What I Said To the Students in the Essex School for the Gifted

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 25^th of August, 2002

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

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
with our whole lives, our troubles and joys
to receive the gifts our living tradition gives us:
freedom in form and image,
reason as faith's weighty anchor,
and a loving community of concern and care.

Word! Open our minds and hearts like doors!
Silence, empty us of what we do not need!
Song, unify us in uncommon delight.
And at worship's end…

(together) 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….

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Here we are together in this great room.
We are all under the many warm colors
braiding through the wood in the ceiling.

We are all above the carpet enriched with
turquoise and red.

Together we can note dozens of green plants
many of which came from lands far from Ohio,

Together we can note shuttered windows opening up onto the local day;
together we can slowly breathe in the air
which yesterday wafted over the Rockies,
and tomorrow will arch over Labrador.

In the air, molecules and atoms and empty space, molecules and atoms and emptiness
which once may have been part of the hand
which the Dutch heretic Spinoza called his own,
and another atom of air may have been breathed
by Buddha's wife over the crib of their son,
and still a third may have been part of the
wooden house in Chicago where Jane Addams sat down to read the text in the gospel:

"Blessed are you poor."
The whole history of the world
is in this room,
not just by the imagination of the human heart, but by the revelation of the physicist and statistician.
Thus, this is indeed a sacred place.

But no more sacred than everything outside
its louvered doors, from the Memorial Garden ten meters from this pulpit
to the star Epsilon Eridani ten light years away, a beautiful star
which itself is washed in a silence that is much like this sacred silence

silence

Remembering that our common history
is in this sacred room in a sacred universe,
we dare to lift up our own personal history,
and link it to that greater, embracing history,
by naming in our hearts or aloud
the people in our own lives whom we remember,
revere, struggle with or are blest by...
people without whom we are not who we are.

naming

Blest is our common world.
Blest is our common story.
Blest is each individual story.
And blest, the music that hallows it all with beauty.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is taken from a little book published by the Tokyo Unitarian Church which lifts up the lectures of one of its members, Professor Kenneth Woodroofe. He used to teach at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. This reading is a tad longer than usual, but the language is quite plain, I think, and easy to grasp. It's called "A Summing Up."

In the words of Sir Julian Huxley, religion is a way of life founded upon the apprehension of sacredness in existence. This apprehension of the sacred is accompanied by the emotion of awe, a blend of wonder, dread and love, and is always characterized by self-forgetfulness. Joseph Addison summed up this state of mind well in his phrase: "I'm lost in wonder, love and praise."

Are there different kinds of religion?

Yes. There are undoubtedly different kinds of religion. But I do not divide religions into Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism - and so on. Rather, I see two fundamentally different kinds of religion in each of the religions.

In the first place, I differentiate between firsthand religion and secondhand religion. Firsthand religion arises from the direct and immediate apprehension of the sacred by the individual. Second-hand religion is the acceptance of something as sacred on the authority of another. You believe it to be sacred but you have not experienced it for yourself. There is a great deal of secondhand religion among the believers in all religions. But it is firsthand religion which is, to me, authentic.

In the second place, I differentiate between the kind of religion which makes a distinction between the sacred and the profane, and the kind of religion which apprehends not just sacredness in existence but the sacredness of existence. In the former, the church or temple is sacred. The market place is not. In the latter, everything is regarded as sacred. This kind of religion sees that sacredness lies not in the nature of particular objects but in our attitude to them, which is one of wonder, dread or admiration. Authentic religious experience, in the words of the English Unitarian L. P. Jacks, "is not an exceptional thing reserved for privileged souls, not exceptional even in the sense that it occurs only at rare moments in life. It is the normal experience of an ordinary person grasped in its entirety and deeply felt."

What is the function and relevance of religion to us today? The answer to this question arises out of our description of the religious experience. We are experiencing negatively what our world becomes when there is no reverence, no sense of the sacred. We see what we have done to our planet because we have no reverence for nature. And when we have no reverence for human beings, have we not reason for lament?

We do not need a new concept of God, but a living sense of the sacredness of existence itself which can awaken in us the admiration, hope and love by which we can live.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a 1990 poem by Adria Bernardi, who has worked as a journalist in both Memphis and Chicago. I used this as a reading once some time back, but it's worth repeating.

Old Woman Being Interviewed

You think I'm just an old lady.
You don't know nothing, nothing,
young man, with your little machine there
whirring around, you telling me

"Forget it's there,
just forget it's there
and tell me how you feel,
how you feel.

Were you ashamed to work as a maid?
Were you humiliated to scrub toilets?
Do you have low self-esteem
because you ironed the
boxer shorts of rich men?"

You don't know nothing,
nothing, young man.
You're bored with me.
And I'm bored with you.
Why don't we end this thing right now
so you can find someone who really
interests you,
and I can go about my business.

You want me to tell you
my secrets, but you think I don't have any.
You think I'm just an old lady
with red hands.
Wait till you're ninety years old and
we'll have a stranger with a machine
ask you a lot of questions,
ask you to sum it all up in forty-five minutes.
You don't know the half of it, young man.

"It's best you go now, I think,
Yes. Nice to meet you, too, young man."

But you didn't find out
nothing, nothing, young man.

You don't know that I was young once
with full lips and two lovers.

Sermon: What I Said To the Students in the Essex School for the Gifted [Next][back to top]

(Please note that I am not using the readings this morning in the way I usually use them. I refer to them obliquely, not directly.)

Every summer for the last four years I have participated in my small way in an amazing event. It's called The Essex School for the Gifted of the State of Ohio and I am proud to say it's directed by a member of this congregation, Dr. Thomas Stephens. He always asks me to come to the opening banquet and lead an interfaith-style blessing to begin things. And he asks me during the week to participate in a program where young men and women, juniors in high school, learn about the world's religions. This they do as part of a whole week of intensive learning about the world. They meet professors, sociologists, judges, scientists, artists, singers, and athletes. They build things together, they create small groups together, they stay up half the night together, and they meet people who are…well, gifted as they are. That's right…this is a week long school for Ohio high school students who are seen as especially gifted by their teachers.

Now, some people are uncomfortable about the use of the word "gifted." "We are all gifted!" they protest." "It is undemocratic to single out certain people as especially gifted." To prove their point they will quote me the crucial assertion by Thomas Jefferson that we were all "created equal." (Of course Jefferson was only talking about white males being created equal, but, to be fair, I'll understand the critics to be broad in their interpretation of his words.) The idea that some are very gifted, and ought to be set apart for special encouragement, is apparently an uncomfortable idea for some people.

Even some of the students at the Essex school expressed a certain, well, embarrassment, about being picked by their districts to be part of this week long event. Some of them put so many quotation marks around the word "gifted" that you could tell they were downright sheepish to claim their time at Essex as appropriate.

Well, I can understand how some students might be made to feel sheepish by a few classroom razzes back home. But sorry, I don't buy the twisting of Jefferson's utterance out of whack. I fear that folks who think great differences in skill and gift are not to be supported and guided, are not speaking about democracy and equality at all, but about their own fears and resentments. Such fears and resentments need to be faced, not projected outward onto others, as far as I am concerned. Equal worth and dignity does not mean, in any way, that we are all "the same" in our gifts. But as our children's book made clear this morning, there is no shame in not being the same.

Now I, for one, see with complete clarity that some people have a lot more gifts than I do. To me, it's a waste of my time to feel inferior to, or be threatened by, those who have such gifts. My best friend in California is far more gifted than I am, if you just want to reduce this to simple numbers. Richard can speak and think in German, Spanish, Portuguese, English and French fluently. I can't. He's also good in Italian and Hebrew. He is a magnificent athlete, working out and practicing with his competitive swimming team rigorously week after week. I am not an athlete. Furthermore, everyone who meets him comments on his handsome looks and movie star smile. He is also an artist and a poet and a cook of no small skill. He is an admired environmental architect by profession and is attending Law School this coming year to obtain his Juris Doctor. On top of this all he is a good friend to many, very witty, and has a rich capacity for love, both for family and friends. He has many more gifts than I do, Richard. But why should this simple fact affect our relationship? After all, we love each other, and thus, admire each other's gifts, not count them. So when people start to number gifts so as to either stew in resentment or feel bad about themselves by comparison, they are walking down the wrong path, as far as I am concerned. You don't count gifts. You give thanks for them. You admire them. You don't compare gifts. You share and rejoice in them. If one has more than another, I see no point in pretending that is not so. Far better to remember the proverb of the peasant teacher Jesus, "From those who have been given much, much will be expected. And from those to whom still more has been given, still more will be expected." No matter what our gifts, in number or variety, after all, we are all in this together, and we need each other and every single one of each other's gifts.

Thus, the Essex School doesn't count gifts, but finds ways to admire them, and to bring together those who have been often made to feel isolated because they are so lavishly gifted in smarts or talents or skills.

Many of these juniors in High School find themselves more self-accepting and encouraged after this grueling week held at the Ohio State campus. Many discover opportunities for career paths that had never occurred to them. Many make lifelong friends. Most of them go on to use their gifts fully and wisely without holding back. The two Essex alumni speakers at the banquet Sunday night, for example, were each poised and moving, living testaments to the supportive and transforming power of the week-long school.

My task on Wednesday morning was to tell the Essex students about Unitarian Universalism. Of course, there were several other religious teachers there that day. A Buddhist lay woman, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, a Hindu teacher, a Disciples of Christ pastor, each of whom was to teach about their own respective faiths. We were of different ages, colors, backgrounds, and education as well as of different religions.

To talk to folks, however gifted, who have mostly never heard of Unitarian Universalism, was a daunting task. Especially when given just ten minutes each session. But nonetheless, this is what I said to them:

Hi. I am Mark Belletini, senior minister at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus. Maybe some of you, maybe most of you, have never heard of Unitarian Universalists before. (Plenty of nods when I said this.) Well, don't feel bad if you have never heard of us, because we are a relatively small religious grouping as far as numbers go, measured not in our tens of millions, but in our tens of thousands. We are found, however, all over the world, in different indigenous forms… we are called Unitarians in some places, Universalists in others, but in the US we are now called Unitarian Universalists. We used to be called by other names like the Sociniani (after Socinus or Sozzini, the Italian theologian), Pelagiani (after Pelagius the Irish monk), or Ariani (after the Egyptian theologian, Arius).

We are rooted in several heretical or liberal Christian communities. Thus the words Unitarian and Universalist used to be adjectives that modified the noun "Christian." But in the last 100 years they have become nouns in their own right and the word Christian has been dropped, although some still use the word of themselves. Others among us claim to find their Unitarian Universalist expressions influenced by the wisdom of the Buddhist or Muslim or Jewish traditions as well.

But we do meet for common worship on Sundays. And Wendy and I are called "ministers," and we do most often refer to our congregation as "church" which, I admit, sometimes confuses people about us.

People sometimes ask us what we believe. It's a fair question, I suppose. But I find that hard to answer, because I almost always hear in the question, a request for a simple, clear answer. But our whole religious history protests against any reduction of our religious principles and process to simple common statements of belief or even unbelief.

This doesn't mean we don't share many ideas, or worse, that we are all just stubborn, free-thinking individualists who all happened to find each other under a common roof one day. That's a pathetic picture of us for sure, even though I sometimes hear that image used by people. Our ancestors, despite their somewhat differing theologies, always shared an approach to the world, characterized by reason, freedom, tolerance and love, and I don't see how anyone can practice our religion honestly without relating to those four great historical streams in their own theologizing. We are not, after all, just a theological catch-all for misfits.

And true, our long names, Unitarianism and Universalism, are rooted in old theological debates about particular doctrinal beliefs. So let me begin there. At the very least, Unitarians are those who are not Trinitarians, that is, we find that the practice of talking about Ultimate Reality, most often called God, in terms of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is not meaningful to us anymore. And Universalists were those who hundreds and hundreds of years ago, could not subscribe to the idea that some would be saved and some damned. If God is Love, they said, then there can be no final hell after death. "Even better," they affirmed, "there should be no hells of poverty, war, deceit or oppression on this side of death." Salvation, or wholeness of spirit if you will (which is all the Latin word "salvation" means, after all) is not for the few but for everyone, universally, they said. Thus, our long name Universalism.

But if wholeness is for everyone, this does not at all mean we are all the same, or all alike. Equal worth dignity does not make for equal skill or equal capacity, as you Essex schoolers know very well by now. Bela Bartok, for example, was a Hungarian speaking Unitarian, and I am an English speaking Unitarian Universalist, but please, PLEASE, don't ask me to play the piano, thank you, or worse yet, compose. I don't have that gift. Susan B. Anthony was a courageous speaker and also part of our movement, but don't ask Bela Bartok to give strong feminist speeches…it was not one of his gifts…music was.

You have heard my Buddhist and Jewish colleagues lift up the centrality of love and justice in their faiths this morning. You have heard my Hindu and Muslim colleagues talk about these great words earlier today. You may be surprised at how much we each tend to sound very much alike when we speak of these great words. Yet I am sure most of you can point out times in history when each of our respective religions did not bring this love, justice, compassion or peace into the world. There have been wars of religion, and persecution in the name of religion for thousands of years. Because of this, many gifted and intelligent people have turned their back on religion. I understand that very well and have some sympathies there.

But I think the reason you heard so much agreement this morning from leaders in various religious traditions is because each of us here already well knows this embarrassing history of violence associated with religion, although clearly violence is associated with secular greed and nationalism even more. And, at the same time, each of us here well knows that none of our religions is uniform on the inside. In each of our religions there are those who take things on authority alone. They have rarely directly experienced feelings of awe before God or the Universe, or too often, they rarely have a sense of admiration and awe for their own present lives. They were told that some great teacher or prophet felt or saw these things before them, and that thus their religious life can only be based on trusting that past authority more than any experience they have in the present. Sometimes today these folks who revere authority and conformity in each religion are called fundamentalists, although that is technically not a term used outside Christendom until fifteen years ago.

But you need to know that each religion represented here also is claimed by people for whom religion is not second-hand, but first-hand. Whether through meditation or prayer or worship or skepticism or devotional reading, whether through social justice work or teaching or learning, each religion represented here, including my own, has many people among its ranks who do not hurt others or condemn, who never insist on violent, authoritarian or self-serving solutions. They refuse to do harm because they themselves have firsthand experience of how such attitudes affect our common world. They wreck it. They devalue it. They spread death everywhere. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors, understanding well the differences between firsthand and second-hand religion, have always stressed the first as being more important. They have striven to cultivate it among us. "Don't 'believe in' religious ideas," we have often preached, "just because you have been told they are true by someone else, or because you have found such things written down in a book or scripture. Believe in things which your own experience has struggled with, whether found in scripture or not. Read scripture, in fact, by the light of your own experience and the realities of your community."

For example, the great biblical idea of the one sole God itself, so beloved of our Unitarian ancestors in Europe, is much more moving if you associate that idea, not with a creed, but with your own awe and wonder before the infinite unity of the starry universe in the night sky. The idea of your own worth and dignity as a human being, undistorted by cruel ideas like original sin, will make much more sense if you tie it to experiences you yourself might have had marveling at your own existence as a child, or struggling to understand all your differences from everybody else as a teenager. The way Unitarian Universalists tend to put it, love, compassion, justice and peace are not guaranteed by authority from above, but these are qualities enacted and chosen by a community of free people who fully experience their ordinary life and feel its ramifications entirely. Religion, we have always maintained, has to be free in order to be firsthand. It cannot be coerced or forced, either by creed, culture or even by dazzling personalities.

Thus, Unitarian Universalism here in the States has not so much to do with a set of shared beliefs as with a way of life, a set of practices which help us to feel and remember and reason carefully, even living in the midst of a culture of consumerism, war-drums, and casual jingoism which would rather we didn't feel, didn't remember and didn't reason for ourselves. And thus, as religious people, we Unitarian Universalists are not free thinking individuals, but rather, we are individuals who freely enter a pact together to form a religious community. Conformity to the culture at large will win, we tend to fear, without being balanced by the equally great power of community holding us close to a center of care and love.

And this means that besides worship, and book groups and men's groups, and women's groups, and religious education events for adults and children, besides Buddhist groups, Humanist discussions, Jewish seders and Socinian Christian communion services, we place a high value on actual communication, one to the other. Naturally, sometimes we do this well, and sometimes we don't, but our centuries old living tradition always asks us to remember that I am not you, and you are not me, and that I cannot know you unless I communicate with you without hiding you behind easy formulas like "Oh, all human beings are basically the same."

That is not first-hand religion. That is second-hand religion, putting lazy slogans before deliberate experience. If I am a twenty-year--old man and I am talking to an eighty-year-old woman about her life, I cannot begin the conversation by thinking I know what she must think and what she must feel in advance. I can only open myself to her freely and let her tell me her self-understandings in her own words. Otherwise, there is no real communication, no real meeting. Otherwise, I am living my religion without any authenticity.

Now you may well say to me that a 20-year-old having an open and attentive conversation with an 80-year-old is not religion at all, just "a secular experience," but we have almost always said otherwise. Religion is for us, after all, an attitude toward the world, not a list of doctrines about the world. We don't find the sacred in one place, the profane (or ordinary) someplace else. The sacredness of all existence is open to us if we are open to it. Pro fana, the Romans used to say, "Outside the fane, or the temple." What was outside the temple was profane, or not sacred.

For us, sacredness is to be found just as much outside as inside, and this approach to life and the universe makes our religion hard to understand for some, or even strangely different from some other ways of understanding religion.

Oh, we have our worship celebrations on Sunday, our Hymnbooks and our buildings. We have our historical expressions of religious beauty and ritual, as well as some very new expressions like the flaming chalice which we light every Sunday at the beginning of our service, or the water ceremony with which we begin every fall. But, for us, these actions are not more sacred than a conversation, a struggle with a betrayal, an hour of teary grief alone, or a brief minute of extreme joy under the stars with a friend.

But please remember that all of us here, whether Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Unitarian Universalist, spoke of the centrality of love, compassion, justice and peace in our religions, and if you remember anything from this morning's session, I hope you remember that.

I hope that sometime you might come and visit our church and see for yourself what we are like and what we do. Experience first-hand. But no matter whether you do or not, I bid you this: love without violence, reason deeply, crave justice and practice peace in all of your days on earth. These are, after all, the most important gifts, and by far the best gifts, we have to share with each other and the world.

Take a few of the materials I brought with me if you wish, and thanks for listening.

Prayer in the Rhythm of Dance [back to top]

Bagatelle, Waltz, Foxtrot, Pavane
a thousand ways, a thousand ways to dance.
Improvised, choreographed, im-pro-vised
a thousand, thousand ways to dance.
O Love, as I leave this place to-day
show me, show me, show me, that there are
that there are, a thousand ways to love.
To tell the truth, to live the truth,
to sing the truth, to resist, two, three,
to resist, two, three, all the temptations
of pessimism, and hand-wringing,
that try and tie weights, two, three
to my feet, two, three…
show me, show me all the thousand ways
to notice, to notice, the precise green, two, three
green two, three, of a locust tree on my street,
Help me to see that as many said no as said yes,
and that as many said yes as said no,
and that I too/ can decide/ to say yes, yes, yes
to you. O Love, I am here. We are here.
I pray we might so live our lives that in
days to come they might say, they lived their
faith, they loved their lives, they dared to
trust that joy was for them, two, three, joy
was for them, two, three, joy was for the world.

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