Maybe There’s Hope for Faith

Emily Melcher, Student Minister

Delivered at First Parish in Bedford

September 25, 2005

There is a Love Here

(Words and Music by Emily Melcher)

There is a love here to hold you

through darkness and fear.

There’s a faith that can nurture

the dreams you hold dear.

For your longings and questions

are all welcome here

in this circle of faith and love.

Ó Emily Melcher 2004

The Whole of Me

(Words and Music by Emily Melcher)

Reconnect the part of me

that knows just who I am.

Reconnect the heart of me,

that full-of-passion part of me.

Reconnect the soul of me,

the whole of me.

Ó Emily Melcher 2000

Maybe There's Hope For Faith

(Words and Music by Emily Melcher)

All the world over, for thousands of years

faith has helped people to live with their fears.

But faith has been damaged by bloodshed and tears

in every land, through all the years.

I know of children whose minister raped them,

battered bodies and souls as they cowered in shame.

One of those kids used a bullet to silence

the fear that he might be to blame

for what he endured in God's name.

But ministers, too, offer refuge to children

and safety from all of the harm that they face;

A listening ear or a word of compassion,

or shelter or food, or a loving embrace.

Maybe their gifts are God's grace.

Maybe there's hope for faith after all

in churches where children are raised to stand tall,

and nurtured and guided with out shame or fear.

Children are cherished here.

Maybe there's hope for faith.

But women are threatened and beaten and killed

for seeking abortions or showing their skin.

God's mighty avengers believe they serve justice

even when killing their kin

to punish what they see as sin.

And then there are people supporting all women,

believing that each must make her own choice

and seek her own truth and be true to her wisdom,

and speak from her own precious voice.

Perhaps lift it up to rejoice.

Maybe there's hope for faith after all

In churches where women and men can stand tall,

and raise up our voices, each one sounding clear,

a place where we listen and hear.

Maybe there's hope for faith.

And yet, God is invoked to justify hatred

of heretic, Muslim or Jew, infidel.

Countries are ravaged and people are tortured

and driven from homes where they dwell.

Whole nations are banished to hell.

Still, others build homes and bring people together,

building bridges of metal and hope to repair

the damage that's caused when hatred is nurtured,

the souls that cry out in despair.

Maybe they build as a prayer.

Maybe there's hope for faith after all

In churches where people are free to stand tall.

Where all paths are open, all doors are flung wide,

both faithful and doubter inside.

Maybe there's hope for faith.

I have enough faith to hope.

Ó 2001 Emily Melcher

Sermon

Six years ago, I walked into a UU church for the first time.  I walked in hurting, aching in fact, wanting to be invisible in my pain, and at the same time desperately in need of a community which could hold me as I brought together the fractured pieces of myself and my faith, a community which would not only nurture me, but help me, eventually, to blossom into my own gifts and power, so that I might give those gifts to the world.

And you know what?  I found exactly what I needed. 

I was raised Episcopalian, and was very active in the church as a child and youth.  In fact, I was a youth delegate to the Episcopal Convention which voted in favor of the ordination of women.  That was 1976.  When I went to Sweden as an exchange student a year later, I had my unicycle and my Bible in my suitcase.  As it turned out, only one of them would help me maintain my balance.  At perhaps the most impressionable time in my life, I spent a year in a secular country which, by means of human choice and commitment, and without prayers of supplication to any Almighty Father in Heaven, had created a social system which met, at a minimum, the basic needs of all its citizens.  That year in Sweden made me question the whole enterprise of religion, which I had understood, naively, of course, as a sort of tit-for-tat arrangement, in which God would watch out for us if we’d both ask him to, and thank him for it.  

I returned to the states just as all hell was breaking loose in our congregation.  Several young men reported to the vestry (the governing board of the congregation), that our minister had molested them when they were youth.  He had molested them while performing a sacrament called “The Laying on of Hands for Spiritual Healing.”  These youth had sought the minister’s care when they were in pain, and he had abused them.  While the vestry was busy trying to keep the abuse quiet, one of those young men turned a gun on himself and took his own life.  Outraged at the betrayal of trust, the devastation wrought by our minister in the name of God, and the impotence of our vestry in the wake of the abuse, I left the church, slamming the door on my way out.  I dismissed the church and its patriarchy, both human and divine.  

Twenty years passed before I realized that in slamming the door, I’d shut down something in my own heart, too.  There was a tight knot in my chest where hope, trust and love once lived.  I was beginning to loosen that knot in therapy, but my intuition told me that therapy wouldn’t be enough:  I knew I needed to reopen the door to church, though I didn’t exactly know why.

So, I sat there that Sunday, six years ago, in the largest UU congregation in North America, and I let the singing of hymns, the moment of silence, and the words of comfort and challenge spoken from the pulpit wash through me.  And I wept.  Like so many come-inners -- people who’ve found Unitarian Universalism, rather than being raised in it -- I felt I had come home.  And, like people everywhere who’ve come home after a lifetime away, I wept.  Indeed, I wept not just that first Sunday, but for weeks and months.  I sat there, surrounded by strangers who would become friends, and they neither turned away nor invaded my soul as I grieved. 

If there is a balm, my friends, it is in weeping.  I’m not talking about self-pity, I’m not talking about a narcissistic wallowing, I’m talking about letting our wounds break us open so that we can get under the surface, get under the images we fight so hard to maintain, because those images calcify us, reducing us to a fraction of our potential.  I want us to get under the surface to find our common humanity, and reconnect with our passion.  If we walk in here every week, hiding from ourselves and hiding from one another, we make a practice of being only a part of ourselves. And if we’re only a part of ourselves, a part is all we have to give to the world. 

So I don’t think we need to get over ourselves – I think we need to get with ourselves!  Mary Caroline Richards asks “… how are we to love when we are stiff and numb and disinterested?  By what process and what agency do we perform the Great Work, transforming lowly materials into gold?  Love,” she says, “Love, like its counterpart Death, is a yielding at the center… It takes all one’s strength.  And yet it takes all one’s weakness too.”  I hear stories similar to mine over and over again, stories of people whose closed hearts, whose stiff, numb and disinterested hearts, yield again as they allow themselves to be with themselves in community with others.  When our hearts yield, we come alive again, turning the lowly materials of ourselves and our lives into gold.  We find our passion and inhabit our power.  When we do that, our work in the world, whatever it is, becomes an effective outpouring from that Center.  The love that Richards refers to as a being who lives as a possibility in us comes to inform all that we do. 

All around me in my first UU congregation, in congregations I’ve visited or where I’ve led worship, at denominational gatherings, in my colleagues at seminary, in the history and theologies of this tradition, and now, here, in this congregation, I see people who have come alive again, “unfolded souls,” to use Rebecca Parker’s term, “unfolded souls (who are) a presence of creativity and blessing and engagement in the world.”  These “unfolded souls” offer refuge and safety to children, a listening ear, a word of compassion, shelter, food, tutoring, or a loving embrace.  They stand and march together, women, men and transsexual, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual persons, persons of worth and dignity celebrating the worth and dignity of each of us and all of us.  They carry on the struggle for the right of each of us to think for ourselves and to raise our own voices in the struggle and in the rejoicing.  They write letters and blogs and articles, and they lobby their elected leaders.  They protest war and hold vigils for peace.  They write poetry and songs, they dance and play and paint and make this world more beautiful.  They build homes and bring people together.  They raise money to assist victims of natural disasters and inhumane governments.  They build bridges of metal, and they build bridges of hope, and they have been doing so for hundreds of years. 

I am so grateful, and humbled, to be among you.  

And yet, there is something that concerns me in this notion of “unfolded souls,” for the truth is that transformation of ourselves into “limber and soft organisms lying open to the world at the quick” – that transformation is ongoing.  It is often painful, and, to put it bluntly, most of us are not the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Mother Teresa, or Gandhi.  I certainly am not.  The best most of us can ever hope to be is “unfolding souls,” connecting and reconnecting to our selves and one another, passionately engaging and reengaging life in all its beauty and ugliness.  I see this not as an onward and upward progression, but as a dance, in which we sometimes move beautifully with ourselves, others, and life, sometimes clumsily, falling out of rhythm or losing our footing, stepping on our partners’ toes or having our toes stepped on, sometimes hearing the music and joining in, and sometimes sitting on the sidelines, but trusting that the music continues, and that we can move to it, with it, again and again and again.      

This dance has infinite variations and an infinite number of partners.  None of us knows all the steps.  I would not have us use our religion as a weapon to dismiss or diminish ourselves or others, though I know that sometimes, we are guilty of doing so. 

Sometimes the dance is exhilarating, and we feel as if we are flying.  I would have us fly, but I would not have us use our religion to puff ourselves up, though I know that sometimes, we are guilty of doing so.

I see how my own song, “Maybe There’s Hope for Faith,” sets up a dualism, juxtaposing the evil perpetuated in the names of gods by individuals and systems with the good I found both in my Unitarian Universalist congregation, and in the living legacy of Unitarian Universalist commitment to justice.  I told you earlier that I found exactly what I needed in Unitarian Universalism.  I fell in love with Unitarian Universalism and stepped onto the path toward ministry while still in the blush of love, and I’m glad I did.

Just as couples suffer the disillusionment of their idealized images of their relationships, and parents learn that love is a commitment, even in the absence of a warm, fuzzy feeling, I am regularly startled by my own naiveté.  But I’m also grateful for it, because seeing only the good in this tradition for a time made it possible for me to yield at the center, and in doing so, to develop a faith strong enough to weather the inevitable disillusionments.

In these six years, I’ve learned that we Unitarian Universalists are as human as others.  We are prone to arrogance, to believing that we know the steps, and that, if only people would dance to our music, all would be well.  We are also likely to use the fact of our relative privilege to dismiss our own, very real pain and suffering.  

My 25 year friendship and 20 year marriage to my husband – entered into with idealism and naiveté – has taught me that faith deepens through faithfulness, through a willingness to show up, to be vulnerable, and to be changed.  It’s taught me that the friction, the painful places, are growing edges, not just for one of us (as I once believed), but for both of us.

And so, when I wonder if there really is hope for faith, when I see us – Unitarian Universalists - using our religion to set ourselves apart from our own despair, or from our common humanity, when I see us hurting or dismissing one another, when the gen-xer in me touts the advantages of an interior path to the baby boomer in me, who believes that institutions create structures within which souls can unfold, I remember that these are growing edges, for each of us and for Unitarian Universalism, and that we have not arrived, we have not saved ourselves or the world.  I actually don’t believe we ever will.  And yet, I believe that every day, in every moment, we are arriving, we are saving ourselves and the world, and I want to play my part, the part that I, uniquely, can play.  I want to be faithful, because being faithful gives me hope for faith. 

And so, I am grateful, and humbled, to be among you.