Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 11th of November, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
after a week of bright and crisp autumn days
to worship, to celebrate our lives
in the context of our common life,
and in thanksgiving for the greater Life
which, in robin and rabbit, moss and moth
expresses itself in divine diversity,
the many making the One, before which wonder we say :
May our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those visions of what we can together become...
Prayer Before the Silence [Next] [back to top]
Darkness comes earlier,
and the leaves grow crisp on their branches.
As they clatter down the street in the breeze,
their sweet earthy scent brings up to many of us
memories of so many autumns past.
They speak of shouts
echoing out of football stadiums, perhaps, or the melancholy low slant of
the sun,
transforming all the buildings on our street in its sideways spotlight.
Or is it the parade, the veterans parade downtown, uniforms worn in battles
past
brought out into the sun.
Those were different autumns,
those years when the sounds were not the crackle of leaves but the crack
of weapons.
Those were different autumns,
when human eyes looked upon things
they had never hoped to see in their lives.
Those were different autumns,
when men and women became veterans
not just of a war but of an era.
Some came home, some were broken.
Some came home, and built a life.
Some came not to their homes
save in the faint memories of children
and tears of spouses and parents.
The autumn comes without regard to
human wars, human yearnings, human
striving.
The autumn just comes.
But since we are human, let human silence come,
the soundlessness of our memories,
the best and only anticipation of great peace.
silence
Now we add sound to our soundless memories,
and make in our mouths the sounds of the names of those who are veterans
of life's daily struggles, those we love, who love us, those whom we find
tough to love, those we miss. We name them aloud, or in the silent spaces
between the beat of our hearts.
naming
Veterans of life, of love, of loss we all are, creatures of time: days, years, centuries, companions with the silent fish, the quiet lichen, companions too with the rabbit dashing through the brush, the thrush singing in the branches of a bush, and the voice of the singers bringing hope and prophecies to earth by the power of music.
First
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
is taken from a very recent book called Liasons of Life, by Tom Wakeford.
The word "symbiosis" used in the reading, means two forms of life living
together in such a way as to not be able to live separately. Most forms of
life on earth are symbiotic, we know now, but long ago, this was considered
heresy.
In 1896, Beatrix Potter came face-to-face with the first barrier for the symbiosis pioneers-ignorant prejudice. The soon-to-be-famous children's author and illustrator was hounded out of biology by the closed ranks and narrow minds of London's top scientific institutes. Their members, all male, refused to accept Potter's evidence that lichens, those curious (things) living on tree trunks, seashores, and walls, were made up of not one but two organisms in intimate alliance. Yet her insight was more far-reaching than either she or her contemporaries could ever have dreamed.Not only lichens, but also almost every tree, bush, and grass on Earth leads a double life-married to a fungus. While orchids and oak trees appear to be individuals, in reality they live in an inextricably interwoven liaison with a worldwide web of underground fungal foragers. A century after the stifling of Beatrix Potter's search for natural truths and her final retreat into voluntary exile, we can now celebrate her radically new view of life. Interconnectivity can be a strength rather than merely a source of potential conflict; a vital resource rather than a drain.
Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
consists of a few excerpts from Beatrix Potter's diary, written, like
Leonardo da Vinci's diaries, in a code language of her own invention.
I shall always call myself Unitarian because of my father and my mother, but for the Unitarians as a Dissenting body, as I know them in London, I have no respect. Their creed is apt to be a timid, illogical compromise, their forms of Service a badly performed imitation of the Church (of England). We are not Christians in the commonly accepted sense of the term. (I) Believe there is a great power silently working in all things for good. Behave yourself, and never mind the rest.
Sermon: Microbes and Peter Rabbit [Next] [back to top]
Exactly ten years ago, on the second Sunday in November, I preached a sermon at the crossroads of Western, primarily English speaking civilization. Oh, I know there are many other civilizations on the earth, and I know that many folks will dispute me on where the crossroads of any civilization might be located. But from where I stood, it sure felt like it.
I was to preach at the Hamstead Unitarian Chapel in London, England, invited there by the minister at the time, Judith, who is a friend of mine. She knew I had been preaching to the European Unitarian Universalists in Oberwesel Germany, and so she figured, since I was already over in Europe, it would be short work to take the Chunnel train and preach in London the next week. Of course I was delighted to be asked.
But I was unprepared for the sheer charm of the chapel's location, Hamstead. It's on the Tube line (the subway), and is thus part of greater London now as well as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But at one time, by the look of it, it clearly was much more of a country village. Once I had checked into my cottage on the church grounds, I found a map of Hamstead listing all the houses where well-known arbiters of Western Civilization had lived in town. Sigmund Freud stayed down the block. Rabindranath Tagore had stationed himself two blocks away, as had Gandhi when he was in town. Eleanor Farjeon, who had written Morning Has Broken, lived in a cottage two blocks down toward the village and a block to the left. English musicians and artists and poets of all eras crowded the town…the painter Constable was interred in the churchyard down the street, and the famed conductor Sir Adrian Boult, also a Unitarian, lived not far away. Keats wrote his famous poem "Ode to a Nightingale" in a nearby (and very sweet) cottage on a tree-lined lane right out of a romantic's most extravagant dream.
The lovely, even quaint gothic building that is now the Unitarian Chapel had stood there since before the American Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft used to attend there before she gave birth to wild Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame, and as she wrote her famous manifesto Vindication of the Rights of Women, a book that chastened our own Jefferson and Adams. Influential novelist George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans) was not a member of the chapel, but her husband was, and she used to accompany him at times, even though she was somewhat suspicious of religion.
And the austere parents of Beatrix Potter took her to that church when she was young, and gave her her Unitarian identity. But, as she wrote, though she counted herself an English Unitarian, she wasn't entirely happy with the ways and means of the church. She thought the worship service tried too hard to resemble more traditionally Anglican churches, and she felt the language of the preachers to be too much of a compromise in theology. In her journals she often talks about going to church during her travels around the country, but she rarely attended Unitarian chapels, which were few and far between, even then. She found that Quaker Meetings were sometimes fine for her spirit, but she didn't find too many other services to her taste.
When I preached at Hamstead, the service had changed quite a bit, even though English Unitarianism still has a very different flavor than North American Unitarian Universalism.
Nonetheless, I think that Beatrix Potter would have enjoyed the hymns we sang that Sunday… including "We celebrate the web of life" which we will sing later. The tune was known to her, but the text, would have thrilled her. For it is not filled with images of heaven or blood atonement, but of the images of homely earthly creatures. The hymn would have approached her deepest heart and said, "Hello, Beatrix, welcome home!"
You see, Beatrix Potter, who is well known for her children's books, her Peter Rabbit and Farmer McGregor, was once a biologist, or to be exact, a symbiologist, since her specialty was symbiosis. Symbiology asserts that two forms of life benefit from living together to make what appears to be one life, but which is always two. Take a grove of trees, for example. It may look like a bunch of individual trees, whose roots barely touch under-ground. But without the fungus connecting all those roots, the trees would die. In Montana scientists have studied a 15 hectare section of virgin forest interpenetrated by a huge fungus underground that is over a thousand years old, and weighs over a hundred metric tons. It is the the largest living thing on the planet that we know of, bigger by far than any whales or even the largest of the dinosaurs, were one still alive. Yet the earth is covered by such fungi, and no living thing could live without the symbiosis of fungi with all living plants.
Or take the lichen, that small crusty-looking, rather dry life form that discolors rocks round about, especially at beaches and English churchyards. Lichens may not be cute or cuddly, but they occupy more than ten times the area of all the earth's rainforests combined. There are more species of lichens than there are of insects, and here we are in the high numbers of the tens of thousands.
And it was the study of the lichens that intrigued Beatrix Potter so much.
As she grew up, Beatrix was both strangely ignored and foolishly controlled by her self-absorbed parents, and like many girls, was not sent to school, in good Victorian fashion. So, like all great souls, she educated herself. As the family vacationed in Scotland, Beatrix would roam the countryside, observing the flora and fauna close at hand. She taught herself to draw, and then to watercolor, and in that era, late in the nineteenth century, her only rival among women in the art world was Marie Cassatt.
When back in London, she would visit the Museum of Natural History as often as she could, drawing the exhibits there. She and her brother would even take dead animals into their house to dissect, so as to better understand the anatomy.
As she got older, she purchased a microscope, and began to study lichen under its lens. Through her studies, she began to assert the unpopular theory that lichens were actually made of two kinds of life living together, each clearly benefiting and even thriving from the coop-eration.
Encouraged by her scientist uncle, Beatrix prepared a paper on the subject to deliver to the Linnean Society, that prestigious international forum for naturalists where Darwin himself first presented his famous ideas.
Only thing was, Beatrix was a woman, and women were not allowed in the Linnean Society Hall. So her uncle read her paper in her stead, only having to report to her nothing but utter ridicule and sarcasm on the part of the men there.
She tried to show her work to the men who ran Royal Botanic Kew Gardens, but they had heard of her theories, judged her worthless in advance, and treated the shy woman, now 29 years old, so shabbily, that she left what she called "the grown up world of science" and entered the world of children, to become an endearing illustrator and writer of children's books. She had a good income from her books eventually and bought land in the Lake Country. She lost the great love of her life, Norman Warne, to pernicious anemia before they were able to marry, an event that understandably devastated her, and then later married a man named William Heelis, with whom she lived the rest of her life. She wrote her stories and tended beloved pet animals and water-colored daily, finally dying during the Second World War, in 1943, of a bout of bronchitis. She was 77 years old. She left her immense farm holdings, over 4000 acres, to the National Trust, where they remain to this day.
I often talk about characters from our history in my sermons. I do this because the religion of the Unitarians and the Universalists, and now the Unitarian Universalists, cannot be distilled into some abstract creed of common spiritual belief…our religion is always carnate in real human lives, lives of people who make decisions, grow defeated, find deep joy, challenge everything or nothing, and finally face death as we all do. But never has there been a life from our shared history which has refused to teach me much. And never has there been a life before which I could not stand in considerable awe.
When I meditate on the life of Beatrix Potter, several insights come to mind.
So I learn from the life of Beatrix Potter that, in any era of liberal religious history, we may not resemble our ancestors at all. And yet they are still our ancestors. And in a hundred years, if this building is still standing, what kind of worship will go on here? Would we even recognize it? Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he was serving First Church in Boston as a Unitarian minister, would hardly recognize what we are doing here, or appreciate the architecture much. There are no forms that last and endure, Beatrix reminds us, as Buddha told us two millenia and some centuries earlier. Some of us may be more impatient for forms to change, others are scared that they might. But all of us are Unitarian Universalists. There is an interdependence of taste, knowledge, style, and stress as well as a biological and spiritual interdependence. We cannot live apart from each other even in these mundane issues.
The work to uproot prejudice from our hearts, the joyful affirmation of our interdependence at every level, biological, institutional, spiritual…these are the marks of a civilization that is going somewhere, that has much to contribute to the bitter discourses of the modern world, and to the world civilization that might very well dawn in two or three centuries.
If each of us can apply ourselves to the lessons gained from the life of Beatrix Potter, maybe the crossroads of Western Civilization might be anyplace there is a Unitarian Universalist congregation that takes its heritage and our common future seriously. Maybe the intersection of High and Weisheimer will be just as marvelous one day as the tree-lined charming lanes of London's Hamstead. Maybe, just maybe, someone might preach in this pulpit a hundred years from now and remember us, not as a bunch of individuals without any firmer connection than a beatiful ceiling and carpeted floor, but a vital community of interdependent human beings dreaming of a world of diminished prejudice and far less violence than now we know. I believe with all my heart that such a vision is worth my commitment, my work and my dreams. How about you?
Laudate: A Praiseprayer [back to top]
Praise that all life is interconnected,
like a knot that cannot be cut,
like lovers on the day of their best lovemaking,
like heart to all the branches of the body,
like the shore is stitched to the sea,
like the powdery sky which cannot be peeled from earth's horizon,
like the pith and juice of an orange,
like the two lives joining to make a single lichen,
like a living fish in living water,
like praise and this prayer, interconnected, entwined, e pluribus unum,
praise, praise, the great web,
praise the great lacy circle in which we live,
the great rose-window of the spirit that holds
us all in its arms to temper the brutal illusion of our aloneness.
Blest are you, Mystery of the Cosmos,
for we, being part of you, are not G-d.
And for this our song of thanks and praise.
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