by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, April 4, 2004
Last week for our reading I chose a passage about belief from Kathleen Norris's book Amazing Grace, in which she recounts her own long journey back to church and to a new-found faith. At one point in that same chapter of the book, Norris quotes the pastor of her local church in South Dakota. When she spilled out to him her uncertainty about whether or not it was okay for her to come to church, seeing as how she was still so confused about what she believed, she was amazed by his response. "I have no idea why people are there on any given Sunday", he told her. "It seems a miracle to me. I have no reason or right to know why they've come. All I can do is accept their presence gladly. And together, we worship God."
I immediately felt a kinship with this unnamed and unknown minister in South Dakota. Whoever he is, I'm sure we have plenty of differences in our beliefs and our theology. But like him, it seems to me a miracle that people come to worship together. I see it as a mysterious grace that people come through these doors each week, settle themselves in their favorite spot and open up their minds and hearts to whatever will unfold among us.
It isn't actually that I have no idea why people come to worship -- why you come, why I come, why I would come even if I were not obligated to be here by the fact that you called me to be your minister. I do know some of the reasons why we come. We come because we need a time in our week when we can step away from all the things that fill our minds and fill our hours, so we can choose deliberately to fill ourselves with something else, something new.
We come because we find ourselves a little too alone in our confusion or our despair for the world, a little too quiet in our solitude, and we need to feel the press of other people around us in a way that will linger and sustain us much more than a random gathering in a mall, or a theater. We come because we feel too crowded by our schedules, our families, our chores, our worries, and we want to tap into the pools of silence we know are lying there somewhere a little deeper down.
We come for lots of other reasons too. We come for the children, for the music, for the social life, for the social justice life, for the new ideas that might spring up inside us. We come in the hope that when we mix all of those things together some small, amazing insight will arise, and the meaning of our lives will become a little more clear to us.
But even knowing all of those reasons, I have to say it still seems to me a thing of wonder when we gather ourselves together. I'm coming to the end of my seventeenth year of ministry, which sounds to me like an implausibly long time to be in the same line of work. It should be plenty long enough to unpack the meaning of congregational life, plenty long enough to feel I've got a grip on every nuance of what it means to be a community at worship.
Maybe I'm a slow learner, but I have to say that as the years go by I am more amazed, not less, by what it means to be a congregation, what it is people become when they join together in faith. And I'm not just talking about us, here within these walls, or even the slightly larger "us" of Unitarian Universalists. I'm thinking of the really big "us", all of the people who, in our wondrously diverse languages of faith, try to turn themselves toward something large and important and transcendent.
Rose Marie Berger, one of the editors of the progressive Christian journal called Sojourners, wrote the following account of a man at prayer: "At the corner of 14th and Euclid Streets NW in Washington, DC, many evenings at sunset, the Domino's deliveryman kneels down to pray. About 50 years old, he wears dark pants, white high-top sneakers and the pizza company's bright red shirt. In the dusty space between the cracked sidewalk and the asphalt, between the traffic light pole and a chipped green fire hydrant, he lays down a faded prayer rug and faces…toward the east.
"This street corner is what historian of religion Mircea Eliade would call 'profane space'…There is no center to it. The Amoco station is physically the same as every other Amoco station. Late night patrons regularly hear rounds of gunshots and hit the ground. Cars run the stoplights….[Still], as the sun slants behind him in the west, the Domino's deliveryman lays out his blue and tan prayer rug and removes his shoes. [Kneeling], he touches his forehead to the ground.
"At that moment of prayer, he is not simply one more object in the urban landscape….His act of praying transforms the cityscape into sacred space, holy ground…He becomes a meeting point between heaven and earth…He provides a point of orientation in space and time whereby the world beyond him may be shaped, ordered and structured. Through his prayer practice, he transforms chaos into cosmos. He restores reality. He creates humanness. He incarnates. For a time, strangers become neighbors, a red light becomes a Sabbath moment, and the frenetic urban energy slows perceptibly around him."
What are we doing here? What are we doing here, gathering ourselves into an eclectic community at worship? What are we doing here, through the lobby and up or down the stairs, when we take an hour every week to teach our children some small thread of religious history or insight or truth? When we quiet ourselves into prayer and meditation? When we open ourselves to some new spiritual discipline, or put our hands to some new work of justice, or turn ourselves to reflective conversation in small groups ministry? What are we doing?
It seems to me that what we're doing here, in all the many manifestations of this religious community, is the same thing the Muslim man is doing when he squints through the windshield at the fading light, sees that it is now time for evening prayer, pulls his truck to the side of the road and reaches for his prayer rug. I know it sounds grandiose to say the things Rose Marie Berger says about him, to say that by his small act of reverence or by any of ours, we are somehow shaping our world, transforming chaos, restoring reality.
But I think it's true. I think all of those things are true. Because while there are lots of certainties that seem to fade for me as I get older, and I hope wiser, there are also a few things that I've become very sure of. For instance, I am sure that our lives have infinitely more meaning and purpose when we turn our attention and skill and generosity toward something larger than self-interest. I am sure that we move toward that larger thing, and learn to act for the greater good in our world, only when we find some way to grow in perspective, insight, wisdom and courage.
I am sure that these qualities don't come to us accidentally most of the time, but grow within us because we deliberately make room for them. I am sure we make room for them both through spiritual practices that make us quiet enough to receive insight, and through communities that teach us and keep us honest. I am sure that when we find and form these communities, we magnify the power of our own slow spiritual growth. I am sure that in ways we might never really understand, that magnified power of transformation is one of the most important forces at work in our world.
I don't think it's grandiose, to claim so much for our communities of faith. For me at least, that hope for transformation is the bottom line: it's why I come to church, why I come to be within a community of faith, why I greet my own spiritual practice as an essential element in my life. I think in one way or another we all carry that hope for transformation, and that's what we're doing here.
That hope is what I think we turn to, the container for our sorrows and despair, when we open our eyes to images like the ones we saw beamed out of Iraq this week. I was grateful that I so rarely watch the news on television, because even the newspaper images of charred bodies and cheering crowds were unbearably painful. The revulsion we feel is physical, not just mental or emotional.
We might be able to imagine killing -- in a moment of panic or fear or rage -- but it's impossible to imagine the brutal frenzy that has to unfold within someone, within scores of people, when they become this kind of mob. Even before we knew anything at all about the victims, we knew they belonged somewhere: that they had mothers, fathers, wives or lovers -- someone who loved them. And our hearts break for the pain of those families.
But when we come into a place like this one, into a community of faith, we run the risk that something more will be asked of us. All the things we felt when we first saw or heard about the murderous mob in Iraq come easily to us: revulsion, disgust, horror, sorrow, sympathy for the victims and their families. The religious life -- the truly religious life -- demands that we not stop there. It calls on us to pull from ourselves things that don't come easily, things that seem almost impossible -- like a recollection of our kinship, not just with victims but with perpetrators.
The religious life calls us to remember that the deeper plot line beneath all our stories, beneath even this story, is that we truly are one: not only with those who seem to be like us, who we think we understand, who behave as we want to behave. We are one with the other ones, also: the ones we don't like, the ones whose actions sicken us, the ones we want to think of as less than human.
No one said that it would be easy, this business of transformation. No one said that it would be quick or fun or entertaining, or that once we had turned toward the possibilities we would really even want to go the whole distance. But it is where our hope lodges, where it sticks and will not be shaken loose.
We are a troubled tribe, we human beings. But the message of our faith is this: we get to have a part in how the story unfolds. If it is true that we are one -- not just on levels we know but on levels we can't comprehend -- then it is also true that how we change ourselves changes the whole mix. We do not have an impact on our world only through our obvious choices of action: how we vote, when and how we march or protest, whether we teach or feed or heal or help someone. We also have an impact through the selves we carry into all those actions. Who we are matters just as much as what we do: who we are, and who we let ourselves become.
In Durham, where I live, there is road work going on here and there around the town, minor patching from the winter and cleaning up of the sand and salt. Because the jobs are small ones the road crew moves around all the time, and you never know whether or not the road you're on will bring you around a curve or over a hill and to a standstill because the repair crew has taken on this particular stretch just at a time when you're trying to traverse it. The delays are not terribly long or inconvenient, but they are delays, and they're unexpected. When you're trying to get somewhere in a hurry, full of the long list of things that have to be done, it's hard to look kindly on the unexpected delays, especially when they happen several times a week.
The person who works as the flagman for this road crew is not a man, but a diminutive woman who looks like she's well into in her sixties, with glasses perched on her round cheeks and fly-away gray hair. Whether she's out there in the pouring rain or the sunshine, whenever it has been my turn to inch my car past her she looks straight at me until she gets eye contact, like she's a special friend of mine, and then she breaks into a radiant smile and waves me on my way. Each time this happens, it makes me feel as though I've just been given a secret message of great good news, a little folded piece of golden parchment handed straight in through the car window.
It's gotten so that if I see the road crew up ahead of me on the road, I get off the call if I'm on my cell phone and if I'm listening to music I turn it off, so as to be ready to receive the gift this woman gives me. I think of her as the road crew boddhisatva, because her bearing seems to me not only decent but enlightened. When I've driven on past her smile and her wave, inevitably I find that something small but significant has shaken loose within me, and I myself bring a presence to the rest of my day that is a tiny bit more decent and more enlightened.
The story about the road-crew boddhisatva in Durham is a very, very small story. It seems to weigh nothing at all when held up against a large, terrible story like the killing of four men by a mob in Iraq, or the even larger and more terrible story of the war that shapes the context for the mob. But my faith tells me that these stories are not as disconnected as they seem.
A smile and a shine of deep humanity in the eyes will do nothing to stop mob violence. But they do some small thing to wake me up. And I believe that the more awake each one of us can become, the larger our chances of changing the stories that are told, enacted, played out with brutal regularity by our troubled and misguided human family.
What are we doing here? We're learning how to wake up. We're learning how to change the stories. We're learning how to greet transformation, how to make it manifest within ourselves and in our actions with each other, and in the wider world. I don't think it's grandiose, or an exaggeration, to say that there is nothing the world needs more than it needs these things.
So: this is Canvass Sunday, and this has not been a sermon about money. It is instead my attempt to name the question that has to be asked before we give our money, or for that matter before we give anything of ourselves to this place. What is it for? This odd, energetic, growing, eclectic congregation of ours -- what is it for?
It's for our transformation. It's for the transformation of the world. And though it may not always be obvious, it's that large work of faith that we sustain by what often seems the mundane and even trivial decision about how much of our money will be turned toward this faith community of ours. It isn't mundane, and there's nothing trivial about it. So when you receive your pledge card this week or next, please sit down with it for a few minutes. Take the time to sit with it for a while, with your spouse or by yourself, and think about what this place is for. And then please give as generously as you possibly can. AMEN.