PATRIOT DREAMS
A Valentine’s Day Sermon On Love and Community
James Ishmael Ford
13 February 2005

The Text
Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought; that the Highest dwells within us, that the sources of nature are in our own minds… I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us… Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beautify, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

For those who’ve noticed the title of today’s sermon; no, it’s not about football. This sermon is about politics and religion, communities and love. Well, there is a vague connection to football in so much as today’s reflection is about a visceral urge that communicates itself through many things including our attractions to sports teams. It is ancient, this urge to belong. And sports is a good example; so, one can find references in antiquity for teams named red, blue, white and green. Riots could follow chariot races that would shame today’s European soccer hooligans, or even our American disgraces on basketball courts. In those days governments could on occasion rise or fall based upon their connections to one team or another and its fortunes.

I suggest in fact this urge to team, to group, to band is biological. In its simplest form we are herd animals. But we are herd animals with brains and so our deep need to belong can play out in any number of ways. In fact we need not do anything in particular – we are not chained to our genetic predispositions. And we can see it, we can examine the urge within ourselves and in our communities and consider if this mysterious force has larger significances. Here today I suggest there are. In that movement from merely genetic connection from our affections and obsessions for the group, as multitudinous as they are, sports teams, high schools, states, commonwealths and nations – all are fed by the same inner urging. What matters is less that we feel these connections, and more how we engage them, and to what purpose.

Today we mark two events that speak to a higher expression of that need to belong. Today we’ve received some new members into our community. And later we’ll be taking our second collection – where we demonstrate our broader connections to community beyond our walls. Of course today is the eve of Valentine’s Day, another marker of intimate connection – a central marker of reaching out to another. I think it’s all connected. Today I want to try and explore the deeper of this. What is it that might connect today so close to the feast of St Valentine, a worshiping community, admitting new members to our Society, taking a second collection for a cause not directly connected to us, those various connections to sporting teams, to nations and to the world itself? Let’s see.

Today I want to explore just a little the vision, the dream, if you will, that I suggest informs both our liberal faith and our American nation. And, in this, I bring words of hope. I suggest we who gather here informed as we are by some heart felt intuition of connection are in fact expressing the true ideals of both our living faith and the core of faith in our American nation. I suggest we are manifesting a dream here. It is an important dream. This dream is very important. But it is a two-edged sword – it liberates or it kills. This dream is that powerful, it’s that dangerous

In his essay, “Two Dreams of America,” philosopher Jacob Needleman tells us “Both in its everyday usage and in its etymology, the word dream includes two radically opposed meanings and points in two radically opposed directions of human life. A dream is a vision of truth, of what can be and ought to be; it shapes our fundamental intention and purpose; it calls us to the life we are meant to live and the good we are meant to serve… And a dream is a deception, a night creature of mere seeming; or a daylight phantom that draws us away from the reality of the present moment, idling the engines of our psyche and spirit in imagined pleasures or terrors. Worse yet, a dream is an illusion masquerading as a vision, as when we say of someone that his or her goals are ‘only a dream.’”

And then Jacob posits the deeper question for today. “Then, what of the American dream? (And) Is it a vision or an illusion? Do we need to deepen this dream or awaken from it?” I suggest from those grubby roots of our affections, as T. S. Eliot once said, from the biological need to belong, from our natural coming together, something profound and true is revealed. And it’s revealed within the American dream, which at its center is our Unitarian Universalist dream.

There has been a war in human hearts for a very long time. In the twentieth century in politics these contending forces have been named, for the one libertarian, or when attached to economics, capitalist. And the other has been named communal, or when made economics, communist. The one extols the virtue of the individual to the exclusion of communal claims. The other extols the claims of the common to the detriment of the individual. Don’t think for a moment that because the communist hegemony is gone that this war of ideals is over.

The catch is that both visions are wrong. That is each speaks to a partial truth. We are individuals, pure and simple. And, we belong, we need to belong, in fact we only exist within communities. When people hold one of these truths to the exclusion of the other then hurt follows like night follows day. Wars, suffering, endless cruelties – follow in the name of these partial truths when pursued alone, become false gods.

We need to understand the relationship of the individual and the community. And, I suggest, this vision, this dream perhaps mystically articulated in the American motto: E Pluribus Unim, “out of many, one” is the heart that birthed both this nation and our Unitarian Universalism. Even more, I suggest this is the mystery of love found in that interplay of the one and the other. Today I want to recall us to those emotions of connection and how they have taken place in this nation, its vision betrayed so often and so terribly, and yet burning still in so many hearts. I want to point out how our faith, as we examine it, not only can bring healing and hope to our lives, yours and mine; but may be the hope for reclaiming our nation’s dream, as well.

I have an illustration. I mentioned it in a sermon a couple of years ago. I find it particularly appropriate so I hope you don’t mind my repeating it. A decade or more ago Jan and I embarked upon a driving tour of the East Coast. We were in Washington DC, near the Mall walking around the Capital building making our way to its western side when we came upon a large complex of statues. It featured Civil War artillery grouping on one side and a cavalry grouping on the other. I learned later the whole thing is 265 feet long, and sport’s fans, that’s nearly as long as a football field.

But it’s the central statue that caught me and haunts me to this day. It’s an equestrian statue of General Ulysses S. Grant. Later when I began to research the statue I read how it was supposed to be “an accurate depiction of General Grant’s composure in the heat of battle.” But that’s not what I saw. He’s sitting on an astonishing war horse. As grand as grand can be. But there’s no sword held out for the charge, head up defying awaiting enemies. Instead, he was hunched; perhaps it would be better to say slouched - almost as if against a tremendous storm that could easily break him.

Perhaps it’s the context and the cascade of thoughts and emotions which context sometimes provides. I was certainly aware this man was a failure at everything he did from store owner to president of the United States. He did one great thing. And this statue was about that one thing. He saved the republic. Grant, failure and alcoholic, heeded a call, took charge of an army and he saved the republic. Somehow it is important to me that the statue, while very large, it stands a full sixty-five fee high, was not glorious. Rather it showed a very ordinary man, possibly even a man way in over his head. Those slouched shoulders implied as much to me.

Then in that cascade of thoughts I was aware of the positioning of the statue. The grand war horse and its rider, a failure at everything else he did in his life, were facing away from the capital, protecting it. The capital, filled as we all know, with corruption and veniality and I can’t even name the litany of foolishness of the current administration; ever as much as profound hopes and true dreams. And yet the possibility inherent within those dreams would continue, the dream was not shattered in that time almost a hundred and fifty years ago.

Here we are exploring the possibilities of seeing how we are individuals who find our meaning within relationship. With Grant we see how the individual can be raised up by the community. I hope we don’t get confused by the revisionist history asserting the civil war wasn’t about slavery, but rather states rights. There was only one state’s right at play – the right to hold human beings as slaves. Here the worm at the heart of the dream was making it a lie. And I don’t know; but I don’t see how the dream could have survived without addressing that profound evil. And here’s my point for today. I suggest in that statue we see a genuine moral imperative that can inform us and our choices. Here we see the possibility where we, as limited as we are, you and I, become a force for good in this world. Here we see how the individual and the communal can and do inform each other, and when attended to, can raise us to new heights otherwise unimaginable. Terrible and dangerous, always. But also, pointing to a new world.

Forrest Church, one of the great lights of our contemporary Unitarian Universalism suggests “The ideals we embrace are lofty ideals.” Of course he understands the complexity of it all and gently reminds us. “We will never live up to them fully. (Certainly Grant didn’t.) But, if we devote our lives to them, they challenge us daily to hearken to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Jefferson himself said, ‘It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.’ As a slaveholder he suffers the consequences of being judged by such high ideals to this very day. But his definition of religion remains valid. Deeds not creeds: that is what we stand for as Unitarian Universalists. Our theology itself – embracing so many angles of vision, so many distinctive experiences – is founded on the nation’s saving principle of E pluribus Unum (out of many, one).

In an interview published in the Whole Life Times, Jacob Needleman contends “The (current) administration is touching a nerve partially because a lot of Americans are afraid that, without some sense of sacred morality, we will become so relativistic that many will do whatever they want. The crisis of ethics in our country is the search in our culture for an ethical anchor.”

I believe we should not surrender the field of moral inquiry to the fundamentalists – to those who offer a moral certainty predicated upon a rejection of modernity and reason and good faith. We offer a moral compass that is relativistic, that does call one to individual responsibility while at the same time being dynamic, meeting each situation as it arises. This, I suggest, it is a faith grounded in the real – in what is – as well as what might be. We are, as it says outside our door, about love over creed, about deeds not creeds. And, and, this ancient dream we foster offers a saving morality. It is the path of kindness and generosity, of love manifest.

There’s been a lot of talk of late about Unitarian Universalist elevator speeches. Because our faith is faith in the individual as much as it is in association we are notoriously reluctant to name it, and possibly to cut someone out. But that also obscures the reality that we have a faith, a vision, a dream. It is dynamic and can only be expressed accurately through many voices. We must listen to each other even as we must take stands. So, the libertarian voice is valuable, it corrects the inclination to submit blindly to the crowd. So, the communal voice is valuable, it corrects the inclinations of raging ego, of a universe centered in me. So, our covenant of presence, the great gift of democracy and our Unitarian Universalist congregations is critical.

Forrest Church gives a pretty good summary of where this engaged faith in love and action takes us. First he reminds us how we believe “(m)any of the same things the nation’s founders did. (Pointing out, correctly, how) Jefferson and Adams were both Unitarians. They believed in freedom and the democratic process and so do we. Our religious principle, E Pluribus Unum, is just like the nations; out of many, one.

“We believe there is one light, one mystery, one God, call it what you will.” Personally I find the interdependent web is the most poetic and accurate name for this one. But Forrest points out how this one is a bright light that informs us, and. “The light shines through many different windows.” We need to attend to this, and foster the windows. “We model in our churches the way the world should work: mutual respect; no stone throwing; democracy; religious freedom – all in one community of celebrants and sufferers… Deeds not Creeds is our motto; liberty and justice our social platform; and love our highest law.” Love. Love over creed. Love, the mysterious force rising out of the twin truths of our precious individuality and how we are woven, each of us, out of another. Love is a dance. Love is our religion.

So here we are. Our beloved community is gathered. We have admitted our new members. Soon we’ll be collecting that second collection – symbol of our reaching out beyond the lines that separate us. And in this the way of hope and possibility is revealed. This is the way the poet Langston Hughes points to as he sings. “An ever-living seed,/Its dream/Lies deep in the heart of me.”

May that seed flower and grow.

For the sake of the world, may this healing vision of the precious individual and the mysterious web of mutuality that weaves the individual, of that mysterious truth “out of the many, one” be spread abroad. It is the way of wisdom. It is the path of peace for this world and all who live upon it.

Amen.