Meditation for 11/02/03
Spirit of life, Infinite and ultimate mystery
Known by many names spoken and unspoken,
We give thanks this
November morning
for the 23 people who have chosen
to become members of our church this day.
We are grateful for their
courage to say “yes”
in the midst of a culture that would prefer they say “no”
and we look forward to the learning, growing,
and searching that we will share with them in the years to come.
Some of these new members are a lot like we once were,
Not sure that there would
be a religious community
where they would feel at home.
So we give thanks this day, also,
for the twists and turns of our lives
that lead us into places we never thought we’d go.
Places where we are surprised by joy, as well as
Places where we are challenged to call upon
Strength we didn’t know we had,
Resilience we weren’t sure we could count on
And compassion we didn’t know we could offer.
Plagued by our own concerns,
Troubled by our own disappointments and regrets,
We can be distracted from the certainty
That our neighbors and friends may be struggling, too.
In the seat beside you or
behind you
may be another person working through her own despair,
or trying to make sense of his own fall from grace.
May we remember, then,
that carried on every breath we take in and exhale,
are the joys and sorrows of our earthly companions,
those who, like us, are
doing their best to welcome
the mystery that is this life we share.
And may we find comfort, as our lungs fill with the breath of life,
In the knowledge that we are not alone.
We hold in our hearts this day
All those in need of holding, both inside and outside this hall.
nearby or oceans away.
Those who are hungry for food or peace of mind
Those who are thirsty for self-confidence or companionship
Those who are eager for
resolution and relief.
Those who are desperate for forgiveness or a fresh start.
May we see ourselves in
their struggles
and hear our own voices in their cries.
And may we discover once again that the only love that is ours to keep, is the love we give to others.
Join with me now in a time of silence, a time to listen not only to your own breath, but to the breath of your neighbors, and the breath of this world we share.
(silence)
Amen.
Readings
The first reading this morning is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote:
“…life is good only when it is magical and musical, a perfect timing and consent, and when we do not anatomize it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is enigmatical…and must not be taken literally, but genially. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little abstemious and obedient? Cannot we let the morning be?”
The second reading is “Mrs. Schneider in Church” by Kathleen Norris
It’s the willingness to
sing
that surprises me:
out of tune,
we drag the organist along
and sing, knowing we can’t;
and our quite ordinary voices
carry us over.
I get caught up
in the parts:
the tenor to my left,
still clear and high,
proving that voice
is no clue to character.
I see him not in that brown suit
but in shirtsleeves
in the back room
of his farm-parts store,
cheating at cards;
his wife up front, ragged with work.
The complaining soprano
above the rest
is the grocer’s widow.
She never stopped screaming at him,
and hates him now for dying.
Every week
the young wives lead us,
tilting forward in improbable shoes:
they’re firmly anchored
by the wobbly bass
behind me.
When I was such a one,
still slender and moist-looking,
he attacked me in the coal cellar
and I fought him off
with a shovel.
Now we are changed,
making a noise
greater than ourselves,
to be worthy of the lesson:
all duly noted,
all forgiven.
I was warned about this church.
A few years ago, when I was finishing up my seminary education and engaged in the search process that eventually landed me in Des Moines, I had a conversation with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Department of Ministry. I told the head of that department that I was being considered as a candidate for this pulpit. He told me, “Mark, I don’t discourage you from pursuing this position, but you should know, the Des Moines church has a reputation for being very humanist.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I answered. Obviously, the warning did not discourage me. Moreover, if this fellow at the Department of Ministry had known me better, he wouldn’t have bothered offering a warning like this. After all, I had entered seminary as a humanist and graduated as a humanist, albeit a humanist more open to other theological perspectives. (These days, in fact, I consider myself to be a naturalistic theist, existential mystic, wanna-be Zen-Taoist, in pursuit of creative interchange who holds an attraction to and respect for mystery that some would call God, even though I rarely do. And, by the way, I still call myself a humanist.)
A month or two after my warning from the department of ministry, I visited Des Moines, this apparently renowned bastion of humanism, for a get-acquainted weekend with the search committee (a group of seven church members who had the job of sifting through all the potential candidates and recommending one for the congregation’s approval). I remember sitting in a meeting room for a lengthy interview with the committee. We covered all kinds of topics: theology, conflict resolution style, the role of the minister in church governance, even some of my personal history. We also talked at length about worship. Well, at least I did.
The committee asked me to discuss my approach to the Sunday service. In my response, I mentioned the word “worship” several times. Finally, a committee member spoke up and said, somewhat sheepishly I thought, “Mark, you should know that ‘worship’ is not a word we tend to use at the church.”
“Really,” I said. “Why not?”
At the time, I thought that I could sense the committee getting a little nervous…or embarrassed…or maybe just annoyed. I wasn’t really sure. They explained that several years ago the members had voted to accept a resolution that declared that the word “worship” was not to be used in any official church publications or publicity. It could be spoken, just not written.
I nodded my head.
“What do you think about that?” someone asked me.
“Well,” I said, “I think it’s kind of funny.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I do. I don’t intend any disrespect or derision,” I continued, “but to go to the lengths to vote on whether or not ‘worship’ is an acceptable description for what UUs do in church on Sunday is, well, kind of funny. We have to be able to laugh at ourselves, don’t we?”
From that point on, I suggested that every time I said the word “worship” we should flash the lights, and shake the table as though lightning was striking. To this day, I can’t help but wait to hear a thunder clap around here whenever I mention the word.
Before I go much further into this discussion, though, lest you think I am being insensitive, I should point out that I am well aware of the power of words. After all, I make my living working with words, twisting and spinning them into patterns that I hope encourage people to honor and celebrate their lives, to recall their own inherent worth and dignity, to mourn their losses, to revere their fellow travelers in this life and the interdependent web of existence we share. I know that some words are more loaded with baggage than others…words that mean so many different things that they should not be used carelessly, without definition. Words such as God, faith, spirituality…and, of course, worship.
To glibly toss around words like these, without acknowledgement of what they have meant and still mean in our greater culture, I would have to be either arrogant or stupid. Since I’d like to think I am neither of these, you should know that I am not proposing this morning that we start calling our Sunday services “Worship services” even if that’s what I think they are. No, my intent this morning is simply to share my perspective on what we do here together on Sundays and to encourage you to consider the same thing yourself.
You should also know that even though I still think prohibiting the word worship from being used in publications and publicity is funny and maybe even excessive, I admire the spirit and mettle of the folks who brought the resolution to the congregation and take its purpose seriously.
Since at least half of the church membership has changed since this issue was first discussed, I should fill you in on the history, as I understand it. The story goes that the minister at the time the resolution was passed had been using the word “worship” in advertisements and on the sign in front of the church. Several members did not feel that “worship” was an intellectually honest term for what happens here, particularly seeing that churches all across town use “worship” to mean something that seems much different. So, these members took advantage of our democratic governance and did something about their concern. Think about that! How wonderful that there were members who were passionate enough about the church to get passionate about how we describe what we do…people who wanted others in the greater community to know that something different happens here, something beyond the pale of the most commonly held understanding of the word “worship,” which my dictionary lists as “the rites or services through which people show their adoration, devotion, and respect for a deity.”
Now if we only go by the dictionary definition I just read, I can see why some of us might be uncomfortable using the word worship, for it doesn’t seem to be inclusive of all the people who comprise this community. While there are some among us who call themselves theists, meaning that they find meaning in the notion that there is a divine being or deity, we know that there are many among us who do not. This theological diversity is a treasured feature of our liberal religious community and our services on Sunday necessarily reflect our wide range of religious perspectives by aiming to avoid over-adherence to one particular theology. This is why, for example, I introduce the centering time of our service as meditation, reflection or prayer. This is also why some of us might object to using the word “worship” to describe our services. It’s that assumption of a deity part that seems to make people uncomfortable.
Those from more orthodox faiths who attend our services would probably doubt that what we do is worship, too. One recent guest approached me in the receiving line after a service to point out that she heard no reference to God in the entire service. I nodded. (After all, the absence of traditional God language in the service was no surprise to me, since I had put the service together.) The woman said that the lack of God-language led her to conclude that we don’t believe in God. I couldn’t tell for sure if she thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. Before I could ask, she was gone. “Some of us do and some of us don’t,” I would have told her had she stuck around long enough to hear my response. Still, something tells me she had already heard too much…or was it too little?
When I returned from my summer break this year, a letter was waiting in my mailbox from a man who had been attending services regularly for several months. He shared that as much as he enjoyed the church and the people here, he was going to look for another religious home. He felt that I was too restricted in what I said from the pulpit…that it would be unacceptable for me to talk about God in this community. Then he wrote, “I’d love to get you hooked up to a lie detector to see what you really feel about God.”
While I was disappointed to see this fellow leave our community, as I am any time we say goodbye to someone who has been gathering with us, I was even more saddened to acknowledge that he thought he needed a lie detector to determine my feelings about God. For the record, and perhaps a little late, let me assure those of you who have been wondering, I feel no pressure from this community to refrain from God-talk in the pulpit. I mostly choose to avoid the word God because I believe it connotes so many different things to people as to leave the word virtually useless. Not to oversimplify things, but “God” is a word like “patriot” or “fruitcake”—only the person saying it knows for sure what she means. I do, however, try to find other more inclusive ways to talk about the divine, the ineffable mystery that theologian Paul Tillich referred to as our ground of being, whether I do it by talking about a thunderstorm on a November morning or the breath of a newborn baby; the still small voice from within that comforts me in my darkest hours or the collected voices of a church choir weaving and bobbing their way through a piece of music; the grandeur of the changing seasons, the diligence of an earthworm, or the creative interchange that takes place when two people are engaged in a conversation, expecting to be transformed by the interaction. All of these things, and a million more, are ways I speak of the divine, the holy, the sacred. These are the things that I believe are worthy of our adoration, our devotion, and our respect. These are the things upon which our Sunday services are focused. That’s why I call what we do together on Sunday, worship.
As I assemble the pieces of a service, I do my best to leave room for everyone. I want the service to provide a mirror upon which all of us, despite our varying theologies, can see ourselves in all our human misery and glory. I want to name that which shapes us, that which holds worth in our lives. I want us to catch a glimpse of what is real in our experience: the dual reality of being alive and having to die…that which is both painful and promising, redemptive and reassuring…that which transcends all of the reasons we have to close ourselves off from the world and our lives in it. I want us to be engaged in “high play” as UU minister Mark Belletini defines worship. I want us to open ourselves to something beyond our semantic critiques, beyond our dictionaries, something beyond our always limited understanding and judgment. I want us to open ourselves to surprise and transformation…the surprise that occurs when we see something we have taken for granted or forgotten in a new light…the transformation that occurs when we welcome fresh understandings of old ideas and maybe even begin to reclaim language of reverence we never thought we’d use.
I guess that’s why I wouldn’t want us to deny the possibility that what we do on Sunday is worship, even if some of us don’t believe in God, even if the word worship feels too loaded for us to comfortably use.
Again, let me be clear. I offer my thoughts to you only to stimulate your own…and to humbly suggest that it wouldn’t hurt for us to be more playful with our religious language, to be more playful with the mystery that is this life, to not, as Emerson wrote of the day, “interrogate it like a college professor.”
I appreciate how UU minister Victoria Safford puts it in her meditation entitled “Call to Worship.” [From her book Walking Toward Morning (Boston: Skinner House, 2003)] She writes:
“What if there were a universe, a cosmos, which began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single, silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant scientists, with their physics, their mathematics, their empirical, impressionistic musing, in trying to describe it, would begin to sound like poets?
What if there were a universe in which a world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it bloomed crocuses, and into it blew wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring, and into it at some point grew onions, out of soil, and in went Mt. Everest and also the coyote we’ve spotted in the woods about a mile from here, just after sunrise on these mornings when the moon is full? (The scent of him makes his brother, our dog, insane with fear and joy and ancient inbred memory.) Into that world came animals and elements and plants, and imagination, the mind and the mind’s eye. If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?”
What, and how, I add, would you worship? This is the same question at the foundation of a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson from which came the title of this morning’s sermon.
Emerson wrote:
“A person will worship something—have no doubt about that.
We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts—but it will out.
That which dominates our imaginations and our
thoughts will determine our lives, and character.
Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are
worshipping we are becoming.”
Let’s assume that Emerson is correct…that each of us cannot help but worship something…or to put it another way, according to the roots of the word worship, each of us will be shaped, inevitably, by that which we believe holds worth. What is it that you worship? What is it that holds worth for you…that shapes you and your life accordingly? Is it your work or your family? Is it your emotions or your intellect? Is it your belief in a higher power or your insistence that there is none? Is it nature or music or food or sports or love or sex or solitude or ethical living? Is it money? Is it beauty? Is it forgiveness? Is it this life itself? What is it that you worship? What is it that you are becoming?
These are important questions. Essential questions, really. Questions that not only lie at the heart of what we do together on Sunday, but what we do every day of our lives…every day we climb out of bed and face the mystery that is this wretched and magnificent life. Questions that beckon us toward the commitments we will choose to accept, the risks we will choose to welcome, and the love we will choose to make and share with the world.
So what is it that you worship?
What is it that you are becoming?
So much depends on your answer.
All life flows into a great common life, if we will only open our eyes to our companions.
[so] Let us worship, not in bowing down, not with closed eyes and stopped ears.
Let us worship with the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits.
Life comes with singing and laughter, with tears and confiding, with a rising wave too great to be held in the mind and heart and body, to those who have fallen in love with life.
Let us worship, and let us learn to love.