On a blazingly sunny January morning, I marched into a sanctuary outside of Denver, Colorado behind three huge paper maché puppets.
They were elaborately fashioned, built on backpacks so they could be carried on the backs of their puppeteers:
A brown skinned grandmother, two white braids and a kerchief, a coat hanger twisted into a pair of wire rimmed glasses on her kind face.
A smiling mama, her cheeks pink and a bright red mouth up turned at the sides
A huge little baby, wrapped in a swaddling blanket, paper maché pacifier in her mouth
Behind the puppets, people carried banners: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The colors of the rainbow waving: “Welcome, welcome all and all whom you love.”
Behind the banners marched the ministers and religious educators who had come from down the street and across the country, from East and West, North and South, to celebrate the ministry of a young woman, my colleague and dear friend, Kierstin Homblette.
Kierstin, now Rev. Kierstin, is a community minister serving our Unitarian Universalist Association as the Beloved Community Coordinator for the Denver-Boulder Cluster – seven congregations working together to affect social change in the Rocky Mountains.
Rev. Kierstin’s work includes advocating for Immigration Reform – the puppets are carried by Unitarian Universalists and their community partners in rallies and demonstrations to remind supporters and anti-immigration activists and, perhaps most importantly, lawmakers, that Immigration Reform is about families: about babies and mamas (and daddies) and grandmothers.
Rev. Kierstin also works for full equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people and families. The rainbow banners, with their waving welcome, celebrating the inherent worth and dignity of all people, reminding us that our communities have work to do to ensure that all are equal. And so people are working together to legalize civil unions (as they recently did in Colorado) and marriage (they are still fighting for that) and caring for LGBTQ youth who are at far greater risk of homelessness, and working to safeguard the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people, remembering that we are all worthy of a life without fear, and working together to ensure a life of dignity and protection under the law for all people.
As we sang and danced our way into Kierstin’s ordination, we sang the Zulu words of that now familiar song: Siyahamba, Siyahamba ekukhanyeni kwenkos’ We are marching in the light of God.
Nearly two hours later, after Kierstin had accepted the call to ordination from the seven-area congregations and had been presented with the trappings of ministry: the clerical collar she wears to the state Capitol on lobby visits, the robe, symbol of the educated ministry, and the stole, symbol of the preacher; after we had heard words from Martin Luther King Jr. telling us that the salvation of our society would come as love, and love alone; after we had heard the poet Marge Piercy’s words telling us that harvest comes; after Rev. Alicia Forde remind us in an inspired sermon that we are still far from coordinating the Beloved Community – that vision King had and we share, a community of Freedom and Justice through Love – but that we have the tools we need to do so; after we had laid our hands on Rev. Kierstin and offered her our blessings: Love, Laughter, Peace, Courage, Strength…
After all that and much more, we lifted our voices in song once again.
This time in a gospel hymn. “I need you to survive,” we sang.
I need you, you need me, we’re all a part of God’s body.
Stand with me, we sang, believe in me, we’re all a part of God’s body.
I marched out of that sanctuary feeling more alive, more inspired, and more awake to the joy, the possibilities, and the profound nature of what we are doing together in our congregations and in the world than I have felt in a long time.
There is much planting and tending ahead, but in the end, the harvest does come.
With Blessings on and Gratitude for the ministry of Rev. Kierstin Elizabeth Homblette.
The Seven Of Pentacles
by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
I grew up in the Pentecostal church. When I was ten, I knew just how the world would end: “the fire next time.” Tribulations. Seven seals. The four horsemen. Rainstorms of blood and fire. And what was more, this was coming any day now: the present terrible state of the world had been precisely prophesied in the book of Revelation in the bible. All you had to do was read it yourself.
Polls indicate that roughly half of Americans are waiting for some variation on this theme. For some, it’s the Rapture; for some the Second Coming; for others the Apocalypse, but roughly half of Americans are waiting for a supernatural end to human history and the earth.
Why do people think that? There a lots of conjectures—people who feel oppressed, marginalized, or poor often hope for an immediate end to their . . . tribulations. I also suspect the fear of aging and death figures in. After all, if the world ends today, I don’t have to go through the death process. And I suspect that it also has to do with the desire of human beings to live in extraordinary times—I’m special; the end of the world is special; therefore, the world will end while I am alive.
Then there is how we deal with the fact that the end never comes. Oddly enough, it appears to be that rather than giving up on predicting the end when the end doesn’t come, believers merely begin to reinterpret and believe all the more.
Odd. Human nature. Something we need to ponder a bit.
Jakob van Hoddis was a young man in the early part of the Twentieth Century. He was a poet. And a socialist. A German Jew. And he had some mental health issues. He began to ponder the end of the world and wrote this poem, “Weltende.”
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.
The hat flies off the pointy-headed bourgeois;
in all the winds there’s an echo, like screaming.
Roof tiles fly and break in two
and on the coasts, one reads, it’s flooding.
The storm is here, the wild sea hops
onto land to crush thick dams.
Most people have runny noses.
The trains fall from the bridges.
(author translation)
Now here’s the irony: as a German Jew, as a “degenerate” poet, and as someone with mental health issues, van Hoddis had three strikes as far as the Nazis were concerned. And, indeed, in 1942, the sanitarium where van Hoddis had gone was cleared of its patients and all were killed.
End of the world, wasn’t it? But van Hoddis shows us the irony of apocalyptic literature: it’s wish fulfillment. In the book of Revelation, the bad people, who are people who persecute Christians, get what they deserve. Justice at last reigns supreme.
As a socialist, van Hoddis wanted the upper-middle class to get its comeuppance, and so in the poem, a wind blows the hat off ones pointy head.
You can see this wish-fulfillment tendency for yourself—take a peek at any apocalypse you like, and what you’ll find is the bad guys punished. Sometimes the bad guys are those who aren’t Christian. Sometimes they are warmongers. Sometimes they are the “liberal media.” Sometimes they are the “pointy-headed bourgeois.”
The upshot is always that a power greater than ourselves sets everything right.
You’ve read and heard the descriptions:
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6 ASV)
(By the way, the lion lying down with the lamb is not in the bible. That phrase is a conflation of two verses from Isaiah, the other being:)
The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain, says the Lord. (65:25)
Now wait a minute. Wolves and lambs do not get on well together. And lions don’t eat straw. But this is the problem with apocalypse: it is in its very essence magical thinking. The very nature of our world is that lions are not vegetarian.
So, back to my question: Why is apocalypse so interesting to so many?
Because long-term solutions are not interesting.
Long-term solutions are difficult. And boring. And require committees and task forces and lots and lots of charts and graphs and talking, talking, talking.
Who wants to work on a long-term solution when we can have our cake right now: the wind blows the hats from the middle class and snakes no longer do that gross thing when they digest rats. The serpents take to eating dirt. Nice world!
Unitarian Universalists are guilty too. One of our greatest hits among our hymns is “We’ll Build a Land.” I like it too but some of the lyrics go,
We’ll build a land where we’ll bind up the broken
We’ll build a land where the captives go free
Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.
Wait a minute! No—it CAN’T be! Gladness does dissolve mourning, yes, but you can’t bottle that and pour it on everyone’s head. Gladness and mourning have to exist side by side, and wolves and lambs are just not going to “graze together.”
That hymn is a great way to buck ourselves up, but for real . . . it ain’t happenin’.
And quick-fixes in the real world turn more often into Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Pinochet’s Chile.
Lions can’t survive on grass. And we human beings are going to fix the problems that we have created . . . or not.
I’m not a prophet, but I can make a couple of predictions that I”m fairly certain of: One, lions will never eat straw . . . and some people will always choose a quick buck over the collective good; and two, “god” will not smite these people (at least in a timely manner). What those two things add up to is this: we are on our own. If anything is going to get fixed, it is up to us to do it. (And we know that our opponents are very content to have us curl up, get angry, and stare at our navels.)
Yet accepting “apocalypse never” liberates us to get down to the tasks at hand.
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality.
First, a little family history: Charles Darwin’s family was passionately involved in the abolition movement. Darwin’s grandfather, the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood—of Wedgwood china fame—bankrolled Thomas Clarkson, the great British abolitionist. Britain, due in great part to the work of Clarkson, outlawed slavery in the dominions in 1807 and the colonies in 1833.
(A bit of historical trivia: One of the chemists working in the Wedgwood factory was Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen, and a Unitarian minister. )
Charles Darwin’s father, hoping to tone down the radical reputation of the family, had Charles baptized into the Church of England. But it is an interesting fact of history that the father of the theory of natural selection . . . married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a Unitarian, and considerably more radical, at least publicly, than Charles.
The fact remains that when the 22 Charles boarded HMS Beagle in 1831, he was a conventional Christian considering going to seminary and becoming a priest in the Church of England.
What changed?
For the full story, read Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. When we look at Darwin’s life from the perspective of the slavery question, it looks almost inevitable that he should call religion’s bluff concerning its monopoly on morality and show a way toward a higher morality.
In 1845 Darwin wrote,
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
Darwin knew very well that the appeal to religion as a basis for moral behavior would be one of the first objections to the theory of natural selection. Yes, I think he would have pursued his theory, even if it had meant that human beings had no moral guidepost. But I suspect that Darwin knew that the implications of natural selection point in exactly the opposite direction.
Consider how Darwin framed the discussion:
His first proposal, published in 1859 but written in 1837, was this:
Living things are all one: they are “netted together.” (Darwin avoided the question of the “crown of creation,” human beings, as best he could in his first book.)
Then, in 1871, Darwin dropped the bigger bombshell:
Humanity is all one.
And therefore, we must strive toward a higher morality than that which we have developed thus far. Darwin wrote, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Darwin was a naturalist. He observed the “facts on the ground.” He heard the cries of a slave being beaten. He knew that slavery persisted in the United States and many parts of the world. The conclusion was plain: Religion is not sufficient to make individuals or governments behave in moral or ethical ways.
Darwin knew that, despite pretensions, Christianity—and the other human religions— more often underwrite and condone the prejudices of societies than point in the direction of a higher morality, a more good and just society. You don’t have to be Darwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century to see that!
I’m not an extremist concerning the effects of religion because, frankly, I think people will be people, no matter what the religious or political overlay . . . on an individual level, that is. The evidence is all around us: The vast majority of human beings are basically “good,” meaning most of us don’t hurt others all that often. Most of us don’t steal things . . . all that often. Most of us behave in ways that add up to going along to get along.
Most of us aren’t Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, but we’re not Stalin or John Wayne Gacy either. Most people—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—go along to get along.
That’s on an individual level. Religions get dangerous in the aggregate—when those systems begin to say who can enslave whom; who can subjugate whom; who can kill whom for what set of reasons.
Consider again what Darwin said about slavery and the treatment of slaves:
And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
It is the aggregate that creates the evil, by “palliating”—by underwriting and condoning—the evil deeds.
But in the face of this fact Darwin saw, as perhaps no other human being had ever yet seen, that adaptations are adaptations, brain cells are brain cells. In humans. In primates. In animals. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote.
We are still on the frontier of this way of thinking. William Shakespeare long ago said, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” It took Charles Darwin to tell us just how true this is. And we still don’t comprehend it: We are all netted together.
Where, then, is the uniqueness of human beings?
Consciousness. Not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether the sun is shining; not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether it is good or bad to sleep with particular people. The sort of consciousness that allows us to think about the thoughts of others—other people; other animals. This is the most complex form or consciousness. It is moral conscience.
Before Darwin the answer to the question, “why does consciousness exist?” was, “Poof! It’s magic! Set off by the divine spark . . .” After Darwin, the answer is not so neat and tidy. But the answer we have points the way toward a higher morality. Darwin put it this way: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
This is the profundity of the theory of natural selection: far from making us mere animals, as the religious often claim, natural selection calls us to see beyond the limitations of our time and place. Natural selection posits a mode of being beyond the mere going along to get along. Natural selections tells us to control our basic impulses. Not because those are animal impulses—all our impulses are animal impulses—but because the sort of animal we are can see beyond our selves.
For the last couple of days my Facebook feed has been full of tributes to the late, great Pete Seeger—as well it should be. A genuinely remarkable man, Seeger spent his long life seeking justice, fighting oppression, telling the truth as he understood it, even in situations where the truth was most unwelcome. (If you haven’t seen the transcript of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, do yourself a favor and read it.) He stood in front of the crowds to protest war, and he sailed up and down the Hudson River fighting pollution. But more than that, he had a gift for bringing people together, for turning a crowd into a community through the power of song.
He was extraordinary, but here’s what strikes me. Anybody who really wanted to could do what he did. Sure, he was a good musician, but there are lots of people with better voices—walk into any college conservatory in the country and you’ll find a singer with a rounder tone, a more operatic sound. Sure, he was good on the guitar and the banjo, but there are people in my personal acquaintance who are better. He wrote some wonderful songs, but they’re hardly models of musical sophistication. His talent was considerable, but not really anything amazing—maybe not even all that special.
What was so incredible about Pete Seeger was not any singular gift or talent. What we celebrate, what we remember, was not a man who could do things no other person could, but rather a man who spent his whole very long life walking with a whole heart toward what he believed in. Whether it was his 70-year relationship with his beloved wife Toshi or an afternoon’s connection with a crowd at a concert or a protest, Pete was fully present, fully engaged, ready to be connected. He was a man who knew the power of the people, and who used the considerable force of his personality not to draw attention to himself, but rather to engage people with each other, and with their ability to create positive change. He gave himself, and he kept giving—not as a martyr, but as someone who found great joy in the giving.
He had, in short, the power of the music. Not the power of musicianship; not the prodigy talents of a Mozart or a Yo-Yo Ma. No, Pete Seeger had the power of living in his music, living through his music. He knew the power of music to tell truths in ways that people could hear them. He knew the power of music to draw folks together through the interweaving of voices. He understood the power of music to raise energy, to call forth energy, to move people forward. He sang, and invited people to sing with him, because he understood the deep connection between music and love, and between love and justice.
And he just kept on doing it, decade after decade. We’ve lost a unique spirit this week, a man who put his whole heart into everything he did, a man who had a whole heart, unbroken by cynicism or despair. But I think what he would want us to know is that any of us could do what he did. Any of us could stand up to injustice, work for peace, speak our truth, sing out and keep singing. Any of us could be an instrument of freedom, of joy, of connection and the power of the gathered will of the people. Any of us could. Pete Seeger did.
I was taught in seminary to do ministry with sacred texts in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Our theological and ethical musings are of no consequence if they cannot be applied to what is happening outside the walls of our congregations, if they do not speak to people’s lives.
As the Affordable Care Act comes into effect this month, I’d been wanting to do an in depth exploration of how our Unitarian Universalist values support the struggle for universal health care.
And then I had a baby.
And so it was in between diaper changes, that I heard NPR coverage of the botched rollout of the ACA, of website crashes and governors of some of the poorest states refusing to expand Medicaid as originally called for.
In between feedings, I caught glimpses of newspaper editorials decrying coverage gaps and lower-than-anticipated-enrollment.
As the health care debate raged on, I set up payment plans for our own hospital bills and accepted the care of family and friends who brought food and loving hands to help. I argued with my insurance company about covering portions of my prenatal care, and I applied to enroll my daughter in Connecticut’s HUSKY (Medicaid) program.
And as the pundits went at it, one of my best friends continued her battle with cancer, and another was in a horrific accident that left him in a coma with a devastating brain injury.
Over the past few months, I have seen more early morning light than ever before. As I sit up in the pre-dawn hours feeding my newborn babe, heartsick for my friends, I wrap myself in a prayer shawl, sky blue.
As my heart holds the exquisite joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, I sink into the softness of the shawl and the love of friends and the love of God, and I pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that my spouse and I might find the strength and the will to care well for the tiny person entrusted simply by her birth into our care. And, knowing full well that we cannot protect her from harm or shelter her from hurt all the days of her life, I pray that we might have the courage to be a part of creating the kind of world we would like for her to live in. I share all of this, because I have found that the topic of health care quickly becomes deeply personal. It is crucial that we move beyond facts and figures and media sound bytes, that we reflect on how we are cared for, how we care for others and what kind of society we want to create together.
When it comes to equitable health care, I start with our connectedness, our interdependence.
King wrote these words we read this morning from his cell in a Birmingham jail, calling on white clergy to join the struggle for civil rights : “We are,” he said, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” This is a spiritual understanding of human relations that compels us to care for each other – all of us, even those we might not first see as our neighbors.
Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed writes: “The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.” Understanding ourselves as connected, each to all, we know that stranger and friend alike are our neighbors, and that love and compassion are the foundation of the vision we share with King – and with so many others – a vision of a society in which all are provided for and cared for equally.
People of faith do not need to know once-and-for-all how to fix the brokenness of our health care system. We do need to continually lift up the vision of a society grounded in love of neighbor, rooted in compassion for all, and transformed by care.
We do need to hold together the joy of new life and the devastation of illness and loss, and to celebrate the wondrous love that binds us together. We do need to pray for healing, for wholeness, for peace.
I pray that as a nation, we might have the will to care for each other well.
And I pray that each of us might have the courage to be a part of building the society we dream of.
The ACA gives us a tiny nudge us toward that goal. We have a long way yet to go.
(Today, I preached at the ordination of a new minister in my denomination, Unitarian Universalism. Her name is Rev. Lara Campbell, and I shared the pulpit with Rev. Michael Tino. Here is my half of the sermon.)
“Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message,” wrote Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained by a denomination—the Universalists, in 1863. And we know that she did not demand immediate results, she who worked for women’s right to vote from girlhood and finally was able to cast a ballot in 1920 at age 85.
I think of Olympia Brown, loving this faith despite the widespread discouragement she had to face in order to be ordained and the challenges she faced in ministry her whole life. I think of Egbert Ethelred Brown and Lewis McGee and so many other groundbreaking ministers of color who fought, against resistance and sabotage, for the right to lead Unitarian and Universalist congregations, who stood by this faith. And I think of all the people who still struggle to be able to devote their gifts to this faith, for a variety of reasons.
We do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, their lives say. Their ministries say. Their legacies say. Their legacies are very much with me tonight as I preach, for the first time, wearing a stole given to me after the death of one of my mentors, Rev. Gordon McKeeman, who died in December. Gordon, a stalwart Universalist, who devoted his life to this faith, is now here with us, lending strength and companionship, reminding me that he has entrusted me with leadership, reminding us that he entrusted his life to Universalism and ministry.
I think of these people and I think of all the bold, visionary Unitarian Universalist ministers, ordained and not ordained, right now, some of you sitting right here, who have dreams of new applications for our faith, who believe that our faith calls us to stand with those lofty ideals of equity, justice, lovingkindness, in this miraculous yet devastating world. Who imagine ministries with unusual new shapes and contexts and methods, all of which seek to bring more love into the world.
I think of ministries beginning in coffee shops—Beloved Café, envisioned by seminarians at Starr King School for the Ministry—and yoga classes—Create Meaning, out in Denver—and in the streets—Faithful Fools, which has been inventing street ministry for decades now—and AWAKE ministry in Annapolis, and the Sanctuary in Washington DC—all bold, visionary new shapes for our future. And each week, with the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we live into these new shapes as we try new ways to find each other, to care for each other, to care for our word from all across the globe.
And deep within me, I say, yes! I am so grateful that you stand by this faith! All of you! All of us! I am grateful that so many work for it and sacrifice for it! I am grateful that all of us are here today, attesting to its value, when we could be doing so many other things on a Sunday afternoon!
But then, right there with the yes, something in me whispers, but…just a little whisper that says, but.. yes, but… but I wish you, and I, didn’t have to dream our dreams alone so much of the time, wish some of our best and brightest lay and ordained ministers weren’t still fighting for support the way that Olympia Brown and others have had to fight for support. I wish each vision could be surrounded by others who supported vision and faith, that we could find ways to reach out better beyond our individual enterprises and make common cause, collaborate with one another, build something bigger than our congregations.
In this era of union-busting, I am longing for a Spiritual Union. I want spiritual collective bargaining. I love Unitarian Universalism, and I love the way that our congregations are self-determining and unique, but I believe in those old songs that I was raised on, about how “The Union makes us strong.” I take to heart those words in our hymnal from Dr. Martin Luther King, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And I say, when do we realize that we are that garment, instead of behaving as if our purpose on the planet is to pull apart the threads?
What might we do if we embodied a place of spiritual union with one another? When I say we, I don’t mean only Unitarian Universalists, I mean all of us who believe that people are worthy to be entrusted with carrying and sharing love so deep it will not let us go? What if that name that’s been assigned to us when we wear bright yellow shirts that say Love on them, The Love People, was really our identity? What if we cast fear aside, if we dared to believe that humanity, collectively, is worthy to be entrusted with the message that there is power of love so big that it can’t be held by any one set of religious metaphors and beliefs?
And who might we entrust with our faith? Who might we trust as prophetic voices in our wider faith, a faith not bound by traditional buildings or denominational stakes in the ground? How might we live into spiritual union with the people whose leadership we need in order to challenge and take down the notion of the saved and the damned, the chosen and the unchosen, the deserving and the undeserving, which dominates the US and so many other countries as much now as it did when John Calvin’s concept of predestination, that some are born saved and some are born damned, was widely believed to be true?
Where might we find union and create more love with other people, of every faith and no faith, who dare to proclaim that all people have inherent worth and dignity? Where are the voices saying, YES, African American youth and other youth of color, you are worthy to be trusted! Youth of color, queer youth, youth in general—you are worthy to be trusted! You are the people we need to have as union stewards in our spiritual union.
Where are the voices insisting, YES, people on public assistance, you are worthy to be trusted! More spiritual union stewards, whose leadership we need. Where are those whose witness proclaims, YES, immigrants without all your legal documents in order, you are worthy to be trusted! We need you as leaders in our spiritual union.
What might we do? Who might we dare to be? We have seen some of this in our work for marriage equality, immigration rights, voting rights, in our anti-racism work, as we join other religions and organizations and people to work together, but what if we had real spiritual union?
Whatever configurations our ministries with one another and the world take, whatever architecture we use for buildings, whatever technologies we employ, our own sense of Unitarian Universalism’s worthiness must be a part of the structure. But the time for clinging to small identities is over. The world is far too small now, we are too closely connected to even imagine that we do not have neighbors on every side who care about what we care about.
It’s scary. It means letting go of so many structures and identities that we have confused with worthiness—structures of privilege, or comfort. It means swimming in the ocean rather than in the small pond which our relational faith can become. But love will save us, again and again, when we are afraid, when we are confused, when we make mistakes, when we can’t get our bearings.
We are worthy to be trusted, not because Unitarian Universalists are the chosen people. Worthy, instead, because we have devoted ourselves to faith in a force–call it truth or God, life or love–a force much bigger than we are ourselves—which will not let us go, and which will not be confined or defined.
We have been entrusted with a great faith, and that faith whispers, shouts and sings, You are worthy! Worthy to wear the mantle of this great faith.
The little towns in their squares
light up, as do the scattered
lights of farmyards in the tilting,
fuzzy squares they’re locked in.
I balance a Chilian red
on a bumpy flight out to
one of those squares.
The West is red too,
after we bump to a
cruising altitude through
clouds threatening snow.
I’ve been here before,
but not in this sundown;
in these clouds;
drinking this wine;
in the lines of this poem.
Somewhere out there
I’ve been on the last
cool ride in the back
of a truck at evening,
watching a huge moon rise
and knowing this, too,
would be a last.
We knew that time would pass;
we knew we, too, would pass;
we knew that the land
would not forget us
because it never heard
our cries anyway.
We knew it, but
the terrible wrench
of knowing it
again and again—
the land proved careful
about showing us that,
or perhaps even we
might have rebelled.
Perhaps even we
might have blown out
our little lights
in the squares
and called it a night
with no tomorrow.
Land, what would you
have done without
our fierce burning?
What would we have done,
without our fierce burning?
For now, there is the red.
Then, the darkness,
but for the burning.
[More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…]
Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read on the Epiphany, a feast of light…Because of his fear, [Herod] can only pretend to see the light that the Magi have offered him” (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 1998).
Perhaps because of our fear, we can only pretend to see the light Universalism offers us. Here is our epiphany. We are loved, each and every one of us, every single atom and molecule. We are loved – not for what we do or believe, but for the divine light that shines in each of us.
We are all children of the same star dust and no distinctions we create can defile our original blessing. In a culture built on hierarchy and scarcity, it is a faithful act indeed to trust that everyone is held equitably in a compassionate heart of love. The scarcity of divine love is a dangerous myth, a tool to control and coerce.
Our work in this world, beloveds, is to proclaim the message of epiphany. We are loved, not for who we are, but because we are. We do not have to prove ourselves worthy of love any more than we should need to prove ourselves worthy of water. Just as we need water to be healthy human beings, so too do we need the knowledge that we – every single one of us, no exceptions, not even the most evil creature you can think of, every single one of us is held with compassion greater than we can imagine. It is a grace we cannot earn and we cannot lose.
Our faith has long valued acts over beliefs, and as a social justice organizer, I often celebrate this fact. But there is one belief that I pray will soak into the marrow of our bones, into our synapse and our blood. No one is left out of the mystery, no one is denied a strand of the interdependent web of all existence. We are all beloved.
May this season bring you sweetness – and the courage to live as a beloved among beloveds.
There’s an old Zen story that does like this:
Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.
This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.
Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.
On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.
Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.
After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”
The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”
Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.
On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”
The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.
King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.
King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.
What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”
MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:
collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation;
self purification;
and direct action.
We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.
Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”
King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.
This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.
King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
And,
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Once I crossed the Sierra Madres
with a bus driver named Arturo
who had one arm
and a stick-shift bus.
Sometimes between the
the shift and wheel Arturo’s
good right arm would
pause to make the sign
of the cross toward a portrait
of the Virgin that banged
the windshield from a string.
The lesson here is that
never is a miracle more than
beating the percentages.
Perhaps Arturo still is
waving down the
twisted camino
at each shrine
along the way.
“What’s your hurry?”
always he will ask—
“Do you think you
don’t have time to
find your grave?”
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