In this quiet moment may we make a connection with our higher self, the person we would become: more patient and forbearing, more forgiving, more compassionate and understanding, more courageous before the wrongs that must be righted. Here, may we acknowledge our debt to the good and just from whom we have received benefits; here, may we be moved to revere the ideals of love and mercy. Here let us hold a mirror to our lives that we may acknowledge our failures and mercifully forgive ourselves; here, let us leave some of our burdens and hurts, our feelings of unworthiness, our grudges. With us here may the lonely find friends, the defeated be encouraged, the sore beset by temptation reminded of their loyalty – – and in the warmth of this community may each find a need supplied. So would we dwell together in peace, seek truth in love, and be of help to one another. Amen

Reading, by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman

God bless my mother, and God blessed me. We made it through. She had a stroke and a long period of rehabilitation, and it was clear she was going to have to stay with us for a while. I had all these things in my mind: it was a chance to pay her back for all those years. There were these things I was going to help clear up, like the way she was thinking. I wanted to do the whole job very well, this big opportunity. We should all feel good about it at the end. Little things like that. Some “ little”!

Fights? Classics, like only a mother and daughter can have. And my mother is a great fighter, from the old school of somehow loving it and been very good at it and getting a kind of ecstatic look in your eye when you’re really into it. I guess I’m exaggerating. It drives me a little crazy. I hate to argue. Oh well...

But it got bad. Over a hard-boiled egg, we had a bad fight. We’d both got worn out, irritable, and frustrated. Boom! I don’t remember, what about – – just about how it was all going, and why her stay had gotten difficult and all of us had become more and more irritable and short tempered.

In the middle of it, she stopped short and said, “Why are you doing all this for me anyway?” It sort of hit me, and I started to list all the reasons. They just came out: I was afraid for her; I wanted to get her well; I felt maybe I’d ignored her when I was younger; I needed to show her I was strong; I needed to get her ready for going home alone; old age; and on and on. I was amazed at myself. I could have gone on giving reasons all night. Even she was impressed.

“Junk,” she said, when I was done.

“Junk?” I yelled. Like, boy, she’d made a real mistake with that remark. I could really get her.

“Yes, junk,” she said again, but a little more quietly, and that little-more-quietly tone got me. And she went on: “you don’t have to have all those reasons. We love each other. That’s enough.”

When she said that, it really turned me around. I felt like a child again. Having your parents show you something that’s true, but you don’t feel put down – – you feel better, because it’s true, and you know it, even though you are a child. I said, “You’re right. You’re really right. I’m sorry.” she said, “Don’t be sorry. Junk is fine. It’s what you don’t need any more. I love you.”

It was a wonderful moment, and the fight stopped, which my mother accepted a little reluctantly. No, I’m joking – – she was very pleased. She saw how it all was. Everything after that was just, well, easier – – less pressure, less trying, less pushing, happening more by itself. And the visit ended up fine. We just spent time together, and then she went back to her house.

Sermon: Do the Hokey Pokey and Turn Yourself Around: Community and Meaning

Living in community is pretty much like dancing the Hokey Pokey. Do you remember how it goes? It starts out pretty much like the disconnected body parts of Sydney’s story. The right hand goes in, then the left hand, then each leg. Finally the parts are all together, and we put our whole self in and turn ourselves around.

This reflection on arms and legs dancing was prompted by a suggestion I received several months ago from one of our members. The card reads, “Alan Watts states that ‘fellowship with other people gives one a sense of meaning.’ How about helping us recognize what being part of the church’s fellowship means in our alienated, apparently ofttimes hostile society?”

This request reflects the basic ambiguity in American culture, the conflicting values individuality and community. We are constantly torn between wanting to protect ourselves and keep our options open, and wanting to be part of a larger communal entity that would allow us to stop being so self protective. We can’t decide which is more important, person or place, self our society.

When we focus on ourselves as individuals, we are concerned primarily with the question of rights. We want to protect ourselves from the demands and encroachments of the larger society. We fear the mob. We prize our privacy; we want distance between ourselves and our neighbors. And we make judgments based on what’s good for number one.

When we focus on ourselves as members of the community, the concern for rights is replaced by a concern for responsibilities. We know that a community only functions to the extent that its members are willing to do the work required. We know that each member has a role to play, a job to do, a calling to fulfill. And our judgments are based on how the act in question will affect our community. One of our biggest challenges is defining the extent of our responsibility, the boundaries of our fellowship.

Now, meaning is usually a matter of comparisons that take note of similarities and differences, at least when we try to arrive at the meaning of words. Ask a Unitarian Universalist, what she believes in, and the first things you’re likely to hear will be a list of things she doesn’t believe in. We start out defining ourselves by showing what we aren’t, the ways we differ from most people’s ideas about religion.

Because we don’t require a sense to any creed, we have a harder time trying to define what we do believe in. We’re pretty amorphous. Sometimes it feels as though we exist primarily as a place for separate individuals can come together to practice being unique.

But we do place demands on each other, and we do accept responsibilities within the church community. Those demands and responsibilities or the glue of our congregation. They enable us to become more than a crowd of unique identities. It’s by looking at those demands that we begin to see another kind of meaning taking shape from our company.

It isn’t necessarily a meaning that can be expressed in a belief statement. It has more to do with our process, the ways we try to be with one another, the ways we learn from one another, the truth we shape and reshape together, the context of our love for one another.

For one thing, we start with the awareness that we are all unique, and we celebrate that breadth of difference. Some of us believe in God, and others find that strange, but we agree that this difference is fertile soil. We can grow something here. Some of us believe in the goddess, and others find that strange, but we agree that this difference is stimulating. We can learn from one another.

Some of us believe that this world and all life on it are the results of a complicated series of fortunate physical accidents, and others find that strange, because they believe the world reflects a master plan, but we agreed that this difference is provocative. It keeps us from complacency. In fact, we encourage each other to be as articulate and reflective as possible about our differing beliefs, for the good of the common effort. We want to be challenged in our comfort, stirred by the insights of others, pushed to rebut arguments that come from a different mindset. Like the mother in the reading I shared earlier, we take pleasure in the exchange.

In part the meaning of our community is that we sharpened one another and expect the best from one another.

A second layer of meaning in our community comes from our willingness to do the necessary work of the church, serving on committees on the board, helping with the fleamarket, setting up chairs and tables and taking them down again, serving coffee, handing out programs, teaching in the church school, pulling weeds in the flower beds, repairing light switches.

Each of these activities is a gift we freely give to the larger whole – – and each of these activities helps us define our place in the larger whole. These are things we can do, responsibilities, we accept, ministries, we perform. They are ways in which the community helps us be useful and involved. They are expressions of our sense of ownership of our place in the congregation. So the second layer of meaning and connection in our community is work.

Dozens of us regularly help with all the things that have to be done around here. But there is also an anomaly to this level of meaning: we have a dickens of a time finding people who are willing to organize and lead the congregation. Trying to find committee chairs is often a heartbreaking series of no’s. We’ll do jobs that we can pitch in and get done, but only a limited number of us are willing to make large commitments of time and effort. To the extent that we are unwilling to take on the really responsible positions in the congregation, we are less a community than a gathering, and this saddens me. It’s one of the ways that the centrifugal forces of our culture are stronger than the forces that pull us together. It is also, therefore, one of the areas in which our community is being tested.

Another way we are being tested has to do with feeling able to trust and with accepting vulnerability. We do a very good job of taking care of each other. When someone in the church is sick, members provide meals and transportation, take care of children and pets, visit the sick in the hospital. When someone loses a family member to death, the congregation reaches out to give support and encouragement. When someone comes is diagnosed with a scary disease, others who have already dealt with the disease circle around to offer the gift of their experience. This is important, face to face, person to person work. It’s the part of church life in which we touch each other most deeply. And it happens because some members are able to tell others that they are vulnerable, and it happens because others, reminded of their own vulnerability, have learned to respond from it. So at this level of interaction, the community is about holding one another, comforting and being comforted.

Finally, I hold up the kind of experience that comes to those who accept the highest levels of responsibility, serving on the board and acting as President. These people have the task of making the hard decisions, allocating funds among many who request them, and cutting funds when money is short; dealing with conflicts between persons; making plans for several years in the future; deciding what to ask of the congregation in terms of money and time; and facing the ambiguity of being at the same time both friends and leaders. For these folks, especially, the meaning of our community is life, with all its peculiarities and surprises.

We arrive here initially as strangers, and slowly we make connections, we find our way into the group, and eventually we come to a point at which we began to understand that we have to start taking responsibility for the well-being of the community – – we make a financial pledge, we accept a position on the committee, we agree to teach a class, but at the back of our minds is the question, How much can I do? How much my willing to do? What is my share? And we learned that the community poses questions for us that we had not previously considered, because it asks us to make a commitment, to move from being a separate individual to be part of a large organism, to move from attending to belonging.

And we find ourselves confronted with questions, which we ask of ourselves, no one else puts them to us, questions like, Who am I? What do I hold true in my life? What’s the point of my life? What do I have to give? What am I called to give? What is my role at this moment in history? And where is God in all this?

We find that we have to work on ourselves in order to work in the community, and that working in the community is a pathway to discovering ourselves. We begin to resolve the tension between being an individual and being part of a larger whole. And we discover that the answers we work out within this community help us to do the work of the larger society and to go about creating communities of meaning within it.

So deriving meaning from community is like doing the Hokey Pokey. (You were wondering if I would ever get back to the Hokey Pokey, weren’t you?) You remember how the dance goes... First of all you need a circle of people, you can’t do it alone. Then the songs tells you to put your right hand in, and immediately it introduces a note of ambiguity by telling you to take your right hand out. But the pull of the community overcomes your reticence, and you put your right hand in again, and you shake it all about, greeting the folks in the circle, who are all greeting you as well. And it feels so good that you celebrate by doing the Hokey Pokey, waving your hands in the air and turning yourself around.

Then you do the same thing with other parts of your body, your left hand, your right foot, your left foot, your head, and by this time the circle is starting to feel like home, it isn’t you who’s doing the dance, it’s us. And just to make that point. The next instruction is to put your backside in and shake it all about, and this is so silly that we all laugh at ourselves, because we all know that there have been plenty of times in our lives that we have bumbled about doing things backside first. And we do the Hokey Pokey and we turn ourselves around, and now that turning around means getting our directions straight.

And then all those separate arms and legs and eyes and ears come together as one body, and we make the big plunge, the commitment: we put our whole selves in, and it feels so good we shake it all about, and we discover that the notion of self has become hazy, not because we have lost identity, but because our identity has enlarged so much that we can’t see the boundaries between our lives and those of our colleagues in the dance, and now we are truly turned around and everything is different, and that question that was so tentative a while back about where God is in all this begins to have an answer – – God, whatever that name means, is working through me, through you, through is, and that thought really turn this around, and we have discovered the final dimension of a community, which is that the community is holy, and that blows our minds. And that’s what it’s all about!

And that’s what it’s all about.

Stewardship Story

A Scotsman had applied for admission to the New York City police force, and is part of the screening process, he was asked questions about his general approach to problems that he might encounter as a cop. He’d already explained how he would deal with two drivers who were shouting at each other about who caused a traffic accident and how he would treat a drunk sleeping in a doorway and how he would respond to a woman’s screen. “Now then,” said the inspector, glowering at him meaningfully, “how would you act in dispersing a large and argumentative crowd?”

“Weel,” replied the Scotsman, “I’m not too sure how ye do it here in New York. But in Aberdeen, we just passed the hat around, and they soon began to shuffle off.”

Now we have the opposite intent. We would like to gather a large crowd, even an argumentative one. Weekly. Right here in this building. But we want people who will stick, who won’t shuffle off when the hat goes around. Willingness to provide monetary support for what one believes in. Our benefits from is one of the things that distinguish it church from a crowd. In order to gather that crowd, we have to keep the churchgoing, the lights glowing, the heat flowing, so that people will have something to join. Sydney and I try to do our part by keeping things stirred up guess what your part is.

Closing Words

In community we learn who we are. The more of ourselves we put in, the more context we have for self-discovery. The more we identify with the community, the more we discover that our lives have turned around, that we have a new direction and a larger sense of what we are here for. Let’s put our whole selves in.