Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
Spirit of Life - "Roots"
"Spirit of Life"
Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea; move in the hand, giving
life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come
to me, come to me.
If there is any song that can be identified as a Unitarian
Universalist anthem, it is Spirit of Life. It's
beautiful, popular, widely known, and sung at UU events, and
is, I'm sure, the one most turned to if there are no hymnals
because we've got a fighting chance at knowing all the
words. I believe those who sing Spirit of Life find
the words moving and meaningful. I do. This week and next I
want to reflect particularly on two metaphors in the song.
Roots hold me close and wings set us free.
If we get too literal about the image of ourselves having both roots and wings the picture becomes funny. I'm reminded of a game we played at the Junior Youth Retreat at Cedar Hill last week ago in which groups were asked to draw one animal which was a composite of three - my team drew a part stegasaurus, part chicken, part elephant thing which we called a stegachickaphant.
So, can you picture a creature with roots and wings? How about a pine tree with roots and also wings - a green blur whizzing past the church window? or rooted birds, maybe a spray of colorful, rooted cardinals singing in the memorial garden?
But I digress. Carolyn McDade, when she penned the lyrics roots hold me close, wings set me free, was not being humorous. She meant that the legacy of our past nurtures us, hence our roots, and she meant that human beings need to be able to dream of a future that is open to possibility and to our striving. Roots and wings are about both our stability and about our possibility. We need both.
Today I want to talk about the notion of our roots. A couple of weeks ago I planted some hemlock trees at the border of our property. Their roots were bound in burlap. The instructions were to cut open the root ball, making an -X- on the underside, and to unwrap and fold down the burlap,; it is important that the plant not be root-bound so that they have room to grow. I am taking care to water these trees down to the roots in the coming weeks until they are established. Soon I am supposed to feed them a combination of nutrients called Miracid. Healthy roots are key to successful growth of any plant. Properly rooted, these trees will grow tall and strong, eventually able to withstand storm and drought on their own.
Within human beings, certain stories, those of our religious, group and family heritage are the nutrients which nourish our roots, sustain us and support our growth. Our religious understanding of the world, which I want to touch on today, includes our story of creation and tells us much about who we are, and how and why things came to be as they are. Other powerful stories also affect us - the story of the people with whom we share racial, national or religious origin; and of course, the story one's family heritage, loom large. All these stories combine to tell us who we are and how significant we are and whether or not we matter. They can profoundly influence our perception of the world and therefore, our experience. A disempowering story can cause us to languish under the best of conditions. Conversely, an empowering story can be a source of strength which allows us to grow straight and vigorously against all the odds.
When we sing "roots hold me close" here in this sanctuary we refer to our common Unitarian Universalist heritage. I'd like to share just a bit of how this church serves to order and make sense of my world and how it helps me to understand who I am and can be. I offer my story to provoke you to think about yours and to consider how and why it may be different.
Unitarian Universalism is the religious tradition, a heritage, which provides the structure that allows me to believe the evidence of my experience, mind and heart and places it in a religious context. Growing up outside religion, I was, if not religion-phobic, at least religion-skittish. - skittish of any tradition, really. Let me explain why.
I'm a former high school teacher who taught in many traditional classrooms over the years. In most classrooms desks are set up to face the teacher so that light comes in from the windows from the left side of the room. It's always been that way. You could say it's a tradition that windows are on the left. But would you like to know how it came to be that way? Most people are right-handed. Back when there were no electric lights builders wanted the daylight to stream in from left so the sun's shadow would fall to the right off the page.
Like many of you, I spent much of my life reluctant to let any religious tradition "hold me close," for fear the burlap will be wrapped too tight, and for fear that the traditions they embraced might have already given away to unthinking convention, as they had in classroom design. growing up outside of religion, I was afraid that, rather than nourish me, a religious tradition might choke off sources of growth already available to me. But the openness of Unitarian Universalism to questions and dialogue, seemed different. Unitarian Universalism not only allow its people to make their own sense of the world, it insists on it, really.
Before embracing Unitarian Universalism, I subscribed fully to the wisdom of the scientific method. Feeling forced by religion to choose between science and God while growing up, I had chosen science and the evidence of my senses, hands down. God and common sense appeared to be mutually exclusive provinces in those days. As a result I had internalized no religious structure. One might conjecture that my embrace of Unitarian Universalism, which allowed me religious permission to embrace science without guilt would have cemented my rejection of God once and for all. But that is not what happened. Unitarian Universalism has given me to see that the human impulse to understand that science can be understood as an expression our spiritual dimension. many from within the Unitarian Universalist tradition have viewed the physical world as sacred Scripture - Ralph Waldo Emerson, is one. Application of the scientific method can be understood and celebrated as an exercise driven by religious awe and wonder. Scientific explanations can be understood as exegesis of the Scripture that is the material world. The first sermon I gave here as a parishioner, invited to do so by Elizabeth Tarbox, the minister then, was a scientific understanding of the creation story. Within this framework, here, I finally felt able to let religion hold me close.
I am amazed that I feel a need to say the following, but given the recent articles in the Middleboro Gazette, I feel I must. Religion traditionally answers the question of how the world and humankind came to be with a specific creation story. Unitarian Universalism encourages us to be open to the world of our experience. I am sure it is no surprise to you that the creation myth that resonates for me is what I would call the Universe Story, the one that begins with the mystery we call the Big Bang, the primal explosion from which spewed forth all the evolving matter which has since evolved to became the universe as we now know it. Scientific evidence from the solar system suggests that the galaxies have been evolving for billions of years and that our planet and life on it, are consequences of that same evolutionary thrust. The Universe Story cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing, or where that original explosion came from. It remains in its own way, only the best myth we have, given the evidence. It is a work in progress. Those writing against the evolutionary story in the Middleboro Gazette say the only way to believe in God is to believe the story of Genesis as literally true. How wrong they are! Certainly no one can explain the Spirit of Life that so infuses our consciousness. But God, a higher power, a first cause, - that which is divine and Holy is in no way ruled out by the theory of evolution. The only thing that is ruled out by evolution is accepting the Biblical story of creation in Genesis as literally true. As the columnist McCarrick said in the Gazette a few weeks ago, for creationism to be right virtually all of science would have to be wrong.
Unitarian Universalism provided much more for me than permission to believe in a religious context that which I already thought was true. It has given me room to struggle toward a vocabulary for my own experience of the Holy. No longer forced to choose between science and God, I am now much better able to see and admit that behind every mystery we solve with our science lies another mystery, and better able to feel grateful for this gift we have been given. Ultimately, we dwell in the mystery and we always will, therefore the question of God remains.
Anne Lamott tells the story of a child about seven, lost one day. "She ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived," Anne writes, "but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’" ( from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamotte)
I love that story. If get lost emotionally, the church is always the place from which I can find my way home. I think of this particularly in times of grief and hardship. I remember my childhood home in which we suffered a devastating loss when we had no spiritual community. My mother said "don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine, we have a strong family, and we will take care of ourselves." I admired her pride and courage and what appeared to be her strength. Yet our small family wasn't strong enough and we got lost. And as a child within that family I grew angry that the world didn't seem to care that our world fell apart and stayed that way. The way of accepting and giving help that is natural within a healthy church community could have made all the difference in my life. I cannot say to you that in times of sorrow and tragedy I can take care of myself, or that my family can take care of itself. Instead, I have come more and more to trust that, in those times, if I reach out, if I can open up just a little bit, I will be supported by this church community and, in that process, find my way back to a sense of home.
The church provides both a rhythm and a direction for my life. In my own daily life, I am thrown off balance more than I want to admit. My focus, my priorities, often spin off into unfocussed busy-ness or tiredness or frustration. My connections in this church – in worship, in conversations, in exposure to new insights, in quiet minutes here in the sanctuary, – all of those connections help me recapture my focus and my true direction.
It has been a journey for me to learn to let the church to hold me close. My initial trepidation that religion would refuse to let me grow or ask me to give up vital parts of myself is unfounded here. The burlap which has been too tight, it turns out, for most of my life, has been ironically of my own making. Disappointed as I was that the world didn't seem to care, in truth I had never learned to reach out.
If you are in a place of need, you may feel reluctant to reach out to the church. You may think you can take care of it by yourself as my family did. You may assume the church knows of your need and it may not. Confide in a church friend. Let us be aware of your situation.
The church can be the roots that hold you close in the storm, and may become the very wings that set you free.