To Seek Out Belonging ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
May 1, 2022
(and Sabbath, below)
“The deepest nature of the soul is relationship.” (John O’Donohue)
During these past two years we have been challenged to the very core of our beings by the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, there have been all the logistical challenges – grocery shopping, ongoing shortages, learning new technologies. We each have our own list of worries and problems that we have had to try to surmount, day after day. But most of those challenges have existed largely on the surface of our daily lives. They have required coping strategies, and some ingenuity and great flexibility. However, the effort to maintain our relationships has affected us at a very deep level, because that is where our need to connect comes from. Think about how long you might have had to go without seeing family members or friends. I think of people who couldn’t visit new grandchildren. I think of holidays: speaking for myself, the impact of spending more than one holiday completely alone. I have said a few times to friends that sometimes it feels as though a well inside of me was emptied, and it’s been hard to fill it up again. I crave seeing my children more than ever before; I think, in an effort to refill that empty space. It has been a very hard time, because the isolation affected us at our very core, on the soul level.
We humans yearn for relationships. We seek connection, for the opportunity to belong to something outside of ourselves, larger than ourselves. In ordinary times we can bring all of our separate yearnings to a place such as this church. And even something that we normally take for granted such as Sunday mornings here in church was taken from us for too long.
I wonder about this yearning for connection, for relationship, and from where it comes. My best answer is that it comes from Love.
Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams would say that the longing for community, for relationship, comes from God. One of the ways that Adams defined God was as “the community-forming power.” The power that forms community. Adams believed that we don’t create community out of nothing, but that we make our way to it. Community, or the potential for it, already exists, as God’s love. We seek it, and we find it, and we connect to it.
Our Universalist forebears would agree, because they defined God as Love. But you know what – the names, the labels, don’t really matter. You can use your own names and labels. What does matter is that we share this almost universal longing for connection, this deep nature of the soul. We long for community, and so we have each found our way to this place, here together on this day. Despite all the disruptions caused by Covid, the roller coaster of the past two years, that deep longing does not change.
We can lift up a community as an anchor for us, something to belong to, to hold fast to. But of course, the irony is that a community never stays the same. A religious community is a living tradition – it evolves over time; its membership, its beliefs, its style of worship and the words we use, the music. Beloved members pass away, or move away, but in time new people seek out the community and become beloved in turn. The fact of this religious community stays the same. The nature of it changes.
Today, we will be blessed by the arrival of some new members. This is a great joy for us, for it’s been two years since we have shared this time of welcome. Our community changes today, forever. By being here with us, our new members help the community to grow both in size and in spirit. By being here, we help you as well; to connect, to foster relationships, and to grow in spirit as well.
The word religion has Latin roots: it comes from the word ‘religare’, which means to reconnect. Some of you might remember the words to the old hymn: Blest be the ties that bind. Being here, participating in the many aspects of religious community, is to bind ourselves together. Here you will find roots, a place to grow, a place to heal. Here there will be people to celebrate with, and people to hold us when we fear all is lost. Here there will be people to take action with, to find ways to help heal our broken world. We can fill our empty wells here, and help others fill theirs too. We become co-creators, of this community, and of one another.
We are part of a body in this moment; a body that is a community of faith. By coming together with all that we each bring, we make the community whole as well. It is one of the deepest longings of our human spirit to belong, to form ties that bind, to connect.
May we all experience the connection that holds the members of this body together; whether in pain, or in joy, or in mutual purpose. And may we always know, deep in our inmost essence, that this connection comes from Love.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
Sabbath
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
May 1, 2022
“Even in sleep your life will shine…” (Lynn Ungar, Camas Lilies)
Here’s a question for us to think about together: if you’re not busy, if you’re not actively producing something, do you feel valuable?
I hope you can answer ‘yes’ to that question, but I suspect that many of us are squirming a little bit while we think about it. We live in a time when busyness is what’s expected, when we can feel judged if we’re not being active and productive.
The late Trappist monk Thomas Merton had this to say about this lifestyle: “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation with violence.”
That’s quite a statement. And considering it calls us to consider alternatives. Perhaps the very best alternative is Sabbath.
The idea of Sabbath, of setting aside time for rest and renewal, is an ancient one. We first encounter it as part of the creation story in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. “And on the seventh day, God finished the work that God had done, and rested…And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it…” (Gen. 2:2-3). In some translations of this passage it is said that God ‘exhaled’. I love this image – of God sitting back and saying, “Phew!” But the important point of this passage is that God declared the seventh day to be holy. In fact, the seventh day, the day of rest, is the very first thing in the Bible to be declared sacred. Not a place, not a person, not a deity, but a moment in time.
In his classic work, Sabbath, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel explored the difference, the relationship between time and space. Heschel defined ‘space’ as the products of modern civilization: the realm of things – buildings, possessions, objects – things that we can see, touch, or hear. Modern humans, he stated, labor to create things, to conquer space. Humans use time to acquire space; in other words, they trade time for increased space.
But time, according to the Bible and to Heschel, is what is considered holy and sacred, not the things that exist in the spaces we create. If we are not careful, we continue to trade time for more space – for more possessions, or more accomplishments. It’s a continual trade-off, and the trade-off can become unbalanced. The products of space, the physical objects or accomplishments, can become more important than our sacred time.
The practice of Sabbath is a way to hold time and space in balance. It is a way to resist the headlong effort to acquire the things of space – possessions, skills, wealth. It is a way to reconnect with time as sacred, as holy. Heschel put it this way: “The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we lived under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.”
Sabbath, then, is not simply a day off. Author Wayne Mueller writes that Sabbath, “is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us.”
Consecration. To consecrate means to make something holy. This goes beyond the basic idea of taking a day off. To observe a sabbath is to consciously step away from the demands made by the things we can hear, see, and acquire, to resist their call, and to step toward a better balance with time.
As I prepare to step away from this amazing role as your minister for a time, I have been actively preparing to step toward a different way of being. I was taking stock the other day, and I realized that since 2009, when I began seminary, I’ve done nothing but to strive. I have struggled to grow into this wondrous calling, to be worthy of it, and worthy of you. And if I let all that go, all that has defined me for the past 13 years, will I still shine? I think so. But in what other ways can I shine?
As we say goodbye for three months, I hope you can share with me the sense of this time as holy. You are giving me this gift generously and with open hearts. You are consecrating this time, making it holy, through your generosity. I in turn will treat the gift of this time seriously, by putting down all the matters of the head, all the space concerns, as Rabbi Heschel would put it, and focusing on matters of the soul, matters of time. I will be celebrating the time.
I hope that you’ll also hold in your hearts the idea that time is holy, and that it is worthy of sharing equal room in our lives and our souls along with space.
