A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 11, 2004
Last week we contemplated the wiser, nobler, braver human these times and the days ahead require as the human race lurches into the
most perilous times ever known to us.
But today I want to think about us — just as we are, here, now — we who struggle to become those nobler, wiser humans.
As I have sometimes said by way of introducing the Joys and Concerns, you can always be certain: behind every bright smiling face gathered here there is hidden anguish, disappointment, hurt, fear — as well as promise, and delight, and triumph, and, certainly, stories you never hear but there's material enough in them for another set of gospels and epistles and psalms, and for more chapters in the Unitarian Universalist saga of faith and courageous life.
No one knows, fully, ever, the challenges that are being faced every day, the magnificent destiny waiting to unfold, the delicate promise that might be nourished into some splendor — that is represented here in this Great Hall.
So I want to return to an old theme. The nature of this spiritual community, this congregation, as a part of this religious movement of ours, and how we might fulfill its meaning and promise, or how we might betray it, in what we do here.
We know that there are places and occasions that evoke the best and most promising in people, and there are places and occasions that betray it and evoke, instead, the lowest expectations we may imagine for ourselves.
To nourish and provoke that which is highest and best in us: —There are times and places where that highest and best is very visible and obvious.
Consider, for example, William Ellery Channing's church, in Boston, where the single most important founder of American Unitarianism held forth until 1840. At the core of his message was a faith in the greatness and magnitude of our humanity, the divinity of the human.
He preached about humans in their likeness to God in terms so hopeful and so generous you might, this afternoon as you read the day's news, or tomorrow at work, think that he must have been hallucinating. But consider what happened. From that one congregation came
Horace Mann, the great educational reformer and congressman,
Elizabeth Peabody, his secretary, who also ran the bookstore where all the Transcendentalists gathered, the only one that sold books in German and French, Elizabeth Peabody with her lifelong advocacy of early childhood education and her pioneering of the kindergarten
A hospital for women was founded there, now among the finest hospitals in America, still with its Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
And indirectly, from the influence of that place, came forth Emerson himself, and Parker, and abolitionists and reformers, caregivers and visionaries.
And from them came a people with a passion potent enough to give them courage to stand up to the powerful institutions everybody assumed couldn't be changed, whose grip they thought couldn't be broken: political and cultural and, yes, religious powers that were crushing, choking the human spirit, snuffing out the light at the heart of many people and of an age. Here were people who opened new vistas of spiritual understanding and experience.
But there are so many more dimensions to this drama of a community of vision and faith. These you can only see from up close. They are quieter, subtler. They are the work of human community.
We gather here, and this act is powerful, and in this gathering, each one of us is powerful, more than we know. We can give the gift of courage or we can inflict wounds that do not heal. We can create a climate of fear, sending each other behind defensive fortifications; — or we can create a climate in which fear and hurt are made to melt away. I wonder if, looking around you today, you sense that.
Many of our congregations are organized around a Covenant that very much replaces the creed and dogma you might find elsewhere, that you might have grown up with. A phrase from the covenant of one of our congregations, written in the 18th century, reads "We bind ourselves in love, one with another, endeavoring our mutual edification." We, too, are trying to work out a Covenant — if you were here a few weeks ago when we welcomed new members you would have heard some of the language so far: — in it, from a few selected lines: — we pledge
to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
To seek the truth of our lives with integrity, and to regard each other with honor and reverence.
As a community of faith, we . . . [pledge ourselves] to nurture learning and growth, provoking hearts and minds toward a fuller vision of life's promise; To the full unfolding of the potentials of each person; regarding one another with honor, with love, and with care.
There's quite a bit more to it — if you want to know more it will be discussed tomorrow night at the Council meeting at 7, and everyone is welcome.
The words only begin to describe a fertile soil and friendly sun to give nourishing haven to whatever it is in these lives that is trying to unfold.
I can think of places and communities of people, if "community" is not too strong a word — that have given issue to the reverse of this, that have left in their wake all the evidence of the worst of human capabilities.
You don't have to look far, because there are workplaces and homes and associations of all kinds, including religious societies — that become a kind of breeding ground for both the conception and the realization of the lowest quality expectations of human beings. Have you ever known such a place? Which of us has not?
They range from the most intimate of settings to the scale of nations. What is it that feeds our government's contempt for the global community, and for the very air and water and earth?
These are places where spiritually and psychically abused people hide behind pretend-facades, their spirits hidden in bunkers from which defensive weapons continually fly, where the highest value is constantly to be in desperate competition for dominance, where deception is the rule and — well, what the ethicist Sharon Welch describes so very well as "cultured despair."1
And — Dr. Channing would recognize this as the first spiritual deformity — where persons cannot look into the face of another with faith, and hope, in what, in that life, is waiting, struggling to unfold.
Now, we know that people do not always, or immediately, rise to their full potential. We know we don't. But ours is a faith committed to the fact that sometimes we do, and that it is our calling to help to find and support the beauty that is hidden in another. To believe in one another. And that is worth thinking about.
Think what you do when you assume the worst about anybody, when you decide in advance that they will fail in any endeavor to which they set their hand.
I do not mean to say that our unhapapy previous experiences with ourselves and others are of no instructional value. From these we learn a lot: we learn the weaknesses, the fears, the self-doubts, the temptations that can divert ourselves and others from our path. We learn, also, what our path — our particular path — is not.
Sometimes we set out to do something innocent or good, but for us, it's a wrong turn. So I don't mean to say that we ought always to be cheered along in whatever endeavor we choose. Sometimes what we need is a friend who knows us deeply to discern that a road we've headed down, while innocent enough, is simply not our path, not right for us, is a diversion.
We don't always perceive where our own genius lies. We work dutifully at things for which we have neither talent nor passion. My parents thought I ought to play an instrument. In keeping with their love of Lawrence Welk, they sent off to Mr. Ostroski's, down Central Avenue by the river, for accordion lessons. Then oboe lessons, where I learned how easy it was to break a reed with your teeth — expensive little things — and how hard it was to get anything like music to come out of the damn thing. For these, or the violin, or the piano, I had neither talent nor passion. The president of the congregation in Bangor, Maine was not wrong when, after a service when the organist didn't show up and I substituted, Vicki said, "You better stick to preaching, Jay."
I think of that every time we propel somebody into a task that bears no relationship to their talents, their calling, their passions, or their potentiality.
The irreducible fact is that what we have to work with and what we have to offer is ourselves, not something else, not anything else, and certainly not some facade of a fake self. And our Selves are always growing, sometimes making mistakes, sometimes hurting, sometimes falling on our faces, but always growing and always rich in deep inner resources. Frankly, the chief cause of incompetence is repression of the life force, inattentiveness to the contours and qualities of the life force in us.
And so if we would begin to approach Mr. Channing's faith in the humanity of people, we won't have much patience for the habits and structures that stifle what is most original and authentic in people.
Remember what Mr. Emerson had to say about this?
[I]mitation is suicide; [a person] must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion . . . [N]o kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
There is power here, unseen and unrecognized, to be released; — and we get to decide whether it a power for repression, and suspicion, and resentment, and defensiveness, and despair; — or if it will be an energy of vision, and healing, and of beauty that carries us all over some new threshold of human development.
Let us learn to think of the life of this congregation as a kind of laboratory for our lives and dreams. There is much to be done here and much to challenge our aspirations. But a lot of the time we look at it simply as a machine to be kept running, with slots to be filled. Then we wonder why we haven't gotten handles on committee life and vital leadership positions are now unfilled. It's all about the unfolding of human possibility and the faith to believe in ourselves and each other and in that holy mystery that's trying to unfold in every one of us.
But we get impatient and give up on people, sometimes in a moment of self-righteousness that really flows out of a defensiveness born not of power but of weakness trying hard to look like power. Our harsh judgments on others only betray our low-quality expectations of ourselves, our own containment in sameness and stagnation. Those who know their own power don't have to judge, — and belittle others. Jim Fenhagen's reflections at the time of Princess Diana's death get to the heart of it:
We admire other people's strength, but when it comes right down to it, their weakness strikes a closer chord. We don't identify with Princess Diana because she was royal, or because she was beautiful. We identify with her because we could see the tears in her eyes.2
But it's a well-known truism that you cannot get anything out of something or someone that you don't view sympathetically. By entering another person's story, its character and plot — we discover meaning in our own story, When we are in touch with our own, we are more likely to make sense of another person's story.
There's a biblical quote behind my title and I'll get to it now. A passage from the prophet Isaiah, quoted by the Gospel of Matthew to describe a great leader:
Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice to the nations.
He will not break a bruised reed
Or quench a smoldering wick.3
And whatever is a "bruised reed," you are of course asking. A reed is a sight to behold. These things grew to ten feet tall, like great stalks of bamboo. They used 'em for a lot of things that are now made of plastic. People depended on these things. They were meant to grow tall and strong. According to the unknown writer of these words, the Galilean teacher Jesus saw people that way, but when he saw a damaged one, it was not his impulse to say To hell of it, to break the bruised reed and discard it. To him, a person had value and hidden possibility on her own, whether she measures up to your expectations or not.
There have been times, and there will be more, when we have disappointed each other,
when things have seemed out of joint, and we begin to despair, and then we begin to imprison one another in our own despairing projections of sameness and stagnation. But.
A bruised reed may still be a growing reed, a beautiful and serviceable reed. Have some patience, huh? We all come in here bruised.
And a smoldering wick — the image is of something that may have produced more smoke than light, but it's still glowing, isn't it? In this darkness, that's worth something. We are not here to snuff out dying embers, but to stoke the flames, to cherish and nurture light and purify it because it's all part of the holy fire that burns in us all and it can again burn splendidly. But that takes some faith.
Is there something more important than this? By whatever words we describe it, that is our covenant here.
Our Unitarian Universalist symbol is that chalice of fire. Emerson said that a flame of fire
is the most affecting symbol of what we should be. A spark of fire is the sign of the robust, united, burning, radiant soul. By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of.
We are tenders of that flame in each other: that's our sacred work. Don't quench the flame. From these bruised reeds, these smoldering wicks — these — will come the wiser, nobler human these days demand. It means something to be a part of this congregation.
Is this not the reason for our gathering? Acknowledging again the moving force of Life in ourselves and others, discerning what is trying to unfold, and blessing it with our care and faith.
©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
From the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, published in 1852, two years after her death, by
James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Henry Channing.
One thing only she demanded of all her friends — that they should not be satisfied with the common routine of life — that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained. She never formed a friendship until she had seen and known this germ of good, and afterwards judged conduct by this. To this germ of good, to this highest law of each individual, she held them true. . . . Margaret saw in each of her friend the secret interior capability, which might be hereafter developed into some special beauty or power. By means of this penetrating, this prophetic insight, she gave each to himself, acted on each to draw out his best nature; gave him an ideal, out of which he could draw strength and liberty, hour by hour. . . . She said . . . “Would not genius be common as light if men trusted their higher selves?”
John Weiss, "An American Atonement," 1861
In American Religion (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871), 166ff.
If we try to think well of God by thinking ill of the people he has made, we are irreligious. . . . If it is still worth while to keep the word Religion in the human family, to represent a tendency that was strong enough to ennoble the past in spite of its unnatural doctrines, and is the hope of a wiser future, we must show that there is a better way of binding people to God than by assuming that they are not fit for it by nature.
Every [person] has by birth some function, place, and service, and must have some opportunity. . . . We have this ministry of reconciliation.
Jean Houston, The Possible Human, 1982.
Excerpted from 123-126
I would go so far as to say that the greatest of human potentials is the potential of each one of us to empower and acknowledge the other. We all do this throughout our lives, but rarely do we appreciate the power . . . that we give to others. To be acknowledged by another, especially during times of confusion, loss, disorientation, disheartenment, is to be given time and place in the sunshine and is, in the metaphor of psychological reality, the solar stimulus for transformation. . . .
You feel yourself primed at the depths by such seeing. Something so tremendous and yet so subtle wakes up inside that you are able to release the defeats and denigrations of years. If I were to describe it further, I would have to speak of unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one.
Our greatest genius may be the ability to prime the healing and evolutionary circuits of one another. . . .
It is all a matter of the meeting. . . .
Not having met ourselves, we project our unmet selves upon those we encounter as we also become the screens for the projections of others. We project to others our stale, habituated expectations, so that we have little choice but to "live down" to a tragically limited projection of ourselves. . . .
We imprison others in these projections, isolating them in a containment of sameness and stagnation . . . with little hope of breaking out of the circularity of our settled expectations.
. . . When tender shoots of personal growth are refused the nutrients necessary to their continuance and flowering, they wither and die. . . .
It is all a matter of the meeting. . . . A vitality is given and received and given again. Meaning blooms . . . And this meaning . . . seems to be part of an autonomous life force in itself, a luminous third aliveness. Some feel it as Presence and call it so — the Holy Spirit, the Goodly Being, the Soul of all, the One. It renders the partners in the meeting present to all their content, and they discover themselves broadened, deepened, nourished, known.
May we discern what is around us here: lives of struggle, lives of joy, lives rich with love, lives of disappointment, anguish, anger; lives of hope and triumph, lives made fearful with hurt; —
Sight that sees beyond the shapes and surfaces: sight of deeper seeing, vision penetrating surfaces and show — now let us see and know the promise and the power that has entered these doors, a nd the weariness spent in struggle, and the hidden hurt, and the silent rage, and the fragile trust, and the delight and beauty and exaltation, the hearts hungry for more than bread alone, hoping for the assurance of welcome and refuge, longing for peace and purpose. Holy sight, let us see and know that this is holy ground, the arena of our striving and becoming, an open space for the possible, for higher yearnings. Greater vision, let us see, and discern the power of Spirit at work here, that from us may rise a larger-seeing human with nobler heart, lifted, reconciled, made free —
— in this silence.