On Beacons and Hermits
If there could be an “ideal” Unitarian, that little girl Zora from our Story for All Ages, comes right to my mind. After a hard days work building that beloved community with an eye to a fair and peaceful world, signified in the warm and friendly church building constructed from all our shared efforts, she comes prepared … with her bread and cheese. With my educator’s eye in line, I also appreciate her intentionality – making sure her Dad came with her to the church. Ministers, Educators, RE committees across this country read this story during worships and children’s chapels and Soulful Sundowns, and hope these two messages sink home…. Bring the food you need for the work ahead… and bring your family.
Bring the food you need for the work ahead…. For Zora in this story it was bread and cheese. For me on Sunday morning it’s a cup of coffee and a bagel. However, it may also be less literal. It hints at a much deeper message. How do we sustain ourselves in this difficult work of building what our Sixth principle names as the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all? To start… food. I offer playful jest at the everyday, bread, cheese and coffee. Last week, our congregation organized through our Weaving the Fabric of Diversity committee, a community dinner with a neighboring Mosque and our local area Muslim community. Regretfully, I was home recovering from Strep as a recent reward for working with so many children at the start of a school year. But now that I’m healthy again, I look back at an opportunity that I missed. Now maybe this dinner could be seen as the goal itself – a meaningful sharing between different religious communities – as a remembering that in light of 9-11, we can continue to choose another path together. I think that’s a crucial lesson to take with us.
I also feel that dinners like last week’s Ramadan meal shared between two communities, offer the food we need for the work ahead. In the ebb and flow that happens for many Unitarian Universalists between the work of letter writing, marches, candle vigils, protests and petitions, we need to maintain time for retreat. Shared meals in community can serve as a spiritual retreat in themselves… the means to renew our selves in reflection and camaraderie. It is a retreat from our strivings and doings… to remind us of our being.
From this annual Ramadan meal we develop growing friendships over the years that remind us the dream of our Sixth Principle, the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all, is real and attainable… one gathering at a time. This hope can influence our daily efforts and relationships. It pulls us beyond ourselves to seek answers and meaning in our commitments with our families, friends, fellow congregants and even our commitments to strangers. Our forceful actions in the world can accomplish tremendous good: for example, vigils showing solidarity offer healing, or marches finally make visible the strength of a differing view. And to sustain these often needed efforts, we need the food for the work ahead. We need to return to our community and family ties that remind us world community is the goal. Our strivings for social justice must be predicated upon an awareness that despite what societal changes happen this day, this week or this month, we have within us the power to affect sweeping changes in our daily lives.
Zora’s community had no house of worship, no place where folks with peace in mind, could gather outside their own homes. They did the work of making the community reflect their image of the beloved community. Then they paused to sustain themselves through a simple meal. The church in this story symbolizes this goal of world community. The pausing from the work refocuses the congregants on their relationships with one another. Our efforts and strivings put us in relationship to one another, but hopefully we remain in relation with each other without those strivings, without those marches, without those vigils, in between those Ramadan dinners. Sometimes we’ll have that bread and cheese on hand, and sometimes we’ll need to head back home to sustains ourselves.
Maybe my image of Zora as the ideal Unitarian Universalist doesn’t work for you. Ideal, when it comes to religion and ethics, can sometimes be a tough notion to swallow. How about familiar? To me she certainly seems like a familiar UU. I imagine her as the eyes of the narrator, or maybe even the narrator herself. She’s got the discerning eye that notices every detail going into the new church. The paint on the walls, the color of the stones, the flowers embroidered on the altar cloth. Like that familiar UU, she’s also the first to notice that somethings not quite right. The lamps and lanterns are missing! Sometimes we have a visionary eye, and sometimes we have a critical eye. But this time, her critical eye and her visionary eye met and we have a compelling story about lanterns that reminds me of a Retreat I once took. How many folks have ever been to Star Island? The retreat center itself describes “Star Island (as) one of the rocky, wind-swept Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Rye, New Hampshire. For over 100 years, summers here have provided individuals and families with a welcome respite from their busy mainland lives.” I was there for what’s called “Life on a Star” or “LOAS II” just two summers ago. I was volunteering as a Youth Advisor for their high school youth group for the week.
Some of the more memorable moments of this week, happened every night after dinner. Someone would ring the local small chapel’s bell and folks would line up outside where we ate, and collect lit lanterns. We’d stroll up to the chapel by ones, twos and threes for a short evening lay led worship. The imagery of the carried lights painted against the darkened sky and deep waters in the distance flowed into my imagination. In Zora’s story and this classic Unitarian Universalist retreat island, … we carry our lights into community – sharing our wisdom and our heart for brief moments. Folding back the cover from the eternal for an hour, we enjoy one another in between the quiet and the sound. Only to return our lanterns back to their resting place until we gather again.
What lantern have you picked up in Brooklyn? Which do you entrust to a guardian until we can gather again? Is there a beacon of yours you’ve long since forgotten? Or one you secretly wish to craft for the next generation? When you hear the bell in the distance call, will you share your lantern with those who come after?
This coming Friday night, we’ll start anew a tradition of Soulful Sundowns. A monthly multi-generational evening of dinner, worship, arts, crafts, percussion, film, games and discussion! Recognizing the lights we each carry, these contemporary worships will grow from our shared insights, talents and dreams. With dreams in mind, this respite will prepare us for our Congregational Retreat the following morning held here. Like the Ramadan dinner, it can be our goal in itself – another opportunity to live into our community more fully. Also like that dinner, it can sustain us as the food we need for the work ahead. Service is best lived and most sustainable when it is married to spiritual retreats like this.
Here too is an excellent example of a good place to apply that second lesson I suggested we carry from Zora’s story… bring your family. It takes a community to build a sacred home. Whether that family be your parents, children or neighbors held dear in your heart, we grow ourselves… we grow ourselves into an intentional faith community one commitment and one invitation at a time. Gini Courter, moderator of the UUA, has often said of our annual General Assembly, that “it is made sacred and holy by our choosing to gather together.” We make our gatherings, worships and classes sacred with our intentionality. We do so with the energy we put into our reunions, with our eye toward sharing, holding, and stewarding for a time, that beacon of light that is our liberal religious faith; hoping that it may find its way into our hands someday or maybe even this day.
Our first sung hymn this morning points to another important message. Adapted from Christian scripture (1 Cor. 13:1-3), this passage cautions us that “though we may speak with bravest fire, and have the gift to all inspire, and have not love, our words are vain, as sounding brass, and hopeless gain.” Our continued striving to a more just world will be strengthened with sparks of brave fires moving us forward, and be eased by inspiring words and deeds. But to truly be sustainable, they must grow from an “inward love that guides every deed.” The ebb and flow of action and retreat brings us back to a place of intentionality where we discern and renew our loving commitment to one another, ourselves and what Peter Greene, a youth advisor, named at yesterday’s district youth con as, “the world we wish to live in.”
Now, if there’s someone in this congregation that has a skill for metal, and a desire to craft lanterns, please, please do let me know. But whether gifted with a craft or not, there are other ways to construct our beacons. Considering one last example that’s also very close to home, we have six congregants who have stepped up to help pass on a light of sorts. Our small group ministries, that Garnett spoke of earlier, could be seen like this. Smaller intentional communities of 10 or fewer folk – members or visitors – gather every month to share their hearts and minds with friends, congregants and strangers. Much like our teachers in our children and youth religious education program, they’ve been entrusted with the lamps given to them – with an eye to helping those they walk with to and from the place they hold sacred in their hearts – so that some day this light of truth and this flame of love may shine forth from another hand than their own. In using their power to carry their lanterns for a time, we learn to let go of our control over one light so that many more may some day shine. So that this day, they may shine. This is our greatest calling, and each of us are called.
