First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Starting Off Right

It is a good thing, I suppose, that ministers are not members of the screenwriters guild – one would hate to start off the year having to choose between crossing a picket line and not attending church! W. H. Auden makes the claim, in the coda to his re-telling of the nativity story, that our return to the frustrations and disappointments of everyday life after the intensity of Christmas is spiritually depressing. When January hits, and the glamour is packed away along with the tree, he says "the spirit must practice its scales of rejoicing without even a hostile audience." We try to escape from this disillusionment, he suggests, by looking around for something – anything – "to inhibit our self-reflection." In other words, we don’t want to have to examine our lives too closely, once the candle glow of O Holy Night fades into the grey light of tedious winter with its slushy sidewalks and cabin fever. I think that Auden is right to a certain extent; there is a let-down after the holidays, if they have done their work at all in us. The suspension of disbelief that makes Christmas work leaves a certain dreariness upon the world of practical necessities, but I would argue that in fact this reality check is good for the human spirit. The splendid possibilities that yuletide always celebrates, the vision of peace on earth and good will among people, only really gets anywhere if it survives into the challenges of the new year, inviting us to think and act differently from the usual compromises and ingrained despair of our habitual routines.

In this sense, I think that Auden is wrong; inhibiting our self reflection may feel like the path of least resistance, but it doesn’t really serve us well. That is why the cultural tradition of new years resolutions is not just arbitrary; it actually is the logical follow up to the irrational hopes and generosities of Christmas. For it is not that one is true and the other is false; the human heart is a more complex reality than that. We need our moments of enchantment, and visions of what the world might be; otherwise the mechanics of getting and spending come to dominate our souls, and make us small. But those visions require follow up, if they are ever to be anything but pleasant daydreams; until we take account of the demands they place upon us, and come face to face with the cost in discipline and dedication of making them real, we are only indulging ourselves.

Howard Thurman expresses this well in his benediction:

When the song of angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

Then the work of Christmas begins…

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among the brothers,

To make music in the heart.

These activities, healing the broken, rebuilding the nations, making music in the heart, are the work of Christmas, but they do not commence until the night of magic is over, when the angels are silent again, and the star of wonder is seen no more. The festivals of light are all about aspiration, desire, the things we want – toys and candy for the unsophisticated taste; joy to the world, and peace and good will for the mature audience. But the start of the new year is about duty and commitment, practice, and the demands of the time being. And you know, with the unconscious wisdom of the cultural consensus, that the time has come for losing weight and getting in shape, for doing something about the bills and the savings account, for writing thank you notes and cleaning out files and closets and visiting the dentist, and all the other unamusing exercises of basic virtue that are necessary to the maintenance of ordered lives and self-respect.

Of course, these sorts of resolutions are notoriously short-lived, and soon enough the cycle of ordinary life reasserts itself, with most of my old habits and dilemmas largely intact, and the world goes on much as it did before the disruptive influence of the holidays and all that Christmas spirit. But it seems to me that the most important qualities of my humanity are not actually exhausted in what we might call the ‘resolution virtues’ – those personal disciplines of thrift, nutrition, neatness, punctuality, exercise and so on that get such close scrutiny at this moment of the year. When I actually reflect upon the kind of person that I want to be, it is the relational virtues that loom largest; kindness, justice, compassion, cheerfulness, and making a difference in the world are really more important expressions of my values, because they affect the quality of other peoples’ lives as well as my own.

Religion has traditionally been the advocate and instructor of virtue in human culture, and for humanists that advocacy is indeed its identifying and compelling dimension. What is religion for, if not to explore and explain our ideals? To remind us, and summon us again, to the values we hope to exhibit in our actions, to the ways in which we have said we want to conduct ourselves, to the commitments and aspirations by we have chosen to shape our lives? If these were easy matters, like putting a new color of paint on the walls, it would be pointless to build an institution around maintaining our accountability to our highest expectations of ourselves. But in fact it is true that ‘the time being is… the most trying time of all’; and our moments of high resolve are fleeting experiences. Without a way of reminding ourselves from week to week what our best intentions were, and the kind of person each of us meant to be, it is easy for those values to get lost amid the demands and busy-ness of making it from one day to the next. And yet, if we put off our moral reckonings until all other matters are attended to, we shall never have them; it is meaningless to affirm virtues unless we are willing to use them as we go along, and try to measure our conduct by them in the midst of life’s pressures and complications.

This, it seems to me, is the foundation of a faith community in any religious congregation, and specifically in this one. What brings us together as humanists is not the acknowledgement of god, but rather the acknowledgement of our own hopes and limitations. None of us can ever become the people we want to be in isolation. Alone, we have no one to practice our virtues on, no one to remind us when we forget, no one to comfort us when we fail, no one to recognize and celebrate our successes, no one to encourage us when we lose heart. We need other people who are striving, as we are striving, to be more fully human; we need them to compare notes with, to ask questions of, to share our discoveries, to demonstrate that no private failing is ours alone.

This kind of community, of shared spiritual aspiration and practice, is one of the most tender and nourishing human connections I know; when we find it, it is a treasure of great worth, and many are the people who come seeking it here. The problem is that such community is very costly, and because it is costly, it is rare. The larger society in which our lives are formed, and in which institutions like this one exist, does not prepare us for such community, or help us to find it or sustain it. When we do, it is a kind of subversive secret, an act of resistance against the materialism and commercial comfort of popular culture. Now there is much to be said in favor of the culture of comfort, as I will explore a couple of weeks hence when we consider the practice of torture, but what it does not do is to cultivate our capacity for intimate community. So it would be unreasonable to expect such community to come easy. Like a strong marriage, or wise parenting, or deep friendship, spiritual community is an achievement, not something that can be had for the asking. It requires three costly investments, and only those who make those three commitments will find that precious connection enriching their lives. And so this morning I want to suggest that if a deeper spiritual community is part of your yearning, as it is for me, and for so many of us, that we might consider adding these three investments to our resolutions for this new year.

The first costly investment for building true spiritual community is risk. It is only when a person is willing to articulate their ideals and aspirations that they can identify others who share their yearnings. It is only when you are able to let someone else know about your disappointment and discouragement, the roadblocks that have turned you aside, and the challenges that you failed to meet, that you will find you are never alone in these dilemmas. It is only when a person makes himself or herself accountable to another human being that their values become conscious daily realities, because they are lived through someone else’s eyes. It is that experience of being deeply known that makes community so precious, yet no one can know us except as we are willing to risk setting our truth before others, to struggle and grow in the light of their presence.

The second requirement of community is acceptance of others, and this is a more costly investment than many of us often realize. It means engaging other people despite their persistent failures to be who we would prefer them to be. It means settling for the flawed human beings at hand, rather than the perfectly sympathetic and responsible folks you are hoping to meet some day. This is the exact opposite of the message of our transient, youth and success obsessed culture, which seems to encourage us to write off imperfect people easily, on the theory that better ones will come along. Acceptance of others is costly because it means that we must learn to heal relationships, rather than discarding them; this requires that we be able to hear the impact we have on someone, and sincerely repent, if we have given pain. It also requires the largeness of heart that allows us authentically to forgive, when someone expresses regret. To practice acceptance is to come to know and accept the quirks of personality that make an individual’s character distinctive, and celebrate that diversity, rather than forcing all people into one standard mold. It is to give others the same freedom to be truly themselves, that you need in order to be your own best self.

Finally, the creation of spiritual community takes time, and thus requires of us persistence. Worthwhile relationships do not drop into our laps fully formed, and the only way to experience community is to show up -- with commitment. This is costly because it means that we must overcome our own logistical inertia, to bring our scarce time and limited energy to a new possibility, and keep making this investment throughout the shifting chapters of the community’s life. Churches had this quality more nearly once upon a time, when folks were less mobile, both geographically and denominationally, so that joining a congregation – or being called as its minister – was assumed to be a life-long commitment. The people still fought with one another, over the color of the carpet or the length of the prayers or the mission project, but they stayed, and buried their dead together, and raised their children together, and knew one another’s triumphs and hardships, and helped each other remember who they were called to be. While there is much to be desired about the freedom to choose a religious community that is congruent with your beliefs, the marketing strategies of a consumer culture will never offer the depth of connection that grows only out of shared experience over time. I have always maintained that meaningful community thrives best not in situations where people are made comfortable and their preferences catered to, but rather in circumstances where we are asked to make significant sacrifices, and overcome challenges that we did not know we could accomplish, in the service of something that matters intensely. It is in working with others on substantive issues, whether electing a candidate, or making a movie, or testing a vaccine, or training for a military mission, or performing a difficult piece of music, that we learn to know and depend on others, and to make our shared strengths productive for a common purpose. Helping each other to become more fully human, and to live more meaningful lives, is such a substantive purpose; it offers a breeding ground for the sort of friendship that Kahlil Gibran describes, where when one speaks his or her mind, we do not fear either agreement or disagreement, but listen always with an open heart.

There is no institutional or political structure that can make this kind of community happen; no amount of money can guarantee it, and no leadership can bestow it by fiat. It can only be cultivated by the careful investment of risk, acceptance, and commitment over time, by sticking with the people who know us best, warts and all, doing meaningful work together as our lives unfold. Our society’s demand for instant gratification makes us less patient with these organic, relational processes, but there is no microwave convection oven for community, no shortcut to the demanding path of learning to know and be known in the reality of our shared humanness. Conventional religious communities would claim that they discover their connections to one another in a shared reverence for god; the humanist perspective reverses that equation, to say that we discover the holy within the connections of our common humanity.

The gift of a new year offers each of us yet another opportunity to become more nearly the person we are called to by the angels of our better nature. Let us remember that this does not happen in isolation, for it is our nature to be social creatures, and to build meaning in the context of community. As independent minded as we like to think ourselves, we cannot practice the scales of rejoicing, or of virtue, alone, for it is in relationship that our values take on flesh and become real in the world. These communities do not happen arbitrarily; they grow out of the costly investment of time and commitment, risk and acceptance, accomplishing some substantive purpose together. This is how the work of Christmas is carried into the new year, into the ordinary time being of our lives, to actually make a difference in who we are, and in the world we build. Let us resolve, then, to cherish the ties that bind us into spiritual communities, and to nurture them with the openness of our hearts and the understanding of others, by showing up persistently and engaging with our best selves.

In early 19^th century America, the Shakers, a radical offshoot of the Society of Friends, pursued a vision of spiritual community which left a lasting mark on our culture of design and craftsmanship, as well as many practical inventions, and a much-loved hymn celebrating the ‘delight’ of that connection. Let’s sing together.

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Opening Words

KG: Good morning, and welcome, on this first Sunday of 2008!

We arrive out of many singular rooms, traveling over the branching streets.

SP: We need one another when we mourn, and would be comforted.

We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.

KG: We come to be assured that our brothers and sisters surround us,

To restore their images upon our eyes.

SP: We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation,

And need to be recalled to our best selves again.

KG: We enlarge our voices in common speaking and singing.

SP: We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose,

And cannot do it alone.

KG: We try again that solitude found in the midst of those

Who with us seek their hidden reckonings.

SP: We need one another in the hour of success,

When we look for someone to share our triumphs.

KG: Our eyes reclaim the remembered faces; their voices stir the surrounding air.

SP: We need one another in the hour of defeat,

When with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.

KG: The warmth of their hands assures us, and the gladness of our spoken names.

SP: We need one another when we come to die,

And would have gentle hands to prepare us for that journey.

All our lives we are in need of others, and others are in need of us.

KG: This is the reason of cities, of homes, of assemblies in the houses of fellowship;

It is good to be with one another.