“The Season of Invitation”
A sermon by Heather Starr, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon
Rocco April, Host
Who are you inviting into your home, into your life, this season?
What ideas, spiritual teachings and wisdom, are you inviting into your soul-life?
In this time of winter, of turning inward into our homes and our fire-lit gatherings,
we will investigate the idea of invitation, who we are each inviting into our lives,
and who we are inviting ourselves to be in the world.
CALL TO WORSHIP
Good morning. It is good to be with you this morning. On this day, may you feel calm and gratitude for simply through having made your way here this morning. In this sanctuary, may you be reminded of the sacred, the transcendant, the mystery of all this is greater than the daily details we each deal with individually. In this community, may you feel the strength that comes from lives joined together in journeys shared and in dreams and concerns given voice. Come, let us worship together.
SERMON "A Season of Invitation" Heather Starr
For me this time of year, this ‘dark of winter,’ never fails to invite me into periods of reflection and evaluation of where I now find myself, this year, and how I find myself, my life circumstances, my perceptions of the world. It is without a doubt winter-time, and I believe that some deep part of our physical being carries along within us hibernating tendencies, rhythmical memories of the seasons deep in our veins. As I wrap myself up in long-sleeve layers and long-johns, so too does my soul squirrel inside myself more deeply, sorting through a year’s worth of experiences and adventures and tallying up how this year has worn itself on me.
I have been watching with great absorbtion a British documentary series that some of you may be familiar with—it’s called The Up Series, and, starting in 1964, it documents the unfolding lives of 14 British children, first at 7 years old, then 14, then 21, and so on. Every seven years the director, Michael Apted, sits down and interviews these 14 folks about their thoughts and feelings about love, career, education, politics, class, family, religion, ambition, and their reflections on themselves as they look back at their lives and watch and re watch, along with us, the soon-familiar clips of themselves at 7 years old. We get to see, over-and-over again, Tony’s incredibly sweet 7-year-old dream: “I’m gonna be a jockey when I grow up, I’m gonna be a jockey when I grow up.” And he does grow up, succeeds in a brief-but-memorable moment as a jocket, and goes on to become a taxi driver, and have a family.
The theme of the film is a quote adapted from the Jesuit tradition—“give me a child of seven, and I will show you the man.” And, as the decades pass and these children grow to become adults and have families and children of their own, it is a sort of haunting message that inevitably raises the age-old question of what does result from destiny, and what from personal will? What is within our individual power to change about ourselves and our lives, and what are we seemingly set on living out, whether through family legacy, social location, or individual genetic makeup?
To take our spiritual lives seriously, to understand that somehow our spirit undergirds all our actions and values and our ways of being with one another—this means that we must somehow make sure that we are drawing upon our sources of wisdom and also inviting new spiritual nourishment into our lives.
For me, the familiar, wise voices that I return to to ground and remind me of my life, and my path—well there are the poets—Mary Oliver, June Jordan, Allen Ginsburg—and very close by there are the songwriters—Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown, Michael Franti—the voices and sung poetry that help me to remember my own bearings. There are also the long-time friends, other human beings who reflect me to me and who remind me about the hardship of the world and about embracing life with gusto as well. And there is the outside world—in its beauty and its wildness both threatening and reassuring, ever mysterious, easy to feel awe in once again. These are all sources of wisdom and inspiration in my soul-life. I am new here in Central Oregon, and I am still searching out and inviting the places that I know will become familiar, places I will come to know for the way that they teach me, through their external seasonal changes, about the internal changes happening simultaneously within me.
Mary Oliver writes: “Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, onto the path, was always a kind of relief. I was returning to the arena of delight. I was stepping across some border. I don’t mean just that the world changed on the other side of the border, but that I did too. Eventually I began to appreciate that the great black oaks knew me. I don’t mean they knew me as myself and not another—that kind of individualism was not in the air—but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting. It was like a quick change of temperature, a warm and comfortable flush, faint yet palpable, as I walked toward them and beneath their outflowing branches” (Winter Hours 96).
When I reach out and invite new wisdom into my ears, heart, and home, it is from equally vast and also intimate terrain. This is what I wish for you within a Unitarian Universalist context—that marvelous sense of freedom to locate and name and celebrate your sources of wisdom as meaningful spiritual guides that do lift and nourish your spirit. Our Unitarian Universalist Principles include “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth,” and “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Our Principles go on to acknowledge a tradition that draws from “Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves,” “wisdom from the world’s religions which inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life” and “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science…” and I could go on; they’re printed in the front of your hymnal and I invite you to read them, and read them again, because we are charged to be seekers, to be journeyers, and to support one another in the spiritual explorations of our lives.
I have been listening to a reading on my I-Pod of the Dhammapada, a sacred text of the Buddha’s teachings. Would the Buddha have approved of this oh-so-21st-century transmission of his sacred text—his teachings adjacent, and shuffle-able, with hip-hop and Pearl Jam and missives from Barack Obama and Julia Sweeney? I think he would have.
Julia Sweeney’s another new voice I’ve invited into my living room, much to the distress of my two cats. I laugh so hard while I’m listening to her that their constant naps get completely disrupted and they leave the couch in disgust for quieter corners. Julia Sweeney is a former Saturday Night Live comic who has put together a hilarious one-woman monologue called “Letting Go of God.” What I love is that Sweeney’s piece is essentially what any one of us here might recognize and name as Julia’s spiritual journey—a journey that we all go on, each in our own way.
Sweeney was raised a good Catholic, she attended Catholic school and mass religiously. As an adult, after a relationship break-up, as she was reassessing her life, she felt she’d become lazy about her faith, so she started going back to her neighborhood Catholic church and getting involved. And then she started going to a Bible study class and she started, well, studying. The Bible. And she had a lot of questions! And the questions did not get answered so well!
She eventually left the Catholic church with a great sense of freedom and relief, eager to go out and find the church that would work better for her. Along the way, she reads Karen Armstrong, she explores other world religions. She decides she’s probably a Buddhist and goes to China, Tibet, and Katmandu, she studies at a monastery and, well, she studies again, and finds her previously glossy impressions of Buddhism dampened for her as well. She tries on “God Is Nature,” and then “God Is Love,” and along the way she writes this passage:
“…[T]he real truth was, I was starting to get nervous about my relationship with God. I felt like we were a married couple in trouble, trying to find some common ground. I began to wonder just who I was married to. How defined did it need to be for me? I mean, the truth was, God worked for me. William James said, ‘It doesn’t work because it’s true, it’s true because it works.’ When I prayed, I felt calmer, more focused; it really changed my state of mind. But just because the idea of God worked so well for me, it didn’t necessarily mean that he existed. I felt suspicious. For the first time, I wondered if God wasn’t just my imaginary friend. As they say, ‘the invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike.’ God requires faith. Faith does not require evidence, right? But the more I thought about it, my faith was based on evidence. The evidence of how I felt when I prayed. The evidence of everyone believing in god, almost everyone I ever met from the time I was a kid. The evidence of what I had been taught by people I trusted, admired, and who, ultimately, had authority over me.
So my faith in God was based on evidence. Well then, how could I not examine that evidence?
But how did I examine everything? How did I know what I knew? I had to know!”
And her journey continues. And I invite you to listen to it. I invite you to invite voices into your life that challenge you, that don’t line up with what you believe at this moment, that nourish your own ponderings and your appreciation for the wealth of perspectives we human beings have of this one world.
I went for a walk recently, in my new neighborhood, in the evening, in the fresh snowfall. After a while, turning a corner off Bear Creek Road, I came upon a stone labryinth, dusted with snow. There it was, right in front of me, unmistakeable even in the dim evening light. This is so 2006, to me, to just go out for a walk and stumble on a labryinth. The labryinth is a spiritual tradition that dates back to at least 1200 years before the Common Era, before Christ, with the exact same designs and paths today that were drawn on ancient Greek columns. Part of the reason I had set out for a walk from my own front door for a change was because I just didn’t feel like getting in a car and braving the streets with all their trepidatious, this-is-the-first-snow-of-the-season-what-do-we-do drivers. And so to stumble upon the labryinth reminded me of the people who drew labryinths in the middle of the Crusrades in France, when there were wars raging on all around them out in the world, and it wasn’t safe to go on their usual pilgrimages…so they brought the pilgrimage inside the sanctuary, they created a way to imitate those long contemplative winding walks without leaving their own community.
For me the labyrinth has become a place and an experience where I connect with my embodied memories of other labyrinths I have walked—in New Mexico, in San Francisco, in Manitoba, in Portland, one foot in front of the next, walking forward and also remembering back. Each time my body takes these so-conscious, so-deliberate steps and walks that path, I remember every labyrinth I have walked, every path, back to the very first one.
I first walked a labyrinth in a busy and noisy conference center in Cleveland, Ohio, for the 2001 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly. In the main hall there were hundreds of tables, booths, issues to learn about, petitions to sign, and even more hundreds of people mingling, ogling, shopping, talking, commiserating and campaigning. The hubbub in this room was lively and busy, a little bit like a faith-based Wall Street with all the coming and going and people waving and shouting to each other. (You are all invited to attend this annual international convergence of Unitarian Universalists, by the way, nearby in Portland in June, 2007—and do take advantage of the fact that it’s nearby! In 2008 it’ll be in Florida!)
Anyway, back in Ohio in 2001, way back behind the displays, off in the corner of this warehouse-like exhibit hall space, there was a curtain that concealed a wide and open area, and spread out on the concrete floor there, a labyrinth painted with thick purple lines on a huge off-white canvas. To me it looked like just some lines painted on the ground, very 2-dimensional and only a little bit intriguing. I stood and watched a few people walking through it, each at their own pace, one bare foot in front of the other. I was skeptical at first. I watched. There was a flyer on a low table near the entrance, and I scanned it. “A labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness,” it said. “It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. The labyrinth represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world. A labyrinth is not a maze, for which many choices must be made and an active mind is needed to solve the problem of finding the center. With a labyrinth there is only one choice to be made. The choice is to enter, or not.
An open and receptive mindset is needed. The choice is whether or not to walk a spiritual path.”
I stood outside the labyrinth and tried to trace with my eyes the path into the center and out again, and I couldn’t do it; the path wove in and out and my eyes couldn’t keep all the curves in order. This was for me the pivotal sensation of the labyrinth: trust. Letting go of a need to draw the line myself, and trusting that the path would lead me in whatever way was the right way. It was not a maze to figure out. But nor was it a simple walk, a stroll, or a hike on a clearly marked trail. It was a weaving that I would walk into. I had to trust it and not concern myself at all with how the curving in would lead me out again.
I stood at the entrance and said a prayer of intention. “Walk in,” the note had said, and like Alice in Wonderland, I dutifully followed the directions set out on the table. “Walk in, concentrating on all that you wish to cherish, savor and receive. In the center, pause, sit and be. Walk out, focusing on all that you want to give back, give of yourself, what light you want to shine out from your eyes, what you want your love to look like and from where to summon it.” I don’t know how much time went by while I was walking through those purple lines, one foot mindfully in front of the other. As I walked in I took in the peacefulness of the other couple of people who were walking; a few times I brushed shoulders or elbows with someone walking in the opposite direction. The silence was intimate, it was inviting.
A young teenager came in and skipped joyfully through the labyrinth, and that made me glad. In the center I sat and noticed my breath, and my calm. And then I walked out again, concentrating bodily on anticipating sharing my calm and love with those I would encounter. I stood again at the entrance, now the exit, and said a prayer of gratitude. I wanted my whole body to remember this peace, this grace, this invitation to moments of introspection and stillness right in the midst of the clatter and chaos of a national conference. Anne Lamott writes “I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt. I gobbled, licked it, held it down between my little hooves.”
In this town, there is a labryinth just off Bear Creek Road. After I walked through it, I wondered who had created it. I tromped up the hillside there and discovered myself at the First Presbyterian Church on SE 9th Street, where I had been once before for an Interfaith Worship Service. There’s lots of parking there and the labryinth is just down the hill on the north side of the parking lot. Check it out sometime. Invite a friend. Invite more of yourself to the experience than you usually do.
This is a introspective season of the year, a time in which we reflect on events of the past year and begin to contemplate our dreams and plans for the coming year. May you make a place for the spirit and the soul within you. Bring that soul some food. Bring that soul some inspiration, some comfort, some song, some company. Give your soul the opportunity to speak, to sing, to cry, to rage, to be overwhelmed by the anguish of this world and by its beauty. Amid the hubbub of these holidays, carve out a place in your days for your gentle, human spirit. May it be so.
BENEDICTION
During this sacred season, may you invite into your spiritual life inspiration from young and old, from sources familiar and unfamiliar. May you walk forward, focusing on all that you want to give back, give of yourself, what light you want to shine out from your eyes, what you want your love to look like and from where to summon it. Step into the world with curiosity and with astonishment. Go in love, and go in peace.