by Preston Moore, Intern Minister

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

That reading Marilyn did from Annie Dillard was a real wake-up call, wasn’t it?  I liked the part about the ushers issuing life preservers so much, I wondered whether I should get up here and ask all of you if you’re ready to go whitewater rafting this morning.  That’s not what you signed on for, of course.  But what did you sign on for?  What brought you here?

And what brings me here?  At various times in my life, I have offered myself various answers to this question—building community, working for justice, seeking sanctuary from the stress of everyday life.  The answer I give more than any other is the hope of making a connection with the divine.

But, what kind of connection am I hoping for?  Am I just looking for some improvement, or an out and out transformation of my life?  How would I recognize transformation if it were happening?  Well, when people experience something transformative, they become emotional, excited, eager to share what has happened.  I’ve asked myself, do I behave this way about my experience of church?

In my theology class in seminary, a Baptist student shared a videotape of a worship service in his church.  People were emoting right out loud, calling out spontaneously.  There was a sense of urgency.

I felt a strong desire to deflect my own discomfort with this video.  When I realized this, I had to ask myself, how deep do I go when I participate in church?  What am I careful not to let others see, sitting there cloaked in my cool rationality?  Where’s the urgency?

As many of you know, I practiced law for a long time before entering the ministry.  From the very beginning of my legal career, I was taught that it is crucial not to show fear, because the adversary would exploit it.  I thought of this way of operating as a kind of protective clothing I wore in my job and took off when the workday ended.  Now, the first problem with that was that it could only happen if the workday actually did end, and in my legal career, I tended not to let that happen.  I had a cell phone in my ear on family vacations, and in many other ways I just never really left work.  Not surprisingly, I was still wearing this protective clothing when I came to church. 

I have to ask myself, what did I miss by unconsciously letting that happen?  What exciting possibilities might have opened up years ago if I had been able to be vulnerable enough to reveal the fears and anxieties and other emotions I was keeping hidden beneath that coat of unflappable confidence I wore almost all the time? 

The word I would choose to describe what caused me to miss the urgent opportunities in church is “insulation.” The kind that smooths out the emotional highs and lows.  We all work hard to insulate ourselves and our families from misfortune, from hardship, even from bad weather.  Less consciously, we sometimes insulate ourselves from subjects that are disturbing or bring up fear—like death, or the travails of others. 

Sometimes insulation can be too much of a good thing.  It can make you miss what’s going on.  On April 12, 1912, a society lady boarded a luxury liner in Southampton, England, headed for New York.  She asked a crew member, “sir, is this ship safe?”  He responded, “Madam, God himself could not sink this ship.”  The captain, heavily insulated from the possibility of disaster by all the hype and grandeur around his new ship, shared this imperturbable outlook.  Ignoring one warning sign after another, he took hundreds of passengers aboard the Titanic to a watery grave. 

Looking back, it’s clear that my legal career became a kind of insulation.  Insulation from many things, but most particularly, from intimacy.  And cruising along in my successful, unsinkable career, I missed things.  I didn’t see the iceberg.  After thirty years of marriage that included raising two children together, my wife walked in one day and said, I’m getting a divorce.  A huge gash below the water line.  Right out of the blue.  Except of course, it wasn’t really right out of the blue.  Looking back, I can see that it was sitting there for a long time, hidden beneath all the insulation.

How’s the insulation in your life?  In some places at least, might it be too much of a good thing?  

Maybe all of that insulation in modern life has distanced us so much from truly transformative experiences that we settle for something less than the real thing.  People often have such experiences after a close brush with death.  They report a heightened sense of aliveness, an intense spiritual experience.  When they weather the crisis, they marvel about how every leaf on every tree looks divine, how just breathing the air feels magnificent. 

How do we interpret these experiences?  Like one of those quirky perceptual tricks that come and go, some kind of optical illusion?  Do we ask ourselves whether something important is being revealed?  Whether the effect could actually be lasting? 

Susan Starr is a U.U. minister who used to attend my home church in Oakland.  She gave a sermon a few years ago reflecting on her own life crisis over alcoholism.  She described the two worlds between which she saw herself moving—A.A. and her church.  She mused that, ironically, she seemed to get her social psychology at the church and her religion at A.A.  She wondered what the difference might be between the people around her at A.A. and the people around her in church.  She said, “I think the difference is that the people at A.A. know that their very lives are at stake.  And when that sense of urgency becomes present in this sanctuary,” she said, “you will be amazed at the things that will happen.” 

When I look back on what Susan said, I can see what was pulling me toward church at that point:  a sense of urgency about my life, and a recognition of the possibility of transforming my life without having a near-death experience like the ones she described.  This was something of which I was not very conscious but it was actually very strong.  Strong enough eventually to walk me out of the legal world and put me onto a path toward ministry—despite all the positive signals society was sending me about being a successful lawyer.

For all of the power of that pull, something was still making me hesitate to open myself up to what was going on in church.  I was ambivalent.  I felt conflicted.  Even when that growing sense of urgency had moved me pretty far forward in the pews, something was still warring against that hope for transformation.

That something was fear.  And what was there to be afraid of?  Maybe . . . finding the experience I was hoping for. 

In a church that engenders an experience of the holy, there is a door that marks the way to deep spiritual experience.  It is human nature to be drawn to this door.  Whatever reasons we give out loud for coming to church, I believe this is the answer to that original question: what brought us here?  Sensing its nearness in church, though, we become afraid of what we might find if we walked up to that door and opened it, or even got close enough to feel connected to what is on the other side.  What fearful thing might be waiting there?

My name for that fearful thing is God.  But whatever it’s called, why would connection with the divine make us uneasy or fearful?  I think I know why.

This connection might be so powerful that it would inspire us to take on challenges so big and so daunting they frighten us.  This is the danger Annie Dillard is talking about.  This is the power waiting here.  When you come to church, put on your life jacket.

This is what ministers mean when they talk about being called.  For me, the fearful part about being called to ministry was not being called away from the law—certainly not that—or about being called to preach, or to raise money, or any of the other outwardly ministerial things.  It was about being called to vulnerability.  The vulnerability that is the root and nerve of all those outwardly ministerial things.

It’s too late now to do anything but answer that call.  I’ve glimpsed the possibilities it holds.  And I know the price I’ve paid in my own life by avoiding vulnerability. 

Holding these fears inside me, in the old days before seminary, I came to church.  But I hesitated.  I thought about walking over toward that door. But I hung out in the entryway hoping to absorb some transformation without shedding my insulation and moving toward vulnerability.  Without revealing myself too much. 

So long as we are alive, we are not meant to actually walk through that door.  But we can get very close, maybe even swing it open a little, and feel our connection to the divine vividly.  And then we drift away, and we start to forget the sense of connection.  In human life, this forgetfulness is inevitable.  And then we remember our divine connection again and move closer.  And then we forget again. 

This is our calling, to dance the dance of remembering and forgetting, back and forth between the finite and the infinite, between forever and the here and now—near that door, and “nearer my God to thee,” as they sang on the deck of the Titanic, but never quite fully arriving; moving away into distant forgetfulness, but always, always returning.  We cannot dance that dance without an experience of spiritual urgency—a sense that our lives depend on it.  Nurturing the favorable conditions for that experience is, in the deepest possible sense, the sacred work of this church.  And now it is my sacred work too.  I am excited by it, I want to share it, and—now I can finally say this—I am more than a little bit scared, now and then . . . But that’s no reason to stop dancing.

Where are you in relation to that door?  Who’s standing around you?  Anybody?  I ask you this because I finally figured out why it was so hard for me to get close to that door.  I was trying to do it alone, pretending I had no fear. 

In most places in life, it would take a miracle or a catastrophe to have this hoped-for transformative experience, and continuing to have it over and over again would be inconceivable.  In church, this experience is available without any miracles; well . . . actually, just these three:  that we trust one another, that we reveal ourselves to one another, and that we see one another for the truth we are.  With these ordinary miracles, we will be amazed at the things that will happen.  Not in heaven.  Not on the other side of that wonderful ominous door.  But here and now.  AMEN.

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Copyright 2004, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.