Six Ways to Herd Cats: A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur
A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

What should I preach about? Aware that the fall seems like a rude awakening from the slumbers of summer, I've asked several of you that question; and it was Chris Rabinowitz who said she's been watching the leaves a lot lately. Instead of the sensuous, lingering, slow revealing of color, this year it seems the change to autumn will just happen: a leaf green today will be, without warning, brown tomorrow. There's a sermon in there.

And, as often happens, things just appear in my mail box. John Huenefeld sent me an article from Time Magazine titled "The 20th Century Blues - Stress, anxiety, depression: the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes."

From the Unabomber to President Clinton, everyone seems aware of a certain funk - and the Time article has it that human beings come with a built-in flaw: we're happiest in community (hanging out with our neighbors and loving our families) but we're genetically programmed for dissatisfaction, never having what we want, never wanting what we have. There's a sermon in there, too.

Yet another thought rattling in my brain is a presentation made by my colleague Scott Alexander to a group of ministers. Unitarian Universalism won't grow, he said, until we get past treating what we do as some kind of hobby - a spare-time, recreational, it's this-or-the Sunday-paper-and-a-bloody-Mary kind of mentality - and start regarding what we do as vital, worthy of our deepest loyalty. The trouble is that we're so do-as-we-please individualists that leading Unitarian Universalists is like "herding cats." Spurs don't work! We'll turn up our noses if the Chablis isn't properly chilled!

So while I'm pondering all these highbrow thoughts, the calendar turns and the next thing I know it's Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, and if ever there is a religious season that might help us weave together the loose ends of our lives, might help heal our brokenness, this is it.

Rosh Hashanah is a beginning, the New Year; and Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement...at-one-ment...the hoped-for conclusion. What's left is what's in-between. It's like life: we are born, we'll die; the book opens, the book will close. So, meanwhile, what do we do? With these two holidays as symbolic bookends for this season and for our lives, I'm going to make six suggestions for you cats to ponder.

The important thing about Rosh Hashanah is that it's a beginning. The shofar was blown at the creation, it was blown when God gave the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and it is a reminder that beginnings happen. Bad stuff happens; beginnings happen too.

It's interesting, when Christians talk about beginnings they usually get hung up on counting the years - the creationists say 'God created the earth in the year whatever' and that leads to all sorts of silly controversy. Jews, however, say, "Who knows when it all started? The point is it started." One of the features of reality is that beginnings happen.

Too often we forget that. Human beings get stuck in grief; we get stuck in anger; we get stuck in depression; we get stuck in injustice; and we are convinced that whatever we are experiencing at the moment will never change.

Judit Gellerd who was here last week preached later in the week that her Transylvanian Unitarian minister father took his own life on his 60th birthday knowing that he was about to be arrested and returned to prison. He was hopeless - "even the songs of birds seemed cries of pain," she said. He did not know - he could not know - that someday, now, there would be a rebirth of freedom and hope.

And when any of us are in pain, we are tempted to believe that it is hopeless. Rosh Hashanah says not just that beginnings are possible but that - so long as you hear the shofar's call - beginnings do happen, must happen, inevitably happen.

Well, that's the beginning of my sermon. And I could quit right there because if we could believe that, well, I'm not sure that there is anything more important for ourselves, or our kids, or our community or our world to believe. Listen up. Beginnings happen.

So now what? We could just wait around to die, but I do have this list of six things to do to pass the time.

These come out of a book about leadership titled Credibility, and were drafted by someone named Donald Michael who is a professor at the University of Michigan. He calls them "six characteristics of the new competence of learning for changing times" but they strike me as "six ways to herd cats" or maybe "six good things to do before you die." There's no gospel finality to this list, but if you resonate with the desire for wholeness, if you suffer from the autumn blues or the 20th century blues or the human blues, these strike me as six of the most fundamental challenges on our journey toward Yom Kippur, toward feeling at home in this skin and this world, at-one-ment; life tasks before the closing of our book.

And the first characteristic is to "acknowledge very high levels of uncertainty and to learn to live with the stress of unstable situations." We are the animals that lust for certainty, that figure 'to everything there is a reason." Well, hah. If there were a reason for everything, then men would ride side-saddle.

There are reasons for many things, and more reasons yet to be discovered; but for many of the most anguishing of human experiences, life answers with a resounding "Who knows why?" Why are people born the way they're born? Why do some people experience disease and trouble and others do not? Why is sexuality so complex, and child-raising, and just getting through the day? And why do some lose hope while others do not? Why was one of the children in the after-school program of the UU Urban Ministry shot for no reason in Dorchester the other day? Why was it Paul McLaughlin who was killed last week?

Our expectations of ourselves are unlimited and yet we are a limited species. Especially in an era of technological change, we cannot be masters of all that is known. "The ultimate purpose of all non-trivial learning," says the educator George Leonard, "is to increase your perception of what you don't know." And "some realities," as Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in the quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude at the top of the order of service, "are so new we haven't even names, and so we must point."

There's also an old story about a dispute between Christians and Jews in the walled city of Verona. The city had become overcrowded, so the bishop called the chief rabbi and said, "The Jews must leave."

"But we've lived here for generations," the rabbi replied. "Shouldn't we talk about it?"

"But who should talk? Everyone cares about this issue." And so the rabbi proposed that they talk in the amphitheater. "But no one could hear us there," the bishop countered. "It will have to be a silent debate."

On the big day, everyone turned out and the bishop began by raising his hand up to the sky. The Rabbi brought down his hand and pointed it to his left palm. The rabbi held up one finger. The bishop held up three fingers. The bishop reached under his chair, pulled out a wafer and ate it, then a cup of wine and he drank it. So the rabbi pulled out an apple and he ate it. At this point, the bishop jumped up, and he said, "You're right. The Jews can stay. We will have to find another way to solve our problem."

The perplexed crowd gathered around the bishop and asked what was said?

"The man was brilliant," the bishop replied. "I said, 'The Lord commands all Jews to leave Verona today.' He replied, 'But the Lord is here in Verona with the Jews also.' And I said, 'The Trinity - the father, son and holy ghost - is our guide on this matter.' But he said, 'There is only one Almighty God.' I responded with the wafer and wine, to say that only those who follow Jesus are saved. But again he returned, 'We are all the children of Adam and Eve.' And he is right. We are in this together. We will work it out."

Meanwhile, another crowd gathered around the rabbi asking what had happened. And the rabbi said, "I have no idea. The bishop said, 'The Jews must leave today.' I said, 'We're staying right here.' He said, 'We'll give you three days to pack.' I said, 'We'll take a week.' Then he ate his lunch and I ate mine."

We sometimes pine for stress-free living, and we sometimes seek the illusion of that freedom through drugs and alcohol, over-work and over-play. While reducing stress is a good and healthy thing, the truth is that we may also need to strengthen our ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity. In other words, you're not gonna have a stress-free life so what are you gonna do to get stronger and deal with it?

I've probably told the story of Chuck Yeager and the X-15 that broke the sound barrier. Well, lots of people had tried to break the sound barrier but they'd get going so fast that their planes would start to shake, rattle and roll - so they'd slow down. But Chuck Yeager was courageous and crazy enough that when his X-15 started to lurch, he went even faster - and soon broke through to a new level of calm and stability. Lots of times when things get too scary (with our parents or our partners or our kids or our health or our consciences), we back off, slow down, and miss the opportunity to achieve new calm and stability. So my motto is: We're here; life's queer; get used to it.

The second characteristic is "to embrace error and use mistakes as learning opportunities." Most of us are so afraid to make mistakes that, at best, we tolerate the mistakes that we or the ones around us make. But embrace them? Seldom! And yet to learn is to change. Education is that process that changes the learner; and to be a learner you have to be willing to be a fool. In some places at some times, I'm pretty good at that; but at home unobserved I can be a haughty know-it-all. "I'm angry," says Sue. "I'm angrier," I'll say unhelpfully. Or stupidly I'll say, "No, you're not really angry. You're just tired."

There is the story of the Navy ship that in the middle of the night in thick fog receives a radio message, "to avoid collision, bear starboard ten degrees." Convinced that it was it exactly where it was supposed to be, the ship radios back, "Must insist that you bear to port ten degrees." The message returns, "Must urge that you bear to starboard." "Negative," the ship retorts, "You're in the wrong place. You change course. State your rank." "I am a private in the coast guard," comes the reply. "Well, I am a captain and this is a battleship." The final transmission was, "Most respectfully, sir, please avert. I am a lighthouse."

The third characteristic is that we "accept responsibility for the future, and we evaluate the present in light of anticipated futures." The Rabbi Hillel said, "If not me, who? If not now, when?" Langston Hughes said, "When you have turned all the corners and at last run into yourself, then you'll know that you have turned all the corners there are." James Baldwin said, "Whatever gives us the right to think that someone other than ourselves is responsible?" Sage after sage has said that "the godly thing to do is to assume there is no God and to act as if only you are responsible."

Personal responsibility is the sermon preached from many pulpits these days. Despite our roots in the self-reliance of Emerson, liberals have too-often failed to instill this virtue. And we are paying the price. In our Congress in recent days, we have done a fine job of dismantling every entitlement. We have made it amply clear that others must now be responsible for themselves. But the pendulum has swung too far: It is an odd perversion of the gospel of responsibility that we now fail to accept , avoid and abdicate responsibility for one another. No partnership, no marriage, no family, no community, no society is a mere collection of individuals. Loyalty to oneself is loyalty to the connections between us; personal responsibility is common responsibility; our neighbor is our self.

To "develop interpersonal competence so we learn from one another" is the fourth characteristic. I think about the epidemic of urban violence, and in Friday's Globe it was said, "there are kids out there who will kill just for being dissed." Now each of us has some repertoire of conflict-resolution tools that range from running away to murder. If we can't run away, maybe we can talk our way out, or joke our way out, or get help, or negotiate, or snarl, or distract, or do a variety of things short of violence. But it behooves us, if we have two things we do before we lose it, to try to learn a third. Or if we have three strategies, to learn a fourth. Each of us has our usual ways of handling conflict, but we seldom try to deliberately learn unusual ways. And this isn't just urban conflict resolution strategy this is suburban kitchen conflict resolution. It's not about them; it's about us.

I took a personality test once that analyzed my conflict resolution strategies. My primary strategy is cooperative, collaborative, facilitative. If that doesn't work, my secondary strategy is authoritative: do it this way because I said so now! Maybe there are some things I can learn in between?

And cliched though it may seem, listening is the single most important interpersonal skill that we can improve but seldom try. (It even works for the Boston Red Sox. Another Globe article on Friday attributed this year's success to one virtue: Dan Duquette's ability to listen.)

"Knowing ourselves," is the fifth attribute. Cliched, of course. Ignored, you bet. Ask a friend to tell you your greatest strength, your vulnerability, your "growing edge." Grant them immunity from prosecution. To name your struggle is to claim your power.

I spoke with a Sunday School teacher this week who discussed the story of Cain and Abel last week. "Have you ever been mad at somebody and didn't tell them why?" she asked her kids in class. "Yeah, I've done that," one girl replied. The teacher said that for that child to recognize herself, and to wonder if there might be some other better way made the whole class worthwhile.

And, listening is again relevant. Prayer, even. We think of prayer as talking to the divine when I suspect we'd be better off to think of it as listening. An old academic named Dean Inge once said that "prayer gives a person the opportunity to get to know someone they hardly ever meet. I do not mean God but oneself."

And the last characteristic of learning for changing times, the last way to herd cats is "to create support groups for ourselves." Loneliness is also epidemic in our society, and not unrelated to the epidemic of violence. If we are to create meaningful community in this church, we must nurture alternatives to loneliness - be they nuclear families or extended families. A neighboring church assigns every member to an extended family. We're developing a system of pastoral care so that no one falls between the cracks. Truly every class, every committee, every meeting must perform double-duty - there's a task to be done but at least as importantly there's support to be given and received. Every person within these walls is both in need of ministry and capable of ministry. We can't do good work in the world if we can't take care of ourselves, and we can't take care of ourselves alone: we need one another.

And so we come to the other bookend of these Holy Days, Yom Kippur. As it was acknowledged at Rosh Hashanah that beginning is possible, at Yom Kippur we acknowledge that we have much to learn. We've made a botch of things - in business and politics, in love and in a thousand other ways. We cannot start fresh until we say so aloud, to ourselves (whisperingly if need be) and to one another (howsoever timidly). There are competencies we have yet to learn for these changing times, but even cats as fickle and stubborn and unherdable as we are can learn, and we can begin again.

And so to conclude this sermon, I ask you to turn to the person sitting next to you. Introduce yourself if you don't know one another. Look them in the eyes, at least briefly. Smile slightly, but I don't want you to feel obligated. Don't hold their hand or touch their shoulder (unless that seems to both of you like the right thing to do). Get past the feeling of weirdness. OK? And following my lead, repeat the words of this litany of atonement:

For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference