It feels like limbo, this time between the holidays of Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and the New Year. And limbo it is. We are in a state of suspended animation with regard to events that have rocked the soul of our nation. That old aphorism of the Village Voice applies: Expect the Unexpected. Perhaps this invitation to uncertainty serves us well as we move through the day-to-day rhythms of our individual and communal lives. The best of prophets would have had a tough time with this past year as events both star-blessed and star-crossed have coursed through our lives.
In the very first week of 1998 my family greeted a new arrival--grandnephew, Hudson Bull Prichett--I love it, a little New Yorker named Hudson! Six months later, we saw the life cycle play out between two ends of a loft in Tribeca. This was a space where we had spent holidays, attended avant-garde dance concerts, witnessed two people in love taking their vows of matrimony, shared meals and precious conversation..... It was early July. In the loft's performance area, my brother-in-law was living out his last full day, his 67th birthday, succumbing to lung cancer; in the loft's living space, little Hudson was taking in his first solid food. Hopes, expectations, loss, and sorrow all underway at the same time in the same powerful space. Memory now attaches to one person--anticipation, to the other.
Here at All Souls, have we not also witnessed the serendipitous rites and rhythms of the life cycle? Have we not taken a flower, dipped it in water, and dedicated our future--on their brows to consecrate their thoughts, on their lips to consecrate their words, on their hands to consecrate their deeds? What a cause for celebration it is to welcome our youngest and to affirm that our responsibility toward them is equal to the promise that is theirs.
We have opened our hearts yet further in the hearing of memorable one-liner sermons voiced by our children straight from the center of the moment in the dialogues of our intergenerational services. We have been moved by the Credo statements of our young people who have participated in this church's Affirmation process. We have witnessed these same young people moving into the Senior High seminar, where questions and issues straddle home, school, and the larger world.
What celebration we have known this year! We have gathered to mark two decades of Forrest's ministry here and the five decades of his life. We have invested our faith in his and our continuing ministry through contributing generously to a capital campaign that makes possible our expanded ministry within and beyond these walls--through physical accessibility, music that reaches the depths of our soul, and an institute of forums spawning affinity groups that will stretch our understanding of what it is to nurture community.
We have continued to honor hope through the multiple avenues of outreach. Extended community has become extended family. Twice a week all year long, we welcome neighbors who have fallen on hard times to Fellowship Hall for Monday dinner and Friday lunch. Peace on earth, good will to all is given substance in our newly operating Task Force on Nuclear Disarmament. LifeScapes, an umbrella group that spans generations, has called us to spiritual retreats that bid us to stop and reflect, social events that afford respite and renewal, and an emerging agenda of visitation to those of our congregation who are homebound.
There are miles to go.... In the year ahead, we anticipate an initiative that will spur us towards the work of anti-racism and enable us to become an ever more pluralistic congregation as we embark on what our larger community of faith calls a Journey to Wholeness. There will also be opportunities to connect more meaningfully with the community of Unitarian Universalist congregations nationally and internationally.
As we moved through the December holidays, we affirmed the wonder of unexpected light with the commemoration of Chanukah. We recognized the strength of friends, family, and ethnic tradition in the knowledge of Kwanzaa. We embellished on the tradition of our Family Christmas Service, with an adventurous little one--some might call him a lovable rug rat--crawling up the chancel steps through the lines of our Community Chorus onto a friendly lap. Once again we hearkened to the sites and sounds of our children--angels and shepherds and all--in the beloved Christmas Pageant.
"Let nothing living slip between the fingers of the mind, For all of these are holy things....." we spoke responsively.
In short, we stretch the moments of time with mindfulness and memory of the precious events of every day.
In this "no guarantees" journey around the sun, we also knew grief and loss and outrage. Did we not mourn the passing of women and men with whom we have shared these pews over the years? Some of us gathered here to celebrate a life lived and contemplate life ahead without the sound of a special voice, a familiar step, without the assurance of a gentle touch or even the peculiar pleasure that comes from familiar orneriness. Personal presence moves through what we call death to become personal memory.
We were stunned this year when Vladimir Marcano, one of our young assistant teachers, was shot in front of his school for his jacket. While Vladimir survived, he was critically wounded. Many have contributed generously to a fund to alleviate the exorbitant medical expenses borne by his family. We can also leverage our sadness and outrage into political advocacy for stronger gun control and for public policy that focuses on better offers for all our children.
The narrative of our day-to-day has been marked with the welcome and the unwelcome, harmony and dissonance, in our neighborhood and beyond. Expect the unexpected. In our national and international neighborhoods, the unexpected has moved into regions that are surreal.
How jarring it is to view a split screen newscast! In one corner, we have the presidential impeachment proceedings. In the other, white light expands over a computer-generated target in Baghdad. It was only a few more shopping days until Christmas. Only a few more sundowns until Ramadan. A few decades ago I was invited by my Iraqi roommate at the American University of Beirut to spend Christmas in Baghdad. Somewhere in the morass of that city, she may be raising a family and getting up every morning to go to a school where she teaches mathematics, which she studied at the American University on a government scholarship. While I am no fan of Saddam Hussein, I have profound reticence about the positive outcomes of bombing Iraq. UN inspections now have less than little hope, and we are likely never to know the real body count. Nonetheless, Saddam continues to rule with the craft of a tyrannical Houdini.
Meanwhile, the politics of destruction have assumed distinctive form on our home front. Who can tell what the outcomes will be and how they will enlarge or diminish the canyons of partisan politics?
How easy it would be to throw up our hands and turn to the crossword puzzle or take in a good escapist movie. Certainly we all need diversion. We are indeed recipients of the ancient Chinese dictum: May you live in interesting times.
Interesting times produce choices. With relative freedom to know and to act, to discover and to debate, we exercise the tenets of our liberal faith--speaking out for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, committing ourselves to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, promoting but not imposing the use of the democratic process.
In 1947 after our world was shattered by war and humanity's capacity for evil was undeniable, James Luther Adams, Unitarian theologian and professor, observed that:
....The prophetic liberal church is the church in which persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in the light of their faith, to make explicit through discussion the epochal thinking that the times demand. The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the common responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional), with the intention of making history in place of merely being pushed around by it.
How--in our lives as individuals and as creatures of community--might we make history rather than being pushed around by it? We rebel at the notion that we are predestined for whatever.... The alternative is to be proactive, to give vent to the fullness of our liberal religious imagination. We can carve out choices and act upon them across the spectrum of listening and learning to leveraging the power that is ours to act and advocate, motivate and mobilize.
It's about time and how we move through it. It's about our openness to the unexpected and finding our voice as events unfold....whether those events transpire here in our midst or in Washington, Baghdad, Bosnia, or Honduras.
A few weeks ago I was browsing in a bookstore in Berkeley, California--after retracing the steps of long-ago peers who found their voices in the Free Speech Movement and their priorities on a small plot of land that became People's Park. In the aisles of Cody's I had hoped to find an out-of-print work by Wallace Stegner. Instead, I found myself reaping the unexpected...reaching for a volume of poems by Wendell Berry and landing on "History," a work he had dedicated to Wallace Stegner. These words leapt off the page:
All the lives this place has had, I have. I eat my history day by day. Bird, butterfly, and flower pass through the seasons of my flesh. I dine and thrive on offal and old stone, and am combined within the story of the ground. By this earth's life, I have its greed and innocence, its violence, its peace.
It is our choice to discover day by day what is happening within and beyond us, interpreting it all through the lens of our experience, our understanding of history, our aesthetics, our realities of heart, mind, and spirit. This very moment as it is lived by all our fellow travelers embraces all that has ever happened. It carries the sounds of harmony and dissonance as they have reverberated throughout history. And it offers up choices.
....How is it that we arrive at the point of straddling the spaces of new life and the threshold of death? How is it that we give ourselves to life and are called to celebrate rites of passage and rites of passing? How is it that we adapt the senses of our souls to connect with events that reach us live through the medium of a split-screen?
We witness miracles of joy and miracles of destruction, acts of love and acts of terror. We participate in decisions of wisdom and prudence and decisions of folly. We are challenged to accept our "common responsibility [for at least attempting] to foresee the consequences of [our] human behavior." We "eat [our] history day by day.... By this earth's life, [we share] its greed and innocence, its violence, its peace." I wonder. Are we not having the time of our lives? Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998.