Whoever we are, whatever our differences: — Out of wherever in this aching world our lives have led us — this beautiful, this threatened, this wrenched and frightened world: we gather here.

Unitarian Universalists — to the utter amazement of nearly all other religious communions — UUs have an old tradition of taking the summer off. (Someone once explained this to me: he said that UUs are the only religious folk God trusts enough to leave alone for the Summer.)

But look at this. We come back. We enjoy the break but we want to regather. From wherever we came, out of this aching world — this beautiful, this threatened, this wrenched and frightened world: we gather.

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Our gathering-place is very beautiful. But two weekends ago I sat in no less than three of London's Unitarian meetinghouses. One of them was very familiar to me — I worked there once; the other two I'd never seen before. They were shadows of their former selves, tiny gatherings, one in a decaying chapel in grimy East London; the other in the very toney, trendy neighborhood of Islington, where once 3,000 people would gather every week in a grand sanctuary, but it had been destroyed by a German bomb, and now a tiny hall built just after the war is plenty big for the dozen people who gather there.

Still, in each case I knew I was home; I felt the presence of very great and noble souls, visionary and brave people, present and past and future, and, and even, among those small numbers, I met three who, within the last couple of months, had only just been drawn to those three Unitarian gatherings: an educator, a BBC commentator, and a young African man from the troubled streets of East London. Very different places, very different people — but something had drawn them there — and sends us back into that aching world — that beautiful, threatened, wrenched and frightened world.

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There is a something that draws us here.

We gather in even richer company than you can see. I want for us to think about that for these few moments.

What kind of gathering is this? Who is here, and what, and what difference does it make?

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It is obvious enough that we gather in the presence of each other. I have always thought a UU congregation — certainly this one — is a rather amazing thing. I ask myself: where do these amazing people come from? what brought them here?

This place is more than an old building, of course. Of course, some of the noblest chapters of this congregation's story were written in Florence, in a hall, or under the trees. If this Great Hall finally, one afternoon, dissolved into a soggy pile of old bricks, you would still have a feeling of being somewhere, because you are a gathering of people who yourselves constitute place, you make wherever you are somewhere.

In 1843, Samuel Johnson — one of my favorite ministers from another time — wrote this to his special friend and fellow Transcendentalist ministerial student Samuel Longfellow — he wrote:

My dear S., you were one of the very, very few here with whom I could speak the thoughts that almost force themselves out of my lips wherever I am, though I am sure of being misunderstood.¹

How much it means when somebody else understands the words you speak and the passion that burns at the heart of you, who believes in and supports the unfolding of your highest self. John Milton once wrote, "Our country is where we can live as we ought."

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There are ghosts here, too. Or rather spirits, unseen companions.

Many noble and shining lives have filled this place, and filled your homes, and though they are gone, still — somehow — we meet them here.

What, after all, is time, the passing of years? The great British physicist, Julian Barbour, says that time is an illusion; that time is just a cosmic convenience that keeps everything from happening all at once.²

Once, Lydia Maria Child, and Charles Burleigh, and Mr. Emerson — who spoke here at least twice that I know of — were here; — so was Sojourner Truth. How far away, really, are they? or Theodore Parker or Margaret Fuller? They, too, inhabit this place, and many others who have made this place sacred. You can still feel them here, and here you will meet them, among these, here, in whom they still live, through whom they still hope and love and speak.

Here we ask, what dreams and works do they pass on to us to fulfill? The work they began is still unfinished: what they dreamed is ours to do.

Others are here, too, unseen — some we would not want to admit could be among us, but sometimes they come here with us, maybe hiding in some crevice of your mind, to surprise us at some unexpected moment. Perhaps St. Paul, or someone who was a difficult part of your life, is here somewhere with their heavy judgment and condemnation. Once, in my previous congregation in Oak Park, after the fundamentalist preacher across the street had pronounced the judgment of God upon the village for allowing gay people to live there, and after my response, the newspaper devoted fully eight pages to the transcript of a conversation between Pastor Ray Pritchard and me. I had to agree with him that if St. Paul were there with us in that room at the newspapers, he would agree with Ray, and not me, about gay people and quite a few other matters. Terrible. And if St. Paul could turn up in this Great Hall today, he woulkd not approve of many of us.

But suppose — St. Paul did not come back just as he was, as if freeze-dried for two millenia — just the same as he was when he wrote those dreadful words in Romans 1, or his words about how women are to remain silent and obey their men, or how slaves are to obey their masters. Suppose instead — during those intervening twenty centuries, St. Paul had learned something?

Then maybe he, too, would rejoice in this gathering today — in its pluralism and diversity, in its embracing of our humanity as it really is — because, after all, was it not St. Paul who wrote "For there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one"?

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Even he might change: everything changes.

Where then the sense of place, and home, and rootedness? How are you supposed to feel at home where everything changes?

We who come here, and the details of our lives, and the ideas we think and the deeds we do, flow from the same source from which all nature flows. Nature knows no permanent fixtures: the Universe is fluid and ever-changing.

The heart of the Universe is a roaring engine of creativity, and the genius that created one magnificent moment is now creating another.

This is not a place that leaves us as it found us, and it is not a place that itself remains the same.

You and I would not wish to attend the Unitarian church of the 1830s. We would find it pretty strange. There would be hymns about God the Father, and how you have to believe in Christ to go to heaven, and a whole lot of other stuff. But this faith of ours, and this gathering — they are really a journey, aren't they? The questions of the past have now meaning: they are the wrong questions. For us there are new questions to guide us, to challenge us, to engage our minds and hearts. You would not come here if you didn't understand that, and require the company of others who do.

Here the gods and teachers and inner wisdom figures we carry around with us can be brought into the dialogue, too; can learn and stretch, too.

v

But there is another dimension to our gathering. Who is present here?

All our brightest highest selves

All our dark shadows

All our godhood

All our demons

All our dreams and vision and nightmares

All that we have been and are and will be and might be or might have been

All that is gathered here.

All our lives are expressions of something larger, a greater Life, from which our lives flow, and we yearn for it. It is the Life within us, our very breath. There is in us a yearning for it, and we can find it in our deepest selves.

Here we may meet our deepest selves — our human powers, our divine powers and possibilities, the Sojourner Truth in us, the Emerson in us, — for these heroes are around us and in us: And what do they now yearn to do and be?

They're a part of us. There are many parts of us, and sometimes we meet them here: the angry parts, the frightened parts, the proud parts and the ashamed parts, the brilliant parts that can do great things we don't even know we can do — but those parts of us might make us work!

Thomas Merton asked, "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?"³

What is it to touch, and know, and befriend, all of these selves, these powers that are in us, — that come to us in memory and hope, in dream and imagination, in aspiration and sense of call and duty?

Not that we always want to be gathered with so many parts and dimensions of our selves, not that we spring from our Sunday morning beds exclaiming, "I'm going to church with my rigid stubborn fearful terribly injured self that must undergo its frightening painful exhilarating transformation." But we know it could happen, and we could come away different than we went in, and if it doesn't ever happen, we probably won't be back. For we come here to gather up our scattered hidden unrealized selves, and to do so is one of the first meanings of the word love.

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And there is something else about our gathering:

Here we are invited into the very mystery of our being, the Life of all life, the life-force surging in all that is. And that Life is not something other and separate from ourselves; but contains us, and our lives flow from it. There is a communion of all that is.

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This gathering of ours — this sacred place — is high, and wide, and deep. But what can it mean to us, and what can it mean in this larger community?

But that depends, doesn't it, on the how much of our selves we bring here, the intensity with which we do so. There are many things that scare us off. Because, after all, such in-depth engagement always comes with an additional spiritual challenge:

how to draw upon our highest capacities, the best that is in us, while at the same time navigating around the temptation to indulge the worst that is in us, our worst particular traits —

— you know, that delicious feeling, maybe, of being a victim, that deep assurance that nobody else is really capable of understanding or appreciating us — you know those special challenges that come with a gathering of human energy!

When we gather here — there is so much more than our eyes can see. When we gather — it is a sacred place. At its best this is a gathering of all our dreams, all our highest aspirations, all our gifts, and all that we are, gathered here in the presence of so much more — inspired and energized by the unseen congregation of those who inhabit these walls and inhabit the minds of those who gather here — in the service of the Mystery from which all of it flows, in the profound Communion of all Being.

May we come to know what is in us, and what it calls us to be and to do.

There is more to us than we know. And now we must make the future. We must face the future with no less courage, no narrower vision, no smaller love, than that which makes this place sacred.

And then we, too, shall go forth from here, and then shall we, by our lives, our love and courage and vision, make this place more sacred still.

¹ Lectures, Essays, and Sermons by Samuel Johnson with a Memoir by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883, p. 15.

² London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Phoenix/Orion paperback, 1999. Subsequently published in the USA, p. 59.

³ Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert. New York: New Directions, 1980, p. 11.

Three short Readings

The first is from Doris Lessing:

I came down into this town scared witless. At the very least I thought I would have to persuade them I was harmless. But that didn't happen. The town has a central square and a fountain. . . . There were people standing about the square, and as I got into it, full of apprehension, it was the strangest thing, but I was accepted at once. No one expected me to be harmful. Can you imagine what that was like?

From Starhawk:

We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place, half-remembered, and half envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. . . . Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. . . . Arms to hold us when we falter. . . . A circle of healing.

And so we move toward each other, if only because the battle is too large for any one of us to fight alone.

A Letter from Rev. Samuel Johnson
to Rev. Samuel Longfellow, 1843

Lectures, Essays, and Sermons by Samuel Johnson with a Memoir by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883, p. 15.Z&Z&

Gone! My dear S., you were one of the very, very few here with whom I could speak the thoughts that almost force themselves out of my lips wherever I am, though I am sure of being misunderstood. Imagine me met with a blank face or a hopeless incredulity. . . . I wonder how we can have got so perverted as to see the highest things as the lowest, mistake shadow for reality, the outward for the inward, the voice for silence, the silence for voice. You will understand me.

Meditate

The seasons change, and our lives

And outside, the aching world,

so bright with promise
sometimes barely seen behind thick stormclouds

And here again
again here

We gather

some in hurt, some in fear
some in overflowing joy
some in bright anticipation

To meet the coming year, and to shape it,

And, in its unfolding, to discover our own:

And come to know

as only the deep innermost places of us can know

The meaning of our days
The possibilities of the moment
The love that casts our fear
and calls us to
dream and dare

In this silence

may we hear
above the tumult and the turmoil
the voice that speaks
from the heart of all things