Would you Harbor Me?

Sermon by Cassandra Howe
Jan. 16th, 2011, UUCC

Last month I drove out to South Haven, and went for a walk on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was a little windy here when I left, and I was amazed at the strength of the wind when I got out of my car. I was also amazed at how quickly I became worn out from the cold wind and rain. What would have normally been an easy walk along the beach, turned into an exhausting, “why am I doing this, again?” pointless excursion.
Life can be like a storm. Just like ships out at sea, we need harbors in which to rest. Nourish ourselves. Gather strength for the journey. Harbors are important for a crew’s journey, and can be life-saving. Often they’ll have light houses shining out for boats lost in bad weather.
Harbors have three essential characteristics:
1. Sturdy walls or land formations that protect the inside from storm and weather. 2. An accessible and open entrance 3. Water deep enough to set an anchor.

I love that both the firm, sturdy walls, and the wide, open entrance are needed for an effective harbor. Both of these help to create an inner environment of calm waters deep enough to lay an anchor. Deep enough to rest and restore.
Religious community is like a harbor. We need firm walls and an open entrance in which to gather, to rest, to learn, and to return, fully engaged, into the world.
As a religious community, we strive to give safe harbor to the many who come our way. What do we offer each other at the water’s edge? How do we encourage one another to grow? To heal? To seek deeper meaning in our daily life?
Today we welcomed six people as members into our community. In an era of rugged individualism, committing to live and grow with others is a radical act. A choice that affirms our interdependence and deep union with all of life.

One of the functions of religious community is to deepen our understanding of hospitality. Together, we expand our concept of neighbor. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we are told the law states: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Whether or not one believes in God, we can appreciate the importance this reading places on the second part of the sentence: love your neighbor as yourself. It is spoken in the same sentence, the same breath. Loving our neighbor as ourselves was considered as important, and as challenging, as loving God with all your soul.
When I was young, I would help my mother send out newsletters- probably between 100 and 200 newsletters, a few times a year, to people living with AIDS. She was part of a group of people that put on “Strength for the Journey,” an annual retreat for people living with AIDS in the Seattle area. For anyone who has helped with mass mailing, you can relate to the taste of stamps and envelopes that will forever be engrained in my mouth.

When I started, didn’t really have a concept for what AIDS was. I just did it because my mom told me to. When I got older, I grew to have more pride in the work my mother did for people living with AIDS. It wasn’t until I was in high school did I learn something that really helped to ground my work for social justice.
A brief introduction to my adolescent revelation is that I was born six weeks premature. Today, it’s not a big deal. In 1981, it was. I was severely anemic and was given two blood transfusions that probably saved my life. What I realized when I was in high school, was that I was born at the cusp of the medical knowledge around AIDS. What I cannot be sure of is if they were screening for AIDS at the time of my birth. I could have been one of the attendees for this conference. Suddenly, these people to whom I was stamping and addressing envelopes were no longer strangers. They were part of my family. People with whom I felt a common destiny.

Dr. King writes, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a story of radical hospitality. Left for dead, it was not the beaten man’s family that stopped to mend his wounds and bring him to safety. It was his enemy. A person with whom he knew no commonality. With whom he had a history of hatred and un-ease. The Samaritan did not just lightly help him. He put water and oil on his wounds. He carried him to a safe place and, when he had to go, made sure that the wounded person would be taken care of until he was well enough to care for himself.
The Greek word for hospitality is philo-xenia. Literally love of stranger. This story of hospitality are not just about comforting one of our own. It’s about reaching across boundaries of race, class, politics and religion. In his act of hospitality, the Samaritan was healing not just the individual, but society as well.

Love of stranger. Who are the strangers in our midst?
I would say religious community is a stranger. I speak as someone who grew up in liberal religion, and now serves a religiously liberal institution as a minister.
Liberals have an ambivalent relationship with organized religion, to say the least! Often, people who have worked for change within liberal religious institutions, find that you are free to do anything you feel called to do, as long as you are willing to do it alone.
The well-known architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a Unitarian, and who designed many of our churches spoke the mind of many of our members. When asked what he thought of organized religion, he said, “why organize it?”

We are right to feel ambivalent. Religious community has often been more oppressive than liberating. More soul confining than soul uplifting. Consider the sex scandals of Catholic priests, and the painfully slow response for justice by Catholic leaders. Or, the role certain Christian groups like the Family are playing in elevating violence towards gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people around the world. Fundamentalists in every religion are igniting hatred and intolerance. This is heavy. Scary. Real. And makes me want to run the opposite direction from organized religion.
But just because these violent acts are loud does not mean that they get to define what is religious community. Even amidst terrible oppression by religious authorities, people have gathered together to protect their religious convictions. Of love of neighbor. Of freedom. Dignity. Truth.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have a history rich with people acting boldly to create space for religious tolerance and pluralism. People who sought not uniformity, but authenticity.
The history of the flaming chalice, the symbol of our faith, is one such act. In Prague, in the early 1400’s a man names Jan Hus anticipated later reforms of the Church by offering mass not in the traditional Latin, but in the local language, so people could understand. During communion, he gave them not just bread but wine, an element previously reserved for clergy.
These may seem like small acts to us, especially as communion is something many of us don’t feel much connection to. But in his time, these were bold acts, and in 1415 he was condemned for heresy, and burned at the stake. The flame of his death was not forgotten by his followers, who linked it with the chalice of inclusion, as he had offered it to everyone.

Skip a few hundred years to 1939 when the Unitarian Service Committee enlisted a Czech artist named Hans Deutsch, to design a symbol. He chose the flaming chalice. You can find the chalice stamped onto documents from WWII, a formality needed to assist the service committee in rescuing Jews from Nazi persecution.
Just before that time, in 1920, back in Prague, a man named Norbert Capek created the Flower Communion- a simple ritual performed by many UU congregations- including this one- each spring. He created it as a ritual everyone could participate in- whether you were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, agnostic or atheist. In the ritual, each person brings a flower from their own neighborhood (or grocery store), and adds it to the common bouquet. At the end of the service, everyone then receives one flower, taking home a piece of beauty brought by someone else. Capek publicly opposed the Nazis and thus was killed during the war.

Today, UUs stand with others in the struggle for rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender folks in the US and abroad. Rev. Jill from Peoples and I are working with other clergy and lay leaders to put on Kalamazoo’s first National Prayer Hour on Feb. 1st, to highlight the violence against gays in Uganda. As our country becomes more polarized religiously, I see more of a need for a faith that seeks pluralism instead of homogeneity.
Dr. King writes, “There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.”
Perhaps part of why we are all here is because we don’t want to be adjusted. We need help from one another to stand true to our higher ideals. In community we learn to love the stranger. Perhaps the strangers in our midst are not distant people who we do not know. But people in our own families. People with whom political and ideological differences have stunted relationship and meaningful conversation. Perhaps the strangers in our midst also read of and feel the hate rising and lament, as we do, the death of communion, the promise of peace, by an increasingly polarized nation.

May we give harbor to the strangers near and far. May we make strong walls that shelter us from the wind, and give us strength for the journey. May we open wide our welcoming doors, inviting the wanderer in from the storm. And may we seek to give one another deep waters from which to rest, to seek, and to grow.

Works Cited:

Barnwell, Ysaye. "Would You Harbor Me?" Musical composition, Safehouse, 1994.

Buehrens, John and Forrest Church. A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian
Universalism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.

Beuhrens, John and Rebecca Parker. A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive
Religion for the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.

Miracles

What makes a miracle? Is it an impossible event- something that goes against common understanding? Or, can a miracle be claimed by gratitude- like the reappearance of a lost child, or the gift of beauty to a forlorn soul?
December is a month of miracles. Stories of miracles reside in the tale of Christmas, the birth of the Christ Child, and Hanukah, the eight-day flame that existed from only one day’s worth of oil. In both these stories, the miracle is not in grand fanfare and impressive stunts. It is in the hard labor of Mary giving birth to a child, found in a manger. It is in the meaning of one lone flame, surviving from oil, the blood of the earth. Instead of stretching to find miracles “out there,” these stories remind us that what is truly important, indeed miraculous, is what we have right here.
I appreciate that this month-of-miracles rests immediately before the New Year, and my new year’s resolutions. Instead of setting goals that serve to satisfy my expectations, my resolution is to be open to surprise. To the way life defies my expectations, and that from the ordinary unfolds the extraordinary.
The Sufi poet and mystic Rumi writes “Giving thanks for abundance is sweeter than the abundance itself.” How can we be the makers of miracles by our manner of receiving life? By living with a heart full of wonder and awe for this world in which we live?

Joanna Macy and Kristin Tippet

I love "Speaking of Faith", now "onBeing"
Here is a little piece from Joanna Macy and Kristin Tippet's conversation on Sept. 16th, 2010:

Speaking about Macy’s environmental activism (particularly around radioactive contamination and nuclear arms):

"Ms. Tippett: Something that's very present for me as I'm reading about you and the passion you've had for this for a long time is you — you also were always very aware of a sense of grief as you realized …
Ms. Macy: Oh, yeah. Grief got me into it.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. And I think that right now, say right now in this moment as we're speaking in 2010, the spectacle that's very present for people, maybe more in the forefront — certainly more in the forefront of peoples' minds than nuclear power or nuclear weapons were in the '70s — is the Gulf oil spill, right?
Ms. Macy: Oh, yes.
Ms. Tippett: Right. And there is this grief about that. And you really work with people to hold on to that, to take their grief seriously, right?
Ms. Macy: Or not to hold on to it so much as to not be afraid of it because that grief, if you are afraid of it and pave it over, clamp down, you shut down. And the kind of apathy and closed-down denial, our difficulty in looking at what we're doing to our world stems not from callous indifference or ignorance so much as it stems from fear of pain. That was a big learning for me as I was organizing around nuclear power and around at the time of Three Mile Island catastrophe and around Chernobyl.
Then as I saw it, it relates to everything. It relates to what's in our food and it relates to the clear-cuts of our forests. It relates to the contamination of our rivers and oceans. So that became actually perhaps the most pivotal point in, I don't know, the landscape of my life, that dance with despair, to see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn't stay static. It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life."

On The Other Side

An old Buddhist Saw:
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

Last Thursday, December 2nd, 2010, I passed the Ministerial Fellowship Committee- the evaluative board that reviews each candidate for ministry, and who's approval opens the doors for ordination, and, well, employment. Thank GOD that's over!!! It was quite the journey to get to this moment... a lot of anxiety, reading, discussing, huge waves of fear, and even some excitement mixed in the bunch. I don't think I needed to go through the depths of especially the fear, but I guess that's where I am in my life, so be it.
In fact, I knew. I knew that the couple weeks before the interview would be harder than the interview itself. It is hard to prepare for such a significant "rite of passage"/ test alone. Of course, I was part of a study group of other candidate ministers, and we "met" weekly over the phone over the last several weeks, but by alone I really mean lonely. In a new town, new job, living alone for the first time in my life. It has been a lonely last six months for me and sometimes I am not that good at giving my own self the "hospitality of spirit" that I seek to offer in my ministry. But I am getting better. I hope.
I love that Buddhist saying (a colleague of mine sent it to me). When all is said and done, I still have the same list of things to do, the same things that annoy me or elevate my anxiety. I will still have my fear. Self-doubt. Workaholism. These are all part of my "minister." But I also have what lies on the other side of these harsher qualities: I also have my power. Self-love. Passion for ministry. Perhaps one thing I learned from all of this is how to be a better friend to myself. By having more self-compassion, fear means less to me. It's still there, but I can invite it in, serve it tea and cookies, and, satisfied, it moves along its merry way.
Before the interview, I drove out to Lake Michigan. It was a really windy day- the turquoise and darker blue waters patterned one after the other on the wild shore. I had a cold, but I walked that beach anyway. I needed that power. I needed the wildness and the playfulness of the great waters. At the end of my walk, I picked up a stone and gave it my hope for the whole week: that I learn something. Perhaps I have- it may be one of those "escapes words" kinda learning.

Claiming God

Rainer Maria Rilke’s words come to me these days as I find more truth behind this broken relationship that as long made it’s stay on my heart this year.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is the live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I feel like I am finally starting to live my way into an answer. An answer for why I could not stay with Fady. I have spent the last six months still bearing the painful “why,” unable to really understand. The break-up was on his terms and his terms only. But it is finally becoming my terms and that feels so good and the heaviness lightens significantly.
“God,” he, an atheist, said. “It is about God.” As a Unitarian Universalist and as someone who believes in the reason-defying qualities of love, I believed with all of my heart that we would work through this- Our love was stronger than this label- related divide.
And now, I realize, he was right. Ok, so God did divide us. But it’s not a God held by clouds holding a wand and interacting from afar. It’s not even a God such as that I believe in- a higher power that moves in and among all sentient beings, opening us up, calling us closer to life. It’s the God that is community. God as our pull out of our isolated existence towards a greater cause of societal transformation. God is not a cerebral choice to “maybe” participate in community… mmm… tomorrow? It is a deep human need for community. For in order to know ourselves, we must seek the Other. It is a deep feeling that we need each other in order to grow. This is the center of the God I believe in.
It doesn’t concern me whether one finds their power in something beyond or within humanity. Theist or humanist can worship together when there is mutual desire to grow and deepen as spiritual and response-able beings in this hurting world. It concerns me that one opens oneself to change, to transformation, through relationship and commitment.

By opening ourselves to change, we create change. There is no other way. At last, this loss is on my terms. And with it, I find a renewed sense of self, calling, and devotion to the transformational power of God/community.

My Sacred Sad

My heart is full. Full of sorrow and anger and longing and even peace. I long to connect with my longing. And lately it is sorrow that has brought me closer to the earth, closer to my heart. It is sorrow that most resonates with me and I kneel down with my hands on my face, tears washing away these barriers I have made. Barriers to feeling. To life. To love. My sorrow is not a barrier to love. It is a way to love. Many times I judge my seamlessly endless grief over a lost relationship. “Still?” I ask. “Your still not over him?”
Yet, what does this judgmental question do that is good? Nothing! It only makes me more foreign to myself. Something not right, unacceptable, wrong. Broken hearts take their own sweet time to heal. As a friend recently told me, “You never stop loving someone.”
No matter how badly they might have hurt you, and no matter how resentful in the day, when the night comes, it is that unmet love that lingers.
I thank God for my sadness. Tears pull me closer to the earth, the home of my soul, the Ground of all Being. And I find peace.

Deep Peace

Last night I felt a tiny change. Something like thorough joy nestled inside my body. Not the temporary level of fleeting emotions- the surge of happiness or the crush of inadequacy. But this feeling was more thorough, like grainy mud instead of feathers. What happened? Well, breath. There is a wonderful little yoga studio really close to my house run by one woman. It is very community-oriented, much like I experienced at the aikido dojo in Oakland. If you attend regularly, you begin to get to know other regularly attending folks and conversation in the front room lingers up to a half hour or longer after class ends. Last night I was able to breathe deeply with three other women, for a couple hours! It filled me with life, a reminder of who I am, in relationship with all beings. This morning it was like I woke up with someone else by my side. Of course, it was just my cat, who is always there. But there was an extra company, one that I brought, in my room. In my bed. In my daily tasks and pages upon pages of reading. It is good to have a friend... I am cherishing these days of returning to who I am/ to God.

Ntosake Shange's words from "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" come to mind:
"I found God in myself and i loved her, i loved her fiercely."