Sermon by Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs
Delivered at the Installation of Rev. Alan C. Taylor
Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
February 22, 2004
She sat
beside me in the circle. She hid behind her hair. I didn’t know her name. Nor
did I know what personal issues had brought her to the group. I was there as an
apprentice. The group was being led by Mwalimu Imara, then the minister of the
Arlington Street Church, my mentor and the supervisor of my internship.
Dissatisfied with the limitations of parish ministry Mwalimu had been trained as
a therapist by the Gestalt Institute in Cleveland. He thought I might benefit
both personally and professionally by attending the group.
Suddenly, without warning she started to sob. I don’t know
what set her off, whether it was something someone said or just that she could
no longer bear her the burden of her sadness. So there I was; a
minister-in-training, twenty-two years old full up-to-here with what-ifs and
how-tos. I wish I could say I reached out to offer some comfort. I wish I
could say I was moved to tears myself. I wish I could say my first impulse was
to empathy. But the fact is I was embarrassed and annoyed. I couldn’t look at
her. I couldn’t touch her. I drew an emotional circle and I shut her out.
When the group was over Mwalimu asked me to stay for a few
minutes. He sat down on the floor in what had been the center of the circle.
He asked me to sit facing him. Our legs crossed under us we sat so closely
together that our knees touched. “What were you thinking when that young woman
was crying?” “That she was weak and annoying and that I wanted her to stop.”
“Hit me”…he said. “What?” “I said, hit me.” I punched him in the arm. He
slapped my face hard enough so that it really stung. I burst into tears and
sobbed for what seemed to me like hours. He just held me while I cried.
Now I’m not telling you this story to endorse Mwalimu’s
pedagogy though it was certainly effective. I tell it to point to the ways we
protect ourselves from what Seamus Heaney calls “the utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.” I know I’m not the only one who has ever closed his or
her heart against a discomforting stranger. We don’t like to be around people
who make us uncomfortable. But in our wiser moments we’re aware that the
discomfort we feel usually has more to do with ourselves than with the people we
meet. That’s why we learn so much when we make time to be with neighbors we have
yet to know especially when they make us uncomfortable.
Our tendency to avoid those who make us squirm is tied to a
desire for emotional equilibrium, which though it may feel good at the time, is
ultimately deadening. Given that we are commanded to “choose life” being open
to discomfort and so being open to making time to be with strangers becomes a
religious issue. Its something we’re supposed to do at church, Even when its
scary, even when it hurts making time to meet the neighbors we have never known
is part of how we practice our religion. The mystic poet Ranier Maria Rilke
wrote:
Just as the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now raise the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astonishing bridges.
Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.
To work with things is not hubris
when building the association beyond words;
denser and denser the pattern becomes –
being carried along is not enough.
Takes your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
Being open to people who make us uncomfortable is a
spiritual discipline. It takes practice. The same is true whenever we summon
the courage to come together in small groups to confess our weakness and
bewilderment and to rekindle one another’s strength.
Like a pebble tossed into a pond circles of support and
reconciliation have an expanding concentric effect. The strength and clarity
achieved by those who carve out time to be together in those small high holy
circles radiates out as they bring that same quality of attention into their
daily lives.
I want it both ways. I want the church to be a place where
I can be at peace, a place predictable and comfortable enough that I can
surrender into faith, a place where I can let down my guard and be restored.
And I want the church to be a place which pushes me into unpredictable, risky
relationships with people I’m unlikely to choose as my friends. It’s a
programmatic challenge. Ken Patten bids us to “try again that solitude found
in the midst of those who with us seek their hidden reckonings.” But
solitude is only half the story. We are also charged to engage one another in a
covenant of intimacy. To be together in ways which encourage and inspire us to
change and grow and so to be a “light unto the nations.”
There is a direct relationship between how we behave in
small groups and the possibility that we might help to foster peace on earth.
Jonathan Schell, in his magnificent book The Unconquerable World: Power,
Nonviolence and the Will of the People writes convincingly of the shift from
coercive power to cooperative power. In a closely reasoned and carefully
researched argument Schell makes a case for hope arising out of constructive,
democratic engagement. Aware of the bloodshed Imperialism and coercive power
have wrought he nonetheless maintains that the gains in economic welfare and
world security inherent in what he calls “a democratic league” outweigh the old
approach which exerts authority by force of arms.
In other words, the same values, which inform the way we
try to be together in church, ultimately inform how we should strive to be
together as nations. It strikes me as tragic and peculiar that a President
whose life was turned around when he joined a covenant group seems to miss the
parallel imperative to engage respectfully and listen carefully and to be a
reliable partner in the circle of the nations. Here is a man whose life was
unraveling, his marriage was on the rocks, he was drinking himself to death when
a dear friend suggested that he join a fundamentalist Christian covenant group.
The friends he made there helped him turn his life around.
But there is a disconnect between the President’s personal
experience and his political approach. Schell describes a shift in policy,
which amount to a return to coercive power in response to the terrorist threat.
He writes: “The sharp turn toward force as the mainstay of the policies of
the United States was accompanied by a turn away from treaties and other forms
of cooperation. Even before September 11, the trend had been clear. Now it
accelerated. The Bush administration either refused to ratify or withdrew from
most of the principal new international treaties of the post-Cold War era.”
He goes on to list them; the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the ABM Treaty, the
START negotiations, the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, the Rome Treaty establishing an international
criminal court and the UN protocol for inspection and enforcement of a UN
convention banning biological weapons.
My purpose here is not political. I don’t believe there
is an inherent lack of integrity tied to party affiliation. But if encountering
the stranger, if learning to love our neighbors as we love ourselves is a basic
religious value, then how can I not speak out against the Bush administration.
The President and his closest circle of advisors claim to be believing
Christians and yet by choosing isolationism they step outside the circle of what
Jesus lived and taught and so betray the very faith they claim to serve.
There’s no question we need to be strong. But there is considerable evidence
that cooperative force, cooperative power, power which grows out of lasting
genuine engagement, is our best and only hope.
The possibility of peace begins inside us. It grows among
us in the groups that we form. When you choose to make small group intimacy a
part of your religious practice you’re saying yes to being a good neighbor,
you’re saying that you’ll try to tell the truth, you’re saying yes to a
disciplined intimacy knowing, even hoping it will make you uncomfortable. This
discomfort, this stinging discontent is sacrament for us. It is the way we most
powerfully embody our faith. The quality of attention we summon when we engage
in the discipline of intimacy, the way we learn to listen, the care we take in
speaking, the tenderness which so often takes hold and leads us into love is,
dare I say it, the hope of the world.
A few weeks ago I attended a conversation sponsored by the
newly formed Restorative Justice Ministry Team at Unity Church in St Paul. I
had been told to expect something special. At first I was taken aback. The
structure was no different from many other reflective circles I’ve attended.
People were welcomed. The ground-rules were made clear. A question was posed.
And then, using a talking stick to give the one who held it the authority to
speak, we went around the circle. As each person spoke the rest of us
listened. There was no cross talk. No one there tried to solve anyone’s
problems.
But as we listened to each other an abiding tenderness took
hold, differences dissolved, ideology and abstractions fell away and we became
aware of what we share simply because we are human.
I recognized most of the people in the room. There was
only one person there I didn’t know. She was introduced. She told us that just
that morning she had been released from Shakopee Prison after thirty-four months
behind bars. She had come to the Unity circle because she had been invited and
because she wanted to be there. I watched her as each person spoke into the
silence. I watched her listen and nod knowingly. When she spoke I found myself
listening and nodding as if to say, “I hear you sister.” Sitting in that circle
I became aware once again of the transformative power of grounded, intimate
conversation. What matters, is who is in the room. Imagine how the world might
be changed if half the people in the circle had just been released from prison,
or half were Palestinians and the other half Israelis, or half Republicans half
Democrats, half black and half white.
The poet Robert Francis captures the delight of
transforming conversation in his wonderful little poem called "Waxwings":
Four tao philosphers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berrybush
in sun, and I am one.
Such merriment and such sobriety-
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk-
was this not always my true style?
Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of small four
birds. Can you mistake us?
To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together- for this I have abandoned all my other lives.
This sermon is a call. This sermon is an invitation to
move beyond our old ways of doing church. The purpose of the church is not the
church itself. The purpose of the church is to engender the experience of the
Holy, to inspire, to nurture and to sustain us so that we in turn might inspire,
nurture and transform the world. This happens best when worship works and when
worship is reinforced by the disciplined, sacrament of small group intimacy. If
you want Unity Temple to thrive, if you want your faith to inspire, nurture and
transform the world then you will need to enter into a covenant of intimacy.
You will need to carve out the time to become part of what Marge Piercy calls
“small high holy groups shifting like starfish.” This may seem at first like
one more obligation in your already crowded lives. The very thought of it may
make you squirm. But I can promise you that if you take that circle seriously,
if you bring your best self to the experience, if you learn to listen carefully
and take real care in how you speak then an abiding tenderness will take hold
and help to open up your heart. And once our hearts are open then even peace on
earth is possible. It begins right here, right now, this very evening as we
renew our covenant to seek and speak the truth, to love one another without
prejudice and to respond with concerted efforts to what our faith requires.
May it be so and amen.
© Copyright 2004 Rob
Eller-Isaacs, All Rights Reserved.
