by Roberta Finkelstein, minister, Unitarian Universalists of Sterling, Virginia
As the Passover story is told, the ancient Hebrews have fallen on some truly hard times. Enslaved in Egypt, they have lost their autonomy, but not their identity. When a charismatic leader rises up and urges them to trust in their God and seize their freedom, they rejoice. But not for long. Freedom sounds good to them, but the steps required to win it are daunting. Alla Renée Bozarth has created a Passover reading that captures some of these arduous expectations:
Pack nothing. Bring only your determination to serve and your willingness to be free. Don’t wait for the bread to rise. Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing, be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Often, our invitations to freedom look just like that—scary and full of loss and doubt. How often have we faced a choice between the safe and predictable and the unknowable? And sometimes we don’t even feel like we have a choice. Life broadsides us with a loss—death, divorce, loss of job—and we have to move on. We can’t take it all with us. We have to assume that we have what it takes to move through a difficult and uncharted time in our lives.
The ancient Israelites decided to follow Moses. They had watched his negotiations with the pharaoh—the promises made and reneged on, the progressive waves of plagues—and the determination of their leader not to be deterred from his mission. Finally, in the dark of night, with nothing but what they could carry on their backs, they fled their Egyptian captors and walked off into the wilderness that lay between them and the Promised Land.
Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind—fear, silence, submission. Only surrender to the need of the time—to love justice and walk humbly with your God…. Begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into old slavery. Set out in the dark. I will send fire to warm and encourage you. I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud.
Bozarth reminds us that in order to be truly free, we must first unlearn the adaptations we have made to slavery. Fear, silence, submission—they are the very characteristics that keep us alive in dangerous situations. And yet, when the time comes, we have to give them up. This is often the most difficult piece in the recovery process for people who have been abused as children—recognizing that the defenses that served them so well and allowed them to survive unbearable situations are no longer serving them. It takes a real leap of faith to leave those old ways behind as we walk in the wilderness, whether that wilderness be the personal challenge of recovering from a loss, or the communal challenges of creating a new and healthier community.
I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen.... I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way and to learn my ways more deeply.
The image in this piece of the reading reminds us of two important lessons from the Exodus story. One is that we cannot know the destination when we begin the journey. Our dreams in the desert are dreams of a place we have not yet seen—and yet that place is home. We often talk in terms of life being a journey. And when we think carefully about it, we have to acknowledge that none of us knows the destination for our particular path. We can choose goals, but they are only signposts along the way. The ultimate home to which we are headed? “God only knows,” we might say. What makes this truth bearable is the fact that as humans we are capable of dreaming dreams, of casting a bold vision, of using our imaginations to travel past the painful parts and into the new place. The only way to walk in the wilderness is to keep the dreams and the vision firmly in mind.
Though we may ask, “Why me?” or “Why now?” we redeem our wilderness experiences by learning new ways to travel, or new ways to see ourselves on the journey. Now, I’m not arguing for some soppy theology that urges us to be grateful for misfortune for any of the silly reasons that are often given in the name of comfort: God never gives you more than you can handle, when one door closes another one opens, the Lord works in mysterious ways…. Bad things happen to people. But the way we walk through bad times does contribute to the content of our character. Furthermore, the way we remember the hard times also contributes. Over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures, the children of Israel are exhorted to remember that they were slaves in Egypt—that memory bestows an ethical obligation to forever take the side of the oppressed, to forever be grateful for freedom, to forever be at the ready to assist another people on their wilderness passage.
Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings that even your closest friends will have to learn your features as though for the first time. Some of you will not change at all. Some will be abandoned by your dearest loved ones and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth and feel abandoned by you. Some will find new friendship in unlikely faces, and old friends as faithful as the pillar of God’s flame.
The possibility of change is one of the benefits of the intentionally lived wilderness experience. But there is the possibility that you will not change at all. If we go back to the original Exodus story, we learn what happens when people cannot or will not change. Almost immediately after fleeing Egypt, the whining and complaining starts: “What, you brought us out of Egypt just to die in this stinking desert?” Faced with the arduous task of providing for themselves, many of the Israelites long for the security of slavery—it was not much food, but it was given to us. It was poor shelter, but it was provided. We didn’t have to make any decisions, all were made for us. When you don’t have to make decisions, you don’t have to risk making mistakes. And, best of all, you never have to take responsi-bility for the quality of your own life! You always have somebody else to blame.
Some of those Israelites, products of generations of servitude, were not able to make the transition. You know why they had to wander in that desert for 40 years? 40 years is the span of a generation. They had to wait until the cohort of people who had lived their lives enslaved had died off before they could enter the Promised Land. They had to wait for the children to grow to adulthood. A new land required new people who were capable of finding new friendships in unlikely faces, who could bear the burden of being misunderstood and figuring things out for themselves in a strange land among strange people. They weren’t lost for 40 years, they were on the communal journey from slavery to freedom—a journey that had to take place as much in the minds and hearts of the people as it did in their foot-steps through the desert.
Sing songs as you go, and hold close together. You may at times grow confused and lose your way. Touch each other and keep telling the stories. Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from before you were born.
In those words we find the key to creating a religious identity—to being together as a people. Sing songs—celebrate, even the little things. Don’t always focus on the bad and the difficult. Direct your energy sometimes toward the dream, the vision, the idea. Hold close together.
It won’t work every minute of every day—that is OK. In fact, it is to be expected. None of us can get it right all the time, and sometimes all of us veer off course at the same time! That is why it is so important to keep telling the stories. The stories are the spiritual maps that keep us on the path. Continuous corrections are required in all human endeavors. The airline pilots among us can probably explain this more coherently, but is it not true that a jet is off course 90% of the time? And that the pilot’s job is to make those small, minute by minute corrections, that keep the plane approximately on course?
That is who we are—wanderers in the desert, constantly drifting off course, constantly calling ourselves and each other back, reminding ourselves of who we are and what we represent and what we believe in.
So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas. It is the first of many beginnings—your Paschal tide.
With these words, Bozarth acknowledges the truly universal nature of the Exodus story. Waves of deliverance, many beginnings. In every generation, in every country and religious faith, groups set out into uncharted territories. And eventually, wonder of wonders, they arrive at some promised land. Maybe not exactly the place they expected when they set out, but a destination just the same.
Some of you, right now, are in a wilderness stage in your lives. Others are just emerging, sinking your feet into the sweet sand of the Promised Land. Still others are on the other side, in a safe and secure place from which you cannot imagine departing. For some it helps, when you are in the middle of your wilderness experience, to have faith in something, to believe that some force, or some being or intention, is rooting for you to arrive. For the ancient Israelites, this was their God, Yahweh, who traveled with them in the cloud and the pillar of smoke. He was, they felt, quite literally present with them on their journey. For many of us, the idea of a God on a hike with us in a pillar of smoke is a most unlikely eventuality. But others of us hold in our hearts a belief in something other than ourselves that brings intention to our lives. It may be indescribable, or it may change as our ideas and experiences change and grow. But it remains constant in presence.
Alla Bozarth speaks for this steady presence as she concludes her reading with these words.
Remain true to this mystery. Pass on the whole story. Do not go back. I am with you now and I am waiting for you.
The Passover story is a gift to all of us—a gift of memory, a celebration of hope, an affirmation of freedom. All you need do to receive the gift is to put one foot in front of the other.
by Kathy Huff, parish minister, First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California
It was, in the eyes of a child, an idyllic place to grow up—Polynesia, where the molten lava of ancient undersea volcanoes flowed eons ago to create islands of life where previously there were none. I spent hours of my childhood walking on stone lava fields, swimming in pools of water shaped by lava rock formations, exploring the jungle-covered mountains of now-dormant volcanoes. At night I used to dream of what it must have been like when the first one erupted as a fiery furnace rising out of the ocean floor.
As a child living on Savaii, one of the two small islands that make up the small independent nation of Western Samoa, I was aware that the rising mountains before me were once birthed out of the alchemy of fire, water and earth. And that on this island, all life literally depended on the results of this natural phenomenon. Volcanoes had given birth to these islands, that in turn, over time, developed into a profoundly diverse and life-sustaining place for plants and people and other animals.
Volcanoes are awesome and unforgettable. They are beautiful and really scary, and there’s nothing like watching a churning pit of molten lava to make your blood run cold. What is really impressive about volcanoes is that they are so powerful.
Maybe we need a little volcanic action in Unitarian Universalism. Maybe we even need some “volcano theology” to inspire us along the way.
A volcano rises up out of the earth with a fire and a power to reshape and transform an entire landscape. How might Unitarian Universalism rise up to reshape the world’s landscape? How might we ignite a fire of faithful witness and action to change and transform our immediate future?
A volcano sets in motion the possibility for a whole new chain of sustainable life. How might our particular alchemy of faith and action release a new way of being in the world? How might our collective energy create real and sustainable change in the world?
A live volcano is dangerous. I think I like this aspect the best. Wouldn’t we just love it if Unitarian Universalism were seen as the most serious threat to the power currently held by the radical right?
A volcano can destroy anything that gets in its way. There is something to be gained from getting rid of those things within our own movement that get in the way of us reaching our full potential. For example, infighting or unwillingness to consider new ways of doing things can prevent us from putting our collective energy into getting something accomplished or taking a moral stand.
A volcano is constantly in motion. When a volcano erupts, there is no telling where it will go. It’s an unfolding mystery. But when the lava arrives at its destination there is no mistaking its power. We UUs learned a long time ago that ours is a religion that does not depend on having all the answers before it can move in the world. However, while our openness to new answers usually does not stop us from doing what we need to do now, sometimes we really do need to know who we are and where we are going. Which is why knowing our own story is so important.
Once we find our stories, it is not enough to keep them to ourselves. Because the story of our faith is a story as powerful as any volcano. Ours is a story about nothing less than the transformation of the self and the world. Contrary to what others may say about us, ours is not a faint-hearted, believe-anything-you-want religion. Ours is a religion that takes conscience and compassion seriously. Ours is a religion that stands on the side of the oppressed. Ours is a religion of faith in action, a religion of head and heart and hands.
The world needs this religion of ours, and it needs our unique moral vision. We are facing an unprecedented crisis. The long-term sustainability of the planet is in serious jeopardy and human suffering is increasing at an alarming rate.
If we are to make a difference we are going to have to find a way to help reframe the current political discourse and reclaim our moral authority as religious liberals.
I know this is a hard one for us; we are often uncomfortable with the whole notion of “moral authority.” But we have got to get over ourselves and start realizing that it is okay for liberals to express their own moral outrage.
It is morally outrageous that in the richest nation on the planet, one in five children lives in poverty. It is morally outrageous that the market economy requires that the majority of its current workforce be kept in low wage, no benefit jobs. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Our religion connects us with a higher purpose and an ethic of care and compassion that goes beyond politics, but it is politics that is shaping our daily lives. And it is a politics being shaped by a particular religious perspective.
Our religious imperative is to demonstrate that there is an alternative worldview. We need to look carefully at our moral vision, and find new and more compelling ways to articulate and act on the moral story of our faith.
In some ancient religions, when a volcano erupts it is a sign from God. It can be a sign that God is angry at the world or that God is preparing the world for something new. Nowadays, I prefer to imagine that it’s a little of both. And like the people of long ago, perhaps we need to make an offering to bring things back into balance. Our religion is that offering, and our vision is that sustaining hope that will, if we let it, turn the world around.
by Carl Scovel, minister emeritus, King’s Chapel, Boston Massachusetts.
There they sit in the old photograph. My grandfather Carl in suit, vest, and high-button shoes in an armchair, reading a book. My grandmother Louise, prim and upright in a long silk dress, also reading a book. Between them on a table sits Aunt Martha. No, not a relative, but a clock, one of hundreds produced after the Civil War by the Union Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Connecticut, and bought in 1870, I’d guess, by my great-grandfather, Dwight Scovel, a Presbyterian minister in upstate New York.
Aunt Martha is twenty-six inches high, fifteen inches wide, and five inches deep. She has a tall glass door; the top half shows the clock face, and the lower half shows a man under a tree with a guitar at his feet and a church in the background. It is labeled “View in Italy.”
Great-grandfather Dwight took the clock from one small town manse to another in upstate New York until he built a house and settled in Clinton, beside Oriskany Creek. When he died at the age of eighty-five, his son Carl (the only minister among the children) adopted it and dubbed it “Aunt Martha.”
In 1912 Grandfather Carl took it with him to Cortland, New York, where he served the First Presby-terian Church until his death in 1932. Only a few months after Carl died, his widow, my Grandmother Louise, took it with her to China in 1933 when she came to live with her physician son, Fred, who was my father, and the rest of us in Jining, China. (No, you never heard of this city, and you probably never will again.) Aunt Martha stood in my grandmother’s small living room in the small house where she lived near us until she left in the summer of 1941, having heard that war might break out between the United States and Japan.
Dad took the clock at that point, and after December 7, 1941, knowing the Japanese might take our possessions, he hid Aunt Martha in a corner of the attic. We left the house first for an internment camp and later for the United States, but we returned to China after the war. Dad went back to the old house and found Aunt Martha just where he’d left her. He took her to our new digs in the city of Hwaiyuan.
From there Aunt Martha went to Canton in 1948 (I have a photo-graph of her in the dining room there) and then back to the States (Bath, New York) for two years starting in 1951. In 1953 my folks went to India to run a hospital for six years. On leaving the foreign mission field in 1959, they moved to a modest house overlooking the Hudson River in Stony Point, New York. There Aunt Martha had her longest stay, from 1959 to 1987, almost thirty years.
My father died in 1986, and no one was left to wind Aunt Martha in the evening. Our mother had Alzheimer’s and eventually went to a nursing home. In that year, 1987, Aunt Martha came to the King’s Chapel parsonage on Beacon Street in Boston, where she rested in an alcove halfway up the first floor stairs.
She’s come a long way.
My father called her one of his Lares and Penates, and it took me a while to understand that she was one of the movable “gods” of our house-hold. She went with us from place to place, like the Ark of the Cove-nant with the ancient Hebrews, and she gave us a sense of connection with America as we moved around China and India. If you’ve spent a lifetime moving, or even if you’ve made but one painful move, you know what I mean.
You may yourself have some Lares and Penates—a vase, an old photo-graph, treasured books, a set of candlesticks—the locus of divinity. They are your small gods and, like all gods, will crumble or get lost, but while they are yours, they give you the sense of perma-nence that comes in the long run from the One who does not change or crumble, the Eternal, who is ever there, wherever we are.
“Household Gods” originally appeared in Never Far from Home: Stories from the Radio Pulpit, available in the CLF library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150) and at the UUA Bookstore (www.uua.org/bookstore or 800-215-9076).
The day I moved from the beach I took a last walk along the spray-soaked pier. The dawn came softly to Captain’s Hill, and the birds overlooked my tears. I felt other losses, which ones I cannot say; just memories, blunted now, no longer drawing blood, but wrapped like philo dough around the place I call my soul. I need these times, though I’d just as soon avoid them. I need them to teach me things about myself I’d rather never know. These are the growing times, when I push myself to loosen the knots that tie me to old agonies and bad habits, to strengthen worn loyalties, and to find new paths to walk. I took one last walk along the wooden pier. The tide was coming in. I’ll not forget the way it looked that day.
The day I moved from the beach I took a last walk along the spray-soaked pier.
The dawn came softly to Captain’s Hill, and the birds overlooked my tears.
I felt other losses, which ones I cannot say; just memories, blunted now, no longer drawing blood, but wrapped like philo dough around the place I call my soul.
I need these times, though I’d just as soon avoid them. I need them to teach me things about myself I’d rather never know. These are the growing times, when I push myself to loosen the knots that tie me to old agonies and bad habits, to strengthen worn loyalties, and to find new paths to walk.
I took one last walk along the wooden pier. The tide was coming in. I’ll not forget the way it looked that day.
by Elizabeth Tarbox, from Evening Tide, a 1998 UUA meditation manual, available from the CLF Library (www.clfuu.org/library or 617-948-6150).
Bound as we are in common life, we gather in prayer and in meditation. Some of us are praying to God, others to a spirit of life, some praying to the best that is in ourselves and in the world. Together we cry out our dreams and our brokenness. We pray this day for all who are oppressed. For those trapped by poverty; For all whose bodies and minds and spirits are enslaved by addiction, by mental illness; For all held captive by false doctrines, serving cruel gods; For those whose circumstances have blinded them to larger possibilities for the human race and for themselves; For those who have been crushed by disappointment and loss and forgotten the ache of freedom and hope; For captive and for captor; For oppressed and the one who oppresses; For us and for them; For a world bound together in hope and hopelessness; For today’s beauty and tomorrow’s promise; And for today’s pain and tomorrow’s evil We pray for liberation and a rebirth of hope. We pray for freedom, this day. We pray for the love that sees its own errors. And for a world that is filled with hope, banished of cruelty and alive to the promise and the grandeur of each day. We pray for peace.
Bound as we are in common life, we gather in prayer and in meditation.
Some of us are praying to God, others to a spirit of life, some praying to the best that is in ourselves and in the world. Together we cry out our dreams and our brokenness.
We pray this day for all who are oppressed.
For those trapped by poverty;
For all whose bodies and minds and spirits are enslaved by addiction, by mental illness;
For all held captive by false doctrines, serving cruel gods;
For those whose circumstances have blinded them to larger possibilities for the human race and for themselves;
For those who have been crushed by disappointment and loss and forgotten the ache of freedom and hope;
For captive and for captor;
For oppressed and the one who oppresses;
For us and for them;
For a world bound together in hope and hopelessness;
For today’s beauty and tomorrow’s promise;
And for today’s pain and tomorrow’s evil
We pray for liberation and a rebirth of hope.
We pray for freedom, this day.
We pray for the love that sees its own errors.
And for a world that is filled with hope, banished of cruelty and alive to the promise and the grandeur of each day.
We pray for peace.
by Vanessa R. Southern, minister, The Unitarian Church in Summit, New Jersey
Our initial online covenant groups—small groups carefully structured to build community and a place for spiritual exploration—have been a rousing success. Although we added extra facilitators to meet the demand, we already have a waiting list for folks who would like to join. We expect however, that there will be additional spots available when we add new members to existing or new groups this month. If you are interested in joining a covenant group, or just want more information about how they work, please contact Lynn Ungar, our minister for lifelong learning, at lungar@clfuu.org.
The Unitarian Universalist Principles and Sources are only words on paper if we do not embody them within our faith and our everyday lives. Led by our ministerial Intern, Linda Berez, this seven-week on-line course will ask you to explore how you participate in the embodiment of Unitarian Universalism in your personal religious life. Contact Linda at lberez@clfuu.org or call the office to register.
The Unitarian Universalist Association’s annual General Assembly (GA) will take place this year in Fort Worth, Texas from June 23-27. As always, there will be thousands of UUs gathered in this one place to worship, work, and play together and to govern our association of congregations. GA is a unique opportunity for Church of the Larger Fellowship. It is the time for our annual meeting and our one face-to-face worship service of the year, a service that is well known for the quality of its preaching and its rousing music. We also have a booth in the exhibition hall where we meet and talk with people about our church and sell classic chalice jewelry as a fundraiser.
The CLF is allotted 22 delegates. Members should contact CLF Executive Director, Lorraine Dennis, if they would like to volunteer to serve in this capacity. Delegates are responsible for all their GA expenses and are asked to attend plenary sessions, the CLF worship, and the annual meeting; to write a short report to the CLF board; and work three hours in the CLF booth.
Most General Assembly events will be held in the Fort Worth Convention Center, located right in the heart of the city’s Central Business District. The Convention Center offers visitors a chance to take a contemplative walk among the serene surroundings of the adjacent Water Gardens.
Fort Worth is known for its hospitable and cooperative spirit: the city is filled with a unique mix of attractions for visitors—from cowboys to culture, from sports to shopping. Known as “the museum capital of the Southwest,” Fort Worth boasts a truly incredible array of museums—from the artistic to the historic, from the ancient to the modern. Go to the GA website at www.uua.org/ga/ for more information.
by Jane Rzepka, senior minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship
I am traveling with eight feet of neoprene tubing, a blue plastic funnel, duct tape, a small trumpet mouthpiece, and, as logically follows, my husband, Chuck. Everyone has a list of travel essentials; if you’re a horn player and you want to stay in shape, you can’t leave home without your hosaphone.
Even though I hear a lot of dimly recognizable hosaphone renditions of Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary, “Reveille,” and “Joy to the World” when far from home, I’m not complaining—it’s not much of a load. The men of the Great Northern Exploration Expedition of 1860, the first outsiders to peek into Australia’s interior, took a Chinese gong along, as well as a stationery cabinet, a heavy wooden table with matching stools, and fifteen hundred pounds of sugar. And even that is nothing compared to the packing list of one of Jaipur, India’s, maharajahs who, when traveling to England, filled two of the largest silver vessels on earth with water, and loaded them aboard. Why would he pack two containers of water the size of tool sheds? He didn’t trust the quality of English water, so he brought his water from India, just to be safe.
Traveling separates us from most of our stuff. Freed of our laundry baskets and mysterious sets of extra keys; without the hammer, the dictionary, the floor lamp, the turkey baster; without so much as a tub to take a bath in, we have every reason to feel unencumbered, fleet of foot, and ready to go.
But no. Faced with the possibility of freedom, most humans find themselves wrangling the night before liftoff with urgent needs for the hosaphone, a Chinese gong, and our own vats of drinking water. We become hyper-materialists.
It’s hard to let go—that’s all I’m saying. We want to bring ourselves along on the trip, and how would we recognize ourselves without our stuff? Certainly that’s the question travelers face, and it’s not a bad question for life.
It comes up in various ways, this question of “stuff.” Remember scenarios like this?
The Rev. Peter Morales, in Jefferson, Colorado, writes in his sermon “One Small Carry-On:”
You have two minutes. You get to take the equivalent of one small carry-on. What few things do you grab as you run for your life? When our lives are in danger and we risk losing everything, we cling first to those we love. Then we seize those things, like old family photos, that remind us of who we are and where we came from—things that connect us to special people. In the Hebrew Scriptures, a defining moment for the children of Israel came immediately after the Passover. Pharaoh tells the Hebrew people they can leave Egypt. In the story, the Israelites don’t even wait for the bread to rise; they...leave at once. This is their chance at freedom, their opportunity to create a new future. They don’t hesitate. They grab what they can and head out…. In order to move on in our lives, in order to seize the promise that the future holds, we have to learn to leave unnecessary baggage behind. And unless you and I are willing to let go, to leave unessential things behind, we become prisoners of our past, shackled to our comforts, slaves to our possessions, in bondage to our habits. You and I can never reach our promised land, we never attain the promise that lies within us, unless we are willing to leave behind the fleshpots of bondage and risk the unknown. You and I get one small carry-on. We can only take what we can carry with us. What shall we take into our future? What shall we leave behind?
You have two minutes. You get to take the equivalent of one small carry-on. What few things do you grab as you run for your life?
When our lives are in danger and we risk losing everything, we cling first to those we love. Then we seize those things, like old family photos, that remind us of who we are and where we came from—things that connect us to special people.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, a defining moment for the children of Israel came immediately after the Passover. Pharaoh tells the Hebrew people they can leave Egypt. In the story, the Israelites don’t even wait for the bread to rise; they...leave at once. This is their chance at freedom, their opportunity to create a new future. They don’t hesitate. They grab what they can and head out….
In order to move on in our lives, in order to seize the promise that the future holds, we have to learn to leave unnecessary baggage behind. And unless you and I are willing to let go, to leave unessential things behind, we become prisoners of our past, shackled to our comforts, slaves to our possessions, in bondage to our habits. You and I can never reach our promised land, we never attain the promise that lies within us, unless we are willing to leave behind the fleshpots of bondage and risk the unknown.
You and I get one small carry-on. We can only take what we can carry with us. What shall we take into our future? What shall we leave behind?
Whether we consider the question literally or metaphorically, clarity about our identity, our values, and our spiritual good health allows us to move toward freedom. Is it time to abandon the family farm in order to break free and study ballet? Can we leave our identity as a victim behind, having healed enough to feel whole and strong for the future? Does freedom for you mean committing to the job you love, finally leaving the volunteer work? Or committing to the volunteer work, finally leaving the job? Maybe we start small: we’re simply getting the extraneous stuff out of the basement, out of the email folders, or out of the trunk of the car, keeping only the one or two treasures.
For those in the Passover story, the focus was freedom. They could only take what nourished them as they rushed to their future. The freedom we move toward is a different, more luxurious freedom, and, much of the time, we can take what we want to take. May we choose what nourishes us.
by Lynn Ungar, minister for lifespan religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship
(This column is designed for older children to read themselves and/or for families to read and talk about together.)
Does your family like to tell stories? In my family, we hear the story about how my grandfather tricked the border guards when he escaped from Hungary to come to America, and the story about the Thanksgiving that the dog ate the pumpkin pie. Most families have stories that get told over and over again that tell about who they are and how they see themselves in the world. Sometimes these stories get stretched and changed over the years, so that the story gets more exciting, or says more about the people involved.
The Passover story is sort of like one of those family stories for the Jewish people—except that it has had thousands of years to get stretched and changed. Like many religious stories, the Passover story is probably a mixture of both history and fiction, and is told as a way of teaching about what it means to be part of that religious family.
The story goes that the Hebrew (Jewish) people were originally guests in the land of Egypt, but then they were enslaved, and made to do hard labor like hauling rocks, for no pay at all. Pharaoh Ramses IV, the Egyptian ruler, declared that Hebrew boy babies should be killed at birth for fear that the Hebrew people would become too strong and rebel. So when Joheved and Amram had their third child, they made a basket that would float and put the baby in it, hoping he would float to safety. In fact, he was found by the daughter of the pharaoh, who named him Moses and raised him in the palace. Without knowing who she was, Pharaoh’s daughter brought in Joheved, Moses’ mother, to be his nurse.
Moses grew up knowing that he was a Jew, but part of the royal family. One day, when he saw an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Jewish slave, he became so angry that he knocked the man down and accidentally killed him. Moses ran away to the mountains, where he lived with a family that herded sheep. But one day, the story goes, when he was out herding sheep, God spoke to Moses from a bush that burned and burned, but did not burn up. God told Moses to go to Pharaoh and tell him “Let my people go.”
Moses was scared to confront the powerful and cruel Pharaoh, but, in the end, he not only went to Pharaoh, but kept going back after Pharaoh kept saying “no.” Moses asked God for help in changing Pharaoh’s mind, and so, the story says, God kept sending plagues upon the Egyptians, like cattle disease and darkness, gross oozing sores and bugs that ate up all the crops—a new plague each time Pharaoh said no. Pharaoh kept on refusing to let the Hebrew slaves go. Finally, when he still wouldn’t give in, God planned the worst plague of all—killing all firstborn Egyptian children. The Hebrews were told to mark the doorways of their houses with blood from a lamb, so that death would pass over (Passover) their houses.
This tragedy finally convinced Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. When they got the news of their release, the Hebrew people grabbed up what they could as fast as they could, because they knew that Pharaoh would probably change his mind (as, in fact, he did). They took only what they could carry on their backs, and because they had no time to let the dough rise for bread, they cooked the dough very quickly as flat little crackers. Today, as for centuries before, at the Passover cele-bration, Jews eat flat crackers, called matzah, in remembrance of this family story.
What are the stories that your family tells? What do these stories say about how you see yourselves? Have you asked older people in your family, like grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles to tell you their stories? If your relatives live far away, they might even be willing to tell stories into a tape recorder or onto videotape or DVD, so that you can hear them and keep them, or they might write them down and send them to you through the mail or the Internet.
If you had to run away from your house quickly—say, because there was a fire or a flood coming—what would you take with you? If you could only take what you could carry (after you made sure that your family and your pets were safe) what would you take? These things that are most precious to you tell part of the story of who you are. If you’d like to share with other CLF kids your story about what matters most to you, you can go to the Kids Talk section at the bottom of the KidTalk page on the CLF website (www.clfuu.org/kidtalk) and tell us what you’d bring.
The most important part of the Passover celebration is telling the story of the Jewish family—but whatever your religious back-ground, telling your story and the story of your family is important. In our stories we share where we come from, who we are, and who we hope to be. Our stories not only tell about us, they also shape who we become.
So, please, tell me a story.
Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintel of the houses...and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. —Exodus 12:7&13
They thought they were safe that spring night, when they daubed the doorways with sacrificial blood. To be sure, the angel of death passed them over, but for what? Forty years in the desert without a home, without a bed, following new laws to an unknown land. Easier to have died in Egypt or stayed there a slave, pretending there was safety in the old familiar. But the promise, from those first naked days outside the garden, is that there is no safety, only the terrible blessing of the journey. You were born through a doorway marked in blood. We are, all of us, passed over, brushed in the night by terrible wings. Ask that fierce presence, whose imagination you hold. God did not promise that we shall live, but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars, brilliant in the desert sky.
They thought they were safe that spring night, when they daubed the doorways with sacrificial blood. To be sure, the angel of death passed them over, but for what? Forty years in the desert without a home, without a bed, following new laws to an unknown land. Easier to have died in Egypt or stayed there a slave, pretending there was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first naked days outside the garden, is that there is no safety, only the terrible blessing of the journey. You were born through a doorway marked in blood. We are, all of us, passed over, brushed in the night by terrible wings.
Ask that fierce presence, whose imagination you hold. God did not promise that we shall live, but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars, brilliant in the desert sky.
by Lynn Ungar, from Blessing the Bread, a 1996 UUA meditation manual, available through the CLF library (617-948-6150 or www.clfuu.org/library). Reprinted in What We Share: Collected Meditations Volume Two (Skinner, 2002), available through the UUA bookstore (www.uua.org/bookstore or 800-215-9076) or the CLF library.
...that the CLF has worship and religious education resources for small UU groups? Contact Lorraine Dennis at the CLF office (617-948-6166 or ldennis@clfuu.org) for more information about our Church on Loan program.
Last updated June 12, 2005
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · E-mail: clf@clfuu.org
