Libraries, Church, and the Unexpected
A sermon delivered on Aug 25, 2019 at Gloucester’s UU Church
By Mern Sibley and Roger Garberg
Welcome and Announcements
Our remarks today compare two different kinds of sanctuary—the church and the public library. Part of the motive for this comparison is that one of us, Mern, currently serves on the board of the Sawyer Free Library. So she has a lively interest in the life of libraries. A second part of the reason is that we wanted to reflect on the importance that people find in collecting stories and practices that help them flourish—the collections called religious narratives and rituals. The library struck us a good analogy to the kind of religious collecting done by the UU church. And now that we’ve reflected more on the analogy, it still seems a good one. We hope you find it so too.
Call to Worship, William Schulz (429)
Come into this place of peace
and let its silence heal your spirit,
Come into this place of memory
and let its history warm your soul,
Come into this place of prophecy and power
and let its vision change your heart.

Hymn #203, All Creatures of the Earth and Sky

1st Reading from The Library Book, Susan Orlean
The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.
It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read.
I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them.
It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.
Hymn #347, Gather the Spirit

2nd Reading: This House (#444, Kenneth L. Patton)
This house is for the ingathering of nature and human nature.
It is a house of friendships, a haven in trouble, an open room for the encouragement of our struggle.
It is a house of freedom, guarding the dignity and worth of every person.
It offers a platform for the free voice, for declaring, both in times of security and danger, the full and undivided conflict of opinion.
It is a house of truth-seeking, where scientists can encourage devotion to their quest, where mystics can abide in a community of searchers.
It is a house of art, adorning its celebrations with melodies and handiworks.
It is a house of prophecy, outrunning times past and times present in visions of growth and progress.
This house is a cradle for our dreams, the workshop of our common endeavor.

Sermon: Libraries, Church, and the Unexpected
Mern: I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by books. Not only were there lots of them stacked on tables and lined up on bookshelves throughout the house, but my mother also maintained a bookshop that I could wander into any time for browsing. Some of you who have been in Gloucester a long while may remember the English Bookshop on Rocky Neck. Well, in my childhood the bookshop wasn’t on Rocky Neck yet: at that time it filled one of the rooms of our house, in a room facing the garden. My mother didn’t instruct me explicitly in what to read, there were just so many books and so many possibilities and surprises to be found. There were fairy tales and an amazingly illustrated edition of the Thousand and One Nights, and many another tale to disappear into. I used to wander in there in the afternoon, pick out a book, and sit on the window seat and read for hours. And when my friend Nuna came over to play we would sit in the bookshop together all afternoon, silently reading from our respective selections.
Roger: Unlike Mern, I wasn’t an avid reader nor a denizen of libraries or bookstores until late in high school. It was baseball that brought me to the public library in Park Forest, Illinois one afternoon when I was about 16. The library was sited next to the ball field where I was playing that day. I’d been dropped off early before a game. While waiting, I wandered into the library and started idlily looking over some of the shelves, happening to pick up a volume called “Principles of Psychology” by William James. I was intrigued by the idea that the study of people had principles. What I didn’t know was that I’d unwittingly picked up one of the great works of 19th century psychology, one that was also a masterpiece of one of America’s great philosophers. As importantly, and extraordinarily, William James was also one of the great literary stylists writing in the English language. Anyone drawn into James’s prose is likely to be absorbed into it.
James’ book is full of provocative ideas about human nature, what a psychology of that nature would look like, and how it should be conducted. His provocations have led him to be called the Father of American Psychology. I checked out James’s book from the library. That day I was almost as excited by the prospects there in the book lying quietly in the dugout as by events at my position on first-base. The reverberations of that chance encounter marked the beginning of an Odyssey that would carry me through graduate school and into a career in experimental psychology.
Mern: In my childhood, I was fortunate that the Gloucester Public Schools had school libraries, with librarians, and my elementary school library down the street actually had evening hours several nights a week. I would walk over after supper and see what there was to be found, and the nice thing was there was very little overlap between my mother’s book selection and the school library’s book selection. I vividly remember one evening struggling to bring home an enormous stack of Little House books. Such abundance!
Roger: The library at Shimer College in Illinois wasn’t used much. Not because we undergraduates didn’t read, but because we had so many other readings for classes, readings running to several hundred pages per week. Still, I found good reason to use the library when I discovered that this very funny, smart, and attractive student from Gloucester, Massachusetts worked there in the evening. Marion, now known by her nickname, Mern, my librarian! I could go and pretend to read magazines, and occasionally trade banter with her as she presided at the front desk of the usually empty reading room. As it turns out, Marion, or Mern, had never seen Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, in which a travelling shyster, Harold Hill, poses as a boy’s band organizer and leader, intending to defraud the town, parents, and children. But his plans are unexpectedly up-ended after he falls in love with the local librarian, named, what? Yes, “Marian.” So next we see Harold Hill singing his cheerful and blithe love song, “Marian the Librarian”, in the library of course, where he’s not supposed to even talk out-loud. To my astonishment, Marion, the Shimer librarian, had never heard the song. This meant that I felt the necessity to sing it for her, making a speech in song that I was much too shy to make in prose for many more moons. “What can I say, my dear, to catch your ear I love you madly, madly Madam Librarian, Marion!” … and so forth.
I did very little reading in Shimer’s library but it became an unexpectedly attractive place to spend an evening nevertheless.
Mern: At Shimer College I took a class on the vegetation of Illinois, taught by a crabby and eccentric professor who took us to some beautiful natural areas in the northern part of the state, landscapes that were very new to me. I was very impressed with the size and vigor of the plants around me in Illinois. Trees with massive trunks, ragweed several feet tall! It amazed me, as I was used to the more scrappy, wizened vegetation of New England. That was a fun class, but Shimer wasn’t otherwise working out for me. Too much writing about abstract topics, which I found to be laborious and excruciating. I decided that overall it was time for me to leave.
So in the spring when I was 18 I returned home to help out the family in Gloucester by cooking supper for my dad and taking care of the house. My mother was away in England. Some days I would go out fishing with my dad in his fishing dragger Peggy Bell, looking for groundfish (cod, haddock, flounder). Most days, though, I had a lot of time to myself. I often went to the Sawyer Free Library in the afternoon. Wandering through the library was a pastime I had always enjoyed, picking up books that appeared interesting in the moment.
On one of those cloudy spring days, I was back in the Sawyer Free again, and noticed a book called, to the best of my recollection, Plant Geography. I had not known there was such a thing as the geography of plants. Opening up the book, I read an arresting question on the inside of the front cover: “Why are there no beech trees west of Illinois?” I remember it was a question, not a statement of fact. Up until that moment, I had had no idea that people were studying the reasons that plants are found where they are found, the interconnected web of genes and environment, the rich interactions of plants with the world. I was seized with the idea, there and then, that I wanted to study this, somehow.
It was another two years before I was back in school, studying botany. But that book gave me an important kernel of an idea, and an introduction to a whole universe of questions that I am still wondering about at age 63. I have always carried around that question with me about the beech trees – as I recall, the book didn’t answer the question definitively, but implied that average wind velocity and precipitation are two critical factors (but there is probably a lot more to it). Since that day, I’m a strong believer in the sudden and unexpected possibilities to be found in the library.
Roger: The novelist Zadie Smith points out how a public library offers something that cannot be easily found elsewhere, calling it “an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay… [an] experience that cannot be re-created online.” She goes on, “It’s not just free books, a library is a different kind of social reality (of the 3-dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal…. [The only other place] that come[s] readily to mind requires belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership,” by which she obviously means a church.
Mern: Of course, as UUs, we know that Smith paints churches with too broad a brush—because UU religion does not require any special creed, nor a set of beliefs as a condition of membership. And the story of an omnipotent creator is not the central or even the preferred text. In this, the UU church is more similar to the public library than are churches of other denominations.
Roger: Still, Smith is on to something when she compares churches and libraries. Both are physical places where we gather to share stories. And, both are sanctuaries, places both of rest and of restlessness, transit points from which we start passages or to which we return from them. Passages to and from where? To and from all the unexpected but inevitable destinations that mark the critical waypoints of our lives: births, marriages, deaths.
Both church and library engage you in conversations about these and other waypoints. Officially, there is a big difference between UU churches and other denominations in the way these conversations are conducted. Thus, many Christian churches claim a single story, contained in a Bible, provides all the guidance needed for our life journeys. Never mind that there are an embarrassing large number of variants on this single book, an observation that renders doubtful claims that any one of them is the gold standard. Still, even if I don’t believe there is a pre-ordained collection of sacred texts, I believe that all religions are concerned with collecting records of conversations and reactions to the perennial question, ‘what are people for?’, ‘why do we need each other?’ and ‘how do we foster love and care for one another during the apparently small interval between the two eternities of before birth and after death?’
Mern: For us UUs, there is no set of canonical stories that can satisfy our searching for answers to these questions once and for all, no set of texts that can relieve all our spiritual pain. That’s probably a good thing for UU religion, and it’s an important thing for me. It means that we church members have to be that much more engaged in identifying and evaluating our own important texts. It means we must be that much more actively engaged in the work of keeping the church focused on its mission.
Roger: UU religion permits, no, it requires that members work as a community to identify and celebrate the stories. UU congregants must be browsers, searching the shelves for the books that speak to the perennial concerns of the spiritual life. Nor is this easy or casual browsing. For one thing, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find what you need. Sometimes, we’ll need to invent new stories, constructed from the life narratives that have been heard and shared among members of this congregation. Sometimes we’ll need to face new insults to our sense of justice, finding new guidance either from our past or in our current community. In all this we add to the local lending library of spiritual experience.
If a library challenges us to take stock of the best that other people have said, then a UU church challenges us to add our own voices to that collection, with the hope that the sharing of our individual stories and needs for justice will inspire and guide others to explore and develop their own stories.
There’s only a song’s difference between a library and church, between a site for acquiring information and one for spiritual awakening. Each time we gather, we seek spiritual stories rooted in love, expressed sometimes in song , enfolded always in this sanctuary,. So, Come, Sing a Song with Me—number 346 in the gray hymnal.
Hymn #346, Come, Sing a Song with Me

Benediction
Let us continue to build a library together, filling its shelves with quiet and tender stories of commiseration and love, loud and urgent demands for social justice, and joyful records of shared work and play. Let us invite everyone to browse the shelves of our experience, and let us help them find the solace and the inspiration that their spirit seeks. Amen!