GA 2002 CLF Worship Service
Joie!
General Assembly 2002
Quebec City
Church of the Larger Fellowship
The Rev. Jane Rzepka
I was reading a story about a train. A very long big-shot
train that goes all the way across Canada. The train stopped.
The conductor opened the door. The wind was howling on this
summer night, and the sky was pitch dark and there were no
city lights, and not only no city lights but no evidence of
a house or anything out there on the prairie, except way off
in the distance, where a little town seemed to be, way out
in Manitoba. A young woman climbed off the train with her
suitcases and started walking, walking along the road just
after midnight, toward the faint lights of the village. And
the train snorted and groaned and got out of there as soon
as it could.
The story I'm telling you about the train and the girl is
a Canadian story, a Quebequois story by Gabrielle Roy. It
is a story about traveling, traveling in Canada, just what
most of us, at least those of us who aren't lucky enough to
live right around here--just what most of us here in this
room are in the midst of doing getting to and from Quebec
City.
The girl gets off the train in the dark with her two big
suitcases and she senses the wheat fields all around her--she
feels soothed by the sounds of the wheat stalks in the wind.
The grasshoppers and crickets make a muted sound at that time
of the year, and she likes feeling so much in the midst of
life. She is aware of the fact that as the night becomes familiar
and friendly, she has never felt herself to be so much in
Canada.
The young woman is on a journey. She is alone, as we all
are, really. As the story unfolds, our heroine is searching
for the true Canada--for her this will be a spiritual grounding--and
in the course of this quest, which she understands will take
more than her lifetime, in the course of this quest she asks
a lot of questions.
The girl comes out of the night into a tavern full of strangers,
or rather, she is the stranger. She wants to learn who these
people are, what these Canadians are like, what the truth
about them is, but when she asks them questions about where
they are from and who they are, the questions don't go over
very well. They think she is nosy and her questions put them
on their guard. Later she says to herself, "I didn't
know yet that announcing the search for truth puts everybody
on the defensive. There was something like tangible fear around
me."
Unitarian Universalists, too, in the midst of our journeys,
sometimes learn the lesson that announcing the search for
truth isn't often met with enthusiasm. You wonder aloud about
the symbolism of communion wine and your queasiness about
it, or whether the Hannukah story is based literally on history
or not, or whether we'll be seeing Aunt Michelle in heaven
or not, and the people you are talking with turn out not to
be what you may call "the search for truth." They
call it blasphemy. When we question the truth, whether it's
religious truth, the truth about the way we live our values,
the truth about who we think we are, indeed we will feel something
like tangible fear around us.
Suddenly, we are the stranger. We are the foreigner. The
party-crasher. We can no longer say what we mean. We speak
the wrong language. The young woman gets off the train. She
is a strange passer-by. When she walks through the tavern
door the conversation, in full-swing up to then, stops. She
is alone amidst the people in the tavern, alone in a town
where the train has long since left the station, along in
a very large northern country where daylight is seasonal and
brief. Feeling alone like that can feel a little bleak.
Here in Canada, from what I understand, the people understand
bleak. I have been gallivanting in the land of Canadian literature
--random books of poetry, short stories, essays, and a novel
or two--some old, some new--I chose whatever was on the shelf
at the local library back in Massachusetts.
The reading has been grim. One story ends as the nameless
protagonist, awaiting death by his own hand, writes a last
agonized letter to the lover who left him. The next was about
a very old woman who dies eating a red carnation petal by
petal, she eats it like an artichoke. And there's the novel
The Ash Garden, by Dennis Bock, that turns out to be about
Hiroshima, really, and only incidentally about dying of lupus.
And finally, a book in which the hero, Francois, describes
his life: "I am leaning out as far as possible. I want
to see down into the gulf, as far down as I can. I want to
lose myself." That pretty much sums up my reading in
preparation for a sermon that months ago, in my ignorance,
I entitled "Joie." Joy.
But here's what happens. As individuals, as communities, as
provinces, we find our voice. It used to be, here in Quebec,
that writers imitated the grand literature of France, and
reflected the ethos of the Roman Catholic Church and the conservative
establishment. Right up to the '60's. But since then, we've
heard a voice from Quebec that is no longer colonial, nor
French-Canadian, but distinctively Quebecois-a recent article
in the Times Literary Supplement ["Out of Quebec,"
March 8, 2002], says, "it is only in the last generation
that Quebec fiction has grown out of short trousers."
It is now "a North American literature which happens
to be written in French." In the last half century, the
people of Quebec have found their voice.
And this is what I think: when voices are found, and when
those voices are shared, the desolate, windy, lonely places
begin to recede in our internal landscapes. I don't mean to
overstate the case. I only want to say that being able to
articulate "the way it is" builds a community of
sorts, a community that is available even to those living
alone among strangers. The words resonate, they mitigate,
and they empower the spirit. The people of Quebec understand
that, and so do Unitarian Universalists. A case in point.
The scene is not Quebec at all, but the Khasi Hills of northeast
India, a corner of the country populated in large part, by,
as they would say, large numbers of illiterate Unitarian farmers.
I had been invited with my colleague, Ken Sawyer, to lead
a workshop about preaching for Unitarian leaders there.
So I am sitting there on a bench in a Khasi church listening
to my eighth hour of preaching in the Khasi tribal language.
The electricity has gone off again, it is dusk, approaching
full darkness, and even when the power is on there isn't any
heat. It's in the 40's inside the church, and we are wrapped
tightly in our Khasi shawls. A young man--OK a boy--stands
in the pulpit and preaches with evident enthusiasm-I hear
the Khasi words for "God" and "duty" and
"Unitarianism" go by-pretty much my whole Khasi
vocabulary-and then I swear I hear the words "evolution"
and "Darwin." The boy finishes his sermon and takes
his seat. An impassioned older woman with a wide smile free
of teeth stands and explains to the rest of us who had not
heard of Darwin or evolution, that Darwin believed we have
come from monkeys. An elder rises to his full height and declares
in the loudest possible voice that we have not come from monkeys,
and the discussion is ended.
We quickly moved to a conversation about whether and how betel
nut, the red-juiced, mildly hallucinogenic leaf that you hold
in your cheek and turns your teeth black, may be chewed while
preaching--without the preacher choking to death-preaching
tips that I, for one, had never heard before.
The room grew darker and colder, but the spirit grew livelier,
prouder, fuller, deeper, as the voices of the Khasi's developed
their own standards for successful preaching, articulated
their own distinct version of Unitarian theology, struggled
with indigenous issues, did their best to listen to their
young people and women in spite of their cultural inclination
not to, and raised their voices in song. For the first time
they had chosen to talk about what it means to preach as isolated
Unitarians--what it means to preach a common Unitarian theology
from within a sub-culture that that prefers the trinity, animal
sacrifice or an up-dated indigenous religion. This is the
part of the Khasi journey where the Khasi's preach, the visitors
listen, the night becomes less lonely, and the future less
bleak.
The Canadian young woman who got off the train was from
Quebec, or at least her family was. What she learned in the
tavern was that in the old days of Canadian history, Quebec
sent out living waves of settlers who lived in distant hamlets
and isolated homes. Here in this tavern in this remote town,
she discovers a cousin who shares her manner of speech, who
has hung the same kinds of pictures on his wall just above
the sewing machine, who sings the same songs. And she says,
"I rediscovered the mysterious flame of fellowship which
had shone for me in the prairie and had made me in part what
I was."
When people are isolated on their religious journeys, they
sometimes find the mysterious flame of fellowship. For Unitarian
Universalists, that flame of fellowship can be the Church
of the Larger Fellowship. Whether we are in the prairie land
of Manitoba, the the remote hills of India, alone in the suburbs
of Boston or Boise or Bogota, or anyplace on the planet where
one might welcome company on the journey, it is good to know
that companions are here for the asking.
And then, in the words of our reading, we might grow closer
to "a world where each heart would be linked to every
other; where sympathy would circulate like the air and radiate
like sunshine; where all that dwells in the heart would rise
to the lips, freed from the artificial barriers of etiquette;
where one might freely go up to the passerby who seemed to
be in pain; the red-eyed woman; the gaunt-cheeked old man,
and say, 'Are you suggesting?' Where one could share in other
people's joy, crying out to the laughing couple, even though
their names were unknown, 'Hey there! Here's to the lover!'
Or to the beautiful stranger that one chances to pass, 'You're
gorgeous! I admire you!' … And all this would well up
and burst forth …, and it would become a part of etiquette
and tact, and would be dignified, appropriate, and prescribed."
[Louis Dantin]
In that, my friends, we have our joie, our joy.
So may it be. Amen.
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Last updated June 12, 2005
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