Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 7, 2001
On September 16, the Sunday after the attacks in New York and Washington, I wasn't surprised to find our sanctuary filled to overflowing. We needed each other intensely, and it was natural for us to turn to our community of faith. What did surprise me a little on that Sunday was that our overflowing building held within it scores of people we had never seen before -- strangers, who came through our doors that day despite the fact that this was not their known and familiar place of worship. It would be easy to attribute their presence among us to simple need: that first Sunday in particular, people all over the country needed to be with other people, and they gathered in halls of worship in droves, listening for a word or a chord of music or a grieving, collective silence by which their wounded hearts could be soothed.
But our crowded sanctuary on that extraordinary Sunday cast in a new light, at least for me, the question of why we come to a religious community on any Sunday. Why do we gather here? I know that it's hazardous to generalize about any fairly large grouping of people, and far more hazardous when the group encompasses a lot of diversity, as is true for this congregation. But I think it's still possible to declare a few things about us, and I think that on top of all the different things that compel us here individually, it's also true that most of us are looking for something more than community when we walk through these doors. We can find at least some sense of community in a lot of other places. When we come to this place, I think it's in the hope that something here will wake us up a little bit -- wake us up to our lives and to each other and to the deeper callings that are thrumming along like low bass notes below our foggy routines.
I think we know that for the most part we are sleepwalking through our lives. I think we know that our lives are short, fragile, precious beyond measure. But somehow we still live, day after day, as though we were riding long, lazy strands of eternity, as though there will always be time to get around to the important stuff by and by.
One of the ways that we wake up to our lives is through shock and trauma, and certainly many of us have lived with a certain edge to our days, an attentiveness as well as a fragility, since the events of September 11. But it takes something else for us to stay awake, something else if we are to keep ourselves at a deeper level of attention. It's a deliberate choice, a decision. And I think it's the instinct toward that choice for wakefulness, for attention, that leads us to a community of faith like this one.
A week or so after the attacks President Bush urged us to take up our normal lives again, and was particularly emphatic that we should travel and eat out and spend money, pretty much as though nothing had happened. I'm sure he was hoping to encourage us away from fearfulness, and was hoping as well to give a boost to that essential economic engine known as 'consumer confidence'. But 'normal' is not the best we can do, and there are dimensions to that blithe pattern of getting and spending that contribute perilously to the deadening of our lives. The community of faith stands against that deadening.
In a poem called Blessing, Eileen Karpeles writes these words [adapted]:
Out of wood and stone, out of dreams and sacrifice,
The people build a home.
Out of the work of their hands and hearts and minds
the people make [a house of worship.]
...[They] trust one another so surely
that they dare to [touch] the deep fires that burst into anger
as [well] as the sweet springwaters that swell into laughter;
the slow erosion of tears as well as the soaring song.
[The]...rafters hear the voice of the child
as willingly as that of the orator,
and the song of the lute, the clack of the [keyboard],
the swish of the broom,
and know that all are as holy as the shout of a million stars.
Out of 'dreams and sacrifice', the work of our 'hands and hearts and minds', we build a religious home together. We don't come here in order to leave the world outside or to transcend it, but in order to translate it, turn it toward a new light. In that new light we see holiness and wholeness where before we might have seen only brokenness, or nothing at all.
There is a story from the Buddhist tradition: a man in search of holiness and purification left his family and his city behind, learned the deepest art of solitary meditation, and dedicated himself to its practice with single-minded devotion. After twenty years he decided to return to the city in order to teach others the enlightenment he'd found. On the first outskirts of the city, as he entered the marketplace and made his way through the crowded streets, he was roughly jostled by someone passing by. The monk whirled on the person in anger, and in that moment realized that in all his twenty years of solitude, he still had not found true enlightenment.
The spiritual practices of solitude are essential to many of us: prayer, meditation, yoga and so on. But what the Buddhist story points to is the real life nature of genuine spiritual depth. If what we learn in our solitary practice can't be brought with us into the market, into the places we live, then it hasn't taken us where we need to go. UU writer Peter Fleck once said, "The saints may derive holiness from being alone, but they can only express it in their relationship with other human beings."
We live our entire lives within overlapping circles of community: family and workplace, school and social club, soft ball league and AA meeting, loose collections of friends, neighbornoods. We are social animals and most of us move without much conscious awareness through a dozen forms of community during any given day. But of all the varied and overlapping communities in which we live, it is this one that is explicitly dedicated to helping us deepen our spiritual lives. How well it succeeds depends on how well we learn to practice the spiritual disciplines of community.
I once heard Henri Nouwen give a workshop in which he defined the disciplines of community as forgiveness and celebration. I had to think hard about those two things before I understood the weight he was assigning to them. As important as forgiveness is, I can think of a few other virtues I would rank at least as high when it comes to learning to live together in a way that makes us ever more attentive to our living. Love, for instance, and patience, and a finely tuned sense of humor. Humility definitely has to be in there, and probably something that could be called faithfulness: that is, the willingness to stick by one another through the rough patches as well as the easy times. I suppose it could also be called stubbornness, or tenacity.
Nouwen's focus on celebration also gave me pause. Of course we want to celebrate together, but our collective life involves a lot of sorrow as well as joy. When we come together to grieve or to rage it's hard to think of that under the heading 'celebration'. But I tried to look more deeply at his reasons for choosing these two, for holding up forgiveness and celebration as the central practices, because Nouwen really chose community as his spiritual path. He could have stayed in academia, where he lived and worked for many years, or he could have lived as an isolated monk, or used his fame to travel and lecture all his days. What he did instead was to become a member of a L'arch community, a household of mentally handicapped people living in community with others not so handicapped. And it was in that context that Nouwen says he came to realize that community is the clearest place in our lives for purification. It is, as he put it, "the place where more often than not the person you least want to live with always seems to live."
We have to forgive each other for that. We have to forgive the streak of pompousness, and the tiresome habit of talking about ourselves. We have to forgive the neglect, forgetfulness, the willfull disregard of which we're capable, the irritating little habits. We also have to forgive the cruelty or the betrayal or the deceit that even the best among us might sometime visit on another. We have to practice forgiveness within this community because that's what it's for. This is our practice ground. This is where, in the words of the poet, we can trust each other enough to touch the fires, as well as the sweet spring waters. If we can't forgive, here, where in the world will we forgive?
We are mirrors for one another, and the deeper our communion with each other the more aware we are of being travelers in one journey and sailors on one boat. Our forward movement is linked so thoroughly that in the end we see that to forgive the imperfections we find out there is to forgive more deeply the ones we find in here.
Celebration as a discipline is likewise multiple and complex. Celebration within the faith community is not always the easy kind, the kind we fall into as second nature when we lift our voices in song or laughter because life is good. Celebration also comes in the whispered word, 'nevertheless': It is the somber and pained gathering at a time of loss, the careful lifting up of hopes and fears when we are feeling our most fragile, the sturdy evocations of awe in the face of mystery. Celebration can sound out even in the midst of despair, when it speaks with the voice of hope; or in the midst of danger, using the voice of solidarity.
Within a community of faith the disciplines of forgiveness and celebration are honed and practiced on many levels. They are essential. But there is another discipline of community we are called to practice here, in this unique and diverse collection of yearning people. It's a discipline essential to who we are, without which we cannot continue to exist as a congregation unless we radically change our purpose and our reason for being. It has something to do with tolerance, but that word sounds too minimalist and grudging. I started to call it receptivity, but that found that word a little too passive. I finally named it as the willingness to be transformed. It is a discipline that is required of a faith community that chooses to organize itself without the structures and boundaries of a creed.
The willingness to be transformed is the stance of an open mind and an open heart, both toward one another and toward the mysteries that envelope our lives. In its practice we bring a kind of eager attention to one another's halting efforts to speak out the heart's truth. We listen intently, even when a person uses language or imagery not our own. We expect to learn something. We become curious and patient, like someone waiting for a door to slowly open on a new and unknown vista.
When we are willing to be transformed we hold ourselves open for surprise. We do not repress or set aside our busy rational minds, but neither do we fool ourselves into believing that all our understandings will be rational. We open ourselves to our yearnings for the holy and we listen for all the ways in which holiness might speak to us. That openness requires profound respect for the truths carried by other traditions -- spoken in other words of prayer, in other forms of worship, in other names for God.
I think that in the world as it now is, shattered and shifted by September 11th, there may be no practice of heart or mind more urgent than this will toward openness. It pushes us beyond mere tolerance into a passionate hunger to learn, to understand. It makes our essential task the one of building bridges, where others are busy burning them.
Less than a week after September 11 I was in a gathering of clergy, most of them serving congregations we would regard as theologically conservative. As the meeting broke up a cluster of us began discussing whether or not we ought to try to create a large interfaith worship service, particularly to bring together Islamic clergy and believers with those of us from other faiths, as a statement against bigotry and intolerance. One of the ministers in this conversation began shaking his head, and declared that he was no longer willing to participate in interfaith gatherings, that in fact he even had his doubts about the gathering we were in, since it included those who were not Christian. He said he didn't feel free to pray a real prayer in an interfaith gathering.
I answered that I too was troubled when 'interfaith' came to mean 'lowest common denominator', with everyone speaking in such broad language that no one is offended, but nothing much is said. I said that in my tradition we try to celebrate diversity of language and faith, and that in such a light a true interfaith gathering would be one in which his prayer would be spoken in the name of Jesus Christ. Mine would not be, nor would the Jewish or Islamic prayers -- but we would bow our heads with him, and he would bow his head with us. We are all speaking to the Mystery.
This minister of the gospel then drew himself up and said stiffly, 'You misunderstand my concern. A prayer that is not spoken in the name of Jesus Christ is an invalid prayer, and one in which I will not participate.' And with that, the conversation was over.
We live in perilous times, and in perilous times there's a powerful instinct that propels us toward circling the wagons. We want to gather into tight clusters of people we can call 'us', and hold at bay all the others we can label as 'them'. This instinct is dangerous almost beyond the speaking. We can see it with frightening intensity in the Islamic Taliban of Afghanistan, but it was just as clear to me in my Christian American colleague. It is an instinct to which every single heart is susceptible, and we should never believe ourselves to be immune.
But there are antidotes, and among them are these practices of community, these disciplines of forgiveness, celebration and the willingness to be transformed. We are called to practice them here in this home. But we are not practicing with each other, we are not practicing on each other, in order to build the size or the intensity of fellowship within these walls. We practice the disciplines because that's the kind of world we want. This place is not a gathering of circled wagons! If you want a metaphor, it is an incubator, and in walking back out through its doors you are carrying within you all that we hope to grow here. Your task, your calling, is to spread it out there as bravely and as passionately as you are able.
Kazantzakis once wrote, "We are all one, we are all an imperiled essence. if at the far end of the world a spirit degenerates, it drags down our spirit into its own degradation. If one mind at the far end of the world sinks into idiocy, our own temples overbrim with darkness. For it is only One who struggles at the far end of earth and sky. One."