People Get Ready
March 16, 2008
Catherine Senghas, Ministerial Intern

“People get ready, there’s a train comin.” I’m grateful to the choir for singing this song this morning at my request. A couple of months ago I got stuck with it as an “ear worm”; you know, one of those songs you suddenly find yourself singing or humming over and over and over, and can’t get rid of. I resisted the urge to get annoyed by its persistence, and just sank into it. It’s quite lovely actually, as an image of how we might travel our religious journey together. Now I do realize that the theology that underpins the lyrics of this song might not be one shared by that everyone here. Nevertheless, I hope we might explore the notion of a shared religious journey. “You don’t need no baggage, just get on board.” I ask you this morning to think about why you are on this particular Unitarian Universalist train.

I remember when I got on board. Twenty years ago my older child, my son Mike, came home from first grade one afternoon and asked me, “Mum, so some kids go to Hebrew School on Wednesday, and some kids go to CCD on Sunday—what do we do?” Now my husband, Steve, and I had both been raised in families pretty active in their respective, but different, faith traditions. Neither of us particularly wanted to convert to the other’s tradition, and in fact, we had both sort of fallen away from our families’ religions by our mid-twenties, as was fairly common for young adults then, and perhaps still is today. Like many educated and idealistic young women I was disillusioned, even cynical, about my own church’s position on the role of women and certain social teachings. Like many of all ages, I was dismayed and discouraged by events happening all around the world in the name of religion—I didn’t want to be any part of that. But here I was, realizing that perhaps I did want to raise my children in a larger and slightly more varied social community than just the family. So we shopped around and found a church that we could both feel comfortable attending, where we could raise our children with other parents with similar values, and where we could get engaged in social action to the extent that our busy schedules permitted. We found a Unitarian Universalist church. Our church résumés for these last two decades probably read like many of your own if you’ve been here a while. We pulled our weight teaching Sunday school, pledged at appropriate levels, and were on many boards, councils, committees and projects. I heard many sermons, many quite interesting, and a few that challenged me to think about how I saw my own place in the world. It was a comfortable church life. I belonged.

Over those many years I occasionally wondered why there weren’t very many more Unitarian Universalists. It seemed like a logical sort of place for rational yet compassionate individuals. But we only had then, and still only have now, about 200,000 Unitarian Universalists in the whole United States. 200,000! What’s with that? When friends and work colleagues learned that I went to a Unitarian Universalist church they sometimes asked what it was like, and I’d tell them about the Seven Principles and Unitarian Universalism being creedless, and then they’d usually reply that they were “spiritual” but not “religious” and therefore not needing a church, no matter how liberal. Frankly, I thought of myself also as “spiritual but not religious”, and mainly belonging to a church as part of the support system for raising our children. How many Unitarian Universalist parents think that? How many leave us after their children age out of religious education—maybe only staying in touch socially with their church friends?

As human beings we sometimes have life experiences that challenge our understanding of reality and what it means to be human. I have had a few such experiences that make me realize that being “religious” is not a choice. It is part of our human nature. We are bound to one another, which by my understanding is all that “religious” really means, from the Latin “re ligare”, to bind or to fasten. We need one another in times of hardship and loss, and we want to share together the life events that mark the milestones of our personal existence—birth, coming of age, joining together with a life partner, death, and others. There are secular ways to deal with these events, but I personally have experienced the need for deeper meaning at these times. And I have witnessed occasions when people close to me who are not part of any faith tradition have wandered through these situations much more adrift than I wished to see them. How I wished they had a church community like mine!

As I’ve mentioned before from this pulpit, it was the events of September 11, 2001, that prompted me to download the application to theological school and to explore how I might help the Unitarian Universalist movement by being part of its formal ministry, and how I might help support others in their search for deeper meaning in times of spiritual challenge. For a while I was able to integrate my studies alongside my pre-existing career, and although studying did have a big impact on my free time, I still enjoyed all the satisfaction and benefits of my professional work at the feminist research institution where I was well entrenched on the management team. But as I traveled further and further down the path of ministerial formation, I came to the fork in the road, like the one described in the Frost poem that we heard sung as the anthem earlier, where I took the path less traveled and left my financial career behind. I figured that if things didn’t work out, I could always go back…. As Frost wrote, “Oh, I kept the first for another day! _Yet knowing how way leads on to way, _I doubted if I should ever come back.” I care that much about the future of this denomination, this movement, whatever you want to call it. I care that much about opening our theologically liberal community to others.

Still only 200,000 Unitarian Universalists…how can I help change that so that we might make more than just a minor ripple on the surface of our society? I can tell you that many others have figured out that people need religious connections in times of spiritual challenge and they are working in the prisons and in the military to try to impose their various fundamentalist beliefs systemically in those arenas. Did you know that last year there was a federal order to remove from prison chapel libraries any religious materials that weren’t on a pre-approved list of resources? Luckily, due to sufficient resistance from prison chaplains and others, that was overturned. And we see it in our country’s politics working its way into the presidential campaigns. Do we care, as long as we have our own comfortable autonomous religious community here? Are we, as sometimes accused, individualistic to the core? I’ll tell you what I’d love to see in my own lifetime—two million Unitarian Universalists, a tenfold increase.

Now I’m not sure that the way we are going about this currently in our religious movement is the most fruitful way. Time Magazine, targeted growth markets for other media advertising, billboards…. I’m leaning more toward what Curtis Mayfield advised; “Picking up passengers coast to coast. Faith is the key, open the doors and board them, there’s hope for all.” I’m suggesting that if we worked more deliberately in community on our own spiritual development, we might want to stay past the time our children grew up, and we might attract many others who want a place to grow spiritually in community.

I’ve had the pleasure and privilege lately to have had individual conversations with some of the Coming of Age candidates. These eighth graders have to interview either [Rev.] James [Ford] or me as one of the many elements of that year-long adventure. They’ve just embarked on the exercise of creating their credos, which will be presented to us in mid-May at the services that culminate the Coming of Age program. One candidate expressed being a little hesitant about putting beliefs down in writing and reading them publicly, “What if I change my mind later?” “Ah,” I said, “but you will change your mind later! I certainly don’t believe now what I believed when I was fourteen, or for that matter, twenty-four, or forty. Your credo is just a sort of a snapshot.” When I started seminary I was pretty sure I did not believe in God; now I think that perhaps I might, but it’s not a God that is a “being.” How often do we deliberately examine and talk about what it is that we do believe? It’s not that we don’t bump into the big questions all the time: “Is this the work I want to be doing with my life? What has really happened to my loved one’s presence in my life now that death has separated us?” You no doubt have others.

We often hear the fourth of our seven Unitarian Universalist principles cited, the one that affirms and promotes a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. I’d like to lift up the third principle today, the one that more specifically affirms and promotes acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations. There are lots of different faith traditions, lots of trains, and the people that travel on them had all sorts of different starting points and are heading for different ultimate destinations. But for the folks that board our particular Unitarian Universalist train, we are all in this together for the time that we share our spiritual journey. I encourage you to take advantage of the many ways you might tend to your own spiritual growth here—the small group ministries, the wide variety of adult education classes offered, and conversations with your ministers. I guarantee you that too many years of heavy involvement only in administrative committees and social events will eventually drain you and not strengthen your spirit for the times when you will be challenged by the inevitable events of our human condition. I confess that I myself was often more tied up in the work of running our congregation than in my own personal spiritual development. I had to find the latter in seminary—which of course is not a convenient way for most people, and as my dear husband will agree, is a very expensive way.

Here’s my next suggestion—invite your friends, neighbors, and colleagues to visit this society sometime to discover what it is that we have here that they will not find elsewhere. Invite them not just to our fundraising events, but also to our services and events and classes. Invite them to discover the ways we are free to explore the deeper meaning of life in this religious community. Let’s not just rely on people finding us through the Internet! In our reading earlier we heard the words of John Murray, one of the early Universalist ministers preaching in the late eighteenth century in America, encouraging Universalists to spread their hopeful theological message: “You may possess only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and surely he also meant women].”

Our theological context today is not quite the same as Murray’s, but his message applies—if we have good news to share about exploring the meaning of life as experienced in our theologically very open religion, let’s share that. What kind of world do you want? Are you ready to work for it? I’m hoping that you might be willing to dig deep into your talents and treasure not only to sustain and expand the work of this religious society, FUSN, but also of our larger Unitarian Universalist movement.

People get ready, there’s a train comin’. Open the doors!
Amen.
1 Cited in Charles A. Howe, A Larger Faith: A Short History of American Universalism (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1993), p. 9