really need to worry about, all I really can worry about, because in fact there just isn’t enough—money or love or whatever—to go around.

What about the words of our last hymn [“There is More Love, Somewhere”]?  Do we mean what we say, or is it just a pretty sentiment that we are not really called to act upon?

I guess that what I am trying to say this morning is that I still believe that our work in the church and in religion—any religion worthy to be considered legitimate, that is–is to apply ourselves to the achievement of a beloved community.  I guess I still want to believe that the ideal of universal love is more than just a myth.  Not that we will ever succeed in applying it perfectly or completely, but that when we stop trying we are doomed.

If our love stops at the doors of our family and friends and tribe or even our country, we are given license to live in a kind of perpetual Yugoslavian break-up where the only existence is a kind of moral ethnic cleansing which says we can never live together but must remain in our isolated enclaves with no hope of ever transcending our differences.  “One can’t love humanity, one can only love people”: that’s exactly where that kind of logic leads, in my humble opinion.

In coining the term “beloved community,” the late Josiah Royce wrote, “The core, the center of faith, is not the person of the individual founder, and is not any other individual. . . .  Nor is the core to be found in the sayings of the founder, nor yet in the traditions. . . .  The core of the faith is the Spirit, the Beloved Community, the work of grace, the atoning deed, and the saving power of the loyal life.”

He didn’t mean that the beloved community should be some selfish, naval-gazing social clique where all we care about is ourselves.  Rather, as the Religious Education Committee of the UU Area Church in Sherborn recently wrote, “We come to church not to be a beloved community, but to practice the ethics of the Beloved Community for use outside our church walls.  Practicing being beloved community means treating all people who[m] we encounter as though they are beloved, unique, children of the divine [my emphasis].”

I love that subtle distinction between “being” a beloved community, and “practicing” it in the world beyond our walls.

And, of course, it’s always practice; we shall never get it completely right.  But we must keep trying.  And incrementally, painfully slowly even, we will eventually get it right.  If I didn’t continue to believe that, I don’t think that I could go on in the face of that exhausting evening news Asma speaks of in his article.

Some years ago, in another sermon about the beloved community, I wrote that, 

My dream for our church is that it will be more and more a beloved community, a place where we can work out, not so much our salvation, as our becoming.  Each time we welcome a new person in our midst, we increase the opportunities for our own growth and development, even as we provide the context for the other to grow and develop to his or her true potential, his or her truest self.  I can think of no other work so worthy of our time or treasure.  Truly, this is, or can be, holy ground, and truly this is the sacred work we are about. 

After all, I said, we are loved for what we are.  Flawed and imperfect though we may be, far though we fall from what we might become, it is for ourselves that we are loved, and ultimately it is for ourselves that we will be grieved when we are gone.  None of us will fully succeed in realizing our potential.

The real problem with Asma’s argument, again in my opinion, is that it demonstrates so little faith in our ability to transcend those limitations of kinship and tribe and even self which he describes.  It is an argument in favor of the scarcity of love instead of its abundance.  As religious people, it seems to me, we must stand for just the opposite, as exhausting, and even futile, as the effort may sometimes seem.   And believe me, it often does.

For our striving is not just for today, and not just for the world in which we now live, but for a future which we will never see, but which our children and their children will live to inhabit.  We owe it to them and to that unseen future to keep working toward the world of our dreams, to continue our work of building a beloved community and “a world more fair, with all her people one.”  Our job is to keep that vision and that possibility alive, by living our lives as if it were so.

And if we do so, I dare to say, we shall find the world looking more and more like the world we envision.  The myth of universal love?  Let us remember that myths are simply another kind of truth, no less real than empirical truth, only different.  As it says in our closing hymn,

Since what we choose is what we are,
And what we love we yet shall be,
The goal may ever shine afar—
The will to reach it makes us free.

Amen.

 - The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

 

Readings: On church by Virginia McGill and Leo Tolstoy; 1 John 4: 16b

The Curse of Poverty

Hear the sermon

January 20, 2013

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr. 

This past week, Julie Parker Amery and I attended a “poverty awareness day” at the NewburyportCity Hall.  In response to a project of students at the River Valley Charter School, Poverty Awareness Day was proclaimed by Mayor Holladay as a way to annually bring awareness to the poverty that exists right here in our midst.  Speakers representing several local social service agencies and churches, including the Salvation Army, Best Foot Forward, Pennies for Poverty (now chaired by our own Michael Sandberg), Central Congregational Church, and the Pettengill House provided firsthand information about the extent of poverty here in the greater Newburyport area.

The work of these groups and many others in our area attests to the fact that while Newburyport may look like a pretty affluent community—and considering that a majority of folks here make more than $100,000 a year, it obviously is—nonetheless, at least a thousand folks among us find themselves in severe poverty, defined as having an income less than $18,000.  These individuals and families constitute an almost invisible component of our community.  But it’s even worse than that: more than 200 kids in our local schools are living in severe poverty, and many of those kids are homeless.

The statistics statewide are pretty shocking.  There are around 50,000 homeless students in Massachusetts.  Shelters around the state take in around 3200 individuals per night.  At the same time, around 2100 families also are seeking shelter.  On a recent Monday, 1600 families were being housed in motels around the state, including some right here in our own community.  Of the Pettengill House’s 2700 clients, 540 are homeless.

Poverty, according to a definition offered at the Poverty Awareness Day program, is defined as “the inability to participate in the activities of normal living.”  I’m going to guess that that definition even includes more than a few of us, either past or present.  It could include quite a few of us in the future if we become ill, go through a divorce, or encounter any number of other crisis situations.

City Councilor Ed Cameron, who works in the field of homelessness, used the metaphor of flying to describe the situation of many in our community.  Most Newburyport residents, he said, are “flying closer to 30,000 feet” and can afford a bit of turbulence in their lives, such as an illness or other crisis, because of the nature of their jobs and livelihoods.  But there are many who can’t afford to get sick or stay home with a sick child for even a day because they run the risk of not being able to pay their bills or of losing their jobs.  “When you’re cruising at low altitude,” Cameron said, “any turbulence can make you hit the ground.”

The causes of poverty in our area are various.  They include a lack of education, which is a key to getting out of poverty; the high cost of housing here and in surrounding communities; substance abuse and mental health issues; and domestic violence, which accounts for around 40% of homeless families.  For many folks right here in Newburyport, there is not enough money, no place to go, and no safety net of family or friends to help them over the rough patches that inevitably, unless we are incredibly fortunate, come to us all in this life.

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we are celebrating today, was not only interested in combatting racism and achieving civil rights for people of color in our country.  Perhaps more radical than that was his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and his work to alleviate poverty.  We shouldn’t forget that his Great March on Washington in 1963 was not only about freedom, but also about jobs.  As I reminded us in my sermon on King last year, King’s assignation in Memphis, Tennessee took place not in the context of a civil rights demonstration, but of King’s support for striking sanitation workers.  King wrote,

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.  It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization. . . .  The time has come to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Early in the year in which he died, King wrote presciently that,

Most people who are poor in this country are working every day and that is not said enough.  They are working here in Washington and in all our cities.  Working in our hotels, they clean up our rooms. . . .  They work in our hospitals, they work in our homes. . . .  Most of them are working every day, working sometimes sixty hours a week, working full-time jobs and getting part-time incomes.  These are problems that are very real.

Unfortunately, very little has changed since then, and things may even be worse now than in 1968.

As someone who has worked on the front lines, so to speak, of this dilemma for thirty years, I can tell you that King spoke the truth.  Here at the First Religious Society, we are fortunate to have the use of invested funds in our endowment to aid people in need.  Of course, the kind of aid I am able to distribute on your behalf is only a bandaid, but sometimes even a bandaid is helpful.  I don’t think we should ever underestimate the value of a few dollars to someone who is completely broke.  Typical needs that I try to respond to using funds from our Swasey Fund include food, diapers, transportation, automobile expenses, insurance, prescriptions, Christmas gifts, holiday assistance, rent, utilities, medical expenses, and clothing.  I also work with many local agencies to provide assistance to persons in need, and sometimes make larger donations to local social service agencies to assist them in their work.

While a few of the people I see are merely passing through our community, most live here.  Some I see on a regular basis, and so have been able to learn a little about their lives.  There are retired grandparents who find themselves bringing up a grandchild, people caught in between social security benefits, folks who have lost their food stamps or are in the process of trying to get them, people who can’t get to work because their cars are broken down and they can’t afford to fix them, people whose health insurance, if they have any, doesn’t cover a certain kind of prescription.  There are people with obvious mental health issues, people with physical disabilities, victims of domestic abuse, folks who have lost their jobs, people who have missed paying a month’s rent and face eviction if they can’t come up with it.

Yes, there are a few people who are just taking advantage of us and an occasional congenital liar, but I have come to see that even those people really need help, even if they are mostly to blame for their own situations because of substance abuse or inability to hold a job.  A few I have had to say no to, but I always try to err on the side of goodness and mercy.

And while it may turn out to be true that “the poor you have always with you,” I try, on behalf of our religious community and our religious values, to be as helpful as I can to as many people as I can.  For as King also wrote, “Any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and women and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that can scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”  Occasionally, someone that we have helped actually manages to get back on his or her feet, and that is pretty darned gratifying.  It doesn’t happen as often as I wish, but the fact that it happens at all is a very hopeful sign.

On your behalf, I try to live up to the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner–even if the form of imprisonment is one that is only self-imposed by poor judgment or poor habits.  With some people, I do confess, it is difficult, because not everyone is likeable, and a few are even a little scary.

But if this isn’t the work of the church, then what is?

We are very fortunate to live in a community with so many wonderful social service agencies.  I try to work closely with as many of them as possible, because one of the unfortunate realities of my involvement in this work is that I really don’t have time to do the kind of case management that can be most helpful to the people I see in getting them back on their feet.  Most churches are simply not equipped to do that kind of work.  Working with other agencies that do, I can be more assured that our resources are being used in the best possible manner, and that my bandaids are more likely to have a long-term impact on the lives of those I meet and serve.

Those of you who help out with the Friendship Table at the Salvation Army or other meals programs know, from first hand observation, that there are many in our beautiful community who are living on the edge.  We should never underestimate the importance of activities like that, nor should we underestimate the importance of our collections for cause.  Giving money may not be as hands-on a way to help as some of us would like to see, but I can tell you that in an economic environment where every agency is struggling for every single penny in order to survive and continue its work, money is not insignificant, and may even make the difference between a source of help existing or not, and thus a person being saved or not.  Ninety percent of the assistance that the Salvation Army is able to give in our community comes from the donations of individuals like us and churches like ours.

King came to understand that the only solution to the economic inequalities that exist in our country would be what he called “a radical reconstruction of society itself.”  That reconstruction has still to be accomplished.  He wrote that,

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between poverty and wealth.  With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the west investing large sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: “This is not just. . . .”  A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling things is not just. . . .”  A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

As I noted in my sermon last year, the great challenge of our time is whether the current political stalemate can be overcome and progress finally made toward building a more just and equitable nation and world.  Personally, I would like to hear a lot less about the cost of our “entitlements,” and more about the need for generosity on the part of those of us who can afford it.

In this important work, the life and thought of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still have an important role to play in speaking to the moral conscience of this brave new world in which we live, and reminding all of us, as he once said, that “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

May we always remember that, and may we always maintain a hopeful vision for the promised land of our dreams, not only for ourselves, but for all people, everywhere, and especially for those who need our help who are close at hand right here in our own community.  So may it be.  Amen. 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: From “The King We Ignore,” by Jonathan K. Cooper Wiele

Downhill from Here

Hear the sermon

 

January 13, 2013

“God give us
the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
the courage to change the things that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr 

By a quirk in the way I visualize the calendar, January begins a long, steep, almost vertical descent toward spring and summer.  Summer, beginning around the end of May, levels out.  Beginning in September and up until the end of December, it’s a steep climb, not quite vertical, but rough going; thereafter, it’s all downhill until June.  Probably wishful thinking, given New England winters and weather.  However, it is true that the days are already lengthening!

And why does this matter, you ask?  As one of those people for whom the shortness of the days and the paucity of light is much more depressing than the winter’s cold, it gives the illusion that the light’s return is closer than it actually is.  Thus my title: downhill from here, implying not that things are about to fall apart– which they may well be–but that the sledding from here on out will be a lot smoother, even if it won’t.

There are a lot of metaphors for me in this visualization, but the one that has been most on my mind in recent days is the courage to be.  How do we find the courage to be in the dark times?  I hope not only by fooling ourselves, as my little calendar trick does for my light deprivation syndrome.  How do we get past the low times and the lonely times, the times of loss and pain and sorrow?  These will come to all of us, if we live long enough.  They must be endured: how do we find the strength to endure?

These post-holiday times can be especially hard on people, and though I don’t know if there are any statistics to back it up, it always seems to me that there is a spike in deaths at this particular time of the year.  This year has been no different, affecting both this congregation and my own family in the death of my aunt.  From this vantage point the winter can seem endless, the cold relentless, spring and summer and the return of light, both literal and figurative, a hopeless dream.  Loss hits hard at this time of year, and we may even wonder if it’s worth it to keep on keeping on.

I really believe that the calendar has a lot to do with this, though I can’t prove it.  I know that for myself, this is the time of year when the candle of hope burns dimmest, when courage begins to slip, when the cumulative effects of loss and sorrow seem to grow strongest.  It’s the time of year when I have to work hard at finding meaning, when all my accomplishments and goals begin to seem questionable, when creativity is at its lowest ebb.

Sixty-one years of experience have taught me, or should have by now, that “this too shall pass,” that my spirits will revive with the coming of spring, that everything will look differently in April than they do now, in deepest January.  But here, in the middle of it, whatever “it” is, it is easy to forget, and sometimes I falter in my conviction.

This is a good season in which to pray, and I mean this in no pious or even overtly religious sense.  Prayer, for me, is a conversation that I carry on with the universe.  It may or may not be in the traditional language of prayer, though I often find traditional prayers to be comforting.  The one that I included on your orders of service this morning is one of the most helpful, and it is no surprise that it has been adopted as the motto of many addiction recovery groups: 

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Another of my favorite traditional prayers is the “Lord’s Prayer,” ascribed to Jesus, though probably a compilation; especially its line, “thy will be done.”  This one-line prayer reminds me that I am not all powerful, that I am not God, and that there are many things over which I have absolutely no control whatsoever, most, in fact, life and death being the chief among them.

Two of my Transylvanian Unitarian friends who have died in recent years have given new luster to a tarnished gem, the twenty-third Psalm.  Both of them found great comfort in their final days in the line, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” a reminder that we are never alone, not even in our darkest times.

More often than not, however, my prayers take the form of an unrepeatable-in-this-context “shout out” to the universe.  Just letting it know that I’m still here, if you know what I mean.  It’s amazing how therapeutic that can sometimes be!

Do my prayers change anything?  Well, as someone has truthfully claimed, prayer doesn’t change things; but prayer changes us, and sometimes that makes it possible for us to change something that needs to be changed.

What resources do we turn to when “despair for the world grows in [us],” as Wendell Berry writes in a poem I shared with you last week?  It’s important that we have some.  One could say that it is our religious work to seek out those resources and to store them up for the inevitable hard times, for what the late Paul Carnes, a former president of the UUA, called the “many causes of despair which life inevitably brings to us all.”  It is one of the reasons we come to church.

In this context I think first of friends and family, of our church community, of our faith (in the sense of “trust” and not of beliefs), of our commitments and of our loves.  These are the greatest sources of courage, though there are many others: poetry, art, music, nature, and not least the example of others who have traveled the dark journey before us with hope and courage.

Following the recent terrible events in Newtown, CT, I happened to hear my friend, the writer and Maine Warden Service chaplain Kate Braestrup, being interviewed on NPR.  You may remember Kate from her visit here several years ago, or you may have read one of her books.  Kate was asked, “Where is God in the tragic and senseless events you witness?”

I found Kate’s response to be most comforting, perhaps not least because it comes straight out of our own Unitarian Universalist tradition.  She said that God is Love, and that divine love is manifested when friends, neighbors, and even strangers show up to help in the aftermath of tragic events.  We manifest divine love just by being present with people in their difficult and tragic times, even when there is nothing we can say.  For my friend Kate, God is the love that people bring by showing up to help and comfort those in need.  That works for me.

Franklin Roosevelt, on the eve of World War II, famously said that “we have nothing to fear by fear itself.”  He was right.  It’s especially true as we contemplate our own deaths or the death of someone we love.  My colleague Michael McGee has written, 

To be courageous about death, we must first recognize and accept that every one of us is fearful.  We are afraid that we will die, and our loved ones will die.  We are afraid that we will suffer and that we will not be ready when death comes.  And we are afraid of what comes after death—if anything. 

There is nothing wrong with being afraid of death, as long as we face those fears.  That is courage: the ability to face what we fear instead of denying it.

Let us never forget “how great a cloud of witnesses” we are surrounded by, those who by their examples have shown us the way to go, those who have faced their fears and overcome them, those who have shown up, our companions on life’s way, all those who by their presence, past or present, have made our lives bright and given us the will to go on.

Margaret Ames, a woman whose courageous shadow touched my childhood in Castine, Maine, having lost her husband and two college-aged sons in a terrible sailing accident, put together a collection of the readings that had been most helpful to her during her bereavement, entitled For Those New to Sorrow.  I turn to it often when I am feeling blue, always wondering how a particular reading or poem or prayer was helpful to her in her awful time of loss, and, indeed, throughout her life thereafter.  Readings take on new meaning when put in such a context.  Whatever my fears, whatever my problems, I know that there are those who have suffered more and overcome more than I will ever have to face.  And that knowledge gives me a least a few moments of comfort.  Sometimes, that is all it takes to get me back in the swing of things, and helps me to make it through another day, and to face the days still to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, 

Young people always think, if their own lamp has gone out, that the world is dark.  Then, after a while, they begin to look about them, and find there are innumerable lights—solid satisfactions that are always to be had—which have nothing to do with them or their life.  Friends and philosophers, and beautiful places and books and pictures—these are the indestructible joys forever.  If you learn to love those things when you are young, when you are older they will receive you, as the Bible says, into everlasting habitations.

Mostly, I have found this to be true in my own life.  But it is good to be reminded again.

My grandmother used to say that “as the days grow longer, the cold grows stronger.”  Be that as it may, and it spite of this January thaw, I look forward to the lengthening days.  I muster the courage to pass through the gray, dark days, with their losses and sorrow, and I look forward with hope to warmer and sunnier days to come, knowing that joy will return in time, as it always does, if I can only hang it there for a while.  For today, which is the only day of which I can be certain, I take comfort in some words of the scientist, Alexander Agassiz: 

. . . To live our lives as if they had been made for us, and live in hope, do the best we can, work hard, and have as many interests as we can in what is going on around us.

That is my hope for myself and for each of us, and I am confident that if we take that advice, if we show up for one another, if we care for each other and hang in there, if we trust in “the roses waiting beneath the deep-piled snow,” it’s all downhill from here.  So may it be.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: from “Living Lovingly in a Culture of Fear,” by Margaret R. Miles; a poem by Dawn Markova; “New Beginnings” by A. R. Howe.