HOMILY: "Harder Still Is This"

This is the sermon I delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville this past Sunday. The assigned theme was "Unitarian Universalist Moral Responsibility in our Local Community." The worship chair read Raising the Roof as the "Story for All Ages," and before I spoke, I put on four long, gaudy strands of beads:

( Seven years ago, I celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans. )

---

( ...from deep despair and perished things... )

"every feral hair / is given its credible gumption..."

....Moon of the gnashing wolf, moon of the overtumulting tidewaters,
moon of the itch of love, of the gnash of love, of the waters of love
-- we've all been there.

...How short, how everyday, is the step
between two worlds? -- the thickness of the skull? of the skin?
My wife's friend Jane's son young son announced,
in case we didn't know it, "Men-have-penises.
Women-have-vagendas." That's a good one, yes?
And I've been pleased to have been issued passports
into some of those "vagendas" -- to have traveled there.
And always, at that journey's end, I've been left breathless,
changed for a moment and lost in myself and breathless,
and beached on a foreign shore.

- Albert Goldbarth, "Budget Travel Through the Universe"