The Living Tradition

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 2^nd of June, 2002

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

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to worship, to remember in our bodies, hearts and minds
that we are part, not all, of this whirling cosmos.
We worship to know the limits and dignity of our power,
to freely open the door of our heart
onto the summery threshold
of a world greater than ourselves,
and to restore our aliveness with music, word and silence.
And at celebration's end,

may our reason and our passion
keep us true to ourselves, true to each other
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Musical Prayer with Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Cottonwood fluffs settling on my shirt.
Thunderstorms drenching.
Irises. Shiny brick streets.
Black parking lots and tender garden shoots.
Here we are in a local neighborhood set like a jewel
in the large and quarreling neighborhood called the world,
in the larger shimmering neighborhood called the galaxy.

Let the music lift our hearts to drink in this world
in the silence which will follow it.

Shostakovitch Trio Largo then temple bowl and silence
Silence is sweeter when it bridges expressions of beauty.
Our life is sweeter when it bridges many relationships
of love and care and concern, for we are all in this world
together, no exceptions.

We set apart this time for remembering those with whom we are in significant relationships of love,
and friendship and family care.

We name them in our hearts, or aloud in the common air
in an embracing meditation on our lives.

(naming)

Now let the chorus of sweet voices that shelters our
spirits spread over us like the shade of great oak on
a hot day, a respite of coolness against the chafing
sun or green leafy canopy to keep us dry in rain.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a poem by the great United States poet, edward estlin cummings, always spelled in small case letters. He was the son of a Unitarian Minister, Edward Cummings, and grew up in the Parsonage of a New England Church. (This has been arranged for oral reading, not following the poet's style)

All worlds have half-sight,
seeing either with life's eyes
(which is when things seem spirits)
or
(if spirits in the guise of things appear)
death's.

Any world must always half-perceive.

Only whose vision can create the whole
(being forever born a foolishwise
proudhumble citizen of ecstasies
more steep than climb can time with all its years)
who's free into the beauty of the truth,
and strolls the axis of the universe---love.

Each believing world denies,
whereas your lover (looking through both life and death)
timelessly celebrates the merciful,
(whose) wonder no world deny may, or believe.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who said this during an interview in Ms. Magazine.

There is an ancient Indian saying: "We do not inherit the earth from ancestors; we borrow it from our children." If we use this ethic as a moral compass, then our rendezvous with reality can also become a rendezvous with opportunity.

Sermon: The Living Tradition [Next][back to top]

The day I first showed up at a Unitarian Universalist Church, a lovely white New England-style building in Farmington, Michigan, I was immediately confused.

First, the sign in front of the building named it a Universalist Unitarian Church, not the other way around as with most other churches of our type that I had seen.

This told me that ordinary conformity is not a strong suit of such a church.

The second thing I noted was the hymns. I was only 22 years old when I first entered for a service, but I knew a lot about church music because I had always been part of very musical churches that expected a lot of singing from their members.

But the music I found in Farmington was very different from what I knew…the words were poetry, not doctrine, the melodies vaguely Protestant, but not like the minor-key Catholic music I grew up with.

Third, I noticed that they made a great deal about the offering. The minister said interesting words about what it meant to support a church congregation in a culture that wanted us to buy designer blenders, herbal weight-loss pills at 79.95 per month, nifty vans for every member of our family and already faded jeans with Armani labels, jeans sewed in the Philippines by people earning two dollars a day, tops. These comparisons put things into perspective, I'd say, and helped me want to support the church.

The minister's sermon was about e. e. cummings that morning, and how he had grown up in a pre- merger Unitarian church, and how his poetry was explicitly an expression of our religious sensibility . Then we sang a hymn, not about historical characters, but with these idealistic words by the English genius, John Addington Symonds:

"These things shall be:a loftier race than e'er the world hath known shall rise, with flames of freedom in their souls and light of science in their eyes."

Imagine, singing about science and freedom IN CHURCH! And I wondered as I left my first service that day, what kind of church talked about the future more than the past?

What kind of church, I wondered, could still be a church and have such a pliable, open-door sort of way of life? How could they be an institution at all if they had no shape and grounding found in clear, strong uniformity, in creeds and catechisms and five-hundred-year-old traditions? I was puzzled completely.

The next Sunday I attended, the minister preached on our historical roots, such as famous men and women of the nineteenth century I had already heard of: Emerson, Theodore Parker, Susan B. Anthony etc. He said that these were "exemplars and pioneers" of our tradition. Hmm…I thought, like one of the saints in my own tradition.

But clearly I was still confused. Just what was the focus of a liberal church like this, I wondered, the path already taken, or the path yet to be beaten through the wilderness? When did I ever hear about St. Francis of Assisi spoken of as a pioneer?

About six months after this service, I signed the membership book and officially became a Unitarian Universalist. But I pondered my confusions for many years after.

Ten years after I had joined that church, and three years after I had gone to seminary to become a minister myself, I heard my future colleague Scotty Meek say something that began to make sense of my experience.

He said that what makes our religious tradition so exciting is that it is a living tradition… we are faithful to institutional forms, and we are just as faithful to the movement away from fixed forms. We have respect for paths, structures and the inheritance of the past, but we have just as much respect, if not more, for the path yet to be beaten, for structures yet to be imagined, and for the vision of possible futures. We have many exemplars and pioneers, but we are expected not so much to follow their lead as to become exemplars and pioneers ourselves.

These are noble ideas, but frankly, this focus on our tradition as a living tradition, a constantly evolving one, makes us…as a church, as a history, as a concept… difficult to understand. Not just for those outside our community, but often for those of us inside our community as well.

After all, when I simply say the word "church," a number of images will surely spring to mind among those of us gathered under this beautiful wooden gable.

Some will hear the word "church" and remember their upbringing in a church of their youth…some Protestant or Catholic or Anabaptist or Evangelical group. They will remember a priest with too much power, or a comforting ceremony they loved, or a minister who was there for them in their need, or the scary emotional style of a visiting charismatic preacher, or their confusion and resentment about Sunday school warnings, or some sour experience with a cranky church member who wasn't very good with children.

Others were raised in their Jewish households with a very deep suspicion of the very word "church" to begin with.

Others, raised Muslim in a far away land, will find the word "church" still ringing with the battle-cries of the ancient crusades, or blended so skillfully with exported MTV type modern culture that no one can seriously tell the difference. A Buddhist may think of the church as something a bit similar to a Buddhist community, a sangha, but at the same time very different, since Buddhist Emptiness and Western God seem, at least on the surface, to be exactly opposite concepts.

Others, raised without Jewish or Christian congregational experience, but rather, raised in the prevailing secular religion of consumerism, may associate the word "church" primarily with local buildings of unusual architecture, or films starring crooning Bing Crosby in a Roman collar, or saccharine smiling evangelists on television hypnotically making people faint away at a touch, or the bleary-eyed confession of scandal by Jimmy Swaggart, or the invincible cluelessness of Cardinal Law of Boston.

There are a thousand nuances, personal private nuances, associated with the word "church. And all of them come with us through the open doors of this place.

But as Scotty Meek reminded me, part of our growth as Unitarian Universalists is to begin to let go of our personal idiosyncrasies about church, whether pleasant or unpleasant, whether lovely or awful. After all, our approach is not any of these private stories. Our approach has its own story, its own nuances, its own aliveness.

Little by little we have to come to understand how this church functions, how this church walks the tightrope of the present while balancing with its own pole of past and future.

And the longer we engage as members with a Unitarian Universalist congregation, the longer we begin to see how our Unitarian Universalist way is distinct and different from most other ways I can think of. We begin to see that we fluctuate constantly between history and vision, between memory and hope, between well-worn paths and unmade paths, between the open door on a well-oiled hinge and an open door yet to be cut through a wall.

In the words of e. e. cummings' amazing love poem, we begin to see that when we first come to such a church, we will always have only, at best, half-sight. I know I did, at least, when I crossed the threshold at the Farmington Universalist Church. I gazed upon the past peopled with well-known characters with one eye, and I gazed upon all the future orientation I heard with the other. I could get no sense of the whole at all. In the words of the poet, we must always "half-perceive," and I assure you, I only saw half of what I could see at any given time. I couldn't look both ways at the same time.

But little by little, first at Farmington, then at Walnut Creek, then at Rockford, Illinois, then in San Francisco and other churches in California, and finally here, I began to love the church I was part of, both for what it was trying to be, however haltingly, and for what it had been through the years. And when someone comes to love a church like this one, that person, the poet reminds us, begins to develop a vision which can actually see the whole of things.

And this love is first made evident, not when we feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside, but rather, when we recognize something about ourselves. In the words of the poet, it all begins when we finally realize that we are, each of us, neither sinners nor saints, neither sheep nor goats, but fallible human persons born foolishwise and proudhumble. Not foolish, but foolishwise, the poet says, creating a word which we needed all along. Not humble, but proudhumble the poet asserts.

And with his newly minted words, I begin to realize that, till the end of our days, we will make mistakes, overstep our bounds or feel defeated now and then. Yet our pride walks hand-in-hand with our humility, and our foolishness will still walk hand-in-hand with our wisdom. We are complex and ever fallible human beings, e. e. cummings is saying, and not the center around which the whole universe spins. Our individual interpretations of church will always be partial. It's when we enter community only that we can begin to catch a glimpse of the whole.

Once we begin to actually admit that, and after we have begun the long hard process of untying ourselves from our own past understandings of what church used to mean to us personally, we can, as a community, begin to build up the responsible, honest church that we came looking for. That's right, we don't just find it, an inheritance from the founders…we continue to build it. Together.

How do we build such a church? In the awesome words of the poet, the ways lovers create healthy relationships with each other: "by timelessly celebrating the merciful, by moving freely into the beauty of the truth, by strolling the axis of the universe…love." In short, we stop worrying about what we believe or do not believe. We begin instead to see that death and life, past and future are wonders wound together into a single whole, wonders "no world deny may or believe." It stops being about what you believe and do not believe. It starts to be about how you live your life knowing that death and life are one wonder. It starts to be about not making excuses for why some people are not lovable, and concentrating on how you may love more deeply all the same. It starts to be, not about who or what God is or isn't, but about how to live a godly, that is a good and responsible life. It's about hospitality and welcoming, facing the truth and not running away. It's about small covenant groups and circles of nurture, community and care, worship and conversation. It's not about creeds, labels or struggling to answer impossible questions like "What does this church believe?" (as if such a list was the sum and substance of the religious life preached by great thinkers like Siddartha Gotama, called Buddha, or peasant teachers like Jesus of Galilee, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai or Sojourner Truth).

All of this is summarized for me in what Pat Schroeder says so elegantly. What I first noticed, but was not able to articulate, when I walked into that Universalist Unitarian Church, was that somehow this congregation was trying to borrow their life from their children, not inherit the earth from their ancestors. "These things shall be…" we sang, not "Our ancestors spake and we vow to follow their rules." Congresswoman Schroeder called this attitude the basis for an ethical imperative, a moral compass, she calls it. She tells us that, in being as loyal to our children's future as we have traditionally been to the past (and please, you know few people appreciate the formative lessons of history like I do, so please do not think I am selling the past short!), we can open a door in the wall that hems us in, a door to saving opportunities we never imagined until now.

Like many congregations following 9-11, we have not done as well as we hoped in garnering financial support for our necessary expenses this last year. The difficulties spawned by that awful event which blew open the doors of our hearts, and even unhinged them, have presented us with a difficult situation. But although I confess I have not slept well this week, I feel confident that as we meet this afternoon to do what is best for us all, it is the people who truly love this church who will gather. People who find that "strolling the axis of the universe, love,," into the "beauty of the truth," is far better than running away, people who "timelessly celebrate the merciful" as they vote on difficult issues involving both our past and our future. Half-sight, you see, will not help us today…only a vision of the whole will.

And I for one think it's interesting that this poem about seeing the whole was e. e. cummings' very last poem. Think of it therefore as his charge. Think of him telling us at the end of his amazing life to avoid half-sight and to focus on the whole. Think of his poem, in short, as his final legacy. A true legacy of our living tradition. A legacy that asks us to borrow our life, not from him and his exultant words, but from our children's children.

May we be foolishwise enough to do so, Proudhumble enough to keep all doors opened, not closed. May we ourselves, in short, dare to be exemplars and pioneers.

Prayer: A Blessing on this House [back to top]

O Love, may all of our work this morning
serve to enhance our common life,
and bring both clarity and the more creative kinds of insecurity
to our spirit's center.
Like a great piece of music,
may our various tones
and rhythms harmonize to make a whole,
a whole that timelessly celebrates the merciful
and always unlocks wonder's door.
Let the practical hold hands with the visionary,
the necessary embrace that which transcends us.
Let no solo voice nor unspoken voice
have undue sway, and may our reason and our
passion keep us true. Truer. Truest.
Love, axis of the universe,
temper us when we overflow,
freshen us when we frustrate,
burst the boundaries of any dead tradition,
and yet keep us faithful, faithful, faithful to
our children's children and their world.
And to you I offer all the ancient praises!
Kadosh, Alhamdulila, Oyasin, Gloria, Metta, Ave Athena, Om and Amen.

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