SOUND THE CHORUS
James Ishmael Ford
11 September 2005

Welcome back. It is so good to see you all. Welcome home. Today our principal activity is Gathering the Waters, where each of us is invited to come forward and to share our hearts with each other as we come back from this long summer. That can take a bit of time so my remarks here are going to be brief. What I think might be most helpful is to share some about how one might most profitably engage the emotional swirl of events with which we are living and to consider how we might avoid being overwhelmed, and instead, do both ourselves and the world a little good.

First a story from ancient times. In that far away place it was not uncommon for some people to step out of the rhythms we think of as ordinary life, to give up family and profession and instead to devote themselves to lives of meditation and, hopefully, the achievement of wisdom. This was generally seen as work on behalf of the whole community so these people who’d renounced personal comfort and striving were supported in various ways.

One woman who didn’t have a lot, but enough; allowed one of these mendicants to build a small hut on her property and beyond that she made sure he had food to eat and water to drink. After a few years she decided she should put the monk to a test. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but she did it. The woman asked her eighteen-year old daughter to go to the monk with his daily food and for once to stay a little and flirt with him. I really don’t think this was a right thing, but that’s what she did.

When her daughter returned the woman asked how it went, and the girl said the monk looked at her and replied, “I feel nothing. My eyes are like ashes.” The woman immediately grabbed her hoe went down to the hut, beat the monk with several harsh blows and drove him off. She then burnt the hut to the ground, declaring she had wasted good food on that wretch and wanted no memory of her foolishness.

Let’s set the story aside for a moment and reflect on our situation right now. What a beginning to our church year! Echoes of disaster reverberate all around us: the Gulf coast devastated, New Orleans nearly destroyed, our co-religionists in Transylvania flooded and in many cases shifted from poor to destitute, and today, of course, the anniversary of the worst single direct attack on our country in its history. Among our own Unitarian Universalist community of faith in New Orleans one of our churches appears completely destroyed; the other two are badly damaged. People are hurting.

And in the face of it all, here we are. In this gathering there is something curious and compelling. In our presence, each of us to the other, and to the great world itself, I suggest we have a key to a whole life. Let’s look just a little closer.

The other day I found myself watching a snippet of a worship service on TV. It was being held somewhere down on the Gulf coast. The congregation was sitting on folded metal chairs in the open air. The minister was fully robed, it was obvious he was an Episcopal priest – the robes were way too nice to be Catholic or even Lutheran. He began by describing their church building. As he detailed the interior of a beautiful and loved sanctuary it quickly became clear the open space they were sitting in was the site of that church. It was obvious he was speaking from what would from now be memory. As he continued his litany of detail his voice cracked, he choked, he paused. And then he said “Of course that wasn’t the church.” He paused again, and he looked at that rather beaten down crowd of people sitting in those old and battered chairs and he said, “You are the church.”

I thought of this old building in which we sit together and how after a fire or some similar terrible catastrophe someone could have described this building with the same detail and emotion expressed by that minister. I saw how he looked at the congregation and I thought of you. It was hard not to feel strong emotions wash over me, in fact I did, if you’ll forgive a difficult metaphor right now, I felt a flood of emotion, a rather different flood than that which devastated so many lives. This community, this gathering, this Society of freedom and faith has built some serious memories within this building, our beloved monstrosity.

But the church, temple, the mosque, the gathered community, the Society, the heart and truth of what we are, like for that community sitting together in the ruins of its building is nothing less than you. And you. And you. And you. I think it worthwhile to recall that today, as rough as it is, is also Gerry Krick’s birthday. Most people here know Gerry; he served this community as its minister for nearly twenty years. We’ve also acknowledged already those members of this congregation who have stepped forward to take the reins of leadership for this coming year. We’ve acknowledged our Coming of Age candidates and those who will help guide them in this most important year of their lives. And we’ve collected food and money for those in need.

We’re engaged. This is axiomatic to our faith. It is the core of that nineteenth century Unitarian slogan “salvation by character.” We pay close attention to what we do. And we do. As a quick aside, please note our Social Action committee will be meeting after coffee hour. I hope some of you might feel this is a good time to join. We see salve, healing, the care and joy of the world is in some ways in our hands. Certainly as we directly engage the world there should be no doubt we are about the business of God.

And there are traps here. To follow an authentic spiritual path is to walk a narrow way with precipices on either side. To fall into one is to fall into the trap of obsession. We can be so caught up in the work that we forget who we are. The actions of service or justice consume us. This leads to that situation you may have occasionally seen where a peace activist might turn out to be the angriest person you know. To cling too tightly to what we’re doing is to miss the point of interconnection.

The other precipice is that of dis-engagement. Here we find the error of that monk in the story. Eyes like ashes. A correct response was not to flirt back, or not seriously to flirt back – but to acknowledge the humanity of the girl, to acknowledge the monk’s own humanity. To be authentic, to be genuinely spiritual, to be genuinely useful, one must feel, fully. This reminds me how Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please – you can never have both.”

We’re about truth. We’re about not turning away. Now, also, let me demur from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a bit. There is peace in this way of truth. But we can’t take cheap peace, mere repose, eyes like ashes, and confuse that for wisdom.

So, what do we do? How do we stay on the path? How do we continue our work of love and engagement? It really is pretty simple. We maintain a wide heart and an open mind. We feel the sorrow and horror of the world – full. And at the same time, we feel the beauty of the world, full. We turn from nothing. But neither do we wallow. We accomplish this through several kinds of discipline. One is to be quiet occasionally and to allow ourselves to notice that larger place. Another is to belong to a community of care and concern.

That takes me back to us, to you and you and you. As we come together, as we undertake the discipline of presence, of listening with open hearts; not only to our own story, but to each other’s then doors open for us and the world. Our teacher Walt Whitman sang “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”

Feel full. Experience full. This is in fact part of our discipline. It means we need constantly to open our hearts, constantly to open our minds. We need to avoid being right; and instead to remain curious and engaged. So, perhaps of course, we come together. This is the secret of our way, this gathering and sharing and presence is a core spiritual practice for us. We share ourselves with each other. We are present to each other in our sorrow and our joy.

And in that something is revealed. It is nothing less than the way through; it is the secret truth of that other great nineteenth century slogan, this one from our Universalist heritage: love over creed. This is what we’re up to.

And once again it begins. In the great rhythm of forgetting and remembering, of action and repose, once again we are here.

The great work is open. Let’s throw our hearts open. Let’s recall the dance. Let’s sing the chorus of faith. Our community has gathered.

Amen.

Amen.