On the front is a picture of a snake and the word CHANGE in capital letters. On the inside is a quotation from bell hooks, "my strength is not in holding back but in learning to surrender to the motion." A friend gave me this card three years ago when I left Western Massachusetts to go to theological school in Chicago. Since then I have moved five times. Each move represents a part of my personal, spiritual and professional journey while becoming a minister. I have kept this card near all of my beds as a reminder to keep my heart open to my rapidly changing experience, as an encouragement to live right here in the middle of all this change.
This spring, in preparation for serving as your Summer Minister, I read through your recent annual reports as well as other documents describing this church and its history. Immediately I noted the challenge of transition. After many years of stable and consistent professional ministry, you have spent the last two years living with interim religious leaders. I learned that you used your interim period fruitfully and your effort resulted in calling the Reverends Scott Tayler and Kaaren Anderson as your new parish co-ministers. Soon after I learned that you hired Jen Crow to serve as your Acting Associate Minister. They would arrive in August.
I would be here for a brief interlude and then return to Chicago to finish my ministerial preparation. You and I would live together this summer on the cusp. And so I decided to structure our summer services on the theme of transition, on that great cycle summarized so poetically by Barbara Pescan in our responsive reading this morning as "the seed, the flower, the fruit, the opening, the death, the release, the seed."[1]
That is how it goes. We are constantly encountering new experiences as babies are born, children grow, lovers join together in union, partnerships deepen or those who have been united find themselves breaking ties. In all of our lives, jobs and schools change, accidents beset us, bodies age and those we have known and loved die. Our lives are constantly spiraling through the cycles of birth and death, of beginning and ending.
The thing that the poets tell us, though, the thing that the cycles of nature reveal to us again and again, is that each ending scatters the seeds of new beginning and each beginning contains the fading flowers of some end. And the question posed by the poet, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" is the question posed to each of us by the faithful dawning of each new day. This is the day you have been given, says the rising sun. This is your journey. How will you live?
Roger Housden has compiled an anthology of poetry that speaks to this question. He calls the volume Risking Everything and writes of the risk in his introduction. "The risk [the poets] urge us toward," he says, "is the forgetting of our familiar lamentations for a moment and the taking of that tiny yet momentous step - the willingness to try on the life that is truly ours."[2]
The willingness to try on the life that is truly ours, right here, right now - it requires courage, it insists upon risk. A long line of Unitarian and Universalist ministers has preached this message. One of them, the Reverend Olympia Brown, was the first child born to Asa and Lephia Brown in their log cabin on the Michigan prairie in 1835. Olympia's first teacher was her mother who shared with her children her deep belief in the equality of the sexes, a love of poetry and basic Universalist teachings along with the fundamentals.[3] Olympia's father valued education enough to build a one-room schoolhouse for pioneer children on his land, but he did not believe girls needed advanced education. Olympia, in love with learning, conspired with her mother to convince her father that she should attend the school for older children in town when she turned 14. And then again she persuaded him to allow her to attend the only institution of higher learning she could find that would admit women, Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary.
At Mt. Holyoke, Olympia encountered conservative and evangelical religious doctrine for the first time along with strict regulations and restrictions regarding her behavior. She felt terribly stifled and frustrated. Determined to get the sort of education she desperately desired, she tried again to find a college that would admit women. This time she won entrance to Oberlin College where, despite the sexism of the day, she flourished. She developed not only her intellectual abilities but also her religious and political sensibilities. Olympia graduated from Oberlin an ardent abolitionist, staunch supporter of women's rights and with a calling to the Universalist ministry of which she would not be dissuaded.
Brown's passion and determination to live the life that was truly hers led her to shatter many barriers. In 1863 she became the first woman to graduate from St. Lawrence Theological School and the first woman in the United States ordained by a recognized denomination. Despite the prevailing belief that women were not suited to be ministers, the Universalists ordained her and Olympia went on to serve Universalist congregations in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Wisconsin. In addition to her ministerial career, Olympia Brown devoted her time and talents to the battle for equal rights for women. She wrote essays, delivered speeches and went campaigning upon behalf of ballot initiatives all over the country. She also married her beloved John Henry Willis and bore two children. Lest I paint her as superwoman, though, I must also tell you that Lephia Brown moved in with the young family upon the birth of their first child and relieved Olympia of most domestic duties.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Olympia Brown listened to her heart and gave herself to pursue her answers, no matter how unconventional they seemed. What's more, she understood that throughout the course of a life, the answers would change. Brown remained attentive to the call of her spirit. At the age of 52, writes her biographer Charlotte Cote, "a restlessness seized her and would not let her go." And so, after nearly 24 years of professional ministry, Olympia Brown determined she would change careers and become a full time organizer for women's rights. For the next 6 years, Brown devoted her passion to organizing work. She traveled extensively and collaborated and argued intensely with her co-workers in the struggle, among them Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass.
And then, right into the midst of this satisfying life came a devastating transition. Her mother, Lephia Brown, became quite ill. Right on the heels of that sorrow, her beloved John Willis suffered a stroke from which he shortly died. Olympia was overwhelmed and heartbroken. She withdrew from most of her women's suffrage work to care for her mother. To support them, she offered herself as a part-time preacher for rural congregations. She also took over her husband's newspaper publishing business. As her faith helped her open herself to these circumstances she did not choose, Brown began to find blessing. She felt gratified for the chance to give back to the woman who had given her so much. And, as she gained insight into the power of the newspaper, she began to have new ideas about how women's rights workers could use that force to their advantage.
And so it was that when her mother died, Olympia Brown turned again to campaign work. As the old vanguard began to die, Brown sought out the young reformers taking up the work. To the dismay of many members of the historic women's rights organizations, Brown accepted an invitation in 1913 to join the Congressional Union (later known as the Women's Party). Unlike most organizations, which were focused on passing separate amendments in each state, the sole purpose of the Congressional Union was to get the Susan B. Anthony voting rights amendment through congress, and they used what many considered to be very unladylike means.
Ever poised to leap, Brown accepted their offer and devoted herself to lobbying congress, picketing on the mall in DC and exerting any political pressure they could on President Wilson. After a lifetime of struggle, the Secretary of State declared the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, 84 years ago this past Thursday.
The last time she preached, in September 1920, the Reverend Olympia Brown closed her sermon with these words: "Dear friends, stand by this faith. Work for it, sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideals, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty and made the world beautiful for you. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that you are worthy to be entrusted with this great message and that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost."[4] For the last years of her life, Olympia Brown continued to practice what she preached as an activist for peace and military reform. She also continued to delight in her garden on the shores of Lake Michigan and in time spent with her children and grandchildren.
We are indeed inheritors of a great faith. We are a part of this miraculous mystery, each of us given life as a good and beautiful gift. Given too the freedom to decide how we will spend ourselves on life. It matters how we choose. And change ensures that none of our decisions are ever final, for each end contains within it the seed of some new beginning. As a church, a new beginning is upon you. It is August. Scott and Kaaren and Jen have arrived. Now, together, you leap into new ministries and I wish you well as you live into your excitement and hope.
And for each of us the cycle continues to turn. "You see I want a lot," writes the poet Rilke. "Perhaps I want everything: So many live on and want nothing . . . but what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst. And it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret."[5] It's not too late. It is never too late to live here and now, to give yourself to life, to leap again and again into the world that faithfully awaits you, for each of us are her sons and daughters and in the arms of life we are always welcome. Risk everything to choose life. Therein lies abundant blessing. May it be so and Amen.
Closing Words
from your Minister Emeritus the Reverend Richard GilbertAnd now may the rhythms of our coming together,
The melodies of our worship,
And the harmonies of our farewells,
Make musical our living,
Soothing our spirits
And uplifting our souls,
This day and into the beckoning future.
Go now in peace, go making peace.
Amen, Shalom, Namaste, Blessed be.
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