January 22, 2012

“Only the people who risk are truly free.”
 – Anonymous?

It wasn’t until I sat down to write my sermon for this morning that I was reminded that today is my son Ben’s 29^th birthday.  One could say that the greatest risk any of us ever takes is having a child.  I vividly remember my initial reaction on seeing Ben: O my God, what have I done?

Now my son is about to have a son.  What will the ever uncertain future hold for him?

Unlike in the days before birth control, having a child today is often a carefully taken decision.  We carefully consider all the pros and cons before making the fateful decision to bring a new life into what we know is an often beautiful but always troubled and tenuous and possibly already overcrowded world.  Then, we take the leap, with all the risk that leap entails, never knowing the outcome, of course, but changing our lives forever.  That we don’t know just how much our lives will change is undoubtedly a very good thing.

As now, and perhaps as in every time, there wasn’t a lot of certainty in the world into which we welcomed Ben in January 1983.  It was the height of the cold war, and the fall of communism only six years later seemed a remote possibility, more like an impossible dream.  (I could not have imagined, at that time, that less than twenty years later I would have traveled widely and made dear friends in a formerly communist country.)  The possibility of nuclear Armageddon, as vividly portrayed in a movie of that time, “The Day After,” seemed very real.  There was terrible violence to our south, in places like El Salvador and Honduras, a little understood and seedy secret war in which our own government was engaged.  Apartheid still held its evil sway in South Africa, and the beautiful “cedars of Lebanon” were ablaze in civil war.  The cultural divide in our country was beginning to become more visible in fierce debates around religious values and social issues such as abortion and gay rights, even in the liberal state of Minnesota, where we were living at the time.  It was not a particularly hopeful time, perhaps it was not a smart time, in which to bring a child into the world.  But we did it anyway.

Was it worth it?  Of course.  One is never prepared, I think, for the love or the anguish we will feel for our children.  As noted, it has changed my life in ways I could never have predicted.  Yes, there have been the inevitable ups and downs and disappointments of parenthood.  But I would not have missed those experiences, and I hope that they have changed me for the better, at the least made me more empathic and compassionate toward the trials and tribulations of others.

If it is true, as it says in the little quotation on your orders of service, that “Only the people who risk are truly free,” I guess that should mean that we parents are all free.  Perhaps.  Maybe we are, in ways which we now only vaguely perceive.

As our responsive reading this morning [by Rabindranath Tagore] painfully reminds us, it is difficult to take the risk of sharing our true feelings.  But if we are to grow and change for the better we must learn to do so.  Therapists have long recognized that keeping our “deepest and truest and most precious words” locked away in our hearts is destructive of our well-being.  Dare we take the risk?

Dare we take the risk to love?  For even requited love is risky business.  Love may not mean “never having to say you’re sorry,” but it does surely mean grief in time.  When we love, we do so in the sure knowledge that someday all that we love will die.  Let us hope that that day is far away; but make no mistake, it will come.  For many it comes too soon.  To love is to risk all that we are and all that we have.  But what would life be without love?

That quote on your orders of service comes from a poem entitled “Risk.”  Is it true that only the people who risk are free?  Here’s the poem: 

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool—
To weep is to risk being called sentimental—
To reach out to another is to risk involvement—
To expose feelings is to risk showing your true self—
To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naïve—
To love is to risk not being loved in return—
To live is to risk dying—
To hope is to risk despair—
To try is to risk failure—
But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing.
The people who risk nothing, do nothing, have nothing, are nothing, and become nothing;
They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they simply cannot learn to feel, and change, and grow, and love, and live. . . .
Chained by their servitude, they are slaves; they’ve forfeited their freedom.
Only the people who risk are truly free.

It would appear from this poem that risking the things that make us most human is a necessary aspect of living an emotionally full and complete life, a life which is “free.”

Having little of it myself, I have always greatly admired physical courage, the courage to risk one’s very life, especially the courage to “lay down one’s life for another.”  Is there something or someone for whom you would risk your life?  It is hard not to wonder how one would react at the moment of ultimate crisis.  Some of you know, having met the challenge of a life or death moment.  Would I abandon the ship like the cowardly captain of that ill-fated Italian liner?  Would I cut and run?

In spite of my personal doubts about all that, I have to agree in principle with that unknown author that taking some risks in life, even physical ones, is essential if we are to grow as human beings.   I worry if nowadays we are so overly protective of our children that we prevent them from taking some of the risks that they need to take in order to become healthy, mature adults.  I worry that we don’t allow them to fail often enough, or bump up against the sometimes harsh realities of life enough.  I certainly feel that I was more protective of my children than my generation’s parents were of us, and I think theirs may have been even less so.  Perhaps they were more fatalistic and less sanguine about the realities of life and death.

I’m not talking about taking foolish risks—God knows there are abundant stupid and meaningless risks one can take–and I took many of them.  I am definitely not advocating dying a meaningless or ignominious or untimely death.  What I am talking about is taking risks which might entail physical or emotional harm, but without which we will never experience what it means to be fully human or to fully appreciate the amazing gift of life we have been given.

Two of the great books that I have read in recent years are A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water, by the only recently deceased Patrick Leigh Fermor, who, in 1933, at the age of 18, with his parents’ blessing (he’d been misbehaving at school), walked, by himself, all the way from Holland to Istanbul.  It’s hard to imagine parents allowing such a trek today, even with the benefit of all our modern means of communication and GPS tracking systems to boot.  And it wasn’t as if pre-WWII Europe was a much safer place than it is today.

Fermor went on to live an almost unimaginably interesting and romantic and adventurous life, one which also included becoming a hero during the war.  Was it worth the risk?

One of the interesting contrasts that I have noticed during my visits in Eastern Europe is that “security”—perhaps we should say the “myth” of security—is not a big priority there.  People living in that part of the world have never experienced much security.  The attitude there is much more one of carpe diem: live for today.  Live is lived more on the edge.

The expectations about safety are quite different than they are here.  Farm and industrial machinery usually lack the safety devices we have come to take for granted.  Transylvania is an OSHA nightmare.  There is no effort to make parks or trails safer for those who choose to make dangerous or foolish decisions. Young and old ride bicycles on narrow, winding roads where trucks and cars whiz by, missing them by only inches.  The riders don’t even wince.  Horse drawn carts appear suddenly out of the dark on busy highways.  Though operating under the influence is severely punished, serious accidents due to speed and reckless driving are not uncommon.  Young people hitchhike because it is the only cheap means of transportation and most don’t own cars.  Children still walk, sometimes for miles in all kinds of weather, to get to school.  I would guess that permission slips for school or church trips are unheard of and would be laughed at.

Somehow, it all seems more realistic and honest to me.  There is no security in this life, in spite of all our best efforts and wishes to make it otherwise.  I hate the expression “homeland security,” and I hate what we have done in the name of it.

Years ago, my ministerial mentor Charles Grady wrote the following little poem, entitled “Our Jeopardy.”  It seems like an appropriate way to end: 

It is good to use
best china
treasured dishes
the most genuine goblets
or the oldest lace tablecloth.
There is risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or moment
or a fragile cup of revelation.
But not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being—
that is the quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe
where nothing
is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended,
where nothing is ever
lived, loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost or found.

May we, too, be willing to risk those “available artifacts of being a human being,” and in doing so, may we find the more abundant and free life we seek.  So may it be.  Amen.

-The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: “Come to the Edge,” by Guillaume Apollinaire (sometimes attributed to Christopher Logue); “Risk,” by Anais Nin

January 15, 2012

“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.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is sobering to think that today would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 83^th birthday.  What might his eloquent and prophetic voice have had to say about the events of the last forty-four years?  Unfortunately, we will never know.  King’s death at the age of 39 was certainly one of the tragic but defining events of my young life.  I am sure that it played no small part in my decision to consider the ministry as a meaningful career.

For King showed me and a generation of other young people that it was possible for a single person to make a difference and to lead constructive social change, and that religion and the church could still be relevant.  He, like his hero Gandhi and others before him, proved that the universal human values which are found in all religious traditions could be a powerful motivating force on the road to a more just and peaceful and loving world.  He showed us the importance of living a life of service to others and not just to oneself.

In thinking about what I could say about King this year that would be fresh and new, it occurred to me that one of the most overlooked legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. was his critique of the interconnection between militarism, racism, and poverty, and especially his growing commitment to economic justice not just for African Americans, but for all Americans.  I suspect that this is not by accident.

Indeed, like his increasingly vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, King’s work on behalf of economic justice may have been as much a cause of his unpopularity, and ultimately of his death, as his work on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.

It is sometimes forgotten in all the mythology surrounding King that the last evening before his assassination in Memphis,Tennesseein 1968 was spent not at a civil rights rally but at a gathering in support of striking sanitation workers—read “garbage men.”  There, King gave one of his most memorable and prophetic speeches—remembered mostly for the “been to the mountaintop” premonition of his imminent death.

Somewhat surprisingly, given its fame, that passage is found only in the final paragraph of his speech.  King knew that his new focus on the link between the ongoing war inVietnam, the evils of racism for both blacks and whites, and an oppressive economic system was dangerous.  He had received threats on his life—nothing new.  He had already survived one assassination attempt when he was stabbed by a mentally ill African American woman in the 1950’s, and he most likely felt that it was only a matter of time before there would be another.  (In fact, much of his final speech focuses on all the changes he would have missed had he sneezed following that first assassination attempt, as the tip of the knife had settled perilously close to his aortic artery, and the doctor told him he would have died if he had sneezed.)

One could speculate that King advocating on behalf of African American rights was far less threatening to the powers-that-be than King advocating on behalf of economic justice for blacks and whites alike.  As he himself noted, “Many white Americans of good will have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.”  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, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them.  The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

King’s insights about the relation of economics to injustice seem prescient today.  Early in the year in which he died, King wrote,

Most of the 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.

Because he was convinced that the only solution to the economic inequalities that existed, and still exist in our society, was what he called “a radical reconstruction of society itself,” King was often accused of being a communist.  (We hear echoes of this criticism when our current presidential incumbent seeks to address problems of distributive justice and is accused of being a “socialist,” an only slightly less-pejorative term.)  King spoke directly to these accusations as follows:

I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers—from a dialectic point of view, combining a partial yes and a partial no.  In so far as Marx posited a metaphysical materialism, an ethical relativism, and a strangulating totalitarianism, I responded with an unambiguous “no”; but in so far as he pointed to weaknesses of traditional capitalism, contributed to the growth of a definite self-consciousness in the masses, and challenged the social conscience of the Christian churches, I responded with a definite “yes.”

Nonetheless, as our morning’s reading [by Jonathon K. Cooper Wiele] suggested, to “celebrate all” of King we must embrace the extent to which his critique of capitalism had grown into a strong advocacy for a fundamental economic realignment in the western world.  In his famous speech “Beyond Vietnam,” given in April of 1967, fully six years before that war would finally come to an end, King said,

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.”  It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.”  The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them 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.”  This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home . . . physically handicapped and emotionally deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.  A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

The more I have thought about this aspect of King, the more it has seemed to me that he would be very much tune with the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  The disparities of wealth to which King was pointing in the 1960’s have not abated, but, one could argue, have actually grown far worse in the years since.  And the kind of non-violent, mass protest in which the Occupiers have been engaged would, of course, be right up his alley.

So I was not particularly surprised when our friend Tom Stites forwarded me a link this week to an article entitled “Black Churches to Energize Occupy.”  “The mission,” writes reporter Scott Galindez, “which is being called “Occupy the Dream,” will start on Monday, January 16 . . . in commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.  On that day   . . . pastors who are part of the Occupy the Dream movement will connect with the well-knownOccupy Wall Streetgroup to hold protests at Federal Reserve banks in 10 cities around the nation.”

“The strategy,” writes Galindez, “will be to raise the consciousness level of African-Americans, starting in church pulpits, by spreading the message of income equality, economic justice and empowerment.”  As the article makes clear, Occupy the Dream is organized around the vision of Dr. King, “who sought to wage war on poverty, unemployment, and economic injustice.”

As Sgt. Shamar Thomas and David DeGraw of Occupy Wall Street recently wrote in welcoming the founders of Occupy the Dream to the larger movement, “The Occupy Wall Street movement draws its strength from people of all different walks of life, with opinions across the political spectrum, coming together to find common ground and unite against the global financial interests that have bought control of our government.  Dr. King’s vision of economic justice is an edifying example of what we intend to achieve.”

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.  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 of 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.”

King would, I think, be gratified by the many positive changes that have taken place inAmericasince his death.  He would be disappointed, but not surprised, by the depth and tenacity of the problems to which he so eloquently and prophetically pointed our attention more than forty years ago.  Like all the biblical prophets before him, King spoke truth to power and gave voice to the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden, regardless of the color of their skin.  He was ultimately a realist who knew that great changes never come quickly or easily and that our work in the world is never fully done.

In his final speech inMemphis, King invoked the image of Moses from Deuteronomy 33, standing on the top ofMt.Pisquah, able to see the promised land, but not allowed to enter in.  It was a truly premonitory image, evoking both the death of Moses in that same passage and his own death less than twenty-four hours later:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  And I don’t mind.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.  And I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

May we always maintain a hopeful vision of the promised land of our dreams, not only for ourselves, but for all people, everywhere.  As King implored, “Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”  So may it be. Amen. 

 – The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: from “The King We Ignore,” by Jonathan K. Cooper Wiele; from “A Testament of Hope,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

“And now let us believe in this new year that is given us—
new, untouched, full of things that have never been.”
 - Rainer Maria Rilke

Another new year is upon us, and while one could argue, as my late colleague Roy Phillips did, that this yearly transition is merely illusory, more of a continuation, in fact, than a new beginning, still the idea that something new is about to unfold has always provided a powerful incentive for folks wishing to make a fresh start.  The coming of a new year may not be a time for excessive optimism, but it is certainly a time for realistic hope.

I have never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions.  The reality is that in life there are many new beginnings, and many opportunities to start over.  We needn’t wait until January 1st on the calendar to begin to make the positive changes we need to make.

Fortunately for us, we are followers of a religion that affirms that this kind of change is possible, and that it is possible to begin again.  It is never too late.  This hopeful outlook can help us through the many transitions that life places in our path, both those that are expected and, especially, those that are not.

For ours is a faith that refuses to believe that we are predestined to walk a particular path in life, or that we are forever tainted by some original sinfulness.  Rather, our faith says that we are free, that we can change, and that we can continue to grow and to learn new things as long as we live.

We believe, therefore, that while change is inevitable, change is also good.  This is not to say that change is always easy or welcome, because some changes are tragic.  What it means is that we recognize that change may sometimes be necessary in order to move us and our world a little further in the direction of our brightest dreams.  Even terrible changes can grow our souls and increase our capacity for compassion and empathy for others.

Yes, this faith of ours places a lot of responsibility on us.  It means that we cannot succumb to a comfortable complacency or to a despairing fatalism.  We can change for the better, we can make a fresh start, and because we can, we must.  We are free.  The choice is ours.

The great 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker famously said that the “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  That is a hopeful statement, not necessarily an optimistic one.  Similarly, sometimes the change that we experience, while difficult at the time, bears wonderful fruit later on; perhaps not even in our own lifetimes.  At least, this is our faith.

I have great respect for people who have survived and thrived in spite of change and of unthinkable loss.  They give me hope.  I consider the hundreds of thousands of people who have come to this county in order to make a new life in a new place, leaving their old lives behind and starting over from scratch.  And I am humble before those who have made positive changes in their lives by overcoming addictions and by confronting their deepest and darkest fears and temptations or by leaving destructive relationships.  Such constructive and often heroic change is possible for each of us, regardless of the demons we face.

Some of us are lucky enough to have partners and friends who call us back to our better selves, often over and over again, allowing us to start anew on a more positive and life-affirming path.  I know how important this is, as I, like many of you, sometimes find myself in a negative or despondent place in my life, in a rut, even though it may be what my late friend Ed Atkinson once called a “fur-lined” one.  I need those occasional reminders that I can change, that I can break bad habits of behavior and attitude, and begin again.  As someone has written with truth, “I never changed because it was a good idea.  The pain of not changing became too great.”

The poet Theodore Roethke captures the potential of such attitudinal shifts in his poem “In the Time of Change”:

All things must change: the vision pass
The shadow lengthen on the grass,
The ship go down behind the sun,
The passion of the heart be done.
The flower droops; we cannot stay
The lovely miracle of May.

 But in the time of change, a rare
Illumination fills the air.
There is a shift, a holy pause
Between what is and what once was.
The senses quicken with delight;
The scene grows pure upon the sight.
Our fixity is lost; the eyes
Look out with passionless surprise,
And in that instant we may see
The shape of an eternity.

What strikes me in this poem—and I realize that it could well be a poem about the moment of death, certainly the greatest and most terrifying change that we must ever encounter—is the idea that “our fixity,” what I take to mean our complacency, or our inability or refusal to look at things in a new or different way, can be overcome if only we are open to change, if only we are willing to pay attention in that “holy pause/between what is and what once was.”  And God knows we could all use some “passionless” surprise from time to time (consider the current state of our political affairs) in order, as my friend Philip Booth wrote in his poem “Seeing Deer,” to “see what we see.”  More clarity, less passion, is certainly the demand of our time.

It is really helpful in times of personal or societal change to have a faith which is not pessimistic about the future, for the problem, as Alexander Graham Bell once wrote, is often that “When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us.”  We need a faith which points our gaze firmly in the direction of the door which is always opening before us, if we have but eyes to see.

My own tendency, I know, is to look backward at the closed door, to gaze too “fixedly” on what has been and not on what might be, to miss seeing that “shape of an eternity” which is always there, and that is why I think it is important from time to time that we shake things up in our lives.

I’m not sure at this point that I would recommend moving and building a new house, even one that is only seven miles away, in order to shake things up.  For me it has been a much more stressful and dis-orienting experience than I expected, filled with a certain amount of second-guessing and doubt, even while it has been fun and exciting to contemplate a new beginning in a place where I can pursue some long-dormant interests.  But I know that when I have made such changes in the past, even uncomfortable ones, perhaps even wrong ones, they have almost always resulted in positive growth and in seeing things with fresh eyes.  That is my hope this time around, also, though, of course, the jury is still out.

Trust me, I don’t think moving and building a house is necessary to make the kind of changes I have been talking about, though some of us do need a bigger kick-start than others to change the road we are on.

Years ago, in a New Year column, the wise Erma Bombeck wrote about how for years she had been “overdressed for New Year.”  The articles of clothing that she wished to discard included “the mantle of guilt,” “the hair shirt of self-pity,” and “the belt of prejudice.”  In her metaphorical footlocker was a goodly supply of anger, and “the jewels of frustration over things that I can never do anything about, but that I wear like medals to torture myself.”  Also contained in her baggage were all the old grudges, “many of them antiques,” she wrote, “that I plan on handing down to my children.”  “Every year of my life,” she continued, “the load gets heavier and heavier to carry into a new year.”  “Frankly,” she concluded, “I don’t know if I can face a New Year without my clothes on.  Can I look at old friends and see them for the first time?  Can I keep my eyes forward and not look back?  Do I have the guts to emerge with nothing on but a smile and a top hat?  I’m gonna try.”

Ultimately, that is all that is asked of any of us: that we try.  It is what our faith demands.  Not that we succeed, but that we don’t give up.

Bernice Martin, the Board Chair of the First Universalist Church of Norway, Maine, where I once served, wrote a perceptive New Year column this year in the church’s newsletter: 

Whether we begin our new year with the winter solstice, the lunar new year, or on January 1st, we find in this time of darkness limitless possibilities for the year to come.  While not all the possibilities before us will take us where we want to go in our lives, we nevertheless find ourselves once again on the threshold of what could and will be.  So what is it that we wish to nurture in our lives as we move into the growing light? 

Making meaningful changes that shape the course of our lives can often come slowly.  Reflection on our spiritual or life journey over the past year can reveal pathways that have led us to where we find ourselves today and point to possible headings for our tomorrows to come.  As we look back over the year, what experiences call to us to open our hearts and minds more fully to what might be?

As we rest in the quiet of the long night and the peace of the dawning light, seeds of hope flow in the heart.  It is a hope nurtured by new discoveries as we move through the changing landscape of our lives.  It is a hope sustained by embracing the change we desire.  It is a hope that trusts in the infinite possibilities of Holy Mystery and finds fulfillment in our actions in the world.

At this point in my journey through life, the view forward sometimes looks pretty scary.  I’m not always sure I want to go there.  But I am convinced that the only way to proceed is to embrace the inevitable change.  And I am more certain than ever that, with a little hope and courage, it is possible to start over, to shed the old, worn-out clothing and baggage, and to become the kinder, healthier, and happier people that we long to be.  So many of you have shown me the way to go, that all I need to do is follow in your brave footsteps.

Howard Thurman, the great Black preacher and teacher, once wrote,

I will sing a new song.
I must learn the new song for the new needs.
I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life—of my mind, of my spirit.

I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before.
That all that is within me may lift my voice unto God.
Therefore, I shall rejoice with each new day
And delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.
I will sing, this day, a new song unto God.

May our songs, to whomever they are sung, ever affirm our capacity to “delight . . . in each new unfolding,” to embrace the change we seek, and to begin again.  So may it be.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: from “Moment,” a sermon preached by the Rev. Roy D. Phillips on December 28, 1975  

December 18, 2011

 “. . .and all who heard it were amazed. . .”
- Luke 2: 18

What gives your life meaning?  It’s a good question to ask yourselves in this holiday season, or at any time, for that matter.

Religion has always been about the search for meaning in life.  Among other things, we gather to explore the various meanings that others have found, and, perhaps, to find in them a meaning for our own living.

Unfortunately, most of us do not have as much time to spend on the search for meaning as we would like; we even may not be consciously aware of the meanings which actually sustain us.  It is one of the tragic consequences of modern life that so many of us find ourselves separated from the ground of our being: fragmented not only within and among ourselves, but in our relationship to the sources of meaning in life.  In traditional terms, we would say that we are alienated; separated not only from other people, but from God.

To be separated from others is to be separated from God: from ultimate reality, the ground of our being, and meaning in life.

Our alienation is apparent in the way that we relegate religion to one day of the week, if that.  How very different is the experience of the Pennsylvania Amish community, about whom I have been recently re-reading.  For the Amish, every smallest and seemingly insignificant act has religious consequences.  The Amish have intentionally kept the pace of their lives slow, so as to be able to keep the awareness of the meanings of their days.  To the outsider, they seem merely quaint; but a closer look reveals a conscious, well thought out system for keeping the fragmented modern world at bay.

The Amish make numerous well-considered sacrifices in order to hold on to a life which knows less of the modern separation of the sacred from the secular, the heavenly from the mundane.  They are not separated from their meanings, but live in them at all times.  Paradoxically, their separation from the modern world has allowed them to hold on to and be constantly aware of those meanings.

For us to live in our meanings requires an equally conscious effort: first, to become aware of the meanings, and, second, to keep the awareness of those meanings throughout our busy days.

I’m not suggesting that we become Amish, even if that were possible, which it is not.  But religion doesn’t have to be a once-a-week event in our lives.  The search for meaning can and should be carried on in all that we do, even in the midst of our too-crowded lives.  In our rush to get things done, we often lose sight of the meanings which are to be found even in the most common of tasks.  We are too often in a hurry to complete those tasks, only to find when they are completed that we feel empty; we feel that our work has been for nothing.  Too often, we are left with time which we do not know how to fill, and so end up filling it with a lot of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” [Shakespeare].  We hurry up and wait—but for what?

We forget that all of life is religious, that all of life contains traces of the sacred; we forget that all of life has the potential in its parts to tie up our fragmented lives, to “rebind us,” to help us to “get it together.”  But we have to pay attention to the details; we have to be aware, and practice a little of what the Buddhists call “mindfulness.”

Life, as many have pointed out, has both a horizontal and a vertical dimension.  Most often we are aware only of the horizontal dimension of our lives, without giving much thought to the vertical.  That is, we are not often enough conscious of the ways in which our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the universe have a transcending quality.  As the Amish recognize, the smallest act of a busy day can have a meaning which far outweighs its appearance.  To be mindful is to be aware at all times of the miraculous nature of life, of the sacred in the ordinary: the mysteries of birth and love, of laughter and grief.  Joy and sadness can find us when we least expect it.  We are moved by other people and by the natural world; we can feel empathy; we are able to care, and to experience the beautiful.

Everything we encounter is meaning-full: all things, all experiences.  Nothing is meaningless, although the meanings may not be always immediately clear to us.  Poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins said it in traditional terms: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”  Our lives and those of our fellow human beings are filled with moments of meaning.  The feeling of meaninglessness is perhaps better understood as our inability or failure to see the meaning that is always there; or, perhaps, the mistaken idea that meaning is supposed to be “out there,” rather than right here under our noses.

The job of religion, I believe, is to focus our attention on the meanings that are right at our fingertips, on the tips of our tongues, in the smiles of our children, in the embrace of those we love but too often take for granted.  In short, on the meanings that are to be found in the everyday, in the so-called ordinary and mundane.

The question, what gives meaning to your life, is a question that calls not for some weighty metaphysical speculation on our parts, but for our undivided attention to the details of our living; and not just during this one hour of the week, but during every moment of every ordinary hour and day.

Because what gives our lives meaning is the people, the things, the memories and thoughts which move us to joy or sadness; those everyday experiences which, almost without our knowing it, make life worth living; those fascinations and even those confusions which constitute our awareness of ourselves and of the world in which we live and move and have our being.

One of our most common shortcomings is our tendency to take things and people simply as they are and to see nothing more than meets the eye.  We are much too literal-minded.  We spend way too much of our time in the horizontal dimension.  It is possible to live almost completely in the horizontal dimension, and never to be aware of the vertical one at all.

The vertical dimension includes memory, beauty, the collective experience of humanity, dreams, the sense of mystery, the symbolic, the other: all of the things which expand our experience and make it more than it is.  It is the more that we are after.  Find the things in your life which give you the more and I think you will find that they are the same things which give your life meaning.

The holiday season is a good time to think about meanings, to think about the vertical dimension.  What ruins the Christmas story, in my opinion, is the literalness which cuts both ways: the literalness which says either the story is literally true, or that it is completely false.  Both interpretations are horizontal.

I happen to believe that the Christmas story about the birth of Jesus is not literally true, and I have it on pretty solid scholarly evidence.  But that does not mean that I believe the story to be false.  What I would say instead is that the story is true, but not in the factual or empirical sense by which we customarily determine the “truth.”  If there is anything that the late Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking work on mythology should have taught us, it is that stories—myths, legends, fairy tales—contain fundamental truths about what it means to be human.  The story of the birth of Jesus is a case in point: it does not have to be factual to be true.

And what is true about that story?  That birth is difficult and often dangerous; that the world is not always a friendly place; that motherhood and childhood are beautiful and worthy of our worship; that bad people plot, and have always plotted, the destruction of the good and the innocent; that the human contains the divine; that when God became human (according to the story), God came in the form of a poor—literally poverty-stricken—helpless baby, born in a stable among lowly beasts, of common parents; that the universe was changed by the birth of a child; that the trajectory of the sacred moves toward justice; that life is miraculous; and that even God suffers: that God suffers with us.

There are hundreds and thousands of stories just as true as this one, but what makes this story special is that it is the common property of so many of us in western culture.  Indeed, this story is so deeply embedded in western culture that it is inescapable, efforts to eliminate it from public space notwithstanding.  In this sense the story is archetypal: it is a type for other, similar stories.  Any story about birth gives reference to this foundational story of a birth.

Not surprisingly, other cultures and other religions have their own birth stories, not about Jesus, but about the Buddha or Confucius.

And why is birth so important?  An obvious answer is that it is the way that all living things come into the world.  It is a miracle which we have all experienced.  Along with death, it is the great shared experience of creation.  Birth is the new beginning, the fresh start, the clean slate.  We even speak in terms of the “birth of the universe.”  Life is a miracle: life is where we should look for the divine, even in the most common and most ordinary representation of the life, which the birth story of Jesus purports to be.

This is what I mean when I speak of the vertical dimension of life.  The holidays are meaningful—either positively or negatively—because of the associations and memories that we have of them.  These are heightened times.  Experience is a little larger than usual, a little more exposed.  Other times may be just as meaningful, perhaps, but they don’t carry the collective weight that these shared holidays do.

Whenever I try to answer the question of meaning in life, I am reluctant to answer that “God” gives meaning to life, because that statement implies a lot of things I don’t mean.  And yet, it is a truthful answer to the question.  For as the late Forest Church reminded us, “God” is not God’s name, but our name for that which is greater than all yet present in each.  “God” gathers up all that is important to me and all that makes my life worth living.

God is the relationships that I have been blessed with in my family, marriage, friendships, church, and community.  God is love and beauty and intelligence and goodness.  God is music and literature and art, which discovers that in each of us which is common to all.  God is in my friend and in me and in the world in everything.  The world is charged with the grandeur of God, it is filled with divinity, the sacred is to be found in the ordinary and in the natural which we seem bent on destroying to our own detriment.

That which is greater than all yet present in each: when we begin to look for this we are beginning to live our lives in the vertical dimension.  When we begin to seek the meanings of our lives in earnest, we begin, as some familiar words have it, “to weave our lives into some semblance of the pattern we dream about.”

That is my holiday wish for each of you: that you will find the search for meaning becoming an essential part of your life, and that you will experience those moments of meaning which bring peace and wholeness to our too often fragmented lives.  May it be so for you, this day and in the brightening days to come.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: from a newsletter column by the Rev. Phyllis O’Connell

December 4, 2011

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life,
and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Charity is hard and endures.”
- Flannery O’Connor

It has often seemed to me that the most meaningful part of the Christmas season is not Christmas Day itself, but the days and the weeks leading up to it.  It’s the anticipation that I like.  But as my late colleague Forrest Church once warned, “Advent is the season of expectation.  One thing it teaches, however, is that we don’t always get what we expect.”

Recognizing this reality, the early Christians designated a time of preparation in anticipation of the actual arrival of the holy-day of Christmas.

Advent is the ecclesiastical season immediately before Christmas, consisting of the four Sundays preceding Christmas, and today is the second Sunday of Advent.  The word “advent” comes from the Latin word meaning, simply, “to come.”

The first clear references to Advent appear in the latter half of the 6^th century—long ago enough to indicate that Advent is very old indeed.  Pope Gregory the Great, who was pope from 590 to 640 AD, is said to have introduced the Advent season into the Christian calendar.  This Gregory is the same whose name is so closely linked with plainsong that it is commonly known to us as “Gregorian Chant.”  He was a prolific writer who produced works on the duties of bishops as well as commentaries on the Bible.  One of his most delightful works is his life of St. Benedict, a charming little book full of fact and fiction that still makes good reading.

Advent season is observed as a time of preparation, not only for the great festival of Christmas which follows it, but also for the Second Coming of Christ as Judge at the last day.  It is this latter interpretation of Advent which finds expression in a hymn by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther:

Great God, what do I see and hear!
The end of things created!
The Judge of mankind doth appear
On clouds of glory seated!
The trumpet sounds; the graves restore
The dead which they contained before;
Prepare, my soul, to meet Him!

Advent is thus not all happiness and light.  It is a serious time, a time of  great expectations.

A former ministerial colleague, Elizabeth Alciade, once wrote, “It is no coincidence that the more we can prepare for this festival [of Christmas], the more meaningful and joyful and peaceful it becomes—all the things most of us ‘expect’ from Christmas, but alas, so often do not find.”

Many religious rituals and rites of passage begin with a similar period of special preparation, as a way both of heightening the experience itself and of getting the most out of it in terms of new understanding and knowledge.  Time and space must be made in our busy lives if we are to have any chance of realizing our great expectations.  As my colleague writes, “Quietness must be made, or should I say discovered, even in the midst of the heightened activity.  The more of this side of preparation, the more we allow for noticing an exquisitely wrought snowflake, new fallen on our winter coat, for listening to a child, for holding the hand of one who is afraid, for hearing the sounds of silence, for sharing a simple meal with a lonely neighbor—the more Christmas will ‘come’ for us.  The real preparation for Christmas,” she writes, “is largely this making of space, this allowing of quietness, this refusal to be caught up in the tinseled rush.  This is the ‘being’ part of preparation, that we, too, may perchance ‘hear the angels sing.’”

I know all too well how difficult it is to find the necessary time for our own quietness and peace of mind, because almost yearly I fail in the effort myself.  Even if we do not expect the imminent return of Christ, we still expect a lot from Christmas—perhaps more than it can ever provide or satisfy.  One thing is certain, though: it is very difficult to meet our great expectations, or any expectations for that matter, if we are too busy or too hurried to enjoy the moment in which we are living.

The idea of consciously preparing ourselves for the holiday and for the expectations we cherish for it would seem to be transferable to other areas of our lives, as well.  For having expectations is important, as long as we heed the warning of author Flannery O’Connor, who wrote in the words I included on your orders of service this morning that “To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life.”  We need something to look forward to, something to work toward, something to give us hope for the uncertain future, some vision of how things ought to be.  As the prophet Isaiah wrote, “without vision, the people perish.”  But we need to keep our expectations realistic, or we are sure to be disappointed.

Just as we need our great expectations for the holiday season, I think we need to have great expectations for our church.  These expectations begin with a vision of what our church is and can be, not only for ourselves, for those of us already here, but also for those in our community whose lives we may yet touch.  These expectations begin with a vision plenty rather than poverty: the idea that there is still more than enough to go around.  It is a vision not only of what we already are, but of what we might become.

We need to remember that at least half the fun in life is, or can be, getting there.  John Daniels, in his book The Trail Home, writes that, “A destination sets you in motion, but once you’re moving here, what’s important is where you are.”  We need a destination, a common purpose, a shared vision, a dream to set us in motion.  But what I think Daniels is saying is that we also need to be fully present in the moment in which we find ourselves.  It’s a paradox: where we are now, what we do now, is just as important as anything we may accomplish in the future.  Or to return to my original conceit, these Advent days of preparation are just as important in their own way as the Christmas holiday to which they lead.  Perhaps, even more so.

A writer in the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship, a church without walls for those who find themselves living in places without a Unitarian Universalist congregation like ours, once wrote, “Advent cannot have for [religious] liberals the meaning the season holds for more traditional Christians, but it can provide families with an opportunity to become aware of the significance of spiritual values inherent in the winter festival season for them.  During this season, families can become acquainted with the many Christian legends, customs, and traditions of our heritage and discover those which are particularly meaningful to them.  Out of such experiences come the special family observances so dear to each member of the family and yet so unifying in the effect.”

Something analogous can happen to our church family as we unite in the common purpose of expanding our community not only numerically, but spiritually.  There are always opportunities for more inclusiveness as we work toward our common goals.  The preparations we make are thus important in and of themselves, as well as in what they can lead to in helping us to realize our great expectations for the future of our beloved community.

There are also meanings to be found in this holiday time of preparation, and memories to be recounted.  There are moments to share and people to be with, which can enrich and heighten the holiday when it comes.

We must always strive to keep our expectations great, if realistic, because part of the expectation of the Christmas and Hanukkah seasons is that this is a time when we dare to hope for peace and freedom and good will for all.  It must be our hope and our commitment as well as our expectation if it is ever to become a reality.

This year as in all the years before there is much to bring despair.  The economic uncertainty in which we are living, the environmental challenges, the political intransigence, wars and rumors of wars, not to mention the many causes for despair in our individual circumstances, should caution us not to expect too much.  But let Advent, Christmas and Hanukkah be a time for recommitment, for it is commitment which brings hope and makes the present habitable.  It is as we work for a better, more expansive and inclusive world that our outlook on the world becomes brighter.

My colleague John Taylor has written, “If there were no Advent, we would need to invent it.  We human creatures, in spite of all that has happened to us, and been done by us, are still hopeful.  Something new, something vital, something promising is always coming, and we are always expecting.  Thus in Advent candles are lighted to mark the time of preparation, and with each new light our anticipation grows—as it should.  We are, after all, a hopeful people, and that hopefulness deserves a festival.  Advent is a time of anticipation and as long as we expect, as long as we hope, someone will light a candle against the prevailing darkness—and neither the winds of hate not the gales of evil will extinguish it.”

Advent, then, is a time which takes our great expectations seriously, but which also expects something from us.  Let it be a time to discover quietness and space, for memory and longing to have their day.  But let it also be a time for renewing our vision of hope for our church and our world, and for recommitting ourselves to both, and to the struggle for peace and justice once again.

In closing, a prayer by the late Unitarian minister, A. Powell Davies: 

O God, we thank Thee that at the darkest time of the year there comes to us the brightest festival.  Let the gladness of its faith and the joy of its promise be warm within us!  Let us believe its hope: that sometime there shall be a world in which humanity’s inhumanity is ended; a world of good will from which all cruelty is gone; a world in which the prophecies of old have found fulfillment, in which the nations are at peace and hatred and strife are known no more.  A world in which children’s faces are bright like the face of the Christ-child, and all harshness and bitterness are banished, and love and gentleness have everywhere prevailed.  Let the darkness of our skies be cloven!  Let the angel of hope appear!  Let the song be sung to our waiting hearts, the song that is sung by the heavenly host, and let earth join in the chorus!

May it be thus; may this Advent-time be the fulfillment of all our great expectations.  Amen.

 - The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: from “The Courage to Hope,” by Peter Gomes; by Roy D. Phillips

from “The Courage to Hope,” by the Rev. Peter Gomes
Advent is the season of hope, and we worship the God of things that are not yet, the God of things that are to be.  That is both true and easy to say, and I have just done so; but hope, real hope . . . is not quite so easy to come by.  Sometimes our hope fails us for lack of imagination, lack of courage, or for not thinking or hoping ‘big’ enough—cheap and inadequate hope.

. . . Advent hope is not an exercise in nostalgia or seasonal optimism; Advent is not celebration but fortification against the very forces that would drive us to despair and drag us downward; Advent is an exercise in endurance, in preparation for the long journey to a time and a place we have not yet been, and for which all the past and all the present are mere preparation.

from a newsletter column by the Rev. Roy D. Phillips
Spiritually, Advent suggests to us that we have the darkness in our lives right now (not merely ‘had it’ or ‘know others who experience the darkness’).  We have a darkness in which we are living.  Advent is an opportunity to become more fully aware of our own darkness.  What form does it take for us—this year?  Failure, guilt, shame, sadness, disappointment, compulsion, puzzlement, loneliness, frenzy, boredom, fear, hopelessness.  What form is the darkness taking this year?  Get in touch with it.  Experience it.  Own it.

Let it be there.  Meditate upon it.  Pray about it.  Then—and not too soon—listen for the promise in Advent and Christmas.

The light is coming.  ‘Now is our salvation near.  The night is far spent; the day is at hand.’

What is the light for your life?  Not merely for someone else in another time and place.  The darkness and the light and salvation—here and now in your life, our lives:

‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’

‘The light shines on in the darkness and the darkness has not put it out.’

November 20, 2011

“For Everything that has been—Thanks.
For Everything that will be—Yes.”
- Dag Hammarskjold

 Dag Hammarskjold’s little quotation, which I have included on your orders of service this morning, just about says it all for me on the theme of thankfulness.  His simple words would seem to constitute a thoroughly adequate attitude toward life.

Not that it an easy one.  As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I am not an optimist by nature.  But I try to be thankful for my blessings, and even to find the thankful places in the losses and disappointments that I, like all of you, have sometimes experienced.  And most of the time I try to say “yes” to life.

Often, I turn to my religion to help me through the “dark nights” of my soul.  I am grateful, among other things, for our hopeful faith which draws me out of my negativism and occasional defeatism toward something resembling appreciation and gratitude for what I am and for all I have.  As self-help author Melody Beattie has written,

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.  It turns what we have into enough, and more.  It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion to clarity.  It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.  Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

I suppose what I am saying is that thankfulness doesn’t always come easily or naturally for me, and perhaps it doesn’t come so for you.  In so many ways, the world belies our gratitude.  As former Catholic priest and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll has written, “An intense awareness of what is given assumes the like awareness that it will be taken away.”  Suffering and tragedy and loss are part and parcel of this life we share, and sometimes, and for some of us, they are the larger portion.  This is unfair, but it is a fact, and we had better not equivocate about it.

So I don’t want to offer you just another glib catalog of all the reasons why you should be thankful.  Certainly there are manifold reasons for sorrow and sadness in this world, and in many of our individual lives.  But part of what we need to get over is the idea that an attitude of thankfulness must preclude the element of sadness and regret.  Indeed, it would seem that a mature thankfulness must include a recognition of these other realities of our existence.  That is, we must be thankful in spite of, and even in some instances, because of, those realities.

Perhaps a true spirit of thankfulness and the ability to say “yes” to life is impossible without them.  Not that we must have those realities, but that, as the Buddhists so clearly recognize, we do have them.

The Buddha’s great discovery was that all existence is suffering.  Despite his parents’ best efforts to protect him from this reality within the walls of his palace, Prince Siddhartha Gautama found out, as we all do eventually, that life is not the proverbial bed of roses.  His Buddhahood—his enlightenment—resulted from this initial discovery of the suffering which existed beyond the palace walls and united every living being.

I daresay that the most inspiring people we know in life are those who remain grateful and hopeful in the face of great suffering.  Those who have suffered loss but who have transcended it.  As someone has said, with truth, the greatest company is the company of those who have suffered loss.  All of us, if we live long enough, will suffer loss and disappointment at some time in our lives.  All of us will experience sadness and sorrow and regret.

Fortunately, that is not all there is.  The vast majority of us survive and even thrive.  And that, to my mind, is the true source of thankfulness.  It resides in the resilience of the human spirit and its ability to rise above the suffering and to be grateful once again.  We need to give thought to this word of thankfulness so that we will be reminded of our ability to rise again, so that we will remind ourselves of what is precious and life-giving in this world and in our lives.

A few years ago, our fellow church member Cyd Raschke shared with me the following poem which she had written; it’s a great reminder about some of the things we ought to be grateful for, but oftentimes aren’t: 

Shout to the stars your
prayers of thankfulness
for safe journeys,
profound insights,
and friendly strangers.

Loft into the wind your
indebtedness to failures
that teach you to pay attention,
or fulfill an obligation thoroughly.

Welcome warmly like the break of day
the difficult person who compels you
to be patient and gracious.

Bow at sundown
and seek forgiveness
for gratitude not expressed
for a loved one now lost,
good health,
peace.

And when a thousand small storms
threaten to cloud your vision,
may you see that your greatest blessings
have been right in front of you
and deep inside you all along.

A few years ago, I elaborated as follows on a favorite prayer of mine [“The Word of Thankfulness”] by the late Unitarian Universalist minister, Robert Storer:

I remind myself to be grateful and to say yes to the new day that never fails to dawn.  It will come even when I am gone, for others to enjoy as I have, and there is comfort in that.  For the earth with its high places and its low places: for my native coast of Maine with its dark spruce trees against granite and ocean, for the prairies of Minnesota and the Black Hills of South Dakota, and for the beautiful green mountains and valleys of Transylvania, home of our partner church.

For growing things, for our own ability to grow, for our children whom, we pray, will outgrow us.  For treasures we can see, and for treasures that are hidden.  There is always hope, and if we are patient our treasure will be revealed to us, and it may be buried under our own kitchen.

For the places where we live, where our true treasure lies, where we are at home and safe, where we learn to share and to understand one another,–perhaps the most difficult and challenging task, as we must reveal ourselves, our own true, hidden selves, to discover the ground of that understanding.

For people we have learned to trust, and who trust us: that is faith in a nutshell, my friends.  “Be ye faithful people”: that is, trust.

For people who have never let us down—we know who they are—who believe in us when we fail (over and over again), who help us over the rough places (and on the long haul, they’re mostly rough places), and for whom we wish to give thanks (for whom we must give thanks, if we think about it at all).

For the life that is ours on this once only day of our lives, the only day of which we can be certain, the only day that really matters at all, since none of the others is certain, and all the ones that have gone before are gone for good.  The life we would not exchange with any other person: this one is hard, because it is always tempting to believe that the grass is greener in someone else’s yard.  The life we would not exchange (it’s the only one we’ve got) with any other person (because it is unique and it is precious and it is ours, and we are loved if we are loved at all for what we are, not for what we might be).

My prayer to the ever present help for each of us is that we will say “thanks, yes” for this day and for all the days still to come.  Not because we are naïve and foolish optimists, not because we have never had any doubts, but because we have looked at all the realities of life and of our particular lives and know that we must be thankful and affirmative.

May we be truly thankful for every gift of life we have received.  And may we have hope and companionship to carry us through the inevitable disappointments and heartbreaking losses, and over those rough places where we cannot yet be thankful, that our lives might be filled not with despair and loneliness, but with the possibility of grace and life.  So may it be.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

November 13, 2011

 “But if our hearts turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship . . .
other Gods our pleasures, and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day,
we shall surely perish out of the good Land whether we pass over this vast Sea to possess it. . .”
- John Winthrop

 The reception of new members into the church is a reminder to us that it is people who must embody Unitarian Universalism if it is to have any impact on the world.  It is people who are the church, who not only occupy the pews but who, by their participation in the machinery of its governance, make it go.  It is people who live its ideals, and do its good works.  It is people who pay the bills.  It is hard to believe that we could ever take any of that for granted.

Yet, in our Unitarian Universalist tradition, the church as an institution has sometimes received short shrift.  The pendulum of our emphasis on the individual has sometimes swung so far that the church has been treated as hardly important at all.  This was the case with some of the Transcendentalists, and with Emerson in particular.

I personally love Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it is really inappropriate to name churches after him, as we are fond of doing, since he was mostly an anti-institutionalist.  Emerson left the ministry of theUnitarianChurch.  He placed responsibility for religious authority upon individual conscience alone, as in his famous admonition, “Acquaint thyself at first hand with Deity.”  He had more respect for individuals than I suspect we deserve.

Fortunately for us, not all Unitarian Universalist ministers—not even all Transcendentalist ministers—felt as Emerson did.  It is fortunate for us that there have always been a few institutionalists among us, people who keep the churches going when idealistic ministers and wayward congregants decide to go off tilting windmills, as they so often do.

I mean the kind of people who stick by a church through thick and thin, who stay even when they disagree with the minister, who work, often thanklessly, to keep the liberal church going for the rest of us to enjoy and benefit from.  I mean those people who sit through interminable committee meetings, and who work on rummage sales, auctions, book sales, and May Breakfasts.  I mean people who serve as canvassers during the annual pledge drive.

Because it is easy to forget that the institutional church, for all is faults and shortcomings, embodies our liberal religious tradition and values.  Disembodied souls wandering aroundWalden Ponddo not preserve traditions, or create sanctuaries from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I happen to believe that the preservation of our liberal religious tradition is important.  We can’t afford to take it for granted.  We need to remember that it is by institutions such as the church that the riches of ages, the experience and wisdom of humanity, are handed down.  We have something precious here, something which demands our love and support.

For it is our ongoing tradition which bridges the gap between our past and our future.  It is our tradition which holds meaning that is transformed to meet the needs and challenges of today.  Our tradition shows us the progress of the liberal impulse in religion: it is what we live by.  And by way of synthesis with our present, personal faith, we are enabled to live better and happier and more meaningful lives, and perhaps to make better sense of the difficult and confusing world in which we live, and which we hope to serve.

The ideal church and commonwealth to which John Winthrop’s sermon [“A Modell of Christian Charity”] points is an extremely loving and helping community, a place where all are called to be ministers to each other on their spiritual journeys and in their daily lives.  How far the contemporary situation falls from this ideal is, I would argue, one of the primary motivations behind the Occupy movement.

Winthrop called upon the undocumented immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to “always have before our eyes our commission and community in our work, our community as members of the same body,” in order that they might keep “the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”  That’s good advice for both churches and secular communities, which forWinthrop, of course, were inseparable.

His sermon is a reminder that for the earliest settlers on these shores, behavior was at least as important as theology:

. . . We must be knit together in this work as one person, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves or our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality, we must delight in each other, make each others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. . . .

Winthrop didn’t just say it, he tried to live it.  Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his classic Builders of the Bay Colony, wrote that, “In his private affairs Governor Winthrop was not what New Englanders would call a good manager.  He consistently neglected them for the public business.  For many years he refused a salary, spending the proceeds of the sale of [his English estate] in public concerns, when there was no money in the colonial treasury.  He gave generous hospitality as befitted the station of the chief magistrate, although so temperate in his own habits that his friends called his attention to Paul’s precept to Timothy: ‘drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.’

“He was almost recklessly charitable, and died ‘land poor.’

What goods he had he did not spare;
The church and Commonwealth
Had of his Goods the greatest share,
Kept nothing for himself

declares Perciful Lowle with truth, in his ‘Funeral Elegie on the Death of the Memorable and Truly Honorable John Winthrop Esq.’”  Morrison continues,

A dishonest agent in England embezzled the Governor’s property there; and a rascally steward of his Ten Hills estate on the Mystic, diverted to his own use the profits of the Governor’s crops and cattle.  Winthrop did not mind these losses at Ten Hills so much as the discovery, after the steward was sacked, that the neighbors had taken advantage of the man’s unfaithfulness to make some very questionable bargains [by way of full disclosure, one of those neighbors was the Rev. Ezekial Rogers of Rowley] . . . .  There is no better summary of the Governor’s life than that of William Hubbard, the earliest historian of Massachusetts: ‘A worthy gentleman, who had done good in Israel, having spent not only his whole estate . . . but his bodily strength and life, in the service of the country; not sparing, but always as the burning torch, spending. . . .’

When redressed by small-minded neighbors (possibly the same who had swindled him, as mentioned before) for failing to prosecute a man caught stealing wood from his woodpile,Winthropreplied that he had cured the man of stealing: he had simply let him have all the wood he needed.

How refreshing such honesty and generosity and wisdom seem in the face of so much that passes for government and religion these days!

In 1936, the Unitarian Commission on Appraisal characterized the mission of the liberal church in this way:

The members of a church are held together not by the common belief that it is well to be reasonable, but by an ardent desire to help each other and the world . . . .  The measure of unity and efficiency which the church is to achieve will be determined chiefly by the intensity of its religious life.

To help each other and to help the world: that is to be the service which our churches render, and we are told that the success of this service depends on the living of “an intensely religious life.”  What might this mean for Unitarian Universalists today?

I believe it means that in order to fulfill the church’s role of service in the community at large, we must first of all assure that our churches are the kind of places where the intensely religious life can be lived.  This is not about selfishness; rather, we must first respond to the spiritual needs of those within our churches, and the rest—service to the world beyond our doors—will follow.

It is this radical being together as a community that I see as the prerequisite to the true ministry of service in our churches.  If we expect people to stay within our fellowship, we must provide a home for them in which they can freely grow and develop as faithful, dedicated, and generous persons.  We must be “ministers one to another.”

Fortunately, the excessive emphasis on the individual in our movement has given way in recent years to a greater appreciation for the value of the communal aspects of religious life.  For what had been missing in some understandings of religious liberalism was any sense that spiritual growth takes place in community, a reality which had been recognized and celebrated in the past.  In 1936, the Unitarian Commission on Appraisal had defined the central role of the church as “nourishing the spiritual life of its members and . . . disseminating through them the highest form of religion that it knows, in the life and atmosphere and constitution of the community which belongs to us all.”

In recent years Unitarian Universalists have begun to question a narrow emphasis on “self-fulfillment” and to rediscover the importance of the institutional church as a place where spiritual growth may be encouraged and nourished with and among others, and where “service” truly is “its prayer,” as we say in our Affirmation of Faith.

Perhaps naively, I still believe that our liberal church can be a “city upon a hill” in the sense that the gospel of Matthew and Winthrop speak of it.  To become so, we must be a church which reaches out into the wider community, a refuge meaningful and accessible to all those who would join with us.  As a church we must do all that we can to encourage social and economic and racial and intellectual and sexual diversity in our membership.  The task which lies always before us is to locate our theological message firmly in the midst of a community that cares and world that needs.  Too often, we have heard stressed the negative and individualistic aspects of liberalism, while sacrificing the unity and community necessary for effective service.

Author Peter Marin tells of a conversation with a young man who was much taken with New Age trends and with a kind of other-worldly mysticism.  It was all very attractive, but the young man said desperately to Marin that he was troubled.  “I know there is something outside me.  I can feel it is there.  But what is it?”

Marin replied, “It may not be a mystery.  Perhaps it is the world.”

The world is out there, people.  And it needs us. Winthrop’s vision still awaits fulfillment.  To build that city upon a hill, we must begin with love and courage.  If we can be a truly caring community of faithful persons, we will already have cast our communal light abroad in the world. In the words of our closing hymn,

These things shall be, a loftier race
Than e’er the world has known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of science in their eyes.
New arts shall bloom of loftier mould,
And mightier music thrill the skies.
And every life shall be a song
When all the world is paradise.

Amen. 

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading: from “A Modell of Christian Charity” by John Winthrop

November 6, 2011

 “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.
It is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.”

- Vaclav Havel

I don’t know about you, but for me one of the most difficult challenges in life is how to maintain an attitude of hope.  It is awfully tempting, in the face of a world with so much suffering and tragedy, to succumb to pessimism.  I have always been grateful that I was raised in a hope-full religion, one that affirms our human ability to overcome adversity, not with magical or wishful thinking, but by our own efforts and with the help of a loving and supportive community.

I am not, by nature, an optimist.  Nor am I a total pessimist.  I prefer to think of myself as a “realist,” or perhaps you could say that I am a “realistic optimist.”  Like the Czech poet, playwright, and politician Vaclav Havel, I lack the conviction that everything will turn out well, and, just to be on the safe side, I am also usually waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I happen to think that optimism is overrated, and I’m not alone.  In her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, author Barbara Ehrenreich decries what she calls “the mass delusion of positive thinking.”  Her book is a warning, among other things, against those who claim that upbeat attitudes lead to improved health outcomes.  They don’t, at least not always or even most of the time.  And she blames our current economic woes, in part, on a kind of wishful thinking that infected our financial institutions and obscured the uncertain and irrational realities of a market economy.

Ehrenreich sees positive thinking as a reaction to the Puritan Calvinism of our nation’s original founders.  (I happen to think this is at least partly a misinterpretation of Puritanism, and perhaps even of Calvinism, but that’s a subject for another sermon.)

But Ehrenreich also warns about the kind of neo-puritanism that preaches a so-called “gospel of  prosperity,” certainly a perverse twist on the Protestant Work Ethic and one that doesn’t align at all with John Winthrop’s ideal of “a city upon a hill” where it is the prosperity of the “commonwealth,” and not of the individual, that is ultimately important.

The good news isn’t that God wants you or me to prosper, as some are claiming, but that God wants us all to prosper, which we could do if only we were to make real the ideals of a beloved and truly caring community.

It may seem odd, given what I have said about myself, that I am a great admirer of our Unitarian and Transcendentalist forebear Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of those positive thinkers who reacted so strongly against the pessimism of his day.  It’s true that Emerson was an optimist, but in his case it was a hard-earned optimism, forged in the furnace of loss.  Emerson lost his father at a very young age, experienced poverty and dependency as a youth, lost to early deaths two older brothers who were expected to do far greater things than he, and to whose lost potential he forced himself to live up, suffered the death of his beloved young wife, Ellen, when she was just nineteen, and lost his favorite son Waldo to diphtheria when he was only four.

It is Emerson’s optimism, or perhaps we should more accurately say, his hopefulness in the face of such losses, and of all the evidence to the contrary, that I admire.  Emerson can never be accused of being naïve, as some have sought to do.

One of the books that I most enjoyed reading during my sabbatical was the late Peter Gomes’s The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. Peter was the minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church for over thirty years, and for a brief time in the early 1980’s, Peter was my academic advisor at Harvard Divinity School.

Peter was a lousy advisor, and a sometime critic of Unitarian Universalism, but that’s another story.  I continued to admire Peter as a great preacher and teacher and as a truly unique human being.  When he came out of the closet as a gay man in the early 1990’s, I admired him for his courage.  The fact that he was a black man in a predominantly white institution, and that no one seemed to notice that obvious fact of his being, was one of the mysteries of the unusual man that Peter was.

Though I didn’t always agree with him—he was politically and theologically conservative whereas I am not, particularly—I have always found his work to be intellectually stimulating, and, in a weird and unexpected sort of way, reassuring.

Such is the case with one of the chapters in Peter’s book which I mentioned before.  It is a chapter on “hope.”  Peter writes in that chapter,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope.  Hope is not merely the optimistic view that everything will turn out all right in the end, if everyone just does as we do.  Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.

Peter continues by making the old-fashioned, and to me surprisingly comforting, claim that real hope is actually the product of suffering and adversity.  As the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca wrote at the beginning of the Common Era, “The good things that belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”  This claim that we grow as a result of adversity is, I think, one of those unpleasant and unpopular truths that the trend toward positive thinking has, in recent years, tended to obscure.  Gomes continues,

This kind of hope requires work, effort, and expenditure without the assurance of an easy or ready return.  [St. Paul] . . . reminds us of this: we pass from sufferings that are not avoided to endurance, which is the quality that allows us to keep on when it would be easier to quit.  The process of enduring produces character, that inner quality, not to be confused with image or reputation, that is who we are when no one is looking.  It is from character that hope is produced.  That is where the old aphorism comes from that says, “Show me what you hope for, and I will know who you are.”

Hope, Gomes concludes, is “much more than mere optimism.”  What a relief!

This is the lesson that I would hope that all of you, but especially our young people, would take away from my sermon this morning.  There is so much in this world, economically, environmentally, politically, and even religiously that can easily defeat our optimism.  There is much in our personal lives that can easily defeat our optimism.  But it can never defeat our hope, because our hope is more realistically grounded in the real world where suffering and disappointment are not the exception, but the rule.

“Hope,” as Emily Dickinson once wrote with characteristic truth,

is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

Hope is not about instant gratification.  It is not the certainty that everything is going to turn out ok.  It is definitely not the mistaken and sometimes harmful belief that I can avoid pain and suffering by simply wishing it away or by having a positive attitude.  Rather, hope is that inner quality that confronts the suffering and tragedy and brokenness of the world and of ourselves, rolls up its sleeves, and gets down to work.  “Hope,” as Havel reminded us, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  “Hope,” as Gomes suggests, “. . . is not the opposite of suffering; suffering is the necessary antecedent of hope.”

It is optimism that leads to despair, not Hope.  For optimism, Gomes says, “. . . seduces us into looking at the bright side at the risk of failing to take reality seriously.”  A hopeful person, on the other hand, is one who looks directly at that reality, and nevertheless keeps on keeping on.  A hopeful person may be hurt and disappointed, but will never despair.  As my colleague Bruce Southworth once said, “We have the power to choose; we have that power to choose between good and evil and to wrestle with the gray areas.”  It is what our religion calls upon us to do.

What I hope that we are teaching our young people here at the First Religious Society is to be hopeful, and not merely optimistic.  What I hope we are doing is helping them to build the strength of character which will carry them through what the late Paul Carnes reminds us are “the many causes of despair that life inevitably brings to us all.”  As the great 19^th century Unitarian minister Minot Savage once wrote, we must “Teach [our children] that they may become part of this great effort of humanity to lift up the world.”  For that great effort is the surest way to overcome despair, and to nourish our hope.

That is my message for this morning, in a nutshell.  You may give up your optimism, but never give up your hope!

In closing, an anonymous prayer for hope:

I am afraid of nearly everything:
of darkness, hunger, war, children mutilated.
But most of all, I am afraid of what I might become:
reconciled to injustice,
resigned to fear and despair,
lulled into a life of apathy.

Unchain my hope,
make me strong.
Stretch me towards the impossible,
that I may work for what ought to be:
the hungry fed,
the enslaved free,
the suffering comforted,
the peace accomplished.

So may it be.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

“I will send my terror before you,
and will throw into confusion all the people . . .”
- Exodus 23:27

This morning I want to try to tackle an issue that has been troubling me since long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  It is the question of whether the terrorists of this world, by skillfully employing the insidious tools of fear, have already defeated us.

I am not an expert on terrorism per se.  But as an observer who has lived through what we might call the “era” of terrorism, dating back even before the horrific blast which killed over 200 United States marines in Beirut, Lebanon in the early 1980’s, it has often seemed to me that there has been not only an increase in our fears about security, but also a slow but steady decline in our values around the rule of law since these attacks began to escalate three decades ago.

Ironically, the rise in terrorism has taken place in the context of what some scholars believe is a centuries long decrease in human violence.  Hard as it may be to believe, the level of human violence has steadily decreased since at least the 13^th century.  According to Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, in some areas of the world the homicide rate has fallen as much as one hundredfold.  As Pinker realizes, this decline in human violence is counter-intuitive.  He sets forth his thesis that humankind is more peaceful now than at any time in the past in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature.  In a review in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section, Leon Neyfakh writes of Pinker’s findings,

Not only had homicide rates gone down all over the developed world, but so had the amount of war, domestic abuse, rape, slavery, and all kinds of other unspeakable practices.  The more Pinker read, the more convinced he became that humans, as a species, had undergone a truly profound transformation.

Pinker claims that we are living through “the most peaceful era in human history.”  He says,

[If] reason, science literacy, democracy, open economies, empowerment of women—all of these things—if you can actually show there are ways in which they’ve made life better, you remind people that, hey, these things haven’t always been there, and a lot of what we appreciate in life, we should thank these developments for.

Interestingly for us Unitarian Universalists, Neyfakh writes that Pinker points more than anything to the Enlightenment as increasing the kinds of empathy and tolerance needed for people to live peacefully side by side.  Unitarianism, with its emphasis on freedom, reason, and tolerance, may well be the quintessential religious product of the Enlightenment era.

Pinker’s hope in writing his book, says Neyfakh, is that it “will serve as a decisive defense of modern life—a testament to the fact that for all the complaints one hears about contemporary depravity and nihilism, and for all the carnage in the headlines, mankind deserves credit for having managed to largely free itself from its violent, beastly instincts.”

Alongside this optimistic view of human history, there have been recent studies showing that violent crime has actually decreased significantly in the United States over the past several decades.  It sure doesn’t seem that way, and I’m sure that the people in Dorchester and similarly afflicted neighborhoods would dispute it.  So what is really going on?

Clearly, the increase and scope in media coverage of practically everything under the sun has added to the impression that there is more violence in the world, and not less.  Acts of terrorism in particular receive extremely wide coverage.  What is hard to grasp is that even including the carnage of 9/11, the numbers of victims of terrorism are actually relatively small in comparison to history’s past atrocities, and the number of incidents relatively few.

In a New Yorker magazine commentary written twenty-five years ago, an anonymous author wrote that,

The terrorist . . . wants to change our minds.  To this end, leaving our military forces largely untouched—and certainly undefeated—he attacks our civilian population.  He calculates that when we see our people, including our children, being blown up in airports and discotheques, we’ll think twice about pursuing the policies he despises.  The blood that the terrorist sheds is tangible, and the policy change he seeks will have tangible effects, but the means by which the one is supposed to produce the other—terror—is purely a mental product . . . .

“The challenge posed for us by terrorism,” wrote the author, “is how, in the face of it, to remain true to our ideals.”

I suppose this is the question that troubles me in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, in the light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the shadow of the murky means by which the so-called “War on Terrorism” is being fought.

If the terrorists’ intent is to turn us away from our highest principles and ideals of justice and the rule of law, then we would have to say that they have succeeded, at least to some extent.  If the intent is to make us waste precious resources of life and material in a prolonged and seemingly unwinnable armed struggle, they have definitely succeeded.

Alongside these two questions, there are smaller ones, about how since the modern rise of terrorism, we have begun to live more by our fears than our hopes.  America, the most optimistic nation in history, has become pessimistic.  A feeling of hopelessness is pervasive these days.  Our house, which Lincoln reminded us could not stand divided, is seemingly divided as never before.  The widening gap between rich and poor, one of the main issues among the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the real or imagined sense of disempowerment which is one of the main issues fueling the Tea Partiers, both seem to have roots in insecurities which have only escalated with our efforts to confront and defeat terrorism.

It remains to be seen to what extent those movements are motivated solely by anger, and whether and if that anger can be channeled to lead to and sustain any constructive change.

Our economy and the economies of most nations in the western world are in a mess, and the huge and increasing inequities existing between the haves and have-nots beg the question of whether the capitalist system can still be the means to a fairer society that its founders intended it to be. Our body-politic can’t seem to reach a compromise on just about anything.  Our nation is more polarized than ever in recent memory.  Xenophobia is on the increase as evidenced by the draconian measures that are being taken against immigrants both illegal and legal, and by the disturbing increase in violent anti-Muslim activity in parts of our country.

The idea that all Muslims must be terrorists is one of the most troubling stereotypes in an age of them.  Several years ago when I was in India—a nation which we forget still has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world, and one of the least violent—an Indian friend said, “Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but almost every terrorist is a Muslim.”  Of course, it is not true, not even in India.

We know, for example, that there are many other varieties of homegrown terrorists than the Muslim variety, as evidenced by radical Christians who bomb family planning clinics, anti-government anarchists like Timothy McVeigh, or even the homophobic, anti-liberal gunman who stormed into a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee several years ago, murdering one of its members and wounding several others.  In most of these instances, it remains to be seen to what extent “religion” is a direct cause of the violence, or is simply being used as a convenient cover for the goals of a radical politics.

All such acts of terrorism have a similar effect, though, of making us more fearful, less trusting, and more suspicious of anyone and anything that falls outside our area of familiarity and comfort.

While the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements may appear to have little in common, I believe that both represent the economic, political, social, and perhaps even religious fractures that have begun to open in our society.  Are these fractures all the result of terrorism?  Certainly not; but terrorism, I believe, has helped to make them even wider by sowing a kind of dis-ease and insecurity that makes it difficult for us to come together around common goals or even to agree on our common values.

In the current polarized state of affairs, no one seems to be able to imagine a third way.  There’s way too much black and white, either/or thinking.  It’s either a “clash of civilizations,” to borrow Samuel Huntington’s model, or nothing.  Having spent considerable time in Romania, a country where fear was all pervasive, and where people of different ethnicities and religions were skillfully pitted against each other, I am dismayed by the idea that we cannot live successfully together in our differences, and I do not believe it.

What about the common roots and incredible synchronicity between the major western religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and the cultures they have spawned?  Diversity and multiculturalism are too often seen as destructive forces these days, a kind of watering-down of “real” Americanism, instead of as the tremendous potential source of richness, energy, and renewal that they can be, and have often been in the past, for our society.  Thus the mostly negative debate about whether to teach about religion in the public schools.  God forbid that we should have accurate and objective information about the strangers already in our midst, let alone about those who are more familiar to us.

We need to stop cowering in fear long enough to have a conversation, and, perhaps more than anything, we need to learn to listen to what others are saying, and not to dismiss them on the spot because they don’t look or sound like us.  Knowledge, as they say, is power.  It is fear and ignorance, as always, that we need to fear the most.

In 1975, when the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered evidence of five unsuccessful CIA-sponsored assassination plots against foreign leaders, then Senator Frank Church, the chair of the committee, wrote, “The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy.  Means are as important as ends.  Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraint that makes us free; but each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.”  In another place, Church wrote of the founding fathers, “They acted on their faith, not their fear.  They did not believe in fighting fire with fire; crime with crime; evil with evil; or delinquency by becoming delinquents.”

The question is whether we have already crossed that line, and whether we have the will and courage to go back.  The New Yorker article to which I referred earlier ends with the following thought, with which I will leave you:

The right balance between the need to prevent terrorism and the need to remain true to our ideals would not be easy to strike; but it is a task that free people, who know that there is always a cost in efficiency for adherence to moral standards, are well equipped to address, for they can be confident in the knowledge that against a nation abundantly armed with courage terrorists can never win.

Let us trust that this is still true, and that it is not too late to reassert those high values which have made our country, in spite of its many flaws, a light to the world.  So may it be.  Amen.

- The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: Exodus 23: 27-33; from Terror in the Mind of God by Mark Juergensmeyer

“We go looking for something godlike but ultimately idolatrous,
and we do so in all the wrong places.”
- from John Buehrens and Rebecca Parker, A House for Hope

One of the things which I had hoped to explore during my recent sabbatical is the perennial question of God, finding myself in what I would call an especially “barren” period of my life spiritually speaking, and feeling that my old conceptions of God may have gotten tired.

I have not always, but often, been aware of a benevolent “presence” in my life which has usually expressed itself as a kind of companionship along the way, and which has been useful mostly in keeping me moving along the track which I seem intended to walk.  It is when I have temporarily lost this sense of presence that I have had the experience of seeming to be off that track.

Whether or not to call this presence “God” has always been a dilemma.  Definitions of God are always tricky; as my late colleague Forrest Church used to warn, “God is not God’s name.  God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

Even in the Bible itself, depictions of God abound.  God is the wind that sweeps over the nothingness at the beginning of the book of Genesis.

God is the anthropomorphic being that “walks with me and talks with me” in the Garden of Eden.  God is experienced in a burning bush, and in “the sheer silence,” wonderfully translated in the King James Version of the Bible as “the still small voice.”  God is a cloud which follows the ancient Israelites into victorious battle.  God in the Bible can be a cruel judge, and a loving and compassionate father.  For Jesus, God was “Abba,” literally, “daddy.”  “God is love,” according to the first letter of John in the New Testament, in a passage beloved by our Universalist forebears.

In the proverbial literature, God is personified as “Wisdom,” interestingly always a female.  God is also described in the Bible as one who gathers chicks under her wing, one who gives birth, one who calms and quiets us like a child quieted at its mother’s breast, a protective she-bear, a birth-giver, a mother eagle who bears us on her wings, and a woman in labor.

There have been enough books of theology written to fill every cubic inch of this building, and beyond.  Indeed, each one of us is a theologian, each in our own way struggling with the idea of God, and each drawing our own conclusions, regardless of what any official theology says.  Official theologies all started out, in fact, as personal ones.  As I noted in the little journal I kept during my sabbatical, “Whatever our skepticisms about ‘God,’ God remains the most significant direction of our attention.”

I decided to revisit some of the concepts of God that I had found meaningful in the past.  I wanted to see if I could recover that sense of “presence” which has been so important in guiding me on my journey through life.

I believe that most people’s difficulties with the idea of God stem from bad definitions.  Many of us are “looking for God in all the wrong places,” as John Buehrens and Rebecca Parker write in their recent theological book, A House for Hope.  Some of us simply cannot get a particular negative image of God out of our minds long enough to consider the other possibilities.  Others are stuck with definitions that simply don’t work anymore.  It’s instructive to remind ourselves about all those biblical images.  Even the writers of the most sacred books of Judaism and Christianity couldn’t agree on the image of God.  That is because God defies being pigeonholed, even though we do our best to do so.  As the Taoists are fond of reminding us, “The Tao that can be known is not the Tao.”

Most of us create God in our own image.  But as my colleague Forrest reminds us, God is that which is not only present in each, but greater than all.  There will never be a final definition of God, in spite of all those who claim to know better.

So I went back to some of the definitions which had worked for me in the past, and which I had carefully filed away in my “God” file, to see if any of them still worked.  And I was pleasantly surprised.

I reread those words of Pablo Casals which I shared with you in the reading this morning, and I chanced upon these beloved words of John Haynes Holmes:

. . . When I say ‘God,’ it is poetry and not theology.  Nothing that any of the theologians ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that the poets have written about flowers and birds and skies and seas and the saviors of humanity and God—whoever he or she or it may be—has at one time or another reached my soul!  More and more, as I grow older, I live in the lovely thought of these seers and prophets.  The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my tears.  I never seem so near truth as when I care not what I think or believe, but only with these masters of inner vision would live forever.

I reminded myself of these inspiring words of Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician founder of what has become known as the “process” school of theology:

God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. This creative principle is everywhere, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a continuing process, and the process is itself the actuality, since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey.  Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to the estate of an irrelevancy.  His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.  

Feminist theologian Carter Hayward speaks of process theology this way:

We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world.  There is no doubt in my mind that, in so doing, we are participants in ongoing incarnation, bringing god to life in the world.  For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love. . . .

These are approaches to God which I still find meaningful.

Let me say at the outset that I long ago abandoned what I call “the guy in the sky” theology, though I confess that I do sometimes relate to the universe as if it were personified.  I do talk to God; but I understand that this is metaphor and that in actuality I am really talking to myself.  But if, as Emerson suggested, I am “part and particle of God,” this is most appropriate!

I do not believe that God is a cosmic magician who directs our activities on earth.  As my colleague Forrest writes in his last book, Love and Death,

God doesn’t torch houses, will entire cities to disappear under floodwaters, or sentence toddlers to drown who wander too close to the family pool.  I could not worship such a God even if I believed in him.  But I don’t believe in him.  My God is not a puppet master pulling every string above this tiny globe as if the universe turned on how we behave here.  Greater than all and yet present in each, no less mysterious than the creation itself, God is not the cause of our undoing but the cosmic ground of our being.  I’ve never needed biblical miracles to confirm my faith, writes Forrest.  It’s not the supernatural, but the super in the natural that I celebrate.

I do believe that each of us contains a spark of the divine, as the Platonists insisted, and I do believe that we are all connected in ways which we will probably never fully understand.  I think that in those rare moments when we experience that connectedness, we are experiencing something of what is meant when we say God.

Author Alice Walker in her novel The Color Purple comes about as close as anyone to getting at this idea of God:

Tell the truth, she writes, have you ever found God in church?  I never did.  I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.  Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.  And I think all the other folks did too.  They come to church to share God, not find God. . . .  God is inside you and inside everybody else.  You come into the world with God.  But only them that search for it inside find it.  And sometimes it just manifests itself, even if you are not looking, or don’t know what you are looking for.

One of my favorite works of theology in recent years is the late Harvard Divinity School professor Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery, where he writes, 

The only possible check against the monumental deceits which human religiousity works on our gullibility—and on our desire for certainty in a terrifying world—is the constant reminding of ourselves that it is indeed mystery with which we humans ultimately have to do; and therefore we dare not claim to know the right and the true, the good and the real, but must acknowledge that in these things we always proceed in faith, as we move forward through life into the uncertain future before us.

I truly believe that most of us who have a problem with God have not allowed ourselves a wide enough definition or, simply, enough possible definitions.  Where God is concerned, you can never have too many, because there will never be enough definitions to fully encompass what it is that people have meant or tried to describe when they say “God.” Perhaps philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was right when he said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”  But I hope not.

I believe that there is merit in speaking of our ultimate commitments and trust.  “Theology,” we are reminded, means “god talk.”  I believe that by continuing to speak about what we mean when we say “God,” we may even catch an occasional glimpse of what it is that we are searching for.   The Unitarian Universalist minister Raymond Baughan once wrote, 

You try to say the world the way it means to you.  You look at what you live and try to speak it; and the mystery turns into a search for language to tell how it is, and what the world has to say about what you mean. 

We are all theologians.  We step, says Wallace Stevens, “barefoot into reality.”  We touch the running water and the rocks.  We hurt.  We laugh.  We grasp and are grasped.  We fall and are embraced.  We find ourselves in others and others in ourselves.  Broken and fragmented, we are driven toward wholeness, toward integrity, toward healing what separates and divides us from one another.  Long before we hold any belief about it, we feel the presence of something sacred and meaningful.  Unable to name it, we respond with metaphor, with vision, with decision; and we live as though that were the way the world is.

You theology is your commitment, wrote Baughan.  In Herman Melville’s words, “it is not down in any map; true places never are.”

The problem with trying to speak about God in a twenty minute sermon, or course, is that there is simply not enough time.  There is too much to say, and so this is only the beginning of a conversation that I hope you will begin to have me and with yourselves and with each other.  I know that I have barely scratched the surface of this subject, but I hope that it has given you food for thought, or perhaps set you on a quest for more.

Several years ago, participants in our teenage “Up and Coming UUs” group were asked to come up with their conceptions of God.  I think they are quite remarkable, and so want to share just a few in closing: 

–[God] is a source of comfort and faith for all religions . . . a feeling of hope that everyone can find inside themselves.

–Some force, some energy started all this—all that came after Nothingness.  I think that is most likely the case.  And we all therefore have within us that energy, force, or power.

–God is a spirit. . . .

–God [is] anything which personifies Hope, Love, and Faith

–If anything, I think God is like the wind.  You can’t see [God], but you feel [God’s] presence as [God] passes over the land.

–Sometimes I think the God concept is dangerous because it can (and does) often give people the idea that unseen magical forces determine their lives as opposed to personal and social responsibility.

–God is a great mystery, beyond knowing. . . . 

–God is a creative spirit that dwells within each person.

–God is a power that is around us all the time.

–God [is] a spirit, a force, behind all that is.  My own personal view is that we are sparks of the consciousness that is God, and that God experiences reality through us—without us, It could not experience Itself. 

–God isn’t really a physical thing.  It’s an essence in everything.

With young theologians like this in our midst, we need not worry for the future of our free faith, or of the world.  Amen.

 - The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Reading from “Music is a Miracle,” by Pablo Casals