Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
March 17, 2002
By the Meanings of Things
Kendyl Gibbons:
A week from today we have invited all the people we know of who have spent part of their growing up years here at FUS to join us for a special Homecoming celebration Sunday, when we will reflect on the impact that this community has had upon their development and their lives. Being raised as a Unitarian Universalist entails both challenges and blessings, which Matthew and I share. While we did not grow up in this Society, we were both part of UU families and congregations from our earliest years, an experience which gives us a certain perspective on the heritage of this tradition. This morning we have asked ourselves and each other to contemplate the gifts that were given to us - what we learned from our childhood UU experiences - what challenges or difficulties it presented us, and what it was that kept us, unlike so many of our siblings and classmates, committed and active in the institutions of this faith.
Matthew Johnson (Intern Minister):
Part of the problem when talking about what I learned from Unitarian Universalism, what sort of person I am because of it, is that I don't have a control group. There is no twin of me, living in the world somewhere who was not raised in this faith. At least as far as I know. And because my Mother was also raised as a Unitarian Universalist, the values I learned from her may have been UU values even if she hadn't stayed in the faith. So its hard to know where I stop and Unitarian Universalism begins; and as I use that phrase it seems clear to me that there is no such place. There is a part of me that is not ministry; but there is no part of me that is not Unitarian Universalism. I am infused with this faith; it does more than make me who I am, it is my home in the world.
Often, we talk about handing on our values to our children. We work hard for them to learn justice, kindness, environmentalism, acceptance, and the importance of social action. And yes, I got those things. But I was handed on something far greater than values.
Sometimes, we talk about handing on our history and philosophy to our children. We teach about the famous Unitarians and Universalists, helping to give our children a sense of a historical community to which they belong, and an orienting perspective from which we can encounter the world. And yes, I got those things. But I was handed on something far greater than history and ideas.
Occasionally, we talk about handing on friendship and connection to our children. We encourage social activities, and at our best we make this happen across generation lines. We would like our children to stay connected and in touch with other Unitarian Universalists. And yes, I got those things. But I was handed on something far greater than friendship.
We rarely talk about handing on salvation to our children, even in our most "spiritual" congregations. We rarely talk about liberation for our children; liberation from drudgery for dreams; liberation from ignorance for interconnection; liberation from fear for freedom; liberation from loneliness for loving community. But these are the greatest things handed on to me: salvation and liberation. Wholeness and freedom. What was handed on to me was a way of knowing and participating in the work of the holy, of being deeply connected to all that is, of being absolutely positive of God's love even when I could not use the word God.
Another way of saying this, I suppose, is to say that I got depth. Under the values, under the history, under the friendship, I have received from this living tradition an awareness of my own participation in a sacred and mysterious power which calls me to transform myself and the world. Sometimes I like to think of religion as a deep well. We are given a bucket and a rope, we can drop down and get some of that water. I think I was also given a pulley, a tool to make it easy to drop down the bucket and get more water whenever I am thirsty. Or perhaps a better metaphor is that I was handed a watertight barrel to carry the water I pulled up, and a map back to the well so I could fill up again. I know that some of the children I grew up with in this faith only got the barrel, but not the map. For me, as I know it is to so many parents whose own children have left the faith, this is a source of deep sadness. I know the liberating and sustaining truth of this free faith, the way it calls upon us to save and savior the world apart from suffocating creeds and doctrines, and I want everyone in the world to know this truth. That people who have been with us and not discovered it leaves a hole in my being.
What was I given? Values to guide me, a faith tradition to call home, a people to call mine, and a love to repair the world and to save my own soul.
KG:
It is true for me also that there is no control group; no picture of me as I would have been had my childhood not revolved intensely around my family's involvement in the Unitarian Universalist fellowship and then church in which I grew up. Perhaps it was in my nature to be ardent and devoted; I suspect that I would have been so in whatever religious vocabulary I was offered. Yet it is not so much the actual content of the Sunday School curriculum that I remember; there was Ahkenaten, and Jesus the Carpenter's Son, and the Beacon science series, about which I chiefly recall endless peering into microscopes that never worked. There were Martin and Judy stories, and creation stories From Long Ago and Many Lands, and awkward attempts at folk dancing. There were children's worship services led by nervous volunteers, with For The Beauty of the Earth accompanied on the mandolin, and there were Christmas pageants, and flower communion services - I remember all this, but it is not what I learned.
What I learned, from what my parents and my teachers and my ministers said and did, were these things. I learned, which they wanted to teach me, skepticism. I learned not to take anybody's word about the answers to ultimate questions; not even theirs. And with that skepticism I learned humility; that no one had all the answers, or the one right answer, and neither would I. I learned that there is too much to know about the world and about life for anyone to ever master it all, and that there is an enduring, irreducible mystery to the whole thing. In giving me skepticism, they gave me a profound respect for all that is unknown and unknowable, and taught me that I do not run the universe, and thankfully never will.
At the same time, I learned to understand myself as a co-creator of the world in which I must live and move and have my being. Without meaning to say exactly this, my childhood church seemed to insist that so long as there was one starving child or a single injustice perpetrated in the world, it was because I personally was not trying hard enough to fix it. It took me a long time to come to terms with the pain of that message, but on the other side of it, I found the twin truths of responsibility and possibility. At its core, it contained the promise that the world as it was is not immutable, that human creativity can change things in fundamental and lasting ways. Progress was by no means inevitable, but it was and remains possible. And I came to see that what gives our co-created world its profoundest shape is the institutions that we build together. We invent the structures of our human communities as surely as we invent language, and it is through the way we are together that we practice and incarnate the values we cherish. I learned that religious community must be a laboratory for the practice of everything it seeks to teach; if the church itself can't do it, no one else is going to be able to, either.
I do remember when I first began to do theology, inspired by our Sunday School class field trips. In retrospect, I wonder if it wasn't when the teachers were at their wits end with vague lesson plans and over-active children; all I know is that once or twice a year they would take us, piled into the backs of station wagons, to the duck pond at the local cemetery. It is probably actually smaller than I remember it, grassy shores around a circle of water, with an island in the middle, a curving oriental bridge and weeping willows, surrounded on all sides by acres of gravestones. The ducks were fat and placid, shining white as angels. We took bread crumbs to feed them, and I don't remember that anyone ever fell in the pond or otherwise got into trouble; it was peaceful and beautiful, and it made perfect if inarticulate sense to me that we would go there as part of church. That juxtaposition of beauty and mortality was my first pre-intellectual, almost pre-conscious, intuition of what religion was all about. The existence of the loveliness and vitality of nature within that setting of death was in its essence a question - and question that did not need to be stated, because it had no possible answer. But I knew in my bones that there was something both inevitable and importantly right about the duck pond in the cemetery, and that those ideas and questions - almost too large to think about - belonged to the religious enterprise.
From that encounter and others like it, I learned reverence; I came to believe utterly that there is something precious at the heart of life; something that resides in all people, even in me, that makes us part of what is precious in life, and therefore makes us precious too. I learned to long for wholeness, for the unity of living water and the silent presence of the dead; I learned that mortality is inextricable with what is precious, and that real beauty is in the depths of things, not on their surfaces. And I learned - I do not know how, but in the same inarticulate lesson I learned - to want to deserve happiness, more than to want happiness itself.
The challenge of Unitarian Universalism as it was presented to me was its rootlessness. The adults who taught my Sunday School classes and who nurtured me in many ways were, like my parents, come-outers from the orthodox traditions of their own childhoods. They had very little sense of the history of the tradition they had newly embraced, so it was hard for them to hand that history on to those of us growing up within it. I was in college before I learned of Olympia Brown and the early Universalist and Unitarian women ministers. I had already aspired to ministry myself, reasoning that whether or not there had ever been women ministers in our faith before, there was no good reason why I shouldn't be one, but it was a comforting revelation to find that I stood in a long line of spiritual ancestresses. I came to my undergraduate classes in Old and New Testament in nearly perfect ignorance of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and while I am grateful not to have had to unlearn much that my more orthodox classmates thought they knew, I shudder to think what my ignorance might be today if I had not chosen to take those courses. I am most grateful for the trick of memory that makes hymn texts stay with me; were it not for that, there would be little or nothing of the comfort of old familiar words engraved on the neural pathways of my brain to be available in times of crisis. The adults who were escaping the stifling rigidity of their old rituals had no awareness of how their children sometimes longed for repetition and dependability in our developing faith lives.
This rootlessness contributed to what I think of now as an idolatry of immediate community. Church, as the adults of my 1960s congregation experienced it, seemed to have to do entirely with their network of relationships to one another, and when those relationships came into conflict or experienced betrayal, there was little loyalty to anything beyond them that might have held or supported people, or called their behavior into accountability. At times I pondered deeply what it would mean to believe in a self-conscious, personal God, so that there might be an authority that would transcend the mere celebration of gregariousness, but I found that I could not will myself to accept what I didn't really think was true. I also came to see that some part of what was presented as zeal for justice and indignation on behalf of the oppressed by the adults in our church might actually have been more accurately characterized, as one of my colleagues has since put it, as 'shallow, angry people trying to change the world by telling everyone else what to do.' The connection that personal wholeness, reflection, and spiritual resources might have with the energy to make genuine, sustainable advances in social justice was one that I would have to look to other religious communities to discover.
MJ:
What was hard for me about growing up Unitarian Universalist? Lots of things, I guess. I never got the neighboring faiths curriculum so other traditions, especially Christian traditions, were a mystery to me for a long time. In a related vein, I felt the absence of ritual forms, of any sense of sacrament. For those of us who grow up UU, we don't understand the baggage that these words carry; but neither do these concepts come naturally to us. I could go on like this, listing little places where our faith could be better, but no tradition is perfect, and eventually I found my way to understand other traditions, and to claim ritual for myself. Indeed, I'm grateful sometimes for having had to do the work myself. Life is challenging, one's faith should be to. Our faith should ask a lot of us, ask us to live out our ideals.
And because I chose ministry, I have taken up this challenge. But I know that this is a place where our faith has failed others: for people raised UU who do not take up ministry, it is often difficult to find ways to deepen the faithfulness of living. My sister stayed active in Unitarian Universalism in college, but she has just graduated and moved, and her faith is waning. I am worried that she will misplace her map back to the well, that she will decide that Unitarian Universalism has done all it can for her, that it has no yet-to-be-realized transformative possibilities for her own life. Been there, done that. I know UU's, and some of you here fall into this category, who have stayed with the faith without becoming ministers, but the number is small.
But this is not my challenge, except to the extent it makes me sad to see my sister fade away from our religious home. This is a place the faith fails many, but its not the place it has failed me.
Where has this faith failed me?
Racism.
Some of you may be thinking, "Matthew talks about racism and anti-racism all the time. Didn't he preach on anti-racism last time he was up in the pulpit?"
Yes.
Our movement's failure to overcome its institutional racism, to create a diverse and beloved community of faith, despite our best hopes and highest ideals, is a source of deep personal loss for me. It makes me weep, makes me yell, makes me turn red and blue and green altogether, when I think about the absence of anti-racist education and people of color in my religious childhood. I never learned in Sunday School to cross the line between white and other, not in my actions, not in my heart, not in my mind. We did not engage racial and ethnic difference, even when the one or two children of color were around. Only now, as I prepare for the ministry, am I able to reach out and form accountable relationships; only now am I seriously applying Unitarian Universalist liberation theology to the struggle against racism.
We live in a homophobic society; but I learned in religious education—in the whole life of the faith—that homophobia was not OK, that my religious values required me—REQUIRED ME—to take a stand against homophobic jokes, to resist the indoctrination of my own mind and heart. Imagine a seventh grader telling his friends that it wasn't OK to make gay jokes around him. I didn't keep a lot of those friends, but I knew I was doing what was right. And when I later realized I was bisexual, I knew I was already in a faith community where that was just fine, and I knew what friends I could trust. We live in a homophobic society, but this faith teaches us to resist injustice and to love one another.
We live in a racist society, but all I learned growing up UU was that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a hero. I did not learn to act against racism, I did not learn that racism was alive, I did not learn to resist racism in my own heart. We are doing better now than we did then, but not good enough. Our faith teaches us that all are connected, that all deserve justice and respect; and this faith failed me and so many others when it did not apply those principles to racism.
So what kept me in the faith? I get this question all the time. People find out that I was raised UU and they want to know what the secret was. What did somebody do right—and the simpler the explanation, the better, because then they can just replicate it in their own congregations. And I do have a few concrete suggestions based on my experience: have excellent youth advisors; encourage youth to attend regular services; include youth on committees; encourage youth to attend General Assembly, District Annual Meetings, and UU camps. These all were important to me, in large part because they connected me with adults in the congregation and the movement.
But I think the real answer to the question, "what kept you in the faith?", is ministry. And I do not mean simply my own call to ministry, although the importance of that can not be denied. I do not know if would have had the gumption to form a UU campus group in college, in a town with no UU congregation, if I was not planning on ministry. My call to ministry has been the driving purpose in my life for eleven years now, and there is no doubt that that sense of purpose kept me engaged in Unitarian Universalist communities when the going got tough, and when my need was low.
But when I say that ministry kept me in the faith, I do not mean primarily my own call to ministry. I mean those ministers that passed the faith on to me, that mentored me, that were an example to me of what a spiritually mature, intellectually honest, ethically wise person could be. I saw in their being a kindness and a wisdom, and long before I knew I wanted to be a member of that profession I knew I wanted to live that deeply in faith.
Last week, at the meeting of UU ministers from around the world in Birmingham, Alabama, I had a conversation with the man who was my minister from when I was five until I was eleven. I remember him as my first minister; he remembered me as a skinny little kid. What I learned from him, and from all my ministers, was that this was a faith worth living for. That freedom and acceptance were spoils of a hard-fought battle for religious liberalism; that this faith made people more alive, more loving. In the stories told in those first 15 minutes, in the sermons I listed to as a youth, in the church potlucks and coffeehours, in Christmas pageants and canvass dinners, I saw ministers who preached and lived the good news of this faith: that through loving community and free thought, people might be liberated and the world might be made whole. Their message was an invitation to participate in creation, to aid and abet the work of the divine, and I accepted the invitation, and so I stayed in the faith. I shall be forever grateful.
KG:
In a personal sense, I believe that it was the respect and approval of the adults I met at church, my Sunday School teachers and others; my friends' parents and my parents' friends, that nurtured me and kept me coming to church, or at least believing in it, during difficult times. They saw me as special, and enjoyed me, my precocious intelligence and my intense desire to please; they foresaw a future of achievement for me. Once I got to seminary, the significant connection I made with those who would be my colleagues created an equally important nurturing environment. Yet I think many young people were nurtured by their congregations in the same way, who did not become active Unitarian Universalists as adults. It is also true that I became too attached to my independence of reason, judgement and conscience to ever be comfortable for long in most other faith traditions. Jesus seems to me a fascinating guy, but I neither want to live his life nor follow him - as indeed I do not think he ever supposed anyone should. I must carve out my own spiritual sustenance, and find my own path, in order to be assured that it is authentic, and that it seems I can only do in the heritage of this free faith.
My Unitarian Universalist upbringing gave me an affirmation of my own power and competence that I prize, and would never willingly surrender. It also taught me to respect the integrity of my own and others' religious journeys; that there is more than one path, that we are all seekers, even when we know it not. One thing that I have learned from those who found this tradition after long struggle is how lonely it can be to try to do the work of spiritual growth and responsible service by oneself. I have always known that I was not alone in my questions and yearnings, and I know that I will always want the community of those who, with me, seek their hidden reckonings. In this covenant of memory and promise, I know that I am free to follow my own path wherever it leads, to follow the beckonings of all the many human ways of the spirit, trusting that so long as I report honestly my own genuine experience, I will find acceptance and support. I know, too, that I will always be in conversation with those whose experiences have differed from mine; that my assumptions will be challenged and my thinking expanded by the enduring differences among my Unitarian Universalist community. I have faith that our striving will always be for greater diversity and inclusiveness, rather than greater uniformity, and that, it seems to me, is the path of life.
What kept, and keeps, me in this movement is the conviction that if I cannot participate in making one small congregation operate by the values of liberty, authenticity, reason, and compassion, then there is no possibility that the world will ever operate that way. The vision that I carry, of wholeness within and around me, a world made fair, with all her people one, and a life of grateful, joyful, meaningful service for myself, can only be realized as it is shared, and can only be brought to pass in the common endeavor of building an institution that will survive my own brief days. This faith, this Unitarian Universalist heritage and community, is the place where I, and we together, most nearly touch that vision. It is my birthright, and it will be my precious inheritance and my sacred allegiance as long as I live.
Opening Words
Gathered friends, welcome.
Welcome to this house of hope, this house of faith, this house of freedom.
Come in, come in and sit with us a while. Let go of your list of things to do. Of errands to run. Of details. They can wait for just an hour.
In this hour, join with us in sharing life, in celebrating life, in envisioning a world made more whole and more free.
Come in, come in, and sit with us a while. There is wisdom in the world, come and share in it. There is love in the world, come and live in it. There is goodness in the world, come and create it. There is beauty in the world, come and rest in it.
We begin our morning together with words from Antoine De St. Exupery
In a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up
The heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore we do not neglect the ceremonies of our passage:
When we wed, when we die, and when we are blessed with a child.
When we depart and when we return; when we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children.
It is not the place of some official to hand to them their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge and ideals,
They will lose all of us that is wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children, lest they drag out joyless lives;
Lest they allow treasures to be lost because they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings of things.
It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.
We live not by things, but by the meanings of things. Let us covenant together, let us work together, so that our lives might be more full of meaning and purpose, and less overcrowded with things upon things. Let this flame of the chalice we now kindle be our beacon in a hectic world, calling us to spend our time in pursuit of our greatest dreams.
Closing words:
You might think that the journey which began in the churches of our childhood has ended for us in ministry, but T.S. Eliot writes:
What we call a beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.
So it has been; so may it be.