– From Passage to India, by Walt Whitman – read by The Rev. Dennis J. Daniel
Passage, O soul, to India! Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables. Not you alone, proud truths of the world! Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science! But myths and fables of eld—Asia’s, Africa’s fables! 20 The far-darting beams of the spirit!—the unloos’d dreams! The deep diving bibles and legends; The daring plots of the poets—the elder religions; —O you temples fairer than lilies, pour’d over by the rising sun! O you fables, spurning the known, eluding the hold of the known, mounting to heaven! 25 You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, burnish’d with gold! Towers of fables immortal, fashion’d from mortal dreams! You too I welcome, and fully, the same as the rest; You too with joy I sing.
– From Will and Spirit, by Gerald May – read by Eric Landberg
Willingness implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering into, an immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one is already a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is the setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence... Willingness and willfulness do not apply to specific things or situations. They reflect instead the underlying attitude one has toward the wonder of life itself. Willingness notices this wonder and bows in some kind of reverence to it. Willfulness forgets it, ignores it, or at its worst, actively tries to destroy it.
– From The Dance, by Oriah Mountain Dreamer – read by The Rev. Sydney K. Wilde
What if your contribution to the world and the fulfillment of your own happiness is not dependent upon discovering a better method of prayer or technique of meditation, not dependent upon reading the right book or attending the right seminar, but upon really seeing and deeply appreciating yourself and the world as they are right now?
Sermon: ‘Til We Meet Again – Revs. Dennis Daniel and Sydney Wilde
– Lover of Leaving: Our plans for Our Sabbatical – Dennis
Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving; Ours is no caravan of despair; Come, yet again come.
I have pondered the meaning of the phrase, lover of leaving, since I first heard the song several years ago. What I think it means is an ability to hold the circumstances of our life loosely, acknowledging that things change and we change, the people around us change, and what we thought we could depend on last year no longer avails. The skills that enabled us to prosper in one era of our lives are not sufficient to the needs of a new time. The resources that energized our work in the past become depleted. The understanding that used to give meaning to our world no longer serves because the world has moved in a new direction.
All of this is true for ministers. Sydney and I are both aware that we need some fallow time, time to take in new ideas and new experiences, to gain new perspectives, and to acquire some new tools. We need a rest from telephone calls and emails. We need time to absorb new energy without having to give back, time to reflect, time to learn. In short, we need a sabbatical.
The idea of the sabbatical comes from the old Jewish notion of the Sabbath, the day of rest, and from the sabbatical year, the year in which the fields were allowed to lie fallow in order to replenish their fruitfulness. Since ministers seldom get to experience a real Sabbath, the sabbatical year is planned into our contracts with our congregations. However, churches are reluctant to lose the services of their clergy for a full year at a time, so we take our sabbaticals in shorter pieces, but more frequently – in our case, for five months after five years of service – actually, we will be away for six months, because we are combining our sabbatical with our vacation, but we aren’t starting until the end of five and a half years, so it comes out about even.
Needless to say, we have been making plans. It’s actually hard to convince ourselves that what we need is real fallow time. We feel a need to be productive, to make this time count – after all, we’re being paid to do this, so we have put together lists of places to go, things to do, people to talk to, books to read, projects to complete. It all sounds exhausting when we just rattle off all the stuff we have said we want to do. However, we will not have to attend a single committee or board meeting in all that time, which means we will be able to move at our own pace, without interruptions. We may finally complete a thought...
So, yes, we will go to Europe for two weeks, and we will attend a couple of ministers’ retreats to collect data and oral histories, and we will partake of religious services in other places, and we will read, read, read. I have plans to put together a book of my stewardship homilies, and I will take another week at the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral. We will visit family and be nourished by the landscape of northern California. And we will finally get to put away the Christmas things and clear our desks and reshelve the books that have strayed from their proper places, and if we are lucky we won’t have whole weeks eaten up by computer problems. (We both remember with dread the computer that ate August).
The purpose of all this is to be able to come back in August with a renewed sense of call and a new readiness for ministry. For that to happen, we are also going to have to open ourselves to the unplanned and allow ourselves to be fed from unexpected sources. I have been reading the novel Gilead this last week, and the song, There is a balm in Gilead, has been running in my head:
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole; There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul. Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain, But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.
In order for our sabbatical to revive us, we are going to have to open ourselves to the Spirit as it shapes itself in our lives. We will visit medieval cathedrals and cathedral groves among the redwoods, we will hear music of many varieties. We will read the travails and dramas of dozens of characters, and we will listen to lots and lots of sermons delivered by lots and lots of preachers, and for any of it to give us what we really need, we are going to have to put aside the whole idea that we are in control of this experience and allow ourselves just to listen to the song of the hills. We are going to have to say Yes to the wonders we will experience and let them affect us. We are going to have to learn to receive.
One of my favorite poems, unfortunately too long and too dense in its language to read aloud in a worship service, is Richard Wilbur’s “On a Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Wilbur compares two fountains, actually, for he looks first at the rising columns of water in the Piazza before St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, water striving to raise itself against the constraints of gravity and falling then to patter on the pavement in its own applause. Too often, he says, this is the model on which we shape our lives. In contrast, he offers the statue of a faun in the Villa Sciarra, with its goat-like legs and human torso. The faun holds an enormous scallop shell into which water falls from above. Its cup runneth over, and the faun is serene in its acceptance of what comes to it, like Saint Francis, says the poet, lying in Sister Snow. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
– No Caravan of Despair: The Church Takes a Sabbatical, Too – Sydney
Come, come, whoever you are, Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving; Ours is no caravan of despair; Come, yet again come.
Imagine a “caravan of despair,” wandering in the wilderness, lost and unsure of its direction. Perhaps, it has passed this place many times before, unable to find its bearings.
When Ministers go on sabbatical, congregations should have a sabbatical too. You also need a time to reflect and renew, a time to get your bearings, and determine new directions, lest the well worn path become stale.
As Dennis and I look back at the history of this church and especially at the 5 ½ years we have been with you, two observations stand out.
1) Number one, every time we undertake to write a new Vision/Mission Statement the results come out pretty much the same.
Our congregation has covenanted to be “an inclusive and caring spiritual community.” Our Vision is to be a beacon of a free and liberal faith. The Mission of our church is “to inspire responsibility in achieving social justice. To care for each other, the larger community, our environment and the interdependent web of life.”
It is as though each time we come around, we sight on the same star, our guiding light, and say “Yes” that is who we are and what we want to be. We know who we are! And, we know what we want to become! Ours is no caravan of despair; we have our bearings. We have chosen our path.
2) Our second observation is that over the last 4 years we have focused on our new building. That has been our dream: to finally have the space to meet our own needs and to allow us to be that beacon on Mt. Reston, and to care for the larger community.
The last report that I heard from the Building Expansion Committee is that we are getting very near to the realization of our dream. The current estimate is that we will break ground early next Fall!
The question that crosses my mind is “Then what?”
What Dennis and I hope for you during the sabbatical time is that you as a congregation will take the opportunity to pause, reflect, and renew. We would hope that during the next several months, between now and next September, you will reflect on how we become all we want to be after the building is in place. Sabbatical can be a time for variety and experimentation.
You will experience many different people in this pulpit. Some will follow our general orders of service and some will create their own forms of worship, and all will have their own perspectives to share. You will get to know our new Music Director and have a chance to participate in new ways with new music. You will be offered a range of adult programs and encouraged to create your own. And your Board will provide a congregational assessment process that will allow you to reflect on the gifts which UUCR has to give and will urge you to consider not only Who we are and What we want to become, but How do we achieve the goals we set for ourselves.
That process begins tonight. A steering committee appointed by the Board will meet with Dennis and me and a facilitator, a Unitarian Universalist from Alban Institute, the premiere organization in the country for church consultants. We will discuss the ways in which this congregation welcomes, nurtures and serves its members. We will reflect on both the strengths and the areas that need change. We will articulate a vision for the future of our church that will engage and revitalize our congregation as we move through and beyond the building project.
Tomorrow the consultant, Larry Peers, a person whom Dennis and I know and trust, will meet with just the two of us to suggest some resources and some areas of growth that we can pursue while we are on sabbatical.
The second phase of this process will involve the entire congregation in the assessment and achievement of your goals. The process will continue throughout the spring and summer.
In September, on either the first or second Sunday, we will all meet together to discuss the insights that we discovered in our travels and studies, and the discoveries and goals which you as a congregation have determined while we were away. Together we will decide how we can best proceed into the future to achieve our mutually derived goals.
Our colleagues tell us that the purpose of a sabbatical for a minister is to re-vision the ministry. And the purpose of sabbatical for the congregation is to revision the future of the church. When we return, we look forward to rejoining the caravan as we journey together in new directions.
– Come, Yet Again Come: September Song – Dennis
Come, come, whoever you are, says Rumi, who wrote the words to the chant we have been examining this morning. Come, whoever you are. That invitation extends beyond questions of diversity and acceptance of others, which is what usually comes first to our minds. Come, whoever you are, is also an invitation to self-examination. Whoever are you? Whoever am I? Whoever are we, as a congregation?
The question of true identity is one we flirt with all our lives, as we try on new self-concepts as teens and as we test ourselves in work, in marriage, in ambition and failure as adults. Identity is not a fixed quality. It develops with experience, trial, challenge and discovery. And six months is quite enough time to work changes in both personal and group identities. When we come together again in September, we will all be different. Coming back together will have some of the feel of starting out as new ministers in a new church.
For Sydney and me, the time away will allow us to broaden our experience in several focused areas. We have projects in mind. We know what we will be trying to learn. We go out with the intention of coming back renewed and better prepared to meet the needs of the congregation. I hope we will also come back with a deeper understanding of ourselves, both in terms of our gifts and our needs, and a new appreciation of life in all its beauty and terror. The congregational self-assessment process that Sydney described may result in a greater self-understanding on the part of the church as well. We hope so.
I offer to you all the same challenge I find myself giving to the Lay Ministers and the ministerial students I work with as I help them craft their sermons: Go deeper. Go deeper, to the point that you are having to struggle to get in touch with the meanings and the hopes that lie well beneath the surface. Go deeper.
Every congregation, like every family, is dysfunctional in its own special way. Part of the learning process we hope you will all engage in over the next six months, will be a bringing to the surface of the dysfunctional patterns we have learned to accept and by which we have learned to live. What has kept this congregation at somewhere between 200 and 240 members year after year, in spite of our constant hope that we will grow larger?
Why do we have so much trouble organizing certain normal functions of a church, like having a trained cadre of ushers? A men’s league? A women’s alliance? A regular calendar of social activities?
Go deeper.
Why is it so difficult to find officers and board members every year? Why does serving as president take such a toll on the person occupying that position? Why do we find it so difficult to define the requirements and privileges of membership? Why do certain committees thrive while others need to be reinvented every couple of years? Why is it so difficult to define Unitarian Universalism, and does that fact somehow affect our ability to serve ourselves? Why do we work so hard to avoid conflict when we say we believe in diversity, which ought to translate as difference? What questions lie so deep in our collective psyche that I’m not yet aware of them?
Go deeper.
And what keeps us thriving as a congregation in spite of all these systemic imparements? This is a healthy church, is spite of its quirks. How does that happen?
I hope that you will ponder some of these questions while we are away. Putting new structures in place will not accomplish much if we do nothing to resolve the systemic problems. We’ve tried new structures every couple of years and the problems persist. Look deeper. You may discover that working at a deeper level of reality puts you in touch with true satisfactions. You may even have epiphanies. You may receive clarifying visions of the beauty and terror of our congregational life. I hope so.
I hope that when we all come back together in September we will bring a freshness and an enthusiasm for what will, in effect, be a new ministry. Sydney and I will be different and the church will be different. If we have done things right, we will all be a tad more real with each other. We will enter a new phase of life together, another verse of our song, a bolder YES to life. Come, yet again, come.
In the meantime, we wish you a safe and satisfying journey. Like Thoreau, may you travel widely in Reston, while we travel widely across oceans and continents.
Benediction – by Marta Flanagan
And now, wanderers all, through the valleys and the mountains, we go forth. May the blessings of creation be ours and may the memory and the promise be our inspiration. Go in peace. Amen.