THE DANCE WE ARE

A Sermon by James Ishmael Ford
2 March 2003

The Text
"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." - Emma Goldman

Have you heard the story about three small town preachers, one a Baptist, the other an Episcopalian and the third a Unitarian Universalist? They were talking about how to get rid of the bats they all had in their bell towers. The Baptist minister said, "Well, I tried shooting those darned bats. But all I did was end up with holes in the roof."

The Episcopalian, a little more PC than the Baptist, said, "I trapped our bats and took them thirty or forty miles out of town. But it didn’t take a day before they were all back!" Then the UU minister said "Well, I got rid of every bat we had. Not a one is left."

The Baptist and the Episcopalian were astonished and asked the Unitarian Universalist how she did it. "Well," she replied, I had the Board elect them all members, and then we sent each one a pledge card. Haven’t seen ‘em since."

The truth is we’re in pretty rough times. This is the second year of a recession. Some of us have lost jobs. A larger number might lose jobs. And just about all of us, whatever else may be said, are worried. It can be pretty easy to not want to think about pledging. Certainly, this isn’t the best time to kick off a canvas.

On the other hand the building needs to be kept up. Our staff deserves their salaries. And we have lots of projects we support ranging from religious education to social justice. We’re involved, we’re engaged, we’re active. And all that takes money. So, we have to talk about it, and today we will, or at least how our generous support of this community fits within our larger understanding of spirituality and engagement.

The title of today’s sermon is "The Dance We Are." I want to explore a little what that metaphor dance can mean for us as we reflect on our situation, both the hard parts and the good parts. I suggest dance is not only apt, but it speaks to something profound and true about us and what it is we’re about together in this old and venerable place.

But I didn’t start with that title, or with that image. Besides dance, the other term that most caught in my mind while I was preparing this talk was generosity. You know, I want you to be generous when you receive your pledge card. But, also more, I want to explore why generosity is what we’re about. So, before we consider dancing, let’s talk about generosity.

Last evening at our canvas kick off dinner, and I know the majority of us in this room today were there, so this part will be brief, at the event I explored some definitions of the word generous. In essence it means open-handed, broad and liberal in that traditional sense of noble. But along with dictionary definitions while surfing the web using the search term "generosity," I ran across the website for the Cathedral of Hope, in Dallas, Texas. And that’s most of what I’d like to talk about today.

With three thousand members the cathedral is the largest church in the world focused on a ministry among GBLT (for the non-cognoscenti that means gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) people. This is an amazingly large and in many more ways than mere size, successful congregation. Like us, they are a lively and committed people, seeking personal depth and authentic outreach to help in the healing of our broken world.

What popped on Google was their section called "Covenant Keepers." It addresses what they see as the mission of their membership. And I was very impressed with what I found. Now, we’re a community that for a large part of us is going to be more suspicious of their Christian perspectives than their being a mostly gay congregation.

But, I believe we can learn a great deal from their open hearted Christianity. So, I hope we can set aside any hesitations we might have, and hear what it is they think about authentic relationship, particularly within the context of being a people of faith.

While it can sometimes be hard to discern among our largely rational and certainly humanistically inclined community (you may recall that old "Welcome Back, Kotter" episode where the person is hurt and someone cries out "Get him a priest," to which someone else says, "he’s a Unitarian," to which the first speaker responds, "Then get him a math teacher," nonetheless, nonetheless, we are a people of faith.

I’ll return to that in just a moment, but first, that Cathedral of Hope. They call their members to five principles which very much, to my mind, summarize an authentic spiritual community. These are prayer, presence, generosity (which is how they popped for me on that Google search), service and growth.

Today in a worship service dedicated to formally kicking off our annual operational canvas, I would like to reflect on these five things: prayer, presence, generosity, service and growth, suggesting they may well be exactly what we are about in our own pursuit of depth and meaning.

Prayer: possibly for some among us the most problematic of these terms. But, increasingly among us, I think not. So, to situate this term prayer, let’s first consider faith. While we are a very this-worldly community, incredibly focused on bringing our values into our lived lives; we are if we look at those values, definitely people of faith.

As I often repeat while the Principles and Purposes are not a creedal statement, they do point to what we commonly hold as shared perspectives among ourselves today. That seventh principle about the interdependent web, speaking as it does of our radical interdependence is a statement of faith.

To believe in the reality to which the web points is an observation and a call to engagement. It is also faith in something we only see partially, even if we feel it deeply. After all, this image ultimately suggests we belong to one family. And while we may in our hearts believe this, when we look around at the world, it can be hard to believe this with our heads.

Particularly, I find, in this world where violence and terror are such common things, and that interdependent family would have to include dictators and presidents and others threatening and often actually tossing bombs and missiles at each other and us and our children. But, our faith, our authentic faith expressed in that metaphor of an interdependent web is that we are intimately wrapped up together, people and leaders, every blessed one of us.

This is a hope, perhaps a body knowing, if not a completely rational analysis. It is a call from deep within us. So, all that said, what would prayer be? Of course prayer stands for many things. It can be hope in the face of hopelessness. It can be our longing for something better than what is. It can be an articulation of overwhelming joy in the face of beauty in the presence of hurt, such as breaks the heart. And, prayer can be used for us in that sense used by the Jewish-Christian mystic Simone Weil.

"Prayer is attention." Simone tells us. Prayer is what we attend to. Prayer is what happens when we allow our egos and ego needs to be set to the side, if only for a moment, allowing ourselves in that moment to attend to the vastness that is. This, of course, brings us to presence. Presence has a number of meanings for us.

On the one hand it means simply showing up. We go to work. We do what needs doing. We bring ourselves and our children into this place. We put our bodies here. And in the doing presence also means we try to give ourselves some time in all this to that paying attention.

This can mean paying attention to what is happening at this service. And more, it can mean paying attention to each other, to that mystery of our intimate relationship with each other. And more, it can mean paying attention to each precious moment as it presents. Here, by the bye, I think we might briefly hold in our minds that word "dance."

Of course to be real, presence also means showing up for more than an hour or two in the week. It means giving time to do things together. It means giving time to work together. It means finding time to have fun together. It means exploring times of the silent, of the unspoken together.

I think the fact that half of us are engaged in activities sponsored by our Society that can honestly be characterized as spiritual practices is a significant statistic. I also want to hold up that other half, those of us who do not find those formal settings useful, but who nonetheless give equally of ourselves in other activities of presence, study groups and social outreach for instance, speaks to the breadth we bring to this enterprise of authenticity, what makes our religion liberal in that ancient sense.

And this is where generosity arises. Now, whenever I talk about how good we are at one thing or another, some among us quite correctly point out how often we fail in these aspirations. But, here I’m addressing not only what we actually do quite often, but what is also our goal as people of faith, people who fall short, who are as is our common human condition, often broken and hurt, and less than our aspiration.

Here accepting who we are in our shortcomings as well as our aspirations we find the generous heart, that aspect of who we are that I would most like to focus on today, this day we’ve given to consider why we want to support this community financially. So, generosity.

Generosity is not, of course, just about money. This generous heart springs from our deep, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, knowing that we are family, that we are connected, that we do belong in some very real way to each other. Generosity springs from our sense of presence to each other, to what we hope for, for each other as well as for ourselves. Does the word dance echo in this definition?

And of course this generous spirit doesn’t rest in one place, in our families or in our church. That’s why we’ve calendared today to be a second collection Sunday, to flat out celebrate the broader aspects of our generous heart. We average sixteen hundred dollars a second collection, a pass through collection; that is, not one penny of this collection stays here in the community.

It is earmarked for some other worthy work of the greater family. As most of us understand today, indeed, in just a few minutes, we’ll be collecting for the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office, a particularly significant activity in this time of such world-wide strife.

And this points to how we focus our impulse to be generous. Specifically, we are committed, I believe, as a people of faith, and as members of this First Unitarian Society to be people of service. We cannot live our spiritual lives alone. Of course there are times of solitude for every life, sometimes happily and sometimes sadly. It can be conscious or thrust upon us. However it comes about there are times when we need to be alone, to stop, to withdraw, and to look within.

But in general as we look within, it is our common experience as Unitarian Universalists that we find how we must at some point then reach out. It is a rhythm, a dance. We are called to lives of service, just as certainly as if God whispered it in our ears. This happens in so many ways in that rhythm of prayer and presence and generosity, in that dance of life.

Rhythms: prayer, presence, generosity, service and growth. We give ourselves and some of our time to our children and youth. We give of ourselves and our time to the care crew helping those among our number who need a little attention. We give of ourselves and our time to the hurt and need beyond the walls of this precious and good community. We act in a hundred ways, leading and following. We act for the good, for the holy, for the right.

Of course we’re also wary of resting on our laurels, at least when we’re truly on our game, truly attending to the matter at hand. We always question our understanding of that good, of that holy, of that right. While acting, we are also questioning and correcting. The authentic path is not straight, but a zigzag of attending and adjusting. We study, we pray, we meditate, we act, we grow. We dance.

We grow deep. To hold to that image for a moment, here in this place we sink roots that nourish our lives and the lives of our children and the lives of children we didn’t think we had before coming into this place. And from those deep roots we do grow healthy and spread our arms like branches of a tree, beneath which the birds of heaven truly can take their rest.

Here perhaps we discover we are talking about revolution. We’re talking about turning over the old order, the order of isolation, of cruelty and oppression, of hatred and racism and sexism and homophobia and classism, every "ism" that hurts and stains human dignity, and sacred possibility. This gathering here today is about revolution.

Of course, as we can recall from a few minutes ago, that old anarchist and radical Emma Goldman declared how, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." What might that mean for us today in this call to reflect on our nature as people of faith, as people given to sacred reflection, to authentic presence, to generous hearts, to serving self and other, to growing deep together?

Well, at bottom the authentic way is a dance. There are many apt metaphors for our lives, and we’ve explored several today. But the one that most often stirs my heart is that of dance. Here we find the rhythms of life and death and renewal. Here we find each and every one of us at one time leads, at another follows, that sometimes it’s fast and raucous, at other times slow and sensuous.

But it is always a dance.

It is that dance we are.

And it is that dance we celebrate.

Let the rhythm continue.

Amen.