The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist

75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common

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“My Spiritual Story and Ours”

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, October 1, 2006

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 

 

It is told of a Zen Master who had done a painting for the King’s palace that when the King wanted to see it, he would say, “Wait a little longer.”  Years passed and the King repeatedly asked, “Isn’t the painting ready yet?”

 

The Master said, “The painting is ready, but you are not.  Existence is always ready.”

 

But the King insisted.  They entered the room and the painting was breathtaking! – three dimensional – the hills, the valleys and a small path going somewhere inside.

 

“Where does the road lead?” asked the King.

 

The painter said, “I will go and see.”  And he entered the path and disappeared beyond the hills.

 

That is what it means to worship.  You move into life.  You don’t stand outside it and ask where it goes.

--Zen story

 

It’s really a shiny apple pear plum privilege for First Parish to be among those hosting the Three Apples Storytelling Festival this weekend, and I thank Julie Turner and Doris Smith, Maria Green and no doubt many others for the good shepherding of this complex event.

 

Religion and stories go together: religion is about the ways we understand our lives and life itself; and it is by learning, listening and discovering our own and others’ stories that we come to understand these things. Ministry is mostly story-telling – story-listening, too – and then re-telling stories in ways they may be heard afresh.

 

So I want us to consider stories this morning, but I hear so much these days about people wanting something spiritual that, well alright already, I’ll say something spiritual.  I’m not sure what I’ll say, but I’ll say something spiritual. 

 

And another ingredient in this stone soup of a sermon this morning is that I’m also aware that, in the course of listening to me sermonizing over the years, you can learn quite a bit about Darfur, and history and politics and psychology and sex and child-rearing, the price of tea in China, and you can hear some beautiful quotations and poetry and nifty stories and a hundred other things…but I sometimes wonder what is said over Sunday lunch when someone asks, “Well, uh, what is it that Gibbons believes?  Is he a Christian or an atheist? Somebody says he’s a Buddhist!  What is he?  What’s his story?  And, for that matter, what’s the story at First Parish?  What’s that place about?  What’s their story?”

 

You’ll recall the old story about Calvin Coolidge who, upon returning home from church one Sunday, was asked what the preacher talked about.  “Sin,” said the notoriously succinct Cal.  “Well, what did he have to say about sin?” he was asked.  Coolidge’s terse reply: “He was against it.”

 

Frankly, if I preached about sin and a similar question were asked of you over lunch, I just bet that sometimes, well, you might not be able to tell for certain if I was fer or agin it.  And it is commonly known that Unitarian Universalists too often do not have a clear and plain spoken answer to the question, “What is Unitarian Universalism?”  

 

So that’s the preaching task I’ve put before me this morning.  My spiritual story and ours, in plain language. 

 

Let me tell you that the only story worth its salt (and, by the way, when someone says “worth its salt” and a whole lot of other stock phrases, such phrases come to us out of the Bible and, thus, I do contend that it is important for us to have some familiarity with Jewish, Christian and other bibles because they illustrate and illuminate our human experience)…but the only story worth its salt, I say, is the story we live and know in our own experience and imagination.

 

I’ve learned bible stories and Greek myths and Sufi tales, but the stories that matter most to me are the stories I’ve lived or imagined.  My stories are no holier than any of your stories, but I’ve got to admit that I admire the truthful spunk of that young man Ralph Waldo Emerson who went to Harvard Divinity School (my alma mater) and was assigned to write a scholarly paper on one of the Gospels.  “I don’t want to write a paper about somebody’s Gospel,” Waldo complained, “I want to write a Gospel of my own!”  Similarly, the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker asked, “What’s so miraculous about the ancient Egyptians who devised a way to change a dead man into a mummy in a period of years when it only takes the Harvard Divinity School a few months to make a mummy out of a live man!”

 

The spiritual stories I was taught as a child were stories of my grandparents’ farm in Sugar Grove, Illinois.  My grandfather Erv found arrowheads when he plowed the fields behind the horses named Nip and Tuck.  He worked hard and sometimes for breakfast had a little gin with his eggs. 

 

When he ate a whole pie at one sitting my grandmother Olive asked if he liked it and, like Silent Cal (whom he did not vote for) Erv said he wouldn’t have eaten it had he not.  Olive and my mother Mary Lou cooked for the men who, at harvest, ran the steam-powered combine.  Migrants and hoboes slept in the barn.  My great-grandmother Minnie, who lived with them, once burned her metal-stayed corset in the chimney and filled the house with smoke. 

 

And when she was a teenager, my mother and her boyfriend had too much to drink and, well, she got pregnant.  Secretly she got a back-alley abortion in Chicago – this must have been about 1928.  And this happened a second time too, a secret shame to my mother (and it’s not coincidental that, when I was a teenager, she always made it clear to me that there always would be money available should I ever know a girl with an unwanted pregnancy). 

 

Some years and boyfriends later – in 1935 – my mother and father were married in the living room of the farmhouse.  At the ceremony, my father’s striped boxers could be seen plainly beneath his white slacks.  On their wedding day, one of the farmhand girls cried into the peach ice cream she was churning.

 

Then it was in, I think, 1937 that Erv, my grandfather, broke the glass front cabinet in the dining room with his fist because he didn’t have $150 and the bank foreclosed on the farm’s mortgage.  He picked up the phone (I used to be able to remember the farm’s phone number – it was something like Fox-1-2-8-2) and Erv tried to reach President Roosevelt on the phone.  He just knew that, if only FDR knew what was happening to him, the President would help.  But they couldn’t reach The White House and they lost the farm – that was the cosmic tragedy of my family’s story. 

 

They moved to the city where Erv worked in a factory and died after an industrial accident.  It was just as well, my family said: had he kept the farm the work would’ve killed him sooner.  I was 5 years old when Erv died in 1957.  I remember the King Edward cigar that was placed in his breast pocket as he lay in the casket. 

 

I never lived any of that story, but it’s the taproot of my spiritual story.

 

Formative to my spiritual story was growing up in suburban Elmhurst, Illinois in a house my father – a tool salesman who never graduated from high school – paid for in cash, $25,000.  Church never had any appeal for my father (except when church suppers promised something other than potluck) but every Sunday my mother drove me a half hour into the city of Chicago where the Third Unitarian church was, well, another world.  People of other races, politics, professions – scientists, artists, cranks.

 

Behind the pulpit were big ceramic murals of Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, and Jesus.  Once, on April Fools Day, their ranks were joined by Alfred E. Neuman.  The minister was one of the great humanists of his day.  Sunday school consisted of learning about “the miracles that surround us” – the human hand, for example, and its 27 bones.  We learned about the first monotheist pharaoh Akhenaton and Queen Nefertiti; and we memorized the first lines of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, in this crisis, will shrink from service to their country…” 

 

I smoked my first cigarette in that church; held the hand of my first girlfriend; danced to Big Walter Horton and Johnny Shines Chicago blues; and with my minister, when I was about 12 years old, marched in my first civil rights and, soon after, anti-war demonstrations. I know that those demonstrations made a positive difference. That my church should be about changing the world became the definition of what I still think church should be about.

 

At about the same time, with another church friend, I volunteered at an inner city youth center, the Henry Horner Boys Club; and on a city street on our first day I was robbed of my watch.  The Chicago Police took me in their patrol car to look for the kids that took my watch.  “Were they shiners?” the cop asked.  I had never heard the term shiners. 

 

Religion, for me, was learned experientially, inductively: from the particular to the general.  I was (and remain) a Unitarian Universalist inasmuch as UU churches engage me in these experiences.  I never much thought about being a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or an atheist, and I still don’t. Religion is not a bloodless noun; religion is a verb, an activity.

 

In five decades, I haven’t budged much from that.  That’s still my religious story and I’m sticking to it.  I will say that I’ve learned to be a bit more respectful of other traditions.  When I was about 7, I challenged my little Roman Catholic friend Gary Henderson to an experiment in the efficacy of prayer.  In his backyard, I prayed aloud and fervently for God to deliver me a sheep.  Black or white, a sheep.  It seemed a religious sort of thing to request.  But when none appeared, I deduced that prayer was ineffective in sheep-production.  In the decades since, I have come to see the limits of my methodology.  Indeed, I really have come to appreciate – and sometimes to practice – varieties of religious expression. 

 

When Unitarian Universalist verbosity oppresses, I do spend time in a Buddhist monastery and, though my more meditative son laughs at our brevity, there is a Zen meditation group that meets here every Tuesday morning and does absolutely nothing for 20 minutes.

 

If our Unitarian tradition sometimes seems a bit heady, our Universalist tradition provides a somewhat more heart-centered corrective balance.  My student ministry was spent in Akron, Ohio, a UU church with Universalist origins.  My mentor there, the Universalist Gordon McKeeman, is as distinguished as our own Unitarian minister emeritus, Jack Mendelsohn – and when they both ran for the presidency of the UUA in 1978 – two out of the three candidates that year – both Gordon and Jack lost.

 

One story about Gordon McKeeman illustrates the Universalist ethic in practice.  When I served our congregation in Mendon and Uxbridge, Massachusetts, Sue and I bought a house in Millville, Massachusetts that for decades had been lived in by devout Catholics.  In every room of the house there was the icon of the sacred heart of Jesus, wrapped in thorns, rather bloody.  There were colorful sacred hearts of Jesus in the bedrooms, embedded in the light switches, in the cellar, and in the woodshed.  It didn’t seem right just to throw them out.  What do you do?  Take them back to the Catholic church?  I consulted Gordon McKeeman.  “No, no,” he said.  “Add to them.”  Leave them in place and add to them.  And so, in our house now, I think we may have transplanted a few sacred hearts of Jesus, and we cherish them, along with the Buddhas, the flaming chalices, the pendulous pagan goddesses, the busts of FDR, the Grateful Dead posters, and all the rest.  It’s a big world; not an either-or world; we’d best make room for everybody. 

 

To be a Unitarian Universalist does not mean you have to check your past beliefs or faith or religion at the door: no, here you may be (you can only be) yourself.  Subtract if you must; but add and become spiritually larger.

 

There are a lot of soap suds over the spiritual dam, but I’ll fast forward to recent days: this last week or so.  My spiritual story is entwined with:

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is the Holy Family?  The holy family is your family.  Who are the Chosen People? You are the chosen people.    

 

And so…what, thus, is our story?  What’s the story at First Parish, the story of those Unitarian Universalists?

 

I say that our story is one of:

 

Community.  There aren’t many mythic Sugar Grove farms in our experience today.  Our families are far-flung. Thus we must create our communities; and First Parish is a prime example.  This is my community and our community. 

 

Unity; the inseparability of experience.  The poet Francis Thompson said “Thou cannot stir a flower without troubling a star.”  And whether we are talking about our environment or globalization or the relations between those who share the same street or pew or bed – or those in prison, or those who sweep our office buildings, or those who live and die in Iraq or Darfur or right here at home – our story is one that affirm the interconnectedness, the unities and the universals of life. 

 

Thus our story is also one of Compassion.  Who are we to think that our life is somehow different from that of any other human being?

   

And, I believe, our story is also one that recognizes the essential importance of cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance:  moral educators have shown that we learn and we grow ethically when we are exposed and confronted by those who are different from ourselves.  Different races, sexual identities, classes, religions, politics, nationalities, experiences, beliefs.

 

There are stories that take us away from the world, inside ourselves perhaps, away from this life.  That is not our story.

 

We live our religion when we know ourselves from deep within, but when we also get out of ourselves and enter the world.

 

And our story is also one of human agency.  We are human and we are agents, agile – more resilient than we imagine – and able to make a difference.  Ours is not a story of subservience to the Fates; what we do or do not do matters.  Unitarian Universalism is not a faith we inherit; it is a faith we choose.  Our lives, singly and in common, are about choice:  what we choose is what we are.

 

Community; unity (the inseparability of experience); compassion; cognitive dissonance (getting out of ourselves); the vitality of human agency and choice.

 

It’s too late to make this long story short but I can bring this story to a close.  There’s an old poem, doggerel really.  It’s about our spiritual stories:

 

A thousand cults, a thousand creeds,

Is one a rose and the rest all weeds?

Or is each one suited to meet some needs.

Is your own so great that the rest seem small?

Then keep it and live it, that’s all.

 

Pagan, or Christian, Gentile or Jew,

How may you know that your own is true?

Not for him or for me or for others, but you,

To live by, to die by, to stand or to fall,

Why, keep it and live it, that’s all.

 

When the wolves of the world are on your back,

Does it help you to beat the mad world back?

To laugh at the snap of the snarling pack,

Does it leap in your heart like a huntsman’s call?

Then keep it and live it, that’s all.

 

When the strong are cruel and the weak oppressed

Does it help you to help? Does it sting in your breast?

Does it sob in your soul with a wild unrest?

To fight against might and let nothing appall,

Then keep it and live it, that’s all.

 

When the last fight comes and you take your stand,

And the sword of your strength breaks out of your hand

And the ground ‘neath your feet turns to shifting sand,

Does your religion sing when your back’s at the wall,

Then keep it, it’s yours and that’s all.

 

And as for sin, am I fer it or agin it?  Well…it depends.

 

What’s most important is to know that existence is ready.

This is what it means to worship: You move into life.  You don’t stand outside it and ask where it goes. 

Where does the road lead?

I will go and see.

 

Please.  You come too.

 

Amen.