Make Ready for the Coming Day

BARBARA:
Dear people,
all of you dedicated leaders of this movement,
lay and professional,
you who give your life,
your money, blood, sweat and tears,
your heart, mind and soul to living Unitarian Universalism,
we honor you, we thank you.

BILL:
This evening we honor all those who have created and served this living tradition,
and those who take up its gifts and challenges to shape tomorrow.

BARBARA:
What a deep privilege to speak to you all.

As we anticipated this service, we have been filled with joy
and dread every day.

We have struggled to be ready for this day.
We have created sermon after sermon, draft after draft.

We have dreamed of this day.
Nightmares, really.

We dreamed we showed up without a sermon.
We had to climb fences, scale buildings, scramble up a dry creek bed, crawl over rocks, looking for the manuscript.

We dreamed we didn’t have our robes
and the robes of our teachers and mentors who have gone before were too big.
We couldn’t fill them.

We want to live up to this day and this living tradition, this stream of life.

This stream of life is like stepping into India’s Ganges River.
Babies are born here, honor is given, dirty laundry is washed,
the needy come begging, bodies are cleaned, spirits renewed, ashes returned.

To make ready for this day we went to Nashville to a preaching conference
and heard great preacher after great preacher.
We heard Hebrew Scriptures, Old Testament prophets, parables of Jesus,
sermons that made us cry.
At the end of each day of the conference,
we struggled to write another sermon for this day.

BILL:
Our first sermon celebrated the Living Tradition,
naming important events in our history, our roots, places we have visited:
Nicea and Budapest, Kolosvar and Torda, Baltimore, Boston and Gloucester,
ancestral churches at Plymouth and Cape Cod.
Their stories must live in us.

Another sermon lifted up
the foundational theological themes of our great tradition:
freedom of conscience; openness to new truth;
the ethical imperative toward justice, equity, non-violence and peace.
We imagined a service where we would mourn together actions of our nation:
slavery, the Viet Nam War, Iraq and then begin to imagine what can be.
Draft Three was a sermon naming the names,
telling the stories of Pioneers, Prophets, and Mentors,
including those we recognize in the year of their deaths
and celebrating those retiring from active ministry.
Their lives speak, their deeds beckon,
calling us to a deeper spirituality,
and to activism
to save this planet
and the very soul of what it means to be human.

A fourth sermon praised the inherent worth and dignity of all people,
naming the Divine Spark within each of us as the core
enabling us to participate in the creative evolution of all that is.

Draft Five talked of how the lives of our congregations shape the living tradition,
and how we often busy ourselves with the smallest of matters,
holding ourselves back from what we could do in the world with all this energy.
We named the good work of raising up our children, living out our principles.

A sixth draft lamented our giving into forces that keep us apart,
honoring categories more than our common humanness.
The day will come when we know we are all connected,
when love will burn away fear, alienation, separation.
The day will come when we will welcome the stranger.
The Golden Era of Unitarian Universalism is yet to be.

Draft after draft, six sermons, but not one sermon.

BARBARA:
We read aloud Emerson’s Divinity School address and prayed for you
to have, what he called, the good ear that can find virtue in any sermon.

Each night we tossed and turned and had another dream.

BILL:
I dreamed I had a thorn in my side, my backside really.
It was scratchy and bloody.
When I pulled out the thorn, there was an open boil.
Out of it came a worm, snakes like guts.
I was pulling out everything in me.
When I got it all out, I woke up.
I thought that’s my grief,
my grief for my father, who died in January,
a dedicated lay leader,
one of the many names not spoken in these services,
who is part of this living tradition.

I got it out, my grief for my father,
grief for all our losses.
I felt better.

But,
the world demands so much of us all.
There is so much grief-
what our country is doing-wars and greed-
and what our country is not doing-feeding, sheltering, caring.
There’s so much. We can’t ignore it.
What stops us?
What sorrows are we denying?
We’ve got to grieve before there can be new life.

BARBARA:
A visitor to our congregation asked to meet with me.
She told of the almost unspeakable violence she experienced as a child.
She is used to denying what happened to her, pretending, passing.
She was open and vulnerable and risked telling the truth.

She feared I would run away that her story is too much, too horrible.
She looked down.
She said,
“I don’t know if I can be a Unitarian Universalist,” she said.
“You have to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

I prayed for a response that she could hear.
“You don’t have to affirm the inherent worth and dignity
of the people who did this to you.

Others can do that. We have a community for that.

You only need to believe in your own worth and dignity.
My heart breaks open hearing your story.
You did nothing to deserve this.
I pray you can love yourself
and know there is a way through.
You are not alone.”

After inviting her to bring to our next meeting photographs of herself as child,
she showed them.
There she was as an infant in her little white sleeper pajamas,
above her crib, a mobile of birds flying, circling her.

Then there she was at ages 4, 7, 11 and 13.
She looked closed down.

On the table was a shiny metal blue bird, given to me years ago.
The bird, the gift, had been sitting in the same place for years.
It was time for the bird to move, to pass the gift along.

The blue bird is for you.

“May it be as if this bird is circling over you,
blessing you,
comforting you,
grateful for you,
reminding you that you did nothing wrong.
You deserved as a child to be protected and held.
You are a blessing.
You have dignity.
You have gifts the world needs.
You are worthy of love.
You are loved.”

She fell on to her knees sobbing.

This is just a beginning.
The human soul is complex, deep, mysterious.
This is a beginning.

BILL:
In our congregations, we remind one another.
You are worthy.
You are blessed.
You have gifts to share with the world.

There is so much in each of us that can never be destroyed.
So much lives that is not broken.
There is life for us,
the coming day to meet,
the full force of our creativity and love to be released and shared,
gifts to pass along.

There is healing balm in our congregations.

We know how to be present, to be with,
to speak the truth, to listen,
to be changed.

Our grief named, we can open to beauty,
to our possibilities and promise.
We have springs of life to draw on: music, poetry, story,
joining our strengths for good use in the world.

BARBARA:
But in Nashville at the preaching conference,
I was tired, drained, dried up from all the busyness and business of the church year.

Bill and I go straight from the preaching conference
to a Zen Buddhist Monastery and Retreat Center,
a gift of our congregation, two days up in the mountains.
We will write and make ready for this day.
We are all business; we have a mission.
We will finally nail down this sermon.
It’s late May and we are passed the due date and the grace period
to get this sermon turned in so it can be captioned for you to read here this evening.

We drive our car half way up the mountain in the middle of nowhere
and a stage carries us an hour further
up and down a long, rough and rugged road to the Zen Center

We arrive, pulling our suitcases containing our conference clothes,
our laptop computers in their cases slung over our shoulders.
We march into the office.

We tell them we’re here for a private writing retreat.
“Where can we set up our computers?”
They tell us, “You do know, don’t you, there’s no electricity!
“Grrrr. What kind of Zen monastery is this-
where people can’t even recharge their computers!
How can you do this to us?”

We run our computers by the batteries and write
pulling all six drafts into one final version
that when we read it, skims the surface, misses the mark.

The batteries are used up; there’s no power left.
We need to write! We will have to leave!
But there’s one stage out a day and it’s already left.

We’re stuck.

The culture wants all of us to be stuck.
Nothing better than to have us deny all the crap,
keep us busy, producing and consuming, afraid and anxious.
The culture is glad to have us ignore beauty
and bottle up our creativity never to be released and shared.

We’re stuck.

We’re stuck in a place with flowing streams rushing over white boulders,
with sunlight on green, air sweet with pine.

We’re stuck in a place where they are experiencing the once in every twenty years or so explosion of California tortoise shell butterflies.

We’re stuck at a monastery known for their home baked breads,
their ginger yam casseroles, fresh greens dressed with citrus and berry vinaigrette,
their chocolate hazel nut cake.

Kerosene lanterns light the paths at night.

People are bowing as they pass one another,
sitting together meditating on loving kindness and peace.

We’re stuck in a place known for its hot springs, baths, and healing waters.

BILL:
I walk out of our cabin and into the light of the full moon,
illuminating all around me.

I open my eyes, and my arms, and my heart.
I breathe in beauty, and I breathe out love.
I let go of my sorrow.

I pray:

O Mysterious Spirit,
You who have accompanied me all the days of my life,
Source of Inspiration, Source of Courage,
be here with me, in my time of need.
We have no sermon.

Spirit of this Living Tradition I cherish,
quiet my mind, answer my prayer.

What can we say?

And the ancient stars speak saying:
Tell them - Learn the history, cherish it, but don’t get stuck in it!

And is there more?

Remind them,
the spark of divinity within you can be fanned by the flame of others.
Enter, through your trepidation, into the creative process.

Stream of Life, this Living Tradition,
when I am dried up, drained,
You come to me and I am refreshed.

Is there more to know? to tell them?

Feel the blood coursing through your veins, the blood of your ancestors.
The spirit of the Father, and the Mother,
and all loved ones gone before, calls to you:
“Cry for me when you must.
Laugh with me when you can.
Remember always you are held in the embrace of love.”

O God of All,
Spirit of Being, in whom we live and breathe,
Spirit of the Mountain, the Moon, these Tall Trees,
Is there more?

Remember the breeze as it blows.
Remind them to listen to the sound of the water as it rolls over rocks.
You are one with all.

Is there more?

Enough!
You don’t need a thing.

Tell them:
You have everything you need.
Your cup brims with blessing.
You are ready for the coming day.

BARBARA:
We are ready.
Now is the time.
We go down to the river,
the hot springs, the baths, the healing waters,
this living stream of life,
we go down to the river,
vulnerable,
naked as the blue jays who fly around us,
we go down to the river
and we step in.  ♦