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bronze_ribbonsThis 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. These are some of the beads I caught while watching the parades there. Earlier this month, I wore them in honor of an extraordinary man named Jace Burch, who suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 48.
Jace loved, loved, loved to have a good time, and his partner asked that the memorial service be a 70s disco party. Many of the participants in the service wore either beads or Titans jerseys, and the music included the Village People; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and Barry White, as well as "River in Judea" and ""Standing on the Side of Love." It was truly a celebration of Jace’s life, and one of his co-workers from the State said it was giving him ideas about what he wanted when the time for his funeral came around (but that he didn't plan on it being anytime soon!)
Jace was one of the most visible members of First UU Nashville, and not just because he wore his Titans jersey and his Titans earring to church on game days. He contributed countless hours to feeding the collective body, mind and spirit of First UU, both literally and figuratively. He was a host for Stewardship dinners, and he catered Seders and teas, and he helped organize balls and fairs and concerts and block parties. He chaired the Fundraising Committee the past three years and was known for his ability to "turn making money into an opportunity to have fun.” He was on countless committees and helped with numerous maintenance projects, from shampooing the carpets to scrubbing out the kitchen to raising extra money for paint. His obituary specified that donations should be made to the church building fund.
On top of everything else, Jace was a stalwart of First UU’s Caring Committee, and he was known as linchpin of the church’s Senior Breakfasts. I remember a speech he gave which started out, "I love old people," and he talked about how he’d learned so much from them. That speech has stayed in my mind for several reasons: it was the first time I’d heard the rule about waiting until after Good Friday to plant seeds, and it was also one of the times Jace described himself as a "fat, agnostic, hillbilly queer" for whom First UU had provided a spiritual home and community. It is hard to imagine a community or institution that would not have benefited from Jace’s considerable energy, expertise, and capacity to love, but the sad and sorry truth is that, because of who he was, there were places he knew his gifts wouldn’t be welcome.
I find it tricky to stand up here and talk about UU responsibilities to our local communities, in part because I always start to feel squirmy -- like I'm preaching in a glass pulpit -- when I start talking about "responsibility" as applied to anyone other than myself. This isn't to say that I don't hold strong opinions, or that I'm not wildly judgmental when someone's child is kicking the back of my airplane seat. At the same time, I’m all too aware of my daily failures of compassion. I’m conscious of how complicated everyone's lives are, and how there are a multitude of invisible pressures and unarticulated pain that aren’t represented in "candles of concern" or otherwise voiced to the world at large. My mailbox and email accounts are bombarded regularly with calls to participate in campaigns and rallies and task forces, but I’m currently in a phase of my life where I barely have time to walk my dog, never mind walking in marches and fundraisers.
So, I want to take this very idealistic topic -- "Moral Responsibility" -- and place it within a realistic frame: given the overwhelming demands on our collective time, and given what an unholy mess the world is and will be, what are our obligations to the larger community? How do we discuss and demonstrate our faith in ways that are effective but not obnoxious? How do we cope with other people’s expectations?
There’s a George Bernard Shaw quote I saw in a UU newsletter last year that has stuck in my mind ever since. It goes like this:
Mr. Shaw also wrote, "You have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than you do to consume wealth without producing it." On the one hand, I’m fairly allergic to whining, and few things frustrate me more than people wallowing in entitlement or despair, so these quotes resonate with me. On the other hand, I’m a Franklin Planner girl and a firm believer in what they call "sharpening the saw": that is, you cannot take proper care of everyone else if you don’t take care of yourself first. There are times when certain deadlines will be so urgent that they throw the natural balance of priorities out of whack, but the great big problems of our society are not going to be solved by skipping exercise or flossing.
So, in my not so humble opinion, our first moral responsibility to society is taking proper care of ourselves. The health of the mind is tied to the health of the body -- I, for one, am a whole lot saner and nicer when I get enough sleep -- and society needs us to be physically and mentally present to the degree that we are able. It needs us to be around to help pick up trash and build houses and prod our representatives into representing us, and the healthier we are in body and spirit, the more energy we can give to such tasks.
Our presence is important and necessary in itself. Even if you don’t have the time, means, or ability to be active as active-ists, it can make all the difference in someone’s life to find out that you are a person of faith who will value them as they are in the here and now. Your presence can provide courage to someone questioning whether they should stay here in Tennessee, when our less enlightened legislators make life difficult for them. Your presence can demonstrate to embittered souls that not all religions are caravans of condemnation and despair, and that there exists a community that will cherish their gifts and support their quests. Your presence can help inform your neighbors of perspectives and possibilities new to them, be it of successful same-sex partnerships or ways to conserve and preserve our natural resources.
By "presence," I don’t necessarily mean you have to brandish a UU banner everywhere you go, although I do think it well worth mentioning in appropriate contexts. Over the years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the people who’ve asked me about Unitarian Universalism -- usually after knowing me for a while and interacting with me in other contexts. I think a fair number of them have been gratified to discover that "religious," "inquisitive," "fun-loving" and even "downright hedonistic" are not antonyms. In our current cultural climate, religion is too often wielded as a weapon to kill joy and quash debate. When we speak up and speak out as Unitarian Universalists in the wider community, we are testifying to a faith that emboldens and supports its members as they work toward a more just and beautiful world.
I cannot stress enough that the choice and form of how "present" you should be in your communities is something only you can assess, and that the choice you make for now is not necessarily the choice that will be right for you next year. It is up to you to determine what you can afford to give and share. Some of us who are short on time contribute in financial ways, and vice versa. Some of us have children to raise or parents for whom we are caretakers. Some of us have disabilities or illnesses that preclude significant physical involvement. Some of us are still in the beginning stages of recovering from loss or abuse or addiction. There isn’t a preacher, guru, or committee on this earth who can create a one-size-fits-all yardstick to fit every possible permutation -- at least, not one I’d trust.
What I do see as universal, and of utmost importance, is that there are choices for you to make every day in what you say and what you use, what you buy and what you choose to share. Our collective moral responsibility is to own these choices and their consequences. For some people, this is easy and a no-brainer. I confess I find it inordinately hard, and many days I don’t manage it: when I fail to get something done, it can be so much easier to blame interstate traffic or what I ate for lunch than to admit I had other priorities, no matter how reasonable or urgent those other priorities happened to be. It’s scary to me when I have to let other people down, regardless of whether their expectations were justified or not, and I’m not really fun to be around when I’m on the defensive.
That said, in this day and age, I think many people are so accustomed to being disappointed and disregarded that they are astonished and inspired when they meet people truly in love with life, truly invested in doing good work, and truly interested in listening to them. I feel our moral responsibility is to be present as those people -- to steer clear of pettiness and despair and easy assumptions, and to live our lives as embodiments of praise. It is a miracle that any of us exist at all, even for the far-too-brief blink of eternity that constitutes the span of a human life. As far as I’m concerned, we do have a debt to whatever we hold sacred: it is given to us to live our lives as bravely, as generously, and as joyfully as we can, and in doing so, to encourage others to be brave and generous and joyful as well.
Last Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of W. H. Auden, who wrote a much-quoted poem called "September 1, 1939." He later disowned the poem, declaring the phrase "we must love one another or die" to be incurably dishonest, given that we all die anyway, no matter how much love we manage to share or not. One poem that did make it into his Collected Poems was a canzone written in 1942. It’s the basis for the hymn "When Shall We Learn" in our hymnal, and I’d like to read it for our meditation, followed by a couple minutes of silence.
[Both poems available here]
...
Five minutes of your time... five dollars to spare... what you can give, when you can and where you can, it matters. Blessed be, amen and alleluia.
The title comes from "Where My Free Spirit Onward Leads," by Alicia S. Carpenter. (In Singing the Living Tradition, which many UU congregations use as their hymnal, it's set to "Kingsfold," a traditional melody arranged by Vaughan Williams.) The final verse goes:
I've had better weeks: my voice isn't up to par, which is supremely frustrating; I cannot seem to get caught up on umpety-teen fronts; I accidentally deleted my entire in-box during Tuesday's all-nighter; and I just ran out of aspirin. On the other hand, the two aspirin I took earlier are working; I've clawed up a few notches on the learning Alps; and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is as terrific as various folks have said (marymary, I thought of you during one of its mentions of Rilke; I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't yet picked up on how its protagonists are distantly related to Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, or if the connection is simply that the author was inspired by them (and that a Sayers book appears in one of the couple's encounters)).
There's another Alicia S. Carpenter lyric that's been running through my head lately. It's one of those songs I don't really believe in when I look at the lyrics closely. They're a little too "all of us" for my taste, and I'm a little too dour at my core: some things don't come back, and some things become irretrievably nasty. And yet, and yet -- paired with a 17th-century melody, the words insist on echoing in my head, such that I end up humming "something always, always sings" while driving to and fro...
Seven years ago, I celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans. These are some of the beads I caught while watching the parades there. Earlier this month, I wore them in honor of an extraordinary man named Jace Burch, who suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of 48.
Jace loved, loved, loved to have a good time, and his partner asked that the memorial service be a 70s disco party. Many of the participants in the service wore either beads or Titans jerseys, and the music included the Village People; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and Barry White, as well as "River in Judea" and ""Standing on the Side of Love." It was truly a celebration of Jace’s life, and one of his co-workers from the State said it was giving him ideas about what he wanted when the time for his funeral came around (but that he didn't plan on it being anytime soon!)
Jace was one of the most visible members of First UU Nashville, and not just because he wore his Titans jersey and his Titans earring to church on game days. He contributed countless hours to feeding the collective body, mind and spirit of First UU, both literally and figuratively. He was a host for Stewardship dinners, and he catered Seders and teas, and he helped organize balls and fairs and concerts and block parties. He chaired the Fundraising Committee the past three years and was known for his ability to "turn making money into an opportunity to have fun.” He was on countless committees and helped with numerous maintenance projects, from shampooing the carpets to scrubbing out the kitchen to raising extra money for paint. His obituary specified that donations should be made to the church building fund.
On top of everything else, Jace was a stalwart of First UU’s Caring Committee, and he was known as linchpin of the church’s Senior Breakfasts. I remember a speech he gave which started out, "I love old people," and he talked about how he’d learned so much from them. That speech has stayed in my mind for several reasons: it was the first time I’d heard the rule about waiting until after Good Friday to plant seeds, and it was also one of the times Jace described himself as a "fat, agnostic, hillbilly queer" for whom First UU had provided a spiritual home and community. It is hard to imagine a community or institution that would not have benefited from Jace’s considerable energy, expertise, and capacity to love, but the sad and sorry truth is that, because of who he was, there were places he knew his gifts wouldn’t be welcome.
I find it tricky to stand up here and talk about UU responsibilities to our local communities, in part because I always start to feel squirmy -- like I'm preaching in a glass pulpit -- when I start talking about "responsibility" as applied to anyone other than myself. This isn't to say that I don't hold strong opinions, or that I'm not wildly judgmental when someone's child is kicking the back of my airplane seat. At the same time, I’m all too aware of my daily failures of compassion. I’m conscious of how complicated everyone's lives are, and how there are a multitude of invisible pressures and unarticulated pain that aren’t represented in "candles of concern" or otherwise voiced to the world at large. My mailbox and email accounts are bombarded regularly with calls to participate in campaigns and rallies and task forces, but I’m currently in a phase of my life where I barely have time to walk my dog, never mind walking in marches and fundraisers.
So, I want to take this very idealistic topic -- "Moral Responsibility" -- and place it within a realistic frame: given the overwhelming demands on our collective time, and given what an unholy mess the world is and will be, what are our obligations to the larger community? How do we discuss and demonstrate our faith in ways that are effective but not obnoxious? How do we cope with other people’s expectations?
There’s a George Bernard Shaw quote I saw in a UU newsletter last year that has stuck in my mind ever since. It goes like this:
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Mr. Shaw also wrote, "You have no more right to consume happiness without producing it, than you do to consume wealth without producing it." On the one hand, I’m fairly allergic to whining, and few things frustrate me more than people wallowing in entitlement or despair, so these quotes resonate with me. On the other hand, I’m a Franklin Planner girl and a firm believer in what they call "sharpening the saw": that is, you cannot take proper care of everyone else if you don’t take care of yourself first. There are times when certain deadlines will be so urgent that they throw the natural balance of priorities out of whack, but the great big problems of our society are not going to be solved by skipping exercise or flossing.
So, in my not so humble opinion, our first moral responsibility to society is taking proper care of ourselves. The health of the mind is tied to the health of the body -- I, for one, am a whole lot saner and nicer when I get enough sleep -- and society needs us to be physically and mentally present to the degree that we are able. It needs us to be around to help pick up trash and build houses and prod our representatives into representing us, and the healthier we are in body and spirit, the more energy we can give to such tasks.
Our presence is important and necessary in itself. Even if you don’t have the time, means, or ability to be active as active-ists, it can make all the difference in someone’s life to find out that you are a person of faith who will value them as they are in the here and now. Your presence can provide courage to someone questioning whether they should stay here in Tennessee, when our less enlightened legislators make life difficult for them. Your presence can demonstrate to embittered souls that not all religions are caravans of condemnation and despair, and that there exists a community that will cherish their gifts and support their quests. Your presence can help inform your neighbors of perspectives and possibilities new to them, be it of successful same-sex partnerships or ways to conserve and preserve our natural resources.
By "presence," I don’t necessarily mean you have to brandish a UU banner everywhere you go, although I do think it well worth mentioning in appropriate contexts. Over the years, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the people who’ve asked me about Unitarian Universalism -- usually after knowing me for a while and interacting with me in other contexts. I think a fair number of them have been gratified to discover that "religious," "inquisitive," "fun-loving" and even "downright hedonistic" are not antonyms. In our current cultural climate, religion is too often wielded as a weapon to kill joy and quash debate. When we speak up and speak out as Unitarian Universalists in the wider community, we are testifying to a faith that emboldens and supports its members as they work toward a more just and beautiful world.
I cannot stress enough that the choice and form of how "present" you should be in your communities is something only you can assess, and that the choice you make for now is not necessarily the choice that will be right for you next year. It is up to you to determine what you can afford to give and share. Some of us who are short on time contribute in financial ways, and vice versa. Some of us have children to raise or parents for whom we are caretakers. Some of us have disabilities or illnesses that preclude significant physical involvement. Some of us are still in the beginning stages of recovering from loss or abuse or addiction. There isn’t a preacher, guru, or committee on this earth who can create a one-size-fits-all yardstick to fit every possible permutation -- at least, not one I’d trust.
What I do see as universal, and of utmost importance, is that there are choices for you to make every day in what you say and what you use, what you buy and what you choose to share. Our collective moral responsibility is to own these choices and their consequences. For some people, this is easy and a no-brainer. I confess I find it inordinately hard, and many days I don’t manage it: when I fail to get something done, it can be so much easier to blame interstate traffic or what I ate for lunch than to admit I had other priorities, no matter how reasonable or urgent those other priorities happened to be. It’s scary to me when I have to let other people down, regardless of whether their expectations were justified or not, and I’m not really fun to be around when I’m on the defensive.
That said, in this day and age, I think many people are so accustomed to being disappointed and disregarded that they are astonished and inspired when they meet people truly in love with life, truly invested in doing good work, and truly interested in listening to them. I feel our moral responsibility is to be present as those people -- to steer clear of pettiness and despair and easy assumptions, and to live our lives as embodiments of praise. It is a miracle that any of us exist at all, even for the far-too-brief blink of eternity that constitutes the span of a human life. As far as I’m concerned, we do have a debt to whatever we hold sacred: it is given to us to live our lives as bravely, as generously, and as joyfully as we can, and in doing so, to encourage others to be brave and generous and joyful as well.
Last Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of W. H. Auden, who wrote a much-quoted poem called "September 1, 1939." He later disowned the poem, declaring the phrase "we must love one another or die" to be incurably dishonest, given that we all die anyway, no matter how much love we manage to share or not. One poem that did make it into his Collected Poems was a canzone written in 1942. It’s the basis for the hymn "When Shall We Learn" in our hymnal, and I’d like to read it for our meditation, followed by a couple minutes of silence.
[Both poems available here]
...
Five minutes of your time... five dollars to spare... what you can give, when you can and where you can, it matters. Blessed be, amen and alleluia.
The title comes from "Where My Free Spirit Onward Leads," by Alicia S. Carpenter. (In Singing the Living Tradition, which many UU congregations use as their hymnal, it's set to "Kingsfold," a traditional melody arranged by Vaughan Williams.) The final verse goes:
The ever spinning universe, well, there shall be my home;
I sing and spin within it as through this life I roam;
eternity is hard to ken and harder still is this:
a human life when truly seen is briefer than a kiss.
I've had better weeks: my voice isn't up to par, which is supremely frustrating; I cannot seem to get caught up on umpety-teen fronts; I accidentally deleted my entire in-box during Tuesday's all-nighter; and I just ran out of aspirin. On the other hand, the two aspirin I took earlier are working; I've clawed up a few notches on the learning Alps; and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is as terrific as various folks have said (marymary, I thought of you during one of its mentions of Rilke; I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't yet picked up on how its protagonists are distantly related to Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, or if the connection is simply that the author was inspired by them (and that a Sayers book appears in one of the couple's encounters)).
There's another Alicia S. Carpenter lyric that's been running through my head lately. It's one of those songs I don't really believe in when I look at the lyrics closely. They're a little too "all of us" for my taste, and I'm a little too dour at my core: some things don't come back, and some things become irretrievably nasty. And yet, and yet -- paired with a 17th-century melody, the words insist on echoing in my head, such that I end up humming "something always, always sings" while driving to and fro...
A promise through the ages rings,
that always, always something sings.
Not just in May, in finch-filled bower,
but in December's coldest hour,
a note of hope sustains us all.
...Entombed within our deep despair,
our pain seems more than we can bear;
but days shall pass, and nature knows
that deep beneath the winter snow
a rose lies curled and hums its song.
For something always, always sings
This is the message Easter brings:
from deep despair and perished things
a green shoot always, always springs,
and something always, always sings.
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(no subject)
2/3/07 19:50 (UTC)(no subject)
3/3/07 20:38 (UTC)(no subject)
3/3/07 02:55 (UTC)Regarding _The Time-Traveler's Wife_, that is actually one of the books I have managed to start and finish reading in the last few months (after hearing about it in another friend's LJ!), and would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
(no subject)
3/3/07 20:41 (UTC)Initial thoughts about TTW - it's a rich and moving book (I was in tears during one chapter, though I'd have to go back to see which) and I want to finish and reread it properly when I've time to do so. (In all honesty, I finally got to it because I needed to decide whether to mention it in a class I'm about to it.) You?
(no subject)
3/3/07 20:45 (UTC)Are you going to mention it in the class?
(no subject)
3/3/07 21:02 (UTC)Definitely my experience as well! I meant to read just one chapter over breakfast, but ended up losing the entire morning to it.... I will mention it in the class, albeit with the caveat that it is not in the style of Sayers -- i.e., if someone's looking for more books just like the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in tone and structure, they would do better to look at other classic (and classic-style) mysteries (or maybe Mercedes Lackey's Serpent's Shadow...) but if someone's into sexy magic realism or trying to parse out how men and women (don't always) relate to each other, or how people's perception of other individuals' (lack of) interest in sex is so often frustratingly shallow and prescripted (now that I think about it, what might have started me crying is one of the parts where Clare's friends are giving her grief for not appearing interested in boys), then this would be a book they should definitely seek out.
Good point about the non-linearity. I should mention that as well...