My colleague Emily is a chaplain at a women's prison. It's a state facility so most of the people incarcerated there are serving sentences for serious crimes. They will be there for a while - some for a very long while. Once, at a minister's gathering (and I should let you know I got her permission to tell this story), Emily was reflecting upon the way her ministry has developed during her tenure at the prison. To help us understand she told a story. When she first began working there, she observed a curious pattern. Often in the course of her meetings, women would tell her that they wanted to become a minister. Sometimes they would schedule appointments expressly for this purpose. They'd sit down in her office, announce their intention, and ask her to tell them the steps they should take to achieve their goal.
Emily was confused. Many of these women had relationships with religious bodies that could be described as tenuous at best. Why did so many of them express an interest in becoming ministers? And why were they wanting to talk about this when there was a whole, long laundry list of other pressing issues to be dealt with in their lives? Emily knew that most of the women carried broken fragments from their lives as a result of poverty and addiction, abuse and mental illness, years of rage and grief. Not understanding the question behind the question, she would answer them directly. Well first, she'd say, you need to get your GED. And you need to decide what denomination you want to be affiliated with and check out their requirements. You'll probably need to do advanced academic work and so on. She'd give them the details they asked for and move on.
After a number of such encounters, though, she found herself reflecting more and more deeply on the question. Were they really asking about the steps to pursue a vocational path? She decided to check it out. Next time someone told her they wanted to become a minister she responded by asking them why. What did they imagine their lives might be like if they became a minister? Their answers were variations on a theme. If they became a minister, they would be grounded. They would have some perspective on the tumult of their lives and they would be able to transform their past into something of use. They would be generous and loving. Their lives would be satisfying and meaningful and they would be able to help other people. These answers changed everything. Emily dispensed with the list of steps and instead offered just one. "The path to becoming a minister", she would say, "begins with learning to make peace with yourself." And then she'd ask a question, "at this point in your life, what stands between you and peace?"
I think it is a good question for all of us. I think sometimes we're not so unlike the women in the prison. We have some longing, whether vague and shifting or quite clear, and we look around for something we might be or do that resembles our vision. We look for some established path, some clear example upon which we can model ourselves. Models are helpful and sometimes twisting, diverting paths can help us get clear about our direction. But other times those paths can lead us astray. "If you don't know the kind of person I am," writes the poet William Stafford, "and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern others made may prevail in the world and, following the wrong god home, we may miss our star."[1]
I think it is possible to miss our star. I don't mean when it comes to choosing a profession or training for some contest or deciding where to live, though that can happen too. I'm talking about that deepest place inside ourselves, that place in our hearts that tells us who we want to be, that tells us how we want to spend our lives. Some call it a still, small voice. I like that description because it implies that you really have to pay attention, you have to listen carefully, honestly, if you want to hear. There are so many people invested in telling us who we ought to be. Everywhere we turn there is the weight of culture and tradition, the voices of politicians and advertisers telling us what we want. It's impossible, at least for me, not to be influenced.
As a younger adult, I had this sense that I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to feel like I could shape my life's unfolding. Many moments of my life thus far had been chaotic. And I, newly independent, had a deep longing for a sense of control. I didn't want to feel like life was always going to happen to me. The path I found to satisfy those longings turned out to be dangerous. It began with vigorous exercising, it twisted into obsessive attention to what I ate and how often and how much and eventually turned into bulimia. It was confusing. I felt very powerful. I caught glimpses of feeling tremendous control over my body. And I was very thin. That was what the world said I should be. At moments I thought it was what I wanted to be. But some deeper wisdom in me knew that it was very, very wrong.
With a lot of help, great effort on my part and some measure of grace I found my way out of that forest. Now, all these years away, it is easy for me to see how lost I was. I had some sense of who I wanted to become but, like the women in the prison, I couldn't see that I needed to begin with all that was standing in the way of peace with myself in order to discern the shape of my own star.
That ability to choose for ourselves is one of our great human freedoms. Of course it is built on the shoulders of history and memory, limited (in some places in the world more than others) by our circumstances and shaped by the contours of our own particular gifts and talents. But outside those limits, our freedom is immense. Each of us has come into being as a result of some mystery we can't hope to comprehend. We did not ask to be born and yet here we are with these fragile, powerful, precious human lives. They are gifts, freely given. But I think they also make demands on us. Having been created, we become co-creators. And so we must ask ourselves, what shall we create? What do our lives want from us? And how shall we live them? Who will we become?
Perhaps you recall the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. He yearned to become real. One day in the nursery, he sought the council of the Skin Horse. "It doesn't happen all at once," the Skin Horse advised. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."[2]
From the pages of the storybook rings truth from the ages. The process of becoming our best selves takes time. May Sarton was already a mature woman when she wrote, "Now I Become Myself." "It's taken Time," she writes, "many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, worn other people's faces, run madly . . ."[3] It makes sense to me that this work of becoming is the work of a lifetime. We are always growing. I think that is part of the deal of life. Change comes, bidden or not, and we must decide how we will respond. Who will you be now that you live on your own, apart from the family that raised you? Who will you be now that those children have left you in a suddenly quiet house? Who will you be in this new relationship or without the old one you've been in so long? Who will you be with that aging body, the one that no longer works quite like it used to? Who will you be now that your beloved has died, the one with whom you lived and loved all those years?
Be it with dread or excitement we wrestle with our choices. And sometimes, like the Velveteen Rabbit, we have to endure little deaths in order to become. Sometimes we have to take the selves we knew into the dark, into a tight, little cocoon where we can grieve. And then when you are ready, "finally, insane for the light, you are the butterfly and you are gone," writes Goethe, "And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth."[4] It's so private, so intimate, this work of imagining and becoming. No one can do it for us; no one can bear our sorrows or exult in our joys exactly like we can.
However, each of our personal choices has an enormous impact on the life we all share, the life in which we are inextricably bound together. Sometimes our choices affect only a single other. Like the day a woman backed into my friend's parked car as she was trying to leave a parking lot. Despite the fact she had clearly caused the accident, she got out of her car and began yelling and screaming. She was bitter and irritated and practically seethed through the exchange of insurance information. My friend had been having a hard time in his life. This encounter further distressed and saddened him. And then, two days later the woman called to apologize. I'm sorry, she said, that is not the person I want to be. It was my first day at a new job and I was driving the company car. I couldn't tolerate making a mistake so I tried to act like I didn't. Please forgive me. When I saw my friend shortly after the woman's phone call, he told me that her apology had helped restore his faith in humanity.
I imagine it wasn't easy for her to make that call. I know it isn't easy for me to admit to myself or anyone else when I have fallen short of my own aspirations. I think that is part of why church is so important. It is for me a place where it is okay to bring my failing. Here it is okay to acknowledge our mistakes. Here is a community that will try to stay with us when we fall short, when we lose sight. In this place are others who would have us forgive ourselves, lay down our shame and guilt and encourage us to begin again. Here we say that it is courageous, that it is beautiful to hope and dream. Not only that, we remind each other, in the words of Langston Hughes, to "hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."[5]
He knew of what he spoke. Langston Hughes lived in a world in which African Americans daily battled the ravages of racism. For people of color, the dream of a just and equitable world has been a clarion call nurtured through the generations. In our history as an association of congregations, we have had mixed reactions to that call. We have our share of prophets, women and men who urged us, a predominantly white movement, to become inclusive and welcoming of people of color. We often remember Theodore Parker, the Unitarian Universalist minister who defied the Fugitive Slave Law and fought for the abolition of slavery. Perhaps you've heard of Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian Universalist layperson, a passionate civil rights activist and young mother of five who was murdered after she participated in a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, AL.[6]
Less often remembered are those in our history who overtly supported the structures of slavery. We don't tend to talk about the ones who wanted to maintain segregation, who'd just as soon have all white churches. Across the country, in many of our congregations, anti-racism groups are forming. They are trying to understand how our collective choices have affected our shared life. They are trying to understand the history of racism and anti-racism in the wider association and right there in their own churches and communities. And there are folks who wish they wouldn't, folks who don't want to explore that sometimes-painful past. But here's the thing, the vast majority of us say, these days, that we want welcoming churches. We say that we want to become an anti-racist, multi-cultural movement. And I believe that we really mean it, that we really believe in our shared dream of an end to racism.
But like those women in the prison, we have to be willing to take our work one step at a time. We have to begin with all that stands in the way between us and our dreams. "If you have built castles in the air," writes Henry David Thoreau, "your work need not be for lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."[7] Together, and as the body of Unitarian Universalism, our job is to build the foundations under our anti-racism dreams. It isn't always easy and it might hurt a little sometimes. But together we might hold hope for each other when our own hope fails. Together we might nurture compassion when we fall short and encourage each other to begin again. We can remind one other that it is beautiful and courageous to hope and dream.
None of us asked to be born. Yet here we are, sprung from the same source and knowing that one day we too will return to that great mystery. In between we live our lives, simultaneously alone and inextricably together. It matters who I am becoming, who you are becoming. Our private choices ripple out, affecting us all, affecting the interdependent life we all share. It matters who we are becoming, when we act together that ripple can turn into a mighty wave. Let us listen well to that voice calling us into becoming, it has deep wisdom to share. And having heard, let us risk the courage it takes to heed our call. In so doing, may we continue to become ourselves.
Amen and blessed be.
Closing Words
Lindsay BatesWith faith in the creative powers of life,
With hope for the future of life in this world,
With love for all others who share this life with us,
Let us go forward together in peace.
Our meeting has ended; let our service begin.
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