by the Rev. Heather Starr

A sermon given August 10, 2008
First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

From the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13, verses 11 and 12: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.  For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

When I was a child—seven years old actually—my mother, a long-time Unitarian, gave me my own copy of the King James Bible. On the inside cover, she wrote: “Whether for its religious or literary meaning and beauty, I hope that you treasure this always.”

This gift from my mother was just one of many open-minded, open-hearted, gifts that instilled in me the message I convey to you today. Thoughts, ideas, articles and books may be given to you.  You may be told, over and over again, what to think about things, what is important in life, what is worth pursuing.  But I have definitively determined (after much wishing and thorough experimentation) that books on the shelf and magazines in stacks do not, sadly, leap of their own accord into our brains and become ideas that we have sorted through, absorbed, and understand.

First, I have to open the book, open my mind; be open to the questions my soul is asking and that this complex world is asking of me.

For all us, it is crucial to periodically consider and evaluate how our faith is working in our lives. Otherwise it’s like a plant in the dry season that you’re watching-but not watering, wondering: why is it dying?  Why isn’t it lively?  Why isn’t it producing any flowers, any fruit?

By “your faith” I mean that which feeds your spirit, that framework which you use to determine what is most important to you; what theologian Paul Tillich called “the ultimate,” the guiding rubric that you use to help you through hard times, to help you understand and empathize with other people, to help you make sense of your own yearnings, fears, hopes, and joys.

Perhaps Unitarian Universalism encapsulates the Principles and Purposes, the community, the national and international religious identity, the colorful history and the hard-won theology that you identify as “your faith.” Unitarian Universalism has certainly been the basis for me, the airport through which I have traveled countless times and from which I take flight in my daily life.

For me, the poem by Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck, reminds me about the wealth of treasure to be found by diving into the past—the past of our own lives, and also the past of our faith experiences. “We are, I am, you are, by cowardice or courage, the one[s] who find our way, back to this scene, carrying” the knife of our own intellect, a camera of visual memory, and all the books of myths and meaning-stories that populate our internal bookshelves, our lives and conversations.

Here are some of the short stories—the visual instants caught in my memory’s camera—that have defined what this “faith” has been about for me, so far.

The first memory I have of coming to this First Unitarian Church in Portland is of returning. While I’m sure I’d been brought here before, perhaps it had been awhile; this is the first self-aware, conscious moment in my memory, here in this church building that was then entirely on Salmon Street. In this moment, I remember being the new kid, entering an unfamiliar space, a cacophonous new classroom. I remember being the one who didn’t know anybody and didn’t know where things were.

Five years old and already, I was assuming what many adults visiting our congregations assume: everybody else must know everybody and know all the rules to all the activities, “the way things are done around here.”  Clearly everybody else comes every Sunday, and it’s just my family that only comes sometimes.

These myths about church life, about social life, about community are deeply ingrained in us, and this is stage 1: establishing connection with others, building trust.

The next thing I remember, maybe a year later, is sitting at one of the long religious education classroom tables beside some big windows, Sunday morning sunlight pouring in, a bunch of other kids around the table, and the teacher at one end assigning us this: draw Jesus. “Draw who or what you understand Jesus to look like.”

One kid drew a man wearing a robe and holding a big walking cane.
One kid drew a man with a beard sitting on a cloud.
One kid drew a butterfly.

I’m not particularly good at drawing and never have been, so I probably drew a sun, a cloud, and a tree, because I pretty much had those images down. What I remember especially well is that after sitting there and quietly drawing for a while, the teacher asked us to go around the table and hold up our drawings and explain them. “Uh-oh”, I thought.
I didn’t do it right, I didn’t draw how we all just know that we are supposed to think God looks…now I’m in gigantic trouble! But one-by-one, as each kid held up their drawing and explained why they’d drawn this or that as their depiction of Jesus, the teacher said “That’s so great! That’s beautiful! How thoughtful!” and so on and so forth, affirming and encouraging, all around the table. Even about my sun and cloud and tree.

I know that at six years old, I knew Jesus was about religion, and as far as I could tell, a lot of religion was about Jesus, and if it was okay for me to draw a sun and cloud and tree as my depiction of Jesus, then maybe what I thought and felt about religion was okay, too. At that moment, what I discovered—from this church—was that maybe religion
wasn’t all about right and wrong and rules.

Maybe, just maybe, this religion—this Unitarian Universalism—was about celebrating the creativity, diversity, and vitality of life in many forms.  Among other things, this is stage 2: grappling with images of the “ground of Being,” the holy, and our own understanding and articulation of them, within a community.

Skip ahead a few years. I think I was eight.

What I know for sure is that I was not yet in the fifth grade, and The Really Cool & Friendly Music Guy, whom you all call your Minister of Music, Mark Slegers, was starting up a handbell choir for fifth and sixth graders. I wanted to be in that handbell choir so bad.

I remember sitting to the side of the room while Music Guy called up the fifth and sixth graders and organized them into a long row behind a table of handbells. They got to wear these sleek gloves and hold these glowing brass bells of all sizes from smaller-than-a-teacup to larger-than-my-fat-cat-Cassie.

At that moment, church was a place that held sparkle and mystery and what-seemed-like-magic to me and I wanted to be a part of those rituals, that magic, I wanted to get in close and figure out where it came from and how it worked. Stage 3: Meaning is found through ritual and symbols (and in the case of this church, with its amazing music program, that may well take the form of c-y-m cymbals as well as s-y-m symbols).

Some years later, there was youth group. What I remember about youth group was sitting on couches downstairs on Sunday evenings and staring up at the series of purple footprints crossing over the ceiling that someone, somehow painted up there.  At that moment in my life, youth group was about consistency during a time when everything else was subject to change.  Youth group was there, no matter what: Sunday evenings, couches, show up, hang out, people’ll be there talking about whatever’s going on in their
lives at that moment, from the trivial to the transformative.

Intense things, real things, in addition to always wondering how on earth—was it a miracle, or a ladder?—someone got those footprints up there.

I remember being so grateful that here was a place I didn’t have to pretend to be cool or mainstream or popular—none of us felt that we were cool, mainstream, and popular, so here we could just relax and be ourselves. Other people were always there to listen and tell us it was going to be alright. We didn’t have to say much, and there would probably be snacks. (This is Stage 3 continued: forming an identity within a community, trying to “fit in,” feeling strongly about certain values and beliefs without having yet accumulated and encountered a wide range of life experiences and perspectives.)

The annual church youth group overnight was a rite of passage.  We roamed freely through this dark downtown church building, all night long.  I remember the candlelight ritual in the mysterious steeple that welcomed us into being youth group leaders, and I remember thinking “does anyone in charge know that we’re running around in the church in the middle of the night by candlelight?”  You did know.

To be trusted to inhabit Our Church all through the night was thrilling, and made it that much more Our Home, Our Spiritual Home, in a very specific and concrete way: we, too, we awkward teenagers, were also its stewards. We felt respected and trusted, and at fifteen or sixteen years old, we noticed that we were being respected and trusted. We held our heads higher in the gaze of that trust.

And I remember being so incredibly proud and grateful and amazed by My Church, my Unitarian Universalist-ness, when in the midst of the whole Measure 9, anti-gay-Oregon-Citizens-Alliance-Lon-Mabon-1992-statewide homophobic mess, My Church held a special service on the morning of  the Annual Gay & Lesbian Pride Parade. This wasn’t a service in witness or in protest or even in solidarity—this was a service of celebration. In the midst of a political and social fight that was tearing communities throughout Oregon apart in hate, My Church was celebrating love. My mother and I went to that Saturday morning service, expecting it to be a somber and marginally-attended affair, and, to our surprise, the place was packed. People were wearing bright T-shirts and waving rainbow flags and holding up posters and colorful signs—in church! They were ready to parade, they were ready to celebrate, and they were ready to live their lives proudly.  I was almost ready, too.

At that moment in my life, I was terrified by my own silent and erratic hormones, what seemed to me to be strange, intense, abnormal and speechless desires. I had a crush on another girl at school, and I knew as if it were a scientific fact I’d been taught in biology class that something must be wrong with me. I was terrified, but after that celebratory morning service here, I never had another thought about being alone in the world—more people than I  could possibly count were there in that sanctuary, ready to celebrate the human capacity to love. Unitarian Universalism, I had experienced yet again, was about celebrating life, with all its challenges and human awkwardnesses.

I went to college and discovered that Unitarian Universalism comes in all shapes and sizes of gatherings, whenever two or more people are together engaging in real, genuine, soul-searching sharing and conversation. In the dusky Earl Chapel on Columbia University’s campus, I met with a group of 6 other students in a circle on Sunday evenings, and we shared about our experiences and how Unitarian Universalism affected our interests and our choices as young adults. Walking through the nearby halls of Union Theological Seminary, I saw flyers amidst the Biblical and Torah study group sign-up sheets, flyers about Unitarian Universalism and social action events and inside I beamed.
At that moment I realized that this faith tradition was an integral part of my identity, part of how I understood what mattered in the world, what was worth doing, what was worth waking up for.  We Unitarian Universalists were here, there, and everywhere, energized and motivated by our faith, living out our convictions in the wider world.

In each chapter of our lives, from birth to death, our faith—if it is a vital and active part of our lives—takes new shape and can help us to acquire new meaning. These “stages of faith” are examined and articulated by developmental psychologist Jim Fowler. In his rough sketch of faith development, we tend to go through a series of  stages, each at our own pace and in our own way. First as an infant and then as a toddler, we learn about being cared for, about  trusting in other beings. As a child we learn about images of the universal, of God perhaps or radiant  Nature, of the ways that all creatures are alike. We develop our imagination; we ask countless questions. We begin to form stories and wonder about the stories behind everything and everyone. At this stage, we are in the thick of it, we are as philosopher George Santayana describes when he said: “We cannot know who first discovered water—but we can be sure that it was not the fish.” As teenagers we form an identity and a sense of how we are distinct from each other. As young adults we apply the ideas and concepts we’ve absorbed to our decisions about what to do with our days, how to make a living, who to spend our time with; as Adrienne Rich writes, she had “to learn alone, to turn body without force, in the deep element.”

Well into adulthood we continue to expand our awareness of the paradoxes of life, of the importance of intergenerational engagement in the world. Along the way, we may be jarred by life experiences into questioning and re-evaluating beliefs that we had long taken to be given. Along the way we may also become terribly certain, positive that we know what is right and true and that-is-that. Fowler puts it this way: “Stage 4 has to do with capacity for critical reflection. Its dangers inhere in its strengths: an excessive confidence in the conscious mind and in critical thought.”

Fowler generalizes that most adult Unitarian Universalists are at this Stage 4 of his faith development paradigm—what he calls Individuative-Reflective Faith, characterized by the following: we self-select to associate with people whose perspectives we share, we make moral decisions based on what is “good for society,” we invest in communities with a shared ideology, and we draw upon our own individual judgment as our primary “locus of authority.”  Now skeptical of symbols, we are more interested in the meaning of symbols than in the symbols themselves.

When I read this—and vigorously underlined it because it seemed so startlingly accurate to me—I simultaneously immediately realized that “it’s time to renew.”
Faith should be a moving target, a dynamic force in our lives that is one thing when we are children, something else when we are teenagers, a new entity in our lives again as young adults and renewed throughout our adult lives.

Fowler depicts the next stage, Stage 5, as involving “a new reclaiming and reworking of one’s past. There must be an opening to the voices of one’s ‘deeper self,’ a critical recognition of the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self by virtue of one’s nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, [or] ethnic group. Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage…maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are ‘other.’ Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self, this stage’s commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation”

In other words, if we only surround ourselves with like-minded people, with people who agree with us, we are stagnating. I struggle with this myself—people with whom I agree seem so much more—well, agreeable. People who I agree with seem so much easier to be around—safer, less threatening. Yet I also know that when I keep myself always in the safe, secure zone, I am stifling my own growth, shutting out opportunities to experience more of  life.  More importantly, I am missing out on the chance to discover that there is much more at stake than my safety.

Transformation much larger than just that of my spirit is possible when we step out of our familiar routes and neighborhoods and imagine a larger consciousness, a much more vast and all-encompassing love. We must continually be seekers, always searching for “the wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth.”

An engaged, engaging faith is complex and it is demanding.  Unitarian Universalism is only one “angle” on faith, but it is a challenging one. It asks of us on a daily, sometimes hourly basis: Are you honoring the inherent worth and dignity of every person you encounter?  Are you practicing justice, equity, and compassion in your relationships?
Are you accepting of other people’s humanity? Are you encouraging others to spiritual growth and depth in their lives—on their terms and not yours? Are you engaging in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning in your daily life? Are you participating actively and energetically in the democratic process in this congregation and in our society at large? Are you helping to build a world community that has as its primary goals peace, liberty, and justice, for all people? And are you doing all that you can to acknowledge and respect that your individual human life is part of a fragile, interdependent web of all existence?

These questions, these Seven Principles of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, these questions can inspire us and they can surely overwhelm us. We need this community to help us to continually renew, to not become complacent or cynical, to remind us of what we are about, to encourage us to believe in the possibilities of the future, far beyond the walls of this sanctuary.  Alone, questions of faith can seem daunting.  Together, in local and global community, we can learn from each other, we can challenge and inspire each other.
From the first moment we allow ourselves to hear questions of the spirit reverberate within us, throughout every chapter of our lives, we can create and continually recreate faith-filled lives, intergenerational spiritual communities that call each of us to be our ever-evolving, best selves, and that create a world we delight in being a part of.

Let us never cease from the life-long search for meaning, alongside one another. May your faith be an ever-renewable resource, an energetic force in your lives.  And may you be an energetic force in the life of your faith community.
 
May it be so.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, help us to remember always our part in the human struggle to live in harmony together.  During these summer months, guide us to the sources of renewal that are best for our spirits, for the replenishment of our souls.  May we see beyond the familiar and the comforting to that which lifts us into new and larger understandings.

Blessed be, and Amen.

BENEDICTION  

Step forward from this place renewed and alive with curiosity.  Trust that everyone you talk to, every place you go, offers a chance to experience more of this wide world.  Go in love, and go in peace.

Copyright 2008, Heather Starr. All rights reserved.