First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
November 18, 2001

What is it all for? Why is it that people build churches, and join churches, and give their time and talent, and support and loyalty for decades, to churches? When we ask this question of our newcomers, in the orientation groups -- we ask each of them to tell us something of the story of their journey, and what they are looking for that has drawn them to our society -- there are three words that come up over and over again. They are looking, they tell us, for a sense of community, for meaning in their lives, and for a deeper spirituality. Of course they want religious education for their children, and a stimulating experience on Sunday morning, and sometimes a place to get married, but those things can be had without the covenant commitment, the soul presence, that membership in a religious body necessarily demands.

Community, meaning, and spirituality; I suspect these are the things that people seek in any church or temple, mosque or synagogue, whatever their theological orientation. This morning, as we welcome our newest members, and celebrate the dedication, fifty years ago, of this building, it seems useful to consider how these experiences come about in this society, and what we mean by them. It might be helpful, as we look toward our second half century here, to understand the building blocks of which meaning, spirituality, and community are composed, and the process through which our lives may be transformed by them. Particularly in the case of spirituality, I suspect that we could use a clearer definition of this rather ambiguous and confusing term; what does it mean in the context of a pluralistic, agnostic congregation with a strongly humanist history?

Let me begin by suggesting that both community and meaning are by-products. Like happiness, and love, and some of the other best gifts of life, they cannot be sought directly. Community emerges not out of having a good time together, as is sometimes thought, but rather out of engaging with others in challenging and worth-while endeavors. Community flourishes among those who are engaged in accomplishing something that they believe in, among those who must struggle together to bring about a valued goal, among those who have overcome adversity through their reliance on one another. This, I believe, is what was at the heart of that first Thanksgiving celebration among the Mayflower pilgrims. Surely they were glad at last to have more than enough to eat, and the assurance of sustenance through the winter, but what they were really happy and grateful for was each other. Those who had survived that first winter of deprivation and sickness had been through a dreadful time together; none of them could have survived alone, and many did not survive as it was. As their grief was shared, so their survival was shared, and so they were bonded into an indissoluble community, for which no expression of thanks could ever adequately express their gratitude. It is not the feast but the sharing which is at the heart of this holiday; the community that grows in the midst of our endurance and our building of life together.

We, the heirs of those New England colonists, would do well to take to heart their real lesson. It is not in leisure and luxury and idle or frivolous dissipation that we will build communities that can sustain us and inform the shape of our lives. It is not by making each other comfortable that we make enduring connections, and weave the fabric of our lives into one another's care, but by pursuing goals that make a difference to the world and to us, by undertaking the discomfort that matters, and achieving our dreams with one another's help. Certainly people who have built a community out of their joint endeavors and shared labors can take time to enjoy one another's company, and celebrate their achievements, but the community is built not out of those celebrations, but out of the work that precedes them. This leads me to suggest to those who are new members, that if your goal is a sense of community, do not seek it only in recreation. Rather, find some folks who are engaged in a task that matters to you, whether that is educating our children, or building affordable housing, or welcoming others into this society as you were welcomed, or making sure that this building is still standing fifty years from now, or fostering mutual understanding in our city's interfaith community, or performing inspiring music, and get to work.

In the same way, I would submit that a sense of meaning in life is also a product not so much of the search for meaning in itself, but rather of persistent commitment to values and relationships that over time express meaning. Meaning is rarely discovered in its raw form; instead, it ripens in and through those things to which we have given devotion, sacrifice, and enduring loyalty. And this means, I suppose, that meaning is necessarily the product of meaninglessness, of doing things we don't always want to do, and sometimes putting up with things that annoy us, and bore us, and choosing against our short term gratification at some moments, so that we might practice the commitment over time that is the ultimate locus of meaning. That is why, I think, our religious heritage so emphasizes the idea of covenant; it is in the context of the promises that we make to one another, and our efforts to keep those promises faithfully, that our lives grow their meaning. Every parent surely understands this, and every thriving marriage is a demonstration of it. Those who find a life work worthy of their patient study and ever-increasing skill know it. Religious community, too, can be an object of our loyalty over time, and thus increase its potential for giving meaning to our lives. This is why we honor those arriving at their milestone anniversaries of membership; I suppose that what this society means to our ten year members is something they could not well have imagined when first they joined, and perhaps could not easily describe now.

Another path to meaning is through taking responsibility and leadership, in whatever context your own life offers. I believe that we are called to leadership in myriad ways; parenting is possibly the most important leadership of all; teaching is leadership; we are leaders in our professions and in our communities, in our families and in our neighborhoods, every time we step forward to model and advocate for the values that matter to us. Therefore, I believe that a significant part of the mission of this congregation is to cultivate our capacity for service and for leadership; both yours and mine, because it is in the work of service and of leadership that we will build the community and grow the meaning that so many of us have come here to find.

What, then, of the third hope, for a deeper spirituality? This is a difficult word for some of us, and a confusing one for many. How many times have we heard someone make the claim, both in this community and outside of it, "I'm not a religious person, but I'm very spiritual." What does that mean? As you probably know by now, I think that both of these words can be meaningfully construed without reference to a self-conscious, personal deity. Let me propose an understanding of spirituality that may give some content that is recognizable to us when people say that they are spiritual but not religious, or that they have come to this society as part of a spiritual journey, or in the hope of deepening their spiritual lives.

First of all, I am very conscious of how demanding is the path I have described to community and meaning; it requires effort, persistence, sacrifice, devotion. These are not trivial or easy expectations. I think when people talk about spirituality, they are talking about an experience of the inner nourishment that strengthens and encourages us in those projects of service and leadership. Without that sense of spiritual energy, it is easy to become burned out and disillusioned, and to lose the thread of meaning and the community connection in the tragedies, failures and injustices of everyday life. Sometimes the leadership we would give seems to go nowhere, to be offered to an indifferent world, or to become mired in our own confusion. Sometimes communities disappoint us, or our endeavors become stalled and our groups dysfunctional rather than supportive. When these setbacks happen, it does not mean that our commitments or our endeavors are wrong; we should not conclude that the ideals of meaning and community are impossible to realize. So what do we, what can we, turn to in those moments which come to all of us in one way or another from time to time? In the answer to this question, I believe, lies the key to understanding spirituality.

Spirituality, I would suggest, is a combination of four qualities; it is the perception of ultimate sustenance and accountability, together with the capacity for ever-increasing gratitude and reverence. And the good news of the Humanist tradition, it seems to me, is that this collection of dynamics operates in human life with or without any concept of a traditional God. So let us unpack these qualities one by one, and see how they work.

Spirituality includes the perception of ultimate sustenance; it is the recognition, which Thanksgiving celebrates, that we are sustained in life by much that is freely given, and that we have not earned. This is something that the Humanist may quickly confess, first with reference to the earth itself; the delicate balances of this planet give us air to breathe and food to eat, from the sun's light comes our all the energy in our bodies and in our world. We are compassed about with beauty in so many forms, and all the materials of our creative work. And indeed we know that those who will not acknowledge their dependence upon an ecosystem that they did not create are those who most willingly destroy it. Second, we are dependent from the moment of our birth upon a human community that gratuitously shelters and cares for us, that creates structures of language and relationships by which we understand our own identity and the possibilities of our life. The simplest bread in our mouths is a triumph of cooperative human endeavor, from the farmer to the miller to the baker to the grocer to the family cook; we are infinitely dependent upon a vast web of people we know and people we will never know for our comfort and safety, our education and entertainment, for the meeting our myriad desires and for all the opportunities that invite us to grow and to achieve. We are sustained by human society as by the earth itself. Again, we are sustained not only by the present community of humanity, but also by the centuries of history and development that have preceded us and brought us to this day. Because of the achievements and sacrifices of those who came before us, our knowledge is vaster than theirs, our powers are greater than theirs, and we are the heirs of beauty and wisdom unachievable in any one lifetime. Our freedoms and our ideals, our moral discernment and our hopes for the future, all rest upon a heritage that we can only contribute our own part to, but can never repay. We are sustained by history, by society, by the planet, and no doubt, when we come to think about it, by much else that we depend upon to make us and keep us human. To live in the lively awareness of that sustenance is one aspect of what spirituality means.

The second quality of a spiritual consciousness is a sense of accountability; the recognition that something is asked of us, that by the sheer fact of our birth, we owe a certain kind of debt to the world. It is that realization of obligation that the reformer and educator Horace Mann was talking about when he said "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Part of the process of spiritual growth, it seems to me, is the developing recognition of where it is that our accountability lies. Some say that we are accountable to the past; to that vast heritage of giants upon whose shoulders we stand, to preserve the truth they discovered, the liberty they won, the good they achieved; to correct their errors, and fulfill what they left incomplete. Some say that we are accountable to the future; that in all decisions we must consider the implications for our descendants unto the seventh generation, that we owe to those who will follow us a world made better than the one we inherited. Some say that we are accountable to our own ideals; that the justice we can envision calls to us, that the peace we believe in and the goodness that is possible and the beauty we might create will haunt us until we give ourselves to their realization. Some sages have taught that we are accountable to the poor and the powerless, the vulnerable of the earth, for only in attending to their well-being shall we discover our own. Others have taught that we are accountable to the gifts and talents within ourselves; that our task is to actualize the creative potential that is uniquely ours, for no one with just our gifts ever has lived on this earth, or ever will again, and what we might be ought not to be wasted. It does not seem to me that any of these answers is wrong, and no doubt there are many more. But spirituality has to do, in part, with this perception that our lives are not our own to waste if we please, but that there is an inescapable demand upon us, and that we are accountable for what we do and what we become.

The third aspect of spirituality is the growing capacity for gratitude; the acknowledgement that we have not earned, and cannot earn, the gift that is our life, or the sustenance which makes that life possible. This is not a gratitude merely for what is good and pleasant; thankfulness that ceases at the first setback, and turns to bitterness in the face of disappointment, is merely self-serving, not an element of a sustaining spiritual life. Rather, the gratitude of spirituality recognizes that at the heart of creation is mystery, a mystery that is arbitrarily both tragic and abundant; gratitude sees that abundance and tragedy persist side by side, and that neither one cancels out the other. Authentic gratitude for the abundance is not shaken by the tragedies; instead, it affirms the givenness of a world we do not control, and rejoices in the good of that world despite its potential for pain. Such gratitude does not have a direct object; it is gratitude for rather than gratitude to. For example, we do not know, unless the records are still available and we look it up, the names of all those who helped to design this building, all those who gave money to fund its construction, or all those who actually dug the foundations and laid the bricks and installed the wiring. Nor can we tell all those whose hands have tended it in the fifty years since it was dedicated. Nevertheless, we can be profoundly grateful for this building, that it is here to welcome us and to shelter this community, even if we may never know precisely to whom those thanks are due. To live in a constant awareness of that kind of gratitude at all levels for all the gifts of this world is, I believe, a basic element of spirituality.

Finally, and perhaps most challengingly for religious liberals, I would suggest that spirituality includes a capacity for growing reverence; let me say precisely what I mean by that. I define reverence as responsiveness to a certain intersection in human experience where our perception of the moral overflows into the aesthetic, and our perception of the aesthetic overflows into the moral. I think it's the same thing, either way, but let us look at some examples of both cases. The moral overflows into the aesthetic wherever we are so overwhelmed by goodness that we see beauty as well. When I contemplate Gandhi's nonviolent march to the sea, or Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", or the movie "Schindler's List", or Maya Lin's Vietnam war memorial, I am struck almost to tears by a poignant admiration and gratitude and aspiration that it seems to me must properly be called reverence. It is not the moral achievement alone that moves me, but the way in which goodness becomes beauty which evokes that reverence. It can also, paradoxically, be evil that does this; it seems to me that Ground Zero in New York is a holy place, as is the concentration camp at Auschwitz. No trivial thing should be built in such places, at least for a long time; to stand there is to be stilled into reverence. Something similar happens to me at the place where overwhelming beauty signals a kind of inescapable affirmation of life and moral order; the way that the seasons melt into the annual renewal of springtime, the way that the night sky filled with the light of a million stars bespeaks a vast cosmic energy; the way that Van Gogh's iris or Elgar's Enigma Variations or Auden's poetry realizes the height of the human spirit. This kind of beauty does not exist for itself alone, but forms a part of the wholeness and goodness of the world. In such experiences, I am lifted into something beyond beauty that I have no name for but reverence. And I would submit that although your list may be different from mine, there might just be moments in your life when you find yourself also in that place, whatever you call it. The capacity for such experience, of wonder and awe where goodness meets beauty and they fuse, is a fundamental element of spirituality.

To cultivate these capacities, for reverence and for gratitude, and for the perception of sustenance and accountability, is what I mean by the process of spiritual growth. It is this constellation which has the power to keep us going on the path of service and leadership, as we practice those callings, finding in them the meaning and the community that make us fully human. I believe it was this kind of growth that Felix Adler meant when he had inscribed over the platform of the New York Ethical Society the affirmation that "The place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground." It is what this congregation meant when they sought to design a building that would, in the words of Roy Thorshov, teach them and their children to be "thoughtful, self-reliant, courageous, kindly, and good." This building is beautiful for a reason; it is meant to inspire us to better lives, to call us to leadership and service because that is where meaning and community will grow. It calls us to more constant awareness of the sustenance we receive, and greater clarity about our accountability; to a more honest and coherent expression of our gratitude, and a deeper experience of reverence, that we may be nourished in our journeys, and strengthened in our work together.