Some time ago, I asked my Dad how it was that my family had become Methodists, since I knew that he had been raised in that tradition. I expected him to tell me something about the theology of the Methodists, or John Wesley or the warm, emotional side of that faith, but he didn't. He said that when his parents needed to choose a church, the Methodist Church in their small town was a little bit closer to their home than the Baptist church. That was it! But for an accident of location, I could have been raised a Southern Baptist! Hard to imagine...
Now, today, most people put a little more thought into picking their church. Because they can drive farther, churches have gotten larger, just as supermarkets and high-schools have gotten larger. So when people church-shop, many of them evaluate churches as consumers would, comparing features: how good is the praise band, how silver-tongued is the preacher, do they serve cappucino or even breakfast, does the church-school have a playground with the latest equipment. Often, belief, theology, tradition and history do not even enter into the picture, or if they do, they are only a small checkbox on a large checklist.
We don't have a praise band or a playground and we don't regularly serve breakfast, (though our coffee hour snacks are fairly spectacular, in my opinion) And as for silver tongued preachers, certainly this tongue is made of flesh, so I hope you are here for different reasons. I hope you came here because you are, or were, looking for something different. I think most of you came, and stayed here because you want to belong.
Let me quote Reverend Ravi Janamanci, a Unitarian Universalist minister who spoke at General Assembly this year. I think Jim Rogers commented on Ravi's talk in the last newsletter. Ravi describes his experience as an immigrant from India, and his sense of not belonging.
In the US, I felt like a visitor from outer space. ... In the anonymity of Chicago, I wanted to belong--as a natural part of the human landscape, not an aberration to be tolerated. I wanted to be comfortable in the presence of others and know they were comfortable in mine. I did not want to be caught ... in the fault lines between worlds, cultures, and faiths.[1]Ravi wanted to be a part of the community. Ravi went on to describe what happened -- a minister who invited him to church. Let me continue this long quote because I love his language:
The late Reverend Frank Robertson, ... invited me to his church. Frank gave me the incredible gift of seeing myself as more than just the sum of my identities. He showed me what Unitarian Universalism was all about: a faith open and welcoming to people regardless of ethnicity, theology, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or political affiliation; a faith where theological crossbreeds, cultural mutts, religious hybrids like you and me can struggle and connect.... A faith where being a mutt or a mongrel is not an awful place of last resort but an intentional first choice. Instead of promising a heaven of sameness, Frank invited me into a community of individuals working at creating a heaven on earth.Ravi notes that belonging in this faith is a struggle. He says:
Many of us struggle to belong in this faith–as people of color and from minority cultures, as differently-abled people, as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning people, as Christian theists, pagans, atheists, secular humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, or as Republicans.
Yet, we stay. We keep showing up. Why? – because we know we are not alone. Somehow, we know that we belong here and that the struggle to belong is an integral part of belonging.Ravi's message is this: we belong because we must. We meet others here, engaged in similar struggle, and in them we glimpse a higher sense of purpose that we wish to be a part of. We discern that this community is connected to something big, and we want to be a part of this discovery and creation of meaning, to share in what is being constructed here.
Whether or not we are members, and have actually completed the ritual of signing the membership book, we are here, we belong, because we must. We come here, because at least to some degree, we can let go of some of the pretenses imposed in the other communities where we live and work. Here, we can just be ourselves and not our identities, imperfect but working to be better persons in a better world.
We also come, I hope, in part because we feel cared for here. Friends in this church community want to learn about our struggles and our suffering as well as our successes. Even if the community can do little to heal the hurts, it can hold us in care, and help ease those burdens.
Every bit as important as being cared for -- is caring. We come to this community because is offers us an opportunity to care, to help out, to be of use. We care not only for others in the community, we care for the community itself. Once these basic needs are met, we can expand our caring reach to those outside the walls of this community. The church is interconnected to other communities through care, through the work we do in the larger world.
For most of us, caring is a natural and a joyful response. We are glad to be of use, whether it is visiting friends who are ill, or helping out here in the nursery on Sunday morning, or organizing the Farmer's Market. Our hearts grow warm as we do these things, and that joyous warmth brings us closer to others and deeper into this community.
I consider this church community to be a microcosm of the larger communities in the world. The challenge of this church, or any community, is to provide a safe place for people to be of use, to follow their calls. This may mean helping them to find and do things they may not otherwise get a chance to do. One of the challenges of this church is to push us to explore areas that may be uncomfortable or scary of difficult.
We're beginning to explore a new form of Shared Ministry in the Sunday Services group. I'm inviting individuals who are in that group to work with me on particular sermon topics. Diana Shaheen worked with me on this one, and I asked her to find readings and poetry and to bring her own thoughts to a conversation about the topic of Belonging to Community. I think Diana also might agree that this is stepping out of her comfort zone, and doing something new and different. I look forward to others on the Sunday Services team trying this approach with me. It's an example of caring by being of use.
A final way to care, to help out, is through our financial contributions. We are entering the weeks of the pledge drive, the time when we make financial commitments for the next year.
Giving money to an organization is both very simple and complex. It seems simple because it can reduce the measure of our care to a simple numerical calculation. How much do I value this church community? Two percent of my income? Three percent? Five or ten percent? That's the simple part.
And giving money is complex because money and finance is so imbued with so much meaning in our culture. Salaries are secret in most companies. We're all focused on getting a 'good deal' in our purchases and transactions. Many live in anxiety as the worth of our retirement accounts ebb and flow as they ride the jitters of the stock market. So even thinking about making a monetary gift to the church through a pledge can bring up complex emotions. We hope the next few weeks will provide an opportunity for each of us to explore this complexity.
It would be nice to consider a variety of different types of community beyond this church, but time does not permit that. So let us consider just one more, one at the opposite size extreme from this church. Let us consider the ecosystem, that interconnected web of life to which we all belong and which we cannot choose to leave. Like it or not, we're all part of the community of nature.
The reading by Stephen Belbin we heard earlier was excerpted from a longer paper "Totality and Belonging: Toward Eco-Concept Synthesis."[2] This reading as well as the paper offer rich ideas about our place in the ecological community. I hope I can offer a brief exploration of these ideas.
Belkin tells us that among all those forms of life, we alone have the sense of belonging. As sentient beings, we understand our place in nature in a way that other creatures and inanimate objects cannot. We have awareness, and since we are aware of belonging to this community, that awareness brings choice. We can choose how we will interact with the community of life.
One choice for us is the traditional Judeo-Christian view: we shall have power and dominion over the creatures of the earth, use them, bend them to our wishes. We see the natural world is corrupt, imperfect, even evil, to be tamed.
Another choice is to merge completely with the natural world as it is. We could return to a state of nature, and we could live off the land in the most Romantic sense. In this approach we see nature as perfect, and are in awe.
Belbin tries to find a middle way between a humanity that is separate from nature and which dominates over it, and a humanity that is completely embedded in nature. We can belong, in a different way, to the natural world. We have to recognize that nature is neither perfect nor corrupt. We have to confront the bad as well as the good. We have to discern, we have to act responsibly.
Moreoever, we have to be leaders. In the words of writer Margaret Wheatley, "I define a leader as anyone who's willing to help, anyone who sees an issue in their community, their family, their organisation, and is willing to just step forward and do something about it."[3] I would note that this definition of leadership applies both to our role in the world, and in this church as a microcosm of the world. So in either setting, in any setting, when our awareness leads us to care and to help, we become leaders in the community.
Now there was one part of the reading that I struggled and tussled with. Belkin imagines our current world, our interconnected ecosystem, what he calls the totality, as a bridge that we must cross over to some perfect and unchanging reality beyond.
He warns that we cannot stop on the bridge -- either by worshipping Nature or power -- we have to cross. At the same time, we cannot just fly across, bypassing the bridge, and (his words) "claiming instead a self righteous inheritance of a glorious future invisible." In other words we must not ignore or despoil this world in hopes of some future rapture or resurrection to some heavenly home in the afterlife.
So we have to cross. What does it mean to cross over the bridge to some perfect and unchanging reality beyond? Perhaps this might refer to an ecologically sustainable reality, in which our very downsized ecological footprints tread lightly on this earth. To achieve true sustainability would require that we operate at a level of physical neutrality: zero population growth, a flat GDP, elimination of all extractive and polluting aspects of production.
It may also be that this perfect and unchanging reality is related to some worldwide spiritual enlightenment. Perhaps the emergence of the Omega Point or the technological singularity. I personally don't know what that would look like. I don't have that kind of theological imagination. I may be agnostic on this potential for enlightenment, but don't let my beliefs or unbeliefs limit yours.
But whatever Belkin means, there may be a germ of truth in this idea that we must cross the bridge. If we think of our church community as a microcosm of the larger world, then I do agree that part of our task is not to come to this community and just stay in place, doing the same things over and over, but to cross the bridge. To find personal spiritual transformation and to live lives of wholeness.
The community becomes both an end and a means. We both cross over the bridge and we live on it. We do our part in this church community, sharing the joys and the burdens of our ministry. We become leaders because we care. And at the same time, we continue to do our own work of self development and transformation. We do both these together: both crossing over and living on the bridge.
In all of our communities there are bridges. We live on them, we belong, we do the work, and we cross over, finding change and growth in whatever way it is presented to us.
As to the whole world, the totality, the concept of simultaneously living on and crossing over the bridge is hard to grasp. I continue to struggle with that image. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the vision of where we are going and what we must do. It is fleeting, hard to put into words. Better to reach for the words of others, like Albert Einstein:
Human beings are part of a whole called the "Universe", a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.[4]Each one of us is a member of several communities: interlocking communities of family, church, city, nation, and the whole of humanity. We are asked to widen our circle of compassion beyond the boundaries of each of these communities, blending and overlapping into the larger community that is this world. We are called to care, and to care is to lead. This is how we get to the other side of the bridge, to a more perfect reality. It is up to each of us to do this, in our own way, and it is within our abilities to do so. It is a lifelong task. Let us rise to that task. May it be so.
Notes:
1 Ravi Janamanci, "Faith in the Borderland", Sermon at GA 2009,www.uua.org/documents/ janamanchiabhi/090628_faith_borderland.pdf
2 Science in Africa on-Line Magazine, http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2001/december/ecocon.htm
3 Margaret Wheatley, speaking on Future Tense, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2009/2611237.htm
4 From Irene von Lippe Biesterfield with jessica van Tijn, "Science, Soul, and the Spirit of Nature", (quoted in Parabola Fall 2007, p. 52)
