The Ties that Bind
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
August 11, 2019
The story goes that an anthropologist was once studying a tribe of people in Africa. He proposed a game to the children, putting a basket of sweet, ripe fruit near a tree, and inviting them to race to the tree. Whoever got there first would win the basket of ripe fruit. When the anthropologist gave the children the signal to run they all took each other’s hands and ran together, arriving at the tree together. Then they sat in a circle and enjoyed the fruit together. The researcher asked the children why they chose to run as a group, when one of them could have had all the fruit. One child replied, “Ubuntu. How can one of us be happy if all of the other ones are sad?”
Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a term used in southern Africa that is often translated into English to mean “I am because we are.” It is a philosophy that emphasizes a belief in a “universal bond of sharing that connects all of humanity.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy)
Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the concept of Ubuntu this way: “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” (Tutu, Desmond, No Future Without Forgiveness, 1999. Retrieved from Wikipedia.)
Other cultures, including our own, have a similar understanding of the need and importance for life in community. “There is no life apart from life together,” wrote theologian Rebecca Parker. (Parker and Buehrens, A House for Hope) Truly, we humans are not meant to live alone. We are created out of love, out of connection, and we live out our lives within a wide variety of relationships.
Think for a moment about how we define ourselves. We think of ourselves as parents, as offspring, as siblings – a part of a family. We are spouses or partners, or friends. We are managers, or colleagues. We are fellow citizens, club members, and church members. When we use these labels for ourselves, and often we have many such titles, we are defining ourselves according to our relationships to other people.
We are so much more together, participating in community life, participating in relationships, than we can ever be by ourselves. To grow emotionally, to grow in wisdom and understanding, we must find opportunities to connect, to reach beyond ourselves and our limited understanding of life. “I am because we are.”
And so, we find ourselves living in community, in its many shapes and sizes and forms. Community is the connective tissue that binds us all together. It is a life-creating and life-sustaining force of human existence.
From time to time I offer you a different way of thinking about God, beyond the humanized vision of the heavenly father. We have talked about creativity being God, or beauty being God. And here is one more concept of God, offered by Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams, that God is the ‘community-forming power.’
I am fascinated by this concept: community not as an organization or an entity, but as a force. As divine energy. If we look at community as something so elemental, so life-giving, it takes on a new importance. We become not just part of an organization, but part of the power that surrounds us and connects us – this power that some might call God, or the Spirit of Life.
Irish poet John O’Donohue sensed this power as well. As he said in our reading this morning, “Belonging is not merely shelter from being separate and different. Its more profound intention is the awakening of the Great Belonging which embraces everything.” (O’Donohue, John, Eternal Echoes, pp. xxiii-xxv.)
In community we gain the sense of participating in something greater than ourselves. We might not always believe that we need it, but we are responding to that drive within us to seek something beyond ourselves, to bind ourselves together into something stronger and better than we can achieve alone.
But at the same time, participating intentionally in community, in that life-creating force, is challenging. It requires commitment not only to our own growth but to that of others. “I am because we are.” It requires recognizing that the community does not exist only to meet our own needs. The community exists to enable people to come together, to be seen and accepted for who they are, to be part of a living body that both transforms each one of us, and at the same time, is transformed by each of us.
Because of the mutual transformation that takes place I think of a religious community as a living and spiritual organism. By choosing to become part of a congregation, we change it. And if we participate with our whole heart and spirit, it in turn will change us. In order for this to work, we have to make a commitment; we have to be willing to stay with it, to allow ourselves to become a part of the community, to allow the community to influence and to change us. The word ‘religion’, after all, comes from the Latin root of ‘religare’, or ties. Religion is the tie that binds us.
And yet, there is an inherent tension in this transformative nature of community. We progressive religious types prize our individuality, our independence. Americans have long held on to the myth of the hardy individual – the explorers, the brave pioneers pushing westward. Ironically enough for we Unitarian Universalists, it is a national trait that is often associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, himself a Unitarian minister, wrote an essay titled “Self-Reliance” and declared that people could be their own religious authority – that we did not need the structure or authority of a church in order to worship. Emerson might have been the first person we could call spiritual, but not religious.
We continue to be called to reconcile this tension between the honoring of the individual and our human need for community; it has carried through our national life and our religious life. The tension is evident within the seven principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Our first principle affirms the worth and dignity of the individual. Our seventh, and last principle, honors the interdependent web of all existence. And somehow, in our congregational life, we are called to bridge that gap, to balance that tension, to work to meet our own needs and at the same time, to recognize that we are not present for ourselves alone. We are here in order to participate in the creation of something larger than ourselves, as John O’Donohue put it, to “weave our souls into the great tapestry of spirit that connects everything everywhere.” To create the ties that bind.
We long to weave our spirits together, and at the same time, to hold on to our uniqueness. And how do we balance this tension? How do we create and sustain community and ourselves within it?
One way to respond to that tension, that need for balance between the individual and the group, is to live together in covenant. As Unitarian Universalists we often say that we do not have a creed, but that we have a covenant, a promise, to balance the conflicting needs. We promise that we will walk together, that we will offer each other our mutual care and trust. We agree to hold our individual beliefs, our individual needs, in balance with the beliefs and needs of others. Our visions for our community may be different in many respects – say, for example, the religious words we use in worship, or the kinds of music – or the decisions we make about caring for our beloved building. As perfectly imperfect humans, we can often be completely certain that we are correct, that we know best, and that the other people on the committee just don’t get it. But living in community, living within that life-creating and life-sustaining force, means that it is more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right. And this is a challenge for us, every single day. We need the vision of covenant, the understanding that we make promises to each other to walk together, in the words used by our Puritan ancestors, to be able to balance the competing needs and desires.
James Luther Adams wrote that “human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitments, by making promises.” He quoted Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, as saying that humans are “the promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, promise-renewing creatures.”
Our religious ancestors, the Puritans, (yes, those Puritans!) placed a great deal of emphasis on covenant, on promises, on ‘walking together’, in their phrase. The Puritans defined churches as groups of people who have “covenanted to ‘walk together’… in the spirit of mutual love.” They traced the authority to covenant together in this way all the way back through the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. They cited the second commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, as well as the example of the early house churches first gathered by Jesus’ disciples. Seventeenth-century church members agreed to gather together regularly for mutual education and teaching, by creating a church that was intended to support and to guide them. They freely gave up their individual needs in support of a community based on mutual love. They sought the ties that bind.
Now, looking back at this from the 21st century, we cannot always recognize the actions they took as loving. We think of them as harsh and judgmental. It feels as though the community requirements were more important than the individual needs. And perhaps they would look at us and think that we emphasize the individual too much over the group. But the important thing to remember here today is this tradition of creating promises – covenants – to set forth how we would treat one another as part of a community, how we would foster this life-sustaining force that some would define as divine energy coming from God.
Regardless of where community comes from, and how well we carry out the promises, the covenants, we make to one another, we return to them again and again to help us order our community life. Without covenant, either implied or written down and recited, we will struggle to sustain ourselves in community. We can forget that the needs of the group, the community, are at least as important as our individual needs and desires. And so it is vitally important that communities examine their promises to one another from time to time, to be certain that they continue to ‘walk together’ as the Puritans promised in 1630.
Beginning this fall, the Board of Trustees is planning to begin looking at our church community – our mission, our vision, and our promises we make to one another. You will hear more as plans develop, and you will be asked to participate in the conversations that will draw out our deepest hopes for our congregation. But as a first step, today we have taken a look at what community means, and what it means to us.
My friends, we have used so many words today to try to understand the nature of community. Ubuntu. The Great Belonging. The ‘community-forming’ power that is God itself. We’ve spoken about the needs of our very souls for connection and relationship, and how we find our very being, our identities, in relation to one another. “I am because we are.” “There is no life apart from life together.” May we hold the balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. May we continue to explore what community means to us and to who we are, and may we always hold dear what has been given to us.
May it be so,
Amen.
