Into Whose Hands?

Copyright © 2010, Rev. Bill and Barbara Hamilton-Holway

On the Jewish and Christian calendars this is a holy week. Jews are celebrating Passover. The Passover Seder tells the story of the Jews’ journey into freedom, reminding them of their ancestors and of who they are as a people. For Christian’s today is Palm Sunday. Jesus was a Jew and the holidays coincide.

Jesus came into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover with his closest followers. They ate supper together and the ritual of communion reminds Christians to whom they belong—the body of Christ.

After the meal, Jesus and his friends went to a garden to pray. He was betrayed by one of them, arrested and questioned by authorities. The crowd, who had praised him, became a mob and called to have him crucified.

Accounts vary. In the story as told in the Book of Luke, as Jesus was dying, his last words are addressed to God, “Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

So we ask, is there a greater will to which we commit and entrust ourselves? Who are we? And whose are we?

I’m a Cornhusker.

I’m a Sooner.

I’m a daughter and sister.

I’m a son and brother.

I’m my children’s mother.

I’m the apple of my daughter’s eye.

I was raised Congregationalist.

I’m a UU to the 6th generation.

I’m a lover of poetry.

I’m a reader of history.

I’m an earthling.

I’m a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam.

I’m my brother and sister’s keeper.

I’m my own man.

I am accountable to my 5000 Facebook friends.

I am ashes. I am dust.

I am stardust.

I am a single cell…

in a body of four billion cells.

I’m part of the stream of evolution and creativity.

I’m one with the universe.

Within me is the soul of the whole.

I’m a child of God and the cousin of reptiles. Any moment I might love or fight or flee.

Anybody here a Hoosier? Anyone a Bokononist?

Our religious text for today’s service is from the Bokonon religion created by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle. Bokononism is based on untruths, Vonnegut says, yet if you live by them you can be happy and lead a good life.

Vonnegut writes of a superficial encounter between two people,

"My God," she said, "are you a Hoosier?"
I admitted I was.
"I'm a Hoosier, too," she crowed.

In Bokononism, such proud, and often kind of meaningless, associations of human beings, hoosiers, huskers, sooners, are granfalloons. Other granfalloons for Vonnegut are “The Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, The General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows, and any nation, anytime, anywhere.” Any of these granfalloons could be a possible vehicle for depth of connection and meaning, but by themselves, they are superficial.

It’s certainly possible that two hoosiers, or a husker and a sooner. might be part of a karass. A karass, in Vonnegut’s made-up religion, is a group of people who are connected, but maybe don’t even know it, and who are acting together for the will of God.

What associations give us meaning, real meaning, and connect us with others in acting for the good? Whose are we?

What does it mean to us that we’re Unitarian Universalists and belong to a UU congregation?

We Unitarian Universalists are known for our heresy: literally to be people who choose. We hold high the affirmation of individual freedom of conscience. We abhor all that would constrain the individual’s search for meaning.

However, in our affirmation of the individual, we have, all too often, throughout our history, under emphasized the importance of connection and community. In our Western, ego-centered culture we have viewed democracy as a way to preserve individual rights more than as a way to discern collective wisdom for the collective good.

For the good of the whole, sometimes personal preference or personal gain is sacrificed. Sacrifice has all kinds of negative connotations. Too often, it has meant one group of people forced to sacrifice for the benefit of another group, or one person submitting to another’s will and losing themselves in the process.

But choosing to let go of personal gain, choosing to surrender personal preference is needed for the collective good whether it’s a personal relationship, a congregation, or a country, like putting public health over private gain.

I remember as a youth proudly stating that as a Unitarian Universalist I could believe anything I wanted to believe.

But, it is not accurate to say that as a Unitarian Universalist I can believe anything I want to believe. It is more, that our tradition calls to each of us to follow our conscience in matters of religious belief, with full understanding that conscience is a collective concept.

We reject understandings of God as a transcendent Being, an all-knowing, all-powerful actor, dictating the course of human history. We reject this understanding because it conflicts with our experience as beings with the capacity to make judgments, with free will, the power to choose.

In doing so it is all too easy to reject theological language, thus losing the sense of the Divine as that which lies beyond or within all being, connecting all existence in, as we now often say, an interdependent web.

When we speak the word God we speak of being connected to something larger than ourselves, some good larger than the personal. We speak of the depth of our relationships to ourselves to one another and all creation, to mystery and miracle, and the deepest longings of our hearts.

When we begin with an affirmation of our interconnection, our interdependence, we begin to ask deeply meaningful theological questions. Our conscience is the result of the interplay of all we have known, been taught, had modeled for us. Our conscience is not ours alone but connected to all of humankind. The question “Whose are we?” calls us to a depth, for it reminds us to consider all our relationships.

In our first relationships, most of us were part of a nuclear family. Some people can trace their families back generations and generations.

We belong to families—sometimes needing to redeem them, other times sustained by them.

“We would hold fast to all of good we inherit,” writes Unitarian Universalist Phillip Hewett, “even as we would leave behind us the outworn and the false.”

We belong to families, biological and chosen and more. We are shaped by ancestors we did not know.

One year our family didn’t want to decorate a Christmas tree in the usual way. We wanted to make a Family Tree. We decorated the tree with photos of family and extended family members and with people with whom we believe our lives are connected. We had photos of Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Matisse, Bach, Beethoven, Basie, Beatles, Dylan …a depiction of a fictional character, Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, and more. All of these people we claim as part of our family tree.

We are the fruit of many generations of the human family. Most of what we have and what we know, we receive from others.

We are part of the stream of human consciousness. We are like themes in music and dance, repeating, each in our own expressive ways, our similar fears, joys, and longings. Footsteps behind us in the dark are scary. We cry when we witness tenderness and goodness. We all long to be loved. We know we belong to the human race, and all the evil humans do, we, too, are capable of doing. Still we don’t forget that goodness dwells within us.

Whose are we? The two of us asked ourselves. We went for a hike from Mount Tamalpais to Stinson Beach and back up the Dispsea and Steep Ravine trails. As we walked, we asked, “Who needs you?”

Our house plants need me. I’m the one who waters them.

When our daughter’s dogs stay with us they depend on us.

Our children are grown. They still need us, but not like they once did.

We asked, “To whom are you accountable?”

The two of us are accountable to one another. We know our faithfulness and commitments to one another affect more than ourselves and beyond our family.

We are in a covenanted relationship with our staff and with you, with our ministerial colleagues and with the Unitarian Universalist Association. A deeper accountability is each to our own conscience and ideals, deeper still is our accountability to life, to the good, to all that is.

We asked, "Who loves you?"

As we walked, I thought about how I love the rushing creek, the Redwood trees, the green moss, the calla lilies and lush ferns, the blue sky and the sunshine, but do they need or love me?

I remembered words from the hymnbook from Annie Dillard. "We are here to abet creation and to witness to it…so that creation need not play to an empty house." Maybe even our noticing and beholding beauty is needed. Alice Walker says anything we love, we can save.

And if that’s true for Redwoods and calla lilies, blue skies, and sunshine, isn’t it true for human beings? We are here to abet humanity and to witness to humankind, to look at people and see their worth and dignity. "We are here," Annie Dillard writes, “to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature."

We are here not only to abet creation and one another; we are here to join together to co-create the good.

We asked, “Whose life is altered by your choices?”

I am the grandmother of an unborn child, a not even conceived child. I need to take care of my body, my health, as responsibly as I can so that child has my love and support.

I am the great great grandmother of children yet to be. I need to take care of the earth and people so those children can live with beauty and in dignity.

Words from hymns and readings, we come back to again and again, speak to our souls. They tell us who we are, to whom we belong.
"The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world…the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment."

All life is altered by our choices. We sing, "Our world is one world; what touches one affects us all,” and we are accountable to the earth.

We asked, "Whose are we?"

We are strands in the web of creation. Being as good as in our hearts we have always wanted to be affects all life. The world, as Mary Oliver says, announces over and over again our "place in the family of things."

If you belong to the family of things, you can’t just stay closed-up in your little cubicle or in front of your computer or television. You have to get out, to art and plays, to soup kitchens and rallies, get out in nature, get to church.

At church the wisdom of the ages echoes in words we sing and speak together. When we think the answer to whose are we is nobody’s, we can recall these words.

We remember. We belong to one another.

A person we know, who is losing his memory and can’t remember names and faces, says he just loves everybody.

It matters that we live.

It matters that we love.

Our words and deeds vibrate through space and time.

We belong to all who have gone before and all who will follow after. "We are not isolated beings but connected in mystery and miracle, to each other, to this community, to the universe." [anonymous reading #434, adapted, in Singing the Living Tradition].

Together we can be, in Vonnegut’s terms, a karass, acting together for the good.

We are our grandmothers’ prayers.
We are our grandfathers’ dreamings.
We are mothers of courage
and fathers of time.
We are daughters of dust
and the sons of great visions.
We’re sisters of mercy
and brothers of love.
We are lovers of life and builders of nations,
we’re seekers of truth and keepers of faith,
we are makers of peace and the wisdom of ages.
We are the breath of our ancestors, we are the spirit of God.
And into that spirit, may we commit our lives.