"Celebration of Life"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 20^th of August, 2000

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as summer moves through its starry nights
and its mounting storms
to worship,
to be both courageous and beautiful in facing life.
Now may our relationship with all existence
our sacred tie to every star, maple, robin and river
illuminate our lives, our hopes and our dreams.

(Assembly): And may we be true to ourselves,
true to each other, and true to our best visions
of what we can together become.

Unison Reading [Next] [back to top]

by Dorothy Day before the Social Justice Offering

People say "What is the sense of our small effort?"
They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.

A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions.
Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

Prayer before silence [Next] [back to top]

Every word in a prayer like this is like oil in an oil lamp… it is small fuel for light that must last a long, long time.

I lift up the lamp of this prayer so that my heart might notice Russian families bent in grief for their own at the bottom of the sea.

I lift up the lamp of this prayer so that my heart might notice both those made weary and those energized by the roar of the recent political conventions.

I lift up the lamp of this prayer so that my heart might notice the hard lives of the addicted and the broken, who long for safe harbor and yet so often sail for far horizons.

I lift up the lamp of this prayer so that my heart might notice the parents of the world, the children of the world, the single and the partnered, the many and the one. Is there any corner of any part of the world where the beat of my own small heart does not echo, or where my wonder and my sympathies refuse to roam?

Oh little light, light the wick of this lamp
so that I may see clearly what is true:
I am one with all that is.
I am one with all that is.
I am not separate.
I am not now nor ever have been separate.
Not from any word.
Not from the lovely silence.
Not from all my memories of love.
Not from the perfect line of Vivaldi on a violin.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]

is a poem by Jack Gilbert, written in 1962. The first line of the poem, which is called "The Abnormal Is Not Courage" refers to the reality that the people of Poland were not prepared with sophisticated military machinery at the time of the Nazi invasion. So they fought with what they had… old fashioned cavalry, and old-fashioned sabers. They perished miserably. And the Penelope mentioned in the poem is of course the painstakingly faithful wife of Odysseus, waiting patiently for his return despite every suitor. Only a few lines of the poem have been omitted for public reading's sake.

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say that courage isn't that. Not at its best.

It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight and were mangled.
But I say courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but leap forward of the same quality. Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.

Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.

Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage, not the month's rapture. Not the exception.
The beauty that is many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence of long accomplishment.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]

is an often read poem by Marge Piercy, "The Seven of Pentacles" written in 1982. This poem is actually found in our hymnbook among the antiphonal readings, but today you will hear it as a poem. This seems like a perfect reading, actually, for the end of summer and the usual reports of zucchini-conquered gardens.

Connections are made slowly. Sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening. More that half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. Live a life you can endure; make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and a bramble to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs. Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen. Reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long, long time.

Not always…for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Sermon: Celebration of Life [Next] [back to top]

Let's start off with an incontrovertible fact. I just do not like spiders. I am now and have been since I was a child a true arachnophobic.

Oh, I know. Some of you will tell me I am quite mistaken in my fear. But, please do not send me pamphlets and books when the sermon is over to alleviate my terror, and to regale me with the splendors of Evolution's great eight-legged masterpiece. And please, I beg of you, do not prate on about Charlotte's Web.

I have read all of those books. Several times over. I know very well spiders are beneficial creatures, eating tons of mosquitoes for supper each day. I know very well they are remarkable beings, creating from their own bodies webbing with the tensile strength of steel.

And I know their rose-window style webs, decked with dew, remain one of the more popular subjects for photographers celebrating the stunning beauty of the natural world.

But, for whatever reason, I just recoil in terror whenever I see one. Mind you, I am fine with a snake wrapped around my arm, a lizard on my shoulder and a mouse in my hand. But keep those eight-legged thingies away from me by any means possible.

My noted arachnophobia will help to explain why I often say that I wish that the originators of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes statement had found some other image than that of "the interdependent web." After all, don't webs and spiders go together?

You have probably heard that memorable phrase "the interdependent web" before if you have been around here for a while. As I often do, I put it on the back cover of your Order of Celebration. "We…. covenant to affirm….the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."

Now if you read the whole set of Principles that this memorable phrase is embedded in, you will find many remarkable words, words like "justice," and "compassion," and "truth," and "worth." But the English-lovers among you will recognize with a wince at once that all of these words are abstractions, not images. Popular, elegant abstractions, mind you, but abstractions nonetheless. You cannot draw an abstraction. You cannot paint "truth" or photograph "justice." You can, however, draw, paint, etch, photograph or even sculpt an image of "the web."

Now you can see why the image of the inter-dependent web distracts me so. Having told you that I am an arachnophobe, you may well understand why I worry that lurking somewhere out of sight on the image of the web is another image: a nasty old spider.

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Look, humor aside, all I am saying, I guess, is that the interdependent web of which we are part is not some romantic, fuzzy and dizzy statement. It's a mature, cool assertion. This phrase does not strike me, at least, as extolling some new sort of pantheism, where the earth itself is a conscious being working out our welfare. It strikes me rather as a statement rooted simply in the affirmations of both modern science and liberal religion. It says that human beings are simply one part of the interconnected whole with everything else…robin, river, tree and cloud. We are not the lords and ladies of the cosmos, the hubs of the universe. As far as I am concerned, the web image invites us, plain and simple, to reconsider what our theological ancestors called our "humility."

Oh yes, I know, I can present this idea of the interdependent web in a snazzier, more exciting way. I can tell you how certain bees pollinate specific flowers which would perish without their ministrations, or I could lift up the marvel of how clouds of otherwise insignificant miniscule plankton serve to feed no less than the great whales. I can offer beautiful portraits of the web…revealing how seeds dropped by certain flying birds may rise up as rare blue flowers in far flung fields; or how the sunset clouds in Columbus may appear radiant green-gold because of settling dust from an erupting volcano on a remote Philippine Island over ten thousand kilometers from here.

All of that is true. But it's a little deceptive actually, unless I point out the other half of the equation. The interdependent web image also serves to remind me of how few whales there are left in the world because of the tragic human capacity for denial and greed. And I wonder how many beautiful trees, animals and, yes, children perished in the hot ash from that sunset-burnishing volcano in the Philippines?

You see, I am not entirely wrong to be nervous about the web image. There is always some spider image, something terrible, lurking there somewhere, up to no good. Unfortunately, all too often the spider tends to be us…we human beings, tearing at the web foolishly and making a shambles of it.

But, in the end, I must tell you that I think the image of the web is a good one. It's a good one because it refuses to let us take ourselves too importantly. My arachnophobia notwithstanding, I find it a central and comforting expression of my religious life that I am a part of the whole connected to every other part of the whole. I find it central and comforting to say I am one with a distant silver river in China, a stalk of yarrow along a rail-bed in Russia, and every human face nearby. As with you, I am of a piece with everything that is, a masterpiece to be exact. I am part of a masterpiece called the universe, a masterpiece that is blissfully and perhaps humbly unsigned.

Now, I can talk about this religious stuff all poetically on Sunday in the pulpit, but, you know, in my day-to-day life I am mostly unaware of these remarkable connections, this extraordinary interdependent web. Volcanoes and villages around the world are just brief reports in the newspaper, not invitations to religious devotion. I don't usually get the shivers when I read the NY Times or the Dispatch. I just get ink on my hands. And I seem to be far too busy these days to watch the sunset very often.

So, I wonder, why do I even understand this affirmation about the interdependent web to be true at all? How can a part experience the whole, anyway, a little cog, the whole wheel? As some of you know, a few remarkable mystics have claimed to do just that. So must day-to-day, frenetic, bill-paying me wait for those rare mystical raptures before a marvelous sunset to get in touch with the reality of this deeply religious image?

On the contrary. I have come to believe the opposite is true for me. It's not the extraordinary event that leads me to my religious life, but rather the very ordinary ones. Its not a miraculous vision on a mountaintop that uplifts my life, but a daily meeting of someone I already know very well in a hallway. In the poet Jack Gilbert's words, "It's not Macbeth with fine speeches" that returns me to my deeper self, but the long friendships and the commitments in my life that always seem to refuse to glow in the dark.

Let me try to show you what I mean by talking about an event at General Assembly this year in Nashville. For those of you who are newcomers this morning, that's our annual all-congregation assembly. Delegates from congregations in every state and province in North America gather at some chosen city for a five-day conference, now close to 4000 strong. It can be an overwhelming experience to attend such an event for the first time.

I personally have missed only two General Assemblies since the year 1977. And thus, because I am no longer a novice, I am also no longer overwhelmed by the sheer number of events and people. I even protect myself from the tidal wave by making appointments to have lunch or dinner with colleagues months in advance. Oh, I may attend a workshop or two, or lead a workshop or worship when asked to do so, but these days, I try to keep that to a minimum. My six years on the Hymnbook Committee simply wore me out in that regard.

After 23 years, I have become clear that it's the long relationships and friendships that count the most for me at General Assembly. Having a lovely dinner with an 85 year old colleague and friend, Farley Wheelright. Having a two hour talk with my former intern who was once a member of this congregation, Joel Miller, while sitting on the floor of the conference center. Laughing with Charlie Kast and David McFarland and Barbara Pescan and Anne Tyndall. Batting ideas around with Scott Prinster. Going out for a late night tete-a-tete with David Blanchard, one of our great ministers in Syracuse. Joyously partaking of a remarkable dinner with Kelly Flood, Neil Chethik and a friend of theirs they were trying to set me up with. Of course, there was the inevitable four hour lunch with Jane Rzepka after the Service of the Living Tradition on Sunday, where we unpack the world and its problems and then stuff it back into the box by the time we're through.

This is the warm, uplifting side of our Unitarian Universalist idea of "the interdependent web." Without these long-term confidants and friends, these mainstays of my spirit, I am convinced that my ministry would just fizzle.

Now, in a basement gallery right next to my hotel in Nashville, the Smithsonian had put up a loan exhibit of mid-20th century paintings…Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, etc. Naturally, as an artist myself, I took it in. On one of the walls I found a magnificent painting by Millard Sheets, "the father of California watercolor." But I knew something more about him than what the catalogue reported. I knew he was also the literal father of a colleague and friend of Wendy's and mine, Carolyn Owen-Towle, one of our ministers in San Diego. And I knew she was also going to be at General Assembly.

Carolyn's beloved father Millard had died some years earlier. Unfortunately, I knew from Wendy that both Carolyn's mother and her brother had also died… within the month before General Assembly. It was obvious to me that Carolyn was going to show up to GA with a rather heavy load of grief. I also remember her telling me once that her mother had often posed for many of her father's paintings. I found this particular painting before me, a tenement in San Francisco just before the Second World War, alive with motherly figures on steps and balconies. I wondered…was Carolyn's young mother staring out at me from this canvas?

One day, I cajoled Carolyn to come with me and Wendy to see "an exhibit of art from her father's era. Maybe there will be one of his paintings there."

So the three of us went. I knew Carolyn had always loved the artists of this period. She recognized most of them on sight. She was positively dazzled as the three of us strolled through the halls, her soul opening to the great works. When she said, "Oh, there's one of Tom's pieces!" she was referring to Thomas Hart Benton, a friend of her father's, a man she knew as a little girl and one of the great painters of the twentieth century. Carolyn's sheer excitement was exhilarating for all of us, I think.

Finally, she caught sight of her father's work. It was not the one she expected to see, the one portrayed on the cover of your orders of celebration, which actually does portray her mother. But it was a very similar painting, the tenement balconies seen from below instead of from above. In any case, the masterpiece had its expected effect. There were, as you can imagine, poignant moments then for all three of us. The web tightened. Here, here, in unlikely Nashville, with Elvis wannabe's crooning down the street and barbecue smoke clogging every lane, a grown daughter of California, a beloved dead father, a beloved dead mother, and brother, and a hundred artists all met with two ministers from Columbus, and for a moment, the filaments of the great web drew taut and made music in our hearts like a transcendent violin. Past and future joined hands in the present, and the interdependent web glistened as if touched by morning dew or fresh tears.

This deep connection of the heart was not a workshop or a sermon at General Assembly. It was not a business meeting or an agenda. It was an ordinary event experienced by people who long ago made a commitment to serve the Power of Love and Truth among Unitarian Universalist people no matter what else happened in our lives. It was the fruit of duration, the fruit of burrowing for years in the interconnected warrens of this liberal religious movement, to use Marge Piercy's brilliant imagery. Had I just met Carolyn yesterday, this would not and could not have happened.

This revelation of the interdependent web, centered around a remarkable picture at a traveling exhibition, reminded me of what drew me to Unitarian Universalism in the first place, and what still draws me to it. It is with this that I will bring this sermon to a close.

First, I came to this religious approach because I knew right off that secular knowledge…such as the study of spiders or phobias, the history of art, or the feeding of whales, was not considered anything less than religious education among us. I knew early that each and every Unitarian Universalist person is encouraged to study, learn, and be amazed by the full reach of human knowledge… including, I must add, even the more traditional stories of folks like Buddha and Jesus. The interdependent web is always there, sure, but it doesn't just tap you on the shoulder, you know. Few will notice it unless they are open to ever increasing learning. It is learning which reveals the connections of things. Some of our critics say that intellectual, learned things are not spiritual. On the contrary. They are central to the life of the spirit. Had I not known about art a bit, Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and Millard Sheets, I would never have been able to discover the node of the web hidden so magnificently in Nashville, Tennessee.

You may not know anything about art. Fine. The web may tug at you with your knowledge of Greek, or spider biology or wetlands or politics, but without knowledge, it can remain undetected for a lifetime.

Second, I came to this religious movement because I knew it was not a flash in the pan. I knew it affirmed that real relationship, real loving, develops slowly. I suspected when I first joined the Universalist Unitarian Church of Farmington, Michigan that I would be tempted to run away from church all the time, since it takes so much effort, courage and attention to be there and "never look away." I knew there were no short-cuts to religious community…no easy rituals that confirmed it magically in a year or two. I knew there was no welcome that could go more than half way…I had to extend my hand in order for it to be grasped. True, now and then there is a stunning conversation with a colleague at a retreat that makes me feel suddenly intimate to him or her, but in the end feeling intimate is not the same as being intimate. It's not "the rapture, it's the marriage…" says the poet Gilbert; it's the long commitment to staying with the church, sticking to it through the tough times, and the hard questions, and even the disappointments and letting the harvest come at its own pace, not my own.

Not everyone agrees with me, I know. Today, great church think-tanks will tell us to be practical. Forget the long haul, they tell us. This is the consumer age, not the age of faith. Folks shop for what they want in churches like they shop for what they want in their brand new designer kitchens. Ease, and shine, and affordability. Modern folks, the think-tanks tell us, don't like words like commitment and faithfulness. They want excitement at church, pizzazz, mystical rapture with a pop-star belting out the shudders, and a casual, folksy minister who is not really a minister but their best friend, and buckets of easy certainties. They certainly don't want long term intimacy…who has time for that? Be a shopping mall, not a community, a cafeteria, not a family reunion. Who knows? Maybe the church think-tanks are right…practically speaking.

All I know is that I have never come to this or any church for a flash in the pan or a pat on the back. I have come to find more depth, challenge, connection, respect and revelations of higher truth and finer love than I seem to be able to manage all by myself. And I know that all this takes time. Lots of time. Burrowing, reaching out, risking and failing, and then getting up again. And through it all, I find myself trying, in Piercy's immortal phrase "to live as if I liked myself"…. knowing from experience that this is the only way anything meaningful happens… doing it despite all doubt. Never waiting to be perfect, always assuming imperfection. Living "by faith alone," our religious ancestors called it. Call it what you will, but at the very least, call it living.

It's not a bad religion that. To learn more about the world all the time, to stick it out in community by the power of commitment, to have faith that I don't have to be perfect before I try to reach out, and to be open more and more to how I am connected to everything else in the world….it's pretty ordinary stuff I suppose to some people. Not terribly spiritual. Not very snazzy or exalted. But I guess I am different. This is as wonderful a religious path as I can imagine.

I will probably never come to like spiders, although I have to admit I am connected to them, too. I will probably always love painting and the world of art more than any other discipline, and for me, the interdependent web will tighten there and between long term friends, faster than almost anywhere. But in any case, I take my comfort knowing I am part, not the whole, a fleck on the rim, not the big wheel. And in that knowledge, that feeling, I find my happiness.

And in that simple realization, I hope, is all I will ever really need to live the life of courage, hope, and compassion I have always wanted to live.

Prayer  [back to top]

School soon, and then leaves the color of oranges.
Football soon, and then skies the color of lakes.
Cider soon, and not long after the belt of Orion creeping up the curtain of night.

Summer, fall, winter, spring, the seasons turn like a wheel but in every season, the hub that turns the seasons stays the same…

Why is the world so fragile?
Why is the world so enduring?

The seasons turn like a wheel… green leaves to bare branches, flowing stream to frozen brook.

In any season, the hub turns serenely at the center
Behind each rose, a whole planet!
Behind each masterpiece, a whole people!
Behind each question, a small seed of prayer.
Blest is our time together in each and every season and in our common singing.

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