February 2001
Do You Have to Be My Valentine?
by David S. Blanchard, minister, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of
Syracuse, New York
As Valentine's Day approaches each year, I find myself somewhat challenged
in my effort to come up with a sermon that is authentic and real about the
human experience of love. Love is certainly worthy of celebration, of
rapturous affirmation, and tender nurture in our relationships. But if I
have learned anything from preaching 15 years of Valentine's Day sermons, it
is that there are always more people "bewitched, bothered, and bewildered"
by love, than there are starry-eyed lovers recently pierced by Cupid's
arrow. And people don't want to hear a sermon on an ideal that they have
struggled to sustain, that they have had and lost, or that they have,
perhaps, never really known.
Love is such a complex dimension of being human, or, put another way, of
human being. It can be known on every plane of our being: physical,
spiritual, emotional, psychological, and social. Some of what we know about
love comes to us in our genes, imprinted on us in much the same way as our
ability to feel courage, compassion, or fear is. Some of what we know about
love comes to us in the earliest clues we receive as infants, and then as
children. That probably sums it up. Like it or not, by the time we were in
second grade, we probably had learned most of what we would learn about
love. This is not to say we are not capable of learning more, or even
un-learning some of what we have learned. But those things will not happen
unless we make incredibly conscious efforts to re-shape our deepest
understandings of love.
Love is not even easy with people we like. And my sermon is about loving the
people we do not like. The ones we would rather not give a valentine to.
Take a moment now to think back. It's almost Valentine's Day. You're around
seven years old. Tomorrow you will have a little party, and open the
valentine cards that your classmates have placed in a paper sack on your
desk. You have looked over the cards you have made or bought to decide who
gets which one. Your best pals get the best cards...the funniest ones, the
coolest ones, the least sentimental. The members of the opposite sex get the
blandest, least-committal messages, the neutral "Happy Valentine's Day"
message. The teacher gets a special one, maybe bigger, maybe more detailed,
in the hopes that he or she will notice your secret devotion when the next
spelling quiz is graded and you get the "i" before "e" rule confused, again.
The person you harbor secret feelings for gets the best card you can find.
You might have added a few extra hearts, or stickers, or just written both
of your names with special effort. You try to deliver that one without
being noticed.
But there is one more valentine for you to remember. It is the one you gave
to the person you could not stand. The bully. The tease. The know-it-all.
The snob. The teacher's pet. The troublemaker. The one who was the last
person you would ever want to have as your valentine. The one you did not
want to give a valentine to. The one you would never have given a valentine
to unless you absolutely had to. It may have been the last card you had, the
ugliest one, the plainest one. But into this person's little valentine sack,
delivered as surreptitiously as the one to your secret crush, went a card
from you. When the cards were opened and counted, each child had the same
number.
The child who could not stand you gave you a card as well. Who was that kid
in your class? Maybe the name is gone from memory, but it is unlikely that
you've forgotten the feelings you had toward him or her decades ago. Like
it or not, you had to be one another's valentine and-while this was a source
of great aggravation to the second graders you were, it is a source of
great spiritual insight to the adults that those second graders grew up to
be.
Whether we are 7 or 47, the same basic principles are at play. But, for
better or worse, when we are 47, there is no one standing at the front of
the room with a pointer enforcing the "100% compliance" rule for valentine
deliveries. As a result, we lose sight of the spiritual principles that
inadvertently ennoble second-grade etiquette. This includes the neglected
blessings found in coming to love those around us who, at 7 or 47, we find
irritating, obnoxious, mean, aggravating, anxiety-producing, hostile,
difficult, stupid, disturbing, or some alarming combination of the
aforementioned attributes.
Our love for these people is generated not from a selfless and enlightened
consciousness that allows us to operate floating on a plane above the usual
human dynamics, overlooking the temporal frustrations of living in
relationship. This form of love has as its source our own recognition and
appreciation of what that "awful" other person has to teach us about
ourselves and the life we might more fully live. It is, as I've said, a form
of love that does not require us to like the other, in the same way we would
those with whom we share interests, history, humor, devotion, and values.
The people we like are easy to love. They take us as we are, treasuring us
for our gifts and overlooking our deficiencies. The difficult ones whom we
do not like are the ones who have come into our lives, by design or by
accident, to teach us something essential about how to love others, and
perhaps most essentially, how to love ourselves.
The wonderful thing about this group of people, as compared to the friends
we spend so much time and energy seeking in life, is that the difficult ones
have a way of just appearing! I've never heard of anyone having to go
looking for difficult bosses, colleagues, neighbors, parishioners, or
children. Presto, they appear! There isn't much we can do about them-we're
usually stuck with each other. Our options in relation to these folks are
usually limited to the following menu: being miserable, complain-ing,
feeling persecuted, returning hostility, plotting revenge, numbing feelings,
making nice, or some other version of running away from these people, and
all they stir up in our souls. Today I am here to propose a second-grade
solution: send them a valentine.
I can almost hear some of the thoughts buzzing around inside your heads as
you read this. I can hear them, because they have already crossed my mind.
Some of you are making a mental list of the difficult people in your life,
and are worried you won't be able to get through the A-to-F section before
tomorrow. Some of you are trying to find a loophole, the way you might have
in second grade: "I don't have any more cards, I don't know how to spell
their names, I must have dropped it on the way to school, my dog ate it. .
." etc. Only now, you rationalize that those people really don't matter, or
that you've gotten good at avoiding them, or that they could not possibly
have anything to teach you. And some are thinking this whole premise is
irrelevant, since you've long ago figured out how to keep anyone from
getting to you.
If you're one who's figured out how to keep people from getting to you,
consider whether there's an off chance that people find YOU difficult. Don't
be surprised to find a flurry of unexpected valentines showing up in your
mailbox someday soon.
I am, of course, talking about symbolic valentines, representative of a
process of spiritual growth and healing that, for most of us, is typically
initiated by encounters we would not choose, relationships we struggle in,
lessons we would just as soon avoid, and by those people in our lives who
challenge our capacity to be fully present to life's richest potential.
Maybe the difficult person in your world makes you feel guilty, or angry, or
powerless, or dumb, or unworthy, or invisible, or judged, or even physically
ill. Chances are that if you were very careful about looking at it, the
feelings summoned as a result of what may seem like an insignificant
encounter, are of profound significance to you.
Without intentional and conscious efforts to bring meaning to pain, most of
us stay trapped in unsatisfactory and conflicted patterns, which we manage
in all kinds of twisted ways (drinking, anger, fatigue, depression,
violence), not in the hope of healing, but in an attempt to mask the pain.
We opt for the comfort of familiar (even if destructive) behaviors, over the
upleasant prospect of understanding our most basic feelings about ourselves
as spiritual beings, not only fully capable of love, but innately worthy of
it as well. That's a lot to live up to, if you've always thought you didn't
deserve it, or you had to earn it.
We are here to teach each other otherwise.
I should make it clear, no one is a "difficult person" to everyone. That
would be too easy. If that were the case, all we'd have to do is banish the
difficult folks. But in reality, the person I would rather never see again
may be the first person you look for. It actually has little to do with the
"difficult person" at all. It is about what happens within us when we
encounter the "difficult person." Typically, the "difficult persons" in our
lives are blithely unaware of their impact on us. They are just going along
minding their own business, being who they are, for reasons we can never
fully grasp. At some point in our lives, early if we are lucky, we realize
this dynamic, and suspend our efforts to change the other person. Upon some
deep and honest reflection, most of us could see that when the "difficult"
people open our old wounds, it's completely inadvertent on their part. All
too often we indulge ourselves in the luxury of blaming them for our
troubles, when all they've done is remind us of an old wound-created in a
time past remembering. We are tempted to hate them for something we ought to
thank them for.
It has been my experience that all spiritual growth emerges within the
context of relationship. It may be our relationship with the Spirit of Life.
It may be in our relationship with a community of people. It may be in our
relationship with a lover or a child, but inevitably, spiritual growth-that
is growth in compassion, humility, forgiveness, and love-emerges from
relation-ships that are committed to unity, and responds in healing ways to
anything that fosters separation or permits brokenness. Here I mean unity
not as "sameness," but as mutuality. Great spiritual growth can emerge from
our closest relationships, as they have the most at stake when unity is
threatened, and they offer us the safest environment to learn what it takes
to preserve unity.
A deep spiritual challenge that most of us face is seeking that spirit of
unity with the people we find most difficult. It is often the last thing we'
d want to do. I fail at it regularly. Eventually I hope to fail less
frequently. I am learning that it is not impossible, however, to achieve
unity in relationship to those who bother us the most. There are a couple of
basic disciplines that make it a less absurd concept to imagine. The first
discipline is to be aware of judging. Our judgment is an unfair lens to use
if we want to see the whole of another person. The second discipline is to
accept the situation for what it is. Perhaps this is not a person we'll ever
like, but here we are. We need to deal with it. Third, we need to be at
least willing to see the good that exists in others. We need to challenge
ourselves to be fair and open to more than one dimension of another. And
last, the fourth discipline, is to be prepared to manifest kindness toward
these people whom we find difficult-not because of what we know about them,
but because of what we do not know.
Doing all that won't make other people any less "difficult," but that's OK,
since that wasn't the point of the exercise. The "point" is being
responsible for our own spiritual growth, and responsive to the excellent
practice afforded us by the "difficult" people who come to us, unbeckoned,
as teachers and guides. It is intensely difficult work, this spiritual
growing, and it is not without its risks. To be trusting is to be
vulnerable. Some "difficult" people are mentally ill, and some are
malicious. Some caution is required. Not everyone is equally committed to
the principle of unity, or the effort required to sustain it.
In second grade, sending valentines was mandatory between each and every
child. I don't know if it still is. I don't know how much it might have
mattered back then, since there were so many more subtle yet strong messages
to kids who didn't fit in. But maybe on that one day, they were able to
forget about feeling marginal, and were able to imagine themselves loved by
everyone around them-to feel the kindness extended to them by the others.
Maybe it made some more loving themselves. I suspect it was worth the
effort.
I don't have a pointer, but I'm here to tell you, yes, tell you, that you do
have to be each other's valentine. No exceptions. An old jealousy does not
excuse you, nor does your position on politics or some other ancient
disagreement, your seniority in your company, or your varied judgments about
each other. Those are all just smokescreens to keep you from seeing each
other in your fullness and worthiness. Every splendid, ornery, generous,
judgmental, complicated, devoted, and difficult one of you had better figure
out a way to be each other's valentine. If we can't find a way to do it for
each other as Unitarian Universalists, what hope is there? We are here to
manifest for one another the love that we need most. And it may be that some
of what we need will be delivered to us by the most difficult people we
know.
So be brave. Be patient. Be open.
Be trusting. Be true.
Be my valentine?
Quest February 2001 Contents
CLF Members-See You in Cleveland?
CLF is entitled to have 22 delegates at the General Assembly in Cleveland,
Ohio on June 21 to 25. To find out more about what will be happening at this
year's GA, check out the GA page at the UUA website at
http://www.uua.org/ga/.
If you think you'd like to participate in GA2000 by representing CLF as a
delegate, you will be able to attend the CLF annual meeting of the Board of
Directors and CLF members, meet our minister, the Rev. Jane Rzepka, meet the
CLF staff, visit-or even volunteer at-the CLF booth, and attend the CLF
worship service.
Your costs, in addition to your travel, include adult full-time registration
of $230, hotel rooms averaging about $130 a night, and meals. Call CLF at
617-742-2100, ext. 166 and speak to Lorraine or e-mail us at clf@uua.org
before March 31 to indicate your interest.
Quest February 2001 Contents
Goodbye and Welcome
It is time for us to say goodbye and thank you to Marcie Schutzman who was
the Church of the Larger Fellowship's church administrator for one year.
Marcie was responsible for organizing and streamlining many of CLF's office
procedures. She was a friendly voice on the telephone to members and friends
who called the office. Unable to face another New England winter, however,
Marcie has moved on to Florida. We miss her and wish her well.
In her place, CLF is pleased to have found Lorraine Dennis, who comes to CLF
from the YMCA of Greater Boston where she was Business Manager of the
Burbank Branch in Reading and Wakefield, Mass. At the YMCA, Lorraine managed
the design and construction of a new building, designed an eight-month PR
and marketing plan for the pre-opening membership campaign where the Y grew
from 1,600 members to 8,600 members in one year. Lorraine worked with the
YMCA of Greater Boston to establish "best practices" for all accounting and
fundraising tasks, including several upgrades to mainframe computers and
conversions to networked PCs.
Jane Rzepka, speaking as Lorraine's former minister, calls her "a pillar of
the UU church in Reading-one of those people who steps up to the plate
regardless of the need. From singing a solo on Christmas Eve to mediating
disputes, Lorraine is one of those responsible types. She's known as a
stable shoulder to cry on, a hand-holder, a support person. Lastly, she is
the funniest person in the congregation."
The role of church administrator at CLF is a critical one. The administrator
is the primary communicator between the organization and its members, its
Board of Directors, and other UU organizations. She manages the office and
the staff in the absence of the minister and is responsible for keeping
operations running smoothly. If you don't get a chance to speak with
Lorraine on the telephone, you may meet her at General Assembly this June!
Quest February 2001 Contents
The Importance of Beauty
by Sarah Lammert, minister, the Unitarian
Universalist Church of Ogden, Utah
February tends to be a gray month. Here in Utah the weather is so changeable
that February doesn't feel terribly oppressive. In many parts of the world,
however, a gray fringe of clouds seems to set in at this time of year,
burping and spewing forth wet, freezing rains that gather in gutters and
inevitably manage to soak over the tops of the tallest boots. To me,
February has always been a month to be endured until the promise of spring
could issue forth in March.
Looking out my office window at one of those gray, wet days, I can see that
there is a kind of harsh beauty in the layering of gray upon gray. Certainly
this is not the kind of beauty that sings in the blood, awakening the heart
the way the morning sun does when it comes pouring through an open window.
February is a kind of meditation on the shadow arts, where we can find
hidden splendor in bare trees, and sad, slow songs, and the mellow flavors
of smoky cheeses and a soft Merlot.
Human beings crave beauty, need beauty as much as the air we breathe. And
much like air, beauty is all around us, available to pull in through our
senses , if we would but slow down, and pay attention. Thomas Moore, author
of The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life writes: "The soul has an absolute,
unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment. It requires them
like the body needs food and the mind needs thought."
"If you get simple beauty." writes Robert Browning, "If you get simple
beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing God invents."
"When you have only two pennies left in the world," advises a Chinese
proverb, "buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with another."
I know I, for one, have become swamped with clutter in my life. My office is
dusty; my stacks of papers that need sorting at home are sky high. The
laundry seems endless and demanding, and every time I turn my head something
in my house has been spilled, spit up, slobbered upon, torn up, or bent. Yet
there are those times when I look up at the horizon and feel pulled into a
sacred reality in which I know that the world is filled with beauty. A
simple painting on a wall, a wisp of song playing down the hall, the play of
water in a river, the crunch of autumn leaves, the fragrance of bread baking
in our oven-any encounter with the simple, lovely side of life, restores me
and fills me with a sense of
well-being.
Beauty is always available, although it helps immensely to clear space in
your life so that we can behold it. Just as we stand back from a painting at
a museum that we wish to particularly study, so, too, do we need clear space
in our minds and our physical surroundings so that beauty might enter in.
If we are constantly hurried and preoccupied with items in our day planners,
we will most certainly fail to notice what is lovely to behold. If our
dining room tables have become our "flat filing cabinets" and cleaning up
the dining area means "getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of
the car" (to quote an unknown internet joke source), perhaps these are signs
that it is time to get a babysitter one Saturday, put the dog out into the
yard, and spend the day lovingly tending to our own homes-our sacred spaces.
When Andy and I lived in a 750-square-foot cottage in El Cerrito,
California, there was little room beyond the furniture and walkways to
absorb the kind of clutter and chaos that I, for one, left in my wake during
a busy week. The house was so small that we had to keep our bicycles in the
living room, and there was barely enough room to pull the drawers of our
dresser open in the tiny bedroom without dismembering our middle sections.
I loved that little cottage; it had a wonderful quality of natural light,
and I had set up a little altar on an entire precious shelf in my room. I
could lie or kneel on my bed and look up onto this lovely perch, filled with
tiny bowls, crystals, dried flowers, carvings, incense, and candles. On the
sides of the shelf I taped up lovely pictures cut from magazines, and tiny
fortunes from cookies, and each object held a distinct memory of a place, or
a special experience, or a loved one.
"The root meaning of the word art," writes Corita Kent in her book Learning
by Heart, "is to fit together." Given all the endless possibilities of the
question "what is art?" this simple definition intrigues me. In my
dictionary, art is defined as "the quality, production, expression, or realm
of what is beautiful." Emerson, who wrote several essays on beauty, blends
these definitions when he writes: "We ascribe beauty to that which is
simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end."
Each of us has the ability not only to perceive beauty, but also actually to
create it. We are not all painters, no, and we are not all poets, or
singers, or chefs. We are all artists, however, fitting our lives together,
attempting to discern what is superfluous, and finding ways to illuminate
what is good and right and lovely in our
living.
Alexandra Stoddard, author of several practical guides to beautifying our
lives, speaks of looking for the spirit of grace as it unfolds everywhere
before us: To live with grace today, despite the strains of modern life
often causing us to act against our own natures, requires steady vision. To
hold fast to the basic things, the simple enduring pleasures, is the surest
way I know to sustain that vision.
Following the rhythms of our hearts, believing in and using our own powers,
rediscovering the wonder of nature and the sensory world around us, finding
satisfaction in our labor, sustaining closeness and connection to family and
friends while also taking time for solitude to feed our inner well, and
remembering always to celebrate-all these comprise a gracious vision of
life. Although we may never perfectly realize these ideals, by keeping our
gaze fixed in this direction, we will never lose our way for long.
Sometimes we do need a temporary change of scenery in order to wake up the
artist within, and to wake up our senses to the presence of beauty.
Vacations can serve this purpose, so long as we don't make the fatal mistake
of cluttering them with even more activities than our daily sprints.
Amazingly, though, a simple shift in the daily routine can shake us back to
our (five) senses-back to a space in which we are able to have the clarity
to experience grace. A spontaneous walk in the foothills, a run home for a
nap during lunch, or a break that allows us to drink a tall, cool glass of
water might just do the trick.
I remember distinctly that one day on a vacation with my parents and
siblings during my college years, I woke up early to a cool June morning
over Lake Superior. Usually I am one of those people who likes to dangle her
toe in the water and think about it for a while before risking the shock of
cold water. On this one morning, however, I moved fluidly and with
determination to the water's edge, with no discomfort or thought of
stalling. I took only a moment to breathe in a good, deep breath of that
lake air, and plunged into the freezing boundary waters. I came up gasping,
and then calmed myself, and resubmerged. There I floated, a creature wholly
of another element, suspended in a liminal reality between lake bottom and
surface. Everything after that bold swim seemed "more" that day-the food
tastier, colors more vivid, clothes softer, people more loving.
To acknowledge the existence of beauty around us is not to deny the
existence of ugliness in our world. One thing that is lacking in much of the
literature I have been able to find on living a more beautiful life, is the
acknowledgement that we cannot build walls around us that hold beauty in and
hold the ugliness of poverty, of pollution, and of injustice, at arm's
length. Perhaps human beings are distinct among animals because we perceive
beauty, perhaps not. Most definitely we are distinct among animals for our
ability to create huge blemishes on the face of our earth, with our garbage,
our greed, our thoughtless developments, and our often-scarring industries.
If we are truly to re-invest our living with beauty and grace, we will have
to come to terms with the collective nature of our impact on the earth, and
find ways of living that are more harmonious, and more in service to others.
"The soul has an absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into
enchantment. It requires them like the body needs food and the mind needs
thought." (to quote again from Thomas Moore): "Yet our culture often takes
pride in disproving and exploding the sources of enchantment, explaining
away one mystery after another and overturning precious shrines, dissolving
the family farm that has housed spirits of civility for eons, or desecrating
for material profit a mountain or stream sacred to native residents."
We have yet to learn that we can't survive without enchantment and that the
loss of it is killing us.
"If you can get beauty"-if you can open your eyes, and attune your ears,
extend your fingers to touch, allow your taste buds to delight, and take
time to smell the roses-you will have gotten the best of all of creation.
Beauty and love walk hand in hand in the most surprising shadow plays and
moments, and to be attuned to them is to experience joy and ecstasy.
"Crossing bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have
enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration," explained
Emerson.
Robert Richardson, in his biography, Emerson, the Mind on Fire, writes that
when we can hold fast to this connection, we have access-through our own
poor power-to the world's power and beauty. Not only did this insight never
leave Emerson, it never lost "its sweet urgency, its sensuous hold on him,
its ability to lift the common moments of everyday life on the updrafts of
awareness."
The fact that Emerson, a Unitarian, lived with this kind of awareness
perhaps explains his deep impact on so many people in this country even into
the present day. As he himself put it, ".as fast [as one] sees beauty, life
acquires a very high value."
Even as I am taken with the words of poets and artists and theologians on
the subject of beauty-I am equally taken with the simple Chinese proverb
that tells us that beauty is as important as food to the one with only two
pennies-even the fading beauty of a lily.
E.B White once wrote: "A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.He [or
she] unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it." Removing the veil
that covers up the essential wholeness of things-the veil of external
trappings that keeps us from perceiving beauty-is something each of us must
do for ourselves.
Artists of all types give us tiny clues about beauty, some across large
canvasses, and some through a mysterious blending of words, images, notes,
and flavors. It is we who must give up our toe-dangling, dive in, and be
wholly transformed by beauty. What are we waiting for? Certainly the world
around us shouts for us to notice. Even on the dullest February day, the
light breaks through the grayness, stunning us with its ability to shine.
Quest February 2001 Contents
 From Your Minister
by Rev. Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, CLF
Several years ago and shortly after twilight our 3-1/2-year-old tried to gain
his parents' attention to a
shining star.
The parents were busy with time and schedules, the irritabilities of the day
and other worthy pre-occupations. "Yes, yes, we see the star.now I'm busy,
don't bother me." On hearing this the young one launched through the porch
door, fixed us with a fiery gaze and said, "You be glad at that star!"
This excerpt is from The Strangeness of This Business, the UUA Meditation
Manual for 1976 by the Rev. Dr. Clarke Dewey Wells, emeritus minister, Lake
Region UU Fellowship,
Lakeland, Florida.
To Worship
To worship is to stand in awe
under a heaven of stars,
before a flower, a leaf in sunlight,
or a grain of sand.
To worship is to be silent, receptive,
before a tree astir with the wind,
or the passing shadow of a cloud.
To worship is to work with
dedication and with skill,
it is to pause from work and
listen to a strain of music.
To worship is to sing with the
singing beauty of the earth;
it is to listen through a storm
to the still small voice within.
—Jacob Trapp, 1899-1992
Be ours a religion which, like
sunshine, goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine, the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.
—Theodore Parker, 1810-1860, Unitarian minister
As members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we're in luck! "A church
without walls," "A church home anywhere in the world," mottoes the CLF has
long embraced, have developed straight out of our liberal religious
tradition and culture. Whether CLFers are members of local congregations or
not, as Unitarian Universalists, we are eager to live our religion well
beyond four walls.
The intermingling of "religion" and "life" goes way back for us. In 17th and
18th Century America, the distinction between sacred and secular blurred,
and our forbears understood "meeting houses" as gathering places for a host
of activities. Looking back from the vantage point of 1868, one Unitarian
minister described past practice: "[A meeting house] might be open on
Sunday for religious worship, on Monday for town elections, on Tuesday for
some civic celebration, on Wednesday for a funeral, on Thursday for a
popular lecture, and regularly, several times a year, on Friday for the
preparatory lecture." The writer, the Rev. Joseph Henry Allen, bemoaned the
then new conception of "churches" in the New England countryside, where a
fancy new architectural space became especially designated as "sacred."
There, religion is "separated from the broad daily life...and is forced to
occupy a field apart, to rest on a separate foundation, and attempt a
peculiar work." As Unitarian Universalists, we don't set our sacred spaces a
side.
Our heritage calls for holistic religious experience, the interweaving of
spirituality with life in general. We hear the same kind of message from
another quarter, the Transcendentalists, who provided our movement with an
infusion of spirited romanticism: they wanted preachers to acknowledge, for
example, the falling snow at the window. Religion was not bounded by the
conventions of traditional worship services, for, in the words of Henry
David Thoreau, even though "we fancy that this din of religion, literature,
and philosophy, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates
through the universe, ...if a man sleep soundly, he will forget it all
between sunset and dawn." Thoreau and his Unitarian friends were more
inclined to find religious experience in nature. For him, February's sermon
could well be, "I am singularly refreshed in winter when I hear of service
berries, poke-weed, juniper."
Within Unitarian Universalism, the walls between "holy" and "other-wise"
refuse to stand. For parishioners in the American Midwest in the late 19th
Century, the focal point was not so much nature, but love and service. They
believed in the interplay between religion and hospitality. Homes could feel
sacred; churches home-like. So churches were designed to offer welcoming
features for the larger community-fireplaces, sofas, inviting kitchens,
areas for children, space for schooling and workshops. And homes were built
with values in mind, values to be perpetuated room by room-truth illuminated
by lamps in the parlor, fellowship by an ample dining table, warmth and love
by the hearth.
I love our Unitarian Universalist
tradition. It feels exactly right to me. When I think about members of the
Church of the Larger Fellowship out there enjoying a blizzard in spite of
its nuisance and peril; or folks in the southern hemisphere, where the heat
and dust may have been too much, awaiting the blessings of the autumn ahead;
or a UU child on her belly watching the moss, and watching it some more, I
know our congregation has the old "church
without walls" spirit.
When you tell me that a few families are meeting above the local convenience
store on Sunday mornings, with some greenery in a vase and a candle sitting
next to it, to sing songs and discuss what matters, and you tell me you sit
with your children Wednesdays after soccer doing activities they found in
uu&me!, I realize that we know how to be religious in our old-fashioned
Unitarian Universalist way-whenever, wherever.
It makes me glad that our religion, our ways of the spirit, are so much with
us. Wherever we are.
Jane Rzepka
Minister
Quest February 2001 Contents
REsources for Living
by Laura Cavicchio, interim director of religious education, Church of the
Larger Fellowship
Sharing the Sacred
"We have an altar near the kitchen and candles are lit during food
preparation to remind us to take care and be attentive." With permission, I
share this message from Lynn in Vermont, who sent it to our CLF-RE e-mail
list. In another correspondence, Peter, of Boston, states that on his home
altar he has, among other things: "a Persian Sufi illumination.a bottle of
sand from Bermuda, a sheaf of wheat, all kinds of photos and prayer cards of
helpful saints, mementos from friends of differing faiths, the Bhagavad-Gita
with Sanskrit text.a small bottle of holy water from the shrine of Lourdes.a
book of meditations from my Godfather."
It seems that for some CLFers, a home altar is a regular staple of shared or
personal religious practice. Some folks choose another name, such as
"sharing table," to describe the corner of their homes that are devoted to
the gathering of sacred treasures. Some also incorporate a weekly family
ritual. Knut, of Norway, shares his family's "table" practice, as follows:
"We have a small ceremony when carrying the chalice from its cabinet to what
we call the Unitarian table. It is just an ordinary table, but when the
chalice is carried out it becomes our "sacred" place.Last Sunday our
four-year-old son, Carl Christian, lit the flame. Since we have no Unitarian
minister among us, we decided that the one lighting the flame is the
Unitarian minister for the day.After breakfast we have a small ceremony when
the chalice is carried back to its cabinet. We need the table for other
things and our sacred place is no longer visible but inside our hearts."
As Unitarian Universalists, we
understand along with Theodore Parker that "the good heart" bears the sacred
within it. For us as religious liberals, sacred reality is continually
revealed in the here and now of our world, whether it is visible to our
eyes, or not. We understand that we are the prophets of our own religious
awe and meaning; that within our spirits we carry our own altars, rich with
the gathered treasure of our religious imaginations and experiences. As Jane
reminds us in her column about sacred space this month, in the Unitarian
Universalist tradition, we don't set our sacred spaces aside-we live
seamlessly in them.
Which raises some questions that are worthy of reflection. For instance, is
having a home altar, or sharing table practice a way of setting aside the
sacred? Does having a special sacred space of our own mean that we isolate
it from all the rest that is sacred? It is apparent that for many of us, a
tangible sense of reverence is one of the necessities of daily well being.
Many of us want to nurture a regular, reverent awareness in our family
lives, too. I think that to be intentional about these things is good. I
love the religious resourcefulness evident in the letters of some CLF
members. I am also one who subscribes to Emerson's philosophy that whether
it is conscious or not, "a person will worship something.." In the reading
by that title in our hymnal, Emerson admonishes us to "be careful what we
worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming."
I find myself turning to our premiere 20th century Unitarian Universalist
religious educator, Sophia Lyon Fahs, for some insight. Her book,
Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds, is all about the fostering of
religious faculties, such as curiosity, or "how to awaken in children
wondering awareness and reverent thinking, especially about invisible and
intangible realities."
Fahs encourages us to have some natural objects on an altar or table
"perhaps.a branch of autumn leaves, a rose or lily.an unusual stone."
because it is through encounter with the things that we can see and
touch-the visible-that we direct our attention to encounter a larger
reality-the invisible. She feels that we want to encounter things not in
order to find the spiritual lessons from them, but to
discover for ourselves "more of their own true nature." Fahs further
declares that "a reverent asking of questions of Reality.can appropriately
be called a way of praying."
Human beings have gathered around religion's table since the dawn of
questions. To bring our big questions to the table is something that we, as
discerning religious liberals, do throughout our lives. In this regard, I
think it is appropriate to consider an interpretation of the meaning of the
word "altar" that I learned in my studies of the Hebrew Scriptures. That in
the ancient Hebrew tradition, pilgrimage to the Temple mount signified a
going to the "table of decisions," where things of most sacred importance to
the community were placed. Certainly, our home tables are equally worthy.
Let us take care to be mindful, as Unitarian Universalists, of how and what
we choose to place upon our altars, however we may name them.
As Unitarian Universalists, we may simply desire, as the Rev. Sarah Lammert
suggests, a special place in our everyday lives for the contemplation of
beauty. We may find a home altar or sharing table to be a good place to be
intentionally aware of the tangible and intangible realities that most
deeply sustain our lives. A shared-table practice may help us, and our
children, to know more fully, what is "no longer visible but inside our
hearts." Our sacred place may be interchangeably the breakfast table,
sometimes the homework table, and sometimes, the table where the chalice is
lit by the Unitarian Universalist minister of the day. May we practice
religious resourcefulness and curiosity. So may it be, in our homes, in our
hearts, and everywhere.
Quest February 2001 Contents
Notes on a February Day
by Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, the Church of the Larger Fellowship
I'm going down Route 93 South. I get off at Exit 30, Route 28/38. I make
that left and there's the sign on the right-hand side: "Drive-Through
Clams."
What a great idea! Wouldn't some fresh clams just hit the spot? In only a
minute, there they would be, next to me on the seat of the car, an unusual,
off-season treat in the middle of a busy winter day in New England.
I think of summer time. Sand on bare feet. Sunshine on the top of my head.
The early strawberries, the plums, the corn on the cob, right on into the
Concord grapes as autumn approaches. And planting: starting the seeds,
installing the quick-fix flats of store-bought annuals, coaxing the
perennials, hanging a little something on the porch. Watering. Weeding. The
lilies, the phlox, the sedum. Of course there's the grilling, too, tuna
steaks, hot dogs, pineapple-how can you go wrong? Yes, those clams get me to
thinking.
The "Drive-Through Clams" sign gets closer, and as I focus my eyes, I see
that the sign says "Drive-Through CLAIMS" -insurance, I guess. The moment is
over, and I have had my dream.
Quest February 2001 Contents
Last updated June 12, 2005
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