In Motion
Sermon by Rev. Lyn Cox, Recast June 28, 2009
“Gather the spirit,” we sang together earlier. I think of that hymn as a very active song. Gather! We are calling out to each other, encouraging movement from one place to another. Wherever you find the spirit, gather it! Bring the spirit together! We support movement in the way we listen to each other. We encourage movement within.
I believe that Unitarian Universalism is an active faith. It requires something of every participant. We come together to care for each other and the world. Describing a congregation or the Unitarian Universalist movement as a whole can be difficult, because we don’t have a rock-solid, unchangeable creed. It’s a different way of thinking of religion than many people are accustomed to. What draws us together are ways of being and doing.
Universalist minister and scholar L.B. Fisher wrote in 1921, “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all. We move.” Even 88 years later, after consolidation with the Unitarians and epic world events, we have inherited this active faith. We move.
This explanation, “we move,” is satisfying in a number of ways, but pretty soon we have even more questions. Where do we move? How do we move? By what power do we move? We’re all in this movement together, and I’m not saying I have any final answers, but I would like to ask those questions along with you for awhile. In our Unitarian Universalist faith, where do we move? How do we move? By what power do we move?
Where We Move: Linear Motion
Talking about our active faith reminds me of an experience I had. UU students and campus ministry advisors filled the room, perched on the edges of couches, sprawled on the floor, reaching up to cheer and reaching out to encourage. We were playing improvisation games to practice articulating our faith for outreach activities with campus ministry groups. There were two chairs at the front of the room, one for the role of questioner and one for the role of UU representative. Anyone could offer to “tag in” and replace either person any time. We were gathered for a UUA-sponsored Campus Ministry training, which drew in part from the curriculum “Articulating Your UU Faith” by Barbara Wells ten Hove and Jaco B. ten Hove.
Questioners tried to stump their friends in the UU representative chair. “What do you believe about Jesus?” “Is this a cult? If you can’t give me a straight answer, I know it’s a cult.” “Why do you get together? What’s your goal?”
For their part, the people in the UU representative chair did pretty well, smiling and answering as non-defensively as they could. Sometimes they would respond with, “Well, that’s a good question, what do you think?” Many of the UU representatives tried to give objective and “right” answers, and they had some good ones. “We believe in keeping faith with justice, equity, and compassion.” Some of the representatives would say, “I can’t answer for all Unitarian Universalists, but I can tell you what I think.”
Before playing this game, we had prepared by filling in the blanks for the sentence, “I used to believe _________ , but now I believe ___________ .” For instance, I used to believe that God was a man in the clouds, but now I believe that the Holy is beyond our human understanding of gender or geography. I used to believe that people go to Heaven when they die. Now I believe that, when I die, the matter and energy that make me who I am will be released and re-absorbed by the forces that create and uphold life.
When I say, “We don’t stand, we move,” the first thing I think of is this linear motion from A to B. In order to describe this kind of motion, I need to have a way to describe point A and point B, and maybe something about the time it took to get there. To tell the whole story of motion, it’s not enough to say, “I don’t believe in such-and-such.” That’s like describing point A without any other information. We can’t describe motion with only one data point. “Now I’m not so sure” is a possible way to describe point B. Telling the rest of the story isn’t always easy. Describing point B can be emotionally difficult. Leaving point A may have been painful, how can I commit to finding a point B that I might have to leave again. Describing point B requires focus and creativity.
One of my professors in seminary, Rosemary Chinnici, told us that we come to a time when we realize the faith we have inherited is inadequate for what we are facing. She called this religious impasse. I don’t think she meant that everyone changes religious affiliation when hitting a rough spot, I think she meant that we have to change how we relate to our faith.
Another of my professors, Rebecca Parker, writes what she learned from Professor Chinnici about running into religious impasse. “[A]t such moments we have three choices: We can hold to our religious beliefs and deny our experience, we can hold our experience and walk away from our religious tradition, or we can become theologians.” Parker and Chinnici both recommend the third option.
Religious impasse happens to people who were raised with no formal religious tradition. It happens to lifelong Unitarian Universalists. All of us have beliefs. Beliefs can be challenged by personal experience, no matter who we are or where we’ve come from. When the workshop facilitators asked us to frame positively, “now I believe,” they were asking us to become theologians. This is what our religious communities must do. We must equip each other and encourage each other to become theologians. If we can do that for each other, we will be able to describe where we move.
I’m curious about where we move collectively as well as individually in faith. We draw from the words and deeds of prophetic women and men, people who drew maps for their generations and for ours. Sometimes we follow those maps and sometimes we move off the edge. How do we map out our shared hopes for ourselves and for future generations, giving new edges for future generations to move off from?
In this morning’s story, the three little pigs had trouble at first mapping out their shared hopes. They had some learning experiences that brought them together, and finally planning session when they identified their absolute needs and their negotiable desires. For the three little pigs to move together, they needed to listen to each other and to identify their hopes. They learned from their past challenges, but didn’t dwell on them in fear or blame. Who knows, by having the forethought to articulate their shared hopes, they three pigs might have made a map that others could follow to safety. Where we move isn’t just about us as individuals, or even us as a group, it’s also about welcoming others who are moving toward point B.
How We Move: Circular Motion
How we move is part of the story, just as much as where we move. Physicists study at least 5 or 6 kinds of motion: harmonic motion like a swinging pendulum, reciprocation, rotary motion, Brownian motion, circular motion, and linear motion such as the point A to point B that I just described. I’d like to think for a bit about circular motion.
Let’s say I’ve got a rock on the end of a string. If I swing it in a circle, I’ve got centripetal force, a center-seeking force that pulls the moving rock toward the center of the circle, and I’ve inertia that keeps the rock moving in whatever direction it’s going away from the center. The force that pulls the rock to the center is tension on the string. If I cut the string while the rock is going around in a circle, the rock will fly off in whatever direction it was pointed it, tangential to the center, probably injuring someone or breaking something in the process. That’s how I feel when I can’t find my spiritual center.
If we are in motion, acting in a dance of dynamic tension with a set of forces and influences, how do we stay connected to the center? If we are telling the story of how we move, the center and our relationship to it is part of the story.
I used to live within walking distance of a lake in a fairly large city. The lake is edged with schools, churches, parks, and a walking path. At the lake, I saw geese and ducks, and I met birds that were new to me, like banded coots. Occasionally I would see a pelican or a heron, just hanging out in the lake in my neighborhood. The lake was like a meeting place, a natural town square for human and non-human neighbors. Families, couples, elders, runners, weary people seeking rest, teenagers seeking new horizons, all came to the edge of the lake to sit or to walk the three-mile path around it. I would walk by the lake when I had something to think through, or when I was moved to have a heart-to-heart talk with a partner or friend. The lake seemed to me to be a center of community and beauty. What went on underneath the surface of the lake was a mystery to me. The water was reflective and unknowable, but it provided a center around which hearts revolved.
Where is the center? What keeps us connected to the center? In this congregation, you proclaim a common bond through your mission statement. Perhaps the visible and tangible forms of that bond have to do with love and acceptance of one another. The common bond is the string tying the souls of this congregation to the center. Love and acceptance are inward acting forces. I don’t think love and acceptance form the center by themselves, they are the forces that keep us connected to the center as we continue in motion.
I’m not sure where the center is. It might be “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” or the “interdependent web of existence.” It’s an interesting question. I look forward to hearing what you discover as you learn and grow and move together.
In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau writes:
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
Thoreau did a lot of wandering, often not far from home in Concord. I think the Holy Land he referred to is any place that is walked with reverence. He made side trips to point A, point B, and point C, and he ended up not far from where he started, a circular motion that was significant without needing to measure long distances between the beginning and the end. In sauntering around the center, let us move in ways that reveal holiness. Ultimately, the questions of where we move and how we move center around something that is beautiful and mysterious and worthy of our pilgrimage.
By What Power Do We Move: Sources of Energy
“We move.” In addition to questions about where we move and how we move, there are questions about what moves us. By what power do we move? What are our sources of energy?
UU minister and singer-songwriter Meg Barnhouse writes about this in her essay, “The Stretcher and The Swan.” In her essay, she refers to the Rilke poem we heard earlier in the service. She says:
I used to have two speeds, a hundred miles and hour and full stop. Crash. I thought I was supposed to go and go at full speed until I couldn’t go any longer, then I slept. Then I’d wake up and start again.
As I’m getting older I’m adding more gears. I have “slow” now. Some days.
One of my holy books, the I Ching, talks about the wisdom of not doing. I get tired when I forget and act like I’m the source of my energy, my love, my creativity. I’m the one who sustains my friends, who gets things done, who works things out.
The poet Rilke wrote about a swan and how awkwardly he moves on the ground. His bearing changes once he lowers himself into the water, which “flows joyfully beneath him, while the swan unmoving and marvelously calm, is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown, more like a king, further and further on.”
I’m experimenting with letting go, allowing wave after wave to hold me up, move me along.
May I be granted the wisdom to know when to paddle my feet.
(This essay is in Meg Barnhouse’s collection, “Did I Say That Out Loud? Musings from a Questioning Soul.” She references “The Swan” by Rainer Maria Rilke.)
Barnhouse writes of the mistake of imagining that one is the source of one’s energy. I am not the source of my own energy. We draw from powers not of our own making when it comes to love, getting things done, working things out. Like the swan, we move gracefully when we move with the waves that lift us up.
What kinds of powers support and uphold life for you? Do you have a shared purpose as a congregation? Does that purpose move you? Do you trust that purpose enough to be moved?
Caring for each other and the world are worthy goals. We don’t have to do it alone. The powers and blessings we hold are entrusted to us by unseen hands. Let me try to clarify what I mean by that. Unitarian Universalist communities embrace people who believe in a personal god, people who interpret god as a metaphor, people who don’t find god to be a useful concept, and many others. That diversity doesn’t mean we live in a world entirely of our own making. There are sources of energy that move us forward, around, inside out, and through. When we honor the namable and unnamable forces, we open ourselves up still further to the energy of those sources.
Twentieth century Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams wrote:
Traditionally, our churches have been grounded in a covenant binding us together … but this enterprise of maintaining the network is itself not to be understood as simply a human enterprise. It is a response to a divinely given creative power, a sustaining power, a community-transforming power. This power is ultimately not of our own making.
(James Luther Adams, “The Prophethood of All Believers”)
We have many ways of understanding the mysteries of creative, sustaining, transforming power. Your description may involve the inspiration of ancestors and prophets, or it may involve the momentum of stardust forming and re-forming in echoes from the birth of the universe. Your description may involve a still, small voice within. It may involve the dreams of generations to come, calling you into being. There are many names for the source that sustains us and transforms us while we are constantly in motion.
Moving On
“We do not stand at all. We move.” True enough. Where do we move? How do we move? By what power do we move? May we become theologians, creating maps for our spiritual journeys. May we circle around the center in service to a shared purpose. May we empower each other for the journey in cooperation with the Source of Life.
