In a long-ago time, when long ago peoples

were building cathedrals and raising up steeples,

they crafted stone creatures and set them on perches

to guard and protect and watch over the churches.

so gargoyles were born, and they stood night and day,

keeping evil and terrible spirits away.

 

Now this bit of verse from the irresistible "God bless the Gargoyles" [Dav Pilkey] speaks to me, for a short while ago, I summoned my morning energy for that upward spiral to the North Tower of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Those of you who have made this ascent of 255 steps know well the reward that waits in that open space that is home to a one-of-a-kind family of gargoyles and chimeras. A chimera, by the way, is a close cousin of the gargoyle, but unlike the gargoyle, does not choose to spew rainwater and serve as a downspout. A chimera simply is.

I was not alone taking in the panoramic vista of Paris. Plenty of other tourists were milling about, but my favorite of the permanent residents of the North Tower was the stryga, a half human, half bird-like creature of fantasy in stone. Head in hands, elbows fastened to the ledge, with piercing eyes he is cast in eternal contemplation of the ever-changing city of light stretching before him.

Our time in Paris unfolded under the watch of this memorable creature. For my daughter Shana and I, it was our first visit to this city.

Lest you suspect a travelogue, the answer is No. I choose rather to call forth impressionistically my experiences and reflections of these past weeks–some rising from the soil of France, some rising from the Midwestern terrain of this country, where the 40^th General Assembly of our Unitarian Universalist Association unfolded last week. More later about that which we call GA.

Why to Paris? Paris sounded magical. Shana had just graduated from college and is adept in conversational French–unlike her mother, bumbling along with my Bonjour and Merci. I had been to Europe but never to Paris. I think too I needed to be in a place that was drenched in beauty, a restorative to the senses as well as the soul. What could be a more palliative sequel to an intense church year? What could serve as a more apt breather before the long and programmed days that comprise General Assembly? And Shana needed a memorable affirmation of her academic achievements. Our needs coincided in the readiness for a Mother/Daughter time that was just ours. We were smitten with the idea and the reality.

Now many of you know me well enough not to be surprised that I drew up a list--my must-see’s, must-do’s. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, a day trip to Chartres, Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, the Arch de Triomphe, a day trip to Giverny, the Louvre, the Musee Picasso, the Musee Rodin, the Musee d’Orsay–only steps from our hotel where our windows opened to the Seine and the Loeuvre. I am completely capable of exhausting myself with lists alone. And yes, I made it to all these places, even taking time to smell the flowers in the rose garden I hadn’t counted on surrounding the most imposing works of Rodin, even meandering down the streets of the Ile St. Louis with no destination at all.

Perhaps some of the more memorable occurrences shared by Shana and me were those I didn’t plan, had no stake in planning or, heaven forbid, controlling. Cuisine, for example. Of course we ingested and imbibed at our fair share of cafes that confirmed our expectations of the French culinary arts, but our evening at the Eiffel Tower stands out. It was ten o’clock at night and still light. By the time we descended from this spectacle, we were ravenously hungry though not ready to cough up the francs for the restaurant on site. There were no apparent compromises nearby, and the hour was late. So we scurried across the street to the fast-food stands straddling a carousel and had our first sampling of what I hope is not the French hotdog. These lengthy cylinders were encased by a quasi baguette, not of the freshest texture. "Mustard, s’il vous plait." Mustard we got–mustard that could warm the fires of that place I don’t believe in for a long long time. Our nostrils steamed. Our eyes watered. But we were famished, so we washed it down with huge gulps of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola. We survived and were filled.

In the days that followed, I continued with those visits on my list, sometimes with Shana, sometimes on my own when she chose to chart her own course. There was a day–at least one–for which she was completely in charge. I had waived even the power of veto. What did she choose for our destination but the Cemetière Père-Lachaise, a graveyard of the remains of the illustrious most decidedly off the beaten track. We wound our way through the Metro on a morning that can only be described as dismal, cloudy, rainy, with a chill in the air. How perfect!

Out of the Metro, we turned toward another underworld. Map in hand, we headed first for the tombs of those 11^th century lovers, Abelard and Héloïse, he a priest, she a nun, whose passion betrayed their faith and whose faith betrayed their passion. May they only know liberty to do more than rest in peace. Our map went from damp to drenched. We fished out our raingear and were off to the resting place of Frédéric Chopin, whose monument serves as a posting site for love letters of the living. It was pouring by the time we found the Sphinx-like tomb of that controversial literary figure, Oscar Wilde, coated, simply coated, with red-lip kiss marks. We flipped up the hoods of our rainjackets and put to rest our useless umbrellas. Passing the tombs of Balzac and Delacroix, I couldn’t miss the grave of Marcel Proust, whose simple black marble memorial is routinely adorned with a solitary rose. Remembrance of Things Past, of course. And Shana could not possibly forego the flower-strewn shrine to Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors, for any who might not remember this luminary who OD’d on drugs in the early 1970s.

Then we rounded a bend and headed uphill. On the outer edges of this cemetery rest a series of monuments to the hundreds of thousands of French Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust and to those who perished resisting the Nazis and the Vichy regime that enabled them to wreak their havoc in France. The haunting power of these gaunt sculptures--skeletal, ghost-like, wielding symbols of oppression--moved and chilled us. Like souls who would not let us forget, these renderings in stone rose larger than life to remind us, to remind us.

What a montage is this place called Père-Lachaise. How unlike cemeteries in this country that separate the dead by credo is this common ground of testaments to our varied lives girded in our common destiny. I guess we Unitarian Universalists just infiltrate where we can… or cast our ashes where everybody belongs.

I was so ready for that sun-drenched day when Shana led me again with her instinct for the apt Where and When to the Jardin du Luxembourg, that sprawling park, where children sail their small craft in the otherwise formal pond, a bust of Chopin nestles in the foliage, and the outdoor cafes invited us to rest awhile and bask in the flickering sunlight cast by the branches of chestnut trees. We sat there, sipping our beverages, nibbling away at our lunch, and taking pleasure in the children cavorting in the playground a few steps away and the gentle breeze, fluid as the light. I sat there with Shana and did nothing at all, nothing at all but accept the blessings of time, place, and presence.

Au revoir, we murmured–Yes, I did learn how to say it correctly! –and we were home.

A day for breath catching and off to Cleveland for General Assembly. Poet Josephine Miles understands:

The gift that was Paris with Shana was melding into the gifts that lay ahead in Cleveland on the occasion of our 40^th Annual General Assembly and the heightened ambience of an election year for a new President and Moderator of our Unitarian Universalist Association.

Again, take a deep breath. I am not even threatening a play by play account. Connections of experience and reflection answer my purpose. You can access uua.org for yourselves, and you will have ample opportunity to learn more from those 30 of us ministers and members of All Souls, New York City, who participated in this historical gathering of 4,500 Unitarian Universalists from the U.S., Canada, and beyond. A formidable assemblage of energy that doesn’t wait to happen.

Yes, we elected Bill Sinkford as our President, with Galen among the hub personalities of his campaign, and Diane Olsen as our Moderator, and others to serve on our Board of Trustees and Commission on Appraisal, and yours truly to the Commission on Social Witness (with no opposing candidates, by the way). And yes, we sought out those workshops that challenged and inspired us and linked with our special inclinations here at home. And yes, Forrest proclaimed "A Theology for the 21^st Century" to a packed room–a very large room–and received a standing ovation. And yes, we networked and schmoozed and rendered our minds alive and our derrieres numb by those marathon plenaries. And yes, our youth caucused and partied and petitioned with vigor that transcends optimism. And yes, in the Service of Living Tradition we honored our ministers new, ripe, retiring, and departed. And yes, we stirred to the words of our eloquent neighbor, Dr. James Forbes, who delivered the annual Ware Lecture. And yes, we voted on Study/Action issues and Actions of Immediate Witness. And yes, Melaney and I sauntered along the banks of Lake Erie when we couldn’t take another moment of it. And yes, Christina was a completely compatible and tolerant roommate. And yes, our delegate chair Lorraine Allen kept more or less track of all us. And yes, you will hear more and know ripple benefits from it all.

But again it was the unexpected, the unplanned, that constellated into those gifts that transcend schedule and agenda.

How could we have counted on the downpour that mocked umbrellas as hundreds of us heeded the request of regional clergy and Native American leaders to join in a personal public witness at Jacobs Field, Cleveland’s baseball stadium? Many of us from All Souls made our way through the cloudburst with posters in hand protesting the misappropriation of Native American referents and images played out in the term Cleveland "Indians" and their caricatured mascot, "Chief Wahoo." We went also inspired by the words of Dr. Charlene Teters--activist, artist, lecturer, and member of the Spokane nation, who declared: "We are not mascots, we are not fetishes to be worn - we are human beings!" Her passion one-upped the formidable weather, and we moved on out chanting, "People, not mascots!" Lightning flashed; thunder cracked; our so-called "wetness vigil" was unstoppable. Then there was the reflection of my own water-rat self in the drenched images of Arthur and Mary-Ella and Guy and George and Dick and Polly and Mary and Julia and Mary-Ella’s unforgettable cry as we rounded the corner that led back to our hotels and the promise of a hot shower: "To the Sheraton!" Les Miserables with purpose we were.

Yet another dimension…. How could we have counted on the hotdog lady in front of the Convention Center as a local saint who served up sodas and hotdogs by the score hour after hour, when those food courts in the Convention Center came up empty? A two-dollar lunch, for a really great hotdog for which I did not need a fire extinguisher. What could be bad? She even had sauerkraut.

And how could we have imagined the gentle electricity of a newly elected president who cut through the competitiveness of this election-year GA? On the night of clear results–how thankful we were for clear results–Bill Sinkford stood calmly at the podium of the Renaissance Hotel asking all of us present to take off our Sinkford buttons. The campaign was over. And he incisively reminded us that: "As we celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the union of the Unitarians and Universalists to form the UUA, it is a time of growth in our congregations—growth in numbers and growth in spiritual depth….This is a time to honor our history and a time to look ahead….a time of challenge."

Bill invoked the challenges before us: that Unitarian Universalism has good news to share beyond our sanctuaries, that we are challenged to heed the energetic voices of our youth and young adults, that we carry a healing message for a hurting world, that "racial gulfs can be bridged by committed people working to eradicate racism and other oppressions." As our first African-American President, he spoke with the authority of one who had left our movement for a period of years. It was at the 1968 General Assembly in Cleveland that our community of faith was painfully divided over the issue of funds that had been committed to fighting racism and poverty through our religious movement, funds that were not in the end forthcoming. Hundreds had walked out, Bill among them. But years later he returned, and he stayed the course. He and so many others began the long slow steps in our Journey Toward Wholeness. And on that Monday evening a spare week ago, he proclaimed that "we will leave Cleveland in 2001 united as a movement in celebration of our principles and newly committed to our purposes."

How could we have known that those historical threads would run their course in this return to Cleveland? That the incongruities of cultural and racial division could be faced and embraced if we only heeded the core of what we presume to be about in our liberal faith community? How could we know that the backdrop of banners of every hue and texture brought to Cleveland by congregations of increasing hue and texture would bear witness to our ever-increasing pluralism? How could I know that my own ponderings of my time in Paris, with its centuries of oppression and revolution and justices and injustices and religion as liberator and oppressor of artistic expression would resonate for my time in Cleveland? And who knows? When we meet next year for our 41^st General Assembly in Quebec City, perhaps I shall say more than Bonjour and Merci.

Threads of then and now were twining with a rapidity that was wholly unpredictable for me. For in the summer of 1968, while Cleveland was simmering along with the rest of our country, I had embarked on my own journey. I had made my way from New York City to cross this continent in a cathartic effort to heal from my personal loss earlier that year. We know it was the year of King’s assassination, of Robert Kennedy’s murder, of the Chicago police clubbing anti-war protestors at the Democratic National Convention, of protest upon protest toward ending a war that the French had lost 14 years before in Vietnam.

It was during that year’s Tet offensive that Russell Flesher lost his life because of a decision he had made with which I vehemently disagreed. He was a 2^nd Lieutenant with the U.S. Army in Vietnam. But life is rife with incongruity. I had loved him and married him. So in that year of loss and volatility, I drove west from New York, stopping for awhile in the small town south of Cleveland where Russ had been raised and his parents still lived on the family farm. I hadn’t seen his mother since then, though I have kept in touch with Christmas packages and Mother’s Day cards. His father had long since died. It was time to visit Clara, his mother. It had been 33 years. It was time.

So I did, this last Tuesday, visit Clara. It was brief in time and affirming in soul. We sat in her living room and spoke of our lives now and of another life then. We spoke of her summer life in Wooster and her winter life in Florida, where she is blessedly surrounded by family. We spoke of what mattered and what didn’t. She had fixed a vegetable plate and a chicken casserole, as graciously served as Paris’s finest. "Your visit was a gift," she said simply as we hugged before I left the next morning for Cleveland and the airport. "Our visit was a gift for me too," I replied.

The incongruous presence of that distinctive creature astride Notre Dame, watching it all; the wholeness that we seek in our hunger for beauty and justice; the reminders of that of which we are capable as members of humanity that is more and less just and gracious; the simple pleasures that punctuate undue intensity; the ready arms of friends and family; the promise that we might fulfill in our community of faith; the blessings we know as travelers on our ever turning planet. Let us lend our voices to those of angels and gargoyles and chimeras and humanity fragile and resilient to invoke blessings that are ever precious:

"god bless the rain, and the storm clouds that bring it.

god bless the music, and the voices that sing it.

god bless the ones who sing everything wrong.

god bless the creatures who do not belong.

god bless the hearts and the souls who are grieving

for those who have left, and for those who are leaving.

god bless each perishing body and mind,

god bless all creatures remaining behind.

god bless the dreamers whose dreams have awoken.

god bless the lovers whose hearts have been broken.

god bless each soul that is tortured and taunted,

god bless all creatures alone and unwanted."

 

And the gargoyles beheld wherever they roamed

that the souls of the lost weren't really alone.

each one had an angel, each one was protected,

and each one was cherished and loved and respected.

—(from "God bless the Gargoyles" by Dav Pilkey)

 

As you each recognize your own, your very own Paris, Ohio, may you know, may we all know, the blessings of being cherished and loved and respected. Amen.

 

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