Only a few months ago I was ordained in this sanctuary by this congregation as a Unitarian Universalist minister. It was a milestone among milestones in my life and that of my family and a stellar celebration in our life as a congregation. It was also an apt occasion for many of you to ask what you have to do to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. My soundbite response is: a lot and it only took me 35 years! My more moderate response is a laundry list of steps that define the process:
a three-year graduate degree known as a Master's of Divinity, an M.Div., from an accredited seminary. Mine is from Union Theological Seminary here in the city.
an internship appropriate to one of the three ministerial tracks recognized by our community of faith--parish, religious education, or community. My track is community ministry. My internship was as a staff person working with children and families only a few blocks north of here, at the Washington Houses Community Center of Union Settlement in East Harlem.
a semester or a summer of full-time Clinical Pastoral Education. Mine was at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
a comprehensive two and a half day psychological screening. The Center for Career Development and Ministry of Newton Centre, Massachusetts conducted my screening and issued recommendations that encouraged me to continue in the process leading to ministerial fellowship. Ministers must be psychologically prepared and accountable for the responsibilities we assume.
completion of an extensive reading list specific to Unitarian Universalism
multiple letters of reference, essays, and completion of statements of proficiency in about 18 areas such as theology, Hebrew and Christian Scripture, World Religions, Social Theory and Ethics, Human Development, and Anti-Racism and Multiculturalism.
While all this work is overseen by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee of the UUA, the Unitarian Universalist Association, it is the congregation that actually ordains the minister and agrees to do so through a congregational vote. This means that even if the Ministerial Fellowship Committee does not give a rating that says this person has the green light for ordination, the congregation may exercise its prerogative to go ahead and ordain the person anyway. Of course it's good to have the blessing of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, and I do, but I thought you might like to be reminded that congregational polity is at the heart of governance for our community of faith.
Now, the final step in the process leading to preliminary fellowship with the UUA is to meet for one hour with members of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. Most of that hour is devoted to the ministerial candidate responding to questions posed by members of the committee, based on their reading of what ends up as a very fat packet of materials on the candidate.....more stuff, in fact, than you or I would really ever want to know about anyone. The first segment of that hour is a sermon given by the candidate to the congregation not so spontaneously formed by members of the committee.
When we learned that Bill Grimbol could not be present as planned in our pulpit this morning, I thought....Hmm, what a prime opportunity for me to share with you the sermon that I shared, in early December, with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, adapted accordingly. And remember what I said about the ten minutes? It holds, from this point on. So what did I tell them, and what do I choose to share with you?
It was my second trip across the country. With a generous stretch of time at our disposal, my friend and I had driven all the way from New York, visiting family and friends en route. While in Denver, we had strategically avoided phoning a particular cousin whom I had found less than pleasant to be around over the years. We saw whom we wanted to see, drove on, and wound our way up the dramatic coastline of California.
It was a gorgeous day; we were midpoint in a leisurely hike out onto the seal rocks of Monterey Bay. I reached for my camera, hoping to get just the right shot of my friend astride the rocks, with the seals and foam as backdrop. But there was this woman who happened to be precisely in my chosen spot for this photo opportunity. "Please ma'am, would you mind moving a bit to the.....?" "Jan!" she shrieked. "I don't believe...." Of course, here was my cousin from Denver.
Even when separation was desired, time and space and maybe a tad of karma conspired to craft a connection. The double irony is that while this friend is no longer my husband, the lady on the rocks is still very much my cousin.
"Six Degrees of Separation" is the title of a play produced a few years ago and familiar to many of you. Its premise is that each of us is separated from any other person on the planet by, at the most, six degrees, six persons. Take me, or you, and a young child from a mountain village of Nepal. Between us are no more than perhaps her mother who works beside her sister whose husband knows this Peace Corps volunteer whose brother's best friend went to high school with one of us.
Six degrees exaggerates the separation. Again and again, in settings as varied as a subway platform and the locker room at the Y, I encounter someone with whom I share a meaningful connection--a mutual friend, children who know one another, roots in the same church, common ground. There is, at the most, one degree of separation, just enough to distinguish us from one another.
I routinely strike up conversations with complete strangers. Only a few moments into the interchange we discover that tie that binds--often across the habitual barriers of age, ethnicity, race, education, economic privilege. We simply connect. It is the direct experience of that connection that feeds and nourishes any ongoing connection--intentional or coincidental.
As I formulated my thoughts for what I would say, it was early November. It seems like years ago. The United States was again confronting Iraq with deadlines, framed by the intense mistrust that had emerged from the impasse in Iraq's openness to military inspections. Air strikes were imminent. I wondered. Would the targets of those strikes again be rendered invisible to us in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqis who would die? This saga was not over. It had barely begun, and the crisis of Kosovo with NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was only months away.
I had just led a retreat for a segment of our adult congregation at All Souls. In a preliminary letter, I asked participants to bring with them to share with others an icon representing a positive dimension of their spiritual journey. What did I bring?--a stole, a translucent stole laced with filigree, given to me by Laila Barakat, my Iraqi roommate at the American University of Beirut in the early 1960s. The occasion had been the Muslim time of Ramadan. During this year in Lebanon, I made friends with many whose religious roots were Muslim, or Druse, or Christian Maronite. How was it possible that Western Christians formed the only enclave who got it right, I queried, surrounded by all these new friends who seemed perfectly worthy of God's love? A budding Universalist I was....As US warships approached Iraq, I wondered and I worried. Where was my roommate from Baghdad? In the grand scope of international policy, I know one degree of separation, and her name is Laila. In Arabic, it means "night." My roommate could just as easily have been a Serb from Yugoslavia, with a just as enchanting, connected with a gift as palpable and fragile as the stole I resurrected last fall.
Are we not all points on an orb--the same orb that circles the same sun? As Unitarian Universalists we are reminded that every "I" carries worth and dignity and that we are all a part of the interdependent web of being.
If we stretch our imaginations and consider how our era as a liberal religious movement might be regarded historically, those who follow us will refer to our vacillation between worshipping at the altar of the individual and affirming our community, between independence and interdependence.
The Buddhist notion of self comprises a cluster of attributes, skandhas, all of which are in constant flux. One of these attributes, Vinnana, is the Buddhist counterpart of Western self-consciousness--that which leads one to say "I am I; I am not you." It is, in Christmas Humphrey's words, "the heresy of separateness, of separate individual existence." It is a high hurdle in the journey toward enlightenment. It is a high hurdle in our journey toward wholeness.
The Journey Toward Wholeness embraced by many of our congregations, including our own, is a process of countering the powers of racism and oppression, as these forces move deeply within us. We are broken, wounded by historical voices of power and privilege that echo the refrain, "I am I; I am not you." The sense of power and privilege accruing to our sense of self impedes us in this journey. Wholeness sings a different song, a song of community where each "I" is rendered worthy and the vision of world community is on the horizon, however blurred.
Jesus taught us to "Love our neighbor as ourselves." Buddhist teachings suggest that our neighbor is our self and we, our neighbor. They inspire us to recognize the gift of our connection in our global neighborhood and beyond and share whatever rudiments of life support our common well-being.
"I" come to this life from a state of "we." I thrive in this life because I am within the greater reality of We Are. I leave this life as I know it and enter a profound oneness with the ultimately mysterious "we." I may dissolve, but We do not disappear. Beyond the borders of birth and death, there is no evidence that "I" as an individual exist. On an elemental level, there is no "I" and "you." There is "we." It is our sense of "we" that girds our capacity for community. It is our sense of "we" which informs us surely and gently that it is common ground we tread, common air we breathe, common ocean from which we emerge, and common light towards which we proceed.
In this place and this moment, our paths are crossing--yours and mine. We are each and all open to the rhythms and images of the other, rhythms audible and inaudible, images visible and invisible, bringing the accumulated traces of all the connections we have known throughout our gathered lives. We are a congregation--a community of more or less autonomous souls considering the promise of common ground.
In life as we know it--and in life that transcends all knowing--there is one degree of separation at the most. We are the lady on the rocks in Monterey Bay. We are the droplet of water that pauses on the rock on which she stands. We move surely towards that ocean from which we all came forth and are drawn into the stars that illumine the path we share.
In life as we know it--and in life that transcends all knowing--it is one degree of separation at the most, the very most. L'chaim. Amen. Copyright AllSouls, 1999.