Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

January 4, 1998

For one needs only
to be turned around
once,
eyes shut in this world
to be lost
Not ‘til we are lost
do we begin
to find
ourselves.

--Walden
Henry David Thoreau

I have to admit that being lost is a common phenomenon for me—no doubt of it, I am geographically and spacially challenged. I often experience a sensation that is the opposite of deja vu—I come to a place I’ve been hundreds of times, and I look around and say to myself, "You know, I’ve never been here before!" I’ve found various solutions, though, like living next to an ocean. That helps. Portland is easier than some places for people like me—at least we have a river that divides the city into east and west. When I get lost, I imagine a big map in the sky. I imagine Sunset Highway going west, like the sun sets, to the ocean, and then I know where I am—sort of.

Once I used to be impatient with myself and blame myself when I got lost, but now I accept that spacial orientation is simply not my gift. I try to forgive myself and get on with it. Sometimes I even have new adventures by going an alternative route. Like the time last year when I got lost in North Carolina. I was there preaching for a Celebration Sunday event, staying at a bed and breakfast just outside of Chapel Hill. Somehow I got on the wrong road and went for ten or fifteen miles before I realized I was out in the country. I pulled into a small grocery and filling station, and went inside, flustered and frustrated. There I saw a "good ole boy" in a red-billed cap smiling up at me. I said, in my best Southern accent, "I’m lost!" And he responded, "You’re not lost, Honey, you’re right here--you just don’t know where you’re going!" He was right, of course.

I’ve thought about his words many times since. What does it mean to be lost? What does it mean to be saved? And how do you figure out where you’re going?

My institutional religious life hasn’t been all that helpful. I was baptized into the Catholic Church as an infant, had my first communion at six, and then at age nine memorized my catechism and was confirmed in the faith, so escaping the flames of hell. But the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief that the wafer and wine literally turned into the body and blood of Jesus at communion time—made me a non-believer at the early age of 13, and I was declared once again to be in an unsaved state. The answer, according to the church of my grandparents, the Southern Baptist Church, was to give yourself to Jesus, who had died for your sins. And be re-baptized. A Catholic baptism surely did not count, since Catholics were not considered to be real Christians in North Louisiana.

So when I was fourteen, I began attending the Baptist Church. The church had a revival every year, and that year was no exception. Angel Martinez, a converted Catholic, came to preach. Every night for a week I went to hear him. He was beautiful, a Mexican with dark smooth skin and high cheek bones and gleaming black eyes. I had never before seen a Mexican or probably any Hispanic person, and I was enthralled. Angel wore only white suits—and in truth he glowed like an angel up in that pulpit. When he looked at me, I melted. At the time of the invitation, I walked the aisle and gave myself to Jesus, who after all was another beautiful dark-skinned man, a man who was "other." How much I wonder was religious ardor and how much was social pressure and how much was merely hormones. But I’ll never forget Angel Martinez and his white suit and his flashing smile and his love of Jesus.

The problem with being saved this way, though, was that I really didn’t understand my decision intellectually. I didn’t, and still don’t, get the doctrine of atonement—how another person could die for my sins. No, I reckoned I was responsible for my own sins, and so even though I was baptized once again, this time fully immersed in flowing white garments, in front of two hundred people, it didn’t seem to "take." I still felt lost. I still wondered how I could be found, how I could be relieved of my isolation, my sense of guilt, my understanding that I should somehow be a better person than I was.

I put my doubts on the shelf and went about my growing up years and on into my young adult life as a Southern Baptist. As I matured, my doubts grew and my questions made even the most liberal of Baptists uncomfortable. But the real split came when I was divorced. To the Baptist Church I was a kind of fallen woman; to me, the decision, although terribly painful, had been Spirit led. Somebody—I think it was my therapist—said I should try out the Unitarian Universalist Church. She said, as I remember, "There are a lot of divorced people over there." It was there that I had another kind of conversion experience.

I was not in the best of shape at the time. I had lost financial security, a circle of friends, the support of loving in-laws. I had to start over. I was afraid and terribly lonely. I was lost, you might say. Reluctantly, I went to see what these Unitarian Universalists were about. My initial visit was to Friday night volley ball, the social event of the week for this small Fellowship in Central Kentucky. I sat on the sidelines and watched, and every time a new game started, people rushed up and took their places. I was too shy to move. I didn’t know a single person there. Finally, a Black man came over to me and said, "Don’t you want to play?" "Well, yes," I ventured. "Well, come on then," he said with a broad smile and extended his hand and pulled me to my feet. His name was Titus, and he was an African who happened to be visiting in the area for a year, probably at the University I would guess. I don’t remember much about him. But his hand and his gesture of acceptance will always be a part of my memory: a Black man, he reached out to me, a white Southern woman who had never before been in a church where Black people were welcome.

And why do I say this was a kind of salvation experience? Titus extended the hand of fellowship, he pulled me into the group, as I was, no questions asked. I needed love and caring, not condemnation, and I found it there in that Fellowship. They had all the doubts I had, and more! Unlike in the Baptist Church, I could be a leader, even though I was a woman. In fact, they sort of insisted on my being a leader and signed me up for all sorts of committees. They didn’t just tolerate my questions, they celebrated my questions—and celebrated me, as a human being. In that kind of freedom, I spread my wings and flew. Other people were helping with my development, too. My writing teacher Wendell Berry. My therapist and teacher Neil Lamper. But I needed a community of love and support, and I found that in this small Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists.

There was only one arena in which I was not really free in the Fellowship, and strangely enough, that was the theological. Supposedly, we were a free religious community, with openness to a variety of beliefs. But one day during a Sunday morning service I was leading I mentioned Jesus, and I found out soon enough that Jesus was not accepted in this church. I thought that this was peculiar, since historically the Unitarians came out of the left wing of the Protestant reformation. One hundred fifty years ago, we were literally all Christians, but as we began to take into the fold various theological positions, including non-theistic humanists, some began to say that all religion is mere superstition, and that we have moved beyond all that. And others had been badly hurt by various churches in their childhood experience, and so the very mention of Jesus brought back those early painful times. I could not bring my beautiful dark-haired Jesus into this church. Not even as a teacher and a prophet. That was a disappointment to me, and surely a major problem in a church that spoke of theological tolerance.

And there was another problem, this time with too much tolerance, a misplaced tolerance, to my way of thinking, that was destructive to the institution. That was a tolerance of behavior that seemed to say, "Anything goes." Of course, this was the ‘70’s, the age of acting out and experimentation. But, for example, there was a married man who tried to seduce every new woman who came to the church. No one called him on his behavior or suggested that these women might not feel safe coming into such an environment. There are limits to tolerance, and those limits come when other people in the community are being harmed or when the institution is being damaged. As church members, we enjoy enormous freedom, but we need always to ask ourselves how our behavior relates to the well-being of the institution. Does this behavior contribute to the strength, safety, integrity of the institution, or does it bring fragmentation and division? I don’t mean by this that we can’t disagree—not at all—but how we relate to one another is much more important than any task we set out to accomplish. Without that personal and institutional integrity, we have no grounding out of which to do anything worthwhile. And so we cannot support gossip, backbiting, self-righteousness, infidelity, predatory behavior of any kind, disrespect of persons for any reason whatsoever.

The church eventually got a minister, and the 70’s passed, and things settled down. But you know as I think back, there was another significant problem. And this may be a problem with virtually all Unitarian Universalist churches. Salvation really implies two kinds of convenants, the vertical and the horizontal. The horizontal we tend to do pretty well with—the acceptance and love of one another, the openness to various theological stances, the involvement in social justice work—but the other, the vertical dimension, concerns our relationship to the Mystery. As Unitarian Universalists, how do we experience our own lostness, and how do we know when we are saved? In theological language, what is salvific for a Unitarian Universalist? Most other faiths have their lines of demarcation, their rituals and ceremonies signifying that one has become part of the fold. We do not. The closest thing is perhaps our "Coming of Age" program for junior high youth. And even there, we talk more about becoming an autonomous adult than we talk about the maturing of our religious faith. What does it mean to be lost? What does it mean to be saved? As Unitarian Universalists?

I moved into these questions naturally--and inevitably, perhaps—from my upbringing. That question was a central one for all of my kin, Catholic and Baptist. Now, in my new faith, how are these important questions to be answered? Because of the nature of the free church and because of our theological diversity, we can’t have one way, one path, to salvation. But is that the same thing as saying the question is unimportant? I think not.

Most of the time, though, we act as though it isn’t important. Maybe that’s because we are such an intelligent and resourceful people. Relentlessly middle-class and upper middle-class. We are educated, and we have good taste. We think God loves us best because we can talk intelligently about Picasso. We see people on the street who are different—women who wear way too much make-up and bad jewelry. Or poor people--people who don’t have all their teeth, for example. How can that be? Don’t they go to the dentist? Somebody gets drunk at the office party. How could anyone let himself get this way? I mean, yes, our Johnny smokes a little dope, we’ve smelled it in his room, but he’s fine. And we are fine. We’re not like those people. Not lost. We don’t need help, we tell ourselves: we’ll handle it. So we study, we go to lectures, we read, we think, we discuss, we plan, we consult experts. We’re not lost. No way. Well, we have our moments. We find we are aging. Never thought it would happen to us. Well, we’ll get a book on aging. We begin to realize we’ll actually die one day. Isn’t there a seminar at the Medical Center on that? Let’s sign up. We’re not lost. Not us.

What would happen if we admitted our lostness? If we began to understand that one day, we may very well be like that woman who has teeth missing—that one day we may be too weak or tired or in too much pain to chew our food. That one day we may become disoriented and confused. That one day we will have to give up everything we love and cherish. And the answers we need will not be found in books or discussion groups. We will not be able to pay a therapist to give us the answers, because the therapist doesn’t have the answers. Until we know that we are lost—lost in our separation from the Holy and lost in our separation from one another, we can never be saved.

Back to the "good ole boy" in North Carolina. "You’re not lost, you’re right here--you just don’t know where you’re going!" That’s it, you see. You’re not lost when you understand you’re right here, present with where you are and what you are, right there with the rest of humanity. And you don’t look for a way out, then—you look for a way in. You go deeper. You stay with it. "Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes with both hands," says Rumi. "The cure for pain is in the pain./ Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,/ you don’t belong with us./ When one us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us./ There’s no place like that anywhere in the world."

But don’t I need to know where I’m going? Not really. That’s what faith is all about. How can you be a person of faith, if you know where you’re going? Why spend time worrying about heaven? Or even worrying about 1998? We don’t need to know where we are going, what we will be doing. We need to give ourselves away in this New Year. As Unitarian Universalists, we will have no set path, no certain ritual of saving grace. But we are not unlike other human beings in all times and places: we are lost to our own egos and ambitions and we need to be free of ourselves. The difference between the saved and the unsaved, the lost and the found, is pretty simple, as I see it. Have you given yourself away, or not? Do you still need to pull all things to you? Do you really believe you are a superior person? Are you at the center, or is the Holy at the center? Where are you going? You are going where life and history and the Holy and your relationships and your community take you. You are going where you can be most fully who you were created to be. You don’t need a road map, you don’t need to know East from West. That comes later. You need to be willing to make the journey. That’s all.

Let me tell you a story in which the lost is found. On May 27^th, 1992, a bakery in Sarajevo which happened to have a supply of flour was making bread and distributing it to hungry, war-shattered people. At 4:00 that afternoon a long line stretched into the street. Suddenly a shell fell into the midst of the people, killing 22 outright and wounding many more. A hundred yards away lived a 37-year-old man named Vedran Smailovic. Before the war he had been the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Company. When he saw this mangled flesh and death outside his window, he could endure no more. He had to act. Driven by his anguish, he did the only thing he could do—he made music. Every day thereafter, at precisely 4:00 p.m, Mr. Smailovic would put on his full formal concert attire, and take his cello out into the street. He would place a little camp stool in the middle of the bomb-craters, and play a concert to the abandoned streets, while bombs dropped and bullets flew. As though protected by some kind of divine shield, he was never hurt, though at one time, he took a little walk to stretch his legs and the place where he had just been sitting was shelled and his cello destroyed. One frail human being—only flesh and blood and bones—and one fragile instrument singing amidst the violence and destruction. One man, one instrument, singing order, singing peace, singing dignity, singing hope.

Keep this image with you, this man and this music, for this is your saving grace. Admit as Smailovic did: you are not in control. You cannot make the world into what you want it to be, you cannot even control your own little life. But you can take who you are and what you are, the best that you can offer, and sit down in the middle of all that is our life, yes, even in the midst of the worst that life can deal out, the bomb craters and the bullets, and you can sing love, and sing compassion, and sing hope. And that is how the lost will be found.

So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.