by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, May 23, 2004
Those of you who are drawn to gardening have doubtless been doing some of it over the last few weeks, or at least fantasizing about what you'll do when you can manage to carve out a little time to get your hands good and dirty. Spring is the time for cultivation, for digging up the soil and planting something new. And at USNH, as in many other kinds of congregations, something analogous is going on. Mid-May is the time we begin laying the groundwork for next year. We finish up our fundraising and plan out the budget for the coming year. We figure out what we need to decide at our June congregational meeting that will move us forward next year. We begin thinking about the classes we want to offer for our kids, and the other projects or activities we want to launch in the fall.
In other words we are looking ahead, which is both a necessary and healthy thing for an institution to do. And in order to do that dreaming and planning, this is also the time of year that we try to cultivate some new leadership. We invite people to teach a class for our kids next year, or plan an adult activity, or join one of the many committees that through their labors faithfully, and sometimes invisibly, stitch together the fabric of this congregation. In the name of that cultivation of new leadership, in our social hall today you will find it particularly easy to learn about the many avenues for involvement that are open to you at USNH. You will also be eagerly invited to think about signing your name on the dotted line to become an active laborer in some dimension of congregational life in the coming year.
What's wrong with this picture? On a certain level, nothing at all. This is a community that is sustained only by its members, and nothing at all of significance happens around here without a pretty good pool of volunteers chugging along to make it happen. But on another level, there is something wrong with this picture, if that's the central snapshot that defines what we're doing together. It was only last week, after all, that I mentioned the old gospel story about Jesus visiting the home of Mary and Martha, and the story's archetypal polarity between the one who stays busy at all the mundane, essential tasks of life and the one who steps away from that busyness in order to touch the holy.
I shared with you the marvelous quote from Rev. Carl Scovel: "We are imprisoned in Martha churches. How do we create congregations willing and able to accommodate and feed the Mary in each person?" I want to try to unpack that question a little more thoroughly, especially in light of the invitation this Sunday to explore the many avenues for involvement and service in this congregation and choose one to which you can lend your energies. Institutions like ours, religious communities, face some unique challenges. On the one hand, our reason for existence is certainly not to create ever larger and more diverse committees with which we can all stay busy. We need to resist the slide toward being a Martha church, where the main channel for connection is to join a committee and make our lives even busier than they already are. As Kennon Callahan put it in our second reading this morning, "People come to a church in our time with a search for community, not committee."
On the other hand, no congregation, of any faith, can be a place where people come in order to be passive consumers. Faith communities aren't like theaters, where people choose the show they want, pay their money and then sit in the seats as the audience, waiting to be entertained or taught or enlightened. We create this place together, in every single one of its dimensions, through the energy, time, talent and money of all those who choose to belong here.
So how do we strike the balance between nurture and labor? How do we sustain the institution in a fair way and on an even keel, while making sure that the people who come here are also sustained instead of burned out, spiritually deepened instead of stretched too thin? One answer lies in the wisdom of William Elery Channing and the rest of our Unitarian ancestors who, more than a century and a half ago, helped him forge what became modern Unitarianism. Channing believed that the primary purpose of religion-- of any religion, not just his own -- should be what he called "self-cultivation". What Channing meant by that term was actually soul cultivation, because that's the sense in which he understood the real self, the core of the person. And he meant cultivation in the same way that we mean it when we go out into our gardens in the spring and dig our grateful fingers into the dirt. It means growing something. In Channing's case it meant growing our souls.
The primary purpose of our religious communities is to help us grow our souls. We understand that central purpose on a kind of intuitive level. But since we generally have a very hard time naming exactly what we mean by the "soul", how in the world will we know whether or not we're growing one? Kennon Callahan names four things he thinks people are looking for when they come through the doors of a religious institution. And as I think about those four things it seems to me that they actually give us a pretty good set of guidelines on whether or not we are doing the work we should be doing -- balancing Mary with the labors of Martha, and helping each other to grow our souls.
Callahan says that what we're looking for in our spiritual homes are a deeper understanding of the self; a sustaining connection to community; insights about the meaning of our lives; and a consistent, enlivening sense of hope. Self, community, meaning and hope: if we are finding the ways to pay attention to those four areas within the walls of this religious institution, then I think we can be pretty sure that no matter how many activities we generate or how many options we offer for involvement, we will strike the delicate balance between Mary and Martha
First, the self: in everything we do in the world, this is where we have to start. In a sense that is obvious to us, but in another sense we have a tendency to resist it because it seems self-indulgent. We have all taken into ourselves pretty deeply the little nagging fear that when we do something to nurture or sustain ourselves, there's something vaguely wrong, something that shades toward selfishness.
I have mentioned before the great wisdom I find in the Vipassana Buddhist practice that is called metta, or loving-kindness. In metta meditation, we choose a phrase that resonates for us, such as "may I be free from suffering" or "may my mind be at ease", and we hold ourselves, our own minds and hearts, at the center of that attention, that sustaining wish or blessing. We then move out gradually to other circles of relationship. We wish the same blessing for someone very close to us, like our child; then for a good friend, then for an acquaintance, and then for a difficult person or an enemy, and on out until the well-wishing is extended to all beings.
It's a very simple, gracious practice that helps open our eyes to the linkages between all of us, and helps to soften our hearts toward people we find difficult. But metta practice is relentless in its insistence that you've got to start with the self: you cannot skip over your own heart's need and focus first on your kid or your friend. Your own laden heart, your own painful despair, your own weariness or fear, have got to be the place where you begin. There is a tremendous wisdom in this practice, and it's one we should bring with us into this place, into the Unitarian Society of New Haven, whether or not we ever choose to sit a single moment in a Buddhist practice of meditation.
Begin with the self. Who am I? What do I love? Where am I most alive and sustained as I move through the days of my life? Where am I wounded, and what do I need in order to help my own healing? In everything we do here, in all our labors to sustain this place, there should be room made for these questions. This is part of what Channing meant by self-cultivation. We have to know who we are in order to learn what we can become.
Then comes community. This is the second part of growing a soul, and it follows on the heels of self-knowledge and self-care. The primary question of community is this one: Where do my gifts and joy intersect with this community's needs? If no person in this congregation ever signed up to join a committee or teach a class or serve us here in any way until that question had been asked, we would move a giant step closer to living out our vision of the beloved community. Choose where you will sign up to help next year based on the answer to that question. Where do your gifts and joy intersect with this community's needs? It certainly won't be everywhere. No matter how skilled you are and no matter how inspired you are to be of use, if you sign yourself up for too many things you will run yourself into the ground, and the high sense of purpose you thought you were serving will begin to taste like ashes in your mouth.
Gaelen Guengerich, one of the ministers at All Soul's Unitarian in New York, once said, "Each of us will compose our lives differently. But the music will be best if we keep our themes few and simple. There may well be someone, for example, who can be a pioneering scientist and a devoted mother and an effective advocate for the homeless and a tireless volunteer for the natural history museum and a gifted amateur musician and an accomplished marathon runner and a beloved church school teacher and an engaging spouse and a world-class collector of signet rings and an award-winning poet and a member of the local parole board. But I doubt it."
Choose your connections carefully. Choose a few mutual threads in the weave of community: how you will best be sustained, and how you can in turn be part of the sustenance of others.
So community is the second part of self-cultivation. The third and fourth parts of growing our souls reach beyond the boundaries of our community. They have to do with where we find meaning in our lives, and how we find and nurture hope. The meaning questions are God questions, whether or not we consider ourselves believers. What is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of my life, and my death? How do I understand the immense mysteries of the universe, and how do those mysteries speak to me? These are faith questions, and this is the place where we need to make ample, generous room for the asking and for the inner listening from which the answers arise.
Hope has to do with how we bring our faith to some kind of fruition in our lives. How shall we live in the world in such a way that our lives make a difference? Measuring ourselves against the large and complex problems of our world, how do we hold onto hope, for ourselves and one another?
There is an old story told about a Vermont farmer who labored for years to clear a stony field and make it fit for crops. When it was finally free of stones enough to really be productive, a stranger stopped by one day while the farmer was plowing and said piously, "Well my friend, you and God have done a great job on that pasture!" The farmer responded dryly, "Well, that may be; but you ought to have seen it when God was doing it all by himself!"
We may or may not be going about the work of our world in partnership with a cosmic force for life and progress that we can know as God. But what is certain is that we are never doing the work all by ourselves. UU minister Gordon McKeeman, who was president of Starr King seminary when I was a student there, used to remind us that all the work we ever do is a drop in the bucket. But he never said "just" a drop in the bucket. He pointed out that when we use that phrase, we always think of the first one, the drop that looks like nothing, that gives a forlorn little plunk when it lands in an empty bucket. But a bucket gets filled drop by drop, as everyone knows who has ever put one under a slow leak in the roof. Along with the first lonely drop there is also a last one, and it's by that single last drop that the bucket finally overflows.
There is always some pivotal last effort or action, one choice among thousands of contributing choices, that finally brings the weight of change into critical mass and pushes things forward in our world. It's in seeing ourselves connected this way that we find and hold onto both our meaning and our hope.
When you leave this sanctuary today and make your way into the social hall for a cup of coffee and a chat, I do hope you will stop at the table that tells about some of the many ways you might choose to find your ministry here at USNH. If you've mostly been floating on the periphery this year, it would be a good time to look at the ways you can move toward the heart of things and build this community by your time and energy. But I hope you will keep Mary in mind as you look at the Martha tasks that sustain this place.
And I hope you'll let your choices for how you will be useful here be guided by the intuition that the inner Mary can give us, about what sustains us and feeds our joy even as we're giving back to the community. We are not here in order to be busy. We are here in order to grow our souls. Amen.
Benediction
Arlene Karpeles [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]…
May these 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… holy…
May the rain fall lightly on this house,
the sun shine warmly, the winds blow softly,
blessing it as a [holy] place. AMEN.