BLESSING THE ANIMALS

A Sermon by
James Ishmael Ford

17 June 2001

Well here we are, observing the last formal Sunday of the church year. Starting next week and on through the first Sunday in September, we’re on summer schedule. Services will start at 9:30, will mostly be lay-led, and all will definitely have a more informal flavor than we’re used to in what we call the regular church year. So, for instance, in the August services at which I’ll preach, I won’t be wearing this increasingly hot robe.

The only real shift in emphasis from recent years that one will find in these upcoming summer services is we will have a worship program every Sunday. We’re letting go of the last vestige of our old Unitarian tradition of shutting down for the summer. If you’re new among us you may not have heard our old assertion that we’re the only denomination God trusts out of sight for an entire season. Perhaps we’ve become a little more untrustworthy. Or, perhaps it just is time to offer in this old sanctuary an hour of reflection and sacred space every week of the year.

For me it’s a little strange to be making these housekeeping references today. It’s hard for me to believe we’ve just about come through our first formal church year together. It has all happened so fast. While I feel a little tired, and am looking forward to the required Unitarian Universalist ministerial trip to Maine in July, I am pleased and grateful for all we’ve done together this year.
I’m able to report we’ve gotten here pretty much all in one piece. Rather nice, don’t you think? We’ve enjoyed some increases in attendance, in membership and in our pledging: all those outward and visible signs of an inwardly healthy spiritual community.

This is a broad and loving congregation. We do care for one another. I feel so grateful to be here among you. Together, I really believe, we’ve done some very good things. We’ve begun to seriously explore the ways of interiority, of reflection. To do this we’ve built upon such powerful activities as the Sunday evening healing service and the spiritual discussion group. We’ve added a very serious Zen meditation activity, and we’ve begun what looks like it will be a wildly successful small group ministry program.

We’ve also been very active in manifesting what we find within our interior exploration. Again, building upon what we already have, we’ve expanded various foci of our social engagement. We reach out to the hungry, we’ve helped out a prisoner, we’ve given our attention to the needs of children beyond our own community. A signal part of this has been our First Sunday second offering, which averaged a thousand dollars a month that we gave in this sanctuary, not one penny of which was used by or for us. Rather it was a pure giving to the needs of our larger family of relationships. This one activity is so representative of what members and friends of this society do.

I want especially to acknowledge our staff. In particular I need to mention Fran Clancy as our administrator, Anne Bancroft as our religious educator and Wendy Berenson as the R.E. assistant, Roberta Humez as our music director, Joe Muise as organist and accompanist, and Amy LeClair as children’s choir director. The work this team has done to make ours a successful and welcoming congregation has been astonishing. I’m so lucky to be able to work with them in service to the mission of this Society.

I’m even luckier. Many may know we have a rather labyrinthine hiring procedure. But, it also turns out it works. Our personnel policy committee presented a candidate for our new membership and volunteer coordinator position to the Board of Trustees, who’ve just ratified their decision. So, this August, Noreen Kimball will be joining the staff as our membership and volunteer coordinator. Please be nice to her, particularly you committee chairs. It is just a half time position.

Good things. Still, this is a sacred hour, and I think it calls us to more than giving and receiving reports, even when they’re almost entirely positive. As we gird ourselves up for the summer I would like to take just a few minutes to reflect on what has been and what might become.

This is part of the great cycle of meaningful life: we reflect, we do, and we reflect again. This is the dynamic of our human existence, and when consciously applied it is the way of a vital and living spiritual life. We’ve certainly been busy. We’ve accomplished a lot. Now let’s take just a moment or two for reflection.

Let’s just catch a breath and look at all this that we are, and that we hope to become. I think we have much to congratulate ourselves for, but also some things that it could be profitable to look at as, as they say, growth opportunities. In that context I find myself thinking of this Sunday with its grand gathering of beasts of all sorts.

Not a bad image for us, hey? I mean what an unlikely gathering we are. We’re almost all familiar with the litany of theological diversity among us: Christians sitting next to Jews sitting next to humanists, sitting next to Buddhists, sitting next to—well, could be just about anything. We are a multiplicity of gifts; we are an interfaith exploration. Our sense of spirituality, of that which gives life its savor, is broad.

We like to reflect on how Unitarian Universalists are notoriously unlikely animals in the spiritual menagerie. Among the rather more tame religious communities of our sisters and brothers who gather as Presbyterians or Reformed Jews, we are rather more unlikely: giraffes, gazelles, dragons, and maybe a ferret or two: fabulous beasts all.

On the one hand appropriately we celebrate this. On the other, to my mind we sometimes are too self-congratulatory about this. Having sojourned here for just under a year now, this is something I find a bit of a danger among us within our community. We shouldn’t think we’re especially wonderful just because of this broadness. It can be a little too easy to tip the hat to diversity and then continue on rather smug about the whole thing, just ignoring what’s actually going on.

As we get too comfortable we can find ourselves in danger of missing the real hurt and challenge and healing that is possible in such a gathering as ours. We need to keep a little of the edge, I suggest, that caused us to differentiate out of liberal Protestantism. We need to remember our way of fully reasoned, as well as fully bodied and fully hearted, engagement. To find the authentic, we must be authentic.

So, we need to acknowledge we’re not always comfortable with that Christian or Jew or Buddhist sitting next to us. Let’s not have dead elephants in the sanctuary. They get in the way, and they can eventually, smell rather badly. Next year I hope we’ll spend a little more time reflecting on such things. We need to know all the animals we are, cats and dogs, turtles and rats; even as we explore what it is that pulls us together, our common animal-ness, if you will. There is a real blessing here. And I hope we’ll give it some attention.

Now we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get caught in a single image to suggest what is our spiritual community, or our real priorities. After all metaphors are limited, they point to something rather than are something. It’s very important not to get confused about this. So, maybe as another frame for exploring what I see we are and might be I would like to shift for a bit from that image of a blessing of the animals.

Marion Bullitt, our brilliant outgoing, unfortunately in both senses of the word, co-chair with Bill Horne of our wildly successful annual operational pledge drive, recently gave me a present. After my now somewhat infamous newsletter column lament about arriving from the Sonora desert and being unprepared for returning to lawns and such, several people came forward with offers for loans of, and occasionally actual gifts of lawn mowers.

When Marion learned she was a little too late with her own offer, she thought something like, "What the heck. I have something James can use in his yard." So a week or so ago I opened the door of my office, and found myself confronted with a rather large, and truthfully very nice manure spreader.

After being reassured by Roberta, Anne, Fran and Wendy (I did ask all of them) that this wasn’t a comment on my preaching, at least it didn’t seem so; I found myself thinking of it as a rather appropriate metaphor for our shared situation here at FUSN. That and, of course, the rumbling herd of wild creatures who are sharing the service with us today. Two wonderful images, wouldn’t you say: that manure spreader and a blessing of animals. I mean what images!

I won’t go very far into the idea of the gifts each of us brings out of our various animal-nesses; what fills that spreader. Every metaphor, if worked too hard, becomes silly. But, I hope you can see something of a point here. In addition to the necessity of our coming together as we are, we also need to work at it. We need to cultivate our own spiritual depth as well as our communal relationships.

We need cultivation. Next year I would like to spend a little greater part of our Sunday time reflecting on aspects of the interior journey. We need to cultivate this part of our lives, this looking inward and finding out who and what we are. After all, for a community like ours, dedicated as it is to a full engagement with the world, it is particularly necessary for us to have some reliable sense of who we are, a real place to start, an authentic place to stand.

Here we come to the great mystery, which is the path of honesty, of integrity, of never turning away from what is. This is very important. Because, this is also the path of healing, love and joy. And, I suggest, it really is ours. But also, remember: we don’t own it, we didn’t invent it, and we’re foolish when we think we have a monopoly on it.

This path of honesty and integrity, and never turning away is the most human of activities. We get it as a free gift, a bonus for being born. But, we do need to cultivate it. We need to haul the night soil of our own making, as it were, into the deal. We must work it into the land, to allow the good and the beautiful to flourish.

So, how do we manifest this? What should be the direction for us to reflect upon and delve within and argue about and fight over laughing and crying and make our way to? What might be the way? And how might we engage it as Unitarian Universalists?
To my mind it would be hard to find a better teacher than the Catholic priest Thomas Berry. Drawing upon his Christian roots as well as the wisdom of the world’s faiths, and his long engagement with contemporary science, Berry spells out more clearly than most, this way that is also ours, of fully integrating the inner and the outer, of contemplation and action, of cultivating the way of love.

Berry writes how "The outer world is necessary for the inner world; they’re not two worlds but a single world with two aspects: the outer and the inner. If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences, or at least we don’t have them in a profound way.

"We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers, and the mountains and the trees, the flowers, the birds, the songs of the birds, the fish in the sea, to evoke a world of mystery, to evoke the sacred. It gives us a sense of awe. This is a response to the cosmic liturgy, since the universe itself is a sacred liturgy."

Let’s make this a bit of our common work next year. Let’s explore what the sacred liturgy of the universe, of the joining of the inner and the outer, can look like. And, of course, let’s do it in our own Unitarian Universalist way: with reason, with our bodies, with our hearts, all full. Let’s bring this wonderful menagerie together. Let’s bless the animals. Let’s bless the world. Let’s give ourselves whole to what is and to what might be.

It is a glorious work. And, truly, it is ours.

Amen.