Chalice Reflection & Introduction to Coming of Age Presentations & For Our Coming of Age Youth

Chalice Reflection
of
Jackie Whipple
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Coming of Age Sunday – May 31, 2009

I have been asked to light the chalice today because I am a grandparent with a lot of experience-- from what your R.E. Director and your Minister are kindly calling “the wisdom generation.” I have been the mentor of two different girls, about a generation apart. And my husband and I have raised two sons and two daughters who Came of Age in this church. And we have four grandsons--one of whom had the Jewish Coming of Age ritual, a Bar Mitzvah. And we have six granddaughters, one of whom also had a Bat Mitzvah.

As you young people know from your year’s study, almost every culture and religion has a ritual marking the coming of age. About the age of 13, you start the transition from childhood to responsible adulthood. Your body is growing up; your thoughts, interests, activities, and beliefs are becoming more grown up too; and some ambitions for your future may be forming. When I was thirteen, I read a book titled “Girl Reporter” and that set my path for the rest of my life. At this age, probably you want more independence and privacy; want to go places and do things on your own; wear what you want to wear; spend more time with your friends than with your parents; redecorate your room, and/or shut your door and live in a mess. All perfectly normal behavior!

Things are changing for your parents, too. A new era of worries: worrying about where you are and who you are with, and why you haven’t come home yet--and other things-- Dreading the day you get your driver’s license. All perfectly normal behavior!

Everything should work out well however: because you all have a good UU background and family relationships of trust and respect--and you all will have your cell phones!

Introduction to Coming of Age Presentations
Jim FitzGerald
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
Coming of Age Sunday – May 31, 2009

Nine youngsters participated in this year’s Coming of Age program and all nine Coming of Age youth successfully completed the required program expectations. The class visited various faith communities, participated in community service projects, and teamed up with an adult mentor for conversations relating to their faith tradition, spirituality, and life. The program now comes to this milestone conclusion in this offering of credo presentations.

The religious education program asked our Coming of Age class to present their credo presentations in one of three ways:
 take the traditional approach of reading a prepared statement from the pulpit
 engage in a credo dialogue between mentor and mentee
 offer their credo presentation in the form of a painting, sculpture, piece of artwork or craft, perform a musical selection, etc. with some spoken explanation of how their creation illustrates their personal beliefs

The choice – is completely up to each mentor and mentee pair.

In a few moments, mentors will be invited to offer some introductory remarks about their mentee before each credo presentation is given. After each Coming of Age class member completes their presentation, mentors and mentees will engage in a simple ritual.

Mentors will light and present to their mentee a chalice to symbolize our Unitarian Universalist faith and the search for truth and meaning that they have shared throughout this program. Mentees will present their mentor with a rose. The rose, traditionally used during a child’s dedication, reappears this morning to symbolize the many ways in which each mentor has helped their mentee blossom and unfold into the promise of a beautiful life.

“For Our Coming of Age Youth”

A Message by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
on Coming of Age Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 31, 2009

When I was your age…. No! I won’t go there. I can just see my own kids turned adults rolling their eyes, sure that they know what’s coming. You’re probably better off not knowing about “when I was your age.”

You are the age you are, and you always will be. That doesn’t quite mean that you’ll be forever 12 or 13 or 14, but you will be exactly the age you are, whether it’s 12 or 13 or 14 or 32 or 53 or 73 or maybe 93 or 103. This morning marks your Coming of Age, when your families and your church honor you as you pause in your own distinctive ways at the open gate between childhood and adulthood. Okay, you don’t get to vote yet. You’re too young for a driver’s license. You’re too young according to the by-laws of this congregation to be an official member. You’re too old for childcare. You’re too old for adults to pat you on the head. You’re in that fuzzy time—too young for this, too old for that.

Which means, you’re just right! You are the age that you need to be. You’re exactly the right age to Come of Age.

You’re of the age when you need not forget what it is to be little, to be a child, to take in the smallest detail of the world as if you’re breathing, touching, tasting, hearing, and holding it for the first time. Never forget what that’s like. Hold it dear.

You’re of the age of leaning into adulthood. You don’t yet have the responsibility or the freedom of adulthood, and they come as a package. Yet this is a time to try out responsibility, to taste freedom; and this is a time when you’re trying the resilience of your elders as you sometimes dip too deep for safety into the well of freedom, even as you swell the hearts of your elders as you sometimes assume responsibility beyond your age, beyond the call of childhood.

You both cherish the opinions of others and stretch your own will to be uniquely you. It’s a tightrope, calling for balance. Don’t be afraid to fall off, knowing that there’s a safety net called your family and your church to catch you. Pay close attention. It’s a trip that you only take once. It is precious and sacred, as you are precious and sacred.

You are coming of age, which is to say, you are becoming who you are. Like the flame in our chalice, you are never still. Your credo, your “I believe,” will change over time. What you have shared with us this morning is no less dear. Return to it five years from now, ten years from now. Return to it when you reach your ripest years. It is a sacred expression of who you are and what matters most to you today.

What matters most to me today is that you are you. You are uniquely wondrously you. Melissa, Sarah, Sasha, Brodie, Isabelle, Adrian, Emily, Julia, and Arianna, I hold you in my heart. This entire congregation, your family of faith, holds you in our hearts as we celebrate you today. I love you. We love you.

Memories and Reflections

“Memories and Reflections”

A Message by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Memorial Day Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 24, 2009

Life and death, those two strands that we braid and un-braid, braid and un-braid. On this day of memory and remembering, they are intimately woven. We’re here and alive in this time and space. We remember those who are not.

It’s not so simple.

For some of us, today is a day of remembering and honoring the war dead, those who were downwind from the winds of war. Some here this morning knew those winds intimately. I don’t know how much you remember, but it’s tough to gloss over what happened, tougher perhaps to bring them into the light of today. Surely there’s an intimacy established among those of you who were in combat, a brotherly/sisterly bond that prevails and protects. When those of us who have not seen combat presume to guess what it was like, we flail and we fail. We’ll never know. I hope we’ll never know.

Memorial Day for me is a somewhat turbulent time. I’m torn between honoring all who have died and calling special attention to those who have perished because we as humankind have been less than kind. Again and again, we have failed to rise to a diplomacy that prevents what I believe is one of the great sins of humanity. So rather than honoring the so-called war dead exclusively, I seek to honor all who have known the precious gift of life and have moved into the mystery that is common to all life, the mystery of death.

By memory and love, those who have died endure. Some live on in common memory. Most fade in the mortal memory of survivors who inevitably join the ranks of the dead. I cannot give them names, for their names are forgotten; but they once graced this earth—for better and worse and across that immense space between. I invoke especially the lives of the long forgotten.

How to “gather at the river” that flows with the droplets of each life, above a bed of ancient stones? How to “gather at the river” affirming each droplet, each ancient stone? How to “gather at the river?” In the spirit of gathered memory, I invite us to speak responsively the words of Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn:

Responsive Reading 720, "We Remember Them," Roland B. Gittelsohn (adapted)

…………………..…..

“In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.”

On this day of memory and remembering, I invite your voices of memory and reflection. Whose memory would you like to lift up this morning? How does this person’s life touch you today?

Voices of Memory and Reflection



Sources:

Roland B. Gittelsohn, “We Remember Them,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 720.

Robert Lowery, “Shall We Gather at the River” (words and music), First published in Happy Voices in 1865. In Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, Boston, 2005, 1046

Chalice Reflection & A Completely Divine Day

Chalice Reflection
of
Joan Lunt
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, Massachusetts
May 17, 2009

Note: Joan wrote this after she and her Circle Ministry (small group ministry) group spent a day working at a Habitat for Humanity project in Hingham. She offered it as her chalice reflection.

With a happy heart and money to spend,
Our circle ministry was challenged to lend,
Our vision, our skill to seed and connect,
New beginnings awaited us, I did suspect.

One cold winter Sunday in Trueblood Hall,
We began with a mission and a call,
To share our passions and hobbies held dear.
Our stunning success became very clear.

Starting with spinach calzones and ending with treats,
We discovered each other's special feats,
And music was made and a seed was planted,
Our wish for a special connection was granted.

Next a promise and a new endeavor,
A selfless act to be proud of forever,
So it was on that dreary April morn,
Our connection to Habitat for Humanity was born.

So loving, kind and friendly was our crew,
We knew this was what we were meant to do,
Coming together in this significant way,
Made for a truly glorious day!

Thanks for the connections,
Thanks for the promises we honored so true,
Thanks for the challenge we knew we could do.

A Completely Divine Day

“A Completely Divine Day”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for the Sunday of our Annual Meeting
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 17, 2009

This past week my brother and I have been on the phone many times. The topic is our mother’s declining capacity to function. I know that some of you have experienced this with your loved ones. It’s heart rending. Whether dementia or Alzheimer’s or another malady altogether invades our capacity to be present and to recall what happened yesterday or even a few moments ago, it’s as if the person we’ve known in ways particular and reliable elude us. Who is she? Who is he? With my Mother, her temperament has turned contrary too. Accountability is simply not in the picture. As I said to my brother, “We’ve really already lost our Mom, Jeff!”

Our mother, who turned 100 years old this past January, lives in a retirement facility near Jeff and his wife, Donna, just outside Philadelphia, in one of those towns known as the Main Line. Just a few months ago we celebrated her hundredth year with a full array of family, including five grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and the surprise appearance of a longtime friend from Nebraska. It was memorable—her favorite food, her favorite birthday cake (chocolate through and through), and stories, stories told and memories shared of our Mom, our Gram, our GiGi, as she’s called by her great-grandchildren. There were balloons. There were toasts. There were antics by the little ones. It was a fine day, a memorable day.

I wonder now if she remembers it. Day by day she slips into what psychologist writer Mary Pipher calls “another country.”

“The only thing worse than having aging parents,” observes Pipher, “is not having aging parents. The old-old die by inches. ….At first, Mother is no longer the best cook in the country, then the children worry she will poison herself with spoiled food or burn down the house.”

Yes, there are the frustrations and the negotiations with caregivers, lay and professional. Yes, there are the matters of where our Mother can receive the best possible care. Yes, there is the undercurrent of guilt that we can’t provide it directly. Yes, there are the considerations of what to do when. But what goes missing above all are the common days, the days in which our Mom as we’ve known her could enjoy a cup of tea with a good friend, could go for a walk in the gardens planted by fellow residents, could attend a school performance of a great-grandchild and laugh and cheer them on, could call us on the phone or sit with us in our living rooms and talk about matters spanning family to friendship to statesmanship. What is missing are not so much the days in which she may have been “Queen for a Day,” which she surely was as we feted her in January, but the common ordinary days; and she’s been blessed to know at least 36,500 of them.

At what point in life do we grow sufficiently attuned to our mortality—and even moreso, to our prospective reversal from operating at full capacity? It’s not always a matter of age. This congregation knows that well. An accident, an illness, a loss, a trauma beyond the sphere of family can stop any of us cold, flipping our world upside down and our hearts inside out. Precious days become the stuff of reflection. Why not attentiveness, I wonder? Why not attentiveness to the time that is now?

“This is the day which the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24)

The psalmist gets it! Whether we agree that God made the day or we simply acknowledge that it’s here and we’re in it, we’re called to “rise up and welcome the day,” echoing the words of George Mack sung by our choir at the outset of this morning’s worship. It can be any old day, an ordinary day, a common day, a day to be longed for one day.

Consider the musings of Gordon McKeeman, his account of the late Japanese Emperor Hirohito, born into a position of royalty and power, which meant isolation, formidable isolation. How the emperor longed “to live just one day as a common person.”

“performing simple chores: dressing, making the bed, eating breakfast…

doing ordinary work, whose impact is largely unfathomable but would be missed by someone if it were not done: the laundry, cleaning, meal preparation…

looking out upon the ordinary world, breathing the air, drinking the water, enjoying children at play…”

all the stuff of “one day as a common person.”

Common, the root of community, the name given to this space outside our Meeting House, a space whose historic purpose derived from that of the English common on which sheep grazed. For us, it’s a space on which we gather on warm days for Frisbee and Farmer’s Markets, for a restful stretch-out on the soft grass, for a chance conversation with a neighbor. A common day in a common space holds the jewels of the wondrous ordinary.

On a seemingly ordinary day, I stood as a young child with my nose pinched up against our screen door, gazing across the mellow thoroughfare of North Adams Street....and wondering. The place was a small town in the heart of the heartland. I stood in the front hall of our frame house across the street from the public school I attended. I was six years old. There was a smoky, gently pungent scent in the air. Time stood still.....It is now, right now. Right now has never been. It will never be again. Today has never been. It will never be again. I am in it. This very moment has never been. It will never be again. I know it. I feel it. I breathe it.

My epiphany of the nowness of time has lingered. It is reflective, recurring, mildly anticipatory, and conscious. “Only connect” reads the prologue to E.M. Forster’s novel, Howard’s End. To connect with ourselves and with one another, we connect with a moment in time—sometimes through intense consciousness, sometimes through immersion in the moment that feels so pure it is indelibly inscribed in our memory.

Such was the preciousness of Emily Gibbs’ connection with her family on the occasion of her 12th birthday in Thornton Wilder’s drama, Our Town. It is a day she returns to as a silent invisible observer from the other side of life as we know it to witness herself in life as she knew it. “Choose the least important day in your life,” admonished a fellow shadow, as Emily pondered which day she would visit. “It will be important enough.” A new arrival on the other side, Emily stood at the open window of this early birthday. The vision and voices of her mother, father, and brother moving through their morning litanies were more than she could bear. “I can’t. I can’t go on,” she anguishes. “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another....I didn’t realize....Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

“It goes so fast,” were the exact words of my Mother, as I interviewed her for posterity just ten years ago, and even then, she had lived Emily’s lifetime more than six-fold. “It goes so fast.”

What day would you choose to return to? Would it be a birthday? A wedding day? Every week I open the Cohasset Mariner to the inside front page, the piece titled “Picture This.” Every week a resident of this town is featured with a photograph and a bulleted bio. This week the spotlight was on a young woman with a radiant smile. Always the featured personality is asked to name the best day of their life. Usually it’s a birthday or the birth of a child or a wedding day. This week it was: “When my Dad surprised me with my car.” Okay. I’ll bet those favorite days change over the course of a lifetime, but getting a new car when you don’t expect it can score pretty high for a young person.

Best days are as relative as time. What would yours be? Not your chosen new car, but the best day of your life? Would it change if you were given a choice, like Emily in Our Town, to relive a single day from the imagined time after your death? What would it be for you?

A sea of days ordinary and common floods my memory. Yes, my wedding day to Dan scores high. Yes, the birth of my birth children scores high. Yes, our daughters’ weddings score high. But I’m thinking of two otherwise ho-hum days that surface in that foggy sea of remembering. One I’ve already cited—that day that had never been and would never be again as I pressed my nose up against the screen door looking out onto our front porch, my six-year-old nose twitching to the scent of what was likely early autumn. The other was a summer day, most likely late June. School had been out for about a month, as is the custom in the Midwest. Every June my Mom would take me and head up to “the farm,” the ramshackle frame home where my grandparents grew corn, soybeans, and alfalfa and kept cows and pigs and chickens. My grandmother was hunched from scoliosis, and my grandfather was not one to pitch in with housework. Gathering her thirty-something stamina, my mother did. Every day she rose early, fixed breakfast for all of us, and dived into the chores—not quite the chores to which my granddad referred (milking the cows, running the combine), but the equally exacting chores of deep cleaning that Mom undertook with all the energy I’ve known her to possess for so many years.

I would usually take a book, run outside, climb a tree, and perch there for hours at a time, reading in shelter from the riveting Iowa sun. Then I would scamper inside and wonder aloud to my Mom when she was ready for a break—that is, when she was ready to spend time with ME. It probably happened more than once, far more than once, but I recall a specific noontime of my Mother packing us a lunch, taking me by the hand, and walking with me through the fields down to the banks of a river—a creek, really. There we sat ourselves in the shade of a giant cottonwood, took out our sandwiches, our fruit, and our drink, and dined. I can’t even remember if we said anything, just that we were together. This was my time, my sacred time, with my Mother.

The sun still warms that day. The sandwiches are still fresh. My Mother’s hand is as firm and sure as it was then, even with a slight scent of bleach from house cleaning. The wind blows anew through the cottonwoods. “Only connect?” Oh yes, that was the heart of the day, the common ordinary day of we two commoners.

I hope my children look back on such times, when all else was let go, and I took them in hand and carved a circle around the universe of just us.

Such are days of holiness. They are ever ripe, how ever they recede in the relativity that is time and memory. Such are the days that are ordinary but were never ordinary. Such are the days fused into our heart’s memory as we lean into them from our now.

No, it’s not nostalgia. I believe it’s a latent understanding that what stands out are those times when we’ve known communion in this world in which we find ourselves. I think of my Mother now and witness her receding inch by inch into that “other country.” I think of my Mother surrounded by four generations feting her long life and ingesting the elixir of her stories. I think of the longing of an emperor to live a single day as a common person.

Whether we are witness to a life long-lived or a life cut short; whether we are privy to our own lives long or bent or gnarled or broadsided; whether we understand ourselves to be part of this world that hurts in so many places; whether we understand ourselves period, I invite us all to consider today as a completely divine day. It is worthy of tending to; it is worthy of stopping for; it is worthy of breathing in; it is worthy of our time, so fleeting and precious.

In the words of poet Mary Oliver:

Every day
I see or I hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

May today be a day long remembered, closely held, and passed through with all possible grace. With all my heart, I know that today is a holy day. Today is all we have and everything we have. Live it! Love it!

I love you, each and all. Amen.



Sources:

E.M. Forster, Howard’s End, Edward Arnold, London, 1910.

George Mack, “Rise Up and Welcome the Day,” composition for the choir of First Parish Unitarian Universalist, Cohasset, MA, 2008.

Gordon B. McKeeman, “Common Day,” in Out of the Ordinary: Meditations, Skinner House Books, Boston, 2000, 30-31.

Mary Oliver, “Mindful,” in Why I Wake Early, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004, 58-59.

“Picture This,” in Cohasset Mariner, Friday, May 15, 2009, p. 2.

Psalm 118, in The Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, Coward McCann, Inc., New York, 1938.

Möbius Mother

“Möbius Mother”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
Mother’s Day
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 10, 2009

What you just heard, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Canon 1 a 2, was part of his “Musical Offering.” It’s a complicated but somewhat whimsical offering. If you see the musical score, you’ll find that the beginning joins with the end and that it’s equivalent to what we would recognize as a Möbius strip. I didn’t prepare a physical model of Bach’s canon for you this morning, but I will prepare a Möbius strip. It starts out as a rectangle [show] with two obvious dimensions, length and width, a couple of edges, a topside and an underside. If I take it and give it a half twist and then join end to end, what happens to the dimensions? What happens to topside and underside? What happens to the two edges? It becomes a surface with one side and one edge. If I run my finger along the edge of this piece of paper that a moment ago had two edges, I’ll return to my starting point and cover the length of what was formerly both edges. There is no interior or exterior. There is no boundary.

It was discovered independently and about the same time, roughly the midpoint of the 19th century, by two German mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing. While it holds mathematical and physical complexities that I won’t even begun to get into, I wonder if those two German mathematicians weren’t just tinkering one morning with a long strip of paper and a bit of glue, and this strip with such fascinating properties became the unexpected gift of their play!

But this is Mother’s Day, not Mathematicians’ Day, so where’s the connection with this quirky but fascinating concoction of a couple of 19th century mathematicians and motherhood?

I’ll love you forever,
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.

So goes the refrain in Robert Munsch’s endearing story of mothering, Love You Forever. It’s a story of a particularly devoted Mom and possibly our ideal of what we hope for as children. We all want to be loved forever and liked “for always.” We long for a mother who will somehow regard us as her baby as long as she lives. We might not want a Mom who crawls into our bedroom when we’re sleeping teenagers and picks us up and rocks us, but let’s cut a little slack for a writer to make his point. What jumps out of this refrain for me are “loving forever” and “liking for always.” The longed for mother love does this. The more humanly understandable mother love is like a strip of paper that doesn’t always know—and sometimes never knows—it can aspire to becoming a Möbius strip.

The flat strip has dimensions and edges and limits. With a gentle twist and a critical connection, we have a form with a single surface and a single edge. If an ant traveled the course of the flat strip, she would eventually come to an edge; and if she wanted to continue her movement, she would need to reverse direction or back up or fall off. Not so with the Möbius strip. At any point, an ant could hop aboard and begin her journey and move forward and forward and forward; and if this ant had the power of spatial recognition, she would discover that she was returning again and again to her starting point. She would always be on the outside and the inside, because outside and inside are meaningless in this form. She would always be moving forward because there is no backward. Theoretically she would be on a journey without end. Forever and always would take on new meaning in this physical connection between the ant and her Möbius world. The entire surface is accessible to her forever.

Idyllic mother love is available and navigable forever, at least the forever that is the mother’s life and the child’s memory. There is eternal access. In the province of psychology and theology too, boundaries are a good thing. But in our idealized notion of motherhood—and our idealized notion of the holy—there is eternal access, eternal connection. Boundaries can be healthy and protect our singularity; but no boundaries are physically necessary when a child develops in utero and, for awhile, during infancy. Even if a child parts with her birth mother right after birth, there is a need to attach to another mother or mother figure; and for a time, that attachment needs to be so close that boundaries are barely discernible. Child and parent or child and primary caregiver weave in and out of those boundary gradients lifelong. It’s the stuff of thousands of hours of therapy, and probably thousands of hours of Circle Ministry—or small group ministry—conversation! It’s the tough stuff of discerning how Möbius our mothers were or are and how Möbius we who are mothers were or are.

Then there’s the take on motherhood offered up by Erich Fromm in his Art of Loving. “Motherly love,” declared Fromm, “is unconditional affirmation of the child’s life and his needs…” Any wonder why those of us who are mothers think that we will never but never measure up or why those of us who were once children—I think that’s everybody—feel like we’ll never get enough? Fromm elaborates on what he sees as needed: “the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child’s life and…growth” –in other words, sustenance and maintenance—and “the attitude which instills in the child a love for living”—in other words an infectious joi de vivre. A loved child is a healthy child, who is glad to have been born.

In Biblical terms, Fromm draws on the notion of “the promised land…’flowing with milk and honey.’” The earth as our mother is an ancient understanding. A land that flows with milk and honey is like a mother who gives milk and honey. Milk, suggests Fromm, sustains us and helps us grow. Honey lends sweetness to life, a joy that we simply are. Fromm claims that it’s easy to spot those among us who got only milk and those among us who knew both, the milk and the honey.

I’m not so sure. Back to that form with a twist. With a simple surface of two dimensions, it’s easy to think and hope in terms of either/or, maybe even both/and. But when we shape it into a form of singular surface, no distinctions, and a forever travelogue, a remarkable blend takes place. In milk and honey terms, there’s no accounting for when we’re sustained with milk and when we’re sweetened with honey. It’s all one substance. So it is with motherhood. What sustains us sweetens us and what sweetens us sustains us. A child or an adult can starve from want of either and surely from want of a basic beautiful blend. The ant traveling along that Möbius strip laps up both.

Consider the Biblical psalm that embodies comfort and security and hope more than any other, the 23rd Psalm. I can speak it from Presbyterian memory:

“The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want;
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He restores my soul…
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

You can test me later on the middle part.

Then we hear the haunting adaptation of Bobby McFerrin, dedicated to his mother and sung by our choir:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I have all I need,
She makes me lie down in green meadows….
She restores my soul…
She leads me in the path of good things…
She sets a table before me…
world without end.”

Milk and honey and more flow through both; but in the adaptation, they flow through the bounty and largesse of mothering. No either/or, but a wondrous blend. And both are forever—like a mother’s idyllic love, forever. Like a journey along that Möbius mother, forever—no holding back, no boundaries, no perilous edges.

Is it any wonder that in ancient times, God or divinity or the most high or the holiest of holies was rendered as a woman, not as a woman over and above all other forms, but a woman nurturing, sustaining, inspiring, and with the forever dimension of regeneration embodied in the seasons of earth, mother earth. Such are the riches of this history that a sermon or two or a hundred and two are suggested for another day.

Where does that leave us on this day, this morning, with the mothers we’ve had or have and the mothers we are or aren’t? Where does that leave us?

Back to those two forms of the strip—the flat one with no twists and no connections, with edges and boundaries and limits, and our Möbius friend, our Möbius mother. As a daughter and a mother and a stepmother and a grandmother—even as a minister and a psychologist—I believe that we go in and out of these basic forms. We’re human; we have limits; we have boundaries; we have exhaustible supplies of milk and honey. Sometimes, we’re just plain exhausted. Then we stretch our humanness. We do that half twist. We connect our beginnings and ends into the idyllically maternal form. Like the earth itself, we give and we take. We warm and we chill. Like the countless notions of holiness, we are bountiful and sparing, affirming and disparaging, accessible and remote. Like life we embody joy and anguish. We are of this world and of this life. We give birth, but what gives life remains a mystery. We raise children, but forces beyond us determine in part how those children navigate the unexpected curvatures of life. What we can all do—birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, grandmothers, and every male here—is to travel the miracle of each day mindful of the forever that is experienced when anyone among us feels nurtured and sustained and glad to be alive because we have traveled at their side. This we can do, mothers all!

I love you, each and all.

Amen.



Sources:

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1956.

Bobby McFerrin, The 23rd Psalm, Dedicated to My Mother, in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association, Boston, 2005, 1038.

Möbius strip, Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip.

Robert Munsch (written by), Sheila McGraw (Illustrated by), Love You Forever, Firefly Books Ltd., Richmond Hill, Ontario, 2004.

Psalm 23, The Book of Psalms, The Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Strange Paths: Physics, computation, philosophy, “Canon 1 a 2,” at http://strangepaths.com/canon-1-a-2/2009/01/18/en/.

Thus Far

“Thus Far”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for the Sunday of our Annual Meeting
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
May 3, 2009

Five years ago and a day you called me to be your minister. I continue to be grateful for that call. I continue to learn from you—as a minister and in so many other dimensions of my life. We speak of “the learning congregation.” A learning congregation has a learning minister, and that rests on the basic assumption that both are paying attention. I believe you are, and I know that “paying attention” is a most valued lesson you have taught me. I’ll explain.

Several years ago, my husband Dan and I faced the harrowing task of teaching our kids to drive. Some of you have been through this. It can be downright terrifying. I’m talking about what the parents go through! Patting your tummy and rubbing your head is the simplest of tasks compared to what any of us must be able to do to get behind a wheel and take to the road. My mantra as a driving educator was singular: “Pay attention! No, don’t check the radio. No, don’t put a tape in. No, don’t channel cruise. No, don’t look at me when you’re talking. Pay attention to the road. You’ll get the knack of the clutch and the brakes (we taught them all on stick shifts). That’s the easy part.” The tough stuff is focusing completely on the road, which includes all other drivers and every single pedestrian.

Ministry isn’t so different, and you know I came from a city where the level of stimulation assumes what we call “multi-tasking!” Multi-tasking might help us survive in New York City or in Boston, but it does not make a good minister. Early on, a few of you gently suggested to me that when I greet you after worship and when I’m with you in conversation, please do not turn my head in anticipation of the next person. When you appear at the door of my study, you feel more welcome if I let go of what I’m working on and not try to greet and complete at the same time. Okay, I’m getting it! And I invite you to remind me when I lapse back into the mode of survival on Lexington Avenue or the cross-town shuttle. I’m still learning. One person at a time; each moment holds a universe.

Then there’s preaching. You’ve taught me so much. Stories connect. Go easy on information. Don’t cram a sermon like you’re stuffing a hefty bag. Be conversational; this isn’t a lecture; it’s relational. You’ve reminded me to preach with you not to you. An unfolding happens when I know, I just know, that what I’ve said and how I’ve said it connects with who you are and where you are at a moment in time, at least some of you. I’ve learned that it is impossible minus one to connect with all of you all the time.

You’ve reminded me week by week and year by year that you’re authentic Unitarian Universalists. You do not walk to a common step or think to a common thought. And for each of you, there’s a galaxy of opinion. Some of you come from traditions in which you’ve been taught that the words of clergy are writ in stone. There are Sundays when I would thank whatever God you believe in for such faith, however blind it might be. Yet I find it far more inspiring to know that you question freely what I say and what I propound. I invite you to continue to question and challenge. It reminds me that you’re paying attention, and it brings us into deeper and closer connection.

You’ve even taught me how to preach about politics. This might surprise some of you who claim that politics doesn’t belong in the pulpit, however often I’ve noted that politics are simply a mode of structuring ourselves in community. Who could ever doubt, for example, that there are “church politics?” However, when I address those sticky matters of power and privilege that so commonly overlap with the arena of secular politics, you’ve thoughtfully taught me to be explicit in qualifying that you don’t have to agree with me. Some of you don’t need such qualification, but I concede to the need of many who were raised in a more hierarchical faith tradition.

What else?

You’ve taught me to take time for myself and my family. I’m still learning, since the Protestant work ethic instilled by my family of origin and my definitively Presbyterian roots haunts me with the message that nothing I ever do is enough. That’s not you; that the unforgiving echo of my past. My husband, Dan, reminds me of what you tell me: “No one on their death bed ever shows remorse about not spending more time in her office—or her study.” I still need such reminding.

You’ve taught me to celebrate! Not that I hadn’t a clue about how to celebrate, but you’ve upped the ante. You throw great parties! You let your hair down. You prepare amazing breakfasts and dinners and receptions. The most recent Spring Fling and Circle Ministry potlucks come to mind. Even when you roll up your sleeves and do what we might call an “industrial strength clean-up/fix-up Sunday,” you turn it into a celebration. You resist taking yourselves too seriously; and in so doing, you call me out of that part of me that takes myself too seriously.

You embody generosity—generosity of time and talent and imagination and yes, money. Just a few days ago, a certain mortgage was burned. You don’t like financial albatrosses, and this one is off our backs. You continue to support our operating expenses, even in the uncertain economy that is center stage these days, even with some tough cuts in a budget that you will soon vote on. In concert with you, I seek to give as generously as I can to support and sustain this congregation. It is a gift given and received.

You remind me year after year how imaginative you are. Last September I stood in this pulpit and recounted the New Testament parable of the sower who sowed seeds on ground that was variably productive. I suggested that each of us is a sower and then offered $1,000 of “seed funding”—funds withdrawn from my ministerial expense budget—in the form of twenty envelopes, each with a $50-bill; and I invited 20 of you to come forward, take an envelope, and use your gift “to seed a ministry within or beyond this congregation and to share with this church the story of how this happens.” The stories that have unfolded, stories like that told by Chartis this morning and all the stories recounted in this year’s Lenten Manual under the theme “Promises Kept,” remind me of how wondrously imaginative you are.

You rise to the challenge of a surprise, whether that surprise is positive or not so positive. When I stood in this pulpit last November and shared with you the news of my early stage breast cancer, you rose to that challenge with extraordinary grace and compassion. You encouraged me to take the time I needed with the surgery required and the requisite recovery. Through our Care Circle, you brought sumptuous dinners to our home and sent cards and even flowers. Through the all encompassing love that is our Care Circle you have graced all those among us who have known those exceedingly unpleasant surprises of a scary diagnosis, a life-threatening injury, or the loss of a loved one. By your actions, you remind me again and again that you are a congregation both gracious and resilient.

You have provided grist for what my colleague and mentor Forrest Church taught me: “Play to the health of a congregation!” Every congregation is first and foremost an assembly of humans, and as humans we’re susceptible to bouts of backbiting, gossip even, nay saying sometimes. Through the many ways in which we seek to practice shared ministry, accountability for who we are and what we do comes to the light of day; so that if one of us offends—and periodic offense is inevitable—we who are downwind of it try hard to speak the truth in love to that person, sometimes in the thoughtful company of our Shared Ministry Committee. It works. Beloved community is the stuff of mutual accountability. To make this work, I seek to give most of my attention to that which is loving, direct, engaged, and accountable in this parish akin to an apple tree on which almost every apple is a joy to digest!

You’ve taught me a heightened appreciation of architecture. These buildings in which our congregational life has spanned almost three centuries are more than buildings. They are historic reminders of the elegant simplicity of 18th century New England architecture. They bear silent witness to the early history of this nation as we know it and to the individuals and families who have been drawn here to discern what is sacred as life is celebrated through worship, through rites of passage that include weddings and dedications and memorial services, and through pivotal decision making that shapes who we are and who we will be as a congregation seeking to realize a faith of covenant grounded in love.

You’ve taught me a love of place. How fortunate I am to be your minister in this village by the sea. Now this is a lesson that didn’t take me long to learn. You perhaps know that I’m an aquaphile, a lover of water and above all, the ocean. Sheer joy is that first dive into the surf when it no longer renders us numb. The robe that I wear carries a hem of appliquéd waves, mirroring our spiritual alignment in our common love of those waves.

Now here we go into the high tides of matters spiritual. Over the course of my five years with you, I have heard a multitude of times that you would like me to be more spiritual. Sometimes I comply, albeit likely by accident. Slowly, slowly, I realize that matters of spirit mirror matters of theological perspective. What is spiritual to one is mundane to another. I have stopped trying to second-guess you about what you mean by spiritual, since this congregation’s spirituality and indeed Unitarian Universalist spirituality is kaleidoscopic, a shifting pattern of who we are as a religious community. Perhaps the most helpful lesson that I’ve learned in the venue of spirituality is to value, cherish even, the divergence. To consider that one day I will “get it” is illusory. In fact, when I expressed to my mentor and seasoned colleague, Victor Carpenter, my frustration about what you all mean by spirituality or what any of us means by that term, Victor responded that “Defining spirituality is like bottling fog.” While fog is not to be ignored; neither is it to be understood once and for all. I have learned simply to respect the mystery and to keep my heart and mind open without trying to land on a “right answer.” In biblical language, spirit translates into breath translates into wind. Spirit is as core to our living as breath, as elusive to our grasp as wind.

You have taught me how much timing matters when any of us considers what we can do and what we can’t. Some of you wear many hats in our parish life and wear them well. Some of you remind me that there are times when you need to go hatless, when you need to be exempt from any committee or task force, when you simply need to be more than do or when you need to do elsewhere also. There are after all the draws of family and job and community. First Parish Unitarian Universalist is not the only show in town. Though here we hit a challenge, and I would be grateful for a magic wand, maybe even a twirling baton, the kind used this past week in California by one quick-thinking female to ward off an aggressor. How to diffuse the challenge of Sunday morning sports? I’m not convinced it’s a brick wall. I invite you to strategize with me as I will strategize with fellow clergy in Cohasset and neighboring communities how to effectively advocate for Sunday afternoon sports, so that families might once again regard Sunday morning as the venue for church. What we who are parents teach our children about caring behavior can only go so far. The lessons and experiences that I know can and do accrue for our children through our religious education curriculum will serve them through a lifetime. Why not transition into a schedule that permits our children and parents a day to have church and sports too! I ask you to join me as advocates for a Sunday that holds both.

Finally, you have given me abundant cause for gratitude. I am grateful that you called me to be your minister. I am grateful that you have ridden waves—some of them white-capped—with me, that you have been patient with me, that you are increasingly direct with me and that you communicate increasingly through the institutions of this parish such as our Shared Ministry Committee or our Parish Committee or our Religious Education Committee. I am grateful for your wisdom, your intelligence, your wit, your imagination, your energy, your humor, and your hope. I am grateful that you manifest in so many ways the promise of this faith and this congregation and that together we enter the sphere of our larger selves, the sphere of community that is intentionally caring, just, and inclusive.

Those words of Forrest on the November evening of my installation continue to ring true:

“Want what you have.
Do what you can.
Be who you are.
And remember, it’s not about you.”

I’m trying. I’m trying. And you are such laudable partners on the journey.

I love you each and all.

Amen.