Home Up Contents Search What's New

April 2000    
January 2000 February 2000 March 2000 April 2000 May 2000 June 2000 July 2000 September 2000 October 2000 November 2000 December 2000

 

 

April 2, 2000

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 2, 2000

Days for Compassion

William Faulkner in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, said of writers: "[The writer] is immortal, not because the writer alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because [the writer] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

"A spirit capable of compassion" is what we are celebrating today, and within this month of April many different religions celebrate this oh-so-necessary and holy trait in humanity, the ability to feel emotionally what another may be feeling in reality. To be filled with a deep sympathy, and even more, to be filled with a sincere empathy for others. To understand and react with kindness to another person’s or another people’s plight.

One of the characteristics of almost every generation since we have had a written record is the complaint that the next generation lacks the compassion and caring of the present one, which may be our human defensive mechanism to make sure that we keep our appreciation alert for how important it is to peaceful society to care for other people than ourselves.

We as parents, teachers, congregations know instinctively that this is a big part of what we are hoping to accomplish in our Sunday religious education classes. Sometimes, as we all learn to our consternation, they do not always learn it quite as clearly as we hoped.

Take the parents of a little boy were concerned about his selfish, self-centered behavior and gave him a bit of lecture, stressing that we are in this world not just for ourselves but to help others.

The child seemed quite impressed and sat silently for a while, thinking, pondering. At last he looked up and said, "I just want to know something."

"Yes, what is it dear?"

"What I want to know is, what are the Others for then?"

When I look at the newspaper headlines or listen to the lead news stories, I am often filled with sadness that there seems so little compassion in the world, yet when I look more closely at the paper and at the people all around me, particularly those in this congregation, I am deeply moved by how very compassionate we can be.

There seems to be a duality always at work in human beings between the need for pleasing the self, and the willingness to reach out to our brothers and sisters in the world. This tendency is lifted up in religion as evil vs good; darkness vs light; hate vs love.

The poet T.S. Eliot said, contrary to most people’s feeling, that "April is the cruelest month." Eliot was a deeply religious man, his father was a Unitarian minister, but when Eliot moved to England after he was graduated from Harvard, he converted to High church Anglicanism. Much of his poetry reflects his beliefs that this life was primarily a "veil of tears" and that it would not be until the next life that we should know real joy and peace. If you learn more of Eliot’s private life, you begin to understand why he may have thought this way. April is cruel he said because it is a reminder of life beginning--and life gone. As he goes on to write: "Mixing memory and desire. . . ." Compassion is in its way the mixing of memory and desire, our sense of a need for understanding, and yet another chance to do things better.

April as a time for focusing on healing and compassion makes a lot of sense. Winter time, until this past century, held on in most of the northern hemisphere into April. Not until April could we, in my childhood home in the northwest, expect a reprieve from the below freezing temperatures and snow.

We know, perhaps always have known, that the winter is the depression time of year for many. How much more true this must have been in days gone by before the comforts of electricity, gas, light and central heating. We who are in the counseling professions learn that the winter months bring more people to our offices. The burdens of life becoming starker in the harshness of the cold months, the darkness of the shortened daylight time, perhaps the feeling the crowding of being cooped up.

April is newness, hope for things to come, the burgeoning of life as plants and animals reproduce into shoots, buds, babies. (And today--which may have been the real reason Eliot called April the cruelest month-- with Daylight Savings Time we get longer hours of daylight when we are up and about and out of doors.

Most of humanity finds newness, the rawness of another season of warmth welcome and filled with possibility. I was out planting shrubs yesterday, such is my anticipation. We will labor in our lawns and gardens for the reward of watching things grow, produce--to see living happening.

Passover and Easter because they are lunar holidays fall from the middle of March to April; they were preceded by the earlier pagan, Greek and Roman holidays that also celebrated life renewed. Remember for the Israelites, Moses was leading them out of bondage in Egypt into freedom and to once again grow a community in the "land of milk and honey." The Passover celebrates God’s protection of the people of Israel as Moses works to free them. Remember, too, it was the Passover meal that was Jesus’ last supper.

The story of Jesus, also about emerging newness, is told in the celebration days from Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to teach love and justice for all and to sacrifice himself, as some believe, for the redemption of humankind. And, Good Friday, the day of his death, and Easter, the day of the resurrection, are stories that lift up the death of one life and the regeneration of another. Rebirth, salvation, regeneration. Hope for the people.

In the older religions, the first of April was the time of the Greek Feast of Peace, which celebrated Aphrodite, the goddess of peace and love, vanquishing Ares the god of war. For the ancient Greeks, April was the month devoted to Aphrodite as the nurturer of friendship and love, and the punisher of both people who spread hate and people who are false in friendship and love.

In the middle of April they had the festival of the goddess Demeter, who they believed upheld the feminine in Nature, having feminine qualities of strength, compassion and wisdom.

April is also the month for on the Tantric Bodhisattva deities who embody consciousness and empowerment of compassion. At this time Buddhists honor and celebrate the equality of all thinking, all sensing, feeling, beings.

For the Baha’i, April is the celebration time of Baha’u’llah’s declaration of himself as the new prophet, and who believed and taught that God was male and female and beyond gender.

The founder of the Jain faith, a variety of Hinduism, birth is also celebrated in April.

Several of the ancient gods and goddesses were celebrated, and feasts dedicated to the larger understand of compassion, healing, and regeneration. (And let me remind us once again that for the people of the times and places where these religions we now call myths thrived, that these were as real and meaningful to them as any faith is real to people today.)

I would remind us too that this is the month of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, whose life was not a perfect example of all that he believed and taught, yet we should never forget that his work for the U.S. Constitution to protect all rights and liberties was a thing not equaled before or since.

Particular April date that reminds us of the horrific extremes human beings can go is April 6th, the day the Hutus began their genocidal massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. This alone is reason enough to stop and consider the meaning of compassion and our on-going, desperate need for it.

If we listen to the politicians, our former sense of getting tough with the American population is swinging back once more toward compassion. Like the phrase, "compassionate conservativism." Hubert Humphery remarked once that, "Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism." Compassion does not belong to any political party. (Goodness knows the pols do not show a lot for each other.)

Compassion is that deep experience, that most spiritual experience of sympathy; or better still, empathy, when we put ourselves in the other person’s place and feel viscerally their pain or misfortune.

In my past life, during my years of teaching elementary school in the 1970s, I was always so touched by the compassion with which little ones immediately respond to each other. I couldn’t begin to count the times I’ve seen a child fall down, get tripped (often on purpose), come to school with a bandaged arm or leg and all his or her compatriots would gather around to offer help, support, loving, kind words of sympathy. True, they can often inflict damage on one another out of their selfishness or need to be in control, but they are much more responsive to their peers suffering and pain than we adults often are.

Still we have to be vigilant in nurturing their urge to compassion. Though, you sometimes get odd manifestations of their understanding. For instance, there was a Kindness to Animals Week at a school, and a fourth grader came home bursting with pride, cluing her parents to ask her why she was so happy. She told them that each student had to do something special during the week that showed compassion for animals. She was happy because what she did had really worked.

"And what did you do?" asked her father.

"I kicked a boy for hitting his dog."

Adults, too, can have their oddities about what constitutes compassion, as the following shows:

A merchant, notorious for not paying his bills, was bargaining endlessly over a deal with a supplier, when a friend came along and called him aside, "Why are you bargaining with this man so bitterly, when you seldom ever pay any of your bills?"

"Look," said the merchant, "I like the man, and I want to keep him from losing too much money on his deal with me."

April is about a very sacred event, rebirth, another opportunity for the earth to give birth and grow its life, plants, animals, human beings. In the animal world particularly, the new baby lambs and rabbits, all manner of creature makes its entry into the world. Perhaps at one time this was true for humans as well. (How many in this room were born in the spring from the end of March through May?) This is a good time to be born, for the warmth of summer, and the promise of the harvest to come are reassuring. A sense of a safety net that nature has provided.

As a child of the fruit growing part of our agricultural community in Idaho, I was very much aware of how precious the warming time was to our crops. Once the apples and plums had blossomed, dread of a killing frost was high until the end of May. It is from the blossoms that fruit will form. My father, like all our neighboring orchardists, had a temperature alarm that went off to tell him if the temperature had fallen below freezing. He would often stay up on nights when he, in his countryman’s wisdom of weather signs, predicted freezing weather. Usually, though, the temperature would drop in the wee morning hours. (It is coldest just before dawn.) Then he called out the smudge pot crew, who were on call to come out and with torches in hand to go up and down the rows of the 320 acres of fruit trees lighting the barrels of diesel fuel set in the rows to create warmth. And massive propellers high over the orchards turned to create warmth, for moving air is not as cold as still air. (Lots of physics to be learned in the country.)

I tell you this to remind us that humans need watching over like the fragile pink and white blossoms of the fruit trees. Every day of our lives we hold the promise of good things in us that we can give forth. Without the nurture communities afford to one another we would have little worth having and worth our daily sacrifice of time and effort.

Compassion is what shows that we are no longer a self-focused, self-indulging being, for compassion is reaching out, giving up our momentary needs for the needs of someone else.

Sometimes the least compassion appears to be what we see nation between nation, but the truth is the least compassion is what happens in our homes, in our workplaces, and even in places of religion.

The guard in this mornings reading, looked at Saint-Exupery and saw another just as himself, a man with a family, a man who feared, a man who did not deserve to die. We too need to look into the eyes of the ones we love, see the eyes of people with whom we work, and feel the suffering of those we know are in pain.

Perhaps one of the greatest sins we can commit is to see another person’s suffering and ignore it. We can not always do anything about that suffering, but we can care; for our caring makes suffering less difficult to bear.

Think of how many times a pleasant smile has made your day when you felt up to your ears with stress. Now, think of how many times you could make someone else’s day.

Thinking, seeing, touching, feeling, these are the real and spiritual components of compassion. Not a one among us can live well without it, for we are imperfect beings. Prone to error and mistake, accident and foolishness, and we, too, sometimes need to have another chance. Forgiveness and caring are the sacred emotions of love that make us able to share this life together. And may it be so forever.

April 9, 2000

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 9, 2000

The World is Too Much with Us: Wordsworth on Immortality

The whole idea of living forever, of being immortal, is such challenge to most of us that we tend to talk about such ideas in very abstract ways. We will talk about going to Heaven, which is, one supposes, each person’s idea of a particular paradise. Considering how widespread the belief is in an afterlife, it is really surprising how little we do talk about it. Perhaps it has to do with the problem one writer noted years ago when she said there are an awful lot of people hoping for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Of course, the idea of paradise is appealing, but maybe not to the same degree for everyone. There is the story about St. Peter who was on duty at the pearly gates and asked the applicant, "Where are you from?"

"Oh, I’m from California," came the happy reply.

"Well, come on in," said Saint Peter, " but I don’t think you are going to like it here."

Immortality is a subject that we ministers obviously just love to get our teeth into. We like to consider and challenge ourselves and congregants about what we believe, especially we very independent Unitarians. I know that I enjoy these subjects more than most, and even my children roll their eyes when they think I am going off on one of my philosophical jags. One time my son, who was about eleven at the time and had wisdom far beyond his years, saw the gleam in my eye as he said something about heaven or hell. I was just getting warmed up, when he interrupted the flow to say, "Mom, you must believe in eternal life, ’cause you never stop talking about this stuff--why don’t you save some for later?"

Immortality, eternity, never ending life, the ability to continue to exist beyond this mortal realm, all these notions have infected the human imagination for hundreds and thousands of years. It was the ancient Greeks who first conceptualized the idea of eternal life for earthly beings, for prior to the Greeks of the time of Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, Sophocles, only the gods were immortal and the realms of heaven and earth were very distinct and separate.

By the time of the development of the western world through the spread of the Holy Roman Empire, the idea had developed that Heaven was a place where God abides and where humans who accept the salvation of Christ could also abide. So even today people talk about dying in the context of going to Heaven. "Grandma died and went to Heaven to be with God." That is the sort of response we will give to small children who are just learning about death. But what is Heaven, what does it mean to live forever, to have immortality? That is a question that we may or may not ever know.

Having spent a good many years studying and teaching literature, I find that poets often deal with these subjects better than even the scholars, theologians, or clergy. Which is why I turned to William Wordsworth to look at one view, one in common with many Unitarians’ views on immortality.

I used to tell my college freshmen students in World Literature, who generally disliked studying poetry, to consider that the value of poetry, beyond its sometimes beautiful language, is its brevity. Poetry has been defined as a subject discussed using the best words, in the best order. That may or may not always be true, but it is true often enough to value that poets consider long and hard the power of language and its arrangement. This was especially true of poets of the Romantic Period, such as the English poet Wordsworth who lived from 1770-1850. This time coincides with the formation and building of our new nation and the idealism of our founders.

For Wordsworth and other poets of the Romantic period, it was certainly a new time (not unlike the feeling we have today with the advent of the computer age), and poetry, too, was in a new phase, unorthodox. There was a change from the old ways; away from the older poetic ideas and forms, moving into new directions, new subjects. Poetry before the Romantic period was purely literary, often difficult, but the Romantics saw poetry in a very different way as a form of communication. This was certainly a new and different way of thinking about either poetry or communication. Scholars of his work state that : "Reading Wordsworth’s poems [even] with the excitement of that revolution long past, we can still feel the power of his desire to communicate. The human heart is his subject; he writes, in particular, of growth and of memory and of the perplexities inherent in the human condition."

Wordsworth often used the language of religion. His poetry tells us that he was deeply spiritual, as indeed most poets are, and that he believed the greatest and most deeply spiritual place was to be found in the cathedral of nature.

His work, like that of Emerson (who lived from1803-1882), on whom he had a direct influence, had an enormous impact on poetry, and historically as well.

Wordsworth’s very ideas are his doctrine of belief, and again, like Emerson, Wordsworth parted ways with traditional religion and attempted to "establish and sustain a secular religion to substitute for Christian faith."

Wordsworth saw immortality in nature much the same as our Unitarian philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. For them, it was the world of Nature that gave us the truth, and Nature that could provide a deep and abiding religious experience for those who would turn there. As we know, it did not become a substitute for traditional Christian faith, but Unitarians in particular probably are the greatest inheritors of the Wordsworth-Emerson transcendental spirituality.

What, though of immortality? I turned to my Harper’s Dictionary of the Bible for information on how the Bible treats the subject. In Harper’s immortality is defined as, "immunity to death, endless existence."

The Harper’s goes on to point out that immortality was a Greek idea, for the Hebrews "accepted death as a limit ordained by God (Gen.3:19). Blessedness for them consisted in a peaceful death at an old age and in having posterity to carry on in one’s place (Gen.15)."

There was no mention of an afterlife in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) until the apocalyptic writing in the book of Daniel, which is dated about 180 years BCE.

But by early Roman times some Jews held to the old idea of death as limited, while others looked forward to the resurrection, and still others believed in the immortality of the soul.

Jesus, as depicted in the Gospels, shared the Hebrew idea of resurrection, rather than the idea of an immortal soul. Interestingly, the word immortal does not even appear in the New Testament Gospels. John writes about a new life and its qualities, but no unending life. In the writings of Paul, that were the primary instrument for creating the Christianity we understand, he does not see an immortality or existence of the soul apart from the body, but sees a new heavenly existence of those who clothed in spiritual bodies that share in Jesus’ resurrection in the new age (lCor. 15:42-50).

If you had Bible class in your youth, you probably remember that Jesus argued with the Sadduccees and the Pharisees. These were the two main groups of Jewish religious thought. "The Sadduccees did not believe in eternal life, but the Pharisees believed in an immortal soul."

The Greek dualism of the body and soul as two separate things is not really part of the Hebrew or Christian understanding that is presented in the Bible in which the soul is clothed by first the physical body, then the spiritual body; but body still. These ideas develop further later on for the newly formed Christian religion.

The main picture we have of the after life, or eternity, is that presented in the final book of the New Testament, Revelations. There the new life is a paradise; lived in heavenly mansions, walking streets of gold, with God at the center ruling over his Kingdom. But Jesus’ words indicate that he saw God’s kingdom as immediate, so early Christians looked for the return of Jesus and a restoration of God’s kingdom on earth, later it was looked for both on earth and in heaven, finally most religions only saw God’s kingdom, that is eternity with God ruling over a perfect world, as something that would come only after death, and only for a certain, saved group of the faithful. Although, in the last two-hundred years in the evangelical or fundamentalist groups in this country the idea of God’s kingdom restored on earth became a major part of their theology.

People have long sought immortality. Why? What would that even be like? Would we in any way relate as the beings we are now? Would we really want it as we may envision it?

I once almost caused my mother to faint dead away with the blasphemy that I thought sitting at the feet of God for all eternity sounded pretty boring to me. When I pressed my fundamentalist family and preachers about the nature of this eternal life, I discovered that I would be transformed into my spiritual body, which was more or less the body but like a ghost. I would not have any memory of pain or suffering, and would glory in the bliss of God’s presence.

What, I wanted to know, about feeling bad for all the people I loved who might not make it to Heaven? Keep in mind, the God I grew up learning about only wanted near-perfect people, and I could already see that heaven was not going to be crowded. Well, they replied, you won’t remember any of that. So, to all intents and purposes, I would not be aware of my real life at all, which made me think I would not know I had had this great reward. A real conundrum. I do not think it will surprise you that religion was my favorite topic all my life, and my elders learned to put me off at every turn.

Unlike our UU faith where questions are encouraged, my childhood religion only wanted obedience, and no tricky questions if you please. Perhaps yet another reason I always loved literature, for questions abound there, and thoughts about those questions without the blinders or binders of conservative religion.

Wordsworth understood God and immortality as part of the same "great ‘presence’ that infuses nature." The natural world for him, and for Emerson, too, possessed both harmony and joy. Nature, he wrote, is where humanity can find salvation. From his poem cycle called, "Intimations of Immortality," he wrote these famous lines (so many of Wordsworth’s poetic lines are famous we incidentally know a lot of his work): "The Child is father of the Man;/ And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety."

And further:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,

For Wordsworth, heaven was right here on earth. Just open our eyes and we could see it. Yet, you and I know that the expectation for life beyond this earth and this lifetime remains a great hope for many of us. What that heaven, that extra dimension of existence, that immortality might be like is shaped largely by our experiences, and no doubt these days by the media.

One of my all time favorite television programs remains an episode of "Twilight Zone" in which Sebastian Cabot appears to a petty criminal (I’ll call him Joe) who has just been in a botched crime and has died. Cabot is dressed in a white tuxedo, and looks very dignified and comforting, and leads the man to a penthouse apartment. Joe thinks, wow, this is not what I expected at all, and finds that everything he wants is his to ask for. So day after day, Joe is surrounded by beautiful women, he gambles, and always wins, he drinks and dines to his heart’s desire. This goes on for weeks, with Cabot standing attendance, always at the Joe’s beck and call, providing all that the man asks in the way of wine, women, and song. One day, though, Joe gets bored with winning all the time, having everyone agree with him, having everything almost before he asks for it. He corners Cabot and says something like, "I’m getting tired of this. I want a little action, not all this perfect stuff." Cabot assures him this is as he always wanted it. To which Joe, who is now angry, shouts, "What kind of heaven is this anyway?" Cabot leans back and emits this huge, sinister laugh and says, "Who said anything about this being heaven?!"

Emerson, much influenced by Wordsworth, wrote: "to different minds, the same world is hell, and a heaven" But he also wrote: "The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."

I am sure that we all have our own versions in our minds of what would be our idea of heaven or of immortality. I personally hope for a blessed rest in oblivion, which is the state the Hindu’s call the highest state, or Nirvana. Of course, the Hindus also gave us the idea of reincarnation.

Maybe you heard the story about Ernest and Helen, who were religious skeptics, but they had a little bit of faith. They agreed that the one who died first would try to communicate with the other. Helen, sadly, was the first to die. For months, Ernest kept alert, looking for signs that Helen was trying to contact him from the other side. Finally, one night he awoke to hear Helen’s familiar voice calling sharply, "Ernest! Ernest!"

"Helen!" cried Ernest. "You’ve done it! I hear you. Tell me what’s it like?"

"Well," said Helen, "it’s not bad. I’m in a very comfortable, calm, peaceful place. After enjoying sleep, I come out and eat in a beautiful meadow surrounded by lovely flowers and trees, then I enjoy the glory of sex, then I have some lovely food, then again I enjoy the glory of sex, then go back to sleep again."

"Wow," said Ernest, "so that’s what Heaven is like!"

"Heaven?" said Helen, " Who said I was in Heaven? I’m a rabbit in Altoona, PA."

Whatever the nature of immortality, for most people, our beliefs are probably a reflection of our religious upbringing or our deepest hopes. Wordsworth believed you did not have to die to see paradise or feel the presence of God. God was in the world, not separate from it. God was all things that are love, joy, and beauty, and all things that are not, but it is beauty and love and joy that are ours to choose.

I do not know if it matters what we believe, except for the comfort it gives the believer. But I like the way Wordsworth encourages us to be in the present with our beliefs on immortality, and with these lines of his I close:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

amen

April 16, 2000

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 16, 2000

Providing What is Needed

Those of you who look at your newsletter or the Saturday News Journal to find our what the sermon topic will be know that what is in your Order of Service today is not what was advertised. Only once or twice in the five years since I have been here have I changed my mind about the sermon I intended to give. There are a couple of good reasons for this. First, I usually plan the year in the summer before and keep my stack of file folders ready as I gather bits and pieces of information from my reading and research. Also, we Delaware congregations put the sermon topic in the newspaper and our monthly newsletter. I notice that only we Unitarians give sermon topics in the religion section of the Saturday paper. Which makes me think of the little boy who went to church for the first time. When he was asked how he liked it, he replied: "Well the music and singing were nice, but the commercial was way too long."

At any rate, I do not like to alter my plans, but occasionally something happens that makes that necessary, and Monday morning as I was in the process of working on my scheduled sermon topic, "Myth and Multiplication" (which will come around next year), one such thing happened.

I can only quote Ursula K. LeGuin: "The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

Today is Canvass Sunday, the day we officially kick off the annual pledge campaign. Frank MacArtor, chair of the Finance committee likes to call this the "Sermon on the Amount." My usual goal is to talk to you about the simple facts about money. That money is a tool. That there is no mystery in this part of what we do as a religious community. We will be able to build the kind of building, have the kind of programs, do the good works we want to do based purely upon how much we all can give.

For only the second time in the five years I have been here are we having an every member visit to canvass, which is a nice way to get to talk with some of the members and tell them your thoughts about our congregation. So it is not only a time to talk about the canvass process, but also to share your feelings about what you like, or would like to see more of, and so on.

My belief, indeed this is a major point of faith for me, is that each of us will give according to our ability, our need, our commitment to and our love for this community we have created. We know what we have is good, that this home of Unitarian Universalism is special and worth dedicating our resources to.

We here at Mill Creek have never been like the group one minister prayed about when he said: "Oh God, please protect us from the members of this church who, when it come to giving, stop at nothing."

What happened Monday caused me to look at our congregation in a different light, perhaps a selfish light, but it made me realize that we need things in life that are not so easy to put into words, but they are needs that rise up for most people at some time. Needs which you who gather here understand and make an effort to provide for, and I do not want that to be taken for granted.

As I mentioned, I was busy at the computer on Monday when the phone rang. The caller was a young woman asking me if I would do a child dedication service for her three children. She had called some other UU congregations and received the impression that they did not do this. I proceeded to explain that of course all our congregations do child dedications, but none that I know of do them outside their membership.

She asked me if I did, and I told her that I had done one last year, but I had did not think that I would do another. We talked a bit more about why she wanted one, and by the end of that discussion, I knew for sure I would not do another.

She told me that she was sending her oldest, about six years old I think, to a local Presbyterian church, and it was a lot of work getting three kids ready for Sunday morning services. I agreed, and said all of us who have done it know that is true. I asked her why she did not ask the church where her oldest was going on Sundays to do the dedication? She replied that she and her husband really did not believe in that faith, and were more Unitarian in their beliefs, so she wanted a Unitarian minister to do their children’s dedication service. As she said this, I found my mouth agape, and wondered if she heard the words coming out of her mouth.

Well, since she asked me why I did not want to do independent dedications anymore, I went on to give this young woman a mini-sermon about why that does not seem like a good idea to me now.

Let me back up to say that when I had been asked by the couple last year, I had not really considered child dedications outside the body of our congregation. It is true that most ministers do a fair number of weddings and memorial services for non-members, for which we charge a fee. (Of course, members receive these services as part of membership.) I have always viewed weddings in particular as a kind of UU outreach, for many such couples come back to our UU churches and societies when they begin to look for a spiritual home or when they have children. We also make an impact in the funerals and memorials we do, for the UU approach is so uplifting of the person’s life that we again provide an outreach to those who attend such memorials. I am always approached by someone at weddings, funerals and memorials asking more about Unitarian Universalism.

So, I thought, perhaps this will be the same sort of outreach. Both of this young couple were only children, both had been reared in homes where there had been no religious teaching, the so-called "unchurched," and they had struggled to have a child of their own, so the birth of this little boy was a very happy occasion for their families. They had a huge celebration at one of the area country clubs, and I did the dedication service much the same as the service I do here at Thanksgiving and Easter.

So what changed? Why did I now feel so certain that I had to draw the line at doing outside child dedications.

The answer is: You. You who are members of this congregation, and those who are members of any UU congregation, and those of you who are here this morning. You are the reason. Because of who you are and what you do as members of our UU congregations.

I went on to tell this very nice young woman (who listened without a trace of defensiveness, so I think she really is a Unitarian in spirit) that when we do a child dedication, it is not the minister and parents alone who enact this ritual. It is the parents who dedicate themselves to their children, but the members of the congregation dedicate themselves to the children as well. We are saying we will not put last that which should be first.

You are saying that we create this place and make it sacred by our commitment to it; we create this ministry by our commitment to it; and we enact our rituals because of our commitment to ourselves and each other. You provide what is needed, not because of any theological mandate or any ecclesiastical authority, you do it because you know we should not put last what should be first.

As gently as I could put it to this young woman, I told her that if I were to do this dedication, I would have to charge her a fee, and I would not feel good about that. But far more importantly, for her to have the dedication separate from the congregation would be to provide only half the ritual.

Consider this parallel: we know that we need to have a family doctor for our children and for ourselves, because if we get sick or have to go to the hospital, we want to have that familiar doctor seeing to our needs. We know that it is better to have a relationship with our medical care provider.

We want to have that sort of relationship with our children’s teachers, dentists, and coaches, too. So why would we leave the care of something as vital as their spirits, their souls, to just any neighboring church--especially one we don’t believe in--just because it happens to be nearby?

That child’s spirit is more important to the child’s life, now and in the future, than anything else--even straight teeth and dancing ability.

My friends, the mind, the spirit and the soul are one and the same thing; our spirituality is our life. Our soul is our life far more than any material thing that we may have. We can lose our house, our car, our business, our loved ones, and still we can carry on. It is our spirit that carries us on. Yet, all too many people would believe that the care and nurture of the soul is not worth the time to get the kids up and to a 10:30 Sunday morning service!

We should not put last that which should be first.

So, I reminded her that she could do nothing of greater good for her little ones that give them a spiritual home in a congregation that would be more than happy to lift their voices in promise and echo her dedication to her children.

I suggested that she was probably closest to the Newark Fellowship, and also more than welcome here, but that if more of the liberally minded would see the significance of caring for the spirit, we would have UU congregations accessible to everyone.

Afterwards, I pondered the lack of connection that so many apparent Unitarians make with the importance of having a religious home for their families. There was a Harris poll done about ten years ago looking at the distribution of religion in this country. Actually these polls are done fairly regularly surveying the U.S. population for religious affiliation, and looking at the demographics. We know from these polls that UUs, per capita, have the most formal education, have the highest average income, and have the greatest involvement in social activism. But the most surprising information in this particular poll is that at that time there were about 100,000 Unitarian Universalist in full membership in this country, yet over 250,000 people identified themselves as UUs in the poll. Of course, the UUA wanted to know: Where are all these Unitarians?

It is really no great mystery. Since we have no doctrine or mandate that says it is a mortal sin to miss Sunday services, Unitarians either take responsibility for their own spiritual growth or they do not. It is as simple as that.

What leaves me a rather irritated when I think of it from this perspective, is that the Unitarians who do not belong to a congregation, expect that there will be UU churches, fellowships, or societies, and UU ministers there when they want the important ritual services of weddings, funerals, and child dedications. I am irritated on your behalf who provide Patrick, Greg, Keith, and myself here in Delaware. Do that 150,000 who claim they are Unitarian not realize that ministers and churches exist because of congregations. I am not a free-lance minister!

They make me think about a little girl named Sally, who one Sunday was given two quarters to take to Sunday school; one quarter for the collection plate and one for herself to spend as she wished. As she walked along the sidewalk into the building, she was playing with the quarters, and of course she dropped one, and watched helpless to keep it from rolling into the storm gutter. Sally looked down through the grating into the watery depths and said sadly, "Oh no, there goes God’s quarter."

This morning, we are privileged to have First Unitarian Church choir and their Minister of Music, Scott Ward with us. Further, for those who may not know, we are a "seed congregation" of First Unitarian Church, who helped us get our start and continue to support, us as they did this year, with a generous grant toward our building program; they take care of their needs and then reach out in many ways because they know the importance of providing what is needed.

Beyond that wandering 150,000, who claim some affiliation with we book-signing members, is a whole cadre of people who call on UU ministers, call on me every week requesting help. Sometimes they want monetary help, and you have set aside a portion of the Agape Fund, which is money you give to help those in need in our Mill Creek community, for the Minister’s Discretionary fund to help those in the wider community. I usually give Scrip so that they can get food. Sometimes they call wanting counseling for all manner of crisis, from marriages falling apart, to children who are in trouble or causing trouble, to those terribly depressed, sometimes suicidal, people who just know that they want to talk to a minister. You have made it clear that you want your minister to be there for these lost souls who turn to us for help.

You give of your hard-earned funds to create this net of safety for our own membership, but also for those others who sometimes know the "dark night of the soul." This congregation provides my services for its needs, but for those others also; yet, I worry that people who call out of the blue like that do not understand that they need this resource all the time, for I am a stranger to them, and we do not have the relationship that you and I have in this congregation.

I will always remember the man who told me that I was one of only two people he could trust. He understood at some instinctive level that we need to have the support of our congregations and our ministers. (I have a minister I call on, too.)

I hope that young woman understands that the decisions we make about how we will spend our time are just as important as the decisions about how we will spend our money, for it is how we spend our time that adds up to how we spent our lives. And that her impulse toward celebrating her children’s lives can only be punctuated by the rituals we observe, but the composition, the writing the story of their spiritual lives has to come first.

As you show by your attendance and involvement in Unitarian Universalism, you are providing the most important things that any human being needs, and we will not put last, what should always come first.

Let us remember Harry Emerson Fosdick’s definition of what is needed for a good life:

TO LAUGH OFTEN AND MUCH;

TO WIN THE RESPECT OF INTELLIGENT PEOPLE AND THE AFFECTION OF CHILDREN;

TO EARN THE APPRECIATION OF HONEST CRITICS AND ENDURE THE BETRAYAL OF FALSE FRIENDS;

TO APPRECIATE BEAUTY, TO FIND THE BEST IN OTHERS;

TO LEAVE THE WORLD A BIT BETTER, WHETHER BY A HEALTHY CHILD, A GARDEN PATCH OR A REDEEMED SOCIAL CONDITION;

TO KNOW EVEN ONE LIFE HAS BREATHED EASIER BECAUSE YOU LIVED.

And here is the Sermon on the Amount: If you have money to give, give it. If you do not, then give your time. When you get either, give both your money and your time. That is how we provide what is needed.

 

April 23, 2000

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

April 23, 2000 - Easter - Child Dedication Sunday

Deliverance: Close Calls Meet Religious Experience

It was in May of1969. I was a young mother going back home for a visit, and had just left my baby, my toddler daughter, with my mother while I went to do a little shopping at a favorite place where I had friends. It had been a while since I had gone back to my old hometown and I was looking forward to seeing places and people I had not seen for a long while. I borrowed my aunt’s car, a new gold-colored Chevrolet Impala. At that time I had an older car myself (and was some years away from owning a new car), and you know how pleasant it is to drive a new car, especially when you do not have one yourself. So I was really enjoying myself. A couple of hours away from the constant caring for my baby (you never know tired until you become a parent) and a chance to drive a car with that unforgettable new-car smell-- a bit of freedom, plus a bit of luxury.

The weather was balmy, but my dad, who could read the sky for weather signs like I read a book, had warned of rain. Sure enough, I had not driven three miles until a light shower began. I was just heading up a short, but steep, hill when I braked for some reason that completely has left my memory, but that act caused that big, heavy, gold-colored 1969 Chevrolet Impala, belonging to my aged and on-the-cranky-side aunt, to begin to spin, and before it was all over I had done a 3600 turn in the middle of the highway. When the car finally stopped, I was heading the direction I had been going, but I was straddling the yellow center line in the road.

Thirty-one years later, I can still feel the abject terror of that moment; that feeling of complete and utter helplessness, when my good driving skills failed to impact the spin, and I felt that eternity of less than a minute when I could do nothing but expect to die.

Then, the miracle happened, and I realized that on this busy road no one was coming in either direction, and I had escaped the worst. Though I was shaken, I felt delivered as if from bondage, the bondage of fear. I felt a new joy for life; I had not died. I felt gratitude; I had not totaled my aunt’s car and not had to face her wrath.

I went back home, shaken, but with a new respect for that first few minutes of rain when the roads are so unexpectedly slick. To this day, I am more uncomfortable driving in rainy weather than any other time.

Any of you been there? I know you have. We all have had those close calls, those moments when we realized, absolutely, that we might not scrape by. Might not get away with our lapse of judgment. Might not make it. These are those sometimes frightening, sometimes invigorating, sometimes ecstatic moments of undeniable truth. They can also be moments that can be our most spiritual moments--the true moments of real growth. Those moments when we are not just living, but viscerally aware of being alive.

Everyone has experienced a close call, maybe several, when we had a narrow escape from a dangerous, perhaps, life-threatening experience. Some close calls are about loss or embarrassment. Some are about failure or realization. Or maybe all these together. What is clear from a philosophical or theological point of view is that many such experiences have led people to a new spiritual understanding. Not necessarily a new experience of something outside ourselves, such as feeling touched or saved by some outside force, though that may well be the feeling, but sometimes it is a greater awareness of ourselves, purely as a living and yet finite being.

Scott Peck reminds us in his book, A Road Less Traveled, that Seneca, the great Roman philosopher of two-thousand years ago, said that: "Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live, and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die."

Scott Peck writes further: "Since birth and death seem to be but different sides of the same coin, it is really not at all unreasonable to pay closer heed than we usually do in the West to the concept of reincarnation. But whether or not we are willing to entertain seriously the possibility of some kind of rebirth occurring simultaneously with our physical death, it is abundantly clear that this lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births."

My belief is that each experience we have of the near miss or the close call, each of those times we just scrape by some difficult or dangerous event, the more we begin to understand the real value of our lives. That cause and effect are undeniable, but the effect we get is not always the one we hoped or expected to cause.

Such is the story that seems to come to us from the Easter message of Jesus, who set about trying to cause some reform in his Jewish faith, but the effect is one that I doubt he could have or would have anticipated.

One of our greatest Unitarian ministers of the Nineteenth Century was William Ellery Channing, whose view of Jesus was that he was more than human, less than God. I believe anyone who seeks to reform, seeks to live life outside the parameters we define as normal, the risk-takers, the dare-devils, the adventurers and the saviors, the non-conformists among us who are both celebrated and castigated, all of these take on this quality of being more than human.

When we experience what I have chosen to term "deliverance," we too find ourselves standing on the edges of what we usually think it means to be human and closer to that undefinable essence we call spirit, holy, god.

These events take us to a place and time in our living that we did not expect to go, and from which we fear that we will not return.

My husband, the weekend pilot and flying instructor, has a book that details several conversations found on the Cockpit Voice Recorders in planes that wrecked. Not the best reading for me, but I was amazed by the final words of these pilots (these were all commercial carriers) who followed their rigorous training exercises to the last second in more cases than not, but on a few of these tapes the words indicated the sense of one of three things all related to their fear in the moment: anger, surprise, and resignation or acceptance.

The tendency to use profanity or vulgar expressions was reflective of their state of mind, although the use of the vulgar tended to dominate, showing that surprise may often be the most common reaction . So the recorder showed that, damn it; Oh sh--, oh God, were often the last words. One said, " I love you, Amy," wanting, I guess, to have his last words be a gift to the one he loved.

I was most taken by the tendency to be repetitive in the moment of recognition that the plane was indeed going to crash, and then in the moment when they came to the stage of resignation. For instance, saying, "oh no, oh no, oh no,"; or some command like, "pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up. This tends to be our sense of denial at work, I have often experienced this myself. "No, no, no, no, no. . . ." Meaning, this cannot happen, this must not happen, not now. Or, "please, please, please, please. . ." which is our bargaining with fate. Or the anger that usually leads us to a string of profane or vulgar words (yes, even ministers), defying fate, verbally assaulting it.

What was recorded in the cases where deliverance happened, when they survived, was pure joy. Often, for these highly trained pilots, congratulations to the crew for somehow making it through, finding deliverance.

Fear of such experiences comes up in humor as well, as in the story of an enthusiastic preacher, wanting to be sure that all his flock would be saves, presented the glories of Heaven very vividly--all the pleasure of paradise. At last, reaching the climax he asked, looking out over the congregation, "All right, brothers and sisters, how many of you want to go to Heaven? Raise your hands."

Every person in the church raised a hand, except one. The preacher smiled out over the group, and then, with an expression of shock and dismay, pointed directly at the sinner, "Oh, brother, don’t you want to go to Heaven when you die?"

The sinner looked at him: "Oh, yes, Preacher, I do want to go to Heaven when I die. But I thought you were getting a party to take off right now."

Perhaps more to the point for all too many who do not want to believe that we are living on shorter string that we would like is the story I heard about a businesswoman had just completed a big deal and was crossing a busy intersection, looking up at the sky, apparently oblivious to all around her. A motorist passes and narrowly misses her.

"Hey you, " screamed the frightened motorist, "if you don’t look where you are going, you’ll go where you are looking!"

Scott Peck writes that many of his patients in his psychiatric practice say that they are not religious, do not attend religious services, no longer hold to their childhood faith, and so forth, then turn that into the phrase: "I guess I’m not very spiritual." Peck points out as Emerson and others before him have, that we are innately spiritual beings, we just tend to name our form of worship differently than the traditionally religious.

Anyone who is a seeker after truth, seeker of meaning, is following his/her deep spiritual leanings. The problem, as is so often the problem, is one more of semantics. We Unitarian Universalists are just as likely to get tripped up by this semantic problem.

I, too, believe that all of life is spiritual, all of life has something to teach us, something more to offer than the covering we call "daily life."

It is when we come face to face with our own mortality, or the mortality of those we love, that we recognize the depth of our desire for life, our hope for deliverance. Which may be why all great religious leaders, both of mythological times and today, have as a central part of their story the climax of deliverance. Jesus seems to be doubting his deliverance in quoting the line from Isaiah, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The moment of truth that he is indeed about to die seems much less like a story of salvation to me than words of recognition. Yet, the writers of Jesus’ story go on to show that he was delivered, that he rose from the dead, and that is what Christians around the world celebrate each Easter.

Perhaps, we UUs might glean from this Easter celebration the message that we too would seek deliverance, that as often as we meet crisis, we too will pray to whatever power exists either with in us or with out. That we are in those moments our most spiritual, for we see the truth more clearly than at any other moment. Whatever you think your moments of spirituality are supposed to be, know that it is in our individual brushes with death and deliverance that we will know our most personal, most authentic sense of spirituality.

 
Send mail to webmaster@uusmc.org with questions or comments about this web site.
Designed by Vega Computing Solutions.
Copyright © 1999-2008 Unitarian Universalist Society of Mill Creek.