Make Our Broken Pieces Whole ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 24, 2021
I had a really positive experience the other day, that I enjoyed thoroughly – I got to sit with a couple of church members to air some conflict.
I’ve said often that ministers can have a somewhat different sense of what is fun.
Our conflict began a few evenings earlier in an email exchange when I allowed my anger to show. We agreed that meeting in person to share our conflicting opinions was far preferable to email, and so we got together and spoke openly together. And warmly. Our conversation was a success.
Interestingly, though, since then, it appears to me that none of us has fundamentally changed our position. Some issues don’t have obvious solutions, and sometimes compromise isn’t really an option. Sometimes we have to decide either A, or B. But what held here, this week, was the relationship between us. And knowing that the relationship is surviving intact, and possibly stronger, has given me reason to smile when I think about our conversation.
Our theme this month is Cultivating Relationships. And my friends, in the past 19 months, when we have been leading disrupted and isolated lives, creating and sustaining relationships has been tremendously difficult. Many of us went months without seeing faraway family members. We couldn’t gather in our normal ways for holidays. Events that help to form the grout that holds us changed or disappeared – graduations, weddings, memorial services. So much of our typical life as a congregation didn’t happen normally – our worship services, coffee hours, choir rehearsals, potlucks, committee meetings, congregational meetings. it’s easy to imagine that over time, the grout that has held us together has begun to erode, to chip away here and there. We have returned to our building, but have found that not everyone who we enjoyed and valued is here. Some have moved away since we last came together, others aren’t quite ready to return, and saddest of all, some have died. The mosaic of our congregation isn’t held quite as tightly as it was before the pandemic.
Churches all across America, probably all across the world, are confronting a new era. There are so many unanswered questions for we church people these days – unanswered questions, and questions that we have yet to ask, questions we cannot answer. I think often of the famous advice from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” We are living many questions about the future of church, and we will simply have to hold on, to patiently watch to see what the future will hold.
Another important question, that we do have the ability to answer for ourselves, is: how shall we act while we are watching? What actions can we take to strengthen our community, and our relationships, here during this time when we’re out of practice with being together?
For we are out of practice in being together, being social. Speaking for myself, I’ve noticed that I can be easily overwhelmed in crowded gatherings. I find that in small dinners or parties during the summer I found myself ready to head home much earlier than I used to before the pandemic. I realized that I was out of shape.
Those social muscles we develop throughout our lives are out of shape both in terms of our stamina and tolerance, and in terms of our speech and actions. We have perhaps lost a bit of our social skills. Add the isolation together with the anger and fear we’ve been feeling and observing over many months, and it adds up to a society that is much more likely to lash out in anger at one another, to say hurtful or hateful things. We witness or hear about people being rude in stores and restaurants, about aggressive and careless driving. These days, we are a society that has forgotten to put the common good before the wants of the individual, that has forgotten to respond to each other with empathy, compassion, and kindness. We are desperate to be right, to win, to have our own needs and wants met.
When we look at the way we are living and treating each other these days, an important role for religious communities becomes immediately apparent. The goal of any religion, any religious community, is transformation. Transformation of its followers, transformation of society. Our church, and all communities of faith, are being called in this moment to work to transform lives.
If you study religions, you see quickly that their bedrock, their foundations, are not the individual beliefs and practices, all those things that we accept or reject for ourselves, but rather, a commitment to compassion. “My true religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama. In the Gospel of Matthew, we read these famous words: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these (siblings) of mine, you did for me.’
When you strip any religion to its essence, its bedrock, that is what you are left with. We often refer to it as the Golden Rule – to treat others as you would wish to be treated.
Earlier in our service we heard of something called the Platinum Rule – a practice, an intention, on a higher level than the old gold standard. Using the Platinum Rule, we strive to treat people not as we wish to be treated, but the way they wish to be treated. Think about that for a moment. It’s easy to know how we want to be spoken to, or assisted. But what happens when we stop assuming that we know what someone else wants or needs from us? We become curious, and more respectful. We remove ourselves from the center, and put someone else there.
Today, religious communities could engage in transformation for our hurting, angry culture by being places where the Platinum Rule lives. How might that look?
Let’s return to our first reading, “The Place Where We Are Right,” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. “The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.” In other words, there is no fertile, loose soil, nowhere for seeds to spout, for growth to take place. As a congregation, let’s choose to be a place where the ground is prepared for growth, where transformation is welcome. To be a place for transformation. To put aside the hardness of being right.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I participated in a challenging conversation, and realized since then that my well-reasoned arguments did not sway the others. And I decided that that is OK. I don’t need to be right on this issue. Frankly, none of us is wrong. But what I need is the relationships that I could risk losing if I was disrespectful, if I argued too forcefully or refused to listen and to consider the thoughts and feelings of others. Those relationships are very important to me. What good is winning, if I lose the trust, the goodwill, of those people?
The poem continues, “But doubts and loves dig up the world, like a mole, a plow.”
Doubts and loves contribute to grout. Insisting on being right erodes it.
I enjoyed the essay about thinking of a congregation as a mosaic – a collection of many different people, and voices, and experiences, and beliefs. A Unitarian Universalist congregation to me is more like a mosaic than many other religions, because of course, we welcome many more kinds of pieces to add to our design. But we also have to be more intentional about mixing and adding our grout. The basis of the grout in a congregation that has more conformity of belief would be a creed, which we do not share. Without a creed, how do we build and maintain the grout holding our mosaic, the material that binds us together?
Let’s think more deeply about what is in the grout. It’s something underneath the meetings, the potlucks, the music. It’s the sharing of our hearts. It’s love. The essential ingredient in the grout that bind the mosaic of a congregation is love. The love that motivates us to gather, to make the coffee, to help maintain the building and grounds, to attend a retreat on a beautiful Saturday morning. Without love, those parts of community life don’t take place. The grout weakens. We struggle to keep the broken pieces whole.
As we come back together in community this fall, let’s emphasize restoring our grout. Let’s ask ourselves, what is our church for? What does the world need right now that we can offer? We know that we can work to counter the culture that is so harmful and corrosive, so focused on winning and losing. We can offer refuge, and a different way of thinking, speaking, and engaging with one another. We can lead from love and compassion, and not needing to win, to be right.
How do we practice this ministry of transformation?
We can begin by holding in our thoughts and in our hearts a vision of how we want the world to be. How can we start to create that world, right here and now?
We can look to our Unitarian Universalist principles, especially the first and the seventh. The first principle affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all people. The seventh reminds us that we are only a part of the web of creation. We remind ourselves that all people have worth, and that our own wants and needs are not at the center of creation. These two principles bring us to a place of respect, and humility.
Moving beyond our own tradition, we can follow the words of the Buddha outlining the five factors of right speech: “It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will.” (Vaca Sutra). We often hear this paraphrased in a way that is more easily remembered: “Before you speak, always ask yourself: is it true, is it necessary, is it kind?”
The grout we require, then, contains these ingredients: Right speech. Right relationship. Compassion, respect, and kindness. Oh, and a dollop of humility, to remind us that the well-being of the community is the most important. When we use these ingredients, we can create a true sanctuary, a place of safety, a place where we act in opposition to the anger and hatred, the emphasis on winning at all costs, so common in our culture today.
Our reading ends with this prayer: “Gather us in, through time and space, and make all our broken pieces whole in community. In our multiplicity, make us one. From each of our jagged edges, give us the shape of a communal beauty.”(“The Grout” by Marcus Hartlief)
My friends, we have all we need to be what the world most needs from us right now. Right here. As we approach a new era, a new time, let’s remember what a church can do, what this church can do, to counter all that is toxic today, and to help create a culture that sustains, and renews, and acts and speaks from love.
May we be a church of Platinum people.
May it be so,
Amen.
