All That We Are

 

A sermon given October 1, 2006

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon

 

Heather Starr, Minister

Don Hartsough, Host

 

"We build on foundations we did not lay.

We warm ourselves at fires we did not light.

We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.

We drink from wells we did not dig.

We profit from persons we did not know.

We are ever bound in community.”

—Rev. Peter Raible

 

 

CALL TO WORSHIP 

Good morning. It is good to be here with you. Together, we are more than any one of us would be on our own. Marge Piercy writes of transformative community that:

         “It goes on one at a time,

         it starts when you care

         to act, it starts when you do

         it again and they said no,

         it starts when you say We

         and know who you mean, and each

         day you mean one more.”[1]

Let us become more known to each other through our time together today. Let us celebrate the community that has been created here and that continues to grow and to change.

         Come, let us worship together.

 

SERMON                                           "All That We Are"                             Heather Starr

 

In the mid-1970’s, writer May Sarton chose to retreat to a rural house in Nelson, New Hampshire, to live alone there with her cats, her plants, and her parrot, and to write.  She was in her sixties then, and wrote one of her most well-known books, Journal of a Solitude, documenting that year of depression and writing, relationship angst and writing, winter loneliness and writing, frustration about being critically ignored for her work, and continuing to write. Here’s an entry from March 1st: “There is a lift in the air, in the spring notes of the jays and chickadees, in the stirring of sap in maples and in me. …Yet I feel sometimes like a house with no walls…The truth is that whatever good effect my work may have comes from my own sense of isolation and vulnerability. My life, often frightfully lonely, interacts with a whole lot of people I do not know and will never know” (115).

 

This book, called Journal of a Solitude, was a favorite of mine back in high school, which perhaps tells you something about the adolescent angst I was going through. What I marvel at every time I return to it is how not solitary Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude is. It is a journey in which practically every entry mentions, and sometimes focuses entirely on, relationship.  Connection with the world. Conversations with neighbors, friends, correspondents, house- and yardwork helpers, editors, lovers. Even there, alone in the wooden house with the amazing light in rural New Hampshire, Sarton was very much a part of a larger community. She hungered for community, for recognition, for friendship, for connection. That tension between longing for solitude and longing for understanding in the arms and appreciation of others is the central tension in her extensive work.

 

Individually, we are each one of us solitudes—islands of individual experiences. There is no one person here in this room who shares the exact same details of the same life stories, the same names and places, as another person here. We truly know and experience the world only through our own individual eyes, noses, hands, ears, each unique to us, each with their own sensitivities and limitations. Our bodies are their own isolating chambers, creating the illusion of separate selves who sometimes walk alone and sometimes exist side-by-side. And our separate bodies tend to be further enclosed in separate rooms in separate houses, at individual desks in individual offices, driving in one-per-person cars one-behind-another on the highway. Our daily patterns and ways of living have a tendency to remove us from one another, rather than bring us closer.

 

Most of us here have busy, full lives. There is so much to do and be involved in in our homes and communities and in the world. Why bother with all the energy it takes to gather together in community? Why put all of this effort into weaving the intricate fabric that holds this congregation together?

 

Someone recently lamented to me about how “in the other, conservative denominations, people are taught that they’ll go to Hell if they don’t go to church! We Unitarians don’t have anything like that.” It’s true, we don’t. And truly the reason that we don’t is not because we’re Unitarians, but because we’re Unitarian Universalists. (The two denominations, Unitarianism and Universalism, were separate faith traditions until the 1960’s, though they had much in common. In the early 1960’s they merged to form the denomination that this congregation is a part of. —And while I know it’s a lot of syllables, I assure you that, with practice!, “Unitarian Universalism” rolls easily off the tongue and invites intriguing conversations everywhere you go.)

 

It is our Universalist ancestors in our Unitarian Universalist tradition that believed and preached that there is no hell, that all people will be saved and held in the love of God, both in this life and in any form of existence there might be after death. It is our Universalism that challenges us to reach out to one another and deliver into each other’s lives a message of acceptance and love. It is our Universalism that encourages us to come into community together not out of fear, dread, or guilt, but out of a loving, hopeful longing for community, and a belief in the possibility of what a group of people can accomplish together.

 

Today, in the Jewish tradition, is the Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day in Jewish synagogues around the world, the community confesses its communal transgressions before God who then forgives the community. Integral to this act is that each person in the proceeding Ten Days of Awe has asked anyone they have harmed in the past year for forgiveness. The prayers, songs and practices of this sacred day are underscored with a message of forgiveness and a lifting up of the Ultimate compassion of God.

 

Our Universalist ancestors believed in this same ultimately forgiving quality of God.  In the early 1800’s, Universalist minister Hosea Ballou rode on horseback from one small Universalist church in rural New England to another, preaching of an ultimate forgiveness, and challenging the reasoning of anyone who insisted upon a vengeful God and an ever-lurking devil. This is our heritage, and it’s also our encouragement, our opportunity. This belief in an ultimately loving Spirit is a central element of our tradition.

 

So while it’s quite true that we don’t have a faith tradition that suggests dire consequences to not gathering together in community, what we have instead is a faith tradition that believes that something incredible, something powerful, something with the potential to transform individuals and society, emerges out of this intentional, voluntary  gathering together. Together, we are more than we would be separately. Indeed, this congregation is composed of a very particular group of people. This particular group of people, having these particular conversations, would not happen organically otherwise. We create here connections, interactions, happenings, possibilities, nets of care for one another that would not be in place if not for this crossroads. This particular group of people, this intergenerational, eclectic, skeptical and faithful group of single people, couples, and families, two-job jugglers and retirees, this group would not find itself in this configuration at the office water cooler or Bachelor’s ski lodge, the Deschutes Brewery tables or the public library lobby. To be this community, we require this set aside place, this designated space and time for sacred gathering. The coming together, the driving and walking here, the gathering that we do here on Sunday morning is The Ritual that creates the opportunity for all the other rituals that we enjoy together.

 

Beyond the home-place and the work-place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg emphasizes the crucial importance in each of our lives of a “third place,” a place where one can engage with others who live in one’s town in a social, thoughtful, not immediately goal-oriented way. A place where one learns what’s going on in town and how to be involved. A place of community. A place, as he describes it, where we find “people with similar interests, and people whose interests aren’t similar but are interesting nonetheless” (xviii)[2]. (How Unitarian Universalist is that?, I ask you!) He fervently campaigns for each of us to take it upon ourselves to prioritize these third places, wherever we find them, in the evolution of our growing towns and cities. Oldenburg writes: “The environment in which we live out our lives is not a cafeteria containing an endless variety of passively arrayed settings and experiences. It is an active, dictatorial force that adds experiences or subtracts them according to the way it has been shaped. When Americans begin to grasp this lesson, the path to the planners’ offices will be more heavily trod than that to the psychiatrists’ couches. And when that lesson is learned, community may again be possible and celebrated each day in a rich new spawning of third places” (296).[3]

 

It takes a place, and also so many voices to make up a community. At the beginning of this service, when we participated together in an Intergenerational Community Covenant, there were many wonderful voices. And I know that some of you were quite probably thinking of the people who are not here today, whose voices are not part of this morning’s gathering. They are missed, and their absence is keenly felt. Each voice is so important, so particular to that person, so essential to the life of this community. A simple act of one person can build the momentum to create an event, a gathering, an action, a ripple effect.

 

Just one example. Upon the suggestion of one of our members here, Christine Boyer, I set aside this past Thursday night to go see a movie. I walked with a friend through the lovely evening light and the neighborhood above Old Mill. We scrambled down the hillside there to the Movie Theater, and I was being noticeably careful because I had a parcel, a bag full of food. This is one so-simple act, yet one that requires hundreds of volunteers on one evening. For the 26th year this year the Oregon Food Bank has coordinated with movie theaters statewide to offer free admission to films (and free popcorn!) with the donation of only 3 cans or boxes. It was so easy. It had a sense of humor, in that the event was called the Cans Film Festival, a pun on the illustrious Cannes Film Festival. There was a volunteer there sitting behind a table, ready to take our cans and hand us our free passes. It took five minutes, and last year moviegoers in Oregon donated more than 90,000 pounds of food, the equivalent of 69,000 meals.

 

As Unitarian Universalists, our tendency to think of ourselves as small only slows us down and causes that hesitancy to become inactivity. Unitarian Universalists throughout history have had a significant impact on this country, far beyond what one might think one person or denomination could accomplish. “Reformers in our tradition include Universalists such as Charles Spear who called for prison reform, and Clara Barton who went from being the Civil War nursing coordinator and “angel of the battlefield” to become the founder of the American Red Cross. Unitarians such as Dorothea Dix fought to “break the chains” of people incarcerated in mental hospitals, and Samuel Gridley Howe started schools for the blind. For the last two centuries, Unitarians and Universalists have been at the forefront of movements working to free people from whatever bonds may oppress them.”[4] We are a part of that legacy of not being intimidated, of engaging in our communities and believing in the possibility for one person, and then another, and then another, to create systemic change.

 

Marge Piercy in her poem “The Low Road” gives us a clear, compelling reason for community: together, we can both celebrate and protect the possibility of one another’s unique lives. We can work together to insure one another’s freedoms. She writes:

“Alone, you can fight,

you can refuse...

But two people fighting

back to back can cut through

a mob.

 

Two people can keep each other

sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope...

Three people are a delegation,

a committee, a wedge. With four

you can play bridge and start

an organization. With six

you can rent a whole house,

eat pie for dinner with no

seconds, and hold a fund raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration.

A hundred fill a hall.

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;

ten thousand, power and your own paper;

a hundred thousand, your own media.

 

It goes on one at a time,

it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again and they said no,

it starts when you say We

and know who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.”[5]

 

This growing community begins with us knowing each other, with learning who we each are and what our joys and concerns are, in our lives, in this community, in this region, in the world. It begins with our knowing each other, and it continues and strengthens through our speaking up, our learning about our faith tradition and being able to speak articulately about it with others, our choosing a part of the wheel of community to put our shoulder against, to push the collective cart a little further along.

 

May Sarton journaled: “There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.“ Hosea Ballou: “Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective.“ And Marge Piercy: “We seek not rest but transformation.

We are dancing through each other as doorways.“

 

One voice is a beginning, but it is not enough. It takes a community to create the possibilities and conversations that our spirits hunger for. Here we are. A community of faith and of inquisitive reason, a community formed by entirely voluntary covenant and commitment. Let us seize upon this creation, this irreproducable gathering, and make much of our moment together.

 

May it be so.

 

 

BENEDICTION

In the words of Lauralyn Bellamy:

“If, here, you have found freedom,

take it with you into the world.

If you have found comfort,

go and share it with others.

If you have dreamed dreams,

help one another,

that they may come true!

If you have known love,

give some back

to a bruised and hurting world.”

 

May we all nourish our communities in whatever ways we can, and find that in so doing, we are ourselves nourished and replenished. Let our worship now end, and our service begin.


[1] Marge Piercy, “The Low Road”

 

[2] The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffeeshops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, by Ray Oldenburg (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999).

[3] Oldenburg

[4] Excerpt from the pamphlet, “Unitarian Universalist Origins: Our Historic Faith” by Mark Harris. Available through the Unitarian Universalist Bookstore, www.uua.org.

[5] Marge Piercy, “The Low Road”