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A: Maintaining the confidentiality of the ministerial search candidates and insulating the MSC from undue influence is critical to the integrity of the search process.  Disclosure of the identity of a candidate can jeopardize the current ministry and the livelihood of a ministerial candidate and can compromise the integrity of the search process.  The nature of the relationship of spouses, partners and immediate family members is more likely to necessitate or result in the disclosure of ministerial candidate identities or identifying information about a candidate.  For example, such persons need to know the travel plans and location of the MSC member when the MSC is observing a candidate preaching, which would inadvertently disclose the identity of a candidate. Additionally, a spouse serving on the Transition Team or Board is privy to information about current USNH business and concerns that, if shared with a member of the MSC, may compromise the discernment process of the MSC member.  For example, a Board member sharing concerns about a current issue or concern (e.g. a financial or fundraising shortfall) with their spouse on the MSC could cause  the MSC member to place too much weight on a candidate’s skills to deal with a present concern at the cost of identifying the candidate best suited to the needs and mission of the congregation as a whole for the long term.  While disclosure can occur between friends as readily as other relationships, typical relationships among spouses, partners and immediate family members are sufficiently more likely, on balance, to result in or create opportunities for disclosure that this policy is a reasonable precaution.  Finally, allowing spouses, partners and immediate family members to serve simultaneously on the Board, Transition Team and/or MSC is likely to create a perception that decision-making authority is concentrated among a small group that is not representative of the whole congregation.  There are numerous other roles at USNH to utilize the talents of the spouses, partners and immediate family members of the MSC members and more than enough talented and insightful members of the congregation that overlapping participation in these roles by people in very close relationship to MSC members is unnecessary.

7. Q:  If I cannot be at USNH on Sunday, May 5 for the election of the MSC members, will I be able to vote for members of the MSC?

A.  The Board has determined that absentee voting will be allowed for the MSC election. The process for absentee voting will be determined and published by April 7.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. Q: Are members that are currently serving in leadership roles eligible for the MSC?

A: Yes.  Any member is eligible to serve on the MSC. However, if a member is elected to the MSC, that person will be required to relinquish other leadership roles at USNH.  After the initial nomination process, potential nominees will have the opportunity to decide whether to accept nomination and agree to relinquish other leadership roles at USNH if elected.

2. Q: If a member’s spouse, partner or immediate family member is currently serving on the Board or the Transition Team, is this member eligible for the MSC?

A: Yes. Any member may be nominated to the MSC, even if a member’s spouse, partner or immediate family member is currently serving on the Board or the Transition Team.   After the initial nomination process, potential nominees will have the opportunity to decide whether to accept nomination and confirm that such nominee’s spouse, partner and/or immediate family members have agreed to resign from the Board or Transition Team if the nominee is elected to the MSC.  Further, while a member is serving on the MSC, the member’s spouse, partner, and/or immediate family members will not be eligible for election to the Board or appointment to the Transition Team.

3. Q: To accept nomination to the MSC, do I have to resign from leadership roles now (i.e. during the nomination stage)?

A: No.  After the initial nomination process, potential nominees will have the opportunity to decide whether to accept nomination and agree to relinquish other leadership roles at USNH if elected.  A nominee need not resign from other leadership roles unless and until such nominee is actually elected to the MSC.

4. Q: If I am elected to the MSC, do I have to resign from membership in every group at USNH?

A: No.  Members of the MSC may continue to sing in the choir and participate in other activities at USNH, however, members of the MSC must resign from all leadership positions at USNH.

5. Q: Why are members elected to the MSC required to resign from leadership positions including the Board of Trustees and the Transition Team?

A: One reason is that the MSC is an extraordinary time commitment that spans a year and does not allow sufficient time for other congregation leadership roles.  Also the MSC is charged with discerning and holding the interest of the whole congregation and to not act as the representative of any particular perspective, committee, program or constituency; which is supported by MSC members’ withdrawal from other leadership roles. Another reason is related to fact that the Transition Team, the Board and other congregational leaders must work closely with the interim minister and members of the congregation. While the interim minister supports the formation and charge of the MSC, an interim minister is not involved in the ministerial selection and does not discuss prospective ministerial candidates so as not to influence the selection process or to give a candidate (someone the interim minister may know) an unfair advantage -or disadvantage.  While the MSC will undertake activities centered around discernment of the congregation’s identity, values and goals, which engage the congregation as a whole, the MSC should be insulated from individual or constituency group influence.  The active and ongoing involvement of the Board, Transition Team and other leaders with the congregation could result in inappropriate influence on members of the MSC that may compromise the integrity of the search process.  Withdrawal from these roles minimizes the opportunity for inappropriate influence on the search process.

6. Q: Why are the spouses, partners and immediate family members of persons elected to the MSC required to resign from positions on the Board of Trustees and the Transition Team?

A: Maintaining the confidentiality of the ministerial search candidates and insulating the MSC from undue influence is critical to the integrity of the search process.  Disclosure of the identity of a candidate can jeopardize the current ministry and the livelihood of a ministerial candidate and can compromise the integrity of the search process.  The nature of the relationship of spouses, partners and immediate family members is more likely to necessitate or result in the disclosure of ministerial candidate identities or identifying information about a candidate.  For example, such persons need to know the travel plans and location of the MSC member when the MSC is observing a candidate preaching, which would inadvertently disclose the identity of a candidate. Additionally, a spouse serving on the Transition Team or Board is privy to information about current USNH business and concerns that, if shared with a member of the MSC, may compromise the discernment process of the MSC member.  For example, a Board member sharing concerns about a current issue or concern (e.g. a financial or fundraising shortfall) with their spouse on the MSC could cause  the MSC member to place too much weight on a candidate’s skills to deal with a present concern at the cost of identifying the candidate best suited to the needs and mission of the congregation as a whole for the long term.  While disclosure can occur between friends as readily as other relationships, typical relationships among spouses, partners and immediate family members are sufficiently more likely, on balance, to result in or create opportunities for disclosure that this policy is a reasonable precaution.  Finally, allowing spouses, partners and immediate family members to serve simultaneously on the Board, Transition Team and/or MSC is likely to create a perception that decision-making authority is concentrated among a small group that is not representative of the whole congregation.  There are numerous other roles at USNH to utilize the talents of the spouses, partners and immediate family members of the MSC members and more than enough talented and insightful members of the congregation that overlapping participation in these roles by people in very close relationship to MSC members is unnecessary.

7. Q:  If I cannot be at USNH on Sunday, May 26 for the election of the MSC members, will I be able to vote for members of the MSC?

A:  Recognizing the importance of this vote, the Board has decided to allow absentee voting for USNH members who cannot attend the May 26 voting day. Two options will be offered:

 (1) Absentee voting at USNH on Sunday, May 19, 9:00AM-1:00PM.

 (2) Absentee voting on-line, Monday, May 20 at noon to Saturday, May 25 at noon.  To use this option, you must have access to email and you must pre-register at http://www.usnh.org/?page_id=2698 no later than Sunday, May 19 at noon.  The registration form is available here starting May 12.

Our congregation is currently being served by The Rev. Emily Melcher as Interim Minister for a term that continues until June 2014.  During this interim period, the congregation will engage in a a search process with the goal of calling a new Senior Minister.  Below is information concerning the ministerial search process.

Ministerial Search Communications

February 27, 2013 – Letter to Congregation (includes ministerial search process timeline)

March 11, 2013 – Update Letter Regarding Ministerial Search Nominations

May 10, 2013 – Update Letter Regarding Ministerial Search Committee Election

Ministerial Search Frequently Asked Questions

Registration for Online Absentee Voting for Ministerial Search Committee

Reading: “Trust” by Thomas R. Smith

It’s like so many other things in life

to which you must say no or yes.

So you take your car to the new mechanic.

Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking

clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,

the envelope passed by dozens of strangers–

all show up at their intended destinations.

The theft that could have happened doesn’t.

Wind finally gets where it was going

through the snowy trees, and the river, even

when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life

is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

Sermon

“Life is like licking honey from a thorn.” Like so many of the anecdotes and stories that find their way into sermons, this one came to me anonymously many years ago. It resonated as a much more evocative image than some of the other, more tired one-line summaries like the bowl of cherries — a more vivid way to name the sweetness and pain bound up together in this life of ours. Since ministry is a lot like life, it also seemed to me a fitting metaphor to guide my reflections this morning; so I asked my colleagues to send me their thoughts on what has been sweetest and most prickly about these twenty-five years of ministry. There was a lot of commonality.

We have found delight in the creation of worship, depth in walking with our people through their most perilous times, power in leading our congregations through difficult changes, awe in those pastoral moments when the holy is met. We’ve been blessed by the love of those we serve, and the friendship of our colleagues.

But at times, we have also been terribly wounded in our ministries. We carry scars from congregational conflict, from the stubbornness and dysfunction bound into the culture of some of our institutions, and from all the ways our people can find to project authority onto us so they can act out against it. We have struggled with issues around congregational growth: on the one hand we do believe that wherever two or more are gathered together, the spirit can be found; but on the other hand we take it so personally when attendance is thin or dwindling, and we carry a fretting anxiety that always, somehow, it is our fault.  It has been hard to navigate the communications changes these twenty-five years have brought: we try to resist the time-drain of e-mail, Facebook, texting, mobile phones and blogging in order to preserve the nearly anachronistic sweetness of the face-to-face encounters that keep our ministries grounded.

And we have suffered the grief of loss, as we accompany those we serve through their dying. We bow to the mystery, and lead the bereaved through rituals of healing, but over time we find ourselves walking with our own “great cloud of witnesses”, our loving ghosts — and this is both sweet and painful.

Here is the most evident place where the honey rests on a thorn: ministry is a work of such deep intimacy with other human beings, and the price of intimacy is loss. Life’s great, immutable promise is change; so the bargain is that as we love, we will also grieve. In our ministries we are caught up in so many different people’s lives — in their secrets and their shame, their hidden scars and public scandals, their victories, losses and longings. It is a privilege, and at times a weighty burden. We are asked for answers, for advice, for absolution. No matter what we say, or do not say, it will likely be remembered, and at times it will change how a life is lived or how a death is greeted.

To do this work well requires us to hold ourselves accountable to the power that brought us here in the first place — to engage our call, in our prayer life or in our meditations. It isn’t possible to go with our people into the liminal spaces where we are asked to walk without some way to sink our roots into deep water. We have to engage a spiritual practice that will keep us honest about our own shortcomings and faithful to our call. So the thorn lies in this as well: the privilege of being a spiritual leader demands that we study the intricate deceits of our own shadows, lest we go astray.

It seems quite incredible to me now, looking back at it, but neither in my seminary training nor in my early years of ministry did anyone talk to me about the importance of this accountability. Twenty-five years ago our ministry, like our congregations, was still afflicted by a sort of embarrassment about God and all the affiliated concepts. In seminary we could talk about our call to ministry but not about who or what was doing the calling, what that call meant or how to engage it most faithfully.

Theologian Martin Buber said, “Living means being addressed”. Some of us, for some reason, are haunted by this sense of being addressed: addressed by God, by Mystery, by the bottomless needs of the world.  I’ve come to believe that our calling is what emerges when we enter into the dialogue.  We’re called into conversation. We’re called to unfold ourselves from the stifling little box of personal obsessions and preoccupations and attend, instead, to some part of the world’s suffering. We are addressed by the gentle, relentless imperative to pay attention.

When I applied for admission to Starr King at the age of 27, I was trying hard to pay attention. I had spent five years immersed in social justice work, in a strong community of other young activists. I was not a Unitarian Universalist but an ex-Catholic, a tentative Buddhist and a political anarchist. The distinctly odd choice of seminary was prompted not by vocational calling, but by a profound spiritual hunger I did not know how to feed. It was something separate from my life as an activist, something few of my radical comrades shared or understood. I had no idea what to do with it, though I was quite sure it had nothing to do with church.

Starr King seemed a low-risk option, since I already lived in the Bay Area and had a flexible job I could hold onto. It beckoned with the promise that I could explore the entire menu of the Graduate Theological Union and thereby learn something that might satisfy, or at least quiet, this longing of mine. In my admissions interview I was adamant about my purposes, and the fact that I had no intention of ever entering the UU ministry. Bob Kimball looked down his nose at me and said, “Well, we’ll see.” I hope Bob remembered that encounter at some point during these twenty-five years and allowed himself to feel a bit smug. So much for Starr King being a low-risk venture.

The shift came for me in my second year, when I dropped out for a semester to live in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace and work against the U.S. sponsored war. In my companions there, both American and Nicaraguan, I found a radical practice of Christianity unlike anything I’d known before.  My path was changed completely by the six months I spent immersed in that work, in tumultuous, beautiful Nicaragua, so filled with violence and sacrifice. It was there that I came to know the power of collective action, grounded not merely in political conviction, but in spiritual practice. I saw nonviolence enacted right in the jaws of a devastating war, and witnessed the shining of that seed, that satyagraha of Gandhi’s, witnessed the serenity, humility and  courage it nourished in those who knew how to plant it well.

It was there that I began to consider this being addressed in a new way — began to engage the conversation more deeply, and to practice the disciplines that helped me listen. And it was there that I got the first hint that maybe I was not, after all, done with church, because I was surrounded by people who drew their strength and inspiration from congregational life. I returned to seminary with a new openness. And then I walked this unplanned path as it made itself known, one small step at a time.

I took an extension ministry in Winston-Salem because it was a limited time commitment and, not incidentally, I thought I was in love with a Methodist minister who lived in that town.  The church worked out; the relationship did not. By the time our extension ministry was ending I had fallen in love again, this time with a man in Connecticut. I moved there without a job, planning to return to social justice work. But the Unitarian Society of New Haven was in search. At the top of the list of what they wanted was a minister who would bring them more spirituality, and more social justice engagement. I said ‘yes’ to that vision, and to them, twenty-one years ago, and I have been there ever since.

You can perhaps see why for years, I thought of myself as a kind of accidental minister. It seemed to me that I had tiptoed in through the back door, never planning to do more than take a quick look around. And then, as in those peculiar dreams we sometimes have, I found myself wandering through its ever expanding rooms until I forgot I had intended to be somewhere else.

The poet said,  “It’s like so many other things in life/ to which you must say no or yes…. Sometimes the best thing to do is trust/….And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered/ even though you can’t read the address.” How faithfully my life has been delivered, it seems to me now, to the place I was meant to be, despite all my doubts and ambivalence. During this long ministry with one congregation, I learned to depend on the sustenance of corporate worship, a practice from which I was once so estranged. I stood in awe at the times, so often unpredictable, when music, silence, prayer and the best words we could muster somehow joined together into a crystalline moment when something vast and holy was evoked.

I learned how to walk with people I loved through their dying –  burdened with the grief of it and yet somehow also filled with a kind of fierce joy, born of the Mystery that thrums away out there on the other side of those shadowed gates.  I learned obedience to a spiritual practice, learned how to rest in the deep silence of solitary meditation and feed my soul for the work of each day. I learned the patience required by community — learned, reluctantly, to trust the often confounding wisdom that can arise eventually from even the most maddening congregational deliberations.

It was in this congregation that I married, and struggled to balance the demands of full-time ministry with those of mothering three children. When my children were little, I carried a relentless, fretting certainty that I was drastically short-changing both my congregation and my family. My people tolerated my angst and respected my boundaries — and they adored my children. They competed to snuggle them as babies, handing them off to one another when I was busy so that I often had to track them down from one pair of arms to another, but never once had to worry about whether they were safe or watched over. Two weeks ago, the youngest of those babies graduated from high school.

It was in and with this congregation that I found a way to hold together these twin imperatives of life that once seemed so divorced from one another: the call to make more justice in the world and the call to contemplative practice and the life of the spirit. The congregation has walked with me in this commitment; many times, they’ve been the ones to lead the way.

Despite all of this bounty and grace, in the last couple of years I began to feel restless. The being addressed,  and the conversation of my calling, began to seem punctuated with question marks. I tried to hold myself attentive to what might call my name. And what called was this new vision for the work of our faith in the world, this UU College of Social Justice. I said “yes” to becoming its first Director. After many weeks of farewell, during worship on Sunday three days ago, my congregation and I put the bookend on my long-ago installation and released each other from our covenant.

That I have left my congregation after so long a ministry feels both right, and sad: the honey, and the thorn — especially in leaving my elders, those I’ve known for this whole run of ours.  As one of them put it, with characteristic humor, “I was so looking forward to having you do my memorial service!”

But that I am leaving for this new justice ministry has a resonance beyond anything I could have hoped for. I leave by the same door through which I tiptoed twenty-five years ago, guided by the thread of that yearning to ground the justice work in a life of the spirit.  “Sometimes the best thing to do is trust/ ….And sometimes you sense/ How faithfully your life is delivered/ Even though you can’t read the address.”  May it be so for you as well. AMEN.

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“At the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly last year, there was spirited discussion of new definitions for our denominational leadership. It was suggested we really need two leaders — a chief executive officer for administration and a spiritual leader: a kind of high priest to the denomination. At one point someone asked the provocative question, “What would such a spiritual leader do?” A youth delegate rose to the occasion and said helpfully, “Just hang out and be religious!”

Beneath the humor is something profound. What is the task of the minister — what is she to do or be? I can do no better than repeat the words of the youth delegate: “Just hang out and be religious.”

….[But] as you may have noticed, ministers walk with feet of clay across the clean carpets of our congregations, leaving their footprints behind…. Every one of us ministers with the proverbial tarnished halo… And so, while ministers are charged with responsibility for the spiritual nurture of congregations, congregations are likewise charged to care for their clergy. Today I am brilliant in the pulpit and you are spiritually intoxicated with my wisdom; next week I stumble and bumble through my uncertainty and need your forgiveness. Today I am a great rock of comfort in a weary land; tomorrow I am blown about as the sands of the desert and I need the oasis of your strength. Today I dazzle you with my perspicacity; tomorrow I forget our appointment.

Blessed are they who minister and blessed are they who are ministered unto. Blessed be the task of the minister. Blessed be the task of the congregation — for ultimately they are one and the same. There are few great ministers or great congregations in isolation: they tend to create one another.”

Sermon: The Far Horizon: A love letter to my congregation…

Rev. Kathleen McTigue   Sunday, May 13, 2012

As many of you know, this will be the last sermon I’ll preach here as your minister. I’ll still be present among you for some weeks to come, and even while on leave I’ll be engaged in some of the work of ministry — but this is the last full-on sermon. The knowledge that this was so put a certain amount of pressure on my psyche as the time for writing drew near.  I’ve delivered something approaching 500 sermons here as your minister, and that fact led me to bounce back and forth this week between two extremes in perspective. On the one hand, this is my last crack at it: What pithy, urgent, essential thing can I leave you with? On the other hand, it’s hard not to wonder: after so very many sermons, what’s left to say that won’t be redundant?

The truth is I probably would never truly run out of things to say, since I was blessed (and cursed) with the Irish gift for gab, and since no matter how good I may be at “just hanging out and being religious”, the unfailing expectation you bring each Sunday is that I will in fact have something to say to you. So the bigger challenge was the temptation to somehow cram into this one remaining Sunday a reiteration of every worthwhile thing I’ve ever said over the years. Once I got past that, I realized there was only one essential thing to say today, which is: Thank you.

My ministry here has depended completely on how you have empowered and shaped me, strengthened my voice, carried me when I was flagging and showed me, in each moment, what it truly means to hang out with you and be religious. In far more ways than I can name today, you as a congregation have created this ministry we have been so very, very lucky to have together. You know how to receive ministry, and you know how to give it — and this will carry you gracefully into the future you’ll share with the next minister fortunate enough to be named as yours.

So: Thank you. Thank you for allowing me — in Dick Gilbert’s words — to walk with my feet of clay across your clean carpets. Like all human beings, I am a work in progress, and this was surely even more true when you first called me here at the ripe old age of thirty-four.  When I was in seminary, there were evaluations at the end of each term that included the professors identifying for each student our accomplishments and what were euphemistically named as our “growing edges”. You have been enormously tolerant of my “growing edges” through our years together. You have not demanded perfection. You have been liberal with your praise of my strengths and generous with your forgiveness for my weaknesses.

Thank you for taking seriously the mandate to create here not merely a community but a spiritual community. This congregation was founded in the 1950s, when a particular form of humanism was ascendent within Unitarianism. At its best, this influence carried our movement into the modern era by showing us that there need not be a contradiction between the rational mind and the life of the spirit. But at its worst, it sometimes replaced an old orthodoxy with a new one, atheist humanism as “the new normal” and any other theological orientation suspect.

It was this congregation, founded by humanist Unitarians, that chose to call to its ministry a young woman who defined herself theologically as a mystic. That term makes me cringe a bit today, because it evokes a slightly whacky spiritual saint. But that is in fact how I identified myself, not because I thought I was enlightened but because I was filled with awe at the mysteries of the universe, the mystery of our living and dying. I believed — and still believe — that our central task is to witness to that mystery, and do all that we can to hold ourselves open to what it will teach us. Despite my rather exotic self-definition, what you heard in those early attempts at articulation was what you also wanted: a way to honor the wisdom of humanism while also lifting up the rich  insights born of intuition, emotion, religious teachings, spiritual practices and numinous experiences.

The yearning for an authentic, collective spiritual life is what has given rise to the vibrancy of worship here. Worship that’s alive and effective is not something we can take for granted in our often hyper rational, self-consciously alternative UU congregations. Here, we’ve found a way to  recognize that through word and music and silence, together we enact something on Sunday morning that can take us a beyond what we might explain with the rational side of our minds. You have consistently brought forward an enthusiastic openness as a congregation to being moved: to having not just your minds stimulated, but your spirits awakened and your souls stretched and your hearts moved.

And this goes beyond Sunday worship. Back in 1999 I took my first sabbatical. As part of it, I went on an eight-day retreat at the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. This experience jump-started my meditation practice, which up to that time had been sporadic at best. At Upaya I realized for the first time that I could not continue to do ministry unless I found a sure and steady way to replenish my own spiritual wells, which were running bone dry.  I had no idea how this congregation would react to the news that your minister had become a committed practitioner of Buddhist meditation.  But I preached about it, and then offered a beginners class in how to sit meditation. Fifty-four people signed up for that class: Fifty-four, out of 350 members!

At the end of five sessions, we invited Beth Roth to bring her much broader expertise to this community as a meditation teacher. She has been teaching here ever since, and by my rough estimate, well over half the members of this community have at least experimented with how to bring this discipline into your lives. The idea that this congregation exists in part to foster in us such spiritual practices is something taken so much for granted now that it takes an effort to remember that twenty-one years ago, the word “spiritual” was not often spoken — much less in tandem with the word “discipline”! We have evolved — and we’ve done it together.

Thank you for pushing yourselves so consistently to live out our faith in the wider world. This is not an easy thing to do. It’s hard to keep faith with the demands made by that interdependent web that shines at the center of all that we believe. It’s painful to deliberately walk out of our zones of comfort to look unflinchingly at the depths of suffering that are often out of sight until we move toward them.  It is the challenge of each day, and therefore the challenge of our lifetimes, to find again and again a path forward into that suffering in the name of healing, in the name of justice. It’s a tough thing, to come to terms with our own privilege. It is the tremendous mandate of our faith to keep doing so, and to keep going out toward the suffering of the world without despairing at the size of our task.

This call to social justice has always been at the heart of how I have understood my own call to ministry. But it is here, with you, that that call has been enacted. It’s here that I have found my most authentic voice, here that I have been sustained when my own spirit was sinking, here that I was met by companions who not only walked with me but who bravely, creatively, struck out in entirely new directions while I merely cheered you from the sidelines. You have been, and are, my inspiration.

Thank you for letting me walk with you through the hardest struggles of your lives. Of the many things I will miss about parish ministry, the one I most grieve leaving behind is the chance to accompany people to the gates of death, and then honor them in a memorial service here in their beloved community. This part of ministry is especially precious to me because of the depth of intimacy in that walk. Most people are pretty well done with superficiality when they have to confront their own mortality.  It’s an extraordinary privilege to walk the path right up to that point, as it turns toward the shadow and mystery of death.

To be trusted as a companion is no small thing — to be invited in, to listen as a person comes to terms with the power of his life or the meaning of her death, and the core of faith that seems to reside there. That I have been privileged to walk that path with so many of our vanished companions means that in leaving, I take with me a great cloud of witnesses, my loving ghosts. Maybe more than any other dimension of ministry, this part of it has shaped and deepened my own spiritual life as I have bowed, again and again, before those mysterious doors, and marveled at the ways our love and our sense of connection stay with us, even years after those we’ve loved are gone.

Thank you for all of the ways you’ve cared for me personally, a care that first manifested before we even knew each other. When I was first invited to be your minister, at the end of our long candidating week together, I was led up to the office where I waited anxiously for the congregational vote.  After maybe two minutes, from up there alone in the office I heard a great cheer go up. Well, that seemed awfully fast — but it surely meant great news, so I waited expectantly for someone to come get me. But I waited, and waited, for probably another half hour. I was beginning to feel the faint stirrings of panic when I heard another great cheer go up. After that second sound of jubilation I was finally fetched, and told the wonderful news that the congregation had called me to be your minister. But what could explain that first, early exuberance?

It turned out to be the moment at which the Board told the congregation that I had requested one small change in the ministerial contract: I had asked for a maternity leave clause. That cheer is what greeted my request. Maybe this sounds like small potatoes to you, but I assure you that it is not. I entered ministry at a time when it was fairly well accepted that women would join men as ministers in our fold; I was by no means the earliest pioneer. But most of the women who preceded me had entered ministry later in life. There were precious few role models of those who had continued in full-time ministry while becoming  mothers.  That cheer at the idea that I could — and should! — do both things was an affirmation that continued to reverberate through our years together.

It had to be invented, and reinvented, as we went along. When my children were little, there were whole years when I carried a relentless, fretting certainty that I was drastically short-changing both my congregation and my family. You tolerated my angst, and then so many of you gently told me –repeatedly — that most everything that went on here could function just fine without me, but that my children could not, and you would send me out the door and home. Somewhere in there, with your help and support, I began to realize that my life was not a balancing act between competing spheres but had become one seamless thing: the spiritual path was in parenting as well as in ministry. They were not separate.

You welcomed my husband when he joined us here, without ever implying that he was supposed to fill some kind of pre-defined role as the minister’s spouse. You joyously welcomed the son I married into, and then the daughters I had in the following three years. You competed to snuggle them, handing them off to one another when I was busy during coffee hour so that I often had to track them down from one pair of arms to another, but never once had to worry about whether they were safe or watched over. You taught my children all of the abiding ethical and religious truths you have helped teach every child here, and never once burdened them with any special expectation as the minister’s kids.  For all of this — for all of this — thank you.

Thank you for the pastoral care you offer here so lovingly. We have been through some terrible losses together — the deaths of beloved elders, sometimes in quick succession; the searing grief the year we lost two children of the congregation to two different car accidents, six months apart; the trauma of the Oklahoma City bombing; the even larger trauma of September 11th.  At these times and at so many others, the pastoral ministry here has rested on the nested circles of support from scores of you.

You have lifted your voices in song to help us express our broken hearts. You have buoyed all of our extraordinary staff in their varied efforts to carry us through. You have quietly passed tissues, held one another, accompanied each other in silence or listened one another into speech. You have stuck it out for the long haul, sitting by bedsides, bringing food, sending flowers, providing rides.  And you have held me up: lifted me in prayer, grabbed me in the hall to hug me, allowed my own tears to flow with yours, and spoken your solidarity far more times than I could count. Nothing that I have done as a pastor would have been possible without you.

In all of these ways — prophetic, pastoral, spiritual, personal — I thank you for what you’ve given me as I have tried to live into the calling to be your minister. I am glad and excited for where my path is taking me next, in service still to that broad imperative to mature spiritually and to put faith into action in the healing of our world.  I am also glad and excited to follow you in the next chapter of this congregation’s life, because I know that all you’ve given to me in my years here is yours still. It’s yours to keep on giving to each other. It is yours with which to sustain, embolden and at times gently guide your next minister, as you have sustained, emboldened and guided me. And of course, I am sad at all that I’m leaving. But I do believe that I take so much of you with me as I go that there’s a way in which I don’t leave you behind at all: you travel on with me.

I preached my very first sermon to you as your called minister on Homecoming Sunday, September 1991. At the end of that sermon I offered you as a parable a story told in MS Magazine by Robin Morgan. She wrote about a trip to a poor village in the Philippines where she sat on the mud floor of a woman’s home and listened to that woman describe her dreams for a better life. What she wanted more than anything — more than better food or housing or clothes — was to learn to read, because, she said “someday I might go somewhere. I hear there are signs on the roads. If I could read the signs, I could know where I was going.”

I offered that to you as a parable back then at our very beginning together because, I said, the purpose of a religious community like this one is to help us learn to read the signs, so we can better discern where we are meant to go with our lives.  When we reach a crossroads — whether it’s one in an individual life, or a huge one that touches the whole society — we need a place like this, so we can help each other read the signs and thus know where we are going.

In these twenty-one years of our shared ministry, we have been learning to read the signs together.  What we’ve learned has carried us a long way on our journey. Thank you for letting me walk with you this distance. Thank you for walking so faithfully with me.  AMEN.

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Life is a process by which each of us comes gradually to a conscious awakening, to a discovery of the fundamental issues of our lives. [We are] in a struggle to move toward…wholeness, individuation, fuller consciousness, a return to the One. And we do not move forward in isolation.

We share the journey with all who travel with us, the ones who came before, those who will follow. There is a splendid common mosaic which underlies it all, and its completion awaits the arrival of each unique and individual piece.

The inner workings of our individual lives form the outer fabric of the one great collective life. Our personal fates and the common destiny are one and intertwined. There can therefore be no such thing as a small life, or one without meaning, for the journey transcends the individual life…In [an] interconnected universe, the personal quest is inseparable from the common dream; the private life and the collective journey are one.

Sermon: Answering the Call, by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, Sunday, May 6, 2012

The theme for our worship services in this month of May is perseverance. It was a theme chosen last summer, when I had a vision of this congregational year unfolding through the springtime much as any other year. I had no way of knowing, back then, of the new vocational call that would come into my own life. If I had known, perhaps I would have chosen a different theme for May: perseverance, after all, kind of implies staying put, hanging in there, digging in.

But however changed the context is for me from what I might have imagined last summer, I found myself glad that I could speak today to this rich word, because perseverance is a core virtue of community. And now more than ever, as we prepare ourselves for the diverging of our paths, it’s an excellent time to think about the practices that sustain this community of faith. They are practices that have nothing to do with who serves as your minister, but everything to do with how each of you listen for the ways you’re called out and called forth in this place.

Maybe being called sounds odd as a term for it.  I will hazard a guess that very few of you first came through these doors in search of a calling of any kind, or with the sense that you were answering one. You came out of curiosity, or out of particular needs and motivations with no real idea that this place might demand something of you.  But sooner or later, you shifted from the status of wanderer or spiritual explorer into something more settled. When you became a member here, whether that was forty years ago or just last month, you did it because your soul had found its home. And at some point in that movement into homeowner of this spiritual community, you have realized  — or you will realize — that you do, indeed, have a calling here.

That calling will take lots of different forms over the years you spend in this place. It takes different shapes based on your skills and inclinations. Answering it can range from making coffee on Sunday morning to serving as President of the Board; from tending the memorial garden on a single Saturday to teaching in our Sunday school year after year, or leading a new social justice task force. But no matter what the specific work to which you’re beckoned here, what it amounts to at its core is one thing: it is the call to shape this place.

You are called to shape not only what happens within these walls, but also the depth of the imprint you together can have in the wider world. You are called to shape not only what this congregation does, but how it goes about the doing. And most important and difficult of all, you are called to shape yourselves in the process: to take with utter seriousness the notion that each human being can grow in wisdom and compassion as long as we are alive. Nothing else that happens here is really of much use to us or to the world unless we are also growing our souls in this way.

That you each renew your commitment to the calling of this community matters now more than ever, with the transitions unfolding in the coming weeks and months. Change always makes people a little anxious. Change within a community can give the whole place a case of the jitters.

This is where perseverance comes it. It has to do with seeing how rooted you are, together, no matter what the changes that visit you. It means keeping faith, in an old-fashioned language.

This isn’t an easy or straightforward calling. Paradoxically, faith communities can be maddening places in which to grow our spiritual lives.  Despite the many things you have in common with each other, you don’t form here a neatly drawn little circle, a communion of the singularly like-minded.  It’s a lot messier than that: a lot richer and more crazy-making than that — and therefore more soul-stretching. There are people here who will become your bosom-buddies, your fondest companions, people who seem to be just like you. There are others you will put on pedestals, who shine for you as exemplars of all you hope to be: they stay centered through chaos or conflict, exhibit nearly superhuman patience, and seem able to remain kind even when you know someone’s got their teeth on edge. You want to be like them; you’re thrilled to be in their company.

And in addition to these buddies and bodhisattvas, you will unfortunately discover that there are nearly always a few people in this, your chosen community, who just drive you crazy. The most humbling and effective thing you can do, to keep faith even with those difficult and annoying people, is to remember that there are also a few within these walls who you drive nuts, despite your indisputably stellar qualities. As Methodist writer Kathleen Norris put it, “The church… is a shaky proposition.  It is a human institution, full of ordinary people, sinners like me, who [can] say and do cruel or stupid things.  But it is also a [sacred place] full of good purpose, which partakes of a unity far greater than the sum of its parts.” Or as Universalist Angus MacLean put it, “We all possess enough virtues and vices to merit one another’s respect and compassion. This is my reason for expecting so much from a church….We cannot expect to find a company of saints [anywhere], but it doesn’t take a saint to do what we must do. In fact, I feel the saints could do less than the dedicated imperfect in the sharing of what our souls need.”

Like every other congregation, this is not a community of saints, but of  manifestly imperfect human beings. Somehow, despite this truth, despite the many ways our quirks and failings annoy or even occasionally enrage other occupants of this house of faith, we manage not only to survive together but to thrive. This doesn’t happen because of how good we are, or how alike we are, but because we are the dedicated imperfect: it happens because we persevere.  Happily, there are habits of mind and heart that we have it in our power to cultivate, which can make our perseverance easier and more rewarding. So today, as we rapidly approach the point in our pathway when we will no longer walk it together as minister and congregation, I want to lift up a few of these. They are elements in the spiritual practice of community, which is what we are always about within the walls of this religious home.

One practice of community is to dig deeply into the spiritual truth that’s held in one of our principles and purposes when we name “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”. We often lift up this principle as an antidote to prejudice and oppression out there in the world, and that’s a good and a powerful way to speak our religious truth. We don’t always remember it as well when we consider our own selves and the gifts we might bring forward in the building up of this beloved place.

Though you know intellectually that there is need here for each person to pour in time and talents to nourish this place, you probably also know that there’s a fairly small circle of people who tend to do the bulk of the work. There are plenty of reasons why this is so. At any given time, any person may have a whole list of good reasons why they can’t step into a leadership role or try out that new initiative that keeps tugging on the imagination. You’re busy, and you’re tired; these days, you may be working two jobs to make ends meet, and taking care of kids or aging parents or both. When it’s all you can do to keep your head above water, you are absolutely right to say “no” if you are asked to take on one more thing, no matter how worthwhile it may be. But if your answer is born not so much of busyness as it is of self-doubt, take the time to consider, and to listen carefully to whether or not you are being gently urged to stretch into a new competence you’ve not quite believed that you possess.

A long time ago I heard a colleague tell this story: while sitting on the family porch and planning a memorial service for the family matriarch, who was his congregant, it came to light that this elderly woman, who had known many hard times in her life, had become something of a hoarder.

Her children had been reluctant to tackle the large job of emptying her house because they knew how much stuff there was going to be to sort through and it was daunting. But it was made easier by the fact that she’d  lived by the motto, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. She had meticulously labeled everything she had saved.  And so it was that when the family finally made it to the over-stuffed attic, among many other things they found there a box neatly labeled, “Pieces of String Too Small to Save”. On opening the box they were not at all surprised to find  that it did indeed contain many, many pieces of string too small to save.

You just know, without ever having met that woman, that even as she knew on one level that her saving of the string was silly, on another level she was muttering under her breath, “You never can tell!” On the literal level, the story makes us laugh and shake our heads and feel grateful that we don’t have quite this level of compulsiveness.

But on the metaphoric level it’s a true story about all of us: all of us have stored within us and tucked away and all but forgotten, gifts and talents and contributions that we have neatly labeled as “too small to save” (or too insignificant to be of use).  But — you never can tell! So keep yourselves open to the proposition that something you consider an insignificant talent of your heart or head or hands is in fact exactly what this community needs. Let your little light shine!

Though I regret that this is so, I must tell you that there is a kind of unpopular subordinate clause to this affirmation. This is a second discipline of community I hope you will hold clearly in mind and heart: we shine with different lights. However obvious it may seem on one level, it bears the gentle reminder that we are not all equally suited to every role. Sometimes we know this about ourselves. I  know, for instance, that my tendency toward impatience makes me a poor choice to teach a large and rowdy class of fourth-grade boys. Someone else might be quite clear that his shyness with strangers makes him a less than ideal greeter at the door on Sunday mornings.

But sometimes we don’t see our deficits as clearly as we see our gifts. The sharp wit that we think is so charming might actually be experienced as hurtful by others. What you consider to be your boundless energy and dynamism might seem to others more like a bulldozer. The speed with which I generate ideas may make me blind to the fact that I interrupt others when they’re trying to bring their own thoughts forward.

The time of transition that’s about to begin is a tender time in the life of this community. There is always vulnerability in change, because there is loss, even when we know there’s tremendous opportunity there too. It’s a tender time. Into this tender time, new roles will rise up for leadership, roles that seem very important or urgent. Because of that importance or urgency, because of your vision or commitment, because of your time and willingness, you may really, really want to be the one to lead the charge. And despite all your energy and willingness, the wisdom of the community might gently tell you, “No”.

We each have our gifts, and we each have our limitations. It is hard to speak this truth to one another. We want so much to affirm, to compliment, to be kind and gentle with one another. It is so painful to have to tell someone No when they raise their hand and volunteer that often, against many better judgements, we put someone into a role for which they are truly not suited. Congregations, more than any other human institution, can suffer terribly when this happens. The person suffers the embarrassment of being ineffective; the community suffers from inertia or conflict.

The work of spiritual community requires our openness to both kinds of movement: the willingness to step forward when our gifts can be of use;  and the willingness to step back, when what we offer is not quite right for a particular role. It requires our affirmation of one another’s gifts, our gratitude for every contribution; and also a deep conviction that truth-telling is what we owe each other, even when speaking that truth feels costly.

So there are gifts that each person brings forward here; there are roles, especially in leadership, that require specific kinds of talents, and the willingness to tell the truth about it if this place is to keep on thriving. But the greatest gift you can offer each other, the thing that makes this community shine as no other kind of community really can, is your willingness to trust each other enough to practice here the arts of right living. I settled on this phrase for it — right living –  because I can’t come up with any other way to say what I think it means to try to live out of the virtues we most honor. These are patience and courage, kindness and tolerance, compassion and humility, integrity and gratitude — those qualities we want so much to bring forward to the world because we know they hold the key to its healing.

The purpose of a religious community is to help us better to live out these qualities. And the way we do it — the only way to do it — is to practice. Which is why we need to give one another the gift of trust, because we know we will fall short of our aspirations, again and again. It’s trust that lets us forgive each other; it’s trust that lets us try again.

One of the things that can almost always be said about this place is that it’s busy: there is a tremendous bustle of activity. All of it, everything that we do here, is designed to serve some angle of our overall purpose. But none of what we do here matters in the slightest if we lose sight of how we’re doing it.  How we do it is the practice of our religion. How we do it is the growing of our souls. So whether you’re teaching dance steps for the musical, arguing a point of policy in a meeting, organizing a class or cleaning up the kitchen, if you pay attention you’ll see that what you’re really doing is shaping the life of this congregation.

The kindness of your voice when you speak; the silence you hold, instead of gossiping; the anger you notice clearly enough as it rises up that you keep from acting out of its energy; the care you take in saying “thank you” — all of the ways we present ourselves to one another, all of the ways we treat each other — this is what it means to live our faith. This is what it means to practice what we believe.  And grandiose though it may sound, this is what it means to change the world. Because if we can do these things here — if we can manifest compassion here, practice living into our virtues here — then we can also imagine bringing them forward into the world that so desperately needs us to live like this.

Episcopal theologian Alan Jones wrote, “We have to keep both [currents] going — the problem-solving, [all the activities], born of the mental genius of our species, and the fearless contemplation of gigantic things, which is the spiritual genius of our species. Souls come into being when they are willing to contemplate gigantic things…”

This is the place where souls come into being, because here we are willing to contemplate gigantic things: like a world at peace, a world of justice, hearts brimming with compassion. May it be so: AMEN.

The Hadron Collider near Geneva will shortly be reactivated and scientists seem confident that this year the elusive Higgs Boson, the predictive fundamental building block of physics, will be located – or perhaps not!  The best description I’ve read of the Higgs Boson comes from what physicist Richard Jacobson is reported to have said at Geneva – this is how he describes the quest….”It’s annoying!  It’s like a missing shoe; you have one and you know the other is there somewhere – you just can’t find it!”

Well, hopefully they will find it, for if not – it’s back to square one.  Like most people, I find it virtually impossible to get my mind around the truths of quantum physics.  I’m told that mathematically it’s a world of simplicity and beauty – but I guess my math just isn’t up to it, and the description of quantum physics in the non-mathematical world is totally counter intuitive.  But let’s not be intimidated.  Neils Bohr, one of its’ early pioneers, put it this way, “those who aren’t shocked when they first come across quantum theory can’t possibly have understood it!”

Basically the quantum world seems to be a world of probability rather than certainty, a world of both / and, – a world where fundamental entities are both particles and waves, and are located both here and there, at the same moment in time.  It’s difficult to comprehend!

But paradoxically it’s made some of the traditional problems of the nature of God easier to understand.  I was introduced to theology before I was introduced to quantum physics, and like all people preparing for ministry I spent many hours in the library and seminar room wrestling with the fact that the early counselors of the church insisted that faith is fundamentally a world of both / and.   It’s a world of utter paradox.  I found this both / and world difficult to grasp.  Surely this paradox couldn’t be right!  But now quantum physics tells us that the world itself is paradox.  The fundamental nature of existence is paradox – both / and.

Hopefully we will soon have the Hadron Collider give this theory the stamp of approval.  If we must live with paradox, and it seems that we must, than surely we can live with it in a bit of theology – with or without a missing shoe.

Sermon: The Divine Trickster: Rev. Marion Visel

I love paradox!  Things that are self-contradictory or absurd but express a possible truth in the both / and world of science and theology, for instance;

Unitarians think there is one God, and mostly we don’t believe in him.

You can leave the beach being both empty and full.

And, on the quantum level – every day is April Fool’s Day!

I confess to being excited last fall when researchers reported particles travelling faster than light; even knowing that particles traveling faster than light is forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity thus overturning a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe, blurring the line between past and present, and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.  I didn’t realize how much I was rooting for those faster than light particles until I learned that the research was discredited.

I love the absurd satire of Groucho Marx, one of my favorite philosophers.  The backward logic of the Marx Brothers satires ridicules fascism, war-mongering, and polite high society.

And, I really enjoy the fact that we don’t know why we celebrate April Fool’s Day.   Perhaps its’ origin has to do with the change to the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 when New Year’s Day shifted from April 1^st to January 1^st.

A celebration at the turn of the seasons makes the most sense to me, as April Fool’s Day is a perfect book-end for Mischief Night which comes at the beginning of the autumn/winter season.  Mischief Night and April Fool’s Day are traditions of casting off reason and good behavior, and indulging ourselves in a feast of mischief.  They are times when children are permitted to sneak about and lay traps for their neighbors, and adults are free to indulge in childish pranks.

Another explanation of the origins of April Fools’ Day is provided by Joseph Boskin, professor of history at Boston University.  He said that the practice began during the reign of Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. Constantine, amused, allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day.  Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day and the custom became an annual event.

“In a way,” explains Boskin, “it was a very serious day since in those times fools were really wise men.  It was the role of jesters to put things in perspective with humor.”

An Associated Press article appeared in many newspapers spreading this explanation.  There’s only one catch: Boskin made the whole thing up!  It took a couple of weeks for the AP to realize that they themselves had been victims of an April Fools’ joke.

[David Johnson and Shmuel Ross]

I love paradox, living in a world of probability rather than certainty; as long as it’s on a cosmic or cultural scale, and not in my life.  I have never appreciated it when paradox, the Fool, the Joker, or the trickster pops up in my own life.  Because the trickster, embodied in people or situations, bring disorder and uncertainty.

I do not like it when I lose my wallet, which many associate with a time of change in one’s identify.  The last time I lost my wallet was the summer I was leaving my firmly established life in Connecticut to go to divinity school in California.  And, I lost my wallet again about 3 weeks ago.  What could possibly be shifting now?  [Sr. Minister, Kathleen McTigue announced her resignation two weeks ago in order to begin a new and exciting position with the UUA/UUSC.]  While I will still be part-time Associate Minister at USNH, and plan to “be the continuity” (as in embodying the positive aspects of this transition time) even I must admit that my role with you over the next couple of years will be a bit different than it has been the previous six years.

I live in the house I grew up in.  I have known my next door neighbors on one side since childhood.  My newer neighbors on the other side had only been there for twenty-one years.  There was a time this January when suddenly my newer neighbors bought a house and moved away, and my older neighbors had a health crisis and so went to a nursing home, and the commercial property behind my house, which had been in continuous use since it was built 50 years ago, was suddenly empty.

This change around me shook me.  I was a combination of angry and afraid, I felt both vulnerable and staunchly protective of my neighborhood.  I don’t get stuck in emotions much but I was stuck in them for a couple of weeks this January.   I realized that quite literally the circumstances that surrounded me were not in my control.

Toward the end of January, still steeped in this emotion stew, I visited one of my hospice patients.  She looked thinner and paler than the last time I had seen her but she had a big smile and a sparkle in her eyes.  In the course of our conversation she said, “I’m doing OK today, not great but OK, but I just decided if I’m not going to be happy now, when I am going to be happy?”

It was as if a switch flipped in me!  As I left her house, stepping out into the “too warm for January” sunshine, I said to myself, “While nothing is certain, you really are OK.  And if you’re not going to be happy now, when will you be happy?”  The circumstances that surrounded me had not changed but I had.  The tricksters’ purpose is to open us to life’s multiple layers of insight, even embracing paradox, so that a deeper point can be made.

The ancient Tarot deck was not used as a form of prediction but a technique where a person communicates with their subconscious, so the conscious and subconscious can collaborate on making choices.  Twenty-two cards of the Tarot deck constitute “the Fool’s Journey.” The importance of “The Fool” in the Tarot deck is symbolized by the fact that it’s the only card or image that made the transition into the deck of playing cards we use today, the Fool became  “the Joker.”  We often just discard the Joker from the deck except when we use it in a card game where “the Joker is wild.”

The Fool or the Joker is a symbol of the void, the pre-creation state containing all possibilities.  Jungian analyst, Marie von Franz, called the Fool a symbol of “psychic wholeness before the rise of ego consciousness.”  The Fool typically appears in Tarot decks as a happy-go-lucky mortal about to step off a cliff into the abyss.  There is in the Fool an element of the divine trickster.  Remember all of those ‘Roadrunner cartoons”?  No matter how wily the coyote was the roadrunner always out-tricked him, because the Roadrunner was really the Fool who had the ability to walk off cliffs into space and not get killed, unaware of dangers all around it, and unself-consciously happy to be alive.

Containing all possibilities, the Fool represents the phenomenon of “synchronicity” or “coincidences” between happenings.  The Fool is the part of us that connects the greater whole, so things are constantly “just happening.”

The child-like symbol of the Fool is a symbol of the human soul the spark of life that reincarnates again and again until it awakens to itself.  Reincarnation is the secret key to the Fool.  Like a child whose awareness is limited to the present moment, the Fool moves from moment to moment, or life to life, without analysis of what has gone before or what might come in the future.

It is the Fool in us who urges the personality away from stagnation, toward enlightenment, and transformation, without fear of the future.  Whenever change happens, the Fool in us is reborn and released into activity.  As von Franz reminds us, “every time a human being makes real progress in consciousness, the whole world for him has changed; relationships change and the outlook on the outer world and on his own situation changes.  There is complete rebirth of the world.”

Like a jester in the court of a medieval king, the childlike Fool is free to speak the truth without punishment or censorship, because we trust in the innocence of her motivation.  She can function for us as an agent of awakening, like the child of the famous fairy tale who announces to the entire community of people trapped in illusion: “The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!”  The Fool or trickster, risks speaking the truth about their culture.

Jesus often took on the role of trickster.  He makes the connection between loving God and our neighbor as ourselves.  He tricks his adversaries because he is the answer in the way that he embodies love of God and love of neighbor.  And, Jesus does it by pulling down all the pretense of religiosity, moral righteousness and smug self-assurance.  He is subversive in transforming those around him and his culture, by overcoming the powers that are based on hatred, bigotry and fear.  We can become the tricksters of our time; acting as an equalizer between people and situations, loving our neighbor as ourself, standing with our neighbor when others attempt to harm or to devalue them, or seek control over the poor, the weak, and the voiceless.

You may be familiar with the “Happy Planet Index” from advertisements

for Costa Rica because they want us to know they rank number one on this index.  The index combines environmental impact and people living long and happy lives.  Nothing to dislike about that but psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, helped me to see it another way.

Kahneman, the only non-economist ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, believes governments should focus on reducing suffering rather than maximizing happiness.  He points out that suffering is easier to measure than happiness and that governments around the world are more likely to work to reduce suffering rather than to promote pleasure and satisfaction.   Suffering is not the absence of happiness; it is defined and measured by people who want to avoid grief, worry, loneliness, despair, boredom, exhaustion and physical pain.  Kahneman proposes that our leaders should be judged by how well they promote life, liberty and the reduction of suffering.

A research study in the United Kingdom found that those with an income of the equivalent of U.S. $75,000. ranked very low on the suffering index.  They had the relative security of housing, food, medical care, transportation, and so forth.  The study also found that any amount above that $75,000. income threshold really didn’t change how happy people are.

Life is full of paradox, and the trickster, the Fool, the Joker, will pay many visits to our lives – usually, when we least expect them.  Just when we think that our lives are well-ordered and we are too mature, too competent to be thrown off of our steady course, a trickster is bound to pop up.

It’s the role of the trickster to be our teacher, to awaken us to who we are, or need to be – now.  The trickster appears when a way of thinking or being becomes outmoded and needs to be called into question.  The trickster exists to question, and will point out flaws so that we do not accept things blindly.  The trickster makes us grow whether we want to or not.

May we be guided by the divine trickster in our deep struggles; when faced with what we fear the most, when called to be a compassionate neighbor, even if it is out of our comfort zone – may we be willing to be the Fool and not worry about appearing foolish.

May we be willing to take a chance, and be open to having a bit of fun along the way.

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The Anti-Racism Team is very grateful to all those who completed our survey several months ago. For those who are interested in viewing summary results, there is a link at the bottom of this post. We are taking the results very seriously, and are using your responses and comments to help shape our work for the coming year.

We are also grateful for the many positive responses we have received to the worship service recently conducted by the team, with Jessie Whitehead’s message “Embracing Racial Equality- Why It Matters.” The mission of the Anti-Racism Team is to assist USNH in the development of its identity as an anti-racist congregation by leading our spiritual community to a deeper understanding of racism, and to expand its role in actively addressing the challenges of racism at personal, institutional and societal levels. We want to be sure that our community is a welcoming and comfortable space for all those who may be attracted to the spiritual principles of Unitarian Universalism.

In response to several comments we received on the survey, we would like to clarify the term “white privilege,” sometimes referred to as “white skin privilege.”  This does not mean that light-skinned people can skate through life with no barriers, particularly economic barriers. Rather it refers to certain societal privileges and ease granted, which go largely unperceived  because they are simply the “what’s so” for those of us so privileged. It has a lot to do with recognizing that there are issues and situations we simply never have to encounter. Realizing our white skin privilege can bring an awareness, or at least an acknowledgment, that “white”  people are generally not subject to the subtle and not-so-subtle slights, judgments, misunderstandings, suspicions, rejections and exclusions that people of color routinely encounter in all aspects of living in the larger white-dominant culture. Our team feels it is part of our mission to invite and encourage our community to be awake and aware on this subject.

The anti-racism team would like to encourage the involvement of all in the USNH community who are interested in supporting this work. Our meetings are normally on the third Tuesday of each month, and are open to anyone in the congregation. Please let us know if you may be interested in being part of the team, or otherwise supporting our efforts. We will have a “meet and greet” table after both services on Sunday, June 10, or you can let us know of your interest by contacting one of the current co-chairs, Patricia Duff (patriciaduff@mac.com) and Tisa Wenger (tisawenger@gmail.com).

 Racial and cultural diversity will, I pray, come to Unitarian Universalism. But it will come as we become known as a faith community that strives to live our open hearted theology, and a faith community that is willing to be an ally in the struggle for justice.

—William G. Sinkford, President, Unitarian Universalist Association, General Assembly Fort Worth, TX (June 2005)

View USNH Anti-Racism Team Survey Results

I apologize for being absent for too long, but I won’t digress.

This is an urgent CALL TO ACTION for health care reform for CT. Come with us to Hartford, Wednesday, April 25, leaving the Unitarian Society, 700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden, at 3:00 p.m. and arriving back there about 7:00 p.m.

The legislature will soon decide whether or not to accept a $75 million grant from the federal government under the Affordable Care Act to set up a State Basic Health Program. This grant is for the purpose of expanding Medicaid coverage to people who are working but too poor to afford private insurance and earning too much to qualify for currant Medicaid benefits. This grant means that over 75,000 CT residents will be able to get health insurance!

More people covered = more prevention = fewer costly ER visits =
better health = lower costs = more time on the job and with family. It’s a no-brainer, and health economy studies prove it. However….

Governor Malloy, who pledged support for SustiNet in December 2010, is now trying to block all meaningful health care reform in CT. Help send this message to the General Assembly and the governor: we want them to support the public interest, not the private profit interest of the insurance companies. It’s time to act!

Please contact me ASAP if you can make this important rally. I need to set up car pooling. If you are willing to drive, let me know.

Peace and good health,

Steve Jennings
Stevejandgj@aol.com
203-281-4300

Call to Worship

“Exultet for Easter Morning”, by Mark Belletini (excerpt, adapted)

I could say they are beautiful, those stars

hemming the blue veil of morning.

I could say it gives me pleasure, that bronze and perfect Passover moon,

or I could say they make me glad,

those laughing daffodils along the lane.

Or, I could just as well say they are lit from within,

divine, overflowing with what some long to call

revelation, or even the growing vision of God.

But today, on Easter, I don’t care which words I use

to express my wonder.

I am just glad to be alive, blessed with such marvels.

I could say that the earth hanging in space

is an accident in the universe that just happened,

or I could say it’s one more miracle in a cosmos full of miracles,

one overflowing with divinity.

But today, on Easter, for all of my education and life experience,

I cannot tell which word is which.

Accident. Miracle. They seem to see each other’s faces

in the mirror of my heart.

And so I rise in gladness again, and sing the marvel that everything is!

Let us worship together!

First Reading: Passover Rev. Kathleen McTigue, from Shine and Shadow

When the escape from Egypt was certain, when the last furious wave had closed over their enemies’ heads and the dangerous waters lay smooth again, when the Israelites could finally turn toward the future without fear that the past would snatch them back—what did they see before them?

Not the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey, but the wide and terrifying wilderness that would claim them for forty long, hard years of wandering. They were not carried along on a surge of vindicated faith, but stumbled forward with paralyzing doubts. And instead of enjoying sweet unity after all they’d been through, they were torn by bickering and division. They walked into relentless uncertainty and discomfort, and fell asleep on the hard ground to wake feeling ashamed for dreaming of the easier life of slavery they had left behind.

Our own stories will never be quite so dramatic. Yet each of us knows a little about what it means to be lost in the wilderness. We know the awful disappointment, akin to despair, of being suddenly pathless and alone when we’d expected to stride confidently straight into the promised land. We know how it feels to take a leap of faith toward some place we want to be—in love or relationship, in work or school or location—only to find that nothing turns out the way we’d hoped and expected. The familiar has been left behind, but what we yearn for has not yet come into view, and there we are, lost in the desert. We have no way to know how long our wandering will last.

These passages through the land of in-between are scary and uncomfortable, and the desert is a place we would rather barrel through as quickly as possible toward the welcoming ground of our destination. But our time in the desert is a passage of the heart, not a physical journey of the body, and it’s not in our power to speed it up….

After forty years in the desert, the Israelites in the ancient myth finally reached its end. They touched life-giving waters again, and waded into the Jordan, amazed and glad. Maybe they knew, even in that moment of deep relief and readiness, that the desert wasn’t accidental, that it had opened and cleansed them in some necessary way. Maybe they understood how the wilderness had sharpened their awareness and softened their hearts, so they could at long last receive, not just the gifts of the promised land, but the gifts of the desert that had brought them there.

Meditation: “Breaking Ground”, by Lynn Ungar

Living in the violence of spring

Living in a time where shells are cracking

and shapes alter

Who can afford to risk forgetting the danger

forgetting the moment the crocus bulb breaks ground

Never knowing whether

snow or sun or ice

awaits in warm or jagged welcome

There is no safety in this restless season

Even the sheltering ground rejects its own,

thrusting the life it held

into the untrustworthy and insufficient care

of air and weather

There are no choices here

No careful path or reasoned way

No holding in reserve for some more settled,

more propitious time

But only the unconsidered faith of the crocus

whose saffron petals echo or demand the sun

Second Reading: Rev. Forrest Church

[Here is] the Easter story as I understand it. Jesus is not a success, he is a failure. His disciples believed that he would march into Jerusalem and ascend to David’s rightful throne, as… messiah. Instead, he was betrayed and crucified. “I thirst”, he said. “Father, why have you forsaken me?” He forgives his enemies, sighs “It is finished”, and dies.

His followers scatter. Peter denies him three times. Everyone who believed in him [failed him] – with the telling exceptions of Mary Magdalene, Salome and Mary his mother, who attended to his body and stood vigil at his grave. Now, two thousand years later, we commemorate this sorry sequence of events with full churches, brass choirs and hosannahs to the highest. The reason is simple. Jesus surprised both his critics and his followers. He became a savior.

To begin with, he was resurrected. He really was. First in Peter’s heart. Then in Simon’s and Andrew’s. He didn’t leave them when he died. They felt his presence, his power, his faith. And it overcame their own weakness. It gave them the strength to go on, to go on preaching and teaching, to heal and save, to care so deeply and generously that the world was changed….

I do not believe that Jesus was the Christ. I don’t believe that he rose from the dead, harrowed hell, ascended to heaven and took a seat at the right hand of God… But I do believe that Jesus was a savior, and that his saving work, perhaps more than that of any other, proves the presence of God within us, working for us and others, powerful beyond our weakness, sustaining, compelling and redemptive. Jesus, in his agony as well as in [all that he inspired in] his followers, gives human voice, face and form to the mystery of God.

Benediction

  From the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth

Ask, and it will be given to you;

seek, and you will find;

knock, and the door will be opened to you.

Don’t judge, and you will not be judged;

don’t condemn, and you will not be condemned;

forgive, and you will be forgiven;

give, and it will be given to you:

in good measure, pressed down, shaken together and overflowing.

Go in peace, believe in peace, create peace. AMEN.

I am happy among children’s eyes

I am very worried and happy

among the crazy and the hopeless

they recognize me, right away

I’m home

And there is nowhere I would rather be

alive or dead

than in this world

Inside this skull I hold and ponder

unending space expanding if I understand correctly

at an accelerating rate, meanwhile

housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless

deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,

I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every

mind, behind each face I pass

and as I’ve been instructed each morning

on rising I obliterate the print of my body

and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore

the wind)

and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid

I don’t mind saying that I am scared

to death of God: I am

afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and

I’ll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can’t grasp it, but I am so very glad.

Sermon: God Says Yes: Rev. Kathleen McTigue, Sunday, April 15, 2012

In Leaves of Grass, our great American poet Walt Whitman wrote:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and  self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sit and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins…

Not one is dissatisfied… Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Animal rights activists would surely disagree with Whitman’s claim, that not a single animal is unhappy across all the earth. But his main observation still holds true: that as far as we can tell from the evidence, it’s only us — the big-brained human animals — that seem to be chronically plagued by angst in all its forms.

It isn’t angst that we’re after; it’s happiness. Three centuries ago this goal was enshrined in the founding of our nation as one of the three pillars of what we’re all entitled to: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Wisely I suppose, our founders chose to leave happiness undefined. And notice, they didn’t actually say we’re entitled to happiness itself — just to the freedom to go chasing after it. But if that pursuit is so fundamental, it makes sense to think about what exactly we mean by happiness — so we won’t waste too much of our time scurrying down dead ends.

What is happiness? The first thing that comes to mind is a bottom-line comfort zone: we need enough food, shelter, companionship, good health and security in our lives in order to feel reasonably happy. But the unfortunate truth, the thing Whitman was pointing toward, is that even when we have these things so consistently that we take them for granted, we are not happy. We revert to angst, or striving, or restlessness. Most of us feel as though we ought to be happy, living as we do among the truly blessed: we’re not in a war zone or in the path of the monsoons, not wandering as refugees or wondering how to get food or clean water.

Yet our happiness comes and goes. It is subjective and individual: one person’s happiness leaves someone else completely indifferent.  It’s also subjective within each of us, from day to day.  Ask people at random whether or not they’re happy with their lives, and their answer can be based on such fleeting elements as whether or not the sun is shining, how well they slept the night before and how friendly you were in asking the question. However random our criteria, it’s interesting to notice how we talk about happiness as a general concept. Our language makes it sound like an object, a thing. Bertrand Russell wrote a book about the “conquest” of happiness, as though it were a creature in need of taming.  We often talk about “achieving” it, striving for it, looking for it. When we’ve lost our happiness or it eludes us, we fantasize about the the things or people or places that would bring it back to us.

But the strange thing is that more often than not, if these fantasies come true they actually don’t leave us feeling happier than we were before. Even surveys of those magical few people who win enormous lotteries show up the surprising fact that millions of dollars later, people are not happier than they were before.  As often as we’ve set our sights on the thing or event that’s bound to bring us happiness, we’ve seen ourselves arrive there, felt the surge we expected — and then felt it fade away. Then we fixate on the next thing that’s bound to make us happy, and we’re off and running, sure that this time the happiness will last, if not forever then at least for a little longer.

Sometimes we can see this habit of mind with alarming clarity. A couple of months ago, for instance, I was lucky enough to have a week-long meditation retreat at the Buddhist center in Barre, Massachusetts. At a Buddhist retreat there is really nothing at all going on except meditation, whether of the walking or sitting variety, punctuated by meals, sleep and the occasional walk in the woods. The whole point is to become deeply quiet and observant because when we do this, we sometimes catch hold of the kinds of habitual states of mind that so often lead to our various forms of unhappiness.

The meals at this retreat center are vegetarian and very simple. Breakfast is always the same — hot cereal, fruit and yogurt — and dinner is actually just called “tea” and is crackers and tahini and again fruit. So the only substantial meal is lunch. All the meals are taken in the same silence that permeates the other activities so even in the midst of eating, we are essentially meditating: paying close attention to our food, or noticing the way the mind wanders and what it wanders to.

One day as I walked serenely into the dining hall for lunch, as I came around a corner of the corridor a delicious smell wafted my way. As I approached the serving table I was thrilled to see that that we were being served spanakopita, which I love. Instant happiness: Spanakopita! I noticed there were two large trays full of it, and happily contemplated the fact that once I’d finished with my first serving I could have another one, there would be enough.

And then I noticed what my mind had just done, completely unconsciously: I had not yet tasted even the first bite of this lovely meal, and already I was racing ahead in time to the moment when I would have seconds! Far from simply relishing the contentment of the moment, my grasping mind was already reaching for the next small form of happiness — having seconds — without having relished to any degree at all the moment I was actually living.

This habit of leaping ahead to the next thing is part of what undermines our happiness. But no matter what we think our fix is, happiness is a fleeting thing. It comes and goes like a balloon bobbing on a string, tied to the conditions we like, the money we want, the people and things we care about. So each element that composes our happiness is colored with shadow, like a clear glass that becomes smoky, because everything we like or want or love or covet will change.

And everything that makes us happy will be lost one day for good, whether through small daily changes or through the enormous change of death. As long as happiness is so contingent, unhappiness looms inevitably just around the corner, because the nature of our lives is change and impermanence.

It’s this truth of our lives that motivates so many spiritual teachers to point us toward something that runs deeper than happiness — maybe something we would call joy, or in a quieter mood, contentment. The spiritual practices we take up, like meditation, point toward a state of being that is not contingent on conditions. It’s instead a circumstance of mind and heart in which a profound sense of well-being and even delight can shine through — even though we experience change we don’t want, even though our lives hold loss and suffering and even death.

That’s what Franz Wright captured in the words I used for the reading today. It’s got an odd ring at first, because this poem called “A Word for Joy”  is filled with very unjoyous words like worried, crazy, hopeless and suffering.  “I am afraid and blind and ignorant and naked” he writes,                                    “and I’ll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can’t grasp it, but I am so very glad.”

This is an acknowledgement that the life we’re given is a broken one, that it comes twined up with suffering: our own suffering, and that which we see all around us in people whose lives are harder than ours.  The poet points to a truth that religion teaches us as well: joy does not depend on eliminating these sorrows. It lives there in the midst of them: even there, necessarily there — because this is what real life is like.  All of our lives have cracks in them, or will develop cracks given enough time. In the end we know we will die, some of us quite a bit sooner than we might choose. We live with that reality, whether or not we like it. When we can embrace it instead of resist it, we taste joy as it flows past us, without trying to grab and hold on.

Unlike happiness, joy seems more like a virtue than a commodity — more like a way of standing in the world as it is. That makes it something we can tilt ourselves toward by the choices we make, just as we can tilt ourselves toward generosity or kindness, humility or gratitude, by the ways we pay attention and respond to our world.

This isn’t a pep talk for positive thinking. We know better than that, in any case. We know that no amount of optimism, no dose of Pollyanna thinking, will wipe out the pain of real tragedy in our lives or take away from us the scars of real sorrow. The kind of vision that lets us live our lives in joy even with that pain and with those scars is not an attempt at denial. It’s the recognition that the ebb and flow of life depend on one another, and cannot be pulled apart. The fabric of our lives is all one thing. If we try to pluck out the thread of sorrow, it unravels too much of the cloth of our lives.

There is an old Hassidic story that tells of a time when God got fed up with the whining of the human race — tired of hearing everyone complain about the suffering that was theirs to bear. Each person was convinced they had more than their share, or a worse sorrow than that of their neighbors. So God invited all of them to hang up their burden on the Sorrow Tree, and to then pick up a different bundle in exchange. In the story, people eagerly hung up their sorrows and then went around and around the tree to figure out which were preferable to their own — only to find that in the end, after seeing all of the other burdens, each person chose his or her own and took it up again.

We can hear the myth of the Sorrow Tree and at first imagine, “I would do it in a heartbeat! I would exchange the dementia of my mother, or the loss of my child, or this awful sickness for some lesser sorrow”. But the wisdom in that little parable is that it’s the whole package that would have to be switched: the nurture of that mother as well as her loss, the joy of that child’s personality as well as the pain, the person you’ve grown to be through your strength as well as the illness. The fabric of your life is yours, in all its dimensions, and when we see this it helps to move us below the contingencies of happiness and unhappiness, below the pettiness of comparison and jealousy.

What lies beneath those things? Maybe it has more to do with meaning and purpose than with happiness. The poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”

How much of our own lives can end up feeling that way! Over and over again we busily fuss about – but what is the song we came to sing in our lives? The more consciously we can hold that question, in some version or other, the less we will lose our lives to trivia and contingency.

What is the song we came to sing? The song has nothing to do with the next promotion or with making more money; nothing to do with a bigger house,  a different spouse or a wider reputation. It doesn’t depend on success, and it doesn’t depend even on the continued presence of those we love best in the world. In the end, it doesn’t have to do with happiness.

The song we came to sing flows from a deeper source. It has to do with right living, with adding justice to more people’s lives. It  has to do with knowing ourselves part of a reality infinitely bigger than our small selves, and feeling that even so, our little feather of weight can move things forward toward the good. These things are elements of the deep water, with the waves of happiness or unhappiness moving only on the surface.

What is the song we came to sing? What kind of permission do we need to give ourselves in order to open up to that song? Sometimes we are so unaware of our own self-censorship, the ways we hold ourselves back from the beauty and power of our own song. We get busy and worried, we slip into self critique, we get anxious about how the world might see us and our small gifts. We believe old stories about our limitations or shortcomings. We hesitate to stretch into something new. We don’t want to risk change because it also risks failure.

Kaylin Haught wrote a poem called “God Says Yes to Me”:

I asked God if was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

Maybe it’s that fundamental affirmation that is at the heart of it all. It echoes the embrace of  Franz Wright’s words in our reading: “There is nowhere I would rather be/ alive or dead/ than in this world…I can’t grasp it/But I am so very glad.” Maybe our whole task is to learn, slowly, through our lifetimes, to say Yes: Yes to all of it, to this crazy, troubled, beautiful world just as it is, and to our small, insufficient, infinitely necessary efforts to heal it. We open ourselves entirely to that Yes. We look deeply at each other, we look at all the beings who surround us each day and we relinquish our judgements, our criticism, our boundaries, and say Yes. We notice how we smack down our own spirits, our own souls so often and we turn gentle on ourselves, saying Yes, Yes. 

We begin to oil the hinges on the creaky doorways of our hearts and open them widely to this difficult, miraculous flow of life around us and say Yes to things as they are, Yes to the whole package, Yes… And then we begin to hear, to feel down in our bones, the clear, persistent thrumming of this universe of ours singing its song, bringing our own song out of us in response, rising on the sweet and inexplicable tide of gladness.  Sweetcakes… What I am telling you is Yes. Yes. Yes.

Amen.

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One strategy we can always employ for facing the tough changes that will visit us is to decide to trust ourselves more than we do right now. Trust your own wisdom. Trust that below our confusion and all the ego gunk that can clog our minds, we know the right thing to do in the situations we confront. This does not necessarily mean we’ll do it, but we know what it is. Why? I don’t know. I only know that there is this underlying base of compassionate wisdom that resides in each of our hearts. Attention, and spiritual practice, can free it. I see it happen all the time.

As the Buddha taught,

Do what you have to do

Resolutely, with all your heart.

The traveler who hesitates

Only raises dust on the road.

Sermon: Embracing an Uncertain Faith, Sunday, March 25, 2012                              Rev. Kathleen McTigue

Back in August when the worship themes for this congregational year were chosen, I had no way of knowing how apt it would be that we decided on the theme of Trust for this month of March. Back then, when I played around with possible titles and settled on something to do with an uncertain faith, I had in mind a completely different direction for what I’d be saying to you today. But the title still seems more than right to me, because this time of change we’re entering invites us, among other things, to think again about why we chose this peculiar faith of ours, which not only makes room for doubt but urges us to embrace it.

In becoming Unitarian Universalists, we did not opt for creeds and hard assertions, for Scriptures that were to be followed rather than pondered. We chose a faith that could clearly name the shifting sands of the real world in which we find ourselves, with all its transformations both planned and unexpected. We chose a spiritual home in which we bow together, regularly, to all the mysteries we cannot know. We assume that our questions will not lead to permanent answers, but to moments of insight. We choose to walk this path grounded not in certainty but in curiosity, not in creed but in covenant, not in the hope for one unchanging truth but in search for the truths we uncover as we pay loving attention to the path of our lives.

This faith we embrace is an uncertain one: not at all in the sense that it might let us down, but in the sense that certainties are not at its core. Instead, our trust is lodged in the path itself. We try to hold ourselves open to what it will bring us. We try not to cling too tightly to one particular point in its turnings, knowing that movement and change are constant and inevitable.

So we have arrived at a point of profound movement and change in the life of this particular congregation. It’s a change that was prefigured by an equally momentous one almost exactly twenty-one years ago. In April of 1991, the Search Committee appointed by your Board of Trustees presented me to you — to those of you who were here then — as the proposed ministerial candidate. We spent two consecutive Sundays together so you could hear me preach, and in the days in between I met with every conceivable committee, task force and interest group within this congregation. At the end of that week the congregation held a vote — punctuated by a raucous and enthusiastic cheer — and I was called to be your settled minister.

When a new minister is called to walk with a congregation, no one imagines the partnership will last a lifetime. Despite the way that the dynamic between minister and congregation is sometimes likened to a marriage, we don’t pledge to one another that we’ll be together until death do us part. Instead, we promise we will walk together faithfully, in trust and respect. We promise that we will serve the high purposes of this community, uphold the values of Unitarian Universalism, and do our best, together, to heed the call of service and healing in the world around us. We make these heartfelt promises as an open-ended covenant. We make them in the hope that ours will be a long and fruitful partnership, that it will serve our faith well, and that when the time comes for parting, we will do it with integrity, good will and even some joy.

My friends, we have fulfilled our promises to one another beyond any dreaming that we could have brought to one another twenty-one years ago. And now we’ve reached the place where our paths are going to diverge. As this Sunday loomed and I had to figure out what it was I needed to say to you, I was determined that this particular sermon was not going to be a farewell. I have several months among you still, and it doesn’t seem quite feasible or fair that they be filled relentlessly with goodbyes. But the truth is that this is the beginning of goodbye, and there is nothing true or relevant that I could say to you today that doesn’t include that acknowledgement.

This is the beginning of goodbye. It will take us all a while to get used to it. It’s going to take us a while to figure out how to let all of the different emotions have their say in our hearts. And it will take a while, for each of us, to figure out where the new ground is on which we stand, now that the path has taken this major turn. Our best service to each other during this very unsettled time is to remember that the ground has only shifted, not disappeared. We’ll find our footing again, much sooner than you may believe, and walk on.

I want to tell you a little bit more than I was able to say in my short letter to you, about this decision: what I see ahead for myself and what I hope for for you. As you already know, I’ve decided to leave my ministry here not for service in another congregation but for a position with the wider denomination.

Though many of you may not know it, the UU Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Association have not always worked together in perfect harmony. They are completely separate institutions, though most of us in the rank and file vaguely assume them to be deeply entwined.

Since its founding during World War Two, when it was devoted to rescuing Jews from Nazi Germany, the Service Committee has primarily been focused on human rights, both in the United States and in many far-flung corners of the world. The UUA, on the other hand, has primarily been focused on building and strengthening Unitarian Universalism. The Service Committee has defined itself mostly in secular terms; the UUA, in religious terms. Over the years the two agencies have sometimes been distant, sometimes cooperative, and occasionally in bad-tempered competition. Hardly ever have they actively sought the kind of energizing synergy that those of us who are their constituents have longed for and expected.

In recent years, that active collaboration and synergy have finally begun, and the most recent manifestation of it is the decision of the two institutions to found what they are calling the College of Social Justice. Under this one umbrella, both the UUA and the UUSC are placing the learning/service trips they have developed over the years. These are the journeys to places like the American Civil Rights south, to Haiti, to Guatemala, Uganda, India and other countries where one or the other institution has developed partnerships.

The vision behind this new endeavor is three-fold: To make these journeys more effective in the life-changing education they offer; to create clear and lasting channels for advocacy, so that those who make these pilgrimages can put themselves to work for justice when they come home; and to ground the whole experience in theological reflection and contemplative practice, so that we are clearly linking our faith commitments to our work in the world.  It is this three-fold enterprise that has compelled me so deeply that I made the decision to leave the vocation that has claimed me for twenty-five years. I accepted the invitation to become the first Director of this College of Social Justice.

I know that you can hear, in that short description, what it is that has called to me. At the heart of my original call to ministry was the yearning to devote myself to somehow bringing together these two essential dimensions of our lives: the wish to be of service to a suffering world, and the wish to deepen and mature spiritually. For twenty-five years I’ve found a way to weave those themes together in parish ministry, first in Winston-Salem and then here among you. Now that weaving is taking on a new pattern. I am stepping away from the direct work of parish ministry, but not from this larger work in which each of our congregations is involved. It doesn’t feel like I’m leaving ministry, but rather answering the call to have my ministry take a new form.

This opportunity comes at a good time in the pattern of my personal life. Our youngest is about to head off to college, and that’s a change in the family life that often prompts new openness to change in other areas. I’m seasoned enough in the work of ministry to feel I’ve got some unique gift to bring to our wider movement, but not so very seasoned that I’m ready to think about retirement. It may not be quite as clear to you, but I believe this change also comes at a lucky time in the life of this congregation. You are seven years out from the last huge endeavor you collectively undertook, which was the building of this beautiful sanctuary. It’s time now to take hold of your vision again and figure out what you most want to do,  in the next chapter of your collective life as a community.

It might be an obvious point, but it bears saying  out loud anyway: Who you are and how you want to manifest our values in the world do not depend on a minister — on any minister — but on you, the lay people who are this congregation.

I know that many of you here today have not been part of USNH for the full twenty-one years of my ministry, but the length of our partnership is now part of the DNA of this congregation, in which you share. Twenty-one years is a long ministry — much longer than most of my colleagues have found, longer than some of them have sought. It has been a grace, a gift and an enormous blessing to me; I hope and believe it has been these things to you.

But here is a truth that I know more by instinct than by any particular fact I can lift up to you: every ministry has a lifespan. Sometimes — perhaps more often than not — ministers outstay the lifespan of their ministry. They hold on because retirement is only a few more years away, or because they’ve grown comfortable with the rhythm of work and are past the point of wanting new challenges. They hold on out of love for those they serve, and maybe fear of change as well. They stay out of inertia, or stubbornness, or because they’re oblivious to the way their effectiveness has waned. In some cases — not as rare as we would wish — ministers stay so far past their due date that congregations erupt in contentiousness, because something in the health of the system knows that it’s time for a change.

When a ministry has been a long and happy partnership like ours, it’s easy to forget that ministries have a lifespan, but that is still the truth: they do. And when we hold on past that lifespan we can cause each other grief. I have no doubt at all that we are still riding high together. Nothing in the fabric of this place has come apart; great energy is still emerging from all of us for new endeavors. And though I know that from time to time I’ve made a few people mad for one reason or another, there has never been the kind of rising murmur of unhappiness that sometimes ushers a minister toward the door — for which I am very grateful! I am still giving you the best I have for my ministry; you are still giving me your support, affection and good will, and together we continue to devote our time and talent to the steady strengthening of this beloved community.

Paradoxically, all of this good news is a part of what I’ve paid attention to in making my decision. You are a congregation in extraordinarily good shape. The energy filling the walls of this space is palpable. The tenderness offered to those who are wounded, the compassion brought to your work in the wider world, and the generosity of giving here are all exceptional. I know I have had a hand in shaping what has come forth during this twenty-one year chapter of your collective life, but the chapter has been yours, not mine. And as it now begins to draw to a close, you have the quite wonderful and exciting opportunity to figure out who you have become during the years we’ve walked together, and who you want to be in the next chapter.

With the help of an interim minister, you’ll have a chance to look at your history with the kind of objectivity only someone from the outside can bring. You’ll start to notice things that need changing, and you’ll start envisioning new directions. And then when you’ve caught your breath and had a good long time for consideration, you’ll have the help you need to set your sights on a new horizon and begin the next chapter. At that point, you will search for — and you will find — a new minister to be your companion and spiritual guide. And when you do, you will again welcome that person in with an overwhelming vote of affirmation and a raucous, enthusiastic cheer.

I have loved being your minister. I will never stop being grateful for all that this calling among you has given me. You have allowed me to walk with you with such intimacy through the most significant struggles of your lives: through your questions of meaning and purpose, through your celebrations of marriage and the birth of your children, and for many dozens of our beloved members, right up to the shadowed threshold of death. So though I’m the one choosing this change, I also grieve it. I will miss you. I will miss this place, and this work. But I am immensely proud of you, and of all you will bring forward for yourselves and for the world in the years ahead.

In the coming weeks we still have a ministry together. It is a ministry comprised of good endings: saying goodbye with clarity and with love. This is a vital part of our work together, because it’s through these good endings that we also free ourselves to say hello with clarity and love — to embrace the changes ahead of us with open eyes and open hearts.

I want to leave you with this poem by Thomas R. Smith, simply called “Trust”:

It’s like so many other things in life

to which you must say no or yes.

So you take your car to the new mechanic.

Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking

clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,

the envelope passed by dozens of strangers–

all show up at their intended destinations.

The theft that could have happened doesn’t.

Wind finally gets where it was going

through the snowy trees, and the river, even

when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life

is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

Amen.

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Colin Turnbull’s description of the beliefs of the Congo Forest People 

The complete faith of the Forest people in the goodness of their forest world is perhaps best of all expressed in one of their great molimo songs, one of the songs that is sung fully only when someone has died. At no time do their songs ask for this or that to be done, for the hunt to be made better or for someone’s illness to be cured. It is not necessary. All that is needful is to awaken the forest, and everything will come right.

But suppose it does not? Supposing that someone dies, then what? Then the men sit around their evening fire… and they sing songs of devotion, songs of praise, to wake up the forest and rejoice it, to make it happy again. Of the disaster that has befallen them they sing, in this one great song, “There is darkness all around us; but if darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.” 

Sermon: Arguing With God

Rev. Kathleen McTigue   Sunday, March 18, 2012

As you know, the theme we’re exploring this month in our worship services is Trust. One of the ways for us to think together about what it means to trust in the flow of our lives, through thick and thin, is to notice the times we question that flow. It hardly ever happens when things are going well: we assume that this is how it ought to be. The questions arise when something lands on us to disrupt our plans, shatter our trajectory and rudely wake us up to how fragile is the structure of what we think of as “normal life”.

As far as we know at this point in our evolution, human beings are the only animals who ask for our world to explain itself. We’re the only ones who seem to ask “Why?” as we move through our lives.  It’s one of the first questions children learn, the one by which they drive us nuts some of the time because of how relentlessly they ask it. It’s one of the questions (along with How? and When?) that leads to amazing discoveries in science, and to the great accumulation of facts we have about how the world works.

But when we ask “Why?” about the things that befall us in our lives, the question is our effort to make sense of the narrative we’re living, our way of fitting what happens to us into the story that is our lives. In that way, it’s a central question of existence, and it’s no longer about fact but about meaning. It becomes the key word as we try not just to remember or record events as they pass, but to fit all the pieces together in to a whole thing that makes some sort of sense. Sometimes we ask the question out of awe at being alive, or joy at something unexpected that’s come our way. But far more common is the “Why?” that’s evoked when things go wrong. It’s at the core of all the questions that are wrung from us by tragedy, especially when it arrives suddenly. Why me? Why our child? Why should this happen now? Why is God doing this to us? Why is the world or our fate so cruel?

These are the kinds of questions we can blurt out in our pain, no matter what theology may have claimed us in our calmer or more thoughtful moments. The story of our lives has suddenly come apart, and we want to know why. In some corner of our being we may know very well that randomness is inherent in our universe. We may know that all true-life stories have rough edges, fragmented plot-lines, and almost always end in mid-sentence. But when our own narrative is suddenly broken, our voices often join in that ancient plea for explanation.

The Book of Job in the Bible is an archetypal story about this plea for understanding. It was written by an unknown poet over 2,500 years ago, and was based on a story that had been circulating orally for uncounted generations before that. It’s one of the oldest examples available to us of this inherent human need to wrestle with the dilemma of undeserved suffering. Thomas Carlyle called the Book of Job, “the most wonderful poem of any age and language; our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem — our destiny and God’s way with us here on earth.”

You may not have read it recently, so let me offer just a brief recap. The story begins in a once-upon-a-time way: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” We are told about Job’s prosperity, and about his great piety.  And then the scene shifts to the celestial realm where all the heavenly beings have gathered to make an accounting to God of their various activities. Among them is Satan, who seems to enjoy a kind of comradely partnership with the Lord of the Universe. They begin to chat. God asks Satan where he’s come from and what he’s been up to, and then asks a bit coyly whether he has noticed what a wonderful guy Job is, how pious and devout.

Satan basically says, “Yeah, but so what? Why shouldn’t Job be loyal and worshipful, when you’ve given him everything he could possibly want? Sure he’s grateful, but try taking away some of his goodies and see how loyal he turns out to be.” God takes the bait: he gives Satan permission to do anything he wants to Job except kill him, and then this cosmic wager begins to play out.  Job’s servants come to him one by one, each one still telling his bad news when the next arrives on stage with something even worse. They tell him of the loss of his oxen and donkeys, his cattle and sheep, his servants, and finally even his ten children. As a final catastrophe, Job’s body is covered in sores. Through it all, Job steadfastly holds to his faith.

Three friends come to comfort him, and their conversations and arguments with him go on for many chapters, playing out all of the things people still say today, all these centuries later, to try to rationalize why bad things happen. But before all of this talk, the story says, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” It seems very tender to me, that long period of sympathetic silence recorded so many centuries ago. For us still today, that silent accompaniment, the willingness to just be still and be present in the face of pain, is the most generous thing we can give to each other.

It’s also hard to do. In the story, eventually the three friends can’t bear to continue this silent witness. They feel compelled to explain Job’s suffering. They offer him and each other the main theological premises of their era — notions meant to hold onto the idea that there is a balance in all things, a reason for the bad stuff, some explanation that shows it is somehow deserved: Surely God has a reason for all of this… surely you won’t be given more than you can bear…somehow, maybe accidentally, you must have done something to deserve punishment… Maybe if you can just pray for forgiveness, things will get better.

Job knows in his heart of hearts that he really is about as good a man as exists in this flawed world, and he refuses to accept their arguments. He will not hold their theological world together by agreeing that he deserves the awful things that have happened. Instead, he points to the gaping hole that has appeared in his belief system: If God is good and all powerful; if God is faithful to his promises and rewards goodness in his children who keep the covenant, then something has gone seriously wrong here.

So Job demands an explanation. He challenges God to explain why this series of disasters has happened.God actually responds to the summons, clothed in a whirlwind. But he turns out not to be interested in whether or not Job is righteous or has a valid argument. In the face of all of the anguished questions, God asks a different set of questions. “Where were you”, God asks, “when I laid the foundation of the earth?… On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?… Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth…? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness…? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion…?”

Job is silent for a long time in the face of this litany, and then he surrenders. He says, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…  therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

This is not the kind of resolution that most Unitarian Universalists find very appealing. The story makes God sound like a bully: despite the flowing poetry of the language, essentially he pulls rank on Job. He says that the universe is massively larger than Job’s little problems, and that it’s presumptuous to demand justice from that universe or the God who runs it. This kind of answer offends our own sense of justice, and in any case the whole idea of arguing with so human a God presents us with too much of a theological stretch. So we tend to just shrug off the whole story, contradictions and all, as belonging both to a tradition and a theology we no longer call our own.

But if we ignore the story of Job completely, we lose more than its lilting poetry. There is power in mythology, power in these stories with roots that reach so far back into the collective narrative that is human history. The story is still important, not because it offers answers that might satisfy us as gospel truth, but because it wrestles — as we all wrestle — for meaning  that might hold up even when we don’t have answers.

One part of that meaning is in the poignant description of how Job’s friends sat with him, silently, for seven days and nights. What better way to honor our common struggles, our communion right there in the muddle that is the human path, than through our willingness to simply touch each other’s pain? It seems to me significant that this long stretch of silent empathy comes before any of the rationalizing. It reminds us that bearing compassionate witness is the first, most generous thing we human beings pull from ourselves and give to each other. Even when we’re baffled — maybe especially then — this gives us a small island of respite where we can rest in the midst of the storm.

Archibald MacLeish wrote a play based on the story of Job, called “JB”. At one point there is a dialogue between two down-at-heel actors who, after hours, are about to perform for each other the roles of God and Satan, though they have no third party present to play the part of Job: “Oh, there’s always someone playing Job”, says one. “…Millions and millions of humankind slaughtered, and for what? For thinking! For walking around the world in the wrong skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids: sleeping the wrong night [in the] wrong city — London, Dresden, Hiroshima….I’ve seen him. Job is everywhere we go.”

Here is another part of the meaning in this ancient tale: Job is everywhere we go. Because the Jobs are so many in our world — because we each may have our times of feeling like Job — one would think that compassion, and the possibility of real communion, would be nearly automatic among us. They are not. It takes a conscious reaching toward and an opening out to let go enough of our individual suffering to see and move toward the pain of another.

Gustavo Gutierrez wrote about the story of Job through the lens of liberation theology, reading it from the perspective of the poor in Latin America and other suffering parts of the world, who so often live out their lives as Job right now. One of the things Gutierrez holds up as a core meaning in the biblical story is that in the midst of his pain and lamentation, Job begins to realize the deep commonality of suffering. He suddenly sees how many there are like him, who suffer without cause, without deserving it, without being to blame. Until then, although he’d been a good man, he had also been prosperous. He had known only good fortune. He was generous to the poor, to the widowed or the orphaned, but he gave to them as though from a great distance. He was far removed from the pain of life, unfamiliar with the true language of loss and hardship.

Guitierrez argues that this new ability in Job to truly see others in their pain is a central point of meaning in the story, because this is how we mature. This is how we begin to know our oneness, our true unity. This is the beginning of real human love, a connectedness that binds together our separate little paths through life — and it’s far more important to our survival than the explanations we think we want.  At the end of the MacLeish play, Job’s wife Sarah returns. When she comes back she tells Job that she left because he kept looking for justice, and all that she could give him was love. Job says, “He does not love. He is.” And Sarah responds, “But we love: that’s the wonder”. As they walk together into their ruined house, Job tells her, “It’s too dark to see”, and she replies, “Then blow on the coal of the heart… It’s all the light now…The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart, and we’ll see by and by…”

I hear an echo of these words in the very different language of our reading this morning. We heard that the people of the Congo say, “There is darkness all around us. But if darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.” I don’t hear this as a statement that suffering itself can be called “good”, but as an affirmation that our suffering is always lodged in a larger frame. This is a statement of faith, not of fact. It’s a trust that on the enormous level beyond our usual, prosaic point of view, there is a completeness, a rightness, that transcends our categories. Though the story of Job is framed in ancient language and a theology we may have outgrown, at it’s core it is a story about coming to this  trust, to this transcendence.

In the biblical story, when Job first demands justice, God says, “Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness? …What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth? Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain… on the desert, to make the ground put forth grass?”

We don’t know. We live on the human scale. We love and yearn, struggle and suffer and die on the human scale. But we live as part of something infinitely larger. Like Job, we don’t know what rhythms move the stars. We don’t know what puts the dazzling light in our children’s eyes that we see the moment they first open them at birth. We don’t know what lies inside the mystery that is death, or how our own amazing consciousness arose from that same void.

We don’t know how it all pans out on the larger stage. We struggle, as Job did, to make sense of our narrative, to have the pieces all come neatly together, but each of us will have our turn to watch as the expected plot line comes apart. Maybe that doesn’t mean the wider scheme is senseless, or has no justice to it.  Maybe it’s just moving to a rhythm too vast for us. Maybe, like the people of the Congo, our best wisdom is to trust: to trust that our way can be guided even by the darkness — that light and dark arise from the same source, and that in the end we can call that source Good.

Amen.

The Blue by Billy Collins

You can have Egypt and Nantucket.

The only place I want to visit is The Blue,

not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,

but that zone where the unexpected dwells,

waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.

I want to walk its azure perimeter

where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,

ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.

I want to stroll through the pale indigo light

examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,

all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.

I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future

and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,

ready to hit the heads of inventors

laboring in their crackpot shacks.

A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,

I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,

waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure

when, with no advance warning, to tiny augury,

the unpredictable plummets into our lives

from somewhere that looks like sky.

Sermon: Bowing to the Gods of Chance, by Rev. Kathleen McTigue,  Sunday, March 4, 2012

This is the first Sunday of a new month, the month that holds the first official day of spring, though this has been a remarkably spring-like winter all the way through. This month our worship theme is trust, which seems appropriate for the cusp of a new season. We can be reminded of all the ways the sturdy flow of life and change around us has a certain trustworthiness to it. If we can tune in to those great movements of change on a cycle so large that it’s like the planet’s own breathing in, breathing out, then it can bring a certain serenity. It gives us the context of the large view on which to rest our little lives, with all the tension and anxiety they can generate for us. It lets us relax  a bit, into the unchanging truth of change itself.

Most of us don’t find it easy to anchor our lives there, in the kind of cosmic rhythm of things. On the scale where we actually live day to day, we get completely caught up in our goals, our aspirations, the vision we create for ourselves of where we want our lives to be heading. Somewhere in the seat of wisdom within our minds, we know that we’re not really in charge. We know this world of ours is filled with wild cards, with the unexpected, with things out of our control that turn us completely around or point us off in a direction we never chose for ourselves.

But in the day to day realm, we forget this truth, this wisdom. We tend to feel like the champions of our own game, the heroes of our own small stories. We get up in the morning and make choices, small and large, steering the little ship of our lives more or less where we want them to go. We get so used to this way of seeing things that we consider it to be normal — this idea that we direct the course of things, that we make decisions and then carry them out. So when what seems normal is violated by the unexpected — when we are delivered one of those bolts out of the blue — it seems almost like a breach of trust, a breaking down of what we held to be our lot.

In a peculiar way, it never seems to matter that we know intellectually that change is the rule of this life, and that most of what changes is not only out of our hands but often turns out to be something we didn’t see coming. When our plans are thwarted we tend not only to be surprised, but in a certain sense outraged — whether we’ve been detoured by something as trivial as a traffic jam that holds us up and makes us late, or as shattering as a bad biopsy. How could this happen now, to me? I had all of these plans! Places to go and people to meet! This wasn’t on the agenda at all!

We know, but we manage nearly always to forget, that the things over which we have control, the things that our plans actually affect, are the merest tip of the iceberg of what actually happens. There is this vast other realm in which everything else is triggered by someone else’s choice, or by happenstance, or by luck, good and bad. It’s the place poet Billy Collins called that “azure perimeter/ where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,/ ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.” It’s the realm that I whimsically think of as belonging to the gods of chance.

In his poem, Collins reminds us that the imaginary place where everything unpredictable lies waiting to be launched, includes all of the unexpected things:  not just those we dread, but those that will bring us unimagined delight. The bolt from the blue might come bearing crisis; but it also often comes bearing grace — even if only in the form of a little new perspective.

There we are, stuck in the traffic jam that holds us up for so long; it has us stewing and frustrated as we crawl along at a snail’s pace, one eye on the clock and the other impatiently tapping on the wheel. We finally crawl our way along to the point where the log-jam originated and we see then that there has been a terrible, multi-car accident. The frustration vanishes instantly, no matter how late we are, to be replaced by compassion for these unknown others whose lives have been vastly more disrupted, perhaps even ended, by something that merely inconvenienced us for a few minutes. We’re filled with gratitude that such was not our fate, not this time, not this day.

This is where the question of trust comes in. Is it possible for us to hold a little less tightly to the way we think things ought to be, the way we plan for them to be? Is it possible to reach for a rhythm that might be there for us even beneath the tragedies, the sorrows and suffering that visit our lives? If we could cultivate in ourselves a kind of bedrock trust in the flow that lies beneath all life on our little earth, wouldn’t that make our walk a bit easier? If we could learn that trust, then maybe when the path we’re walking veers suddenly off away from where we wanted to end up, or we hit a wall or a roadblock or are forced to take another path all together — well, maybe we would find ourselves open to grace in a new way. Open not just to a detour we did not choose, but to a gift we also did not choose.

Beyond even that openness to the potential gift in the unexpected, a trust in the flow of our lives frees us from the anxiety that can so dominate us when we’re afraid of loss. On my week-long meditation retreat this past week, this idea was often at the center of my meditations — the possibility of trust in the flow, even when changes seem to bring loss.

I am on the cusp of seismic changes at both ends of my life in the realm of mothering. On the one end, I’m losing my own mother as dementia pulls her into its dark tides — the loving spirit who taught me all I know about mothering my own children. On the other end, my youngest child is waiting to learn what college seems to be calling her name, and in a very few months I will have no more chicks left in my nest. Both changes are colored by love and sadness, though one of them certainly involves more grief than the other. What they both highlight for me, for the millionth time, is the way in which we all must cope with the ebb and flow of these same tides of change, and how hard it is for us to relax into what is outside of our control and simply accept what is.

But those who have learned something about it give us hints about a level of peacefulness, a level of joy, even, that is not contingent on things going our way but reaches more deeply into something calm and sustaining. Jean Vanier, the French man who founded the L’arche communities for people with mental disabilities, was a deeply religious man. His faith in the flow running below even profound suffering is what sustained him through his work.

Vanier wrote, “The point of religion is to bring us into the presence of God, [of Mystery], opening up our whole being to something over and above the immediate. We can therefore rest and be open… We can easily get caught up in the world of the finite, the contingent, in brokenness and suffering. Prayer [or spiritual practice] is this opening of a door to something over and above and deeper, which gives meaning to all the pain of the finite. It is something that we can just rest in.”

On my return from the meditation retreat a friend of mine told me, “Oh, I could never do that — even sitting in silence for ten minutes would drive me nuts!” I know that meditation is not for everyone, and it isn’t my intention to proselytize for it this morning. But if you are one of those made queasy and nervous by the prospect of quieting your mind — through prayer, or watching your breath, or any other means — I simply plead with you to consider what you might be missing. If we never open what Vanier called “the door to something over and above and deeper”, then we are living on the surface waves of a vast ocean. We are buffeted by every wind and storm. There is a whole ocean beneath us, from which we are not separate. Quieting the mind lets us touch it, and instead of feeling only the immediate waves that rock us, we can feel also the long flow of tides, that sustain things below the storm.

Here is a little parable that presented itself to me this past summer. Outside of my kitchen window is a shrub, a vibernum that I planted some years ago, so successfully that it’s become a small tree, its branches pushing up against the house and window in ways that force me to trim it each year. It’s right next to the outside compression unit for the air conditioner, which had to be replaced this year, which makes it that much stranger that a robin decided to build her summer nest in that little tree despite all the disruptions. So in late July there she sat on her eggs, and the siting of her nest put her just a little below eye level with me whenever I was at the sink — washing dishes, getting a drink of water or otherwise using that area. I could look down into her nest, a yard away at most, and when she perched on its edge to turn her eggs I saw their sky blue color, their lovely smooth symmetry.

She watched me watching her. Sometimes, when I moved into her line of sight suddenly, she was startled enough to fly away, but usually she just did whatever she was going to do, even though I was there and she knew it. She would go off to feed and come back, study her shining eggs for a moment and then settle herself on top of and around them. Following her inborn rhythm, periodically she roused herself, perched on the edge of the nest and poked around, turning the eggs the way you might baste a savory dish you were baking. Once they hatched and the naked little birds with bulbous eyes and huge beaks appeared, she was busier, flying back and forth all day to feed them before settling, just at twilight, her gleaming eye tilted toward me where I watched.

All the while, throughout the weeks of raising this little brood, the robin noticed me watching her. She would see me there and sometimes it gave her pause: she’d stop in the midst of her feeding or fluffing or turning or settling and look at me, gauging the distance between us, evaluating the threat. And then she would go ahead anyway and do the task of her life in that particular moment, though she knew I was there, though she knew I might mean danger.

This simple story from my kitchen window last summer is one I take as an analogy for all our lives. There is an eye watching us, too — not necessarily the eye of God, though one can hope that figures in, but simply the gaze of what happens, what’s coming, what’s out of our control — the eye of luck or fate, the eye of chance. You know it’s there because you feel it watching. You particularly feel it if you’re a mother or a father because of the acute vulnerability that comes with having half your heart lodged within these other beings who arose from you and for whom you care so passionately. You feel it when you watch them shift their small legs one at a time to climb up the immense steps of the school bus. Year later, you feel it each time they drive off with a friend, waving cheerfully at you and your worries as they go.

But whether or not we’re parents, we all feel it, those eyes of chance. Something can happen at any time to disrupt the love, the light, the joy, the sweetness, the purpose and the rightness  of this moment. What do we do about it?

Like the small mother bird outside my kitchen window, we keep our sharp eye out for it, so we can avoid whatever might be ducked as it hurtles our way; and then we just go on. In the face of all we can’t control, we go on with our life-affirming business of tending the eggs, planting the seeds, writing the petition, feeding the hungry, holding our beautiful children and letting them go. We do it without any proof or guarantee that things will all turn out okay. We do it knowing that chance cuts both ways: sometimes the watching eye means us no harm at all, as I meant no harm to the mamma robin outside my window. Sometimes the bolt from the blue is what we’ve been waiting for — the sudden brainstorm, the unexpected insight that solves a problem, the happy coincidence that points a way toward our future. And we do it because even when the bolt brings us sorrow, it’s better to live guided by trust in things — lifted by a wing and a prayer — than be held captive by our fears.

Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, once said, “If I were told that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree today.” That’s a version of radical trust: the faith that whatever is life-affirming remains so even in the face of tragedy; bedrock confidence that whatever sustains us and helps heal those around us is worth doing, though we know we are held in the blue gaze of all that is outside our hands.

This is what it means to bow to the gods of chance. We see how small we are in relation to all that might happen. We know that a wind could come along at any time and blow us far off the course we have charted for ourselves. Nevertheless, we build the nests that re in us to build, and we tend the portion of life that is in our reach and is ours to tend. We rest ourselves on the enormous tides that move beyond our ken, knowing in our best wisdom that even when it seems unlikely, we are held by their buoyant rhythms. We touch the sustenance of knowing we are part of those tides, inseparable from them. We trust. We trust.

In an essay called “Waltzing With the God of Chaos”, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor wrote, “The luminous web is my image for the interconnectedness of creation. Where is God in this? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light — not captured in them,… but revealed in that singular and vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. God is the web, the connection, …the air between the molecules.”

Trust in the web of life. Trust in this vast weaving of creation that is always changing, that carries both life and death, that delivers to us unending surprises, and which will never let us go. Amen.

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