Chalice Reflection & Fear and Spirit

Chalice Reflection
Joan Kovach
October 26, 2008

Good morning!

Well, Friday is Halloween. Saturday is All Saints’ Day. And in the Catholic tradition, Sunday is for the rest of us who don’t reach the status of saints, All Souls’ Day.

Our Circle Ministry groups ponder fear. Jan’s sermon today is on fear and spirit. And our children wonder about what is scary and what is not.

So, what is this about, this juxtaposition of things scary and considering those of us who have already died?

As I prepare the house and yard for trick or treaters, I’m reminded of a time about 15 years ago when I fashioned a grim reaper from black plastic trash bags and propped him on the fence along my driveway. I felt terrible when a friend, very recently widowed, pulled in my driveway, greeted by this dark apparition.

Now that I’ve suffered some deaths in my own family, I think the grim reaper probably went unseen by her. When somebody you love dies, it isn’t about fear, but about the huge loss, the void of their absence.

Again I wonder about this: things scary and death. What’s the connection?

I honestly don’t know. And I think it’s some not knowing that is an essential element of our fear. And then I think, not knowing is also what allows us to experience awe and wonder, even surprise and delight.

When our group spoke about fear, it was fear of death or harm to our loved ones and ourselves that came up. Yet Annie Lamott calls death just “a major change of address.” An unknown, but not that scary.

I light the chalice today, our day of acknowledging spirits and fears, in the hopes that when we need it, we will all have the courage we need to explore the unknown, to face the scary, and to travel through fear to get to awe.

“Fear and Spirit”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 26, 2008

To nurture the spark of your precious life—
we hold you in our love as you go—

we sang just moments ago to our children, garbed in costumes enchanting, endearing and downright scary. What is it about the delight our youngsters take in donning different identities, REALLY different identities? Some fancy themselves fairy princesses; others aspire to be high-tech heroes. And there are always a few who opt to masquerade as villains and vampires so chilling that they’ll be sure to scare all the “little kids” half to death and maybe even send a chill down the spines of some of the “big kids” like us.

Halloween is a time when fear and spirit walk hand in hand, propelled by whimsy, imagination, and a fascination with fright! I became acutely attuned to this many years ago during my seminary field education at a church in New York City’s East Village. Part of my portfolio was teaching a 4th grade class. Sunday after Sunday these 11-year-olds resisted with amazing determination whatever conventional curriculum was on my agenda and for weeks upon end took up the topic of monsters. Were monsters real? Did ghosts really prowl about the churchyard just outside, that churchyard that served as a deceptive lid for what can only be described as catacombs? Beneath this churchyard, where these same 11-year-olds romped and ran during Sunday morning coffee hour, sprawled a labyrinthine cemetery where Peter Cooper himself was buried. It was a landmark graveyard and part and parcel of this historic church.

Perhaps through what Carl Jung termed the “collective unconscious” these children and our own pick up on the dual qualities of the demonic, death scary and death benign. They don’t run from their shadow side. They prepare or purchase costumes to lift their shadow side into the light of day and the amber lights of Halloween night. Our young put their monstrous dimensions on parade, processing down the aisles of this Meeting House, prancing about town and boldly knocking on doors with even bolder, “Trick or Treat’s!” This year on Halloween night, our First Parish children and youngsters from our wider community will grace our own Trueblood Hall, transformed into a Haunted House. Count this morning as a dress rehearsal!

What a peculiar time it is, this series of spirit days known as Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. Light grows less in this part of the planet; we might say “light dies.” We can thank the Irish for the pagan harvest festival that gave rise to Halloween. Called Samhain—“Sowin” or “Sa-ven”—it means summer’s end. It marks the transition between the season of growth and the season of decay, the season of lush greens and vibrant pastels and the season of stark whites and somber greys. It’s exactly the right time for something to slip through a crack dividing those seasonal archetypes of life and death. Up through this crack come the dead, time for a quick visit.

Suspend your rationality; suspend your disbeliefs. Those Celts knew what was good for them. They honored their long-gone visitors with a festival and built huge bonfires to keep any evil spirits at a distance. The tradition continues with children carving grimaced smiles into vegetables like turnips and pumpkins and dressing up in the likes of what we witnessed this morning to keep the scarier spirits at bay. Children learn from their elders the difference between scary and scarier and as children will, opt for scarier!

Halloween is actually All Hallows’ Even, the evening before All Hallows’ Day, sometimes called All Saints’ Day. First established by the 7th century Pope Boniface IV as a festival honoring the Virgin Mary and all Christian martyrs, it was moved a century later to November 1 so that Pope Gregory III might tap its fierce mysteries for the dedication of All Saints Chapel in Rome. An even later pope made November 1 the standard for celebrating All Saints’ Day throughout Christendom. A crescendo of possibility reaches into All Souls’ Day. Celebrated on November 2, the legend spread that living souls can intercede for the dead souls stuck in that worrisome waiting room known as purgatory and help them on to Heaven.

A crack in time, a slant of light separating the seasons, the human obsession with that ultimate uncertainty called death, the human penchant for taking all possible precautions to pave the way for those already on the other side and our own inevitable journey in that direction! ‘tis best to make friends with villains and vampires, ghosts and goblins!

Like jack-o-lanterns carved from turnips and pumpkins, like costumed children dancing through the streets, knocking on doors, striking bargains with neighbors willing to play along, we play along and retreat a few degrees into our own pagan origins. I do not use “pagan” pejoratively but rather to call up the beliefs and rituals that have risen from people past and present living attuned to the cycles of nature.

Like a haunted house in Trueblood Hall, like munchkin projections of our own restless spirits processing costumed down the aisle of this Meeting House, we do what we can to make our peace with fear and spirit. We do what we can—mindfully, imaginatively, whimsically, and yes religiously—to keep hope alive through these festivals of seasonal transition bound in our deep knowledge that we are mortal creatures. We do what we can.

We even build immense cathedrals with plumbing devices fashioned of stone-hewn visages known as gargoyles. Gargoyles, fantastical in appearance, hold form and function. Crafted with open mouths, they serve as downspouts for rainwater to run down from and out from the sanctum that is the cathedral itself. And they multi-task. While protecting cathedral walls from the sure and steady erosion of rainwater, their demonic faces scare away “real demons,” as real as our religious imaginations can muster.

While we hold our own little goblins in our love “as they go, as they go,” we might also pay tribute to the vigilance of the macabre stone-souls known as gargoyles. Both are scary—our kids and our gargoyles. Neither is terrifying. Fear and spirit conspire in wondrous ways amid this seasonal transition from light to dark, from nature’s vibrancy to nature’s rest.

What strikes me in the cadences of Dav Pilkey’s “god bless the gargoyles” is the heroic quality of the scary, the almost martyr-like quality of these intentionally frightful faces leaning sentinel like on the ledges of cathedrals and even my own alma mater seminary! We can all use an angel or two, and gargoyles are no exception.

…now, angels have ways of making things right,
so they stayed with the gargoyles all through the night,
patting their heads and wiping their tears
and whispering life into gargoyle ears.

And soon all the gargoyles did magical things:
they gurgled and coughed and shook out their wings.
then together the angels and gargoyles took flight,
and they soared through the clouds on a blustery night.
and while over pastures and hills they were winging,
the voices of angels were radiantly singing
music of healing and songs of rebirth
to all of the creatures in all of the earth:

Fear and spirit wing their way across the earth issuing blessing upon blessing:

…god bless each soul that is tortured and taunted,
god bless all creatures alone and unwanted.

And the gargoyles beheld wherever they roamed
that the souls of the lost weren't really alone.
each one had an angel, each one was protected,
and each one was cherished and loved and respected.

Sounds like one of those principles we spout as fluidly as any Notre Dame gargoyle spouts rainwater! “Each one was cherished and loved and respected!”

Yes, it’s fantasy, yes it’s imagination, yes it’s an appeal that rises up in each of us from our childhood recognition that fear and spirit walk hand in hand. The shadow that accompanies each of us becomes far less scary when the angels of our higher nature befriend it.

Amid this time of fear, may we turn to that which scares us most and find there a partnership of blessing. It takes trust, layered reflection, and that transcendent state that comes when fear and spirit at long last merge—awe!

Let us issue blessings with reckless abandon upon our little ghosts and goblins. Let us forge a partnership of spirited imagination with what haunts us most fiercely. Let us bless the possibility that we might remember what it was like to be eight or nine or ten or eleven and relish a night when we morph into forms designed to inspire fear and yes, candy. I wish us each the imagination, the daring, and the love to rise into the arc of our own lives with a new blessing, buoyed by this season of blessings beyond reason. Amen.


Sources:

Dav Pilkey, god bless the gargoyles, Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Kathleen Tracy, words and music, As You Go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Souls_Day

Intersection

“Intersection”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Association Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
October 19, 2008

“Out of the stars in their flight,
out of the dust of eternity, here have we come,
stardust and sunlight,
mingling through time and through space.

Out of the stars have we come,
up from time;

…Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight:
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come.

…Out the stars, rising from rocks and the sea,
Kindled by sunlight on earth,
Arose life.

Thus pondered the late Robert Terry Weston on whence we have come and how we have come to be here. Each of us rose from a speck of cosmic dust. And all this time you thought it was the stork—or enjoyable human interaction, maybe. Well, on that last guess, you’re half right.

As for life itself and how the strands of life wound and found their way across barely imaginable distances of time and space, we’re here, precious specks in the universe of here and now, each of us star-marked. With a little help from the cosmos, earth, air, water, and fire have conspired the miracle that life is, that we are.

So consider, if you will, that each of you is a star-beam. And consider the not too far-fetched premise that somehow you have found your way to this space this morning, this Meeting House, where we wonder and speak and sing about such matters, and grow sometimes silent in reflection and even confusion. We’re here. Our star-beams have intersected.

Why? How?

Well, there’s free will. There’s also coincidence. There’s also chance. But I believe we’re here this morning because each of us longs to ponder such matters. Each of us shares amazement at this creation and that we’re a part of it. Each of us probably shares amazement that having the gift of life in common, we as humankind have contorted ourselves into a shape that can only be described as a mess. From miracle to mess is our human condition. Not only mess, of course. There’s celebration. There’s affirmation. There’s caring. There’s all that good stuff that matters so dearly. We really don’t want to be in a mess; we don’t. So we seek each other out. We look for a place where we’ll be heard and respected, even a place where we have different opinions, different perspectives, a place where we can be ourselves, given the standard of basic civility.

For me, that place is church, this church, this Unitarian Universalist congregation. Here we find our star-beam selves intersecting as we make our way across the trajectory that is our life. We question together; we wonder together; we matter together; and we go forth from this intersection of faith to live the questions, wonder aloud, behave as if every creature alive matters dearly. This is how we live our faith.

But wait, let’s coax our souls back into this Meeting House. As Bill Sinkford reminds us:

“In this room there are folks in many different places in their hearts: there are those whose spirits are light today, and those who arrive bearing the sadness of the world. Some are on the edge of adventure, beaming with energy from…a new loved one, new understanding, or a new peace, while others gaze toward the past, and wonder where they will find the strength for another step. Some come today for communion. This may mean connecting through the rituals of worship, or it may be found in a simple conversation over coffee. … To all these seekers we hold out a shared vision. We say, yes. Come on in, and know you are not alone.”

In this time and space of intersection, we move toward wholeness of heart, mind, and soul. We lean into our larger selves, knowing we’re not alone.

Sometimes we come here thinking that it’s only we who are so anxious, so overwhelmed with matters intimate and global. At this time of intersection, we discover it’s not just us. We realize that we’re not alone.

Yet it’s not easy being us. It’s not easy coming together with folks who question as relentlessly and seek as fervently as we do and come up with such a disarming array of approaches, such a pluralism of perspective, each of us tempted to espouse our approach or our perspective as if it might work for everyone. This is our signal that it’s time to listen, time to hear each other’s stories, time to open our hearts and minds to how those stories illumine an approach or a perspective that didn’t initially make much sense to us. We count on those stories for religious community that matters. Intersection has no meaning if we’re only talking about one approach, one path. Dynamic religious community depends upon what we might call “religious traffic,” “social traffic” even, “political traffic” even. No one has the final word.

It’s the intersection that counts. It’s what happens when our paths cross that allows each of us to pass through that intersection so much more intact than we were when we approached it, when we got up out of bed this morning and whined a bit about how wouldn’t it be nice to just have a leisurely breakfast, pick up the newspaper, and declare time out. Then maybe we did something as foolish as picking up that newspaper and spouting a quick, “Uh-oh! These headlines aren’t what I need. Maybe I’ll take myself, even my whole family, off to church after all.”

So here we are. Our paths have converged.

But is it enough, just this crossing, just these intersections over the years since 1721 that we’ve been First Parish in Cohasset, then First Parish Unitarian, then First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Cohasset?

We’re a congregation in historical motion. We’re a congregation learning, sometimes slowly, sometimes reluctantly, that the quality of our religious community, the quality of our religious intersection, is enhanced by being in association with other congregations.

Just yesterday three of us from this congregation—Mary Parker, President of our Parish Committee, Ron Wallace, our Treasurer, and I headed to Worcester for the Unitarian Universalist New England Fall Conference. What a gathering of congregations from every state in New England! Imagine roughly 500 New Englanders, let alone Unitarian Universalists, in the same space for a day of concerted dialogue and worship and discernment about who we are and who we can become. It was moving and powerful. Such are the benefits of religious traffic! You’ll surely be hearing more in the days ahead about the ideas exchanged and what can help us at First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Cohasset move through this time and beyond it, what can help us at First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Cohasset rise into the larger reaches of who we can be as faithful seekers, teachers, justice makers, and stewards of the gifts we are given.

We each began as stardust. Stardust by itself is good maybe for a little light—actually an infinitesimal speck of light. But when we find ourselves here and alive, when we stretch our souls into beams of light, when we intentionally come together with other religious seekers, then something extraordinary happens. We discover that our specks of stardust kindle into a larger light. We discover that our beams of light intersect in ways that make us each the richer in discerning what our lives are all about and can still be about. We discover that the light that we kindle Sunday after Sunday—here and in over a thousand Unitarian Universalist congregations in this country alone—ignites into a flame that is the essence of that which burns in our flaming chalice, symbol of the dynamic truth, the luminous love, that we are about in this faith that we share.

What makes it possible? Each of you makes it possible by showing up, by letting your light shine, by sharing your resources so that you can stretch into your larger self. Each of our congregations makes it possible by coming together at intersections such as conferences that are above all about conversations that matter, worshipping together across the habits of how we worship as individual congregations, and discerning and acting together so that what emerges is an intricate web of activity made possible by an association of interdependent congregations.

This is our Unitarian Universalist Association. This is not some edifice on Beacon Hill. This is the flaming chalice that is ignited by each individual, each congregation, each district, each child, each person who walks into a Unitarian Universalist church hopeful, hopeful for a sanctuary in which she or he matters, hopeful for a community of loving listening folk who say through our deeds, “You matter. Whoever you are, you matter. Welcome!”

Now we have one, at least one, sticky problem. Excuse me, challenge! It comes to mind through the story told by my colleague Kathleen McTigue. And it hinges on the notion of spirituality and discipline. Spirituality is that term that tends to evoke a quick nod of complicit wisdom when we hear it cited. Some of us are even inclined to say, “I’m not really religious; I’m spiritual!” To which I say, “Oyveh!” because that notion commonly carries a very light backpack. Specifically, being spiritual without being religious holds an easily implicit assumption that I’m not accountable. It’s about me and my spirit and the Spirit of Life, and that’s quite enough, thank you very much. So folks who want only spirituality tend not to return when they’re tapped on the shoulder in coffee hour, let alone when they’re reminded in the Meeting House that the spirit of our faith calls us to act differently in the world.

Discipline is another matter. Discipline often goes against the grain of progressive thinkers such as we fancy ourselves to be. Thus, Kathleen’s telling of the folk tale of the “saintly Brother Bruno.” Engaged in solitary prayer, he was rudely interrupted by a frog. What did he do, but lean out the window and tell that sub-human specimen to pipe down. The bullfrog went instantly mute. Then Bruno’s conscience began to gnaw away at him. Maybe Bruno’s own prayer hit God’s ears like the “arrogant croaking of another frog!” Bruno was not ambivalent for long. He again leaned out the window, and bid that bullfrog to “Sing!” Soon a grand chorus of bullfrogs was singing a full-throated anthem. And Bruno learned to pray.

Bruno discovered that the human spirit is not the only one that counts. Bruno discovered that his conscience was more accountable than he’d counted on. The only thing that has me worried is what the bullfrogs thought of Bruno’s prayers.

Spirituality, however, that amorphous notion that carries as many gossamer threads as a cosmic spider web, glistens, simply glistens, in caring religious community.

And so do we. Our spirits soar; our souls awaken; our minds open wide, when we know it’s not just about us. Individually, congregationally, it’s not just about us. It’s about the miracle in which we find ourselves asking, wondering, worshipping, praying, learning, making justice, being awake and attentive, and greeting new beams of light even as we bid farewell to old stars, ready once again to become stardust.

For me, religion, this religion that we know as Unitarian Universalism, shines with the fire of countless stars when kindled in the chalice that is our Unitarian Universalist Association. Some call it the UUA. I call it OUR UUA. How can we not support this amazing convergence of stars, this amazing intersection of light beams that we are, as individuals and congregations? Together, in association, we can grow and learn and touch one another. We can “nurture our spirits and help heal our world.”

I ask this morning that each of you give as generously as you can to support our Association. As your minister, I’d love to give more, but you can count on me for $100 from my personal account and $100 from my ministerial discretionary fund. Let’s give what we can, and know that our chalice will burn all the brighter because we do so.

…Out the stars, rising from rocks and the sea,
Kindled by sunlight on earth,
Arose life.

At this morning’s intersection of light and life, know that I love you, stars all. Amen


Sources:

Kathleen McTigue, on spiritual discipline, in Association Sunday 2008 Organizing and Worship Resources, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2008.

William Sinkford, on in this room there are folks, in Association Sunday 2008 Organizing and Worship Resources, Unitarian Universalist Association, 2008.

Robert T. Weston, “Out of the Stars,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 465.