Order of Service
November 5, 2006
“The Myth of The One Solitary Voice”
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” —Adrienne Rich
PRELUDE Dick Falxa
*GATHERING SONG #151 “I Wish I Knew How”
GREETING & WELCOME -- Frank Arnold
--intro my mother and grandmother
ANNOUNCEMENTS -- Frank
--service brochure (Tom Wykes)
CALL TO WORSHIP -- Heather (Call through Children’s Arch)
Good morning. It is good to be with you this morning.
Let us begin our sacred time today with these words by poet Mary Oliver, from her poem “When Death Comes:”
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
—“When Death Comes”
Come, let us be amazed by one another’s lives and by one another’s spirits.
Come, let us worship together.
Maddie Barrett is going to come up and light the chalice with me this morning. And while we’re doing so, will you join us in standing and singing Hymn #123, Spirit of Life.
*CHALICE LIGHTING Hymn #123 “Spirit of Life”
Please remain standing and join me in the unison reading of the Covenant of this Fellowship, printed in your Order of Service.
*UU COVENANT
“Love is the spirit of this Fellowship,
and service is its law;
this is our covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love,
and to help one another.”
Children, please gather at the back of the sanctuary, come through the arch, and
follow your teachers. (point to the left back of the sanctuary)
Those adults sitting on the end of the aisle, please form an arch with your hands
while we sing together “Go Now in Peace.”
*CHILDREN’S ARCH AND SONG #413 “Go Now in Peace”
You may be seated.
JOYS AND CONCERNS -- Frank
SILENCE & MEDITATION -- Frank
OFFERING (and acknowledgment) – Frank
--including receiving offerings of energy and engagement
NEW MEMBER CEREMONY Melissa Adams Russell leads off,
Frank Arnold, and Heather Starr
CHOIR ANTHEM “Simple Song of Peace” by Jerry Estes
SERMON "The Myth of the One Solitary Voice" Heather Starr
Don’t worry, at this point, she’s pretty used to me.
I’d like to share one aspect of my mother in particular with you this morning.
My mother, and my grandmother as well, are religious.
Fervent.
Dedicated.
And committed, all to a very particular daily ritual.
There is something they practice, every day, no matter where they go, no matter
what state they travel to or what town they find themselves in.
It is ingrained in them, and I am awestruck by it.
I marvel at their devotion.
They read their sacred text every day—with a pencil in hand.
And often something else too—scissors.
Are you with me?!
My mother and grandmother are devoted to the newspaper.
And I mean devoted.
Every day, 365 days a year, my mother gets the Oregonian, and the New York
Times delivered somewhere in the vicinity of her doorstep in Portland.
She reads them with her fine-tooth combs of pencil and scissors ever
nearby, ever ready to make a note that says something like “Heather!
Perri! Mom! Read this!”
And when she’s gone on vacation out of the country and can’t get the paper
where she is, say, perhaps because she’s in a canoe for four days or on a
bicycle in Ireland and really, truly, not able to conveniently bring the
newspaper along, (because otherwise, believe me, she would)—they wait.
The newspapers wait.
They gather themselves and they stack themselves and they patiently wait for
her attentive pouring-over because they know: it’ll come.
She’ll return and somehow find the time to give each and every page at least a
glance, even if it means she has sometimes been discovered in bed, asleep,
surrounded, newspapers everywhere, sections half-read and from 3 different weeks.
The newspaper is a rich community document that I have been inculcated to
respect.
Even in our corporate media-driven monolopy-rife times, the newspaper is not
even remotely a document of one single voice.
It is a composite of voices, each clamoring to be heard.
It serves as an excellent example of our topic this morning: The Myth of the One
Solitary Voice.
Especially at election time, we hear two sides of this myth over and over:
The myth that there is one voice could perhaps rise heroically and triumphantly
above all the others,
and the myth that any one of our voices is too solitary, too inconsequential,
to have any kind of impact on the world.
This is the myth that connects to the “average” person’s sense of themselves as
helpless.
This is the myth that translates to: “my vote, my opinion, doesn’t make any
difference.”
This myth of the One Solitary Voice definitely prevails in our faith tradition,
too.
Somehow every Unitarian Universalist thinks they’re the only athiest in the
whole congregation, the only Christian, the only pagan, the only Republican, the only Buddhist, the only one who doesn’t really identify as a Unitarian Universalist, the only one doesn’t subscribe to any of these terms.
I would like to debunk this myth, right now.
I guarantee each one of us has beliefs that are shared by more than one or two
or maybe even a dozen other people here.
And if you find yourself wanting to argue with me about this, I’m quite certain
you are not a solitary voice in that!
No one of us is nearly as solitary as we sometimes feel.
The myth that we are each so unique and so separate that no one shares our
perspective keeps us isolated from one another, instead of enabling us to
revel in our common experiences and longings.
We must not wait, as Mary Oliver writes, until death comes, for someone else to
vote, to speak, to act, to sign up, to join, to participate, to lead.
“My heart is moved by all I
cannot save,” writes Adrienne Rich.
“I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with
no
extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
I have found my heart so moved by the story of Mariane Pearl.
Mariane Pearl is the widow of Wall Street Journal Correspondent Daniel Pearl,
a seasoned journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in
2002.
A video-taped record of his death was sent around the world by the Islamic
extremists who killed him as a Jewish-American symbol.
In the four years since his death, Mariane Pearl, herself a Buddhist, has been
sharing vulnerable, honest, vivid and heart-felt depictions of the interfaith
community and global support that emerged following her husband’s
kidnapping.
It’s not a fairy-tale story; it is a very real-life story of incredible
perseverence, of defiance, of one hopeful spirit after another affecting
each other with much-needed hope and strength.
At the time of her husband’s kidnapping, Mariane was six months pregnant
with their first-born son.
She organized and energized the interfaith, international search effort that
ultimately did identify his kidnappers and his killers.
She writes: “We ended up being 2 Jewish people, 2 Catholic, 1 Buddhist, 2
Muslim… The reason people became so deeply involved is because two visions of the world were fighting each other.”
She has written a vivid account of the entire experience called A Mighty Heart:
The Brave Life and My Husband, Danny Pearl.
What I find so moving, so inspiring, is precisely that this story was never the
story of one man, one voice, one journalist in Pakistan, but always the story of an every-enlarging group of people affecting and loving each other, the story of unlikely and enduring communities.
Mariane Pearl writes: “The first thing the kidnappers did was deprive Danny of
a voice.
No phone, no pen, no computer.
Even so, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world not only embraced
him as one of their own but understood precisely who he was, what he
was doing, and why.
His murderers tried to reduce him to a symbol—a Jew, an American.
But people knew, in a miraculous way, how charmingly goofy he could be and
how great a journalist he was” (199).
She goes on: “After this excruciating ordeal, there was nothing I needed more
than to be reassured about human nature.
Thousands and thousands of people from all over the world wrote to me and to
our son, Adam.
When Adam grows up, I will have, on the one hand, the terrible tale of his
father’s murder; and on the other, the voices of men, women, and children
from the world over, expressing the full power of human solidarity. Reading each of the [thousands of] letters [that I received], I can feel the
sender grappling to find the words and thoughts that will bring me hope.
I am convinced that if we ultimately overcome terrorism and the spread of
hatred, it will be because there are millions more on this earth like those who wrote to me.
We call them ordinary people.
To me, each one is extraordinary” (236).
As journalists, Mariane and Danny Pearl believed, “We can change the world
by changing the way people think about one another” (124).
I believe this is true of us all as citizens and agents in our world.
First, we must recognize ourselves as composites of one another, not solitary
ships passing in the night.
We influence and inspire one another; we create hope and possibility for each
other.
My relationship to the newspaper, for example, is a direct result of decades of
watching my mother and grandmother and their daily rituals of news
devotion.
And so too, this woman journalist, seemingly one voice, shows how she is in
fact a myriad of voices.
She carries on the legacy of her husband, she spends her days telling and re-
telling the stories of all those people who helped with the search for
Daniel, she creates hope and possibility for her son.
She is a pantheon of voices, and so are we all.
While I was in seminary in Berkeley, I was close friends with a couple who had
two young daughters.
I loved those two girls, Celia and Lucy.
It seemed to me like six-year-old Celia and I had a special relationship, or
maybe that she just asked me amazing and thought-provoking questions about the world that stopped me in the midst of whatever I was busy doing.
I made an arrangement with her parents that one afternoon a week, on
Tuesdays, I would pick her up at her school bus stop and we’d hang out
for a little bit before I brought her home.
Usually we’d go to the old-fashioned soda fountain that was in the pharmacy in
the Elmwood neighborhood and each get a milkshake in a tall glass that we’d sit and savor at the counter while we talked about whatever was on her mind.
I remember when Celia came upon an art book of paintings by the painter
sixteenth-century religious painter Francisco de Goya and wanted to know why, why exactly, were there so many paintings of a mostly naked man nailed to two crossed wooden boards—and was he dead? Or what?
That was fun to try to explain.
And then, then, there was the time that Celia wanted all of us adults to explain
why our country was killing children her age in some other country far
away.
And she wanted to write a letter to the president, and tell him to stop it.
And so we did.
We sat down and as she talked, I typed, and we went over her letter a few
times.
I printed it out and made copies for her parents, and with a little help, she sent
it.
And then the hard part came: she expected a prompt reply.
She wanted an answer to her letter!
She wanted an answer to her letter from the President written just as personally
as hers had been.
She would check the mailbox every day expecting some kind of response.
And none came.
And she felt discouraged, like she shouldn’t have bothered to write the letter at
all.
Sometimes I look around and I listen as we adults disparage politics and groan
about the monolith of government, and I think we are all essentially like Celia, checking the mailbox of the world, wishing that our opinions had immediate, global impact.
And when they don’t, we think there was no point in our effort in the first
place.
This is one of the many myths that we let make us feel powerless: that because
our action did not have the effect that we hoped for, we might as well not have bothered.
In the myth of the one solitary voice, one person, more intelligent and more
radiant, stronger and more confident and somehow larger-than-life, rises up above all the mundane frustrations that occupy the rest of us, and effortlessly changes the whole world.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Superman—we blur our
superheroes and our heroes and in so doing make human beings like ourselves more than human, their acts more than any one of us could ever possibly accomplish.
In making our heroes so mythical, we excuse ourselves from taking our own
heroic actions.
When we mythologize other human beings, we deprive them of their humanity
and we deprive ourselves of our ability.
These myths, unexamined, keep each of us from realizing the power of our own
voices.
In his book Soul of a Citizen, Paul Rogat Loeb writes: “I would like to dispel the
idea that people who take social stands and those who don’t represent
different species, separated by impassable barriers:
[the idea that] a marginal few leap from the womb holding protest signs;
and the rest of us are more ‘normal,’ so rarely concern ourselves with issues we can’t control.”
“We keep our opinions to ourselves because we doubt our voices will be heard,
mistrust our right to speak, or fear the consequences if we do speak out.
We feel we lack essential political skills.
…We simply do not know we have it in us” (Loeb 21-22).
In this election season, so much of our political advertising and machinations
tends to focus on individuals, as if this one person’s personality is the entire incapsulation of how our state will be governed, as compared to this other person’s.
The campaigns we are surrounded by, involved in, and which besiege us with
telephone calls and mailings all focus on individuals, the charisma and viewpoints of one person.
And yet the subtext of these glossy advertising campaigns and less glossy door-
knocking efforts is that each person is connected to certain communities. One person is not a solitary voice suddenly appearing at a microphone and
changing the world, but someone who has built connections, one after another, with other people, with families, with communities and gatherings of communities.
Our voices represent not simply our concerns, but the concerns of the
communities that have created our experiences and shaped our values.
The story of Daniel Pearl became an enduring story not because it is about one
man tragically and publicly killed, but when it is a story of people who dearly loved him and people who never met him, people from many different faith and ethnic backgrounds, working together and creating lasting, meaningful, heartfelt, transformative connections in one another’s lives.
And the significance of six-year-old Celia sitting down and writing a letter of
her own, to the President, is not so much about whether or not one letter
can stop a war, but about the life-giving act of expression, of showing her
how to expand her concern for the world, and not squelch it, how to add her voice to hundreds of thousands of other voices clamoring for peace.
We must make it a spiritual practice to be engaged beyond what seems
convenient for us.
We must actively participate because otherwise, we become numb, we become
visitors of our world, instead of active participants.
Let us take note of the counterproductive myths we hear one another voicing,
the discouragement we let seep out in passing phrases and expressions of
powerlessness, and let us together work as a community to remind one another of all that is possible.
We come together here in order to be inspired, reenergized, and refilled again
with hope for what can be.
As a community, we need each and every voice, each vote—yes, absolutely.
We need one another to vote and then we also need one another to follow-
through, to step further into the rushing world with the certainty that our actions do deeply influence one another and who we each become, do create possibility, do generate life in ourselves and in one another.
We are ourselves creators and recreators of life, of life-giving hope in one
another, of possibility.
May we be amazed by all that we can accomplish together.
May we find ourselves, everyday, married to this amazement.
May it be so.
CONGREGATIONAL RESPONSE AND REFLECTION
CHALICE EXTINGUISHING & CLOSING WORDS
“We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth,
the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts until we are together again.”
*CLOSING HYMN #347 “Gather the Spirit”
*BENEDICTION
one another.
Get to know someone you haven’t talked to before; find some commonality
amidst your differences.
And now, let us step forward into our lives and make them very particular, and
very real.
Let us be newly astonished by all the ways the world offers us to be alive.
Go with amazement and the determination to engage.
Go in peace.
*Please stand as you are able during these portions of the service.